Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (23 page)

Cheobawn was afraid to look.
But babies hid their eyes from the consequences of their own actions.
She was Tam’s Ear. She forced herself to be brave. Turning, she
peered past the shoulder of the Temple, beyond the low roof-line of
the infirmary, out through the clear panels of the dome, to the line
where the stars ended and the Dragon’s Spine began. Above the peak
called White Dragon, light flared, the aurora of the planet flashing
brilliant and green, its tentacles reaching towards her. As she
watched, it flared again, green, then blue, then yellow, snaking
across the sky as if it meant to entomb the world inside its
convulsing coils.

Cheobawn moaned and began to
shiver as she waited for it to stop. Somewhere over her head, Bohea,
safe inside the metal tomb of his battle cruiser, did what he had
said he would do, what his kind did best; the sum total of the
Spacers’ weaponry now rained down upon her planet, prying the
Spiders’ hooks from the fabric of the world, blow by blow beating
them back and collapsing a doorway that defied understanding, the
turmoil of that inferno now lashing the fragile forces that kept them
all safe from harm in a universe of cold vacuum and hard radiation.

Hayrald found her like that,
arms wrapped tight around her body, teeth chattering, her body
shuddered in sympathy with each flare of light.

“
Ch’che? Where have you
been?” he asked, peering at her through the dim light of the lamps
on the edge of the great plaza. “Connor said you went to the
infirmary but nobody there remembered seeing you.”

She flinched at his voice
but could not take her eyes from the sky. He touched her shoulder and
felt the tremors in her body.

“
What’s wrong?” he
asked. “Are you cold?”

“
It is like dragon’s
fire,” Cheobawn said.

Hayrald followed her eyes
and paused to watch.

“
I used to think the same
thing when I was your age,” he said softly, “but then I learned
that it is just the by-product of solar flares interacting with the
magnetic field of the planet. It is a good thing, this. It means we
are still alive.”

“
No,” Cheobawn said as
the sky above the Spine turned golden for just a moment. “I think
there really are dragons. Big. Hungry. Dragons. The only way to stay
safe is to stay small and invisible.” That was a truth, she thought
sadly, that she never seemed to realize until it was too late.

Hayrald hugged her close,
his arm around her shoulders. She could not bring herself to relax
into that hug when so much violence raged over her head. He touched
her cheek and gently turned her face away from the lights.

“
It has been a long day,
Little Mother,” he said firmly. “You are tired. Exhaustion can
play tricks with your head if you let it. Let’s go home.”

Hayrald took her hand and
tugged her into motion, taking her back towards Mora. Cheobawn jerked
her hand out of Hayrald’s fist and hid it behind her back. He
paused and looked back.

“
What is it, Ch’che?”
he asked gently.

“
I said things to you this
afternoon, mean things, hurtful things …“Cheobawn said, stumbling
over the words, hoping desperately not to offend again. She shook her
head and started over. “I am sorry, Da. I was upset. I would never
hate you. No matter what. Words are like knives that cut and wound. I
forget that sometimes.”

“
It’s alright. I
understand,” Hayrald said, amused about something. “Children
hating the ones who love them most is as natural as the rain. It is
how you learn to stand alone. I expect it will get worse before it
gets better, with you.” He said the last with a hint of resignation
in his voice.

“
I don’t want to hate,”
she whispered. “It makes me all brittle inside. I said things to
Mora just now that I did not mean but they cannot be called back. I
am moving into the Pack Hall. I do not have Mora’s permission but I
do not think she will say no.”

Hayrald looked up, towards
the Coven House, a worried frown on his face. When he turned back,
his face was in shadow.

“
This is not unexpected,”
he said gently. “I am just surprised you tolerated her unreasonable
restrictions for this long. She does love you, you know, though she
tries to shield her heart from it. Someday you will forgive her for
what she has done to you. We hold you closest who expect you to go
the furthest.”

Cheobawn stared into the
shadows where his eyes lay concealed from her questions and tried to
breath around the ball of emotions that was once again clawing its
way up out of her guts. It was hard to know what they were, there
were so many, all of them painful. Did love hurt this much for
everyone else? Was this how love was supposed to work? Did everyone
get what was good for them instead of what you needed, like asking
for berry pie and getting stewed bitter greens instead?

Cheobawn choked on the words
when she could find her voice once more. “What? You are not going
to tell me what that means, are you?”

“
No. No, I don’t suppose
that I am,” the First Prime said evenly, taking her hand again.
“Come along. Your name needs to put on the rosters if you expect to
sleep in Pack Hall tonight.”

Cheobawn
woke to the sound of soft chimes and an emotionless machine voice
that would not go away no matter how far she ran from it in her
dreams. Something hard poked her in the back. The web of sleep
finally shattered. She opened her eyes.

“
You’re lying on my arm.
Roll over,” Connor said mumbled, digging his elbow into her
shoulder blade.

“
It is now six oh five.
Vinara has requested your presence in the stables by seven,” the
voice out of Connor’s night table intoned. “The breakfast menu in
the Common Room is as follows. Honey buns. Assorted Sausages.
Breakfast pudding …”

“
Hey!” Cheobawn sat up
and looked over at the table, “How did you get your table to do
that? Can you do that to my table? I’m starving. Let’s go eat.”

“
Holy Mother of all that
is right in the world,” Connor breathed out, his eyes suddenly open
and seeing her for the first time. “How did you get in my bed? What
kind of trouble have you got us into now?”

