Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (8 page)

With a visible effort,
Connor reined in his anger and then added coldly, “You have no
right to question our judgment after the fact.”

Cheobawn stared at her
packmate in amazement. Suicidal as it was, it was well said. Connor
had obviously put a lot of thought into that speech. She wondered how
long he had been rehearsing it in his head. Cheobawn risked a glance
at Hayrald. Hayrald’s eyes had disappeared under a glowering brow.

“
Go join Vinara’s
column. We will discuss this later when I have more time,” he
snapped. Connor hesitated, glancing at his Ear, a sick look of
desperation on his face. “Get!” Hayrald yelled. Connor wheeled
Kite Wing around and set her into a gallop towards the retreating
backs of the riders. Cheobawn watched her packmate go, refusing to
meet her Da’s eyes.

“
That boy would chew
through walls for you. You should use him better,” Hayrald mused.
She looked around. He was not watching Connor now. He was watching
her.

“
That was mean,” she
said.

“
No. That was kind. I just
reminded Connor that being Third is not about being least. He will
thank me later, when his anger has faded.”

“
The older kids pick on
him because of me,” she said, as if this justified Connor’s
words.

“
I can do nothing about
that. He will have to sort it out on his own,” the First Prime said
a hint of regret in his voice.

She stared at him. What did
that mean? The minutia of the moment tumbled slowly across the
surface of her mind. A thousand facts were considered and discarded
until what she needed to know emerged whole from the mix. This was
Mora’s doing. This was Mora’s way of testing her. Pushing her
into the deep end of the pool, waiting to see if she sank or swam.
And because Blackwind Pack had chosen to align themselves with her,
they too, had joined her in the deep, black water. No one would save
them but themselves. They were alone.

So, she thought, as things
tore and she began bleed from the old wounds in the center of her
heart. Just so. Blackwind Pack’s feelings of isolation were not
paranoia then, but a very real result of the Elder’s intentions.
Connor was more right than he knew.

“
You cannot look in his
eyes and tell him he is wrong. Do you wonder, then, at his rage?”
she asked softly.

“
Do not judge me. You know
nothing of what I must …” Hayrald grimaced, the things unsaid
swallowed back down inside him like a bitter dose of medicine.

“
Tell me then, so I do not
grow to hate you,” Cheobawn said, her teeth chattering though it
was not the cold air that had sucked all the warmth out of the world.

Hayrald flinched, her words
finding their mark deep inside him. On any other day she might have
felt guilty for causing that pain.

“
Patience, I beg of you,
Little Mother,” Hayrald whispered raggedly, his face suddenly
averted from her stare. “Do not be in such a rush to grow up.”

Cheobawn opened her mouth
but found nothing to say to this. It seemed a nonsensical thought,
that she could influence her own growth. Her thoughts and her psi
were not her own to keep small, just as she could not keep her brain
and her body from growing, as much as she wished otherwise. Was she a
plant, to be stunted by binding her roots or denying her light?

She shook that dark thought
from her head. This was Hayrald, whom she loved with all her heart.
Perhaps this was just her Da’s strange way of saying he was worried
for her. Perhaps that explained the sadness in his eyes when he
thought she was not watching him.

“
It cannot be helped, you
know. Do not grieve so much,” she said gently, reaching out to pat
his knee.

“
What cannot be helped?”
he asked, turning to meet her eyes. She smiled encouragingly.

“
I don’t mind being who
I am; doing what I have to do. It only looks hard if you are on the
outside looking in.”

Hayrald swore softly as he
clutched her hand and brought it to his lips to hide the emotions in
his eyes. She let him keep the hand for a moment as she listened to
the echoes in the empty space around him. Was it her imagination or
was she getting better at piercing the walls the Elders erected
around their minds? Mora had him bound to silence more tightly than
she could imagine if, even in this moment, he could not speak the
words of love that weighed so heavily in his heart. It was a terrible
thing, being Mora’s Husband. She opened her mind and said the words
that needed saying, hoping to comfort him, though she had no
conscious idea as to what they might be.

It surprised her when she
spoke not to her Da, but to the warrior, the First Prime.

“
My mount’s alarm was
not without reason. Something comes at us out of the Waste. The
bennelk know it but can put no name to it nor see it well enough to
give it a face,” she said. “It is not even looking in our
direction. It is like slab snow clinging to the mountains waiting for
the right moment to let go and come tumbling down. There is no intent
to hurt us but like the avalanche, hurt cannot be helped if we stand
in its way.”

Hayrald looked up, alarm
replacing all else in his face.

“
How long have you known?”
he asked urgently. “Who else have you told?”

“
I only just realized it
now. You are the first.”

“
Do not repeat this to
anyone until I consult with the Coven. If you see the threat, do you
see the defense, as well? What do we need to do?” he asked.

“
I don’t know,” she
said with a long drawn out sigh, feeling suddenly tired. “Do
nothing. Be patient and wait. I cannot see that far yet.” The spell
was broken. Hayrald the First Prime had again taken over, chasing her
Da back into his box. A vision of a future in which that box never
opened again flashed across her eyes. She shuddered. Never. She would
fight that future with all her might.

Cloud Eye, sensing the
unspoken wish on the surface of her mind, took pity on her. Surging
into motion, the bennelk headed back to her herd, her long legs
pacing the ground in swift, smooth strides lest she jar the
distracted human child on her back. Cloud Eye had much to say to Kite
Wing when she finally settled into her place in the column. Cheobawn
did not hear the exchange. She was busy building geometry proofs in
her head. The lesser Ears would have to keep them safe. The Void over
the top of the world was all she could hear and its power made her
blind.

