Usagi had never ridden a horse in her life.

From the way that she knew exactly what to do—how to talk to the horse to keep him calm, how to mount up, how to sit and arrange her skirt in a ‘ladylike’ fashion—she understood that _Serenity_ must have gone riding in _her_ lifetime. However, Usagi also got a sense that the Moon Princess’ skill on horseback—or on the back of whatever other animals had been in use as steeds at the time—had been mediocre, at best. And she had certainly never been in a position to go riding while pregnant.

Luna, on the other hand, had gone riding any number of times, and gotten quite good at it. But all of those times had been over a thousand years ago, and she was still getting the hang of walking around in human form again; simply put, she was out of practice.

Mahdib was a patient and smooth-stepping horse, and Akhmed, walking up ahead and leading his faithful mount along by the reins, was not setting a particularly hard pace, but even so, both women were more than a little sore by the end of the first night of travel.

Stretching her back to work out the beginnings of stiffness, Luna considered Akhmed. She had to admit, the young man knew his business, and was extremely stable, mentally speaking; she’d only had to tell him three times last night that he wasn’t dreaming or going mad, and he had been the soul of courtesy towards Usagi. And not once did he question why the girl had been walking around in the desert in just her socks. (Her shoes were back at Michiru’s house.) But as helpful and polite as Akhmed was, Luna wasn’t sure they could fully trust him.

He spoke Atlantean. So did she, but she’d learned it as a fading, almost-dead language, the base of several modern tongues during the Silver Millennium. Akhmed spoke a dialect Luna wasn’t entirely familiar with, and he spoke it with the comfortable ease of lifelong use.

All the histories Luna remembered reading on the Moon had simultaneously praised and condemned Atlantis, at once the greatest pinnacle of scientific and sorcerous achievement and the blackest stain of greed, pride, and violence in human history. An empire five times larger and ten times older than anything the Queens of the Moon had ever ruled, world after world conquered and enslaved by the single most powerful military force ever known. Masters of magic and machinery who lived for ten times the life-span of ordinary humans, who created wonders undreamed of and yet never truly understood what it was they were doing, men and women whose arrogant power gave them license to do as they wished without fear of consequence, without concern for right or wrong.

Details were sketchy on what had finally brought Atlantis down; even the authors of the oldest records on the Moon, people who had lived to see the fall of the mighty empire, had disagreed over the cause of its collapse. Some said invasion from without, others said treachery from within; everything from financial collapse to divine intervention had been put forth as a possibility, each supposition with just enough evidence to seem as likely as the next. Luna had never really bothered herself with the details, for it had all been very long ago. As long as the dark mistakes of the past were remembered and not repeated, that was enough. The rest could stay where it was, buried.

But now she was in that buried past, in a time when she knew—from a few carefully-placed questions she’d put to Akhmed—that Atlantis was still at the height of its power. The possibilities inherent in that did more than scare Luna; they flat-out terrified her. If someone had noticed their arrival, there might already be magic-seekers after them, and even if the strange beings at the Time Gate had arranged to have them dropped here undetected, every day, every _hour_ they spent in this era increased the risk of discovery. Akhmed had already told her that neither she nor Usagi had coloration common to this region, and that alone was going to make them stand out; with at least three full species kept as slaves, Atlantean culture had not ranked among the most racially tolerant. As long as they kept a low profile, Luna thought they might be able to get by, but should someone take more than a passing interest and decide to investigate these two strange foreign women, they were bound to call on the services of a wizard.

Even the lowliest spellcaster of this era would be able to tell immediately that Luna was not what she appeared to be; the Nekoron had never been slaves—that human thing for cats, she supposed—but as a citizen of the Empire, she would be expected to give answers. Even worse was the possibility they would pick up on the immense power Usagi was carrying around, realize that it was not at all like the magic they understood—and desire to capture it. One thing all the history books had agreed on was that the ginzuishou had been created at the very _end_ of Atlantis’ reign, and might very well have played a part in the empire’s collapse; if it fell into the hands of even a half-capable Atlantean-trained mage NOW, the timeline was going to be ripped apart.

Luna had been very careful not to lie to Akhmed, for there were ways to use magic to detect falsehoods, but she had put the truth through some very complex paces by the time she finished ‘explaining’ things to the young man. She told him Usagi was the daughter and heir of a family in a distant part of the empire, taken from her home and dropped here by magic for reasons unknown. Either by accident or intent, the cats had been dragged along; as retainers of the family, it was their duty to protect Usagi until her bodyguards could find her and return her safely home. They couldn’t risk going to the authorities, but needed a place to stay out of sight.

Akhmed had extended an offer of lodging at his family’s home, and Luna had cautiously accepted it. There really weren’t any other options, stuck in the middle of a desert as they were, but the idea of spending any amount of time in an Atlantean-dominated city would have put her fur up, if she still had any.

They spent that entire day at the little oasis, sleeping for the most part, before setting out late in the afternoon, traveling slowly to make things easier for Usagi and for Mahdib, who was, at Akhmed’s insistence, carrying both women. He explained that his home city, Khairoah, was less than a day’s ride off, but it would probably take two nights to reach at this pace, so he was heading for another oasis he knew of, where they could spend the next day before making for the city. Luna thought the three thugs she had chased off might have had something to do with Akhmed’s caution, but decided to put off asking about it until they stopped.

It was now well past midnight, and Usagi snored as she leaned back against Luna, who was considering the strangeness of once again having arms to put around this madcap girl, how comforting it was to actually do that. Artemis was seated across Mahdib’s broad back, pointedly ignoring Luna. He sat up when the horse came to a slow stop.

“We’re here,” Akhmed said, pointing down to a green patch amidst all the sand, a patch with a spot of blue at its heart, gleaming under the moonlight. There were dark shapes around the area, and dancing, flickering lights scattered amongst the dark shapes.

Luna looked at those lights and frowned. “Those are campfires.”

“Yes.” Akhmed sighed. “You heard last night, what that oaf Tukkad said about papers? My family is a minor house, but we have very prosperous merchant connections, and more than one of our rivals—such as Tukkad’s master, Imnho— would like to take some of those connections from us. There was a meeting amongst four of our partners in the city of Meimphein two weeks gone, and the papers I am carrying detail a number of important shipments due to be made in the next few months. If someone like Imnho were to get his hands on that information, it would go very badly for my family.”

“That oasis we were at last night isn’t on any of the trails,” Akhmed continued. “I didn’t even know it existed until I spotted it yesterday afternoon, but Imnho clearly did, and if he sent Tukkad there, he probably had all the other watering-holes covered as well. He’s certain to have men at the city gates, most likely bribed members of the watch with orders to arrest me, confiscate my father’s papers, then release me later with many apologies.” Akhmed glanced back at the two of them. “Under the city’s laws, they cannot harm a noble—even one of my minor standing—without answering stiffly for it, but you are strangers, with no such protection. And the sort of men Imnho hires...” Akhmed shook his head in disgust.

“What does all of this have to do with that camp down there?” Luna asked, instinctively tightening her arms around Usagi.

“My father and I came up with several plans for how I should make this trip. One of them involved a caravan made up of two of our merchant allies, their best guards, and several of my father’s most trusted men, who would be waiting at this oasis in case I needed an armed escort. They were scheduled to wait three days; this is the fourth.”

Luna looked at the tents below. “So that could be anyone?”

“Perhaps.” Akhmed looked at her, brushing black hair away from his dark brown eyes. “I know cats see better at night than humans. Can you tell me what the emblem on the flag flying over the largest tent is?”

“It’s a nine-pointed star,” Artemis said shortly, the first thing he had said all night. “There are dots at each tip and a shape of some kind in the middle. I can’t tell what, though, or what the colors are.”

“That’s them,” Akhmed said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Here.” He removed his cloak and handed it up to Luna. “Wake up Usagi and put that around her. Make sure she keeps the hood up until we’re in a tent.” He grinned wryly. “I trust these men, but I also trust some of them to talk when they drink, and her hair will be the subject of a great deal of comment if they see it.”

“Usagi,” Luna said, shaking her gently.

“Mmmm... wha?” Usagi yawned and, in a sleepy voice, asked, “Is it morning already, Luna?” Her eyes opened and took in the obviously nighttime sky. She yawned again. “Why’d you wake me up? Are we in trouble?” she asked, sitting up suddenly.

“Not yet. Here, put this on. And keep the hood pulled up. I’ll explain later.” Luna was more than a little pleased to see that, for whatever reason, Usagi didn’t argue with her. She had to wonder whether that had more to do with their current situation or with _her_ current form; if the latter, then this shape-shifting might be useful after all.

They were spotted long before they got near the tents, and a half-dozen armed men moved up the sandy slope to meet them. The three time-travelers were nervous right up to the last second, when the leader of the group came up with a wide grin and hugged Akhmed in the rough, good-natured manner most men use to greet old friends. Most of the men looked curiously at the dark-haired woman and the cloaked figure on the horse, but Akhmed spoke quickly, forestalling questions.

Then they were moving again, down into the heart of the camp.

Dryad cuisine was unusual, to say the least.

Ami had not actually stopped to think about the matter the previous day, but when she woke up the next morning—looking up at a moss-covered wooden ceiling from a bed made of more moss, vines, and leaves, and wearing a light, slightly overlarge dress of some very soft and probably entirely organic material—she realized three things:

(1)— It hadn’t all been a dream;

(2)— She was hungry; and

(3)— Makoto snored. Not as badly as Usagi, by any means, just enough to be noticeable. And thus, just enough to be annoying.

There was really nothing she could do about (1), and she dealt with (3) by getting out of Sasanna’s vast bed and heading downstairs, where—hopefully—she could do something about (2). It was at this point that the question of what, if anything, dryads ate occurred to Ami. Lots of fruit and vegetables, she supposed, and probably some mushrooms—and that distilled tree-sap sweetwater, of course. Well, as long as she kept Makoto from drinking too much, Ami supposed a few days on a dryad diet wouldn’t hurt either of them. Unless of course, Sasanna literally ate dirt; she _was_ half-plant, after all.

The substance of the bed put the best box-spring mattresses Ami had ever encountered to shame, shifting around and readjusting itself so perfectly as she climbed out that the rhythm of Makoto’s soft snores didn’t change even slightly. She paused for a moment and debated whether or not she ought to have a shower first, but a pointed growl from her stomach settled the matter. And in all honesty, she wasn’t entirely sure she was up to tackling the dryad’s rather... um... unique facilities just yet. Besides, Makoto was still asleep, and between her typical morning funk and the strong likelihood of a hangover, the girl was going to be grouchy enough without Ami waking her up.

So Ami padded down the smooth wooden stairs on bare feet, the hem of the borrowed dress whisking along on the floor and threatening to trip her until she pulled it up an inch or two.

“You are awake,” Sasanna said in greeting.

“And hungry,” Ami added. The dryad smiled. “Is there anything around here to eat?”

“For me, yes. For you and Makoto, I am not entirely sure, so I have asked Glossolyndaraberonasym to provide a little of everything we have for you to try.” Sasanna grinned when Ami looked around and saw nothing. “He is working on it. Come. Sit. Drink.”

“Um, that reminds me,” Ami said as they sat together at the table. “Do you have any ordinary water to drink? I’m not sure if sweetwater affects dryads like it did Makoto, but I’m definitely sure she and I shouldn’t drink too much of it.”

