The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  "And that one had brainworm," she whispered to herself. "A lot worse than getting chomped by a dragon."

  And she thought there might be advantages to getting the dragon used to looking in Fiona's direction for its next meal.

  Test the limits, find out the rules, make a map and get the names down right. Did the dragon have a name? That could be important. Just like there probably was a proper castle term for this narrow slit in a stone bay sticking out from the castle wall, not a window but an arrow slit or a quillon or something.

  Brian would know. He was the frigging soldier, fifty years in the British Army with a sideline for the Pendragons, defending humanity against the Old Ones out of Celtic legend. Fifty years with the Gurkhas and the SAS, diddling the records God knows how, over seventy years old, and he still looked like thirty. Just like she looked sixteen, Jo looked eighteen, when their true ages sat to either side of thirty.

  Her hand looked like a human hand, looked like it always had, almost a child's hand. She'd had only a couple of weeks to get used to the fact that it wasn't human. Brian wasn't human, she wasn't human, Jo wasn't human. The Old Blood ran in their veins, the race the humans had kicked out of Europe back during the last ice age. It didn't seem real.

  The Old Blood had brought her here, to this land out of Grandfather O'Brian's tales of Irish myth. It gave her the power to work magic. She really could talk to trees and discuss the balance of ecosystems with an articulate fox. Magic had made sense out of the voices that had seemed like symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. She felt the needs of the forest, touched the heart of the forest like she never had in forestry school. The Old Blood . . .

  Such small hands, to have killed a man. Crushed Dougal's throat, clawed his eyes out of their sockets, hacked him to pieces with a Gurkha kukri. Burned his body to ashes in his own bed, burned his tower and all the blood-soaked bedding in which she'd slept the night. She'd been crazy then, straight from a dungeon cell and living in the disjointed nightmares of sleep deprivation. Now she was sane.

  Maybe.

  A breath of air whispered behind her, and something feather-touched her arm. She whirled, claws out, and raked her nails across flesh. Power gathered, using her, ready to kill again.

  Brian stood there, just stood there patiently waiting for her claws and Power to tear him to shreds. Blood welled up across his cheek, flowing just beneath one blue eye and beside that broad nose his genes had stolen from a Neandertal.

  The rage flowed out of her. She sagged against the cold stone wall, as limp as if the Power had dissolved her bones. "Oh, God! I'm sorry . . ."

  The bleeding stopped, even as she forced herself to stand again. Fresh skin spread across his gouged flesh, and the blood dried and flaked away. Magic.

  He shook his head. "My fault. Bloody hell, I should know better than to surprise you. Used to have to wake the troopers by nudging them with a boot and stepping back."

  "But Dougal's dead. I'm not crazy anymore."

  "Dougal may be dead. But the rest that happened to you, when your were a child . . . Buddy Johnson is alive and well and living in the back of your skull. Your . . . rapist has been there for eighteen years. It'll take more than a few days to kick him out."

  Maureen closed her eyes. Goddamn fucking Buddy Johnson.

  She started to shake all over. "You didn't even defend yourself. Twice my size, trained fighter, you didn't even try to duck, goddamn it! I could have killed you!"

  He reached for her, tentative, and stopped when she flinched away. "If I'd blocked you, grabbed you, then you would have tried to kill me. I'd just as soon not find out how. You had to see that I was harmless."

  "You're too damned quiet."

  "Kept me alive a score of times. I'll wear a bloody jester's dingle hat, all points and bells and motley, if that'll help."

  Maureen stepped back out of the window into the tapestry-draped room of Dougal's castle. Her castle, what was left of it. The corner towers and most of the central keep had survived the fire. So had the kitchens and the cellars and the outbuildings within the walls. Plenty to live in.

  Enough for her and Brian, enough for Jo and David if they'd wanted to stay, enough for Dougal's former slaves to live in safety in this fucking land that said that human blood meant the same thing as black skin on an Old South plantation. Even the fairest legends could turn ugly when you started poking around under the rocks.

  She grabbed a bottle at random from the sideboard, poured a double shot of booze, and tossed it back. The fire burned down her throat and out into her veins, calming the shakes.

