by J. D. Lakey
Leaning low over the withers of her mount, she concentrated on staying small and unobtrusive. Without a weapon she could do little else. She had to trust that Tam, riding close on her left, and Megan near to her right, would keep her safe. Things leapt at them from everywhere. As they passed under the low hanging branches of a black oak thicket, the air exploded, filling with the scarlet wings of the small carrion dragons. Four blades sang behind her as Sam screamed, the sound sharp and piercing over the din made by the angry bennelk, the dying lizards, and the battle cries of her Pack. She did not turn to see how Sam fared. If Bear Under the Mountain wanted him so badly, Bear could watch out for the Lowlander himself.
They left carnage in their wake. Things began to die in greater numbers around them. The small and the wounded were no match against the larger predators caught up in a frenzy of bloodletting.
Cheobawn lost any sense of time.
The sound of death faded, finally.
You stink of blood, daughter. I can run far but they will find you.
Find me deep water, she thought, burying her face in the ruff under her hands.
Not far from the place where the nameless creek joined Badnite Creek in its mad rush off the mountain, Herd Mother stepped off the game trail, her nose taking them down-slope, stopping finally near a series of stepped pools.
Cheobawn flipped her leg over the top of Herd Mother’s back and slid to the ground.
“Alain,” Tam said, “help the captives dismount. Everyone clean up. Who is bleeding? Megan, gather all the medkits you can find.” Tam’s orders rattled sharply through the air. Cheobawn slid down the bank and walked into the water until it reached her waist. There she stopped, the water holding her upright while she cradled her left hand in her right, trying to work up the courage to investigate the damage. Tam came up beside her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. She shook her head, not wanting to tell him, afraid of what he might find. “Let me see.” Tam moved around her, studying her hands. He reached out and pulled her right arm aside before carefully taking her left. His fingers were strong and sure. He ran them firmly along her arm bones, then down into the long bones of her palm. He stopped when she flinched.
Puzzled, he turned her hand over. It took a lot of dunking but he finally rinsed away most of the blood so that he might see the thing she still had clenched in her fist.
“I need that. Don’t lose it,” she said around her pain. He raised an eyebrow as he studied her face, perhaps trying to decide if that was an order or a request. Cheobawn did not know herself. She had become inexcusably rude since making friends with the outlanders. Tam returned his gaze to her hand without comment. Ever so gently, he uncurled her fingers enough to ease the bloodstone out of her hand. Swishing it in the water to clean it, he deposited it in one of his underwater pockets before turning his attention to her fingers. She could not tell what he did but it hurt. When he was done, she unclenched her jaw and remembered to breathe.
“How bad is it?” she asked. He wiped the tears from her cheeks with his wet thumbs.
“Little kids,” he tisked softly. “Good thing your bones are all soft and bendy. Keep it underwater to help with the swelling.”
He unbuttoned her blood soaked tunic and pulled it off over her head, tossing it up onto the bank. Her undershirt and shorts followed. She tried to help but he pushed her hands away.
“Keep your hand in the water. Let me do most of the work.” He washed her, using the sand from the bottom of the pool to scrub at the blood caked in the creases of her skin and matted in her hair. He tried to be as gentle as possible as he washed her brutalized face and neck, but time pressed at the Pack, forcing him to be unkind.
Clean, her bruises became more apparent. He ran his fingers down her arms where Sam’s fingers had left their marks in her soft flesh. Tam looked up into her eyes. He lifted his chin towards her split lip, anger glittering behind his eyes.
“Do you know that the other Packs laugh at us. Because of you,” he said softly.
The words hit her like a fist. Cheobawn trembled as she tried to breathe around the pain in her heart.
“Not now, Tam,” she whispered. “Not here.”
“When, Cheobawn? When is a good time for you? Now is good for me, because you have to stay and listen. You need to know what our Pack endures before you come to live with us in Pack Hall. It doesn’t matter how many prizes we take. It doesn’t matter how high we are in our team rankings. It doesn’t matter that we are respected by the Fathers. The others still laugh.”
Cheobawn tried not to flinch. Unwilling to let him see how much he was hurting her, she looked down, watching his hands wash her body, the water around her stained crimson.
“But I don’t mind,” he continued. “Do you want to know why? Because I know why Mora risked everything, even the respect of her tribe, to bring you into being. I do not think Amabel failed when she made you. I think she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. I know it in my heart and I feel it in my gut.” Tam reached out and touched her chin with his fingers, lifting her face so that she had to look into his eyes. “So when you shut me out, it is like a knife in my heart. No matter what I do, no matter how I prove myself to you, you will not let me honor your greatness by allowing me to serve you as Hayrald serves Mora. You left us. You left me. I thought, that’s it, she is never coming back and my life will be empty and without purpose, forever.”
His hands paused as he watched her face, waiting.
“You would have died,” Cheobawn whispered. “There was no future where you met the Bohea’s weapon and one of you did not die.”
