by J. D. Lakey
Find a way, child of our longing, Spider said serenely, or we will be forced to contrive a more direct and lasting solution.
Chapter Fifteen
A cold nose touched her chin followed by the touch of a warm, wet kiss. Cheobawn frowned and opened one eye. A small gray puppy with enormous feet sat on the pillow next to her head. She pulled her arm out from underneath her covers and scratched its ears. It wagged its tail in happiness. Sleep tugged at her eyelids. She closed them but the puppy would have none of it. It tried to eat her chin with its sharp baby teeth.
“Ow, you little monster,” she said, picking it up by its round puppy belly and setting it on her own belly. Her voice was rough and hoarse, as if she had not used it in days. A patch of skin seal up her inner arm tugged uncomfortably at the surrounding skin. She studied it, puzzled. A half healed wound was barely visible under the translucent bandage. A crazy image of Hayrald kneeling over her with a knife flashed in her mind. Curiosity chased the thought of sleep from her mind. She turned her head to study the room.
She was in the long term care wing of the infirmary. She could tell by the green paint and the bright tapestries on the walls. Their themes weighted heavy on the floral side, full of reds and yellows and oranges. Their cheerfulness made her want to break something.
The puppy was not to be dissuaded quite so easily. It pushed its head under her hand and demanded to be scratched again. She obliged it.
Zeff opened the door and walked in, the boarhound, Lady at his heels, a brindle puppy in his arms.
“Well, look who is awake,” the oldpa said with a smile. “I told them you were just taking a nap. So much worry for nothing.”
Zeff set the other puppy on the bed. It leaped over her leg and tackled its sister, grabbing her ear in its teeth. The gray one yelped and snapped back, the two of them tumbling together towards the end of the bed. Zeff caught them before they fell to the floor and deposited them at their mother’s feet. Lady was not so gentle. She grabbed the brindle pup in her teeth and tumbled him roughly onto his back to nip at his throat until he squeaked in protest. She relented and let him up. He tried to tackle his sister again but Lady pinned him with one great paw and began to give him a bath with her enormous pink tongue.
Cheobawn watched, a smile on her face. Zeff pulled up a chair and sat down beside her.
“Amabel will yell if she knows you have brought animals into her infirmary,” Cheobawn said hoarsely.
“It was the Maker who suggested it,” Zeff said as he filled a glass with water and handed it to her. She took it carefully, allowing him to shove a handful of pillows behind her back so she could sit without too much exertion. She was grateful. To be honest, her muscles were as watery as if she had run the outer track of the dome a couple of times. “She thinks you have lingered long enough, her being a witch who cannot abide laziness.”
“Where is Connor?” Cheobawn asked around sips of water. She was very thirsty but the water sat uneasily on her stomach.
“I am taking his shift while he gets some well deserved sleep. He’s been by your side pretty much every moment for the last week. Breyden had to drag him away to the dining hall otherwise he would have never eaten. He will be disappointed that he was not here to greet you.”
“A week?” She shook her head, trying to sort out the bits of memory that tumbled around there. “Did Hayrald try to cut my arm off?”
“Eh?” Zeff lifted a worried brow.
Cheobawn raised her arm to show him the skinseal.
“Oh, that.” Zeff sighed in relief. “He was a little hasty, trying to get your arm free of your leathers so’s your hand wouldn’t turn blacker than it already was. You gave him something of a turn.”
Cheobawn remembered something else. She held her palm up to the light. Beside the small white scar in the center of her palm, her hand and arm were perfectly normal. Memories returned.
“I dreamed my hand had turned to crystal,” she said touching the scar with one tentative finger. “The bennelk would not let me ride them because I had turned into a spider.”
“Did they, now?” Zeff said. “Who can ever tell with them? They get funny ideas in their heads, animals.”
Cheobawn did not find that reassuring in the least. She frowned uncertainly.
