by J. D. Lakey
Warrior Witch
Text Copyright © 2018 by J.D. Lakey
Art Direction & Layout © 2017 by Dylan Drake
All rights reserved. Published by Wayword Press
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Author Website:
JDLakey.com
Author Contact:
[email protected]
Book Publisher Website:
WaywordPressBooks.com
Books by J.D. Lakey
The Black Bead Chronicles:
Black Bead: Book One
Bhotta's Tears: Book Two
Spider Wars: Book Three
Storm Child: Book Four
Arrow’s Flight: Book Five
Warrior Witch: Book Six
A Brief History of Bloodstones
by the Psi-Ops Specialist, Kirr, Sendai of the Margai people
(Available as a free download for subscribing to my newsletter)
The Throne at the End of Time:
Taurok's Vengeance: Book One
Anthologies:
Choosingday and Other Short Stories
For Cedar and Eva
My wise and brave warriors
The heart knows what it knows
CONTENTS
Copyright
Books by J.D. Lakey
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Link to download A Brief History of Bloodstones by the Psi-Ops Specialist, Kirr, Sendai of the Margai People
Glossary
People of Occonomara
About the Author
You have forgotten something
It is a song that nags at the back of your minds
You are of the stars, the song says
The deep dark cold is where you belong
Take pity upon the land you stand upon and remember the Dark
(Excerpt from the Timewalker Journals, Cheobawn, the All Mother)
Chapter 1
“Hey,” Tam said softly as he leaned over and kissed the top of Cheobawn’s head. “We are here. Time to wake up.”
Cheobawn sighed as she struggled to wake. She could not remember the last time she had been able to sleep the night through. Days and nights merged in her mind, becoming one long flow of time without beginning or end.
Tam tapped her cheek with his calloused fingertip. The heat of his lean, hard body kept that side of her body wonderfully warm. Cheobawn did not want to give up that comfort.. She had been without her Pack for so long she had forgotten these simple pleasures.
Groaning, Che shook the sleep out of her mind and opened her eyes. Soon, she promised herself, soon she would return to her bed in River’s house, and once there, she would sleep for a week.
Megan patted her hand. “What next? Surely you had a plan.”
Che let go of her fierce grip on Megan’s apron. Apron? Cheobawn had to sort through all her memories of being a carrion dragon. Why was Megan dressed like a Lowlander? Oh, wait. that’s right. Megan was wearing a disguise. She had taken hire on the barge as a hedge witch in exchange for passage downriver, her outfit complete right down to the white apron and the straw hat with the scarlet flowers.
Cheobawn looked at her Pack in the dawning light. Not just Megan wore a disguise. They all did. Tam, Alain, and Connor wore rivermen garb—rope soled shoes, loose-legged canvas pants, raw linen shirts tucked into wide leather belts that held their rivermen tools and weapons, wool vests that kept the morning chill out, and the ever-present red cotton bandanas tied around the neck that had so many uses on a boat it was hard to count them. Even Megan wore a bandana. The bits of cloth served another purpose if you were a Pack come down the Escarpment to find your errant Ear. The small scarves hid their omehs. Every person born of the domes had an omeh—an honors necklaces woven whole around their necks at birth and rewoven every year after until they had achieved their adult growth. An intricate construction of plasteel threads and tiny bloodstones, the omehs told the story of the person wearing it. You could tell at a glance things like birth-dome, Pack status, and skill levels. Cheobawn unconsciously touched the empty place at her neck. She had cut hers off in a moment of frenzied self-injury before leaping off the high cliffs, permanently severing her ties with the tribes of the High Reaches.
Che had left it all behind. Her life in the domes, her Pack, everyone and everything she knew and loved. Tam, hard-headed as ever, had refused to accept her loss. He had taken his Pack down the Escarpment to find her, an impossible task. How did one hunt for a small child in the infinite chaos of Lowland civilization? Love drew them back together and now, here they were, together at last. The Luck of a Black Bead, as the Coven intended, cut like a scythe through all obstacles.
Only hours before, Cheobawn had stepped around a corner and—in the time it took for her heart to beat once—walked from the Temple Tower in Windfall Dome to the deck of the barge that had been her Pack’s home for the past few months. River had already found them. He had been trying to coax them off the barge and onto Robert Wheelwright’s hydroplane boat. To prove that Cheobawn had sent him, he fished Old Father Bhotta’s bloodstone from his pocket and presented it to Megan. With a barely strangled yelp, Che had leaped across the deck and plucked the stone from his palm at the last moment, saving herself from having to explain the gift that had been meant as a message of goodbye. She had given it to River, convinced that she would not survive the night.
Cheobawn was still not sure how exactly she had escaped the cage built in the hold of the Hegemony’s starship. Nor did she have any logical explanation for her ability to walk through space-time.
No. That was not totally true. She knew exactly how she had done it. She just did not have the words that could explain the logic-string that had taken her from the infinite darkness of a field-dampening box to the light-filled atrium of the Temple Tower. The Coven had told her not to worry about such details. She would invent the words later. Che had laughed. The Coven had an enormous over-confidence when it came to her abilities.
