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One: Tree Climbers

Taking a deep breath of the warm evening air, Tolinom gazed between the thick branches and leaves of a sturdy oak at the brightly lit countryside. Endless miles of tall grass waved in a gentle breeze broken only by a few scattered stands of trees like the one in which his oak sat. It would make a good place to sleep, and he had little desire to travel any more that day. He wasn't quite sore yet, but there was no reason to make the trip uncomfortable. He wanted to see the world, not have it pass him by in a blur of exhaustion.

A thick branch rustled above him, and he rolled his eyes as his traveling companion swung to hang upside down beside him, legs wrapped around the tree limb. "I don't know why the scenery fascinates you so much," Dola said. Her head was almost level with his own, but she was facing out toward the plains and slightly farther from the oak's trunk than him, so he couldn't read her expression. He knew she was only being playful, though. "This all looks exactly the same as the last hundred miles we've crossed. Grass, grass, and more grass. Where are the vast cities you promised me, the palaces as tall as mountains where if you climb the highest tower, all you can see are human buildings spreading to every horizon?" She held her hands wide as if seeing such a city before her, the motion making her sway a little under her perch.

Tolinom poked the back of her head. "Don't put words in my mouth. Eyrasabi is big, but it's no fairy tale."

"Who said anything about Eyrasabi? I was describing Boendal; Eyrasabi is a hundred times the size, and its houses built of solid silver, streets lined with emeralds, and every human there a knight of the royal court." Her arms folded in front of her in the familiar way that meant she was bored. "At least it had better be, to be worth you hauling me out of Bandarethe to go traipsing across the whole blasted continent." Bored. Or hungry, or tired, or angry, or teasing, or most often, stubborn.

"I think blood must be rushing to your head. I don't remember having to haul you anywhere. You were all too ready to escape your chores."

Dola hefted herself back on top of the branch above Tolinom with ease, barely rustling the leaves in the tree. "All I mean is that you're staring very wistfully at the same monotonous fields we've been seeing for the last two days. You're lost in thought again. What's on your mind?"

Tolinom grimaced. What had been on his mind on this lovely afternoon haven from the mundane, was exactly what he was trying to avoid. Responsibility. Duty. "Ironically enough, I was thinking about Eyrasabi," he lied. "It's been a long time since I've seen it; I was a child then. I wonder if anything's changed."

If Dola recognized the evasion, she let it pass. "Oh, so you're not a child any more?"

"I can't afford to be a child much longer," he murmured, betraying what he had actually been dwelling on.

She made an exasperated noise. "I don't see what has to change."

He was about to tell her exactly what was going to have to change, but she shushed him before he even opened his mouth. A moment later he heard it, too: the low, quiet rumble of a wagon in the distance. Dola's ears had always been sharper than his own. The noise was coming from the west, the same direction they had come from, so it had to be farmers or peddlers from the small village he and Dola had passed that morning, the only human settlement they had come across since leaving Bandarethe. Turning around and straddling his branch, Tolinom peered around the oak's broad trunk and spotted a cloud of dust beyond a hill's green slope a mile or so to the west.

"They won't be within earshot for half an hour at least," he said, but quietly.

"If we can hear them, then--" Dola protested, but he cut her off.

"Human ears aren't Oncan. Besides, they're upwind from us. Near that wagon they probably can't hear anything father than a few feet away."

The branch above him rustled as she turned to watch the distant wagon. "Should we move on?"

Tolinom shook his head. "There's nothing to fear from traders." Of course, the wagon might be carrying someone other than tradesmen. What sort of trouble would travel with a wagon, though? "They'll pass us by anyway. There's enough light to cover a few more miles today, even for them. They won't stop until the sun's set."

"You're sure?"

No. "Of course. Traders are always in a hurry."

A black foot kicked the side of his head gently. "And how would you know?"