  "That stuff will kill you if you don't watch out."

  She glared at Brian. "Fuck off. Sometimes I need a drink."

  He winced away from her eyes and shook his head. "If you don't want to quit, nobody can make you. All I can say is, a bottle of rum used to make the nightmares worse."

  She knew Brian had his own share of horrors, earned in places like the Malay jungles and Aden and the Falklands. He'd killed and bled, come within a hair of dying and held good friends as they died. Sometimes that shared experience helped.

  Maureen poured herself another double. Whisky, she noticed, Scotch. Glenraven Special Reserve, smooth and smoky like the nectar of the gods, she'd never even heard of it before. Label looked like it was printed on gold leaf. Bottle probably cost twice what she'd used to earn in a week. Not that Dougal would have paid for it. His kind took what they wanted, like he'd taken her.

  Brian didn't touch her unless she wanted to be touched. Problem was, no matter how good it felt afterwards, she had to . . . become someone else, in order to let a man touch her. Even a man she loved. Buddy Johnson could burn in hell forever. She just might send him there, if she got the chance.

  "What's the name of that place, the window I was using?"

  Brian's right eyebrow lifted at the change of subject, but he looked relieved. "Balistraria. That little part that sticks out from the wall is called a bartizan. Not all that common for a Scots or Irish castle, but it helps you shoot at anyone who gets close in to the wall. Dougal messed with the design a little when he rebuilt the place. That, and the indoor plumbing and the photocell panels on the roof."

  "Rebuilt?"

  "Yeah. Everyone has an image in the Summer Country. Everyone's an actor in his own play -- Fiona with her cloak of shadow and her witch's cottage, Dougal the Highland laird with his hawks and slaves and hunting beasts. He wanted something more impressive than a crumbling stone tower and a ring of thatched-roof huts. This place was designed to stand against King Edward and those mucking big trebuchets."

  "Fat lot of good it did him."

  "Most feudal lords had more sense than to sleep with their worst enemy."

  Maureen winced and poured another drink. Killing Dougal had served as some kind of catharsis, but it had also created new nightmares. She'd gone to bed with him, and in the morning she'd killed him. Fucking schizoid black widow spider. And Brian was still willing to sleep with her. Either a brave man, or a fool. Maybe both.

  The whisky was finally starting to work. She reached out and caressed his cheek, the smooth fresh skin where she'd scratched him. He smelled good, as always, that feral woodland smell that told her that he was the right species. A faint tickle of desire stirred in her belly. Maybe it was time to invoke Jo, the inner whore.

  He took her hand, kissed it, and shook his head. "We can't. You asked me not to, unless you're sober."

  The kiss sent shivers down her spine. "Don't be a goddamn saint. Takes more booze than that to get me drunk."

  "Matter of opinion. You've dumped at least four ounces of fine single-malt into a body that weighs less than ninety pounds. You still haven't regained all the weight you lost."

  They'd starved her in that dungeon, too. And apparently doing magic burned fat out of her body. If she didn't have any fat, like after she'd escaped, then the magic burned muscle instead. She'd recovered some, but she'd still have a hard time wrestling with a kitten.

 
; Maybe she wasn't drunk. Her legs did seem a touch shaky, though. Either that, or the stone floor was turning into marshmallows. She found a chair and flopped into it, staring at the depths of her glass.

  "A billion men in the world," she muttered, "and I have to fall in love with the fucking one who believes that no means no. Even when I say yes."

  "That was the Scotch saying yes, not Maureen. And I ain't bein' noble. I'm trying to stay alive."

  He grinned, as if he was making some kind of joke. She remembered blood dripping off her hands, splashed in teardrop arcs across the walls, slimy under her thighs as she straddled Dougal's body and hacked his head loose from his neck. The sexy warmth died.

  She swallowed more whisky. "Okay. Jo and David have left. I've fed the pets. You don't want to play with me. What's next on the checklist?"