“Glossolyndaraberonasym can provide several things for us to drink,” Sasanna reassured her. “Besides sweetwater, there is ordinary water, and juice from several kinds of fruits. There is also woodwine, but that is made from mixing sweetwater and at least one kind of juice, then leaving them to set for a time so that they are stronger. And there is mossbrew, which is even stronger.” She giggled suddenly. “Mossbrew, even a little, does some _very_ strange things to my kind, not much different from what happened to Makoto yesterday.”

“Water or juice will do,” Ami said firmly.

Sasanna nodded, got up to retrieve the drinking-bowl, filled it, and returned to the table. As Ami sipped at the slightly minty-tasting water, the dryad looked up and nodded. “Glossolyndaraberonasym has finished. Watch your head.”

Ami looked hastily up and saw a large piece of the wooden ceiling descending slowly towards them over the center of the table; it would, Ami saw— as she hit herself mentally for unintentionally making such a bad pun—leave a relatively wide space around the edge if it came right down to the table. A very large, slightly woody vine connecting the disc to the space in the ceiling was obviously the mechanism—or whatever—which was lowering the thing, and the rest of the surface was covered by twelve bulges made up of a half-dozen or so leaves each, rather like flowers that had not yet opened to face the day. Once the disc settled to a softly thumping stop, they bloomed.

Inside each of the little flowerlets was a different mix of food. As Ami had guessed, fruits and vegetables were present in abundance, and she saw mushrooms in one of the odd compartments. She was a bit surprised to see little quasi-cubic bits of meat in one pod, and there was actually _steam_ coming out of three of them. Everything within the small chambers rose—another terrible plant-related pun, Ami realized with an inward groan; she must be coming down with something!—on leafy little platforms connected to tinier versions of the main stem. Two small vines extended down out of the stem as a pair of long, slender, and sharp-looking thorns slowly poked out from the rim of the disc.

“How...” Ami began. “I mean, what...”

“Like this.” Sasanna snapped off the two thorns and handed one to Ami, then reached out and lifted one of the flower-like food containers completely off the tray. She set it down between them, then used the long thorn to spear a succession of vegetables. “It is handy if we are going to make a trip,” she explained. “The carry-bloom can live for several days away from its root and holds liquid as well as food. The holdwood,” she added, indicating the disc, “can turn to bring over other blooms. And the dripvines will provide what you wish to drink, or a few other things Glossolyndaraberonasym can make to add flavor to the food.”

Ami considered the selection, then decided to start with a bloom that was filled with fruit. “I wasn’t sure if you ate meat or not,” she said, carefully pulling a wedge of what looked to be apple off the sharp end of the thorn so as not to stab her tongue with the thing. “I take it you hunt, then?”

Sasanna nodded with a wordless sound of agreement and pointed past Ami; turning, Ami saw a closet-sized chamber on the wall in the middle of swinging open. She hadn’t noticed it before, likely because the pattern of the grain on the ‘door’ and the ‘wall’ matched each other perfectly. Inside the closet were a number of larger versions of the little thorns she and the dryad were using to each. Four of them were as long as Ami’s arm, and a fifth was as tall as Sasanna herself. There were also about a dozen or so smaller thorns with short, oddly-shaped leaves fixed to the thick end—arrows, of course, which meant that the curved piece of wood next to them was probably the matching bow.

“We do not need to eat much meat,” Sasanna noted, “but we find a little every now and then to be tasty. Mostly rabbit and fish. Some birds. Every once in a while, some of us will gather to hunt a larger creature, but we usually stick with the small animals. Easier to catch, less trouble to carry home. I have not gone hunting for the last few days, but there is some rabbit left in that carry-bloom there, if you would like.”

Ami sampled the small bits of rabbit—which tasted slightly of minty syrup—and the contents of most of the rest of the table over the course of the next half hour or so. She skipped over one of the carry-blooms when it turned out to contain a selection of insects sealed in hardened, sweet-tasting tree sap, and decided it would be safer to forgo the mushrooms and mosses altogether. On the other hand, the fruits and vegetables turned out to be very satisfactory, and one of the blooms held bug-free bits of the hardened sap—flavored with different juices, as Sasanna explained—rather like a bowl of candy.

Ami did have a bit of trouble with what the dryad had called the dripvines, since the great tree controlling them could not hear her to understand exactly what she was asking for. She ended up soaking a shish kebab of veggies with something that was close in flavor to tropical punch, and when she tried to ask for a drink of water, she got instead a mouthful of what tasted like a Cajun Insanity hot-sauce Minako had once insisted they all try. Sasanna seemed to find both incidents absolutely hysterical.

Makoto made her bleary-eyed appearance some time after that, trudging down the stairs with one hand on the wall and another over her face, most of which was hidden by her unbound hair. The borrowed dress whose twin had been too long for Ami only reached slightly past mid-calf on Makoto, and wasn’t quite as loose-fitting.

A dull eye looked out from behind hand and hair, examining Ami and Sasanna. “What time is it?”

“Six fifty-two, local time,” Ami replied after a quick check with her computer. “You’ve been asleep for most of the last fourteen hours. How do you feel?”

There was a pause of about three seconds while Makoto’s brain processed that question. “My head hurts,” she said finally, sitting down to Ami’s right. A third vine and thorn extended out of the growth Sasanna had called ‘holdwood’; Makoto broke the thorn off before the dryad could explain its purpose, picked out a bloom containing a mix of glazed slices of fruit, and started to eat. Ami was more than a little surprised when Makoto took a drink from the overhanging vine without even asking what it was or how it worked. Glancing over at Sasanna right then, Ami saw that the dryad was slowly nodding her head, almost as if she’d expected Makoto’s instantaneous proficiency. Between that and some of what had happened the day before, Ami knew something was up.

Whenever she broke off speaking to either of them to communicate more directly with her tree, Sasanna unconsciously tilted her head at a slight angle; she was doing so now, looking at Makoto but clearly listening to something else. The minor change in posture reminded Ami of something, but whatever it was refused to reveal itself. That bothered Ami.

When it came to schoolwork and studying, a clear and quick memory was at least as important as sheer mental muscle, and Ami had always prided herself on the range and focus of her own powers of recall. Many of her friends and classmates relied on flash cards, elaborate codes, complex studying routines, and a hefty dose of luck when preparing for a test. Ami studied not so much by memorizing the contents of her books as by fixing certain details of each page in her mind: an illustration of a bird’s wing on this page; a crease in the paper on that page; a spot of whiteout on this batch of notes; a silly little doodle courtesy of Usagi or Minako over here. By focusing just on that single quality, Ami could rapidly reconstruct the contents of an entire page, without even thinking about the information itself.

It worked in other situations, too. She could remember perfectly the events of her sixth birthday by thinking of one of the presents, a picture her father had made of her, a pencil sketch done over with watercolors in shades of blue, gold, and pale green. She could recall events from that whole year, and even from a year or so previous, without flaw or failure. And yet she couldn’t place what it was about Sasanna’s little tilted-head manner that seemed so annoyingly familiar.

There were only three places in Ami’s memory where her usually masterful recall broke down. Events from her fifth or sixth year were usually disjointed and fuzzy, and anything before that was pretty much nonexistent. The year which they had ‘replayed’ after fighting Beryl was also confused, since it was two separate sets of events slammed into one another, but with so many similarities between the two that telling them apart was rough going even for her. The other spot of trouble was her life on the Moon Kingdom, and Ami suspected that this was where the source of her current annoyance was located.

The girls didn’t talk about their former lives very often. It wasn’t exactly like they had huge amounts of spare time laying around to spend in reflective reminiscence, for one thing, and for another, there was something decidedly sad in thinking on the Silver Millennium. It was a wonderful time, yes, but the terrible way in which it—and they—had ended cast a pall over the whole period. But more than that, none of them remembered very much about the time. Usagi’s recollection was likely the most complete—and what that suggested about the rest of them didn’t bear repeating. Ami couldn’t even remember what her own name had been, and the very few bits she did have access to were hazy, almost as if she were seeing them through a blue-tinted mist. Yesterday had been the first time she’d heard the name ‘Amalthea’ applied to Makoto.

Illumination, as was so often the case, came in a sudden flash of memory. Makoto’s past life, Amalthea, had been able to communicate with plants, and when listening to them, she had carried herself with the same slightly tilted-head posture as Sasanna was now using. Did that mean that...?

No. Ami couldn’t remember very much about Amalthea, but the girl had been almost identical to Makoto in every physical detail, except that, in the few memories Ami could latch on to, Amma had been a little taller, a little older than Makoto was now. And there was something about the color of her eyes that was different. But certainly, she had not been a dryad.

“Who was not a dryad?” Sasanna asked curiously.

Ami blinked, then blushed. “Oh, uh... um... I was just thinking out loud. It’s the way you move your head when you speak to your tree; it just reminded me of how... well, that is... Amalthea used to do the same thing.”

Makoto froze in the middle of lifting a few slices of apple towards her mouth, and her head turned slowly so that she could stare at Ami in wide-eyed shock. She hadn’t thought about it—had in fact purposely _tried_ not to think about it—but Ami was right; Amalthea had been able to speak with plants. Everyone in the royal court had known it, though nobody was exactly sure how or why. Some of the older court scholars had thought it might have something to do with her Jovian heritage, and the long-term effects of the planet’s intense gravity and powerful electromagnetic field on the human form of life. They had done a study, and...

“Yes,” Sasanna said, answering a question Ami had asked while Makoto was not paying attention. “The pigmentation of our skin is usually this faded green, or a soft brown, like the leaves and bark of our trees. And we all have these,” she added, tracing the pointed line of her left ear with one finger. “There have been sisters in the past with very pale skin, but if Amalthea did not have at least the ears, then she was not a dryad, just as Makoto is not, now.”

...Amalthea had grown up in a world—_on_ a world, or at least on some of its moons—where it was normal for everyone to be tall and strong, so no one had ever teased her about her height or made her feel like some sort of overdeveloped freak of nature. The Jovians were not as numerous as some of the other offshoot tribes of humanity, so they did not put much weight on differences of cultural status. The lords and ladies worked and fought alongside their subjects, and any Jovian was welcome in the household of another; in many ways, the people of the sixteen moons had been like a large extended family. Nobody had ever questioned little Amma’s gift with growing things—especially since she could tell at a glance what was wrong with this field of crops or this stand of trees—and they had all been very proud when she was called into service as the next Senshi of Jupiter. For all their strength, the Jovians could be an almost ridiculously sentimental people, and...

“...think she might have had a dryad ancestor?” Ami asked. “I know you can’t have children by yourselves, but what if a dryad and a human male... can you?” she asked rather abruptly, blushing. “What I mean to say is, is it physically _possible_ for you to have children?”

Sasanna’s blush was as spectacular as Ami’s. “We are not entirely sure. Rheanna felt very strongly for the human she met—his name was Adan—and they certainly... um... tried... but they did not have any children in some fifteen years. This is not exactly an area in which we have much experience,” the dryad admitted hastily. “And even if it is possible, we do not know what such children would be like.”

...Amalthea’s father had been killed fighting a monster of some sort when she was in her second year of Senshi training on the Moon, and the news had hurt her deeply, but she still had her mother, and all her almost-aunts and not-quite-uncles among the Jovian people. She had her friends to help her deal with the loss—and she had the burning comfort of revenge when, years later, after her training was complete, she was able to track down and destroy the creature. Amalthea had made another friend on that journey, as well; Makoto recalled the name ‘Alexia,’ could picture a tall, striking woman with silvery-green hair and eyes, and was convinced there was something important she was forgetting about that friend...

“Mako-chan?”

Makoto gave a start as her attention was pulled back to the relative present. “What?”

“I asked you how you knew how to use that,” Ami said, pointing to the dripvine.

