The Mother's Wheel

By Robin Kirk

The mutant draft Sil, who readers met in The Bond, leads a ragtag group of desperate refugees to hoped-for safety in The Deep. Along the way, they meet an orangutan who loves poetry and guards the narrow path into the jungle. But safety proves elusive as the refugees are pulled back into the war unfolding on the heights. A fearsome bee-mutant attacks as part of his plan to murder his sister, the lovely and dangerous Hive Queen.

Will love or hate rule? Who, in the end, can you count on as family when you are the only one of your kind? Their destinies entwined, Sil, Dinitra, and Fir reunite and must choose between each other and the worlds they once called their own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robin Kirk
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985584158

Robin Kirk

Kirk is the author of numerous books, short stories, essays, and poems. Righting Wrongs: 20 Human Rights Heroes around the World, is available from Chicago Review Press (June 2022). The final book of The Bond Trilogy--joining The Bond and The Hive Queen--is called The Mother’s Wheel and releases in September 2022. Kirk’s short story, “Love is a Wild Creature,” is included in Wicked South. Her travel essay on Belfast was featured in the Best American Travel Writing 2012 edited by William T. Vollman. Her chapbook poetry collection, Peculiar Motion, is available from Finishing Line Press. Her poem, "Imperator Furiosa posts a status update," is included in the 2017 Nasty Women Poets Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press). Kirk has also published two non-fiction books. She teaches human rights at Duke University.

Book preview

Praise for The Bond Trilogy

Praise for The Bond

The Bond is imaginative and fresh, and Dinitra is my new hero. What a beautifully tense, wistful, creative, and genius story! Karla F.C. Holloway, Ph.D., A Death in Harlem and Gone Missing in Harlem

Fans of The Handmaid’s Tale and Never Let Me Go will devour The Bond. Lisa Williams Kline, One Week of You

 An adventure and a masterful exploration of what it means to be a human being. Constantine Singer, Strange Days

The Bond is a riveting dark post-apocalyptic romp that hooked me from its very first line. Katya de Becerra, What the Woods Keep and Oasis

Kirk brings the reader into an intricate, well-imagined world— a landscape so credible it instantly feels like a classic. Beth Kander, the Original Syn Trilogy

 A rollicking adventure story whose underlying questions make for a read that is as thought-provoking as it is highly entertaining. Carolyn O’Doherty, Rewind

Praise for The Hive Queen

In this dynamic sequel to The Bond, Kirk takes readers on an intricately-plotted journey as warrior Fir leads his brothers to escape servitude and finds himself faced with a decision with potentially devastating consequences for those he loves the most. Readers will revel in the lush world-building and carefully woven plot. The Hive Queen delivers on every level! Kate Pentecost, Elysium Girls

Robin Kirk has once again blown me away with her vision of a dystopian future where women rule and men are considered the enemy. Tammy Sparks, Books, Bones & Buffy

 A dark apocalyptic thriller that will leave readers transported to a completely different world and a story like none they’ve ever read before. Jessica Higgins, Write-Read-Life

The intricate world-building, the cast of characters, and the engaging and imaginative story made for an entertaining read from start to finish. Plenty of action, love, and some twists to keep you on your toes! I’m very curious to see where the final book will take us! Jessica, Goodreads reviewer

Praise for The Mother's Wheel

The Mother’s Wheel is a work of stunning originality, deep poignancy, and non-stop action. Kirk seamlessly blends the dystopian and science fiction genres, creating a world in which the reader can’t help but empathize with the ‘drafts’ who have been bred to serve the Sowers’ will. The determination and bravery of the story’s narrator, Sil, keeps us turning the pages, wondering where Kirk’s vivid imagination will take us next. There are battles, adventures, and struggles for power galore. But ultimately, The Mother’s Wheel is a haunting, heartfelt meditation on love, loss, and what it means to belong to a family." Emily Colin, New York Times bestselling author of The Memory Thief and award-winning author of The Seven Sins series

Also By Robin Kirk

The Bond Trilogy

The Bond

The Hive Queen

The Mother’s Wheel

Nonfiction

Righting Wrongs: 20 Human Rights Heroes Around the World

More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia

The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru

The Shining Path: History of Peru’s Millennial War, by Gustavo Gorriti, with a forward and translated by Robin Kirk 

Poetry

Peculiar Motion, a poetry collection

The Mother's Wheel

Book Three of The Bond Trilogy

Robin Kirk

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or locales is coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 by Robin Kirk. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Molly Phipps

Map by Travis Hasenour

Interior design thanks to Atticus

Far Eek Books supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage artists to produce the creative works that benefit us all. In that spirit, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kirk, Robin 1960-.