Dragging River and her Pack off the barge had been surreal. Part of her was not totally convinced that any of this was real. Was it possible that she was still sitting in that black box above the planet going inexorably more insane with every passing moment as the box turned her to ice?
Blinking sleepily at Blackwind Pack, she lifted her head from Tam’s shoulder and studied the faces around her. No. She could not imagine them in this form—they were the same but different. Older, taller, tanner, travel weary yet stronger with a piercing stare that came from living under a domeless sky. This was not a hallucination. Here they all were, Blackwind Pack, whole and complete at last.
Her Pack sat facing each other, squeezed tight into all the available seating that lined the passenger cabin of Robert Wheelwright’s hydroplane. Five pairs of eyes watched her expectantly, as if—through some slight-of-hand—she was going t
o get them off this river and into a safe lair. Tam stared down at her with those deep, dark brown eyes. After months on the barge, he had let his ebony hair grow out and now kept it plaited and tied off with a scarlet ribbon. Megan had copied that style even down to the red ribbon. Being blond-haired and blue-eyed, she was a stark contrast to her Alpha. Connor, Tam’s Truebrother, a rougher-boned copy of his sibling, had done exactly the opposite. He was their intelligence gatherer so he needed to blend in with the locals more than anyone. He had adopted the rivermen hairstyle—cut short for easy care so all you needed to stay clean was to dump a bucket of river water over your head. Alain, his skin now a mass of dark freckles, had not shaved his copper-red hair close, nor let it grow long. It was somewhere in between, and none of it was half as well-ordered as the rest of Blackwind Pack’s choice in hair styles. It seemed as if every red hair on Alain’s head grew as if of its own mind. Alain, Che noticed, unconsciously ran his fingers through his hair, tugging it upright on the top of his head while he was in deep thought. Was this a new tic he had developed since they had last been together in the flesh? This, and the grim look his face settled into when he was relaxed, told her river travel had been hard on them all.
It was nothing a week tucked safely inside a dome would not cure.
That was never going to happen. Not any time soon.
Safety, Cheobawn mused. Where could they be safe, here in the Lowlands? Too many people wanted to get their hands on them—some with good intentions, some not. She knew this first-hand. The deadly intention of the Royal Hegemony had come close to killing her only hours before.
Cheobawn sat up, worked the kinks out of her spine, and looked beyond her friends to check their location upon the River Liff. It was still night. The orange moon—Eiocha—was setting in the west, its lower edge being swallowed by the vast expanse of water that stretched to the horizon. Che twisted in her seat to check the eastern shore. The cabin’s expanse of windows afforded them a 360-degree view of their surroundings. The city of Dunauken sat like a fearsome monster on the near shore, the fangs of the dark cityscape blocking out the stars while the ebony shadows at its feet merged with the even darker river below. A line of man-made stars stretched down the length of the river marking where land met docks. This sparkling necklace was eventually swallowed by the mists hanging over the river delta to the south. There, at the edge of the marshes, the hot glare of the Space Port lights burnt off the fog and filled the sky overhead with a brilliance that surely was meant to beat back the dreaded dark. Spacers, she was learning, were as crazy as Lowlanders. For humans who braved the deep dark of space, they seemed to be unnaturally afraid to sleep with the lights out.
Che’s intended landing point was just down river, closer to the Wheelwright dock—a good ten minutes away if the pilot took his time and did not draw attention to his boat and its rare cargo. Cheobawn glanced at her Pack. Rare indeed. For the first time in the history of the universe a full Pack had come down the Escarpment to confront the princes of the Lowlands in their home territory.
“The pilot will take us to the water-taxi dock. A car will be waiting for us there to take us back to River’s house,” Che said with a yawn.
“Back to my house,” River said pointedly. The raven-haired, copper-skinned Father was scowling at her. “Where you were to be waiting for us. Why are you here and not there? More to the point, how are you here?”
“Yeah,” Connor said. “Tell us again. This time try to make sense.”
Cheobawn smiled. Trust Connor to speak bluntly. He had become every bit a riverman right down to the drawl and the mannerisms. Connor had always been an excellent mimic.
“I may have done something a little . . . no, a lot foolish,” Che admitted with a grimace. “I walked through space-time using the Scerron trick that the star pilots use to fly between star systems.”
Five pairs of eyes stared at her blankly. Alain and Connor looked over at Megan, as if expecting Che’s life-long companion to translate that. Megan sighed. This was one of her many duties. Not just being an Ear to her Pack but also being a translator of the incomprehensible magic that spilled from their littlest Ear’s mind.
“What does that mean, Ch’che?” Megan asked softly, her fingers caressing the bones of Cheobawn’s hand where she held it captive in her lap.
