The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  No wonder Fiona hated her.

  And a deep shielded part of Cáitlin's mind followed a wisp of thought. Let my enemy think I hide in fear. She wants a spy. If I hide from danger, I hide from the very sights she wants to see. If she wants a puppet, then that is all she'll get. The precise wording of the vow, just as she would give. ". . . whenever she requires them." She's looking elsewhere now.

  What I don't know, I can't report.

  Cáitlin reached out with her thoughts, gently caressing the flow of power through the forest. The trees and rocks around here brimmed with magic -- the wildwood rejoicing in its new freedom and the stewardship of a mistress who loved trees. If Cáitlin used the merest drop of that exuberance, her touch would fall no heavier than a leaf fluttering to the forest floor. The red witch walked far away and found distraction. She shouldn't notice.

  Cáitlin fetched scones and cheese and a skin of wine, local food she could pull from the table and shelves of her own small hut. That would least disturb the currents of the land, least attract attention.

  Her feet stirred without her will. The puppet's mistress had returned, sending her captive eyes deeper into the tangled woods. The feet retraced their steps, past the skeleton and its rags of rain-matted moldering cloth, under the oak's spread and the long shadow whose yellow-slitted lazy eyes almost let you forget jaws that could rip your throat out at a whim, across a moss-slick stream chattering from the thunderstorm. Day slid into dusk under the clouds, and the rain turned gentle.

  Cáitlin felt Maureen's presence strengthening in the breeze that brushed her cheek, the leaves that rustled damply under her feet. Fiona loosened the anchor chain, and her puppet crept beyond that ghostly limit. As quiet as an evening breeze, Cáitlin sought her enemy's enemy.

  Faint wood-smoke twisted through the forest and orange light twinkled between tree-trunks, a campfire immune to rain. The savor of roasting meat drifted downwind. Cáitlin smelled a tinge of puzzlement wafting back from Fiona.

  What kind of trick was this, leaving hearth and home for a woods camp in the storm?

  * * *

  Fergus touched the stone wall again, feeling its grain alive under his fingertips, old stonework even as the Summer Country reckoned time. The new work? He sneered at that. But the old . . . It was good work, work by hands that knew stone and mortar and gravity, firm foundations and the strength of compression. This wall knew its roots.

  He cared little for the swings of power in the Summer Country, the balance between one witch and another, the question of Maureen's strength or Fiona's. Stone, now, and the minerals and flows of the earth's blood found there -- those warmed his heart and soul. Not just gold, as some fools had typified his kind. A geode of clear purple amethyst spoke as much truth and beauty as a diamond.

  So he'd made a mistake, entering Fiona's maze? No need to weep over it like that fool Cáitlin. That mistake had brought him here, where he had never been.

  His hand tingled with the residue of a lightning stroke. That was design and love of good stone again -- the bolt had burned into the highest point of the tallest tower, far from where Fergus sheltered. All that power had spread throughout the stonework until each carved block had carried part, well within its strength. Walls, towers, lintels and arches and buttresses all worked together like the cells of plant or animal.

  Fergus liked this keep. It spoke to him.

  And it was empty. That puzzled him, and Fiona through him. Power laired here, deep beneath the ground, and human slaves cowered in their stinking hovels, but the Old Blood had left.

  When Fiona had learned that, she had turned her eyes elsewhere. Stone held no interest to her. She thought it was lifeless, without soul and without a will she could command. That was a blindness in her.

  And this stone was more alive than most. He let his fingers slide into it, molecules between molecules, and felt the heartbeat of it. It welcomed him. Given time and no guard watching, he could walk straight through the thickest masonry of these walls, sink down into the foundations. But it was easier to use doors.

  He turned and looked across the rain-streaked courtyard at one. A human stood in the doorway there, frozen, eyes wide. She paled as his glance fell on her, and she crossed herself with trembling fingers before she slammed the door. He heard the thump as a bar dropped across the wooden slab and settled into sockets.

