by J. D. Lakey
A nose poked out of the shadows at the back of the stall, the nostrils flaring wide to suck in her scent. This nose was small when compared to a fenelk’s nose. The boney plates were the same color as a lichen spotted granite boulder. It was a bennelk; the smaller, more surefooted mountain cousin to the larger, deep forest fenelk. The wild herds grazed the scree covered slopes at the verge of the perpetual snowfields high in the Dragons Spine. Half the size of a fenelk but twice as fierce, they were used by the day patrols because they were light and quick of foot and could cover, in one day, what a heavily laden caravan would cover in four. That was all she knew about them.
She should have been afraid. She should have been doing the exact opposite of what she was doing which was holding out her hands to the soft, velvety nose. She should have been cautiously sniffing at the edges of this animal’s ambient instead of trying to burrow deep into the center of its soft comfort.
A great head snaked out and teeth closed around her arm. It was not a bite so much as a strong grip. With a gentle tug, the bennelk guided her to its side, shoving her under its belly with its nose and the sides of its ivory tusks, all the while purring contentedly. In the ambient, it wished her calm and invisible thoughts.
You are very noisy, little one, someone said. Every bhotta on the mountain must be listening to your distress. It came to her, not in those words, of course, but the images and the feelings were impossible to misunderstand.
Cheobawn lifted her face and stared into the warm golden eyes of the bennelk that stood over her while listening intently to what it was doing to the ambient. She had obviously made a glaring mistake when she assumed them to be as dull witted as the fenelk. The mind inside the great boney skull surely measured far higher than 3 : 3. Perhaps as high as 7 on the sending end of the scale.
This was the last higher brain, rational thought she had. The bennelk’s mind swooped out of the ambient, caught at her own mind and pulled her down into the abyss. Cheobawn was so surprised she did not think to resist. She tumbled, tangled and formless, caught up in a mind both simple and complex. Here, the world was divided into simple parts. There was the herd with all its members. Herds kept the babies safe. Herds pressed shoulder to shoulder to face down the leopards and the treebears. Then there was all else; the not-herd. Humans were part of that group. Then there was the mountain and the sky. Not inanimate, but alive, like Bear Under the Mountain was alive. Cheobawn was strangely comforted by this image.
Simple yet elegant, these thoughts. Somehow they all fit together, one touching the next, linked, living and dying, running across the infinite plain of the ambient, timeless and immortal. This was Herd Mother’s mind. Herd Mother remembered it all. That was her job. That and teaching the babies. Somewhere far away, her body sank softly into the straw on hands and knees.
A question pressed at her. What?
Cheobawn tried to focus. Herd Mother surrounded her, reassuring her that she was safe.
What pursues? What stalks us? Questions insisted on answers. Images of bhotta, treebear, and dubeh leopard bubbled out of Herd Mother’s mind, concern tinging the ambient. Cheobawn tried to put her fear into some sort of coherent image. She built an image of Sybille surrounded by the Coven. The bennelk was amused, as a mother would be amused at the gamboling of a fawn.
Sybille is of the herd, Herd Mother thought at her.
No, no, Cheobawn insisted, there is more. She imagined the Escarpment.
Sure feet on rocks can handle any height, the mountain elk reassured her. Frustrated, Cheobawn pulled her deepest fears out of the dark place inside herself. She imagined the Lowlanders as a plague of fuzzies streaming up the cliffs and Bear Under the Mountain rising up to wage a bloody war.
The bennelk shuddered, dancing out her distress in the deep straw of her stall while being careful not to tread on the fragile fawn under her feet. Cheobawn, on some primitive level, knew enough to wrap her arms over her head as she buried it in the fragrant grass. The female bennelk settled immediately, embarrassed that she had frightened her newest herd member. Cheobawn, caught up in the bennelk’s mind, came away with a surprising thought. Not only was Herd Mother familiar with Bear Under the Mountain but she was not overly fond of him.
Cheobawn tumbled inside the Herd Mother’s mind, full of wonder. All this time, Cheobawn had thought Bear her own personal imaginary demon.