“The Spiders think I am part spider, too,” she said, biting her lower lip as she caressed the white scar. Zeff’s face betrayed nothing, being too polite to show concern for her strange statement nor ask for explanations. He had too many years handling the eccentricities of Ears to make that mistake.
“Lady thinks you are fine, else she would not let you near her pups.”
Cheobawn looked up at Lady, hope blooming in her heart. She held out her hand for Lady to inspect. Lady let her puppy go and came over to sniff her hand before she licked the scarred palm, her tail wagging in a great lazy arc.
So many people had opinions about who she was. Why did it seem that they were all wrong? “Who am I, really?” Cheobawn wondered out loud. “I have ceased to know.”
“Ach,” Zeff said with a rueful shake of his head. “A question much pondered by wiser men than I, I am afraid. Who do you think you are?”
“Black bead, Bad Luck, genetic accident, made in Amabel’s labs with no more thought than Finn puts into the making of his carts, I think,” Cheobawn said. Much to her own surprise, it was not sadness that bubbled up out of her heart, but something akin to anger.
Zeff looked away, uncomfortable. He scooped up the gray puppy and put it back on her bed to cover his intentional silence. Cheobawn grabbed the little dog by the scruff of its neck as it tried to launch itself off the bed towards its brother. Zeff picked up the brindle pup and caressed its ears.
“I have to send this one on in the spring with the first caravan east,” he said sadly. “The Mothers do not like too many dogs in one dome and the Redrock Tribe needs a new sire to keep their bloodlines fresh. I hate to part with him so young but it would be worse if I kept him 'til he grew to love me. You take an old dog away from their hearth and home and they tend to pine and die.”
Cheobawn watched his large hands, sure and gentle in their touch and felt oddly jealous of the puppy. She sighed in resignation. Zeff had something he wanted to tell her. She had no idea where this was headed but she thought she knew its source.
“Fathers are the worst gossips. You have heard about the things I have said to Hayrald and the fight I had with Mora,” she said accusingly.
“Funny about dome life,” Zeff said with a depreciating lift of his brow. “Nothing is private. You share everything with your Pack. Even Mora, holder of all the Sacred Secrets, has the Coven to help if she needs to unburden her heart. From the outside, the Coven and all their Husbands seem like a closed circle but circles nest inside other circles or intersect with the whole of dome life in some way. Information bleeds from circle to circle. If you want something to be kept secret, I have found, it is best to keep it hidden in your own heart. But no one does that. A wise man knows that secrets untold are walls that isolate. Who would want that but the truly anti-social?”
“You live with your dogs in a cottage-for-one by the North Gate,” Cheobawn pointed out, wondering if he was being ironic.
“Hmph,” Zeff grunted, “I am old. I have outlived my Pack. The dogs understand me better than most humans and listen without judgment. We are not talking about me. Do you remember your Choosingday?”
Cheobawn looked up in alarm. This was not a conversation she wanted to have with this Elder, or any other for that matter. Thankfully, her Choosingday was a subject studiously avoided by everyone, all conversations veering wide of its mention just as their eyes veered away from the black bead in her omeh. She had only ever discussed it with her Pack and that was how she meant to keep it.
The oldpa mistook her silence for acquiescence and continued.“You were three so you probably don’t remember it. It was not your normal Choosingday ceremony.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, her
face strangely frozen over the bones of her skull. She grimaced, trying to work the blood back into the muscles. “I do not attend Choosingday ceremonies. Ever.”
“No, I can’t fault you for that,” he nodded, “what with all the Mothers running around like fen hens chasing their hawk scattered broods. Yours was a particularly extravagant affair. Mora ordered a feast complete with barrels of beer and bottles of berry brandy. She had made no secret that she and Amabel thought you were their finest work. Before your inception, the Coven spent months in the High Chambers of the Temple praying with Mother Menolly in the smoke of the altar. Your birth was greatly anticipated.”
“I do not remember the feast.” Cheobawn said through stiff lips.