He batted Dola's foot away and watched the wagon top the hill's crest. More than one wagon, he saw, as a second canvas-topped contraption clambered after the first, both pulled behind a pair of sturdy looking oxen. "We're far enough from the road that they won't even notice us, you'll see," he insisted distractedly. The dirt road wound around the base of their hill. It wasn't really that far away, but with them hidden safely in the oak's branches, they'd be hard to spot even if they made a commotion.

"And if they think this is as nice a place to spend the night as you do?" she pressed.

"Then we share the tree, if they can climb it." They both laughed at that. Tolinom couldn't quite imagine what a human would look like trying to climb a tree. "Maybe they'll have some food," he said, his stomach complaining. The two of them had plenty to eat in the leather shoulder packs slung on the branches beside them, but it was all hard, tasteless trail bread and bland dried fruit. If the traders had some fresh meat they'd share, he'd carry them up the oak on his back. They watched quietly while the two wagons made their way down the grassy hillside. It was an easy journey; so far Tolinom and Dola had seen nothing but the nearly flat grasslands since leaving Bandarethe, nothing like the steep, rocky Jade Hills he remembered from his childhood. Those were still a few days away, he supposed.

"Some humans can be dangerous," Dola whispered, the wagons now less than half a mile away.

"You're getting nervous now? What do you plan on doing when we're in those cities that stretch from horizon to horizon and are full of humans?"

She just used her foot to answer him. He swatted it away again and shushed her. The wagons were close enough now that they might see movement in the oak's branches if they weren't careful. Tolinom could make out the occupants, a brown bearded man sitting in the first wagon with the oxen's reigns in his hands and a child sitting beside him whose gender Tolinom couldn't determine. The wagons were far enough apart that he caught glimpses of another man in the second one sitting beside a woman with a very young child lying in her lap. They weren't any danger, then, just a family of peddlers like he'd first guessed.

As they drew closer, he was able to snatch bits and pieces of their conversations, but he couldn't make any sense of the few stray words he could hear over the wagon wheels' rumbling. The peddlers reached the bend in the road where it began circling the hill where he and Dola hid, but instead of turning to follow the beaten dirt path, the oxen pulled the wagons straight forward over the hill's long, waving grass. They were headed straight toward the oak at the top of the hill.

Tolinom hissed a near-silent curse. So did Dola, but where his was a general, targetless oath, hers was an insult aimed at him, and her foot followed it. She kicked at his head as swiftly as she could without shaking her branch, and they were both covering their mouths to bite back hysterical laughter by the time the lead wagon pulled to a stop under the oak's lowest branches. If Tolinom had a mind to, he could jump straight down and land on the curved canvas tarp.

"There now," said a deep, gravelly voice below him, heavy with a rustic Eyralian accent. "Told you this grove had a good view, didn't I, girl?" Tolinom blinked. Now that the family was so close, he would have sworn that the child next to the bearded man was a boy. Human girls were supposed to wear dresses to avoid such confusion.

The child in question just shrugged, not even looking at the endless fields around them, apparently absorbed in setting the wagon's brake beside the bench on which she sat. "Sure did, Da," was her only response. She was a girl, after all, then. Humans might look nothing like Oncans, but they sounded more or less the same, and few males of either race had a voice that naturally high pitched.

The girl's father watched until she had worked on the brake for a few moments before hefting the reigns. "Welp, we've seen it. Best we get a move on, eh?"

"Hey!" The girl hastened to undo whatever she'd accomplished with the brake before the oxen tried to pull the wagon, but the animals never lifted their heads from where they cropped at the grove's long grass.

The father laughed, a deep rumble that somehow blurred with the noise from the wagon drawing to a halt behind the first. "Score one for Da, eh? You've some catching up to do, Mati."

Tolinom didn't know how many times his heart could skip beats in a single minute.

The man in the second wagon had hopped off its bench as soon as it ground to a stop and was circling the second pair of oxen to set its brake while the woman hummed and gently rocked the infant in her lap. Tolinom wondered why they had brought her with them. Surely the mother would be better off caring for her baby in a comfortable house than traveling between villages with her family. For that matter, he didn't know why the child in the first wagon was present, either. Maybe she was in apprenticeship under her father.