Che shuddered. She did not want to remember this. In fact, she was hoping the memory would fade quickly. But experience told her the exact opposite. The soul-destroying darkness inside the Spacer’s black box promised to be something that would haunt her waking thoughts for the rest of her life. The memories would eventually fade into the background just as the final moments of Sargent Garro’s bloody death had faded. She did not dwell on that particular Spacer’s last seconds of life if she could help it, but every once in a while the memories would return, triggered by a sound or an emotion or the smell of blood, taking her back to that time in the clearing that held Old Father Bhotta’s body—the great lizard killed by a Spacer’s gun and mutilated to assuage Spacer appetites. Her mind played tricks on her, making her relive that day over and over again with perfect clarity—the taste of blood in the back of her throat, the feelings of helplessness as death stalked them, the sight of Garro’s head turning into a bloody mist.
Cheobawn pressed her lips together. The memory of the black box promised to be like that. Painful images triggered by her own terror that would suck all the light out of her mind.
Tam touched her cheek. “Do not cry, wee bit. We can hear the tale another time.”
Che sniffed and shoved his hand away. “I am not a baby. I do not cry.” she said, wiping the wetness from her cheeks.
“No, of course you don’t. What was I thinking?” Tam said softly, kissing her nearly bald head. Juggling so much energy had turned her hair to dust.
“You must promise not to be angry,” Cheobawn said, glaring up into his beautiful dark eyes.
“Oh, by all the goddesses in heaven,” Connor groaned. “Unfair, Ch’che, unfair. You know what that means, don’t you, Tam? She is going to tell you something that will make you want to rip out the heart of someone or something but you will instead have to sit quietly, nod wisely, and say nothing. Don’t do it. Promise her nothing.”
Alain reached around River and punched Connor in the shoulder. “Quiet, you. Let her speak. I want to know the name of the person we need to kill.”
Che took a big breath and let her words spill out of her in one rushed breath. She told the story, and when there was no more air left in her lungs, she finished the telling of it with a conclusion. “So. The Prince Regent sent a starship full of sparkly-suited warriors who looked just like Colonel Bohea along with a Scerron priestess as guide, meaning to capture me and take me back to the Central Core planets.”
The silence in the cabin became ominously tense. Cheobawn held her breath, waiting for their rage to explode.
“Why did you not use your prescient gift, hear them coming, and get away?” Connor asked, puzzled.
Che grit her teeth to keep them from chattering together. How had it suddenly gotten so cold? It took her a moment to find the words.
“I was distracted and they were clever. More clever than I. The Scerron’s mind hid their advance. I felt the danger but I could put no face to it. The men in the empty suits were not where I could detect them, and I could do nothing against the minds kept separate from the armor as they sat in their wire nests, safe inside their starship, far above my head. The empty suits came in anti-grav ships—silent, falling out of the sky like rain, shooting me full of trank-darts. I woke in a starship up there.” Cheobawn pointed up at the sky. “The field-dampening box was the Scerron’s idea, built to hold one person for the duration of a flight from Occonomara to the Core. They put me in it and . . .” Che could not breathe for a moment, the air caught in her throat, choking her.
Tam crushed her against his side. He tried to say something but could only manage a low growl. When she opened her e
yes, Alain was there, kneeling at her feet. He knew what things like this cost her. He had helped her keep the memories of Sargent Garro at bay. “What bothers you? Tell it to us once, fast and quick, and you will never have to speak the words again,” he said firmly.
Cheobawn pressed the palms of her icy hands against Alain’s thin cheeks. Why were they all so thin? No, not just thin. Worn down, burning themselves out from the inside out. This. This was her fault. She refused to cry.
“I died,” Che said to him, her voice barely a whisper. “The box killed me, I think. The Scerrons knew that it would. Planned that it would. Lied to the Prince, who expected an obedient Ear when the box came to be opened in the Core. It was meant to destroy me but I refused to . . . I fought back somehow. It is all jumbled up in my mind. I remember the All Mind. It would not let me go. I remembered the Scerron teaching-knot Colonel Bohea gave me, how it bent reality around corners inside itself. So I stole the power of the box and used it to push me out, back into the world. All it took was one wish and I found myself in the atrium atop the Temple Tower.”
“I am sure the Coven was surprised to see you,” Alain said evenly, though the muscles in his jaw were twitching. Rage burned there behind his eyes. She had never seen him so angry.
Cheobawn felt a smile quiver for a moment at the corners of her mouth at the memory. “No more than I. What was even more surprising was the fact that I could do it a second time, walking from the Tower to the deck of your barge, flying with wings made of wishes and prayers.”
Alain patted her hand. “Thank you. Do not worry anymore. We will find these Spacers and make them pay.”
“I do not think I left many alive,” Cheobawn Blackwind, Ear, All Mother, Star Hunter said, her eyes glittering in the dawning light. Alain eased his hands away, perhaps startled by the uncharacteristic hardness behind her eyes. Che wanted to apologize but could not find the words. She was a warrior—born and bred—which meant she knew how to fight. Aggression did not go unanswered. Force was redirected and aimed back at the sender. Surrounded by an enemy she could not see, she had killed the ship instead, taking out those who may not have deserved to die along with the guilty. There was no honor in that kind of killing. She should feel bad but she did not. Where was the guilt? The shame? She felt nothing. Nothing but fierce rage. Given the choice, she would do it again.
