by J. D. Lakey
Cheobawn tried not to snarl, but was only partially successful. Instead of revealing all her teeth, her lip twitched in a momentary sneer. This jab had found its mark where the needle had not. No matter what her failings, Mora would never say that. Amabel assumed too much.
“You are not Mora,” Cheobawn hissed softly.
“Tsk,” said Amabel, tossing the syringe onto the tray and grabbing a swab and a bottle of antiseptic. “Lucky for you.”
There was a threat in those words that hung ominously in the air. Cheobawn’s psi whispered warnings that ran like a dark river around Amabel’s intentions. It suddenly occurred to Cheobawn for the first time in her life that Amabel, with an entire deadly garden at her disposal, might carry death in her syringes along with all her medicines and potions. The injection might have carried more than an anti-fungoid serum. Cheobawn pushed that terrifying thought away. It did one no good to succumb to the fancies of an over-active imagination when the ambient carried no such warning. All the same, it was hard to shake the thought from her head while her brain tried to build castles out of its ramifications. Were there rules that governed the behavior of the Makers or were they free of constraint? Cheobawn wondered who she could ask. Hayrald, perhaps. He had few reasons to lie.
The exam continued. Cheobawn cringed as the scientist ran her fingers over her body, ostensibly to examine her scrapes and check for broken bones but to Cheobawn it always seemed as if Amabel was searching for the part of Cheobawn that was irreparably damaged, that she might pluck it out.
Cheobawn closed her eyes and tried to find the calm place inside herself that would keep her from rising to the bait of Amabel’s cuts.
This, thought Cheobawn, was the undeclared war that stood between them. On one side stood Amabel, who played with human flesh as children played with building blocks, arrogant in her unassailable wisdom, unable to admit that something strange and outside of Amabel’s carefully constructed plans had walked into the world when Cheobawn was born. On the other side, stood Cheobawn, weaponless except for a stubborn refusal to be crushed by Amabel’s cruelty.
Amabel ignored Cheobawn’s dark scowl, busy as she was with scrubbing her abrasions, reopening the cuts so that they bled anew. The healer was not gentle. Cheobawn pressed her lips together, determined that Amabel would not see her flinch. Instead she sucked the pain into her body and fed it, along with her outrage, into that dark place inside her so that she might leave her mind clear.
“Turn over onto your belly,” Amabel ordered. Cheobawn complied. She pressed her face into the soft surface of the birthing bed. It helped to think good thoughts under these circumstances. She remembered the stalker’s love song, melon bugs, and the smell of fresh earth while Amabel cleaned the long scratches on the backs of Cheobawn’s legs; swabbing out the dried blood and pressing the skin taut, looking for any splinters that might become a source of infection.
“This is not just about you, you know,” Amabel said, her fingers ruthless on little girl flesh. “You will realize that when you are older. If you get older. You are so quick to risk yourself without thinking what it would mean if you miscalculate and got yourself killed. I have no back up plan. Mora put all her hopes in you. Yet here you are, doing thoughtless and reckless things. I understand your anger, but that is no excuse for not doing your duty. Do you think to punish us, we who had a hand in your making, by hurting your body?”
The stalker’s song died in her mind. Cheobawn lifted her head and turned to look back into Amabel’s face, listening hard for the hidden nuances of the words but unable to make them make sense.
“What?” she asked. “What do you mean, backup plan? The Coven has many daughters. Make Megan High Mother. She is better suited to it. More than I.”
“Tsk,” Amabel snorted, not looking up. She was preoccupied, putting skinseal on a particularly deep scratch. “That has always been your problem. You lack imagination.”
Cheobawn opened her mouth to retort but could not find any words to say. How was one supposed to respond to an accusation so incomprehensible?
Chapter Seven
As Amabel saw to the last of her scrapes, covering it with skinseal, there came a scratching at the door. Amabel did not seem to notice or pay it any mind. The door opened and Brigit walked in. Upon seeing Cheobawn, the Mother cringed, a guilty look on her face.