  Apparently he made an effective ghost. He wondered what the woman had seen. Old scars, yes, everyone who knew Dougal would know those. Those had to match. His new scars itched like true healing wounds, wrist and neck and belly. No way of knowing how Fiona chose that pattern, whether she drew memories out of the redhead's blood scattered through the hedge maze or had just guessed at the death-cuts.

  According to rumor, only Maureen would know what she'd left behind to wait for the flames. No one else had seen Dougal's corpse. But gossip about his death spread on the winds of magic and flowed through the waters beneath the land, just as the news of Fiona's defeat had followed close behind. The land knew many things.

  He wondered what the tower would say. Even within the Old Blood, Fergus knew that his skills were rare. Few believed that stone could see and hear and speak. He knew otherwise. You just had to ask the right questions and have the Power to listen.

  Stones as old as these would have seen a lot of blood. They wouldn't think in terms of days or weeks or even years. Centuries, yes, rain and wind eating the walls grain by patient grain -- that they'd notice. They would remember Dougal's coming and the changes that he'd made. They would remember a thing as rare as fire.

  Fergus trailed his hand along the wall, listening, walking slowly through the rain. Old, older, younger, older, the stones told him how they'd stood and the fleeting lives they'd framed.

  And the Power that flowed through them.

  Fiona had lost interest in him. She wanted news of her half-brother and this new witch. If they went elsewhere, her mind went elsewhere, following them. Fiona was riding Cáitlin now.

  Fiona didn't care about stone, about the craft and art and magic of working it, about the ways to draw it up and pile it high and delve it deep and frame air and light with it and stand it strong against the ages. Above all, she didn't understand the Power in it. He felt that Power. He felt that life. He felt pain and long-simmering anger, deep down beneath, and a flicker of hope that he could be the healing touch it needed.

  He followed that sense, to older stone and yet older, deeper into the heart of the keep. He felt the fear around him, peeking from between the slats of shuttered windows. Dougal's ghost walked his cobbled courtyard, and the humans listened to the rumbles of departing thunder and heard death in them. He could go where he willed, take whatever time was necessary. No one dared to face him.

  Old oak waited for him, set strong in old stone and bound about with old iron and old spells. The door was locked. He closed his eyes and set his hand on the pull-ring. Iron. Only one like Fergus could do this, talking to the cold hard crystals that sucked magic into themselves and gave back pain to the Old Blood. He felt the icy fire burning the palm of his hand, but as the metal drew Power from him he used it to align crystal with crystal, stress with stress, until the lock answered him and opened.

  The way led downward, to anger that had darkened these stones for centuries.

  * * *

  Fiona chewed on her lip. She studied the branching diagram on her laptop screen, typed in a few words, added another branch, and frowned.

  Something like genetics, this was, a decision tree that broadened with every step. When she charted genealogy, each level narrowed from past to present. She found that more pleasing. She liked to narrow people's choices until nothing remained but the path she set for them.

  She pushed her chair back from the computer and rested her eyes. Shadows formed out of the darkness beyond the pool of lamplight -- Cáitlin squatting inelegant on her haunches, wincing with pain and wishing herself closer to a fire, Fergus stirring soaked ash inside a burned-out tower. Not
hing interesting. She left them to their boredom.

  The orange lamplight glinted off of stainless steel, gray and green enamel, the curve of Dewar flask and Petrie dish and test tube. These instruments gave her facts, but more importantly they fed her image as a scientific witch.

  None of this uncertainty. Who would have predicted that Maureen would leave her castle to eat scorched rabbit and sleep in a hollow tree? Who would have predicted that Brian would simply disappear before her eyes?

  It had been such an elegant plot. And it had separated him from his darling Maureen. But she'd really rather know exactly where he was, or better, have him back under her control. She'd tried to trace him through the mists of the layered worlds, drawing on the blood ties between them and the tissue samples she'd stored in liquid nitrogen. She'd come up empty.