Do not play with the Bear Under the Mountain, the
bennelk cautioned. Keep him out. Like this.
If she were a small child, blind, in the dark, it would have been as if her mother took her hands and spread them upon the surface of a strong wall. See this, feel this. Then Herd Mother destroyed the wall and showed her how to build it again, using the fabric of the ambient. Herd Mother, as Teacher of the Young, ever patient, repeated the process over and over again, making sure Cheobawn felt every nuance of the process.
Cheobawn fit her mind around the construct and tried to imitate it. It was a warding wall. But the bennelk was doing something - that in the theory of psi skills - was supposedly impossible. Herd Mother was shielding. It was an act of the outward spiral, pushing at the world in the ambient, creating a bubble in which no other being might intrude At the same time she was spiraling inward, while still in communion with Cheobawn and the ambient around her. It was like having Menolly and Sybille occupying the same mind.
No, no. You are watching from the outside. Watch from the inside, Herd Mother chided. What did that mean? Forget logic? How did one do that?
Mother pulled her deeper and repeated the process. Cheobawn struggled with the flow of energies around her. Mother was patient. She corrected her fawn’s mistakes, shoring up the double spirals when Cheobawn hesitated, helping her start over when the spirals crashed against each other and turned into chaos and confusion. The problem was that the spirals of energy wanted to cancel each other out. Cheobawn could not understand why, in Herd Mother’s mind, they did not. She tried and then tried again, trying to analyze what she did wrong after every failure but more importantly, she tried to see what the bennelk did right. It seemed, after much struggle, that the issue was the balance of power. One had to equalize the forces. The spirals needed to push against each other with equal and opposite force and you had to really want them to exist. One could not approach this problem half-halfheartedly.
Cheobawn tried to push out as hard as she pressed in. Just for a split second, she got it right.
The walls of her mind shattered as a wave of energy burst out of her core. She lost herself, safe, somewhere inside an infinite sea of light. It was only as the light faded and the world settled back in place that she realized their hiding place had been discovered.
The bennelk, Herd Mother, Mother of her Mind, squealed in anger somewhere over her head. The floor shook as the immense feet stamped and pawed at the straw around Cheobawn’s small body.
Cheobawn lifted her head and caught the sense of what was bothering her Mother.
Newborn baby must not be touched, the bennelk snarled.
“Cheobawn,” said a soft voice, oddly familiar yet made strange by the tinges of terror that stretched the sound of the words thin. “Are you hurt, wee bit? Can you walk?”
Cheobawn blinked, trying to draw her mind back out of the depths of the ambient as she brushed the straw from her curls. A soft nose nuzzled her ear. Cheobawn closed her eyes and pressed her face against the boney plates of the bennelk’s nose. Her mother was very pleased with her. She encouraged her to stand.
Cheobawn pushed herself to her feet and leaned heavily against a strong pillar of flesh and bone. The bennelk eased her leg gently away, wishing her to stand alone. Cheobawn remembered her body, remembered two legs and not four, and took one tottering step.
“Come out of the stall, wee bit,” the familiar voice called softly.
The bennelk was pleased that she could stand on her own. Others were as well. She could feel them in the ambient, wishing strong thoughts at her, wishing her away from here. She looked
up to meet the double handful of eyes watching intently from the safety of the stable aisle.
“That’s right. Come out,” Tam said. He held his hand out, daring to reach into the stall. The Mother of her Mind took exception to that. Her head snaked out, teeth snapping on air, Tam’s reflexes saving him from the threat of real damage. Mother was quite serious about protecting her baby.
“Careful, boy,” Vinara said. “You’ll lose a hand if she gets her teeth in you. Kid’s gotta get out of that stall on her own steam.”
“Ch’che,” Megan said, her voice calm. Megan knew. Megan always knew when to be worried and when to be calm. “Come out. The Elders do not understand and it worries them.”
“Understand what?” snapped Sybille. “She has a death wish. Amabel is right.”
Cheobawn thought about becoming angry but did not need to spend the energy. Megan was there. The older girl rose to her defense.