“Ach,” Zeff mused, scratching his chin, “Well, it didn’t happen, did it? No one wanted to rub Mora’s nose in your failure. They knew how much she had invested in your success. Besides, by the time it became apparent they were not going to kill you, the magic had sort of been sucked out of the day. The beer and the brandy went back into the cellars and we ate leftover pastries for a week after.”
Cheobawn buried her trembling fingers in the loose skin of the puppy’s neck. It nibbled on her earlobe as she looked away, off into the distance, beyond the walls of the dome. Even now, after all this time, her stomach tightened into a knot when she tried to remembered that day.
Zeff took her silence as a good sign and kept talking.
“Sybille had you to herself right before the actual ceremony. I don’t doubt the entire Coven filled your ears with instructions before that day, telling you what was expected of you, but I can only imagine what Sybille said. She can be bloody minded when she wants something.”
“She said Mora loved me,” Cheobawn said faintly, the memories fogging her mind. “She said I had to be a good girl and pick the box full of love. I had asked for a puppy. I assumed Mora had changed her mind and gotten me a pet. Little fool, I was. I had not the sense to understand that gifts are never about getting what you want or need but about giving emptiness and expecting gratitude.”
“It is not always like that,” Zeff said softly.
Cheobawn bit her lip and refused to look at him.
Zeff sighed sadly and continued. “It was a triple blind test. No one knew which box was which. That year, there had been a plague of fuzzies. It was easy enough to catch a few. Drug them down, put them in the dark, they lie inert, just like a soft cloth dolly or a plush toy.”
“I knew. I heard them in the ambient. I could feel them coming towards me for days. I was so happy. I spent the day singing fuzzy songs,” Cheobawn said hoarsely around the ache in her heart.
“Mora had her knife out, that day,” Zeff said, his voice soft with memories. “It is ceremonial, you understand. In the old days, before the time when all the Mothers born had the gift, the Coven kept their knives handy, in case the little beasty in the box got out.”
“In case the wrong box was chosen,” Cheobawn correcting him, “and the child needed to be killed. I have studied the ancient traditions.”
“Yes,” the oldpa conceded with a grimace. “That was true in the old times. Back when they did not allow the Fathers into the ceremonies. It was an ugly thing, killing a child. The Mothers thought to protect the hearts of the Fathers from the necessity of death. It’s one of the reasons the Fathers will never know whose child is whose. Attachments are discouraged. We are supposed to consider all the children as our own. But it had been generations since a runt was born that needed killing.”
“Is there a point to this,” Cheobawn asked evenly, starting to get annoyed. Did he really expect her to wax nostalgic about this?
“There was no hesitation. You picked up that box and held onto it like your life depended on it. Mora let you drag it off while Phillius took the other box away to dispose of the fuzzy. You ended up under the altar, hidden behind the drapery of a half dozen altar clothes, talking to something.”
The dark place under the altar stood like a beacon mid the memories of that day. Cheobawn shuddered, refusing it entry and thought of other things.
“We had no hint of the disaster,” Zeff said faintly, “until Phillius came running back in, clutching that cursed dolly and looking like he’d seen a ghost.”
“Da killed it. He pinned it to the altar with a blade through its skull. The blood was … I hated him but he took me away from the Coven and I was grateful for that. I think I slept next to him in his bed in the Fathers House for a long time after that.” Cheobawn closed her eyes and buried her face in the puppy’s fur. “I don’t remember much more.”
“All the Coven pulled their knives out,” Zeff said gravely. “It was the First Prime that kept you alive long enough for the Mothers to see reason. Hayrald gathered you up, shielding you with his body, daring Mora to kill you as the whole village watched. She is a wise woman. For as much as she loved him, she needed him more. Without him, there would be no peace between the Coven and the Fathers House. She let him have his way. Do not think that the Coven rules under the dome. They serve. Some things not even your psionic gifts can tell you. She chose to trust Hayrald’s wisdom that day.”