Cheobawn’s heart skipped a beat. That look foretold an imminent storm of Coven displeasure. She could only assume the worst. Raddoc had found her table and Brigit had laid the blame where the blame needed to go. These suspicions were confirmed when Brigit refused to meet her eyes. Without saying a word of greeting to her senior wife, Brigit settled into a hard backed chair in the furthest corner of the room and waited, her hands rubbing nervously together. Cheobawn looked from Brigit to Amabel. Amabel knew why Brigit was here. There was no surprise on the Maker’s face as she finished sealing the abrasions on Cheobawn’s elbow.
The scratching came again. Cheobawn watched the door. Sybille walked in, dressed in riding leathers, as if she had just come from the stables. The tall, thin Mother gave Cheobawn a speculative look with her dark, smoke-colored eyes and then crossed to the wall facing the door. She shoved a tray of swabs aside on the counter there and, with a single lithe motion, settled herself on the high tabletop, one hand resting on the hilt of the long knife she kept perpetually strapped to her thigh.
Cheobawn watched Mora’s Third wife from under her eyelashes. It had never occurred to her before that Sybille, never without a blade on her person, always sat that way, back to a wall, eyes on the room, as if she expected a leopard to leap out from under the furniture at any moment. Of all the Coven, Sybille was the one who still trained in the combat forms with the Fathers and still joined the Fathers on the patrols. Perhaps that was why she kept her platinum hair cut close to the skull.
Did this mean that Sybille knew how to kill? If what Megan said was true about psi skills, Sybille was not an Ear, but just the opposite. Did she spiral downward with the same amount of power as Menolly spiraled outward when her her mind was filled with dreamsmoke? Cheobawn thought about that for a moment. She decided she would never want to face Sybille on the sparring floor, for surely that much power used as a weapon would be deadly, more deadly than any Father could hope to be.
But wait. Sybille loathed petty village politics. What was she doing here? Surely not because of a modified night table? Were they upset about more than stolen authorization codes?
Amabel put the tray away. As she washed her hands, Menolly walked in. This threw all Cheobawn’s speculation to the four winds. The tiny High Priestess was dressed all in white, her ebony hair hidden under a small white cap, as if she had just stepped away from her prayers and rituals. Menolly would not have been bothered nor would she have left the high tower of the Temple for mere rule breaking. Had Cheobawn done something else, something so heinous that the offense had broken the Coven free of their usual orbits to bring them crashing down upon her head? Cheobawn checked the ambient, but found nothing. As always, the Mothers kept their thoughts well hidden.
Menolly smiled gently at Cheobawn as she crossed the room to claim the remaining chair. Cheobawn met those eyes and sucked in a sharp breath. They were as black as the bloodstone in her omen. Menolly was still under the influence of the temple dreamsmoke. She was dreamwalking.
The ambient in the room became a dark still pool whose depths were infinite. Menolly stood somewhere in its liquid center watching, judging, and hearing everything.
This presented two problems. One could not lie to a psi dreamwalker. And Cheobawn was now blind and deaf to anything the ambient might tell her. The High Priestess ruled this room and all the psi females who stood in it.
This was sheer insanity. Menolly did not belong here in her condition. Cheobawn pulled her eyes away and looked back at Amabel, wondering if she noticed.
Amabel ignored her look. Instead the Maker settled herself near Sybille, on the side opposite her knife, and wrapped
her arm around Sybille’s thin waist. Sybille caressed Amabel’s cheek with a fingertip before settling once more to watching the room out of her deceptively sleepy eyes.
Cheobawn looked from one Mother to the next, dismay building in her heart. Menolly’s condition was intended. They meant to strip Cheobawn naked, flay open her skull, and study her insides like some unfortunate croaker stuck to a child’s dissection plate.
The impending danger triggered Cheobawn’s battle sense. The world came into painfully sharp focus as her adrenaline levels rose. She took a deep breath and settled into her body, ready and waiting.
Instead of thinking up a plausible defense, she grit her teeth and tried not to snarl. Her innocence would carry no weight with this group nor could she expect mercy.