“She was never in any danger,” Megan insisted serenely. Cheobawn could feel Megan, there, in the ambient, all her walls down and her Ears open wide. The older girl sensed no danger but she was perplexed by that. Cheobawn stopped and smiled at her best friend.
An enormous nose nudged Cheobawn, reminding her. She took a few steps away from the protective shadow of the massive body. It felt like being naked. Cheobawn was sorely tempted not to leave.
Fawns need to run, her mother reassured her, but they always come back when they get hungry.
Cheobawn took comfort in that simple logic. She looked up into the faces framed in the stall door, wanting to take away their hard-edged looks and their worried frowns. Fawns must learn to run. It was time to go play. She took a step, then another. The bennelk let her go, its mind sliding away from her, its powerful will pressing her onward like a warm hand at her back.
Cheobawn reached the door and pushed her way through, the crowd outside giving way for just a pace or two before they surged around her again. Hands caught her up, while others slammed the stall door closed and slid the latch back in place with a loud snap. She found herself out in the bright light of the stable yard before she could draw more than a few breaths. The ambient bled red with anger, fear, and confusion. The arm holding her around her middle dropped her next to a mounting block and pushed her down, making her sit on the first step. She looked up.
Hayrald. Her Da had come for her. Hayrald squatted in front of her and looked into her face, his eyes assessing, worried. How had her Da come to be here? Had he truly come looking for her? She wanted to ask him, but a cacophony of voices above her head would have made it a futile effort. Her voice would not have been heard.
She smiled reassuringly at Hayrald and then looked up at the faces around her. Tam and Megan, backed occasionally by Alain and Connor, seemed to be shouting as loudly as Vinara and Sybille, their faces red.
Cheobawn let the storm rage over her head, choosing to ignore it in hopes it would fade as the fury of the shouters faded. She let her eyes wander the stable yard. Sigrid, always the wise one, had withdrawn with his Pack to watch silently from a safe distance. She sent him a bubble of warm affection, curiously pleased with him. He was an island of calm, seemingly unaffected by the waves of emotion crashing around him. Was it this quality that caused the Elders to choose him and his Pack for the Meetpoint expedition? Sigrid did not anger easily, unlike Tam. This was the face the High Council chose to show outsiders, The Lowlanders would meet only cool heads and impassive temperaments.
Why did she notice this now, of all times? It seemed important. She filed this revelation away in the back of her mind. Beyond Sigrid stood Zeff and his boar hounds as well as Phillius, the Second Prime and Wissen, the Fourth Prime. Like Hayrald, the men were dressed in riding leathers.
Things started to click together, forming a pattern in her mind. Hayrald, Sybille, and the other Fathers had patrol duty. The afternoon patrol was scheduled to depart soon. Sybille had not come to check up on her as she had thought. Hayrald had not come to her aide. They happened to be here, just as Sigrid’s Pack happened to be here, in a strange convergence of Luck and Fate.
Cheobawn sighed. Humans made her feel lonely sometimes.
Unaccountably sad, Cheobawn looked back towards the barn where her Herd Mother lived, listening. It was easy to feel it, once you knew what to look for. Not a void, such as a bhotta might make, in which to hide its presence and entice you in, but a mirror that made your senses slide around it to see everything but the creature inside. The Mother of her Mind was not alone. She had a small herd of half a dozen, ranged around her in the other stalls. They rested, waiting. Sybille would come soon and they would run the trails around the edge of the dome clearing before twilight claimed the sky and the things with teeth claimed the forest. If they were fortunate they would meet no enemies but if they were blessed they would get to slash their tusks and kick their spurs at any wild thing that dare broach the boundaries of their territory.
Fearless was the Mother of her Mind. Even now she sat inside her bubble, listening to the human herd, pleased at how brave the her new fawn was being.
“They can hear you, you know,” Cheobawn said, looking back at Hayrald.
“Who can, sweet?” Hayrald asked.
“The bennelk. They listen now. They think you are happy that I have been born. But you should calm yourselves, lest they think you do not love their child as much as they do.”
The stable yard grew silent. Cheobawn looked up to find everyone’s eyes on her.
