by J. D. Lakey
“Dinner is over but it is Restday. Celia had a music program scheduled for the after-dinner players so the dining hall should still be open. If we sneak in the back way maybe Nedella will take pity on us and feed us.”
“I could eat an entire grunter all by myself,” Connor said fervently. “Let’s go.”
Cheobawn grabbed the back of his silk undershirt as he headed away.
“Let’s wait for the cart. We will get there faster,” she suggested helpfully.
Connor’s driving was just as frightening as Gudu’s. He misjudged his speed at the end as they skidded to a halt behind the dining hall, the wheels slamming against a stone curb with a teeth jarring crunch. Connor leapt out of the cart and raced into the kitchen. Cheobawn unlocked her fingers from the frame of the cart and raced after him. They stumbled to a halt just past the walk-in cold rooms, their laughter dying in their throats. Nedella and a handful of her apprentices were wiping down the counters, taking the last few swipes over the spotless countertops before shutting the kitchen for the night. The looks turned their way were frigid.
“What are you doing in my kitchen?” Nedella asked evenly. “Why are you dressed like that? Do you know half the dome is looking for you two? Where have you been?”
“Smoked and hung up to dry,” Connor said. “Boiled and basted and cooked until done.”
“Uh, what he means is we got a cough on the foray this afternoon,” Cheobawn said hastily as Nedella opened her mouth to yell at Connor’s insolence. “So we took a sweat bath with menthaleaf 'cause Bre’en said it might help but we fell asleep and I think there was something more than menthaleaf in the leaves we threw on the rocks and my head is all foggy but we missed dinner. I think we are dying of starvation. Is that possible?” Cheobawn ran out of breath. Nedella studied her face, a frown between her brows. There was a scattering of laughter behind her.
“Oh, goddess,” one of the apprentices said behind her hand. “They got into the temple’s stock.” Nedella hushed her with a look.
“No, I don’t think you can starve to death by missing just one meal,” she said dryly as she took Connor’s chin in her hands and studied his eyes. “Who was on duty at the West Gate? Letting you go out to the saunas unsupervised. Honestly, the carelessness just …“
Her caustic opinions about gate guards continued as she took their hands and led them to a small table set off in a corner. “It would probably be best to feed you before I tell Hayrald where you are, otherwise you won’t eat until tomorrow.”
Connor waited for Nedella to head towards the cold storage rooms before he grinned at Cheobawn across the table.
“It worked,” he whispered a little too loudly. Nedella paused but continued on, choosing to ignore him.
The apprentices managed to scrounge up two enormous plates of food. Miraculously, it was still warm. Best of all, there were the two bowls of apple crisp topped with a generous dollop of clotted cream. Connor and Cheobawn started eating the dessert first, shoving it in as fast as they could swallow.
“Slow down. Chew,” Nedella said. “I am going to go find Hayrald. I’ll walk slowly to give you time to finish.”
Cheobawn watched the Master Chef leave her kitchen. She followed her progress out of the corner of her eye and when the Nedella was gone she put down her fork. Connor said something around a mouthful of food.
“What?” Cheobawn asked, pushing her chair away from the table.
Connor swallowed and repeated himself.
“You gonna eat that apple crisp?”
Cheobawn looked down at the table full of food, her thoughts running circles. Suddenly queasy, she shoved her bowl over to his side of the table.
“All yours,” she said. “Listen, Connor, you have to cover for me, OK?”
“Mnnfff?” he said around another mouthful of crisp and cream.
“Can you focus or is your head still full of smoke?” she hissed.
“I love smoke,” Connor said, “but I love Nedella more. This is the best thing I ever ate.”
“I know,” Cheobawn said, patting his hand distractedly.
A thought that had hatched in the back of her head during her conversation with Sigrid tumbled out of its shell into the front of her brain and grew wings, now a fully fledged plan. It did no good to think too hard about such impulses, she knew, because she would talk herself out of going and regret it afterward.