  Brian glared at her glass again and shrugged. "Probably you should go out and plan defense with the trees. Fiona's going to come calling, one of these days, and we'd be wise to be ready for her. In case you've forgotten, she uses plant-magic too."

  "Meaning I ought to talk to Father Oak about a few traps of our own." She set the glass down on the floor and sagged back into her chair. "Okay. Later. Right now, I'm so damned tired I'd probably fall flat on my face before I got as far as the front gate."

  "Rest. Eat. Rest some more, eat some more. Quit drinking. And the land will give you strength if you need it. Remember, the trees like you."

  Maureen felt the rage building in her. "Lay off about the fucking booze, okay? I want a drink, I'll take it." She fought with her anger. She didn't have the strength for it. "Yeah. I can do resting. I'm up to that. What's on your schedule?"

  "Back to poking around in the cellars, I guess."

  Maureen forced her eyes to focus. "What're you looking for, down there? Magic rings? The Horn of Roland? Rodents of Unusual Size?"

  He looked like he understood her references. Must have read some of the same books. "No. I'm looking for the back door. You don't build a place like this without an emergency exit."

  "Would somebody like Dougal worry about that kind of shit? He thought he was fucking invincible."

  Brian winced at her language. "The Castle Perilous is a lot older than Dougal. There's been some kind of hold or keep guarding this hill since the earliest memories of the Summer Country. It sits on one of the strongest flows of Power in the land."

  "Well, if you find Excalibur down there, let me know. We could use it."

  Brian jerked as if he'd just touched a live wire. He hated her references to Camelot. For all that he was christened Arthur Pendragon, he didn't have much use for sappy legends. Brian Arthur Pendragon Albion, her Knight of the Table Round. She wanted to feel his arms around her, his warrior skills protecting her, his body between her and this world of teeth and claws and scheming witches, but she didn't have enough strength to climb out of the chair. Later.

  And that connection brought up a question that had been nagging at her. "Are the Pendragons just going to let you walk?"

  "Bugger if I know. Nobody's ever tried. We all talk about it, but that's just like the old sergeant sayin' 'e plans to use 'is pension and buy a farm in Wessex. An' then 'e cops it takin' th' next 'ill. It's just soldier-talk, probably goes back to Caesar's Legions or the spear-carriers walking the walls of Babylon."

  He'd switched into Kipling Cockney and then out of it as smoothly as any actor. For all his Welsh ancestry, he rarely sounded British. From bits and pieces he'd let slip, she guessed he'd spent years undercover at times, military intelligence.

  He sighed. "Besides, I've probably been fired before I could resign. I got this message . . ." He paused, looking like he tasted something foul. "I think the coding garbled it. Ordered me to leave Liam alone. It didn't make sense, so I ignored it. But I've been wondering, ever since. The Pendragons don't take kindly to that sort of thing."

  "I'm glad you disobeyed."

  She sagged further back into the chair, feeling as if she was going to dribble out between the leather seat and the back. At that, she'd lasted longer today than yesterday, and longer yesterday than the day before. The land was giving her strength, but snatching that moose had taken a lot out of her.

  She waved him off in the direction of the dungeon stairs. "Let me know if you find Arthur's sword down there. We'll give it to the Pendragons as the price of leaving you alone."

  "Look, just bugger Good King Arthur and Merlin and Camelot . . ." He stopped in mid-rant and shook his head. "If Dougal had Caliburn, he'd have hung it on the wall with the rest of his trophies. They're all ash and rusty scrap down in the bottom of the tower. Don't count on legends to save us. Or whisky."

  He closed the door behind his last words -- probably didn't slam it only because you couldn’t slam three inches of oak cross-ply planks. Too heavy to get it moving fast. Barrier against battle-axes. Or drunken witches.

  At least he's still here.

  Yeah. A sane man would be a thousand miles away. One of these days, he's going to figure that out. Then where will you be?

  Her internal critic was back. She'd used to think that was the voice of schizophrenia. Normal people don't hold debates with themselves. Then Brian had pointed out that post-traumatic stress disorder explained everything except the Powers of the Blood. All the shrinks had misdiagnosed her case because she'd lied to them. Telling about Buddy would have let Jo in for a dose of Dad's black leather belt, probably would have beaten her to death.