The girl brightened once she'd finished setting the front wagon's brake. "You only think that because you don't know about all the points I've been getting without you noticing," she told her father with a crooked grin. Apparently they were playing a game of tricking each other. They might not be as harmless as Tolinom assumed. He suddenly wanted very much to know what was hidden under the large wagon covers. Would a family of thieves really be that unusual?

The Oncan forced himself to let out the breath he'd been holding. He was letting his imagination get ahead of him, he knew, feeding off of a childhood's worth of exaggerated stories about humans' affinity for corruption. Very few Oncans actually believed those tales, and after having visited the human country so many years ago, he wasn't one of the believers, but that didn't keep his mind from wandering through the worst possibilities he could dream up.

The man from the second wagon made short work of setting its brake before trotting toward where the father and daughter were climbing down to the ground. "You sure we shouldn't keep going a little ways, Da?" he said in a much younger voice than Tolinom had expected. "We could make Pedrel by midday if we don't stop till night." Tolinom's breath caught in his throat. Beyond the humans possibly moving on, he had to choke down the delighted laugh that tried to bubble from him at hearing how close they were to Pedrel. From what he and Dola had been told, they'd expected to be on the road for another day at least before reaching the trading outpost.

"A little longer than that, I think, but I'd rather not risk the animals at dusk." The bearded man walked around the front wagon, looking closely at each of the waist-high, ironbound wheels before rummaging under the canvas behind it. "I'd rather not make camp in the dark, either, come to that," he said as he pulled out a round canteen. He tossed it to the girl, and she deftly snatched it out of the air while scratching one of the ox's necks with one hand. The bearded man had his head back under the canvas before the canteen reached his daughter's hand. He stepped back carrying an armload of wooden boards. "Come here and help me put your sister's bed together, Jed, then we can see about getting a stew started." For a moment Tolinom was confused--the father held a great deal of wood, but it didn't look like enough to make a bed for the girl, Mati--but as the two men began piecing the boards and rods together he realized they were building a crib for the infant sleeping in her mother's arms. Tolinom grimaced. The more of the crib the men constructed, the more it looked like a roofless cage.

Mati was busying herself with freeing the oxen of their harnesses and tethering them around the oak's trunk with ropes long enough to allow the animals freedom to roam a little as they grazed. After the baby's crib was complete, Jed helped his sister with the second wagon's team while the father helped his wife and youngest child to the ground. They'd built the crib on a level area of the hill far enough from the tree that the oxen wouldn't be able to reach it and knock it over. Tolinom couldn't help but notice that the animals had more freedom to move around than the infant.

At their father's request, Jed and Mati worked together to haul a heavy, black iron kettle from the back of the first wagon, but the girl didn't have as good a hold on her side as she thought. When Jed dragged it past the wagon's back edge, it slipped from her fingers and crashed to the ground, making a sound like a gong. Jed hopped back and shouted at his sister, then pulled the kettle out of her hands when she tried to help him lift it, carrying the heavy pot alone to where his father was settling the youngest child in its crib. Mati threw her arms skyward and rolled her eyes at her brother, her face turning upward with the exaggerated gesture.

Really, it was a wonder none of them had looked up sooner.

Mati stared at the two Oncans staring back down at her, all three freezing motionless for a long, quiet moment. Then the girl blinked slowly and turned deliberately away from them, walking carefully toward her family as though she had just noticed two hungry wolves stalking her and didn't want them to know she knew they were there.

"She saw us!" Dola whispered from above Tolinom's head. He just shushed her and waited to see what the girl would do.