  Oh, she'd lost him before, once and then again, smelling out the faint traces as he stepped through this gate or that, but she'd always known whether he was alive or dead. Even dead meat would carry their shared DNA. She'd know a vector even if she lacked the distance to place him on the map. But now he had walked behind some wall and vanished totally.

  She frowned again and added another "what if" to the branching flow chart. "What if" he hadn't left at all, but had simply learned to hide from her the same way that she hid from him? She didn't like that one. It implied he was turning from brute force to finesse, from his lifelong study of weapons and the fighting arts to the heritage of his blood. That he was starting to use his brain, a disused tool in his kit. Then he'd have both.

  Then he would have to die.

  That was a pity. He was a beautiful boy, and he carried such interesting genes. She wanted a son to mate with the daughter that she carried. Still, she had his sperm stored for breeding.

  Fiona stood up, leaving the flow chart active on the screen. It sat there as a puzzle unfinished, glowing blue against the orange-white light of the mantle lamp hanging overhead. She caressed her microscope and centrifuge, the cold unambiguous enamel and steel of science and the thoroughly modern touch she brought to magic. She used human tools when they suited her task, just as Brian used human firearms when he walked lands where they would work.

  And the Summer Country had no rules against electricity. She had electric lights to use when a flame would be dangerous in the lab. Still, she mostly used kerosene for light and wood for heat and cooking, because she could summon them at need. As far as she knew, no Old One yet had figured out how to summon electrons from the human power grid. So she relied on solar panels on the roof and batteries in a shed out back where the sulfur stink wouldn't wrinkle her nose and brow.

  The orange-tinged kerosene light felt warmer, though, more natural, fighting against the chill of Maureen's curse. She frowned. The bitch shouldn't have been able to do that. Obviously, Fergus had cheated on his promise. He'd given the feeling of protection while not spending time and effort on the true warding.

  Then her face relaxed into the mocking drooped-eyelid smirk she'd practiced in a mirror. Fergus was a problem solved. And his treachery also meant that Maureen thought herself stronger than she was. If the bitch thought she could walk safely through Fiona's gate and hedge and door a second time . . .

  The smile broadened as it became real. But whether her smile was "real" or "false" meant very little. She was an actress, yes. This lab formed one of her many stages, a threat of a kind of Power no one else in the Summer Country could wield. Fully half of her strength lay in convincing her enemies to fear her. If she could do it with a calculated sneer or a piece of lab equipment she rarely used instead of a spell, that craft saved her true Power for when she needed it.

  But if the sneer wasn't enough . . .

  Fiona rubbed her belly, feeling the Power growing there. The baby kicked and turned. She felt her mother's touch, the magic flowing between them as the child grew. Already they recognized each other.

  She let her mind sink into that touch, testing, measuring. She'd been right in her calculations -- the baby would be fertile. The mutation that both mother and father carried would breed true. Her children and her children's children would rule both the Summer Country and the humans' world.

  With a casual flick of thought, Fiona adjusted the lamp overhead, turning its wick down to a blue glow and withdrawing her gift of fire from the flame. A second touch from her mind, and the computer started its complex shutdown dance. The door opened behind her, answering her whim, and she stepped out of the lab. The door closed again, obedient, and locked itself. She glanced over the tangled spells that would kill any stranger who set hand to the lock. They stood firm.

  She climbed the spiral stair to her kitchen, slowly, making sure of each step and keeping one hand on the smooth oak rail because her swelling belly did strange things to her balance. Why did pregnancy have to be so inelegant? The whole process seemed poorly designed. And then there was birth at the end of it, all sweat and blood and pain and mess. Some women even died.

  The kitchen waited, cold and cheerless in spite of a fire in the stove. Smoke pricked her eyes, the curse again, choking the draft of her chimney flue.

  Her stairway vanished behind her, becoming a closet even to Fiona's own eyes. That spell also held. Maureen had never guessed.

  Illusion and acting, the basis of that toy humans called "magic." Smoke and mirrors. And then, hiding behind that veil, the iron claw of true power. It all made life worth living.