“What did she say?” Vinara asked, truly interested.
“She said the bennelk are listening. Suddenly, I am afraid to ask the next question,” sighed Hayrald, shaking his head. “What were you doing inside the stall, Cheobawn. You might have been killed.”
“Megan did not lie. She hears my heart. I was never in any danger. The Mother of my Mind was teaching me how to hide.”
“Wait. What?” Tam asked. “Who is this Mother? Do you mean the bennelk?”
“Dancer? Dancer was teaching you to hide?” Vinara asked, squinting down at her, as if she was trying to peer into a fog. “Why would she do that?”
“How did she do that, is the better question,” Sybille snorted in disbelief.
“Dancer? Is that your name? Dancer,” Cheobawn looked towards the stall, her mind passing through the walls. Dancer flicked her ears, amused. It was not her name but she did not mind her human Pack calling her that.
Hayrald tapped the end of her nose gently to get her attention.
“Why would Dancer want to teach you how to hide?” he asked.
“I was afraid. I wanted to hide but I was doing it all wrong. She taught me her way,” Cheobawn said simply.
“Somebody better start explaining this,” Sybille snapped, “in words that make sense.”
“I think this was my fault,” Vinara offered to the Third Mother. “She was spooking the animals so I sent her off into the barns. It never occurred to me to tell her not to go into the stalls.”
Hayrald gave Cheobawn a pointed look. Cheobawn opened her mouth to protest this unfair assessment but Sybille spoke before she could even open her mouth.
“Why is the Blackwind Pack here? I was not aware that they had been accepted as your apprentices. Did you know that they have an underage tag-along? How could you let a seven-year-old wander around your yard unsupervised? This seven-year-old, in particular. She is Mora’s whelp. Who knows how much harm she could have caused,” Sybille said, acidly.
Vinara blanched and pressed her lips together. Cheobawn waited for the drover to defend herself but Vinara bowed her head, choosing silence instead. Hayrald rose abruptly to his feet and stepped away to stand at Sybille’s back. With a tone and a look, Sybille had somehow transformed herself from his wife and Packmate into a witch of the High Coven, someone he, as First Prime, would neither challenge nor disobey.
“I understand your concern, Mother,” Vinara said. “I will check Dancer myself before you take her out on patrol.”
“What reassuranc
e do I have that this will not happen again? Do you need assistance in your post? The High Council can find an elder with the necessary experience to assign as your second.”
Vinara’s head snapped up, her eyes full of shock.
“Would you judge me? Must I request a tribunal to state my case?” Vinara said tightly.
The ambient was becoming painfully brittle. Cheobawn wanted to be anywhere but here. She sank into the dark place in her core to play with the double spirals. If she did it just right, a warm bubble formed just outside her body. She smiled, pleased. She rose very carefully, juggling the need to control her muscles and her breathing while staying focused on the inward and outward pushing.
She stepped silently and carefully over the flagstones until she found herself, unaccountably, standing in front of Sigrid. She considered the young man for a moment, watching his calm face as he watched the rising tension between Vinara and Sybille. He did not look down. Was he ignoring her on purpose? She pressed carefully outward and inward, extending her bubble until it slid around Sigrid and gathered him in.
Sigrid jerked, a startled look on his face as he looked down at her, seemingly seeing her for the first time.
“How did you …”
“I must apologize to you,” she said. Her words flowed out on a long breath, that she might still hold the bubble while she talked. She breathed in, balancing the inward breath against the outward one. Talking and warding at the same time was difficult. She could feel a sheen of sweat forming on her body. “It was not meant as insult,” she said on the next breaths, “that we intruded on your time with Vinara.”
Sigrid’s eyes flashed around the stable yard and then met her eyes again. Cheobawn could not tell what he saw. She was too busy pushing. The effort was making her blind to more than just the ambient. Her vision had narrowed down into a curious tunnel effect.
“I do not understand what you are doing, Little Mother. One moment you were sitting on the mounting block, the next you are standing here. No. Wait. I remember a dream … you got up and walked over to me. Gah! That does not make any sense. Have you learned to bend time, Little Mother?”