“The future is fluid. You taught me that. You cannot see everything.” he said forcefully, his frustration mounting. Cheobawn opened her mouth to argue but he kept on berating her. “Did you even think to give us a chance? Did you let us in on the decision making process? How do you know I cannot be a valuable part of all your crazy schemes if you don’t give me the chance? By all that is holy, Cheobawn, let me in!”
This was so unfair.
“You would not have agreed to come if you knew the outcome,” she snapped, and then bit her lip, regretting the words instantly.
“What?” Tam breathed out, his anger rising. “What outcome are you talking about? The one where you are so battered I cannot tell who lies under all those bruises?”
“The one where I am dead,” she said softly, looking away.
“I guess you are going to have to explain that,” he said softly, the threat of his rage under sharp control.
“Before I met you at the changing room yesterday morning I checked all the futures where we all lived at the end of this day. There were none.” She looked back at him. “None, Tam. I tried them all. Then I asked for a future where everyone I loved lived. There was only one. I was willing to make that sacrifice. The one for the many.”
“What are you talking about?” Tam said in horror, as understanding began to dawn behind his eyes.
“Yes. Now you see. I did not expect to ride out of that valley. Bear Under the Mountain needed to stop Bohea … the ghost man. He would have assumed the worst if Hayrald, riding at the head of a heavily armed patrol, had discovered them standing over the old bhotta’s body. But a solitary child, a little witch, who could fear such a thing? I was nothing. He wanted to kill me and go home. He said as much. But I got him to listen. The bringer of war, the hand of death, this thing was broken on my innocence. That I still live surprises me more than anything I have witnessed this day. I am not ashamed of my wounds and neither should you be.”
“I did not say ….” Tam protested, hurt by her accusation.
Alain’s warning whistle chirped softly from behind Cheobawn. Tam pulled his eyes away from her to see what Alain wanted. Alain must have finger-signed something because Tam nodded and then turned back, his manner abruptly changed.
“We have to move out soon,” he said, dunking her one last time. She came up sputtering and grabbed his hand to keep him from moving aw
ay.
“This is not done,” she said, gesturing at Bohea and Sam. “I … we need to get those two back to the Escarpment and let them go home. This is more important than my life or yours.”
“Why?”
“I do not know for sure. It’s hard to explain.”
Tam sighed in exasperation. “Try, wee bit.”
“If they die up here, it will be like a stone thrown into a pond. The waves will go out, taking death away from us but they will come back, stronger by a thousand fold and the tribes will all die and everything we know will cease to exist.”
Tam swore.
“You said you wanted in,” she hissed in frustration.
“I suppose you have a plan?” he asked.
“If my dream is right and they truly did come up the cliffs two clicks east of the Meetpoint dome then we need to get them there so they can use their equipment to go back down.”
“Alright, that’s easy enough. Let’s get this over with,” he said firmly, guiding her towards the bank. “The sooner that ghost man is gone the better.”
Chapter Twenty Four
By the time she crawled out of the pool, dripping and nearly naked, she was feeling ill, almost feverish, but she paused to see how the rest of her Pack fared.
Megan had her hands full with the bennelk, washing off the blood spatters and seeing to their deeper wounds. The worst hurt stood trembling as the other animals licked the bite marks clean.
She sent a worried thought towards Herd Mother.
Tongue stops the blood, Herd Mother said, unconcerned. Cheobawn wondered what a normal patrol foray was like, to make this battle seem almost insignificant in the bennelk’s minds.
Sam and Bohea sat at the edge of the pool, their hands still tied. Sam’s shirt, soaked with his own blood, had been cut from his body and thrown on top of the pile that contained Cheobawn’s clothes. Someone, probably Alain, had set the bone in his nose and stuffed the nostrils with cotton wool. The open cuts on his torso had stopped bleeding but the series of animal bites running from his neck to elbow that were still weeping blood. She could not remember if carrion dragons were venomous and her lack of knowledge annoyed her.
Tam found a patch of dry moss not far from the captives and helped her sit. Alain squatted down near them as Tam began to apply skinseal to the cuts around her neck.
“The younger one is a mess,” Alain said, his voice soft. “I think you might have fractured his jaw. I’d rather use the last of our skinseal on the bennelk than waste any on him. I vote we cut his throat and use his body to buy us a little more time.”
Tam looked at her as he shook his head.
“We need him. He is coming with us,” Tam said firmly. He sent Alain off with a lift of his chin and opened his mouth to say something more to her but Connor came down the bank and dumped the contents of Garro’s bag and Sam’s pouch out in the wet gravel in front of her. Bloodstones scattered, rolling everywhere. The bloody containers were tossed onto the growing pile of things they needed to bury.
“Megan says we need to bury these as well. She says they make her head hurt,” Connor said, annoyed. “I said you need them. She said they will get us all killed.”
Cheobawn felt Megan’s distress pressing at her back. She sighed. Tam looked at her, waiting.
“I need them,” she said. Connor sighed the sigh of one used to suffering and went in search of a clean bag.
“Give me the stone you put in your pocket, please,” Cheobawn said to Tam. He pulled the bloodstone out of his pocket and studied it before handing it back to her, then he rose and left, intent on some errand. She weighed the bloodstone in her hand.