Makoto’s mind raced. “I... I saw you using the others when I came downstairs, and...”

Sasanna shook her head. “We were not drinking then. And even if we had been, how did you know what the vine could provide? How did you know to choose between water or juice or the seasonings? How did you tell Glossolyndaraberonasym to give you water, and not something else? Ami could not.”

“Maybe Ami’s not as smart as she thinks she is,” Makoto mumbled, absently moving her arm to block the elbow jab Ami had intended for her ribs. Suddenly without any appetite, she put down the thorn, got to her feet, and walked away from the table to stand by the window.

“Or maybe you heard Glossolyndaraberonasym telling you what to do,” Sasanna suggested.

Makoto shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything.” That was half true; she’d been hearing some sort of faint whisper since waking up, but she hadn’t picked up any kind of meaning out of it. Certainly nothing about how to make sense of this unusual kitchen. “Plants can’t talk.”

Sasanna sighed; she’d been expecting that, too, sooner or later. “Makoto,” she said, rising and following the girl across the room, “I know that what happened to your parents hurt you very much, but you must stop allowing that pain to interfere with...”

“What did you say?” Makoto whispered, turning from the window to stare at Sasanna.

*Be careful, sister-self,* Glossolyndaraberonasym cautioned.

“How did you know about my parents?” Makoto glared at Ami. “Did you...”

“She did not tell me. You told me. Last night, when I looked into your mind to try and understand why we could hear you but not get through to you ourselves.”

“When you... you looked... you went inside... my mind...?” Makoto repeated. A flicker of memory asserted itself, images she thought had been a dream brought on by worry and homesickness and too much to drink. There had been a very definite sense of another mind at work, a presence that was not hostile or threatening, merely curious.

“We were unsure what to make of you,” Sasanna said. “It was only when I found out about your parents and how your mind associates your mother with plants that we began to understand...”

*Sasanna, look out!*

Makoto’s right hand hit the dryad across the face, hard. The blow wasn’t precisely a punch, but it was a lot more substantial than a slap, and it had the full force of Makoto’s arm behind it. Sasanna was nearly as tall as Makoto, but considerably slimmer; the impact knocked her down and slid her backwards along the floor. A moment later, in the middle of her new appreciation for the strength in that arm and the solid texture of her brother-self’s floor, Sasanna found herself being jerked roughly upwards by fingers which had seized a handful of material at the front of her dress.

“You ‘understand’? How the hell can you understand?! You said yourself that you were born out of this tree! You don’t have parents! You can’t begin to imagine what it feels like to lose them! And what the hell do you think gives you the right to go rummaging around inside other people’s minds without even _asking_ them for permission first?!”

“I’m sorry,” was about the only thing Sasanna could think of to say. Makoto’s reaction to those words was to slam her against the floor as if she meant to push the dryad right through into whatever lay beyond the wooden surface.

“You’re _sorry?!_ That’s supposed to make it better?! You’re SORRY?!!”

“Makoto,” Ami said sternly, moving towards her friend and the dryad, “calm down! You’re...”

“SHUT UP!” Makoto roared, letting go of Sasanna as she whirled to face Ami. Her right hand flashed out again as she moved, the knuckles striking along Ami’s chin with enough strength to send her staggering to the side even as she spun to absorb and lessen the force of the blow. Ignoring the ringing in her ears, Ami slowly turned to face Makoto, one hand automatically going to her already-throbbing chin.

Makoto stared back, her still-outstretched hand beginning to shake violently as the anger on her face melted into shocked horror. “Ami,” she whispered, “I... I didn’t... I’m sorry.” She turned away, her own words—*That’s supposed to make it better?*—echoing inside her head.

“Are you all right, Sasanna?” The dryad got to her feet and nodded mutely. “Good. I want to have a shower, and I need you to tell me how that thing you have upstairs works. Kino-san”—Makoto flinched at the neutral formality—“is going to finish eating and then clean up herself. And after that, we are all going to have a talk.”

Without another word, Ami headed upstairs.

They’d had no trouble getting into the city once they’d joined up with the caravan. Passing through the gates shortly after dawn, Luna had spotted two or three men in the armored uniforms of city guards giving Akhmed undisguised looks of frustrated enmity. Two or three armed men do not customarily argue with ten times their number; at least, they do not do so and _win_ said argument. The bought guards appeared to recognize this fact and let Akhmed by without comment.

Reaching his family’s house in the east end of the city, near the river, had not taken long, and the two strangers—and their cat—had been quickly hurried inside by a number of servants. They were shown to a small but lavishly- decorated apartment in the north wing of the house, given many humble bows, and quietly locked in.

Confronted with a large marble tub and a helpful young maid who gave her name as Meria, Luna had understood the situation immediately; they were to be presented to Akhmed’s family as soon as they could be _made_ presentable. Meria sighed in envious admiration when she saw Usagi’s hair—her own close-cut curls were a rich shade of brown—and made almost as much fuss over the fact that she was pregnant. Channeling Serenity, as it were, Usagi accepted the maid’s assistance with her bath with an air that was pure royalty; Luna’s reaction wasn’t quite so casual, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she had to undress to get into the water. The concept of nudity doesn’t really mean much to a creature whose natural form doesn’t wear clothes, though in spite of that, Luna found herself momentarily grateful that Artemis didn’t follow them into the bathroom.

What really bugged Luna was the water itself. Cats, by and large, don’t like water except to drink. They _can_ swim, but normally, only a few of the larger members of the family will do so by choice, and most of them do it only when necessary to catch a meal that might otherwise get away. Once Usagi and Meria had actually managed to get Luna into the tub, though, she recalled a number—a very great number—of baths back on the Moon, and sat back with a happy sigh. Both girls looked at her in astonishment as she began to make a sound in the back of her throat that was very much like a purr; Usagi had finally asked if she wanted them to leave her alone, and Luna’s response was to flip a handful of water at her. That proved to be a mistake as, after a moment to consider the water dripping down her face, Usagi splashed back. Retaliation quickly led to escalation, and they shortly had a full-scale water war going.

After declaring peace and drying off, they dressed. Usagi’s twentieth-century clothes weren’t really up to the task of a formal meeting even with minor nobility, but Meria provided a simple white dress which, even when let out to accommodate Usagi’s waistline, was more than satisfactory. Luna astonished both girls again by conjuring up a high-necked, sleeveless dress with narrow, divided skirts. The material was the same blue-black shade as her hair, and Usagi was startled to see a knife of some sort hanging lightly from the thin belt at Luna’s waist. The curved blade and hilt were both silver, and there was a white pearl set into the pommel. Meria tried so hard not to look at the knife that she might as well have just stared at it.

Luna considered her reflection in a tall mirror and momentarily narrowed her gaze; just like that, earrings and a necklace were added to her ensemble. The earrings were silver crescents hanging from one point, while the necklace seemed to be a string of oddly-shaped pearls. After a moment, Usagi realized that the curved shapes were not pearls but feline teeth, large enough to have come from something like the panther-form Luna had taken on the other night, and polished until they shone like jewels. Between them and the knife, there was something distinctly businesslike, and perhaps a little feral, about Luna’s new dress. Artemis raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

Meria had no idea how to redo Usagi’s hairstyle, so Luna did it for her and shooed away Meria’s attempts to fix _her_ hair instead, knowing that her own impossibly long tresses would respond to a simple mental command to ‘look like this.’ While Luna worked, the maid produced a small assortment of jewelry, but Usagi shook her head even before Luna told her to decline the offer. She had left her earrings at Michiru’s, but her engagement ring and the ornamented locket holding the ginzuishou were enough to fit with Luna’s true-but-not-true story of an heiress in hiding.

Once Luna had finished arranging Usagi’s hair, Meria had shown them to a sitting room and quietly withdrawn, smiling timidly at Usagi and glancing nervously at Luna—and even more so at Artemis.

“All right, Luna,” Usagi said as soon as the door slid shut. “What are you up to? What’s with the knife?”

Luna shushed her and looked at Artemis, who nodded and padded silently over to the door; Luna looked out the window. The skyline was undeniably beautiful, a mix of slender towers and elaborate palaces, all of them built from white marble, glittering crystal, or a gleaming, smooth-edged opalescent stone. She could count no less than four mana nexi among everything else, and shook her head at the sight before turning back to the room. Artemis had the equivalent of a frown in his eyes, but shook his head. Luna knew Artemis was upset with her for not reminding him about their ability to change form at will, but at least he was being mature enough to recognize the danger and put aside the inevitable argument for a better time.

“We’re in a lot of trouble, Usagi. Do you remember Serenity’s history lessons about Atlantis?”

Usagi frowned in concentration, then looked up sharply. “We’re THERE?!”

“Better to say ‘then.’ This is definitely some point during the Atlantean era, if not on the island itself, and if we’re going to get out of here with ourselves and the timeline in one piece, we’ve got to be very, very careful about what we do. This”—Luna hefted the short, wickedly curved knife—“is called a meehara. Do you remember what that means?”

“It’s the ceremonial weapon of the Feri’al,” Usagi said, her eyes closed as she recited something out of her past, “a warrior sect of the planet Mau...” Usagi’s eyes flashed open. “YOU?!”

Luna put her hands on her hips. “Yes, me. Did it ever occur to you to wonder how a _cat_ knew so much about training _humans_ to fight?”

“Well... I just thought... I mean... do you really know how to use that thing?”

“Yes, Usagi, I do. And I know how to fight without it. I could probably take Jupiter or Uranus in a straight hand-to-hand match, if I really had to.” Luna tilted the knife so that the pearl in the hilt was pointed forward, the curving arc of silver that held it gleaming in the light from the window. “There are nine levels of expertise in the Feri’al ranks, and the silver-capped white pearl is the mark of a sixth-rank fighter. Our society goes back almost twenty thousand years, so the Atlanteans will know what this means, and it’ll make it easier for them to accept the story I gave. Helpful little Meria’s probably giving them a report about it right now.”

“Why didn’t you choose a black pearl?” Artemis asked curiously. “You’re entitled to it.”

“Seventh-rank experts don’t normally take bodyguard assignments for anyone short of royalty, Artemis. And since we’re not claiming that Usagi is a princess, if they saw a black pearl, they’d have probably thought I was here to kill someone.”

“Good point,” Artemis admitted, scratching behind his right ear.

“Are you one of these Furry-Alls, too?” Usagi demanded.

“Feri’al,” Artemis corrected. “And no, I’m not. It’s a female society; no males allowed. I was trained as a Garheer, if you really want to know. Not that it makes any difference,” he added, intentionally souring his tone as he remembered that he was supposed to be angry with Luna, “since I can’t change form.”

“But _they_ don’t know that,” Luna pointed out. “If they see me walking around with a sixth-rank meehara, they’ll figure you must be at least as skilled; Meria kept looking at you like she expected you to turn into a half-ton tiger and start tearing the place apart. If you play the role they’re looking for, they’ll see the fact that you haven’t bothered to take on human form as an indication that you haven’t seen any worthy opponents around.” She smiled. “That _is_ the sort of arrogance Garheer are known for, after all.”

Artemis gave her a flat look filled with flaming daggers.

“Time out,” Usagi said, signaling with her hands before they said or did anything else. “Now, will one of you kindly explain to me exactly what the plan is?”

“We bluff.” Luna considered Usagi. “Our story would be a little more believable if you spoke Atlantean, but that would have its own problems, and we can’t do anything about it now anyway. When we meet Akhmed’s family, try to act like Serenity would have when greeting someone of equal rank. Bow just a little, smile, and greet them respectfully. Don’t mumble or try to make jokes; they’ll probably have someone with a translation spell waiting. After that, play along, keep your mouth shut, and Let Me Do The Talking.”