Cheobawn
wound Cloud Eye’s reins loosely around the saddle horn, pressed her
mittened hands against her mouth, and blew hard through all the
layers of silk, wool, and leather in a vain attempt to warm her
fingertips. Even without the guidance of the reins Cloud Eye did not
need help in figuring out where she needed to go. She and Connor
followed Sigrid and Erin as they walked the fence line of the lower
paddocks in search of strays. Vinara had thought this assignment best
after the column had reached the pastures above the orchards and
Hayrald had whispered his report in her ear. Cheobawn suspected he
wanted to send her back down the hill to the dome but Vinara wanted
as many eyes as possible searching the valleys and draws for the
red-haired cattle. Sybille had ended that discussion with a few sharp
words.

Did they hope to keep her
out of trouble by sending her away from the others with Sigrid as a
babysitter? Sigrid surely thought so. He had given her a dark look
upon being informed of his assignment. Erin’s glare had been even
less kind.

Walking the fence-line was
not as fun or as glamorous as rounding up the reluctant herds in
preparation for the drive back down Orchard Trail. It was a tedious
affair; riding slowly, heads bent to watch the ground for tracks.

There were places where the
snow had buried the fence in drifts then frozen hard enough to
support even a bennelk. A small herd might cross the frozen barriers
in search of sweeter grass or warmer bedding areas.

She did not mind Sigrid’s
silence. Connor’s silence was more troubling. He had not said a
single word to her since she rejoined the column and truth be told
she was glad of this. After her conversation with Hayrald, the inside
of her head was a jumble of feelings and thoughts and until she got
them all sorted out, she did not want to talk to anyone, not even
Connor.

The bennelk plodded on. Did
they have to move so slowly? Cheobawn glanced nervously up at the
sky. The sun, its light almost brittle in the dry, thin air, had
reached its apex hours previous and with the short days of winter
still upon them, they had less than an hour to gather up the strays
and head back down the mountain before complete darkness overtook
them.

“
Not a cloud to be seen,”
commented Connor, following her gaze. “Tell me again. How sure are
we that a storm is coming?”

On another day, she might
have smiled at his doubt. Connor was a true pragmatist. He did not
believe in anything that he could not touch with his own hand. Today,
after the scorn of the other Packs and the harsh words from Hayrald,
his doubt rankled.

“
We,” she said, using
his all-inclusive word to remind him he was here of his own doing,
“are most certain. Herd Mother has never been wrong so far.”

“
Says you. How many big
storms have we had so far this winter?”

“
Five, no, six,” she
ventured.

“
And you have warned us
about how many?” he asked pointedly.

“
That’s not fair…”

“
What’s that? How many?
One? Exactly right. You win the prize,” Connor crowed softly,
careful to keep his doubts out of Ramhorn’s ears. “She didn’t
predict the first one, the one that wiped out the herds in the high
meadows and killed Brathum and his patrol,” he pointed out.
Cheobawn flinched at the reminder and looked away to stare up at the
snow-covered Dragon’s Spine.

She missed Brathum. She
missed his flute in the evening symphonies and his voice in the
Temple choir. His patrol had not returned that day, nor for any of
the days that followed. When the winds finally eased, a second patrol
had gone searching. They had returned with a half dozen omehs tied to
the saddle of the Alpha who led them, the bodies left where they had
fallen as was fitting for a warrior of the domes. What the mountain
took, it kept, the saying went. Brathum’s omeh hung in the Hall of
Heroes along with a thousand other honor necklaces, a grim reminder
to any who had the courage to brave the ghosts that haunted that
corner of the Temple that life was not a gift freely given by the
goddesses.

Cheobawn shook those morbid
thoughts out of her brain. Truth be told, she had shoved the memory
of those hard times into a dark corner of her mind and had no desire
to bring them back out into the light.

Yet doubt plagued her.
Cheobawn tried to think back. When had Herd Mother begun to complain
about the ice demons? Locked in the heart of winter, autumn seemed so
long ago. Before the despair of Megan and Tam going into the Temple.
Before the first snow, certainly, but how soon before? Fall had
started out mild, days packed with hunting forays and harvest
celebrations, the crisp night skies clear and full of stars, the
frenetic activity of the dome winding down with the last of the
harvests almost in sight. It was so hard to remember the chain of
events; the shifting, treacherous winds, the ragged wisps of clouds
that were the first innocent harbingers of the coming storm, the
panic in the Elders as the storm seemed to rise out of nowhere and
turn the world into white chaos.

Sitting on the top of the
stairs of the sleep level in the Coven’s apartments, she had
watched the continuous parade of Elders down Mora’s hall, all of
them bearing news of one disaster after the other. Animals lost.
People lost trying to save them. Had she known it was coming and
refused to hear the warnings? Was it her own ignorance that had
killed Brathum?

“
Cheobawn.” Connor's
voice broke into her thoughts. “You didn’t know, right?”

“
I, uh,” she tried to
find the words that were the closest to the truth. “It was so ….”
The words got stuck in her throat.

“
By all that is holy!”
Connor hissed, leaning in close, alarm in his voice. “Tell me you
did not know about the first storm, I beg you.” She looked at him,
feeling sick. He paled, horror dawning behind his eyes. She started
to feel cross with him. Now? Now he asked, after it was too late? If
he could think this about her then so too could a dozen other people
who knew the true extent of her psi abilities. Would they all come to
hate her for this lapse?