ISBN (Pbk.) 979-8-9855841-4-1

ISBN (Ebook) 979-8-9855841-5-8

1. Science Fiction. 2. Young Adult Fiction. 3. Fantasy Fiction.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022901747

Printed in the United States of America

To Frances and Ray,

my best work,

and my own ferocious 12,

RoZee

… And there are monsters in the dooryard, Centaurs,

Scyllas of double shape,

the beast of Lerna, hissing most horribly,

Briareus, the hundred-handed giant,

a Chimaera whose armament is fire,

Harpies and Gorgons, a triple-bodied giant…

Book VI of The Aeneid

by Virgil, translation by Rolfe Humphries

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Contents

1. Ruin and Rage

2. The Deep

3. The Mother’s Wheel

4. Swarm

5. A curious ape

6. Puerta

7. Mapamundi

8. Beast’s Revenge

9. Frog-Guts

10. Nullu

11. The river, a sea

12. Revenge

13. Gray Landing

14. Leaping Fish

15. Mgog-Na-Gog

16. Spire

17. The Dance

18. Hodgepodge

19. Vagabond

20. Ten Thousand Stairs

21. Gatekeepers

22. Darling

23. Jarvon

24. Nektar

25. A surprise

26. Reunion

27. Five

28. Last

29. Mother-Bond

30. Hive Home

31. Qada

32. A birthday feast

Epilogue

Author's note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

1

Ruin and Rage

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No sound is more relentless than a babe’s hungry cry.

Or as piercing. Especially with twins.

I heard the cries every night after we fled the Weave’s fleet, refugees who packed the snowy road north. The babes cried as their Keeper, Abiqua, wedged them against the warm belly of 12, Dinitra’s hyba cross. They cried as a blizzard erased everything save those wails and the steady crunch of my worn boots.

I heard them as I dove into icy rivers to fish and rinse away the dust that stuck to every nook and fold of my moist skin. I heard them in my dreams, when the two of them, Ruin and Rage, were fast asleep.

We knew the Weave fleet would chase us north. Us meaning me, Sil, a draft creature the Weave’s Sowers brewed as an experiment, then discarded. The Captains, former Sowers and rebels all. During the march, I walked behind Dinitra and 12, whose long, brindled tail swept from side to side, the white tuft at the tip like an extra dollop of snow.

The warriors flanked the road, keeping watch for a Legion ambush that never came. Why would they waste fighters? Their fleet alone could erase us from the air in perfect comfort and safety. Farmers and villagers like Abiqua, homes and barns and workshops turned to rubble and ash, straggled behind like a necklace gradually losing its beads.

After the fleet’s first attack, we’d hoped to find refuge at the city of Dolor. But the Captain there, Rek, barred us. Our desperation was her spear against her rival Captains. She meant to force them to kneel to her and her alone.

In the end, even Dolor’s lava stone walls wouldn’t have saved us. This morning at dawn, the fleet appeared on the horizon like a nightmare come to life. Helios bright as torches spit pulsars at the city, sunlight gathered and cooked and condensed. The air seemed to fold in on itself as the vibros behind them bellowed. After, like heavy rain clouds, came the transports with their legionaries and battle dogs. Between the zound zound of the vibros, I heard the battle dogs howling with impatience.

Even my cool, human-and-frog-crossed blood chilled. I saw dozens of ships. Above them all floated a copper-colored sickle ship that looked carved into the sky. As we’d seen at Quillka, the sickle ship captured a single, thick beam of light shot from the Weave’s capital, then divided the beam into slender rays that fed the fleet. The sky became a brilliant, lethal web with the sickle at its center.