A knock at the door precluded any further discussion. Meria reentered the room and bowed. “Lord and Lady Neraan will see you now. If you’ll follow me...”

Luna helped Usagi get to her feet and guided her out the door, walking slightly ahead and to the left, holding Usagi’s arm. Artemis trailed a short distance behind and to the right, somehow managing to look dangerously alert through his usual lazy stroll. None of the other Senshi except Venus would have recognized him just then.

Meria led them to a pair of massive wooden doors, heavily inlaid with silver and gold over many elaborate carvings of spectacular beasts. The girl knocked three times, and the doors opened; Meria opened her mouth to speak, and then hesitated, looking a little nervous. She was obviously under orders to make a formal declaration of their arrival—an attempt by one or all of the people in the chamber to find out Usagi’s family name, and whether there was any advantage to be wrung out of it—but Meria had no more idea than her masters what that name was.

“We can announce ourselves,” Luna said, in a voice loud enough to be heard across the wide room beyond the doors. “You can go, Meria.”

The maid smiled thankfully at Luna and curtsied respectfully, first toward the occupants of the room, then at the guests. She smiled at Usagi one more time before scurrying off.

“Ready?” Luna murmured. Usagi straightened her back and squeezed Luna’s arm as an affirmative reply. “Here we go.”

There were four guards stationed in the room, one to either side of the door and the other two flanking a dais on the far end. Their armor was limited to mesh-like vests which had the unusual symbol from the middle of the nine- pointed star emblem sewn over the left breast, but they all had swords and the appearance of knowing how to use them.

The dais had four seats on it—all occupied—and there were three other people there besides. Akhmed was one, dressed in finer and less-dusty clothes and blinking in surprise when he saw the two women again. Two of the seated men looked like older versions of Akhmed—or more precisely, Akhmed looked like a younger version of _them_—which told them that the one in the finer chair was his father, Lord Neraan, and that the other man must be the Lord’s brother. The black-haired, hard-eyed woman to the Lord’s right was most likely his wife, but there was no way to be sure who the bald, black-bearded man in the chair at the far right was. There was a slender young man with dark blue hair and eyes standing at attention next to him. All of them were finely dressed and very important-looking; Lady Neraan seemed angry about something, while the rest, at least on the surface, ranged from mildly intrigued to utterly disinterested.

It was the robed and cowled figure in the corner behind Akhmed and his uncle that worried Luna as she and Usagi came to a stop before the group. She kept one eye on it as they both bowed; as a servant, hers was a real bow, whereas Usagi’s was more of a gracious head nod. Artemis sat back on his haunches near Usagi’s feet and looked around the room with a slow, lazy ease, shedding arrogance like fur.

“By what right does a lowly servant order the retainers of another house?” Lady Neraan snapped.

Luna rose from the bow and fixed a mostly neutral expression on the woman. Mostly neutral. “I spoke on the authority of my mistress, Lady. And on my own.” The placement of the meehara on her right front hip was quite deliberate, since it made the weapon impossible to miss. The brother Lords certainly noticed, and exchanged a considering glance.

Lady Neraan didn’t appear quite so observant as her husband and brother- in-law. “The authority of a child who claims noble heritage and yet travels with only one servant and a pet?” she said, sneering. “The self-styled heir of an unnamed family apparently so crude in its ways as to be unable to teach its children the use of a civilized tongue?”

“If this, my hostess, is your definition of ‘civil,’ then I am pleased—nay, I am proud to admit to ignorance of your mode of speech.” Usagi’s unexpected words nearly gave Luna a heart attack even as they tipped her off to the shadowed wizard’s use of a two-way translation spell. She kicked herself mentally for failing to notice that she’d been hearing the offensive Lady Neraan’s words in her own native language instead of Atlantean, even though she’d been expecting a spell of this sort to be in use.

“Since you knew of my inability,” Usagi continued, “I can assume that you have listened to your son recount the details of our initial meeting. I know from his courtesy during our short travel that he is a man of integrity, so I can also assume that he would have recounted in full the reasons my guardian gave him for what prevents my lack of a formal introduction. Tell me: is it the word of ‘a lowly servant’ that you disbelieve, or the word of your own son?”

Lady Neraan’s jaw opened, clicked shut, and opened again. “The former,” she said shortly.

“Ah. Then I will say to you now that Luna is no mere servant. Her rise to the sixth rank of the Feri’al sisterhood of claws is in itself sufficient testament to her loyalty and trustworthiness; she is, moreover, the daughter of a proud line of her race and a noble in her own right, with the same honor to be found in any human bloodline—honor which you have twice questioned. She has been my guardian and teacher for years, and I consider her one of my dearest friends; I can think of no one more qualified to speak on my behalf where I otherwise could not speak at all. And by the magic of your wizard, you know my words to be true.”

Luna was suddenly so proud of Usagi that she thought her heart might burst. The girl had wrapped herself fully in the attitude and manner befitting a queen, not only answering the challenges made by Lady Neraan but blowing them entirely out of the water and launching an all-out assault of her own. She had been respectful to the still-silent Lord Neraan by complimenting his son, while neatly stringing the Lady up for her rudeness. She had given Luna the full and unquestionable authority to speak in her place and neatly sidestepped the need to repeat a story whose details she was only half-comfortable with. She had reminded them of the fact that having a wizard employ spells on a guest without first obtaining the guest’s permission was a breach of etiquette, but had at the same time turned that minor insult to her advantage, verifying the truth of her statement.

Stepping forward, the wizard pushed back his cowl, revealing a youngish face with prematurely white hair and green-blue eyes that were a little too wise for his apparent age. He raised both hands, backs to Usagi, thumbs pointed outwards and with his fingers extended, then bowed his head respectfully between them. Luna recognized it as an apology of the most profound kind, since the display of the man’s fingers prevented him from casting most spells without everyone seeing, which would leave him at a decided disadvantage should the slighted party desire to make a more physical answer to his insult. It was also the gesture of a student humbly acknowledging the skill of a master. Usagi’s return nod was formal acceptance of the apology; her following smile and roll of the eyes silently added that she didn’t hold it against him.

The not-quite young wizard smiled faintly, then bowed to the three men on the dais and murmured, “With your permission, my Lords.” He turned to Usagi, bowed again with the words, “My Lady,” and then left the room, taking his magic with him.

After the wizard had gone, Luna turned to the Lords. “Shall we begin again, gentlemen?”

“That might be best,” the elder brother agreed, ignoring the outraged look from his wife. “Will you and your mistress accept chairs?”

“I prefer to stand,” Luna declined politely, “but my lady would be most grateful for a seat.”

The Lord nodded to his brother, who gestured to the nearest guard, who quickly retrieved a relatively plain wooden chair from another room and set it next to Usagi with a bow. She nodded her thanks to the Lords as Luna helped her settle into the seat.

Lord Neraan introduced himself and the other individuals on the dais. His given name was Jormen, his brother was Jherahd, and his wife’s name was Sheryndra. The bearded bald man was Grand Master Merchant Kullen Da’duin, the wealthiest and most personally influential of Neraan’s trading allies. The young man next to Da’duin was his aide, introduced as simply ‘Lund,’ and of course they already knew Akhmed. Lord Neraan didn’t mention the departed wizard. Luna, in turn, gave her standing with the Feri’al, and introduced Artemis as a Garheer m’ram’ha; it meant something like ‘mighty-clawed elite stalker of the shadows’ when translated into any human language, and was in fact his actual rank, about three steps away from the top of his order.

The noble brothers and the merchant apparently realized that, since their eyes flickered briefly to the cat.

“As your mistress pointed out,” Lord Neraan said next, speaking carefully, “Akhmed has already given us his account of your meeting in the desert, including how you came to be alone in the middle of nowhere in the first place. It is not a practice in this household to question the word of a noble guest”— he was very careful not to look at his wife while saying this—“but you must admit, your story is... difficult to accept.”

“Not only difficult,” Luna agreed, “but also dangerous. If, for example, you choose to believe that we are lying, then you must question all our actions carefully and determine who and what we really are; runaway slaves, disguised bandits, agents hired by your financial rivals, or perhaps worse things. Naturally, you would need proof of the falsehood and our true intentions to safely bring the Emperor’s justice on us, for otherwise it would be your word against my mistress’ claim, and if she turned out to be telling the truth, you would have affronted her entire family. On the other hand, if you accept her claim as genuine, then you also accept the rest of her story; if you choose to aid us, you run the risk of becoming involved in potentially dangerous affairs that do not concern you, but if you do _not_ aid us, then you are again faced with the ill will of her family. Did I leave anything out?”

“No,” Lord Neraan said simply.

“You see our dilemma,” his brother added. “If we accept your story without confirmation, we risk jeopardizing our own interests, yet if we try to seek confirmation, we are faced with the same problem.”

“I understand the situation this puts you in,” Luna replied, “and I give you my word, in both my mistress’ name and my own, that our only desires are to remain out of public attention and return safely to where we belong.” She thought hard and fast, then decided to risk the rest of it. “In all honesty, I must add that, while I myself will take almost any means necessary to ensure the safety of my charge, so long as you do not actively seek to cause us harm, no action will be taken against you even if you choose to withhold your support from us. Similarly, even if you do decide to provide us aid and shelter, you will not receive any reward or compensation for it; once we return home, I would be very much surprised if you ever saw or heard of us again.”

“I see.” Lord Neraan looked at his advisors, then turned back to Luna and Usagi. “Well, it seems we have much to think on. Until we reach a final decision, I can at least extend the temporary hospitality of our home to you all.” He signaled the two guards at the doors. “Ihanus and Bedan will see you back to your rooms, and Meria will be there if you need anything. I will send Akhmed to give you our decision in due course.”

Luna bowed. “Thank you, Lord Neraan.” She helped Usagi to stand, and they left the room with one of the guards leading, the other following at a respectful distance. Midway through sauntering out the door, Artemis stopped to consider both guards from head to toe, then flipped his tail in a supremely dismissive manner and seemed to forget all about them.

After the door closed, Lady Neraan let out a vicious sound. “The impertinence! The utter gall!”

“My thoughts exactly,” Da’duin observed in an dry undertone, glancing at his allies to let them know who he was really talking about. Lady Neraan missed the look, nodding fiercely as she took the master merchant’s statement for a declaration of like thinking.

Jormen suppressed a sigh. His wife had a jealous streak which was as wide as the desert, and not nearly as merciful. She also adhered to a rigid code of social conduct with a near-religious intensity; the strange foreign girl’s almost ethereal beauty would have set off Sheryndra’s former trait even if the Nekoron female hadn’t insulted her by what the Lady saw as a failure to follow protocol.

Nothing to be done about it now, though. “Any thoughts on who the girl really is?”

“If she’s not a noble’s daughter,” Jherahd said, scratching at his cheek thoughtfully, “then she’s the best actress I’ve ever seen. There are Ladies of the Great City itself who can’t pull off a tenth of that poise even half as well as she did.”

“Indeed,” Da’duin agreed. “I’d say the daughter of a planetary governor, at least, or perhaps one of the subject sovereigns on the outer worlds, but with that hair... I just don’t know.”

“With two such highly-ranked bodyguards,” Jormen mused, “could she be from Mau itself?”

Da’duin, who amongst them had the most knowledge of distant worlds, admitted it was possible. “But I would tend to doubt it,” he added. “A peculiarity of the shapechanging powers of the Nekoro is that their hair remains the same color no matter what form they take, and _that_ color just isn’t in their bloodline. Lund?”

