The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells Read Free Book Online Page A

his wings and dove.
    He flew up and down the gorge, stretching his wings, fighting the gusty wind and feeling the sun heat his scales. The exercise made him hungry.
    He rode the air currents down to the river, which rushed over tumbled rocks in its shallow stretches, then turned calm where the channel was wide and deep. Moon plunged into water that would have been shockingly cold in his groundling form, and swam along the bottom. He found a slow-moving school of fish, each nearly three paces long with thick, heavy bodies and trailing iridescent fins. He snatched one and shot up into the air again.
    There hadn’t been much point in seriously considering Stone’s offer when he hadn’t known whether the poison had ruined him permanently or not. Now... Moon found himself thinking about it. Long ago he had given up looking for his own people, assuming if there were any others, they were lost somewhere in the vastness of the Three Worlds, not to be found except by wild accident. Now the wild accident had actually happened.
    But going with Stone meant trusting him. Moon would be putting himself in the middle of a large group of shifters, and while he might be a Raksura, he knew nothing about what they were like. If they turned out to be as murderous and violent as the Fell, he could find himself trapped and fighting for his life.
    Another option was to look for another groundling settlement to join, which meant starting over again, with all new pitfalls and hazards. What he wanted most at the moment was to fly off alone to hunt and explore, with no other people to make him constantly wary. He was sick of growing to like and trust groundlings like the Cordans, and knowing it all meant nothing if they found out what he was.
    But he was sick of being alone, too. He had done this all before, resolving to live alone only to become desperate for company, any company, after a few changes of the month.
    He was on his fifth fish when he surfaced and saw he wasn’t alone. Stone, in groundling form, sat on a big flat rock by the bank. He leaned back, propped on his arms, face tipped up to the sun. Deliberate and unhurried, Moon slapped his fish against a rock to kill it, finished eating, then went back in the water to wash the guts off his scales. He surfaced again in the shallows, below where Stone sat, and used the sandy bottom to clean his claws.
    Still sunning himself, Stone said, “You’re not supposed to do that, you know. Raksura don’t.”
    “Raksura don’t bathe?” Moon said dryly, deliberately misunderstanding. He shook water out of his wings, spraying the bank. “That’s going to be a problem.”
    Stone sat up to give him an ironic look. “Yes, we bathe. We don’t fish. Not like that.”
    Moon climbed up onto the rock and sat to the side so he could keep his wings unfolded and let them dry. The sun was warm but the wind was still cold, and if he switched back to groundling form now, the water still on his scales would soak his clothes. “Why don’t you fish?”
    “I don’t know. Probably never had a good place for it.” Stone squinted at him. “So. I’ve got one other court to visit before I head home. Are you coming with me?”
    Moon looked across the river. Small swimming lizards stretched out on the rocks across the bank, waiting for them to leave so they could go after the remains of Moon’s fish. “If you were looking for Raksura, why did you come to the valley?”
    Stone didn’t seem disconcerted by the question. “It was on my way back. I stopped to rest, caught a scent of something that turned out to be you. It was faint because you were in groundling form.” He shrugged. “Thought I’d stay on a few days to look around, see if there was a small colony there that I hadn’t heard about.”
    Moon hadn’t been able to scent Stone. But that might just mean that Stone’s senses, like his shifted form, were stronger and more powerful.And it was beyond strange, talking to someone while Moon was in his