My ears gushed blood from the vibros. My mouth filled with dust from the pulsar explosions. I saw one, then another warrior vaporized. All I wanted to do was crawl under the lava stone where Abiqua shielded Ruin and Rage.

Then a shock: the thick beam of light from the Weave winked out. The web, too: like a gray curtain had been abruptly yanked over the sky by an impatient hand. For a second, the fleet hung there: dulled pergama armor and the shocked faces of the pilots nearest the ground.

Then with a sickening lurch, every ship, the sickle ship last of all, fell to the snowy plain and shattered. Not a single pilot or legionary or battle dog survived.

The wreckage still smolders as I pass with an armful of branches for Abiqua’s cook fire. The cheese-seller cradles one of the twins in her lap, the boy’s delighted eyes fixed on the orange and yellow coals. The other twin sleeps in a basket, looking more like a snoring potato than a human boy.

To his side snuggles a rabbit draft. His tiny fist clamps to one of its long, furry ears.

How many did you count, Froggy? Abiqua’s warming goat milk in a pot. Black embers speck the white surface.

She wants to know how many dead I counted. I counted fifteen drafts, I tell her.

Abiqua’s instinct as a Keeper who had long cared for young children saved Ruin and Rage. They were Rek’s just-born sons. During the Weave’s first attack, Abiqua grabbed them and stowed them in her cheese cart before fleeing north.

As alarms sounded this morning, Abiqua hid with the twins under a lava stone. After the fleet fell, Rek didn’t even ask after them. Realizing that the Weave was no more, she and her warrior-sons immediately took to their airships and flew south, to seize the Weave for their own.

She left her twins behind.

That’s all, Froggy? Abiqua insists. Her goat, named Goat, is tethered nearby and crunches frozen grass. Them ships near blasted us off the Mother herself. Don’t be stingy with your news. How many more dead?

I tell her I saw four farmers dead and seven badly burned.

Abiqua grasps the pot handle and tips it up, forcing the rubbery skin on top to shift. She collects the skin on a broad spoon. For your burn, she says, mimicking how I should spread the skin over the burn from a pulsar blast.

The Sower who brewed me gave me the ability to heal quickly, even regrow skin or a limb. But I feel pain acutely. Wincing, I pat the skin over the burn.

Abiqua’s cheeks and forehead are spattered with bark-brown spots. What about them boys?

She means the Captains’ warrior sons. I want to snap back: It’s not my responsibility to count warriors. I’m just a draft. Warriors belong to their Captain-mothers and they’re the ones who should count and grieve.

But Abiqua knows I counted. Some of the warriors I considered friends. One was Kestrel, a Bird of Prey, who rescued me two years ago from a pergama mine and carried me across the Black Stairs on his back. Barely more than a boy, he’d spied my body half sunk in a river. To his eyes, I could have been a rag or old rope, but he signaled to his brothers with alarm: poor old thing!

I hold this news like some object I can only examine when it’s quiet and I can properly remember. I counted seventeen warriors dead, I tell her. A Captain, too.

What about them knobbies?

Knobbies are what we call the people of the Weave. Their Sowers brew them by design, turning knobs in a laboratory.

We drafts and warriors are made the same way, so this makes no sense. But they’re knobbies to us and we’re scrags to them.

By my count, no one found enough of a knobbie body to collect. They and their battle dogs are buried under the wreckage. Beside the remains of one ship, I found a pair of boots upright, as if someone had carefully placed them there for me to find.

I took them and wear them now. They’re a little big but are better than my old ones. The soles are thick and give my webbed toes space to stretch. Once I turned sixteen, my hair stopped growing and my feet sped up. I’m taller now than most warriors but unchanged in weight, like a band that’s been stretched.

After a pause, I tell Abiqua, The Captains are preparing to burn the dead. I saw Kesh herself, the Head Captain, carrying a dead Captain to the pyre, head cradled in her metal arm. Hisla, mother of the Dreams: boys with her same white hair and light blue eyes, brewed to be scouts and spies. The surviving sons followed, weeping.