“She is entirely human, my Lords,” the young man said, “as is her unborn child. A daughter, I think, but I can’t be sure.”

The brothers and the merchant exchanged another look, and Da’duin turned to his aide. “You can’t be sure?” Lund had certain limited gifts of the mind which did not rely on magic, and could tell things about people at a single glance that would normally take a great deal of effort to discover. Those gifts had earned him an honored place in Da’duin’s service, and had never failed him—until now.

“The two Nekoron are what they appear and claim to be,” the young aide replied, his eyes locked on a point beyond the far wall. “I detect no powers in either of them beyond what their heritage and training would provide.”

“And the young lady?” Da’duin asked.

“There’s an aura of some kind around her, Master; it interfered when I tried to get a lock on her powers. And...” Lund hesitated. “There was a moment, when she was declaring her trust and affection for the female Nekoron, that I caught a flash of something else. It was only for an instant, but it seemed to be coming from her, her unborn child, _and_ that curious locket she’s wearing, all at once. And it was strong, sir. Very strong.”

“A personal mana lens?” Jherahd suggested, referring to a type of device intended to focus and magnify the latent magical powers of the user.

“I don’t know, my Lord. I’m not sure I _want_ to know,” Lund added under his breath, so quietly that even his master didn’t hear.

“Possession of a personal lens would back up her claim to nobility considerably,” Jormen mused.

“Unless she stole it,” Sheryndra put in. “That would explain why she doesn’t want to go to the authorities.”

“Except that we have her word in support of everything her bodyguard told Akhmed,” Jormen reminded his wife. “And I think if we speak with Erridar, he’ll confirm that every word the girl said was true.”

“Which only leaves us to wonder about what she and the she-cat _didn’t_ say,” Jherahd observed dryly.

“True,” his brother admitted, “but even those omissions—whatever they were—only strengthen the girl’s claim. An impostor would have tried to give all the information she could about her supposed family, whereas most slaves wouldn’t have known enough to give any information of use. And Meria would have told us immediately if the girl bore a slave’s mark. As it is, her story tells us just enough of what we need to know, and leaves out just enough of what she needs to keep secret for her own safety, to sound genuine.”

“So you believe her?” Sheryndra demanded hotly.

“I do,” Lord Neraan said firmly. “I think...” There was a knock at the door, one of the guards moving to answer it even before anyone on the dais could tell him to do so.

“Papa? Mama?” A girl with dark blue eyes and long, jet-black hair entered the room, the trailing ends of her pale blue dress weaving around behind her. Her face, filled with the beauty of youth but also an odd pallor, lit up with a spectacular smile when she looked at Akhmed. “I saw Mahdib out in all the commotion in the yard and thought you might be back, Akha.” She pouted, pursed lips a red rose against the white of her cheeks. “Why didn’t you come to see me?”

Akhmed smiled. “I had to speak with Father about something very important, Kaiya, but I was going to go straight to you once we were done, I promise.” He walked over to the girl—she was a head shorter than he, with the same kind of delicacy in her body one expects to see in tiny crystal sculpture—and enfolded her in a hug. “Forgive me?”

“I’ll think about it.” Then she giggled and returned the hug. “Oh, silly, silly, Akha. Of _course_ I forgive you. But who’s the woman you came in with? Or the one in the cloak?” She glared around him at the adults on the dais. “You haven’t made my favorite brother go and get married without telling me, have you Papa?”

“No, Kaiya. I wouldn’t do that. Actually, the women—there’s two of them—were why Akhmed had to speak with me. The one in the cloak is a girl about your age; Akhmed found her and her guards in the desert, and they’re going to be staying with us for at least a little while.”

“Really?” Kaiya asked brightly. “I think I’d like to meet her, Papa.”

“I was just going to speak to her,” Akhmed said. “You can come along, if you’d like...”

“No!” Lady Neraan snapped. “I may have to put up with having that... that _creature_ stay under my own roof, but I refuse to let _my_ daughter be seen in company with a pair of alien savages and an ill-mannered, runaway child! Do you hear me, Kaiya? You are NOT to go anywhere near...”

“Sheryndra,” Jormen cut in sharply, “enough. You’ve made it clear that you don’t like the girl; fine. But she _is_ a fellow noble, and you _will_ show her the same respect you would show to any other guest in this house.”

Lady Neraan’s left eye twitched spectacularly. “As my Lord commands,” she said finally, speaking in tones of pure ice. “But that doesn’t change the fact that Kaiya...”

“...is going to be introduced to the young lady whether you like it or not,” Jormen finished.

There was a silence similar to that one hears right before a volcano decides to blow itself apart; then Sheryndra spoke. “As. You. Say. Husband.” Then she swept out of the room, radiating fury like heat from an oven.

Kaiya watched her mother go. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she? The girl, I mean. Mother wouldn’t be so upset, otherwise.”

“You know your mother,” Lord Neraan said, sighing. “And speaking of which, gentlemen, I think it might be best if I go after her, before she has a chance to start breaking things.”

“Go on,” Da’duin said. “Jherahd and I can go over the shipping schedules just as well without you.” Lord Neraan was already halfway out of the room, and the master merchant shook his head. “One reason why I never married,” he confided to Jherahd. “Too much of a distraction from the work.”

“Fun, though,” the younger Lord Neraan chuckled. “The study?”

Da’duin nodded in agreement, and they both stood. “Lund,” the master merchant said, turning when he was halfway across the room, “I’ll be busy for the next several hours; I’d like you to consult with Erridar and see what he knows about mana lenses and other magical devices. If that meets with your approval,” he added, glancing at Jherahd.

“I’ve no objections,” Jherahd said. “I’d like to be sure of what that device was, myself, if only for a little peace of mind.”

Lund bowed as the two older men left the room, then turned to the two siblings and bowed again. “If you’ll excuse me...”

“Just a minute,” Akhmed told him. “Kaiya, would you go on ahead? I’d like to speak with Lund for a minute.”

She smiled. “Okay, Akha. But don’t take _too_ long.” She drifted out of the room. Both young men watched her go, Akhmed with a fond smile, Lund with an expression that was almost expressionless except for something in his eyes.

“So,” Akhmed said, startling Lund, “what didn’t you tell them?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Nice try, my friend, but I saw you mutter something to yourself there after you were done talking. What did you see? If I’m about to take Kaiya in to meet someone who’s carrying a mana inversion bomb or some other awful weapon, I’d like to know.”

Lund sighed. “Nothing like that, Akhmed. If it were an inherently destructive power, that one flash might have been enough to level most of this manor. I didn’t feel threatened so much as... overwhelmed.”

Akhmed waited. “And?”

Lund sighed again. “You’ve picked up an annoying habit somewhere along the line, you know that?”

“So I’m told. What else did you see?”

“Nothing that makes any sense. I need to consult with Erridar before I can be sure of anything.”

“All right. But let me know what you figure out, okay?” Lund nodded.

“Akha,” Kaiya’s mock-stern voice came in from the hall, “you’re making me wait.”

“Sorry,” Akhmed called back to her. He turned back to Lund, said, “We’ll talk later,” and then quickly left the room, making many grandiose apologies before offering his arm to his sister and leading her away. Lund watched them go, his eyes never leaving the slender girl in blue until she vanished around a corner.

Face expressionless once more, Lund went looking for Erridar, silently trying to figure out a dozen things at once.

In the time it took to go from the sitting room to the apartments where Usagi and the cats had been shown, Kaiya asked a hundred questions of her brother. What was their new guest’s name? What did she look like? Where did she come from?

Akhmed answered as many questions as he could. He gave Usagi’s name and the names of her two guardians, then explained to his curious little sister why first names were all the strange girl could give. The rest of the questions, he dodged, saying he wouldn’t want to ruin Kaiya’s first impressions. He did warn her that Usagi didn’t speak Atlantean, but if anything, that only seemed to make Kaiya more eager to meet her.

When they reached the apartment, Akhmed again asked Kaiya to wait, and went in first. Usagi and Luna had been talking in that unusual language, and looked up as he entered the main room.

“Well?”

“My mother had some objections,” Akhmed told Luna. Then he looked at Usagi and did his best to convey the rest of the message in a smile. “But you can stay.”

He was fairly certain Usagi understood even before Luna translated it for her. “There’ll be a formal dinner this evening,” Akhmed explained after Luna had finished. “Meria will be able to help you with clothes for the occasion, since you’ll be meeting the rest of the family, but there was one person who sort of wanted to meet Usagi right away.”

Luna froze momentarily. “Who?”

“My younger sister, Kaiya. She walked in on us right before Father sent me here, and she was curious about you.” Akhmed considered Luna’s alert readiness carefully; so did Usagi, who poked her friend in the arm and demanded to know what she was being so tense about all of a sudden. Akhmed caught his sister’s name in Luna’s reply, and Usagi’s face took on the same curious quality he had just seen on Kaiya. Akhmed suspected that meant that she wanted to meet his little sister, an impression confirmed by Luna’s reluctant agreement. He turned back to the door and opened it.

Kaiya drifted into the room. One of these days, Akhmed was going to ask his sister how she did that; her feet always touched the ground, but she moved around as if she were walking on air, silently, smoothly. He suspected that some of it had to do with how small she was, but lightness alone somehow didn’t seem enough.

Kaiya was sweeping into a polite curtsey almost as soon as she was through the door, eyes demurely lowered, so it was only as she began to rise that she actually saw Usagi. Her eyes went first to the hair, and seemed amazed, then to the belly, and became startled; Usagi touched both in a defensive manner.

“Akhmed,” Kaiya said suspiciously, glancing sidelong at her brother, “are _you_ responsible for this?”

Akhmed’s reply was to choke and go bug-eyed and stammering. Usagi looked at him and asked Luna what had just happened; she laughed when she got the translation. Getting Kaiya’s attention, Usagi pointed to herself—her belly, actually—then to Akhmed, and shook her head, holding up her left hand and wiggling the ring finger.

“Not Akhmed,” she said, still shaking her head. “Mamoru.”

“’Ma-mo-ru’?” Kaiya repeated, glancing at Luna. “Is that her husband’s name?”

“Her fiancee,” Luna replied. Getting the startled looks anew, she elaborated, again sticking to the truth in a general sort of way. “It’s been arranged since before they were born, and they’ve acted almost like they _were_ married from the first day they met. I think Usagi decided there wasn’t any need to wait and took the ‘act’ one step further.”

“I wish I could get away with something like that,” Kaiya said enviously.

“Kaiya!”

“Oh, hush, Akha. I’m not going to do anything silly. Mother would fall over dead if I tried,” she added with a roll of her eyes. Then she looked at Usagi. “May I?” she asked, glancing at Luna with one hand slightly extended.

Usagi understood the gesture, smiled, and pulled Kaiya’s hand forward. They both felt it quite clearly when ChibiUsa kicked or punched a moment later; Usagi frowned down at her unborn daughter, while Kaiya appeared amazed. And sad, somehow. Longing. Luna noticed it even if Usagi didn’t, took in Kaiya’s pale, too-delicate features, and did some mental math. A quick look at Akhmed—who was watching his sister with a mix of fondness and a different sort of sadness— confirmed part of the answer she’d reached, and Luna sighed inwardly.

Akhmed shook off his mood as the two girls began to talk back and forth, Luna working overtime to translate for both of them. From the looks on their faces, Usagi and Kaiya had decided to be friends, so he quietly excused himself.

Artemis followed him into the front room of the apartment. “That dinner you mentioned; what time will it begin?”