“We need to talk, La … Little Mother,” Bohea said softly, his voice breaking into her thoughts. “You must listen to the message I have been sent to deliver.”
She looked up at them both. Sam was staring at the bloodstones scattered at her feet.
“So close. No one will ever believe this,” Sam said faintly. She ignored his insanity, choosing to meet Bohea’s eyes instead.
“I do not have time. Later,” she said. “You will get your turn.”
Bear and Star Woman wanted attention. She needed to do something with the stones. They lay on the ground, their deep color consuming all the light in the world. Bear Under the Mountain wanted her to heal them of Old Father Bhotta’s death. It surprised her that Bear thought her capable of this, considering her history with tuning.
What if I fail?
I am in you. You cannot fail, Bear Under the Mountain said.
She stared down at the stones at her feet, too tired to suss out the nature of Bear’s riddle.
OK. Just for argument’s sake, pretend I can do this. There are too many of them. Time is running out.
Bear said nothing, thinking the answer obvious.
She looked down at the one in her hand. An old proverb popped into her mind. How did one clean up a mess? One spot at a time.
One problem at a time, she thought, as she held the stone in her hand and began listening to its song to the exclusion of all else. It was a shame really. It was a beautiful stone, the deep color found in only the oldest of bhotta. Old Father’s death had been insignificant when compared to rest of his life. It made her sad, thinking she had to re-tune the stones and erases those memories.
Bear grinned a big toothy grin and Star Woman smiled encouragingly, wanting her to explore that thought. What was the alternative to re-tuning? She looked at her aching hand. What if the stones were only bruised and not broken? What if you could run your fingers through the matrices of the stone, pressing at them hard enough to push everything back into place, mending what was broken while leaving Old Father intact?
With that thought clear in her mind, Cheobawn began to gather energy. She needed to be stronger than the agony etched into the stones. She drank deep from the earth under her feet and began the double spirals. Bear surprised her. He surged up through her body and into the stone. She was not about to turn down help if it was offered but the spirals needed to balance. She could already feel them begin to topple.
In desperation, she flung her will out into the dark of space meaning to steal from Star Woman to shore up the opposite spiral. Star Woman had been waiting. The Dark Mother flowed through her, mirroring Bear’s energy, meeting him in the heart of the stone in her hand.
Cheobawn lost herself in the maelstrom of their union. It lasted forever but was over in less time than it took to draw in a breath. She waited patiently as the bubble faded, until her eyes could see and her ears could hear again. Then she checked the stone. Old Father still lived inside it. Not even his death memories had been forgotten. But the death was a small and distant thing compared to the vast universe in which it now hung. Even Garro was there, his life and death like a flash of a falling star at the edges of the matrix.
She froze as Old Father’s memories whispered to her out of his stone. Up until this very moment, the great lizard’s death had been the overwhelming note in his complex song. She had been focused only on that all night.
A memory surfaced, now, wanting her attention. Old Father remembered the time when humans did not inhabit this planet. The coming of humans and the end of Spider seemed to be the same event. Did Mora know? Cheobawn shuddered. She refused to imagine such a conversation.
Cheobawn found Bear in the ambient. Why do you not hate us? Why allow us to infest your skin and take over your world?
Are you not the Children of my Heart? Bear asked.
Cheobawn nodded. The oldma’s had a saying. When is a thing out of place not out of place? When it belongs.
Cheobawn looked down at the stone in her hand and smiled, content. Now for the next stone. Reaching down for the nearest crystal, she paused. Something had changed. She touched a finger to the bloodstone closest to her toes, surprised at what she found. It was now a twin to the one in her hand. Healing one stone in the set healed them all. She looked up, excited, wanting to tell someone.
Only Bohea saw h
er face. He smiled slyly, knowing what she had done but twisting the truth of it inside his heart.
“You did it, didn’t you?” he said. “I no longer wonder why the Scerrons think you dangerous.”
“I am only seven,” she said, meaning she was too little to be a danger to anyone but herself and those who loved her. Again the words betrayed her, flying through the air and turning into something else in Bohea’s ears.
“That, Little Mother, terrifies me beyond all else.” he agreed without a trace of humor in his voice.
Connor returned with a cloth satchel. He gathered up the bloodstones, being careful to pick up every one. When he was done, he held the bag out to her. She shook her head.
“Give it to Megan. Ask her if they will pass her inspection.”
After Connor departed she turned back to Bohea.
“You are wrong about everything,” Cheobawn said softly.
“No, I don’t think I am,” Colonel Bohea said.
She would have argued further but Tam returned. He glared at Bohea. Bohea looked away, pretending to be content with silence, biding his time.
Tam had clothes in his hands. They were Sam’s, raided from one of his packs. Tam helped her into a pair of shorts that were too big and a shirt that fell to her knees. He retrieved her belt from the discard pile just in time. Alain was rolling the bloody clothes into a tight bundle around a large stone. Tam rinsed the plasteel webbing out before cinching up her shorts over the top of the shirt. The bloodstone she held in her good hand went into one of the many pockets in the shorts, freeing her hand up for riding.