Mati tapped her mother on the shoulder and said something quietly into the woman's ear. The mother said something back, and they had a hushed conversation, not quite loud enough for Tolinom to make out their words. Then, as Mati helped her father and brother to set up the kettle on a sturdy iron stand that had been stored folded inside it, her mother walked calmly to the back of the front wagon, leaning inside it and rummaging around a bit before pulling out an armload of firewood. She didn't look toward the Oncans above her once, but while picking up a small log she'd dropped on the ground she said, almost to herself, "I'm afraid Tuller packed too much food. Always worried we'll go hungry, is my husband, but we've no chance of eating all the beef before it spoils." With the pile of wood balanced under her chin, she started back toward the other humans. "A pity no other travelers are like to pass by this evening. Would be a good night to share a campfire."

Tolinom looked up at Dola to trade surprised glances. Then, with a shrug, he shouldered his pack and hopped off his branch, landing lightly on his feet. Dola climbed to the branch he'd been perched on before following him down to the hill top, her own pack slung on her back. The oxen all shied away from the strangers suddenly appearing in their midst.

The bearded man, Tuller, apparently, watched them from under his eyebrows as they followed his wife to their cook pot while he supervised his children in securing thin ropes to the kettle stand, holding it upright. None of the other humans seemed to notice them, though Tolinom knew Mati and her mother were aware of them. "Our apologies," Tuller said, helping his wife set the firewood down without scattering sticks and logs all over the hillside. "We didn't know this camp was spoken for."

"Huh?" Jed said, following his father's eyes and jumping to his feet when he saw the two Oncans. "Whoa! Where did...I mean, hi." He cleared his throat into his fist.

"It's not spoken for," Tolinom told Tuller. "At least, not by us. If it's all right with all of you, we'd be happy to share it for the night." He hoped that was polite enough. Not all humans were particularly formal, but he remembered having to stand and wait for hours when he'd visited Eyrasabi so long ago while his father indulged various dignitaries in elaborate greetings.

"More than all right with us," the man said, a broad smile splitting his beard. He extended his hand, and Tolinom took it after only a brief moment of remembering human custom. "Tuller Sochaf. That's my wife, Indis, our son and daughter, Jed and Mati, and the sleepy one is Merne." He indicated each with a tilt of his head.

"I'm Tolinom. And this is--"

"Dola Arcla," Dola introduced herself. "Pleased to meet you."

"Dola and Tolinom Arcla," Tuller repeated, letting his arms fold in front of him when his hand was released. Tolinom didn't correct his assumption about his last name. "You share the heir's name, then?"

Tolinom shrugged. "It's a common enough name. Sometimes it seems like half of everyone my age was named after the heir." That was true enough. Tuller nodded at him for a silent moment, and he had to fight the urge to fidget nervously under the man's eyes.

"Well," Tuller said swiftly, rubbing his hands together in sudden motion, "if we step quickly we'll have this stew ready before the sun sets. Mati, why don't you show the Arclas the juggling you've been practicing?"

"What?" the girl squeaked.

"Yeah, Mati," Jed piped up from where he knelt arranging firewood under the kettle. "Show them your juggling. You remember how impressed the Filsens were." He turned to the Oncans. "She's a wonder, you'll see. Just give her a few stones, or sticks. Or a neighbor's fragile glass figurines--"

"Jed!" Mati yelled, throwing a pebble at her brother.

"Um, you don't have to..." Tolinom began awkwardly, but Mati seemed to have forgotten that he and Dola were standing there, instead tackling Jed and almost knocking the kettle off its stand.

With the adults collecting ingredients from the back wagon and their older children suddenly absorbed in a wrestling match, the two Oncans were left as alone as they had been while hiding in the oak's branches. After watching the spectacle of Jed's and Mati's small battle for several embarrassed moments, they walked a short distance away from the humans and sat on the hillside to watch the sun crawl toward the horizon.

"They seem nice enough," Tolinom prompted.

Dola laughed. "And energetic. I can remember when we used to play like that."

"What, you mean yesterday?"

Dola grinned and punched his shoulder in response. He looked over at her, grinning himself, and marveled again at how unfamiliar she appeared with her fur dyed. She was almost blue where the sun glinted off her black pelt. Only her bright green eyes were as he remembered. She tilted her head and gave him an odd look. "What?"