“The sixth hour past High,” Akhmed replied. “If there’s anything in particular your mistress would like, just let Meria know when she returns.”

Artemis thought about it. “Actually, it might be less painful for everybody if you and I went down to the kitchens right now and had a few words with your cooks. Luna would see to it, normally, except that”—he looked back at the three females, who were all laughing about something—“I don’t think any of them are going to be happy with us if we try to break _that_ up.”

The young nobleman nodded sagely, and they left the apartments together, heading down through the halls but not actually saying much.

“How exactly do two high-ranking warriors from a planet of cats wind up as bodyguards to a human heiress?” Akhmed asked suddenly.

“I’ve asked myself that question a few times. Particularly in the last couple of days,” Artemis added sourly. “We were actually in service to Usagi’s mother first. Luna’s family traveled quite a lot, and she met Usagi’s mother when they were both a little older than Usagi is now. I’m told they took to each other right away; I _know_ Luna spent several years drifting back and forth between her training on Mau and visiting the Mo-anor”—Artemis cursed mentally for the slip-up and hoped Akhmed would take the ‘mispronunciation’ of ‘manor’ as a feline accent—“before she finally entered the family’s service.”

Akhmed nodded. “And you?”

“Uh...” Artemis coughed, then mumbled, “Ilostabet.” Akhmed started to nod again, then looked down at Artemis with a thoroughly confused expression.

“A... bet?”

“Yeah. There’s a sort of undeclared rivalry between the nine warrior societies on Mau; our younger warriors hone their skills by running around and playing tricks on each other, and the older members of the societies generally do the same under the guise of ‘helping old friends stay sharp.’” Artemis couldn’t quite keep a note of pain out of his voice. He hadn’t been that old on his last visit to Mau—*How long has it been?* he thought with a swell of homesickness—but he was certainly the oldest member of his society now; the same went for Luna. If either the Feri’al or the Garheer were still around.

Shaking his head, he went on with the story. “One of the aspects of that undeclared rivalry, at least among the Garheer, is that a warrior has to show up a similarly-ranked member of another society before he can earn his advancement. Prove his skills, as it were. I was due for consideration when we heard that Luna had gone into service, and some of my friends dared me to try and sneak into the manor. I thought it was a terrific idea, so I submitted my proposed plan to the masters; I’d sneak in, leave one of our society medallions where Luna’s mistress was sure to find it first the next morning, then sneak out, all without the fourth-rank Feri’al ever realizing I was there. They approved, and I set out in a blaze of anticipated glory.” Artemis had his head up proudly.

“She caught you.”

The white cat’s head fell. “Oh yeah. I found out later that Luna and Usagi’s mother had their quarters connected, but I didn’t know at the time, or I would have gone in through one of the windows. As it was, I got four steps into the main room of the apartment when Luna came out of a side door, saw me, and pulled out that knife of hers. I was in human form at the time, too, so I managed to disarm her, but she hit me over the head with a flower vase and then went panther. I tried to do the same, of course, but that blow to the head must have jarred something loose, because I turned into _this_”—he shrugged his feline shoulders—“instead. Sort of like thinking ‘cat’ when I meant to think ’big cat.’ It took me a minute to realize what had happened, and she was already pouncing at me, so I ran for it. Naturally, Luna chased me, and with the tiled floor in that room, we were both sliding around and crashing into things, which brought about half of the household running. Luna caught me just as the lights went on, then turned back into human form and held me up by the scruff of the neck for everyone to see.”

’Everyone’ being Serenity, her mother and father and two older brothers, the then-current Mercury, Venus, and Neptune, and about fifty members of the royal guard. Getting out of that mess without causing an interplanetary incident was probably the single greatest achievement of Artemis’ entire life to date. Needless to say, the masters had not been impressed; Serenity, on the other hand, had laughed herself silly. Most of her assembled entourage had been fighting to keep a collectively straight face, too; that room had been _annihilated._

“After they finally let me go,” Artemis continued, “I went home and worked harder than ever. It was five or six years later when word reached Mau that Usagi’s family was looking for a new instructor for their soldiers”—the old Master of Arms had retired—“and the masters decided if I could earn that position, it would make up for the mess I’d gotten into before.” Artemis scratched at his left ear. “It was sort of a tournament-style test of skill, and I won, but you can imagine what happened when the family found out who I was. Obviously, they decided to let me stay, so I’d repaired the damage to my honor. And it had Luna in a taking for months, so I was pretty pleased with myself.”

Artemis didn’t tell Akhmed the real reason why he’d gone back. Shapeshifting creatures can usually recognize other shapeshifters when they get close enough, if not on sight; members of the same species can typically tell each other at a glance, no matter what form any of them are in at the same.

When Luna had appeared in that doorway, there had been nothing that would have suggested—to a human, anyway—that she wasn’t just a dark-haired girl in a creamy white nightdress, but Artemis had seen every one of her other forms as well, from the tiny housecat to the huge panther, all superimposed over and mingled with that girl. She was, quite simply, the most beautiful thing he’d ever imagined, and the utter fearlessness with which she’d attacked him—in a nightdress that barely covered her legs, where he was fully armed for a stealthy night mission—had captured his heart.

He’d been _so_ enraptured that she’d almost driven that bloody meehara INTO the heart she’d just stolen, although at the time, Artemis had believed he could have died happy. That, if anything, was a sure sign that he’d lost not only his heart, but his mind as well.

As Minako would say, he had it baaaaaad from day one.

“So you train the house guards?”

Artemis came out of his reverie and nodded. “And some of the family, too, from time to time. Mostly I work with their personal bodyguards—Usagi’s, for example, I’ve been training for the last four or five years. Some of them, anyway. And Luna helps out there, too, when she’s not busy with Usagi herself.”

Akhmed nodded. “I’ve had some formal training myself. Perhaps you’d care to spar with me at some point?”

*Uh-oh.* Artemis stopped, covering the sudden pulse of worry by sitting down on the floor and scrutinizing Akhmed carefully. How to refuse him without insulting him or tipping off the fact that cat-form was the only one Artemis could assume?

The white cat realized something; he hadn’t actually _tried_ to shift forms yet. He’d been too busy devoting his energy to being upset with Luna and disappointed in himself—to say nothing of the effort that had gone into trying to make sense of a lifetime’s worth of suddenly unlocked and kick-started memories—to even consider trying.

He did so now.

Aside from a momentary stiff feeling, the sensation of muscles that have been allowed to get out of shape now trying to do a task they haven’t attempted in a long time, it was incredibly easy. The radical change in sensory inputs—a less precise nose, ears that weren’t as sensitive and strangely-shaped besides, eyes that saw a few more colors than he was used to—only fazed Artemis for a moment, and the stiffness was countered by the knowledge that he’d worn this form almost since kittenhood, when the power of transformation first manifested in the Nekoron people.

The young man who had replaced the white cat was a little taller than Akhmed, somewhere in the comfortable area between ‘lithe’ and ‘muscular,’ possessed of a fine-featured, roguish handsomeness. Long hair, the same pure white as his vanished fur, reached to his shoulders on the sides and halfway down his back. The uniform that had appeared about him consisted of a loose- fitting white shirt and pants, with wavy patterns of silver thread along the arms and legs. The gold buttons of the shirt were open about halfway down to reveal a vest of extremely fine silver mesh and the edges of the white undershirt between that and his skin. His belt had a gold buckle in the shape of the smaller crescent on his forehead, and at each hip hung a s’srah, a triple-bladed weapon designed to mimic feline claws. The steel blades and grips—a combination of handle and guard for the knuckles—were worked with silver designs.

Artemis bowed. “I would be honored.” Then he smiled. “But in the meantime, I think I’d better change back, or I’m going to scare the wits out of your cooks when we reach the kitchen.”

They both laughed and continued on.

The shower was made hot by the same process of pressure and energy as Glossolyndaraberonasym used to cook food. It wasn’t just water, either; Ami could feel a distinctly soapy tingle at work. Sasanna stood a short distance away, explaining some of the substances that were mixed in with the water, but she was extremely subdued as she did so, not making eye contact.

After drying off with a towel of highly absorptive moss, Ami looked around for her clothes or the borrowed dress, and Sasanna—still speaking softly, her eyes downcast—told her that the small chambers where she kept clothes also cleaned them carefully over the course of a day, so her things were only about half-cleaned. She had put the spare dress away as well, and quietly asked Ami to set aside the towel and stand in the middle of the chamber.

“Glossolyndaraberonasym can provide you with something that will fit better,” the dryad said. “If you will let him.”

Six corncob-shaped objects descended from the ceiling on thick lengths of vine, each of them trailing faint wisps of white from the point at the bottom. From those points extended dozens of very slender creepers, and Sasanna had the nearest one rise so that Ami could see the tiny hole in the tip. The dryad closed her thumb and forefinger on the tip and pulled back, drawing forth a nearly-invisible thread.

“I do not know how your kind makes clothing, but this is how we make most of ours. You may find the experience more than a little strange, but Glossolyndaraberonasym will not hurt you.”

“Just tell him to watch where he puts his creepers,” Ami said, feeling more than a little self-conscious.

The next six minutes were among the most unusual in Ami’s life. Some of the creepers took measurements—they had a very light touch, and would have landed the tree in SERIOUS trouble had he been human—while the others began to weave back and forth around each other in a rapid, impossible-to-follow pattern, rather like watching a hundred spiders at work at once. While the clothes took shape, Sasanna continued to explain things about dryad fashion. Of several things she learned during those few minutes, Ami wasn’t sure which was worse; the fact that the species didn’t wear undergarments, or that Glossolyndaraberonasym, having studied her and Makoto’s clothes, offered— through Sasanna—to try and provide some.

The tree wove everything in three major pieces—left, right, and back—according to the measurements, then brought those pieces together around Ami, assembling the pieces and making any last-minute corrections necessary. The end result was a short-sleeved blue dress, essentially the same design as Sasanna’s, scaled down to Ami’s smaller form.

As the creepers withdrew at last, Ami adjusted the dress slightly. It fit perfectly and felt _very_ soft, the fine thread more like silk than anything else she could think of to compare it to, although not exactly the same. At the same time, it was a distracting sort of thing to wear, because for the sake of a better fit, the dress clung in places Ami wasn’t entirely used to having her clothes cling; she took a moment to wonder what Ryo’s reaction would be, seeing her in something this lovely, but the pleasant image was quickly dispelled by a pointed self-reminder that Ryo was a very long way away, and she had more immediate problems to worry about.

Once the dress was finished, Sasanna handed over a comb—wooden, of course, with teeth that were thicker cousins of the pine needle—and a small patch of green moss. Ami wasn’t sure what the moss was for until she noticed a similar spot of the stuff covering Sasanna’s left cheek; beneath it, the swelling of the bruise had gone down considerably. Her own jaw was well into the stinging ache phase, so Ami pressed the stuff into place. It tingled weirdly, a little like the sensation involved whenever Hotaru healed someone, and most of the soreness went away.

“It will hold itself in place,” Sasanna said, “until it has healed the damage. That should not take long.”

They headed downstairs.

Makoto was gone. For the first time since breakfast, Ami looked directly at Sasanna.

“She went into the forest almost as soon as we went upstairs,” the dryad reported. “And she left this behind.” From a pocket somewhere in her dress, Sasanna produced Makoto’s communicator.

“She doesn’t want me to find her, is that it?” Sasanna shook her head. “Too bad.”