“OK, listen carefully,” Cheobawn said, her voice low, her words quick and concise. “I am going to the infirmary. I want to check on Sigrid. I need to talk to Erin and I think she might be there with him. So when Hayrald comes, tell him I am at the infirmary and I will be right back, got it?”
“Got it,” Connor said his eyes half closed, blissfully chewing.
“Repeat it back. Infirmary, Sigrid, Erin.”
“Sigrid and Erin,” Connor said crossly, “I got it. Got it.”
Cheobawn rose and ran down the passageway to the back door. Connor would probably forget but it was the best she could do on such short notice. She paused at the cart and grabbed her leathers, sliding into them as she eased up the side of the dining hall. At the corner of the building she paused and studied the central plaza. The dark leathers would cover the pale silk underwear, making her less noticeable in the lamp light around the fountain.
She waited for a group of elders to pass, late for the evening’s entertainment. After they disappeared into the front of the dining hall, she crouched low and ran across the War battlefield, using the ranks of game pieces as cover. She reached the last battalion of warriors at the edge of the great circle and checked to see who was near. Nothing moved. Cheobawn rose and sprinted the last little distance, running through the garden and up the stairs to her apartments, taking them two at a time. At the top she threw herself flat against the wall and held her breath, listening. All was quiet. No one had seen her.
She opened the door and slipped inside. Again she stopped and listened. Her house was dark and silent. Cheobawn closed her eyes and held her breath once more. The air was still, the ambient empty. She listened harder, trying to feel the spaces around the silence. For some reason she became convinced that the house was truly empty, though in her experience she had never been able to detect the Coven in the ambient before now. One had to trust something. She had to trust her own gut feelings. She had to assume that the house stood empty.
Cheobawn pushed herself away from the door and launched herself across the foyer and down the hall to Mora’s office door. In one swift, practiced motion, she had the door open just wide enough to squeeze in before closing it behind her. She caught it right before the door touched the frame, slowing its swing so that you could barely hear the latch snick back into place. She paused there, waiting for her heart to stop pounding in her chest, waiting for the sweat to dry on her skin, waiting for the ambient to clear of the fear she had been bleeding out of every pore.
Finally she turned to face Mora’s office. The bloodstones whispered to each other, here, inside this room; dozens of stones, each a part of a different family of stones, talking to its sister-stones scattered across the width of the continent, each stone sitting in an identical office inside an identical dome. Alone in the dark with nothing but the bloodstones touching her senses Cheobawn’s mind filled with the ghostly afterimages that still lingered inside the crystal matrices. It had been a typical day in the life of the tribes. The easternmost domes slept and the westernmost tribes were just settling down for the night. All seemed well in the world not yet aware or prepared for the coming storms.
How many times had she done this? She had lost count. This excursion into the forbidden had been a habit, once.
The winter after she turned seven - after Bohea and Sam had leapt off the Escarpment, willingly and for wholly different reasons, and the High Council had forced their own insanity on her, binding her lips from ever speaking the truth by rewriting history - she had come here often. This was where Mora kept Old Father Bhotta’s bloodstone, encased in it
s golden shroud, a mirror bright bubble that hid the bloodstone inside a cocoon of golden thread all leading to a brain crystal soldered to the interior surface of the highly conductive housing. All it took was the minute electrical currents in a human hand to trigger the mechanism and connect it the other bloodstones.
Old Father did not sit in the array of com-spheres set in their cradles on the cabinet behind Mora’s desk. The Mothers, not knowing where the sisters of Old Father’s stone had gotten to and in whose hands they now resided, kept him in a field-damper box high on a bookshelf. Cheobawn pressed her fingers onto the sensor plate on the wall just long enough to turn the ceiling lights on to their lowest setting. Crossing the room, she pulled the stepping stool out of its cubbyhole and set it up below the array of matte black boxes. There were other boxes up there, other stones with equally suspect provenances but Cheobawn knew which one was Old Father’s. Last one on the left. Standing on her toes on the top step, she slid her fingers under the cold box and eased it off the shelf, catching it in her arms as it fell.