"I just wish we had a mirror so you could see how ridiculous you look."

"Said the albino!" She hit him again, and this time he shoved back, knocking her onto her side.

He held up a cautionary finger when she crouched to pounce on him. "We don't want to be a bad influence on the humans," he warned.

Apparently his friend wasn't in the mood to be a role model. They had rolled a fair distance down the hill tickling and trying to pin each other before someone politely cleared their throat above them. Mati was standing a few feet away, her face flushed enough that her freckles almost glowed, grinning broadly at the tussling Oncans. "Da wants to know if either of you are allergic to cabbage." The girl stood calmly enough, but her voice betrayed that she was still out of breath from her scuffle with her brother.

"He is," Dola said quickly, sitting on Tolinom's chest and covering his muzzle with her hand before he could say differently.

"Okay. How about carrots and potatoes?"

"Those are both safe. Thanks for checking." Mati nodded and trotted back up to the kettle where her father was using his body to shelter a small flame from the cool breeze. "We're not allergic to pork or lamb, either," Dola called after the girl.

Tolinom slobbered on Dola's hand while she was distracted, and she pulled it from his muzzle with a disgusted groan, wiping it on his thin shirt beside her thigh. "I am not allergic to cabbage," he protested.

"You are tonight. That stuff tastes awful."

* * *

"So, is this your first time out of Bandarethe?" Tuller asked from the other side of a healthy campfire.

"How'd you guess?" Tolinom answered. He'd been on this side of the border once, of course, but it had been a long enough time ago that he figured it didn't really count.

The bearded man inclined his head toward Dola, who was using several pebbles to give Mati a juggling lesson. The girl had been thrilled when Dola first showed her a simple double ring formation after dinner, and they'd been tossing rocks for nearly an hour since. "Lucky guess, mostly, but every now and again I notice you or your wife studying one of us."

Tolinom's ears twitched when Tuller called Dola his wife. "Sorry," he said, offering a different excuse for his embarrassment. "We don't mean any offense by it. We just--"

"Don't see many humans where you come from, I know," Tuller said, nodding over the empty wooden bowl in his big hands. "And no offense taken, by any means. Why, when Jed here first saw an Oncan he stared at him speechless for an hour."

"I did not!" Jed protested, sitting a little behind his father where he thought it was dark enough that Tolinom wouldn't notice him watching the pair of irsekt sheathed on the Oncan's hips. Tolinom hadn't pulled either of the stone knives from his belt since meeting the humans, but he couldn't blame Jed for being curious. He knew that Oncans had a reputation for being overprotective of their irsekt.

Tuller guffawed a laugh at his son's reaction. "Course, he was Merne's age then, to be fair," he admitted, and his chuckles faded. "All the same, guard your glances once you're closer to Boendal. Folks there can be a bit...touchy." That's where they'd told the humans they were heading to. It was true, but the port city was only one stop on their way to Eyrasabi. The human family had been too tactful to ask why they were on the road, though they had shown no hesitation sharing their own story. The Sochafs were moving from their village near the border to a larger house in Pedrel, where Tuller had been offered a modest but steady job cleaning streets.

"Thanks for the advice," Tolinom said. After the rumors about humans told to Oncan cubs, he didn't think he or Dola needed the warning, but then, he hadn't thought they were giving the humans strange looks, either. "We'll be careful."

Tuller nodded, staring into the fire. They'd moved the kettle aside to cool after everyone had been served, and it waited in the grass to be cleaned. For a long while the only noises were the fire's crackling and the women laughing by the wagons. Indis was bouncing the infant, Merne, while watching her older daughter try to keep four small stones in the air. Dola watched with her hand on her chin thoughtfully, then gave Mati some pointers when the rocks fell to the ground. Her next try lasted a while longer.