Once she had it set to scan for the proper life-signs, Ami’s computer had no trouble locking in on Makoto, the only other human for a hundred kilometers in any direction. She was moving northwest, at a speed which told Ami she’d transformed, and had been going flat-out this entire time. Catching up was not going to be easy.

“Ami,” Sasanna said, “please, let her have some time alone. She’s not in any danger; my sisters and I can...”

“You’re not exactly in a position of trust, here,” Ami reminded Sasanna bluntly, pulling out her transformation pen. “Any of you. I’m not much happier about what you did to Makoto than she is, and when I get back with her, you’re going to have some questions to answer.”

“I didn’t mean to do anything to hurt her,” Sasanna objected. “Linking minds is a natural thing for my kind; it is part of how we express friendship.”

“I don’t care if you declared your undying love, swore marriage vows, and offered her the crowns of three nations in the bargain!” Ami shouted, forcing Sasanna to back up a step. “That doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t have any right to do it in the first place without at least _asking_ Makoto if she wanted you digging around in her mind! And whether or not you meant to hurt her is completely besides the point, now, because you did hurt her!”

“I know,” Sasanna whispered. “I wouldn’t have understood it before I linked with her last night, but I know why she’s angry with me and why it hurt her so much and... and I didn’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Ami said flatly. “You made the wrong one, and now you’re going to have to live with it.” Sparing one last angry look at the sad-eyed dryad, she raised her pen. “MERCURY CRYSTAL POWER, MAKE-UP!”

Bolts of sub-zero energy hissed out from the gleaming mass of power gathered around her upraised right hand, exactly as they were supposed to, but when the coiling energy swung back in towards her, it shattered, like jets of water striking a solid surface. That was the only warning Ami got that something was about to go wrong, and when it did so a split second later, she screamed.

Ami always felt a momentary chill when she changed into Mercury, the brisk and invigorating rush of her gathering power, but now she felt as if her bones had frozen and exploded, icy knives erupting through her body from the inside. She dropped her computer—its alarm was going wild, too little and too late—but couldn’t let go of the transformation pen, its surface so bitterly cold she feared it had frozen to her hand. Sasanna raised her arms to shield her face and stared through the thin space between them in horror at the tiny blizzard that had taken shape around Ami’s nearly-vanished form.

When it worked properly, the transformation took only seconds, and this malfunction did not last any longer, but it ended by blasting out in all directions, an icy explosion that knocked Sasanna to the floor and sprayed snow and sleet across the entire chamber. She got back to her feet with a groan and quickly looked around.

Ice caked the walls and ceiling where the deflected bolts of energy had struck, the sort of white-rimmed black ice one finds after months of a hard winter. Sasanna ignored the new decorations and ran over to Ami, who lay prone in the middle of the room on a blanket of snow. Her pen had fallen from her fingers, and Sasanna kicked it as far away as she could, then carefully knelt down and reached out to check, not for a pulse, but for a thought, even an unconscious one.

Ami’s flesh was bitterly cold to the touch and nearly as pale as the snow around her; the sense of her mind was chaotic, her awareness reeling from what it had just been through, retreating behind barriers of willpower and going deeper and deeper. Sasanna was alarmed by the disorganization, and at how far Ami’s mind had fallen back; she had to go into her subconscious to heal, yes, but if she went too far, she might not get back.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Sasanna moaned bitterly. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Brother-self, what have I done? What do I do _now?_”

Glossolyndaraberonasym didn’t answer, but Sasanna understood the meaning behind the silence. Her brother-self didn’t speak because he didn’t have to; she already knew as well as he what had to be done next.

Sasanna sat on the floor and gathered Ami close, and spared a moment to look at the girl’s closed eyes. “I know you can’t hear me,” she said quietly, “but I was telling the truth. And I know you were, too. Maybe I did have to do it, but I could have waited, I _should_ have asked... and I can’t do either now. If you...”—she shivered and took a deep breath—“if you decide to hate me for this, I’ll understand.”

She put one hand on either side of Ami’s head, sent out a mental message— *I’m sorry.*—then closed her eyes, bowed her head, and entered Ami’s mind.

Jupiter didn’t really know where she was going, or even why she bothered to run at all; even with her communicator back at the tree, Mercury could track her down in no time. That realization finally took hold in her mind, and she slowed, then stopped, transforming back to normal and sitting down with her back to a tree, knees drawn up and head bowed. She tried to think, but every thought that formed in her mind started on one problem and finished on another, after switching to a third about halfway through, something like ‘Mama/Papa-Ami- Sasanna’ going around and around.

Makoto’s body had caused her some problems in the past—for its height, its improbable strength, its almost blatant development—but although she had been embarrassed from time to time, she’d never hated it before.

She’d also never hit one of her friends before. Oh, she wielded a mean pillow at slumber parties, and she didn’t hold back when it came to their battle exercises, either, but this wasn’t the same thing at all. In her mind’s eye, Makoto could see Ami staggering to the side, could still see—and feel—her knuckles striking Ami’s jaw. Her right hand stung, partly from hitting Ami, partly from hitting Sasanna.

She wasn’t at all sorry for hitting Sasanna. Not one little bit. What the dryad had done went beyond a mere violation of privacy, and it was only the memory of Sasanna’s presence in her own mind—the certain sense that nothing was being forced or altered—which allowed Makoto to keep the psychological impact of that intrusion from crossing the line into rape. That the dryad had been gentle and understanding only made things worse; it had allowed her to get in deeper, to bypass the defenses Makoto knew her mind would have slammed down against an enemy.

It didn’t help matters that _those_ memories had been the ones Sasanna had seen. Pain was supposed to lessen with time. That was what the counselor said, the one her uncle had insisted she go see for months after the crash. Michiru said it too, and she had the personal experience to back the claim. So why hadn’t it happened? Each time Makoto confronted that memory, it was as strong as it had ever been; every important thing in her life only seemed to make the pain worse.

Other kids had teased her when she’d started growing—like a weed, they all said; little flower-girl Makoto’s growing like a weed—so much taller so much sooner than anyone else. Her mother had helped her deal with that, and again, later, as the rest of her body worked to catch up and the boys began bothering her. Then her mother and father died, and instead of letting her anger out at home or at the flower-shop, where her parents’ love and her little green friends were all around to help her, Makoto started letting the anger out with her fists. And she got transferred to Juuban, where she met Usagi and the others.

The idea that her parents’ deaths might somehow have been _necessary_ for her to find her destiny as Jupiter haunted Makoto’s nightmares; she didn’t want to think that the price for her friends had been her family, that her future had come at the expense of her past.

Thinking of her friends naturally led her back to hitting Ami, which triggered the memory of striking Sasanna, which in turn reawakened the reason behind that attack, and _that_ reminded her of her parents again...

“What’s all the noise about?”

Makoto looked up suddenly, aware for the first time that she’d been crying, but not bothering to do anything about it as she tried to find the source of the voice.

It was another dryad, though the only reason Makoto could say that for certain was because Ami and Sasanna had both already said several times that there were no other humans around; this new dryad didn’t look a thing like Sasanna, except in certain extremely general ways. She was only about as tall as Ami, and not as slender as Sasanna, with a woody brown tint to her skin instead of the pale, leafy green Sasanna had displayed. Her hair was utterly white except for a few streaks of grey at the temples, and she wore it unbound, kept back from her face by means of a wooden circlet polished so smooth that it shone nearly as brightly as metal or jewels would have. Her face was markedly different from Sasanna’s as well, with a nose that was somewhat longer, a chin just a bit more square, and eyes that were gold-flecked green instead of brown.

After a moment, Makoto realized that this dryad not only looked _different_ from Sasanna, but _older_ as well, and not just because her hair was white. There were faint wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and around her eyes, and her skin had the shiny, not-quite-smooth texture of an old apple. Her fingers and toes—which poked out from beneath the hem of her faded green dress, over which she wore a sash of a darker hue—were callused and slightly crooked.

Makoto remembered something else Sasanna had said; dryads didn’t start to show any appreciable signs of age until well into the latter part of their lives. If this one was old enough to _look_ it, then she must be very, very old indeed.

“I’m old enough,” the dryad replied. “Closer to two thousand turns than one, though in all that time I’ve never had such a rude wake-up call as this. What’s wrong, child? Why are you crying? Has something happened to your tree?”

“My... tree?” Makoto repeated, momentarily confused until she remembered the borrowed dress she still wore. *She thinks I’m a dryad.*

“Well of course I think you’re...” The old dryad frowned. “Wait a moment. You’re human, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” In spite of everything, Makoto was curious enough to ask, “Why didn’t you know? I thought Sasanna told everyone we were here.”

“Sasanna? I suppose she did at that—the girl always has been a chatty one—but there’s a difference between hearing about something and actually seeing it for yourself.” The white-haired head shook back and forth. “I never would have believed I’d mistake a human for a sister; I must be getting wooden between the ears.”

*You say that like it’s a bad thing.*

Makoto jumped. That rough, creaky old voice had come out of nowhere, and it had definitely been a man’s voice—but there _weren’t_ any men, not anywhere on this entire island! So where had it come from?

“That was just my brother-self trying to be funny, and...” the old dryad broke off with a strangling sound. “You HEARD him?!”

Makoto realized then that the dryad was responding to the questions in her mind as much as the ones she had actually asked aloud, but her higher consciousness pretty much shut down as the implications of the phrase ‘brother-self’ hit her. Makoto’s head turned to regard the tree she had been sitting against; it wasn’t a tree at all, but a highly vertical section of root connecting to another of those apparently cross-species forest giants, this one even larger than Sasanna’s tree. The words ‘huge’ and ‘ancient’ were insufficient when applied to this many-branched behemoth, its bark thick with moss and ivy, its roots home to a forest of flowers, its eaves shading an area large enough to blot out the center of a soccer field. The thing looked like it had taken root about two minutes after the dawn of time and just kept on growing since then.

And she had been sitting against it when she’d heard that voice.

Sasanna had been right. It was true; she could hear them. Not just the age-old tree, but the sense of every green and growing thing she could lay eyes on—even the dryad, who was looking at her in absolute bewilderment—registered somewhere on the edge of her mind. Makoto could feel the shocked amazement pouring out of that ancient mind.

Makoto fell back against the vast tree and laughed until she cried.

*Ami?*

*Uhh... Mother... it hurts...*

*Shhh. Pain tells you it’s healing; you’ll be okay in a little while. Just relax.*

Ami could feel gentle arms cradling her head, and wanted to do as she was told, just let go and rest. But she had to know. *What happened? Why does it hurt so much?*

*I don’t know. I think something went wrong when you tried to transform. Has it ever done that to you before?*

*No. I-I’ve been having trouble transforming recently, ever since that mess with the mana nexus, but I don’t know why.*

*Why didn’t you tell your friends?*

*Luna said I’d be back to normal in a few days, and I didn’t want to give Usagi something _else_ to worry about... and it never hurt this much before.*

*I see.* There was a pause. *I also see that it made a similar mess of Makoto’s home, with the snow and ice everywhere.*

*Yes. I’m sorry about that, I’ll clean it... up...*

Ami realized a few things at that point, and opened her eyes. And her mouth.

“Hello, Sasanna. I’m sorry about your tree.”

Sasanna smiled. “He’s okay. We weren’t so sure about you. _Are_ you okay?”

Ami sat up, trying to form a coherent thought through the banging in her brain. About all she got for her trouble was a sharp shift in the pain as blood shifted; Ami clapped her hands to the sides of her head with a whimper.

Soft fingers touched her forehead, and the pain receded. Ami opened her eyes and looked into Sasanna’s, only a short distance away; the dryad’s lips did not move, but Ami clearly heard her voice asking *Are you okay?* within her own mind.