I jab a stick in the fire, sending up a swarm of embers.

Haw! Abiqua protests. She has to flick more sizzling embers from the cooling goat milk.

I’m sick of it all: the Weave against the rebel Captains, the rebels against the Weave. Should I feel happy? Relieved? Victorious? What I feel is exhausted. Hungry. And to be honest, out of patience for more questions. Around us, other fires are flicker. I smell corn mush boiling, some fish stew from fingerlings I caught and distributed.

But what’s mainly bubbling is fear: no sound, no smell, but everywhere. Now that the Weave’s defeated and Rek’s betrayed them, what will the Captains do? Do the rest of us have any part of it?

Nearby, a warrior hunches on a chunk of lava stone, his face buried in his hands. He’s like my exhaustion and hunger and doubt turned into a living thing. The warrior’s the color of dust: dust hair, dust skin, dust tunic, the rope huaraca looped around a shoulder caked in dust. Even the hair ribbons in his topknot that mark him as a Captain’s son are dust, a color none I know claim.

I tell Abiqua that Kesh was making sure the feet of all of the dead, warrior and human and draft alike, point east, a warrior custom to help their spirits take the right path to the Far Lands.

She snorts. The dead will set to fighting on their way. You’ve gone soft, Froggy. When I die, I’m staying right where the Mother plants me. What do I know of the east?

I’ve always been able to read the minds of others if I touch them. If I touched Abiqua’s hand, I know what I’d find: complaints about the cold, a list of dwindling supplies, the needs of the twins, praise for the quality of Goat’s milk, longing for her lost cheese pots, and the list of names she’s thinking of hurling at me: Froggy, Frog-Thing, Froggish, Greeny, Fish-Breath, Fishy, Fish-Guts, Fish-Eyes, and for some reason Padfoot.

This ability is something my Sower gave me. Or perhaps she made a mistake. I was meant to be a Specialized Inland Long-diver, SIL. Why should a miner be able to read the minds of others?

From that, I took my name.

Abiqua’s never called me Sil. Everything but Sil, it sometimes seems.

To my knowledge, I’m the only draft of my kind: part human, part frog, part octopus judging by how my skin changes color to match what I touch. If I’m wearing my wool tunic and leggings, my skin matches brown to brown. If I put my clothes aside to dive, I’m the color of the water: gray if the sky is cloudy, blue if it’s not. Black if it’s night, yellow if I’m napping in a patch of blooming butterbells. I have gills and lungs both, ear and nose holes with little flaps, pores that take in moisture when I’m parched, and two large eyes, one orange and one blue.

Once, Abiqua jabbed me hard as I slept. She said I was changing color in my sleep, from a resting leaf green to orange and yellow and ashy gray. I’d been having a nightmare about Captain Rek’s Vessel, who birthed the twins right before the Weave’s first attack. Before the babes could be properly swaddled, the fleet lifted like an army of suns over the Black Stairs. They’d never been able to rise so high before.

We fled, all except Abiqua. Abiqua plunked Rek’s newborns into her cart, between a waxed wheel of cheddar and a sack of fermenting goat cheese. Then she stepped between the cart’s front shafts and pulled. Terrified, she at first headed south, into the fiery teeth of the attack. I touched her, turned her, and with my words in her thoughts and my hand on her arm directed her north.

To Dolor. To Captain Rek, sadly, but it was the only refuge we had.

On the road, I learned to tell the twins apart by their cries. The older one, Ruin, has a high-pitched, thready wail. Rage, a heavy sleeper, wakes with a blare that every second earns him his name. They have identical brown eyes, identical chubby cheeks, identical starfish hands. When we finally reached Dolor, Abiqua found a sheltered spot between two outcroppings of lava stone and immediately set to warming water for their baths.

We’d made it to a kind of safety, we thought. Yet nothing was right. Captain Rek refused to open the gates. Every afternoon, she and her sons would swagger through our pitiful camp on her way to argue with the other Captains about what to do next.

The shouting echoed off the lava stones. Rek argued that they needed allies. She wanted to reach out to the Master of men to the east. And others, she hinted, who hated the Weave almost as much as they did.

