The Harbors of the Sun (The Books of the Raksura, #5)

by Martha Wells

If the others are dead it’s my fault.” Bramble had to nip that bud right now. She made her voice hard, and as queen-like as it was possible for a short round Arbora hunter to sound. “Merit, we don’t have the luxury for things to be anybody’s fault. We have to be ready to act.”

“She’s not a very agile thinker. Not like us and Delin, the way we talk about things and change our minds. Once she gets an idea, she doesn’t change her mind about it.” Bramble thought it was a sad way to be. If you weren’t entertaining a dozen different possibilities and probabilities at once, what was there to think about?

Bramble couldn’t take it in. It was like listening to a story read from a book. Surely this couldn’t be real. She was Bramble, an Arbora hunter of great skill from the Indigo Cloud Court. People like her hunted and worked and made art and had sex with their friends and at some point had a clutch or two or three on their way to old age. They didn’t become witnesses to the end of their world.

And “weak” wasn’t really the right word for what Shade meant. What he was trying to say was harder to express. It was giving in to feelings other people thought you were supposed to have about things that shouldn’t have happened to you in the first place, but were not like the actual feelings you did have. There wasn’t a word for that in Raksuran or Altanic or Kedaic or any other language Moon knew. Moon said, “It’s not weak.”

The breeze held just a hint of rainy season coolness and was like silk against groundling skin.