Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (2 page)

But Megan had left her,
going off to the temple with Tam and Alain. Cheobawn had cried
herself to sleep for a week afterward.

“
What am I saying?”
Connor said in mock horror, trying to turn his gaff into humor.
“Nobody likes to talk to girls, not even other girls.” It was a
sad attempt at best but she pasted a smile on her face and flashed it
over her shoulder to reassure him that no offense was taken. “You
have tons of friends. There’s Vinara. She lets you groom the
bennelk whenever you want without making you sign up on the stable
roster. And Zeff. He thinks the sun rises and sets by you. Hasn’t
he promised you one of Lady’s puppies this spring? And what about
Nedella? She sneaked us into the kitchens and showed us how to make
berry crisp that one time.”

“
She was feeling sorry for
us because Tam and Alain and Megan had just started their temple
training and she caught us camping out in the dining hall looking
pathetic,” Cheobawn said with a rueful shake of her head.

“
Whatever. It got us out
of stick training with the remedial sparring class. And the berry
crisp wasn’t bad either. Why don’t you go and see if the bennelk
need brushing?”

“
A storm is coming. They
don’t like me messing with their fur when their stormsense is
strong,” Cheobawn said, the words falling out of her mouth unbidden
as she reached out towards the brightly-colored markers scattered
across the map table.

Tam had made the table for
her. She had thought him demon-possessed when the idea first caught
fire in his imagination. The first grimstorm of the winter had
descended on the dome, early and brutal, turning the world outside
into a white chaos of wind and cold and snow, effectively penning
everyone inside the dome. The Elders had been fretful and grouchy,
frustrated that they could do nothing about the fields of hay yet
unharvested and the animals left unprotected in the high pastures. It
would be days before the awful truth would be discovered and the
damages assessed. She had been pacing their packroom like a caged
lizard when Tam had whooped in delight, leapt to his feet, and dashed
out the door. They had had no choice but to follow him, out the door,
down the stairs, across the dome, to the Library, a place seldom
visited by any but the oldpas. Cheobawn had never had reason to enter
the old archives until that moment and found the silent vaults, with
their tall, thin windows and their dust-laden sunbeams oddly
peaceful. The stillness inside the thick, whitewashed walls seemed
impervious to the perpetual industry of the dome and all its
inhabitants.

The Pack had spent the next
two days scrounging through the archive rooms, rummaging through bins
stuffed with rolls of plans and cubbyholes crammed with maps of every
sort until Tam found what he wanted. Cheobawn closed her eyes as she
remembered the look of unbridled delight on Tam’s face as he held
the old, dog-eared piece of parchment up to the light to study the
faded map. Megan, whose eyes and nose were streaming as she sneezed
uncontrollable in the presence of so much dust, had glared at him and
demanded an explanation. Tam had walked away, a mysterious smile on
his beautiful face, infuriating her further.

Again, they followed him.
What other choice did they have? They followed him as he took the map
to Finn, the Master Tinkerer, who showed them how to make the table
and brew the glue they needed to bond the map to the table top. Finn
even helped them with the construction of the hidden compartments
around the edges of the table that opened just like the wooden puzzle
boxes now resting, long forgotten in the bottom of her old toy box.
After a month of hard work, Tam saved the last step for himself. He
banned them from the workshop and would not let them see the table
until it was done.

They had exclaimed in wonder
as their Alpha leader unveiled the final product. He had applied a
clear varnish to the wood and parchment alike, making the colors of
the map spring back to life, the almost invisible tracery of contour
lines and pale blue stream lines once again clean and precise while
the natural wood around it glowed like a finely crafted frame.
Cheobawn touched the table in awe, not believing that a piece of
faded parchment and a pile of lumber could be transformed into
something so magical. Finn put it on a dolly for them and they hauled
it across the dome and up the Pack Hall stairs. It was Megan who
wanted to place it near the natural light of the windows in their
common room and had directed the boys as they rearranged the study
desks, gear lockers and overstuffed chairs to accommodate it. Then
Tam had shown her how to use it.

“
See, wee bit,” he had
said. “It’s just like the map on the foray form but instead of
geometric colored shapes to mark the spots where things are located,
I made these.” And he had shown her how to open the hidden
compartments, each one a puzzle, each one having a different series
of spring-loaded panels and slides, each filled with brightly-colored
bits of plasteel cut into cubes and spheres and pyramids, each a
match to the two dimensional shapes marked in the map legend of the
foray forms. “You don’t have to sit under the tubegrass and make
maps in the dirt anymore. You can use this map to see the world and
tell us what it has to say.”

She had cried, touched by
his gift, her tears making him worry that he had hurt her somehow.
Megan had punched him in the shoulder and called him an enormous
dufus, which made everyone laugh.

That memory was a small
little treasure Cheobawn kept locked up safe inside her heart. It had
made the next day more bearable, when Tam stole Megan away and, along
with Alain, had joined all the other kids who had turned twelve that
year as they streamed into the Temple to begin the cloistered
training that was a requirement for every village member upon
reaching child-bearing age. They would spend the next one hundred
days studying the arts of meditation, pleasure, and mind-body
control.

That had been sixty days
ago. The next forty days stretched endlessly in front of her and she
thought she just might go mad before it was done. She could not
remember a life that did not include Megan. The older girl had always
been there, kissing away her hurts and giving her practical advice
and common sense directions when the ambient overwhelmed her with its
bodiless and ephemeral problems. There was a hole in her life, now;
one that she did not know how to fill. Hanging around Connor just
made everything seem worse. He missed Tam, his truebrother, as much
as she missed Megan, and together the ache of their loneliness seemed
to echo back to her doubly magnified.