“Why are you telling me this,” Cheobawn asked, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. The puppy wiggled out of her hands and climbed her chest to bury its nose in the blond curls behind her ear.
“I think you should not be so hard on the Coven and their Husbands. They do the best they can with what they know. You cannot blame them for being less than you in some ways. They fear you.”
“I am not a monster,” Cheobawn said stubbornly.
“No, no,” Zeff said firmly. “No, you are not. You are something new and strange. It is their own ignorance that frightens them. They are terrified that they might err and in that error, break you. They fear that anything they might do would steer you away from the path that you are meant to walk. They fear to teach you yet they fear that if they do not, you will destroy everything in your ignorance.”
“Yet the First Mother insists on sheltering me,” Cheobawn said fiercely, looking up into Zeff’s pale eyes. “Secrets and lies are my bane.”
“Ach,” Zeff grunted in agreement, “but they are confused by the number of your years and the innocence in your heart, Little Mother. Mora most of all. She knows what the futures holds for you. It is she who opened the Book of Secrets. The knowledge there must be terrible indeed because it changed her irrevocably. I remember her when she was a girl, you know, before she was appointed to her post. She used to know how to laugh. It is sad, but I think she has forgotten how.”
Cheobawn stared at the oldpa. “Do you wish me to pity Mora?” Cheobawn laughed. It was a sound without mirth. Zeff flinched.
“She is not like you, Little Mother,” Zeff said. “Deep down inside, she is still that girl who used to love to play, but the burden of birthing you into the world has left no room for play in her heart. She will see you fulfill your destiny, no matter what the cost.”
“You must excuse me for not feeling grateful,” Cheobawn said acidly.
Chapter Sixteen
Zeff took the dogs and left her to her thoughts. Nothing was as it seemed, apparently. She had been wandering through her life in a blissful haze of ignorance. Now her brain boiled as she tried to fit the pieces of her shattered puzzle back together. She thought that she might never sleep again but her lids grew heavy almost immediately and she slept once more.
“Hey,” Connor said as he tickled her lips with the tip of his finger. “You get real food today. Wake up.”
She bit her abused lips and squinted at him through bleary eyes. A look of intense relief suffused his face as she blinked away the sleep, drew a deep breath, and managed to suppress the cough it triggered. The bubbling deep in her lungs was back.
“It feels like I’ve been running in the cold again,” she said hoarsely.
Connor handed her a glass of water. She did not want it, but after a few sips found herself draining the glass.
“Yeah, Amabel
says we need to get you on your feet today and start walking,” he said, fluffing her pillows.
The water reminded her of other bodily functions. She sat up and threw the covers off her legs.
“Where do you think you are going?” he asked, sounding a little alarmed.
“You said I need to walk. I thought I would start by walking to the bathroom,” she said patiently.
Mollified, he held out his hand. She took it to make him feel useful but the minute she took a step, she was grateful for the support. Everything seemed wobbly. By the time she got back to bed she needed to rest. Connor tucked her in and refilled her water glass.
“We’ve got to talk. The Spiders need …“she said between sips.
Quiet, Connor’s finger said. Wait. Too many ears.
Cheobawn frowned. She was going to say something more, but a healer walked through the door. She was followed not long after by one of Nedella’s apprentices, bearing a tray. Cheobawn sat up, realizing, all of a sudden, that she was famished. The tray was put out of her reach. Cheobawn looked at it and then back at Connor, hoping he would get the hint.
Patience, he signed.
The healer poked and prodded and pressed the studs of her med unit into a few orifices, studied the readings, and then left.
“What happened after…” she said.
“Eat first,” Connor said, retrieving the bed-tray and placing it over her knees. He removed the lids from the bowls to reveal soup, jellied compote and snowpudding with honey crystals dusted over the top. The cup only held weak tea.
“This is not food,” Cheobawn said in disgust.
“Eat it and maybe they will give you real stuff,” he said, picking up a spoon. She grabbed it out of his hand.