“
Calm down. The First
Prime put me on the roster last night. I told you all about it when I
got under the covers but I think you were not quite awake.”

“
No, apparently not,”
Connor said. “Move over. I gotta take a shower and my tongue tastes
like old socks. What else did you do last night that I don’t
remember?”

She crawled out of bed and
looked around for her silk underwear. Until she brought her stuff
over from Mora’s she would have to make do with what she had been
wearing yesterday. Finding the leggings draped over a chair, she got
one leg into them and was hopping out into the common room when
Connor grabbed her arm and stopped her.

“
No, really, Ch’che,”
he said, a deeply worried look on his face. “What are you doing
here? I thought Mora wanted you to wait until spring before you move
in?”

“
I got in a huge fight
with her last night and said some really bad things. I am not sure if
she threw me out or if I ran away but Hayrald thought it was time for
me to move in, so here I am.” Cheobawn said this with as much cheer
and happiness as she could muster. She really was glad to be here, at
last. That part was not false.

“
Do you need to talk about
it?” he asked, his concern etched in the lines around his mouth. He
was not fooled by her smiles.

Cheobawn pressed her lips
together and looked away.

“
Oh, Connor,” she said
forlornly, “how can they say they love you in one breath and then
tell you terrible and hurtful things in the next?”

“
Because they are Elders,”
Connor said, hugging her hard, “I think they take classes in the
Temple that teach them how to torture kids.”

He grabbed her undershirt
off the top of his work station, tossed it over her shoulder, and
pushed her towards the door to the hallway. “Girls bathrooms are
down the hall to the right. Meet me back here in ten and you can tell
me all about it over breakfast.”

Cheobawn pulled her shirt
over her head and was trying to untangle the long sleeves as she
stepped out the door. She nearly tripped over a large pile of baskets
and bins. Pack Hall did not normally allow clutter to accumulate in
the passageways. She thought about getting annoyed at someone’s
thoughtlessness when she recognized a tangle of marionettes in the
top basket. It was her belongings. She closed her eyes; it just hurt
too bad to look at it. Her decision to move only hours old and
already her old room had been stripped clean, the sum total of her
life delivered under the cover of night like some shameful secret.

Connor followed her out the
door, wrapped in only a towel. Something about her stillness stopped
him in his tracks. He stepped around her, pushing himself between her
and the offending pile of luggage and dipped his head to look into
her face. Perhaps he did not like what he saw there because he swore
softly.

“
Hey, stop it. Look at
me,” he said, brushing the tangle of curls off her face with his
fingers. She opened her eyes and met his. “Who cares, right? We got
you here. That is all that counts. Mora and Hayrald can just go fall
off a cliff for all we care, right?”

Cheobawn nodded, clinging to
the irrepressible spirit inside him.

“
I wish …” she said
then stopped herself. “I want to burn it all. I want to make a
bonfire out of it and dance naked around it while it all turns to
smoke.”

“
That’s the spirit,”
Connor said with a grin, knocking her gently under the chin with his
knuckles, “but the Fathers down at the recycling house would have
an issue with that. What say we lug it all down there after we come
back from our foray?”

“
OK,” she said, using
every ounce of her strength to force the corners of her mouth up in a
small smile.

“
Good. Shower,” he said,
pushing her down the hall. “Use a shower cap. No wet heads outside
in the cold, hear me?”

A pair of boys walked down
the hall, naked, towels over their shoulders. She paid them no mind,
distracted as she was with her own thoughts but as she turned into
the girls shower she heard one of them say something to Connor.

“
Hey, baby Blackwind,”
the boy sneered “You forget how to clean your room, ya gotta start
storing stuff out in the hall?”

“
Eat acid spiders,
Jerrek,” Connor snarled. The boy laughed.

“
Yeah, whose gonna make
him?” the bigger boy asked, “You?”

The two boys’ laughter
echoed down the hallway as they strutted on towards the showers.

“
No,” said the smaller
boy loudly, “that’s why he snuck Mora’s whelp up here. So he
can hide behind her skirts.”

Cheobawn stopped and turned
around, pausing in the doorway to listen in case Connor needed help.
The hall grew silent. Perhaps Connor was learning prudence and had
chosen to ignore the stupid comments of mean spirited boys. She took
her shower as she thought about that. It made her sad in a way,
thinking about Connor growing up and outgrowing his pugnacious ways.

It was not until they were
sitting across from each other eating breakfast and she was halfway
into recounting all that had happened in Mora’s office the night
before, telling Connor about Sam and his stones and Bohea and Oud and
her sister Scerron and the doorway in the sky and Bohea’s promise
to hunt out ever egg, when she noticed the bruise blossoming high on
one cheekbone. She stopped mid word.

“
What happened to your
cheek? Oh, by all that is holy. Did you fight them?” she asked in
dismay as the realization hit her. “Both of them?”

Connor touched his face
tenderly with the tips of his fingers.

“
Not bad for there being
two of them and one of them being bigger,” he said with a grin. “I
got a pummeling to the ribs that might need some ice, but I figure
we’ll be out in the cold so there’s no need to get too worried.”

“
Why didn’t you say
something,” she asked, appalled. “I would have come to help.”

“
Didn’t need your help,
did I?” he said, obviously pleased with himself. “Took Jerrek out
with a surprise punch to the ear and I let Mordoc pound me in the
ribs while I got under his guard and knocked him senseless with a
perfect upper cut to the chin. Taller is not always better.”