The box was not really cold nor was it really black. The metal matrix forged by the Fathers in the Iron House confused the light that touched it and sucked the currents of electricity out of the air making it almost painful to touch for anyone with a psi gift. Cheobawn set the box carefully on the floor and then shook the life back into her fingers. The effects did not last for long. They never did.
Sitting on the floor beside the box, she used a fingernail to slide an almost invisible tab to the side before pushing at the latch hidden underneath. The spring-loaded lid popped open, revealing the golden orb inside. Cheobawn did not touch it at first. She held her hands over it, letting its energies warm to her as she cleared her mind and forced her fear into its own black box. It had been more than a year since she had listened last and that last time had been unpleasant.
After Sam had leapt from the Escarpment, strapped to the Pack’s kite wing, before the Coven took her own bloodstone away for good, she had listened to his progress, her fingers pressed around the stone in her pocket, her mind blind to everything but the faint echoes out of its ambient. She had listened as Sam grew more confident in his flying skills. She heard his mind churning, assessing his odds of survival and she had felt his dismay as he tossed the first bloodstones out of his satchel and watched them fall into the mist. She had ached as he ached; the throb of his jaw, the pain of his broken nose, the bite wounds along one arm pounding in sync with the pounding of his heart. On the long ride back to Home Dome from Meetpoint dome, nestled in Hayrald’s arms, atop Hayrald’s bennelk, safe at last, she could have let her own pain and exhaustion consume her but instead she had fingered the stone in her pocket, sending wish after wish Sam’s way; wishing to ease his pain, wishing to keep him safe, wishing the winds under his wing. By the time the Mother’s pried the stone from her stiff fingers, Sam was still in the air, but twenty bloodstones lighter.
She felt oddly disquieted without Old Father Bhotta’s stone, as if things had been left undone and she needed to finish them. Mostly, it had bothered her, not knowing. She was not so heartless that his death did not matter to her. It had been Sam who had thrown himself on Garro to keep him from killing her in the final throes of his poison wracked body. It had been Sam who stood at her side and defied the will of Bohea and Garro despite his own fear. It had been Sam, with no walls around his mind, who had let her share what was perhaps more than was good for two humans to share.
The night she found out that Old Father Bhotta’s bloodstone had not gone into the boxes to be secreted away in the Temple vaults with all the other forbidden artifacts but was in fact sitting in Mora’s office, she had waited until the dead of night to do exactly as she was doing now. She had not had to search to find the stone then, either. Old Father Bhotta’s ghost had met her in the hallway, coiling about her, gladness and invitation murmuring faintly into the ambient, tugging her on. There were no locks in the Dome, not even in Mora’s office. She had merely closed her eyes and let Old Father lead her, guiding her fingers to the box on the shelf. The moment Cheobawn had touched the golden skin of the sphere an explosion of information had overloaded her mind, blinding her. She forgot to breath, she forgot her body, she forgot her name. She became a mote of light inside Old Father’s matrix.
Forty-six stones. That’s how many went off the Escarpment. She had flitted from one to the next. Sam had scattered so many in his mad descent off the cliffs. They lay in a great snaking line between Badnite Falls and the bean field he had ultimately crash-landed in; they were buried in mud at the edge of streams, drowned in ponds, smothered in bogs, lying half submerged in hayfields and maise fields, and bathed in dappled sunlight under the canopy of the last of the old growth forests down below the Escarpment. She had found Sam at last, lying abed in a room that smelled of strong soap and burning herbs that numbed his mind and eased the aches in his body. The drugs stripped away all his barriers and opened his mind to her, his senses becoming an extension of her own. She forgot that she was a child sitting on the cold floor of her Truemother’s office.
Later, it occurred to her that perhaps she used the stones too often and that if she were not careful the minds within the stone might supersede her own and she would forget to come back. That first time, though, without caution or common sense to guide her, she let go and let Sam’s mind consume her.