The humans were all refreshingly good natured, being accustomed to Oncans after living in a village so close to Bandarethe's border. The only tense moment had been when Dola had leaned over Merne's crib to say hello to the infant, and little Merne had let out a squeal of childish laughter with a gleeful, "Kitty!" Both of the toddler's parents had reprimanded her harshly for the racial slur, of course, which had set her to crying, but Dola and Tolinom had assured them that no harm was done. The girl was barely old enough to speak, after all, and Tolinom let himself admit that Dola did have a touch of panther in her features, with her unnatural, black fur. He'd never say so out loud, of course; there was no telling how long she'd hold a grudge after that kind of insult.

"Welp," Tuller said, clapping his hands together and rising suddenly to his feet, "I'd best get some shut-eye if I'm to be any use at dawn." He smoothed out an imagined wrinkle in his tunic and made his way up the hill to the wagons.

"I think I'll stay up a bit longer," Jed said, then yawned loudly.

"Good," his father called back over his shoulder, "then you can see to cleaning and packing the kettle. Kind of you to volunteer, Jed."

The younger man sighed and rolled his eyes, but he set about doing as Tuller suggested. Now that his father was no longer providing a shadow to hide his curious glances, Jed studiously ignored Tolinom while pouring the kettle's cooled broth onto the ground, so Tolinom quietly dismissed himself and found a fairly level part of the hillside on which to lie and stare up at the stars.

The night was even clearer than the day had been, stars shining in their many colors to illuminate the world beneath them even without the help of the two moons that were both approaching their zeniths. One large and white, as it always was, the other a pale green tonight, with dark blue shadows gliding over its smaller surface. There would be a lunar eclipse of the white over the color shifter soon, the astronomers had predicted, several nights before the Veporligh hour expected in a week or two, when the sun would try to hide behind the presently green moon. There would be celebrations everywhere that there were people that day, and far too many fools blinding themselves trying to watch, if the solar eclipse four years ago was anything to go by. Tolinom knew they wouldn't reach Eyrasabi by then, but he hoped to be in Boendal or another sizeable city when the celebrations took place. It would be a sight to behold, humans lining the streets, singing and dancing, or whatever it was humans did on their holidays.

He had almost drifted off to dreams of those festivities when Dola's elbow in his ribs brought him awake. She had lain down beside him at some point without him noticing. "I was speaking with Mati after her parents went to sleep," she whispered, so quietly that he almost couldn't hear her even with her mouth so close to his ear. She didn't sound at all as tired as she should have been at this hour.

"And?" he prompted groggily.

"And it seems a messenger from Bandarethe passed through her village shortly before the Sochafs left. Apparently the heir of Bandarethe has been kidnapped."

That cleared Tolinom's head completely. "He's been what?" he said, looking over at her.

She nodded beside him, her wide eyes reflecting the dual moonlight and emphasizing the importance of what Mati had told her. "Kidnapped. Not only that, but the king's offered a reward to whomever brings his son and the kidnapper back to the border."

Tolinom blinked, his mind racing. "What kind of reward?"

"A big one," Dola answered. "What should we do?"

He turned his head back to look at the two moons now directly above them. "Nothing," he said at last. "We knew they would do something like this. We just didn't think they'd be so open about it." He nodded to himself. "It doesn't change anything."

"But what if we're recognized?"

He grinned, trying to convince himself as much as Dola. "The Sochafs didn't know who I was even when I told them my name. We'll be fine."

"The Sochafs aren't Oncan."

"Then we'll avoid other Oncans. It's the humans we want to see, anyway, right? Besides, even if we're caught, we won't get anything worse than if we went back right now."

"Easy for you to say. You're not the kidnapper." Dola's elbow found his ribs again, but she didn't argue.

"All the same," Tolinom said, remembering the stares Jed had given his irsekt and wondering if more than curiosity might have caused them, "maybe we should leave an hour or two before dawn, just in case."

"Good idea."

Some time later, when Tolinom was as far into his dreams as when Dola had first nudged him awake, she said, half asleep herself, "It's too bad, really. I'd have liked to say goodbye."