Connor covered his pain with
humor. He joked about it and called Tam’s training
Full Contact
Meditation
, or when he was feeling particularly frustrated,
Remedial Sex
, but she did not quite understand why he said it
with a nervous snigger as if he was embarrassed by what the Elders
were teaching in the Temple. Cheobawn did not think what happened in
the Temple was quite as simple as learning the mechanics of
controlling reproduction nor did it sound like fun. Menolly, as High
Priestess, personally oversaw this psi training, and Amabel, as Maker
of the Living Thread, supervised the body mastery classes that taught
fertility control, making Cheobawn suspect that the training was
arduous, exacting, and not to be envied in any way. The kids who came
out of the temple at the end of winter always seemed more serene yet
somehow harder, much like sword-steel might be tempered in a furnace
to better accept an edge.

“
What did you just say?”
Connor asked. Cheobawn blinked, his voice shaking her free from her
thoughts.

“
Huh? What did I say?”
she asked. She looked down at the map under her hands. It would not
stay still in her head anymore, but insisted on shifting and heaving,
like a living thing that wanted to roll over and offer its belly up
for scratching. It had been weeks and weeks since she had been able
to listen to the ambient without feeling ill. She closed her eyes and
her mind to the intrusive energies and began building geometry proofs
in her head. It seemed to help; her connection to the ambient faded
but it made her feel more alone, cut off from the familiar press of
land-sense she had known all her life.

“
You said a storm was
coming. Did the bennelk tell you that? We should tell Phillius.”
Connor said, worry in his voice. Cheobawn turned her face away from
the table before she opened her eyes.

“
The Watch Ears have their
long distance array,” she said with a careless shrug. The
bloodstones inside the sensor-spheres dotted the high places. The
main stone in the Temple was never left untended. There was always
someone listening to the sky over the Dragons Spine. “They will
know in time to bring the patrols in. Stop being a worrywart. All the
animals were brought into the long houses months ago. There is
nothing the storms can damage that has not already been destroyed.”

Connor looked at her oddly.
“The long houses are running out of fodder. Vinara took some of the
herds out to the unharvested meadows just beyond the orchards two
days ago,” he said carefully.

“
What? Why did she do
that? Oh, by all that ….” Cheobawn looked off into the unseen
distance, a worried frown between her brows.

“
How can this be a
surprise?” he asked, accusation in his voice. “You are the best
Ear in under the dome. Why is it that I am the one telling you
something you should already know?”

“
What are you talking
about?” She tried not to sound guilty but failed miserably. Lying
was not her best skill. “It’s not my job to track the comings and
goings of every little piglet.”

“
What’s going on with
you?” Connor asked. “You haven’t touched the map table in over
a month. Are you still drawing your maps in the dust of the
playground?”

“
No. I … nothing is
wrong.” Cheobawn insisted.

“
Then look at that map and
tell me where the nearest fox den is,” he said. It was a command,
not a request. Connor had become a little too autocratic of late, she
thought, starting to feel a little annoyed.

Cheobawn glared at him, not
bothering to hide her mounting anger. “I am not a minstrel. I do
not perform on command.”

A worried frown creased his
forehead. ”You can’t even look at the map, can you? What’s
going on? Is your psi going dark?” It was not unheard of for an Ear
to lose her ability. Age and hormones could play havoc with a
Mother’s psionic skills.

“
Leave me alone,” she
said, folding her arms over her chest. If Connor kept pushing for a
fight she would happily oblige him, she thought.

“
How can you tell me what
the bennelk are thinking but you don’t know where the dome herds
are? Something is wrong. Don’t lie.” Connor threw back his
shoulders, straightened himself up to his full height, and deepened
his voice, adding, “Tam isn’t here so that makes me the Pack’s
senior member. Tell me what I need to know so I can help you.”

“
Stop it! Nothing is wrong
with my psi abilities.” Her voice rose in volume until she found
herself shouting at him. “I wish to the Goddess that there was.”

Connor stared at her. She
looked away, uncomfortable under his inspection.

“
I guess you’re gonna
have to explain that, because I don’t understand you sometimes,”
he said softly.

Cheobawn ran her fingers
through her hair. He was Pack. He deserved an explanation but she
didn’t want to talk about her feelings of being overwhelmed and out
of control, especially not with Connor who would want to fix it. She
looked up into his worried eyes. Hurting Connor more was the last
thing she wanted to do.

“
It’s like a water hose.
Off is off but so is on. There are no settings in between that will
deliver just a trickle.”

Connor groaned, pressing the
palms of his hands against his temples. “Have mercy on a slow
brain. Say that again in words that I can understand,” he said.
Cheobawn sighed in frustration and wandered away from the offending
map table to peer unseeing into the overladen lockers and bookshelves
that lined the far wall. Connor waited patiently.

“
When I was little I
thought I knew everything there was to know and then I got older and
found out I was wrong,” she said.

Connor gestured impatiently.
She was stalling and he knew it.

“
When I was little I
thought that everything I could see was all there was. Then I got
older. What I thought was everything was just the stuff that floated
to the surface, like the scum on a stagnant pond. There I was,
floating around on the surface, thinking I was the master of the pond
even though I could not see underwater. What kind of mastery is that,
to leave things unexplored? So I dove into that pond and found out it
is so deep it might go on forever and that I was just one small speck
in a pond as infinite as the ocean of stars overhead. You can’t go
back from that. You can’t erase stuff out of your head,” she
said. “And even if I could go back to just floating around on the
surface, I can’t because things are all stirred up now. The world
is full of whirlpools and I am swimming as fast as I can to stay out
of them.”