  Chapter Ten

  Maureen studied the curved blade of her kukri, red with blood and the flickering light of her campfire, glowing with the dull shine of decades of use and honing. How many men had died on this blade? She'd killed Dougal with it, and Brian said he'd carried it in Malaysia and the Falklands. Used it on night raids. And now she balanced its weight in her fingers and weighed the shadow across her cooking fire.

  Padric.

  Dougal's huntsman and jailer. He'd tortured her. He'd starved her and broken her sleep into shattered moments and beaten her bloody and staged a rape scene to push her into Dougal's arms. And after all of that, she'd let him live. She'd freed him, just like he'd cut the jesses and thrown that deadly peregrine into the sky to fly free after she'd killed Dougal.

  Now the peregrine had returned. She stared across the fire. He squatted there, tearing at a roasted haunch as if he hadn't eaten since he left the keep. Tall and thin, long blond hair pulled back into a pony tail, worn leather jacket and forester's green twill pants wet from the rain. He had some kind of coarse scarf wound around his neck.

  "Any reason I shouldn't just kill you?"

  He looked up from the carcass, face shiny with grease and blood. Feral. He chewed and swallowed, not totally lost to manners. "None, lady. Please let me speak before you do it." And his teeth tore another chunk from the rabbit.

  Maureen cleaned the blade and dried it on a scrap of fur. Brian would skin her if she let it rust, or sheathed it bloody. Brian was . . . particular about his weapons. His professional tools.

  The rain pattered down through the trees, thickening as if calling in reinforcements to wash away more blood. It didn't touch her, though, or the fire. She slid the blade into its leather sheath and shuddered.

  She needed a drink.

  Instead, she grabbed her rabbit from the fire, juggling hot grease on the green wooden spit until she found a spot that was both cooked and cool enough to eat. Tough, gamy, unsalted and no herbs, she chewed and criticized her cooking. And her mind listed bay and sorrel and sage that she'd seen, and bushes of rosemary, that's for remembrance, and sweet maple sap and apples and a salt lick -- running off on culinary tangents to escape the twin questions of Padric and blood. Her back-brain saw him and saw Dougal behind him and sent her hand twitching for the knife.

  She could live out here without the keep. The forest welcomed and protected her. Something heavy nudged her elbow, and she looked down into deep yellow pools of eyes set in ebony fur. The black leopard settled warm under her arm, purring in an earthquake rumble and staring acr
oss the fire at his former master. Padric and the cat studied each other, quiet and appraising, as if their eyes renegotiated their old relationship of one slave to another. The cat yawned. Padric took another bite, and chewed.

  Slave. Dougal had been a beast-master, able to force the cat and the dragons to obey his will, owning Padric's soul. For Dougal, even Maureen had been just another dangerous animal to tame. That was why she'd let Padric walk away. But it would be so fucking easy to gut him like one of those suicidal bunnies. Part of her wanted that so much she quivered with the tension.

  Maureen lowered one end of her spit, letting the rabbit slide off under the leopard's nose. He sniffed at it, looked back at her with a faint quizzical tilt to his whiskers that seemed to ask why she'd cooked all the goodness out of it if she wasn't going to eat it, and then licked his chops.

  "Not hungry." If she ate now, she'd probably just puke the meat back up when she butchered Padric. If.

  The rabbit vanished in one gulp. Padric stared the carcass down the cat's throat as if he was tempted to dive in after it. He looked hungry.

  But he nodded. "More than one way to tame a cat."

  "Apparently he comes with the castle." The whole scene shimmered with surrealism, something by Kafka or Dali. Maureen wondered if she'd ever break free of the dissociation and depersonalization that was almost, but not quite, schizophrenia. PTSD.

  And she was about to commit another act of trauma. Getting good at it, aren't we? Practice makes perfect? Pretty soon you'll turn into Fiona, so hardened that nothing outside yourself has any meaning.

  She rested her hand on the kukri, caressing its solid reliable coldness.

  "What the hell you want?"

  He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket and then his hands on his pants. So much for manners. But then, she hadn't provided napkins or finger bowls.