It came as almost anticlimactic, that moment when Mora’s tall, slender form glided gracefully through the door. Her truemother closed the door tightly behind her and then turned to survey the room with eyes that missed nothing.
Cheobawn ignored the other Mothers to focus all her attention on her the First Mother. As always, Mora was impeccably dressed, the soft jumper belted to drape perfectly over the curve of her hips, its pale pink color intentionally chosen to match the strings of tiny pale bloodstones coiled around her wrists, the coils holding the sleeves of the spotlessly white underblouse up and away from her elegant hands. Even Mora’s hair was perfect, every strand of her burnished bronze coif lay in its assigned place, swept up in her ever present chignon.
Cheobawn ran her fingers through her own short curls out of habit. Mora always made her feel rumpled.
“Mother,” she said respectfully, though the word never fell off her tongue with any ease when she spoke to Mora. Cheobawn’s grievances with Mora were too great for that. Amongst the tribes, there was natalmother, nestmother, and truemother. They were rarely if ever the same people.
Her mother had broken all the rules and done a thing that had shocked everyone. Cheobawn had never been able to understand what kind of insanity had possessed Mora to make her want to carry a child to term, enduring the rigors of labor, putting everything at risk; her life, the well-being of the tribe, the leadership of the tribal governments, and then further cursing herself and that child by raising it away from the nests.
Perhaps Cheobawn’s life would have been easier if Mora had loved her as a nestmother loved a child. But Mora looked at her with the same emotion Sybille showered on her knives or Amabel, her lab instruments. What did that make her, in Mora’s mind? Useful but disposable? The burden of the black bead in Cheobawn’s omeh was nothing compared to the stigma of being raised solitary and alone in the house of the High Mother under the watchful and weighty eyes of the Coven.
“Daughter,” Mora said, nodding as she leaned back against the door and looked around the room with a calculating eye. “I see we are all here. So let us begin. Brigit?”
Sitting up straighter, Brigit cleared her throat nervously.
“Cheobawn, you asked me a question this morning. I did not think it wise to answer you before consulting with the Council. Please ask it again.” This was well rehearsed, this speech. Brigit was not one for speeches. The other Mothers had been coaching her.
Ah, Cheobawn thought. Puzzle solved. An innocent remark about Lowlanders had landed her here, under the brutal scrutiny of the High Coven.
“Why are you doing this?” Cheobawn asked softly, disturbed by the strangeness of this tableau. If they had been sitting in the garden atrium high atop the Temple spire under the apex of the Dome, a handful of secretaries recording every word, and the Husbands guarding the doors, it would have been a High Council tribunal. But these were her Mothers. As much as she disliked it, as unnatural as it seemed, as unsuitable companions to a child as one might ever find anywhere, these women were her only nestmates. Was this meeting to be as innocent as a conversation across the dinner table?
“That is not a question we are willing to answer at this time. Ask another.” Mora said with a shake of her head.
Cheobawn stared at the High Mother. What was going on if even the why of this was a secret? Was this some sort of weird Coven game? Did they sit around in circles playing word games in Tribunal sessions, like little girls on the playground? If so, she wished she knew the rules.
No matter. The hardest games were the ones where the rules were a secret and you had to figure them out as you played along. Cheobawn thought about strategy for a minute and then spoke.
“What lies below the Escarpment?” she said, by way of an opening gambit.
“It was once a land very much like what you see about you, outside the dome,” Sybille said, her eyes glittering. Mora’s Third liked this game. It was apparent in every line of her body. “A natural extension of the local ecosystems.” Cheobawn absorbed this, puzzling over the words to see if they contained any hidden clues. She settled on the next most obvious question.
“Once, but no longer? What is it now?”
“Less,” Menolly said. “and more.”
Cheobawn eyed the Priestess. Riddles. What did Menolly see in the depths of their collective ambient.
“Less. Less than what?” Cheobawn asked, leaping on the clue while resisting the urge to smile. She good at this game. She wondered if there was a limit to how many questions she might ask before the game was counted over.