But Kesh refused. She argued what everyone else knew: only males brewed to serve were safe. Free males, males with their own leaders and ideas and weapons, had almost brought the Mother to extinction. Males were violent, uncontrollable, dangerous. To make common cause with them would only lead to disaster.

Then another blow: some warriors took advantage of the moment to flee their Captain. I knew their leader well: Fir and nineteen brothers. At an emergency meeting, Captain Rek gloated to the others that this was proof that rot had set in between the Captains and their sons. She, not Kesh, should lead them. Her boys, the Blazes, would never abandon her.

Rek couldn’t be ignored. She had more sons than any other Captain. How many sons did Kesh have, she demanded. Not a one, she’d crow. Just one miserable daughter, Dinitra, useless against the Weave’s helios.

And what about Captain Anku, Rek demanded. Anku had vanished even before the first Weave attack. She’s betrayed them all, Rek announced. That’s why the Weave fleet had finally been able to crest the Black Stairs. It was obvious, wasn’t it? Before joining the rebels, Anku had been the Weave’s most talented engineer. Always a strange one, Rek said gleefully, with secrets. What other Captain would have a beast-born son? That undercut Kesh’s opposition to an alliance with the Master of men. Her own Captain, Anku, had laid with a male, Rek crowed.

The arguments spilled into the camp, Captain against Captain and then the humans who’d fled with us: the armorer, the papermaker, cooks and farmers. The truth is that we all feared what came next. Where was Anku, anyway?

I’d become a sort of leader to the drafts, as much as anyone can lead such a hodgepodge: the alligator draft, the cat-foxum draft, the rabbit draft, the sea anemone draft we all call Darling. All Sower-brewed, then discarded as useless or mistakes.

Then the second attack came, as we’d all known it would. An army of miniature suns, the sky once again sectioned by that awful web of light. We screamed and ran and wept. With Rek’s gates barred, there was nowhere to hide. Even the birds that always seemed to be circling high above Dolor vanished.

The light created the strangest illusions. The shadow of a small boulder grew three times its height and whirled as a helio sped past. A bush, its branches suddenly stripped of leaves, seemed to double in length, then exploded. At that moment, I wanted to flee. I wanted to be rid of everyone, everything. I could vanish into the river, become more frog than human and never have to worry about anyone else ever again.

That’s exactly what I was thinking when the web of light vanished. The sky was ablaze, then: low gray clouds. I took in breath, gills and lungs both. The Weave fleet seemed to defy every Mother’s rule I know. Instead of falling, everything was suspended. It seemed that time itself stopped. In the next instant, the Legion—all of it, ships and pilots, weapons, legionaries, battle dogs—wobbled, slipped, then hurtled down to smash against the plain.

This morning, Captain Anku herself puttered up in a battered croaker. The story she told was simple. She’d left us to infiltrate the Weave. It took her weeks, but she’d finally managed to sabotage the fleet’s fuel system.

She turned off the light. With that, the fleet fell. At long last, the rebel Captains had won.

Won, at least, until Rek betrayed them by attempting to seize the Weave for her own.

Where’s Darling? I ask Abiqua. Darling, the sea anemone draft, can’t be touched. The name is the only way we can show affection.

Soaking, as you should be, Padfoot. You look like an old rag. You should soak.

Soon after arriving at Dolor, I’d set up two water barrels, one for Darling and one for me. It’s not just to clean myself and rinse my gills. The best way for me to think is to submerge in the icy water and let the darkness fill me.

That’s where I am when I hear a sharp knock on the slats. I surface to the smell of burnt butter. Dinitra’s there with 12. The hyba-cross is enormous, her shoulders past Dinitra’s hip. She’s hyena, tiger, battle dog and howler monkey combined, with a little bearcat for the smell.

Dinitra’s quick with her news. She’s come to say goodbye. She plans to take the twins’ Vessel, Susalee, with her and 12. From what I know of their past, they were students together in the Weave. But the Vessel was unlucky enough to be caught by Rek and forced to bear her sons.