She was Sam, thinking Sam’s thoughts and in his thoughts a number flashed like a beacon in the dark. Nine. Nine bloodstones. Nine was not a lot but put together in one spot, they drowned out the noise of the other stones. Nine out of the forty-six was all he had left as his strength gave out and the wind and the kite betrayed him there at the last, gravity pulling him down into the middle of a field to snap bones and re-injure his poor, abused jaw. Images had tumbled about in his mind as her fingers had convulsed around the golden sphere in her hands; images now embedded in the matrices of the stone inside the sphere; the mind numbing agony of crawling out of that field, flashes of a kind face bending over him asking questions that had no coherent answers, another face above the comforting presence of a white coat. Cheobawn had puzzled out the reason for Sam’s relief. The white coat was the universal uniform of a Lowlander healer; male, but a healer all the same.
Everyone kept asking questions. Always the questions. Sam could not remember what he had said in his delirium. Worry about that gnawed deep in his guts when he was fully conscious. What had he told them? What lie could he invent to calm their suspicions and keep them from reporting him to the Guard? His immobile jaw gave him a grace period of enforced silence but the wires holding his jaw together were set to be cut in a few weeks and then he would have to speak. Cheobawn had hovered there, inside Sam’s head, realizing all of a sudden that he had the satchel with the nine stones under his pillow which seemed a very odd place to keep them. She had been confused by his worries, not understanding the strangeness of Lowlander customs. The worry weighed Sam down and made his broken bones ache more, even under the numbing effects of the healing smoke. For some reason, it worried him that someone would take the stones from him. There was a concept in his head that had a thousand words to describe it, words she could not hear, but all based on the idea of someone taking what belonged to another. She had chewed upon this particular bit of Lowlander insanity for a bit, thinking she had misunderstood his thoughts.
Cheobawn’s confusion had driven her out, away from the connections in the bloodstone. She had jerked her fingers away from the sphere, wondering if insanity was contagious, afraid to touch it after that except to gather it up using the folds of her nightgown and roll it back into place inside its black box.
For days after that, Cheobawn had been haunted by the thought of Sam lying helpless and broken while the Lowlander world moved in collusion against him. She stayed away, too terrified to touch the stone again but thoughts of Sam troubled her until she could barely sleep. Ten days later, in the depths of a quiet night, compulsion won out over caution and she found her
self sitting on the floor in her nightgown cradling the Old Father stone in her hands once more.
It was not Sam that she heard, that time. Someone, a hunter, had stumbled upon one of the lost stones. The intense emotions tied to that discovery overwhelmed the entire matrix. The man’s euphoria seemed disproportionate to the value of the thing he had pressed tightly against his heart. He was making plans for his future, plans that seemed silly and nonsensical. Her own giggling had broken the connection and woken her from her fugue state.
The third time Cheobawn held the stone, more than a week later, it was Sam’s terror that controlled the matrix. He was no longer in the infirmary but now lay in an airless basement with only a tiny lantern for light while he listened to the footsteps and voices in the rooms above his head, the satchel with the nine stones clutched tightly against his chest. Men hunted Sam; hunted the bloodstones.
She tried to sort out the crazy images cascading out of Sam’s mind. Secrets were only as good as the people who kept them and someone had talked out of turn. Strange men had come up river on the last supply barge. Hunters; some following a rumor of bloodstones but others following the rumor of Sam. Sam cowered in the dark and prayed with all his might to whatever god might save him, fully convinced that the people above his head would slit his throat and claim his stones. Cheobawn had cried out in horror as she tossed the golden sphere away. It rolled across the room and lodged under Mora’s desk and it had taken her forever to gather the courage to retrieve it.
Fear kept her away after that. Morbid curiosity drew her back. She had to know if Sam was alive. Usually it only took a moment to feel him, to know he was alive, to know that he and his stones were safe. The last time, four months to the day after the death of Old Father, in the darkest part of the year, as the dome made preparations for the celebrations of Darknight Eve and the Coven was locked in the Temple undergoing their rituals of purification, she held the sphere and went hunting for Sam.