  Hell, Maureen remembered, you even lied to yourself. She'd taken a minor in Psych. in college, knew all the PTSD stuff about trauma and nightmares and waking flashbacks and startle reflexes, but that hadn't applied to her. Buddy Johnson didn't exist.

  But she didn't have to hide him now. Brian knew. Even Jo had figured out what Buddy did, how he'd poisoned Maureen's mind for nearly twenty years. God, that had been a scene. No wonder Jo didn't want to stay.

  Plus, David was a human. A bard, maybe, but still a human bard, a more valuable brand of slave. Jo didn't care, but this freaky place ranked humans as a trainable class of monkey. After all, he couldn't do magic, work with Power.

  So they'd gone home, leaving green grass and sunshine and summer to go back to fucking Maine in the middle of fucking winter.

  She stared into the bottom of her glass and wished that somebody had bothered to explain the concept of Happily Ever After to the scriptwriter of this play. She ought to follow Brian, help him, learn more about the history and secrets of this land. But that cell waited down there, stone walls closing in from all four sides, stone ceiling so heavy over her head . . .

  I could be bounded in a nutshell, were it not that I have bad dreams. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

  The room blurred, and tears scalded her cheeks again.

  Chapter Five

  Brian studied the walls of the narrow corridor, holding his flashlight close and running fingertips over cold dry stone. The left side showed raw sandstone ledge, rough-dressed and still bearing gouges from the picks and drills that carved these cellars out of the hilltop. Right side was dry-stone masonry as tight-fitted as those Inca walls he'd seen in Cuzco. He couldn't slide a fingernail between the blocks. A masonry arch formed the ceiling, age-blackened from the smoke of torches and ribbed with enough reinforcing that he could be under the keep walls.

  He knelt down and pulled a brush from his back pocket, cleaning thick dust from the floor. The cleared spot showed smooth stone paving here, patterned in red and green slate, a diamond tessellation with small square insets of gray at the corners. Excellent craftsmanship. Some areas had mosaics, looked like Greek or Roman work. He wondered just who had first lived on this site and drawn on the power that flowed up from the earth. So far, the underground layout seemed more like a Roman villa than a Celtic keep -- a rich villa deliberately buried and hidden beneath rude huts and a plain stone tower.

  The Old Blood loved hidden things and secrets, like Fiona with her "cottage." The Pend
ragons showed their ancestry in that, as paranoid and ruthless as the KGB when their secrets were in danger. Agents disappeared, and no one ever asked because people who asked too many questions also disappeared.

  Like these passages and the feet that had walked them had disappeared, centuries ago. But the keep was thoroughly Irish now. For probably the twentieth time, Brian considered inviting a clúrichán to haunt these musty cellars and drain every drop of alcohol in the keep. Maybe then Maureen could throw away the crutch that kept her from knowing her true strength.

  But she wouldn't thank him. Besides, it wouldn't work. She had to face her own devils and best them, two falls out of three. And if she wanted a drink, she could summon enough booze to drown the thirstiest Irish elf. That was how the Summer Country worked, for one with the Old Blood strong in her veins.

  She still didn't understand the power of her wishes. If she fancied baked ham for dinner, there was a smoked and sugar-cured specimen of Smithfield's finest in the larder, waiting for the cooks. That was the taste she imagined, so some warehouse in Virginia came up short on inventory.

  She wondered why Dougal's slaves were anxious to stay and work, once she'd freed them? She fed them. She was spending energy every day, just maintaining the keep and everyone who lived there. She wanted them to be happy, so she fed them better than Dougal ever had, not even knowing what she did, and they weren't about to walk away from easy labor without a whip to drive it. They knew the choices a human could expect, in this land.

  Brian, however, had choices. He turned his flashlight back to the stone wall of the corridor, wryly comparing it to this new woman in his life. She had about as much give in her as that sandstone. She was as abrasive, and as brittle, and usually as cold. All in all, not a comfortable person to find on the other side of your bed when you woke up in the morning.