I’m not surprised. Kesh had been Dinitra’s Sower before joining the rebel Captains. Kesh made 12, too, to protect Dinitra until Kesh managed to steal them both north. But this new life Kesh offered soon grew tarnished. Rek wanted nothing more than to kill 12, to kill all of us drafts. And I’d watched as Dinitra befriended Fir, unthinkable in both the Weave and her new life among the Captains. That friendship turned to something impossible: love.

Yet Dinitra had helped Fir and his brothers escape. She’d helped the one she loved get the thing he wanted most: freedom.

Now, it was Dinitra’s turn to find a new life and protect the ones she loved.

She holds out her hand and I grasp it, my tiny suction cups flat against her skin. She has a message for me that she’s afraid to say aloud. She doesn’t want to cause a panic. The Captains are planning to leave the humans and drafts behind. They want to stop Rek before she can take control of the Weave. They may already be too late. They think…

I know the rest. I’ve suspected as much from the moment the fleet fell. We’ll just slow them down.

In her memories, I also see her goodbye with Fir, a stolen kiss. It took courage to accept that she loved him, to hear that he loved her too, then part. She’s lucky and unlucky both: to have someone who loves her and then to be so cruelly separated. Inside my own heart, I feel pain and jealousy both. As the only one of my kind, I’ll never have that kind of love.

Where are you going? I ask.

Someplace safe from Rek. She means safe for both the Vessel and 12. Rek has long-hated drafts. She often threatened to kill us all. 12 is at the top of her list.

I think we’ll try to find this draft Queen, Dinitra tells me. She’ll know how to protect drafts like 12.

The Deep is closer. I let her feel my concern. I’ve heard rumors about The Deep as a place where drafts, humans, and beasts can live together in peace. Why not The Deep?

A draft Queen sounds like someone 12 should meet, don’t you think? Dinitra replies.

What about your mother? Kesh sacrificed so much to steal Dinitra back from the Weave. Now, her daughter is leaving her. She’ll try to find you, I warn. She’ll never stop.

Neither will I, Dinitra answers. If it’s the world where 12 dies that I’m leaving, I see no problem stepping off the edge.

2

The Deep

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After Dinitra leaves, Abiqua pours milk into two bottles, careful to measure evenly. For a nipple, she uses the finger of an old wool glove. After settling the babe—Ruin or Rage, I can’t tell—she presses the fingertip into his mouth for a feeding.

The twins are the only ones she babbles to: voice high, head waggling, sometimes sticking out her tongue affectionately. I try never to look at her when she’s being sweet. If she catches me, I’ll get a tongue lashing.

If we stay here much longer, the cold and the hunger will do what the Weave couldn’t, Abiqua says once she’s fed both boys. Who’ll point my frozen feet east then?

I’ll dig you a hole myself.

Abiqua snorts, then coos at a babe. I think she calls this one Softie. You need more fight in you, Greeny.

A warrior comes to collect the lone boy sitting nearby. By the colored ribbons in the boy’s hair, I see that he’s a Bird of Prey. Kestrel, who I saw die, was his brother. The warrior custom is to sing a praise song as their dead burn. In shape language, the warrior cautions the rest of us to stay where we are and wait.

Our dead, too, will burn. Why can’t we join them to say goodbye?

What Dinitra told me is true, I know it now. They’re not going to delay or tell us. They’re going to leave us all behind: the farmers who once fed and clothed and sheltered them. The armorer who equipped them to fight. The papermaker who crafted the tracker maps the Captains and their sons use to find each other. Abiqua and the twins. And drafts like me, drafts the Captains and their sons no longer have a use for.

The Weave is finished. The Captains are victorious. Now, they have a new war to fight against Rek.

The rest of us are worse off than ever.

In the distance, the notes of the praise song rise and fall. When a boy becomes a warrior, his Captain-mother removes his tongue, a sign of loyalty to her as well as a practicality. If the warrior is captured, he can say nothing about their brothers or Captain-mother.

The Captains leave a few with tongues, including a singer. They’re chosen for the quality of their voice. The praise song is always beautiful and haunting, with verses added for each boy or Captain who’s lost. I’ve heard praise songs any number of times, but never before have I listened to them so dry-eyed. They won’t add a single verse for one