Forming a reply around the dull ache was difficult, but Ami managed. *I’m better than I might have been. Sasanna, what did you do?*

*Just now, or... before?*

*Both.*

*Just now, I linked our minds together, enough so that we can share emotions and strong thoughts. I feel a little of the pain in your mind, and you feel a little of the calm in mine, but it doesn’t hurt either of us quite so much as it did. Earlier...* Sasanna hesitated. *Earlier is complicated. You were hurt very badly, and...*

Ami cut her off with a weird mental impulse. *I know; I see it.*

Sasanna blinked as she realized Ami had somehow absorbed the full breadth of _her_ memories of entering the girl’s wounded mind: gently pushing the scattered thoughts and memories back into place; following the trail of thought down into the depths of her subconscious to find the core of the awareness that was Ami; guiding that awareness back towards the surface, towards consciousness. The dryad was startled at how easily the girl had picked up the trick of perceiving the thoughts of another while in a link.

*I’ve always been a quick study,* Ami’s mind-voice replied with a trace of humor. Then she became very serious. *Sasanna, if what I saw was accurate... I think I might owe you my life. Thank you.* A ripple of nerve impulses followed, triggering the purely psychic equivalent of a warm hug and a formal kiss.

*You’re welcome,* Sasanna said, returning the mental embrace. It faltered a little at the end. *Does this mean you’re not angry with me?*

*Not completely. I’m still not happy about what you did to Makoto, but I can tell for certain now”—she pushed gently against Sasanna’s side of the thought-divide—“that you really didn’t mean to hurt her, that you really are sorry, and that you _do_ understand that what you did was wrong.* Ami paused, then blushed slightly. *Besides, it’s hard to be angry with someone who’s just saved your life without feeling pretty foolish. And I...*

*...don’t much care for being foolish,* they thought together. Sasanna smiled, feeling a little better. Then she frowned. *Ami... have you ever done this before? Linked minds, I mean?*

*Only once.* Ami showed Sasanna the moment in which Luna had restored the four Inner Senshi to help Sailor Moon battle a cardian that was simply too much for her. *There have been a few times where we’ve joined our powers together, but it’s not the same thing at all; we’re _aware_ of each other when we’re linked like that, but not to this degree. And that one time, Luna was sending one-way; it wasn’t a link so much as a download. Or defragmenting the hard drive.*

*?*

*Sorry. Late twentieth-century techno-babble.*

*I see.* Ami was fairly certain—well, more than fairly; she knew—that Sasanna didn’t see, but she made no comment. *You’re really very good at this, Ami. Do you suppose your past life might have been telepathic?*

*I don’t know,* Ami admitted. *Except for little flashes now and then, I can’t even remember her—my—name, let alone what she was like or could do.* She couldn’t hide the faint sense of failure that went with that admission.

*It’ll come back to you,* Sasanna said reassuringly. *I didn’t see it, but if you can remember any of it, then it’s all there. You’ll find it as long...*

As the thought broke off, Ami felt a sudden shiver from the other side of the joined mind. *Sasanna? Are you all right? What’s happening?*

*I’ve lost my sense of Makoto,* the dryad replied, amazed. Ami caught a short-lived surge of impulses which her mind translated as a train station full of people all talking at once. *None of us can find her,* Sasanna said, now sounding very worried. *And we can’t find the three sisters and brothers who were closest to her!*

*Calm down, Sasanna,* Ami thought. She paused for a moment, certain that she’d heard—or almost heard—another voice saying those exact same words, a deeper, somewhat drumlike voice with definite male overtones. She shook her head and retrieved her computer from one of the puddles on the floor, the aftermath of her little short-circuit, then began running a series of scans: first for Makoto; then for the presence of unusually large trees in her area; and lastly for dryads in the same general places as the trees.

*Makoto’s fifteen-point-seven-one kilometers to the northwest. She’s alive. I’m also picking up seven overlarge trees and three dryads within a one- kilometer radius of her location.*

It took Sasanna a moment to translate the meanings behind the words—dryads navigated with help from the plants and use of landmarks, and their trees didn’t move at all, so specific measurements of distance were rather a new concept for them—but once she had figured out what the numbers meant, she let out a relieved sigh.

*That’s everyone. They’re okay.* Relief was replaced by a rough *What is going on out there?* before Sasanna got to her feet, breaking the mental link. Ami experienced a momentary head rush as her perspective of things went back to their usual single-opinion point of view, but she was pleased to note that the splitting headache did not return.

“Are there any circumstances under which dryads can lose contact with each other?” she asked, rising.

“It is harder to hear each other at a distance,” Sasanna replied, pulling things out of the weapon-closet Ami had seen earlier, “unless we have our brother-selves to help, but the only time we should lose contact this close is when one of us dies. Since you have been able to confirm for us that this has not happened, we have no idea what could be causing it.”

“But it probably has something to do with Makoto,” Ami said, looking at her computer’s readouts with a sigh. “I could cover that distance in no time at all if I could transform, but it’s going to take until noon to get there like this.”

“It will take as long as it takes,” Sasanna said. She had several small pouches attached to her belt by this point, and had filled two quivers, one with the dozen arrow-thorns, the other with the four javelins and the still-unstrung bow. She pulled a pair of low-heeled boots out of the closet next, boots which looked like they were made from very large, overlapping brown leaves. Sasanna belted the quiver of arrows about her waist, slipped the strap of the other one over her head, then retrieved the slender spear and turned back to face Ami, the boots in her other hand.

“We don’t wear boots except during the winter,” she said, handing the footwear over to Ami, “but our feet are tough, and used to walking around unprotected. I know yours may not be quite so resilient.”

Ami nodded and pulled the boots on, stomping on the floor to test the fit. It wasn’t perfect, but the softness of whatever material they were made from helped considerably. When she looked up again, Sasanna was over by the table, picking up one of the carry-blooms and attaching it to her belt. She motioned Ami over and had her slide a large, sash-like strap on over her dress; the dryad hung four of the carry-blooms on that, then picked up two more, carried them to the tap, and filled them with water. One she gave to Ami, to hang from her belt, and hung the second from her own belt.

Then they set out.

She knelt in the center of a silver-blue tiled pattern of interlinked and fragmented rings, a tall, stern-faced woman with medium-length scarlet hair and eyes that were closer to silver than to grey. She wore a long white robe with a single symbol emblazoned on the front in a deep red hue that was darker than blood, a symbol which an observer from several millennia in the future would think to be a compressed form of the letters ‘P’ and ‘L.’ In her right hand, the woman held a tall staff fashioned in the shape of a huge key; a stone the same deep shade of red as the mark on her robe sat atop that staff, absorbing the light of the chamber rather than reflecting it.

“Rise, Lady Pluto, and present your report.”

Medea, the three hundred and ninth Senshi of Pluto, bearer of the Garnet Orb, Guardian of the Mobius Gate, stood and faced the five Lord Archmages of the Empire. Any of the three men and two women who stood before her—in image if not in true form—could have leveled a fair-sized city in short order, yet they all had a healthy respect for her, a woman whose abilities in conventional magic were not much beyond those belonging to a moderately talented apprentice.

That respect didn’t have as much to do with the fact that she was the daughter of a powerful noble family and an appointed representative of the Imperial Throne, empowered to speak on the Emperor’s behalf, as it did the fact that her unconventional magical powers, given half a chance and even a sliver of room, could have killed any one of them in a single blow.

“Lord Archmages, I have confirmed our initial fears; the energy disruption detected two nights ago was indeed the result of an unauthorized use of the Mobius Gate.”

“Was it a departure or an arrival?” one of the shadowed master mages asked.

“An arrival, in the northern Sharaha desert of Ahfaahri. Three travelers at least, possibly four, and definitely from somewhere in the future. The energy was erratic, though, suggesting that their trip was uncontrolled, so I haven’t been able to pinpoint their time of origin.”

“And the anomaly?” one of the two women asked.

“Still nothing definite on what it might have been. There’s a very good chance that who—or whatever came through is shielded in some manner; that would make scrying chancy at best, but with the residual energy of the Gate saturating the region, such powers have become next to useless, even with the Garnet Orb to focus them. I’ve taken the precaution of dispatching...”

The door behind her swung open unexpectedly as a young girl in a plain grey dress entered the chamber. Her vividly green eyes were humbly lowered, a few wisps of her short, platinum-blonde hair falling forward to frame her face.

“I left orders that I was not to be disturbed, Lydia,” Medea said flatly.

“Forgive me, Mistress, but I thought you would want to know at once. A report reached us from the city of Khairoah only a few moments ago; one of the city’s mana reactors has experienced a misalignment.”

“Of what interest is that to me?” Medea barked. “Either the reactor’s monitoring mages will be competent at their tasks and correct the problem, or they will fail and a minor city will be without proper weather or power for the few hours the realignment will take.”

“Mistress, the misalignment was not caused by a mechanical defect or improper maintenance of the system’s magic; the mages believe it was triggered by a brief increase in the local mana fields.”

“An _increase?_” one of the archmages said sharply.

“Is that even possible?” her neighbor asked.

Lydia’s already-bowed head ducked even lower. “That is what the report claims, Lord Archmage. It bears the testimony of the three mages who were on duty at the reactor when the misalignment occurred, and a statement by their overseer, who has confirmed that all three were successfully truth-scryed.”

“Khairoah is the closest settlement of any kind to the location of the temporal rift,” the tallest of the five wizards reminded his colleagues. “Is it a coincidence that we receive this report now?”

“Two days,” the second of the female wizards noted, “is roughly the amount of time it would take to reach Khairoah from the central point of the rift, if one were to travel on foot.”

The five archmages looked at each other, then turned their collective gaze on Medea. “We must know what is happening, Lady Pluto. You are the foremost expert on any matters relating to the Mobius Gate, and already duty-bound to investigate this incident.”

She nodded. “As you say, Lord Archmage. I will depart for Khairoah as soon as I have informed the Imperial Court.”

The gathered archmages nodded and then faded away, the magic which maintained their images having been canceled. Medea waited until the last flicker of energy was gone before turning to Lydia.

“Find the nearest officer you can and inform him that I need ten of the finest guards he has and at least one competent mage-inquisitor ready to leave within the hour. Once you’ve done that, see to the preparations for our journey.”

The girl nodded as her mistress headed out of the room. Medea stopped and looked back. “Oh, and Lydia?”

“Yes, Miss...” The girl was hurled backwards by a sizzling bolt of blood-red energy which erupted from the leveled staff. It held her pinned against one of the great marble columns of the room for several painful seconds before it ended, letting her fall to the floor. Lydia felt a horrible sensation in her left arm and saw that it had been reduced to a withered, near-lifeless shell of itself, aged a century or more in the space of a few heartbeats. It stayed like that for what seemed an eternity before more of the reddish light flickered across it, restoring youth and usefulness.

“Don’t ever disobey my instructions again.”

Lydia managed to whisper a frightened, “No, Mistress,” as Medea swept out of the chamber.

*Useless girl,* the fire-haired woman thought in disgust. *If I could just find a way to be safely rid of her... bah!*

Medea dismissed the not-infrequent daydream and focused on more immediate, obtainable goals. This strange, unknown power that had appeared so briefly from somewhere in the future, for instance. They already knew it was strong, but if Lydia’s impossible statement had been accurate, if the thing—whatever it was—could actually _create_ mana energy...

Duty be damned. For a chance at that kind of power, Medea would let the entire timeline burn.

And once she had it, she wouldn’t need Lydia anymore.

 

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