“Ninety percent fewer species live in the forests,” Sybille stated, “but this is as expected since ninety percent of the lowland forests have been destroyed.”
This fact was jarring. Cheobawn was not sure she liked where this game was taking her. What if Tam was right? What if the Mothers kept things hidden for a reason? What if she did not want to know what the Mothers seemed intent on telling her? What if she got up and left, refusing to play the game? She looked around at the faces arrayed around her, identically expressionless yet intensely focused. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Cheobawn doubted that retreat was an option anymore. The game had begun and must be played to its end. She set her mind to it in earnest.
As unpleasant as it was, Cheobawn tried to imagine the world without a forest full of life. This was a perversion, this thing Sybille spoke of, yet the Mothers did not flinch when Sybille spoke of it. They were long used to the unspeakable, it seemed.
This string of logic was too disturbing to pursue. Cheobawn backtracked in her mind. She looked back at Mora.
“How is it more?” Cheobawn asked, following the next clue, hoping for a better answer.
More people, more roads, more villages,” Amabel answered. “There are over a ten thousand Lowlanders for every tribesman. The largest lowland village contains over three million people.”
Cheobawn shook her head. The numbers made no sense. She could not conceive of such a mass of humanity living inside one dome. The maximum capacity of any dome in the Highreaches was five hundred people but they usually held half that. She wanted to ask more questions to make them help her understand how this was even physically possible but was terrified that they would actually answer it.
It was time to carry the battle into their court.
“I used Bridget’s passcode this morning. She does not have access to this information,” Cheobawn said, “and yet here you are, spouting book and verse about Lowlanders. Why?”
“You what?” squeaked Bridget.
“Imp!” snapped Amabel, outraged.
Sybille, unaccountably, threw her head back and laughed.
Mora held up her hand and waited for the room to grow silent again before she spoke.
“Which is why we do not commit it to digital memory. The Fathers do not need to know this.”
Cheobawn looked at the First Mother in disbelief. “You do realize that the Father’s have any information related to Lowlanders locked behind a double wall of security in the hub-mind, right? Gender Inappropriate, the warning said. Are they not the arbiters of this secret?”
“Yes and no,” Menolly said. “How do you hide a secret? By breaking it apart an
d giving it to both parties. Forbidden to speak of it, neither knows what the other knows.“
Cheobawn shook her head in disbelief. “Someone must know the whole of it, surely? How else can the dome make a decision if no one has the right information?”
“What decision do you want me to make?” Mora asked.
Well. That answered that question. As she suspected, Mora, as the Waterfall Dome’s First Mother and the Highreaches High Mother, was the holder of all the secrets under the dome. Cheobawn stared at her truemother and tried to form a rational question that would ease her mind about the Lowlanders.
“Why have the Lowlanders never come up the Escarpment?”
“We actively discourage it,” Mora said.
Cheobawn blinked, startled. That answer seemed particularly sinister.
“So,” she breathed out, trying not to feel sick, “I guessed right. The Fathers kill the Lowlanders.” She wrapped her arms around herself to keep out the horror of that thought. “Has Da … Hayrald, has he killed Lowlanders for you? Do you send the First Prime out like one of Zeff’s hounds to kill at your bidding?”
The Mothers took exception to that accusation. Mora’s eyes narrowed. Sybille’s lips quivered in a barely suppressed snarl while Brigit gasped either at the sting of Cheobawn’s arrow or at her audacity to question the motives of the High Council. Only Menolly continued to smile serenely.
“Insolent chit,” snapped Amabel. She would have continued but Mora waved her wife into silence. Cheobawn glared back at the Maker, daring her to say more. Amabel met her glare with a secret smile, shaking her head. Cheobawn turned back to Mora.
“If I am insolent, it is because you have made me this way,” Cheobawn said reasonably, squashing the anger that wanted to crawl up out of that deep place insider her. “What do I know? The maps are empty. You have erased all the knowledge of the Lowlands so I can only imagine the worst of you.”
