Free Bhotta's Tears: Book Two of the Black Bead Chronicles by J. D. Lakey

grit her teeth and tried not to snarl. Her innocence would carry no weight with this group nor could she expect mercy.
    It came as almost anticlimactic, that moment when Mora’s tall, slender form glided gracefully through the door. Her truemother closed the door tightly behind her and then turned to survey the room with eyes that missed nothing.
    Cheobawn ignored the other Mothers to focus all her attention on her the First Mother. As always, Mora was impeccably dressed, the soft jumper belted to drape perfectly over the curve of her hips, its pale pink color intentionally chosen to match the strings of tiny pale bloodstones coiled around her wrists, the coils holding the sleeves of the spotlessly white underblouse up and away from her elegant hands. Even Mora’s hair was perfect, every strand of her burnished bronze coif lay in its assigned place, swept up in her ever present chignon.
    Cheobawn ran her fingers through her own short curls out of habit. Mora always made her feel rumpled.
    “Mother,” she said respectfully, though the word never fell off her tongue with any ease when she spoke to Mora. Cheobawn’s grievances with Mora were too great for that. Amongst the tribes, there was natalmother, nestmother, and truemother. They were rarely if ever the same people.
    Her mother had broken all the rules and done a thing that had shocked everyone. Cheobawn had never been able to understand what kind of insanity had possessed Mora to make her want to carry a child to term, enduring the rigors of labor, putting everything at risk; her life, the well-being of the tribe, the leadership of the tribal governments, and then further cursing herself and that child by raising it away from the nests.
    Perhaps Cheobawn’s life would have been easier if Mora had loved her as a nestmother loved a child. But Mora looked at her with the same emotion Sybille showered on her knives or Amabel, her lab instruments. What did that make her, in Mora’s mind? Useful but disposable? The burden of the black bead in Cheobawn’s omeh was nothing compared to the stigma of being raised solitary and alone in the house of the High Mother under the watchful and weighty eyes of the Coven.
    “Daughter,” Mora said, nodding as she leaned back against the door and looked around the room with a calculating eye. “I see we are all here. So let us begin. Brigit?”
    Sitting up straighter, Brigit cleared her throat nervously.
    “Cheobawn, you asked me a question this morning. I did not think it wise to answer you before consulting with the Council. Please ask it again.” This was well rehearsed, this speech. Brigit was not one for speeches. The other Mothers had been coaching her.
    Ah, Cheobawn thought. Puzzle solved. An innocent remark about Lowlanders had landed her here, under the brutal scrutiny of the High Coven.
    “Why are you doing this?” Cheobawn asked softly, disturbed by the strangeness of this tableau. If they had been sitting in the garden atrium high atop the Temple spire under the apex of the Dome, a handful of secretaries recording every word, and the Husbands guarding the doors, it would have been a High Council tribunal. But these were her Mothers. As much as she disliked it, as unnatural as it seemed, as unsuitable companions to a child as one might ever find anywhere, these women were her only nestmates. Was this meeting to be as innocent as a conversation across the dinner table?
    “That is not a question we are willing to answer at this time. Ask another.” Mora said with a shake of her head.
    Cheobawn stared at the High Mother. What was going on if even the why of this was a secret? Was this some sort of weird Coven game? Did they sit around in circles playing word games in Tribunal sessions, like little girls on the playground? If so, she wished she knew the rules.
    No matter. The hardest games were the ones where the rules were a secret and you had to figure them out as you played along. Cheobawn thought about strategy for a