She tilted her head, eyes and smile questioning. "I didn't reach this age by being careless. I don't sit with my back to any doors, either, and I don't trust allies just because we have a common cause. Move on, and I'll follow after dealing with your problem child."
Liu, and Po, and Ghu, and the others, he led on. The marsh grew silent behind him, the mental voices stilled from their constant whisper of hunger and curiosity. That silence chilled his heart. Treacherous as this witch was, he had no proof she was not killing instead of spelling them to sleep. He did not know which would use less Power, and that was the real test.
She'd given him no choice.
And that was her character. She had him in her power, and she had planned each step of her attack with a cold heart and colder logic, from before their first meeting. If she wanted him dead, he would die. If she wanted the hatchlings to live, they would live. Her words meant nothing.
The red witch left him alone, the respect shown to an equal.
He'd tasted the arrows from Sha'khe's skull. Those weren't the dark witch lying to him. Those were tied to the keep, to the yellow-haired Old One and the human that had left. Those two had killed Sha'khe. But now he wondered what the true song said.
He remembered voices in the cave echoing from long years ago, old voices with moss growing on their scales and crests worn smooth by the centuries. Songs held layers of meaning, with cross-currents and eddies and changes in the flow that brought new odors to your nose as you sank deeper into the words beneath the words. Sometimes the surface of the water told you nothing of the real story, or turned it on its head.
"Forward, my dark friend. Forward only. Turn back and I will kill them." Her voice came from behind him, speaking to his thoughts. So he led her to the last mound, as if she could not have found it on her own, and they were done.
"And now the little dears will sleep for a night and a night, as you asked. That is, unless you do not do my bidding. We've so much trust between us that I've added my personal binding to the common spell. It ties their lives to my own. To make my meaning plainer still, if I die, they die."
She pointed to the stone tower, looming dark on the hill above them. "Remember, if I do not return from there, they will sleep until the sun dries them to powder and they wash away in the rain. You'd best see to it that we win. Shall we get on with it?"
{I hate you.}
She smiled and shook her head. "I can live with that, love. In fact, I'm rather used to it. A great many people hate me. But they can't do anything about it, and you've just joined their ranks. You're wasting time."
Each step, each stroke of his tail against the water, drove him deeper into her plot. She'd planned her moves to leave him a single path. He bowed his head into the attitude of shame.
{What do I do next?}
"I've made your role simple enough -- even a dinosaur could understand. All you do is climb by the straightest way from this shore to the castle. When you reach the castle or along the way, you kill anyone you meet." She paused, smiling. "Anyone except me, but I suspect you've worked that out. The hatchlings, love, remember the hatchlings."
He growled, a long articulated note deep in his belly. Another dragon would hear that as a challenge to the death.
She cocked her head to one side. "You wish. Anyway, the forest and the land won't like your claw-marks on Maureen's soil, so you can expect some resistance."
And then she vanished between two trees. She hadn't told him what she planned to do. She'd mentioned other allies, other slaves more likely, but she hadn't told him who they were or what her chains bound them to do in the attack. She hadn't told him to spare their lives. That also fit her character. He had learned many things about the dark witch, but each one of them too late.
Straight to the castle? Khe'sha looked up. The way hung steep above him, near the limit a dragon could climb, tangled with old trees and heavy boulders. He had never walked this route before -- when he'd guarded the keep, taking turns with Sha'khe for the Master, they'd followed a gentler path and never come close to the house of piled stone on the crest.
The red witch had killed the Master. The red witch had made no move to claim the beasts that served him. The forest and the winds spoke of falcons set free to fly, of other hunters following their own prey where they wished.
The red witch left the marsh untouched, and brought prey to Khe'sha and the other hunters, and held back the rains that could drown the hatchlings. He understood those things now, too late. But she must die. She must die, and the dark witch live, or Sha'khe would no longer live on in Ghu and Po, in Liu and Shen and Chu . . .
The red witch must become part of Sha'khe's song.
"Hair of fire and temper matching,
"Passion and clear eyes well wed.
"Witch blood drawing ever onward,
"Past obsidian armored head."
Words grew in his head, chanting. The form matched nothing in his memories, a new song, fit for the new race of Pan'gu's children living in this new land. More would come to him, verses in the song that remembered Sha'khe through the generations.
Upward, to the tower on the hill. Khe'sha dug his claws into the hillside and felt soil gripping at them, active, aware. He shouldered his bulk between two trees and they resisted, scratching hard sharp limbs at his eyes. Dirt fell away beneath his hind legs. He dug deeper, clinging to the hillside.
The ground shook under him, gently and more local than any earthquake, and a boulder broke loose from the slope above him. He twisted away, but it swerved and rolled across his forefoot with uncanny accuracy. Sharp pain stabbed up his leg. A broken claw -- broken clean off, deep in the quick with blood welling up between his scales.
". . . you can expect some resistance." The dark witch's voice echoed back to him.
The whole hillside slumped under him, a land-slip from the heavy rains and his sudden added weight. Rains that had kept to the forest, rains that had soaked deep into the soil and hadn't raised the water level of the marsh. A tree tottered on the slope over his head, and he ducked as it crashed to the ground. The outermost leaves brushed his nostrils, bitter and hostile. He slipped back toward the marsh, shaking his head, and dug his claws deeper into the soil.
Fresh stone gleamed above him, shiny with streaks of mud, a rampart twice his height where the land-slip sheared off from the slope. Dragons had many strengths, but climbing wasn't one of them. He'd have to go around, find a new "straightest way" to the top of the hill and the keep waiting there.
He had no choice. He turned on the slope and scouted out another route, passing the land-slip by the left, and tested each footfall as he climbed. Trees clutched at him, boulders rolled from their seats overhead, and he stalked his prey as if the earth had ears, the dead leaves underfoot had eyes. The red witch owned the soul of this forest.
"Past the guardians of the forest,
"Pressing onward up the hill.
"Falling but to climb yet onward
"Proving strength is mostly will."
He felt a resonance to the verse, as if it referred to something, someone, else, as well as his revenge. The words woke images in his head, the red witch looking up at similar barriers and surmounting them. Their fates had become bound together in some fashion he couldn't taste.
Chapter Nineteen
David plodded along, head down and leaning forward as if forcing his way into a stiff breeze, seeing just enough of the landscape to avoid stepping in front of an eighteen-wheeler on Route 186 headed out of town. Not that he had anything against semis, mind you. That would be a nice, clean, quick way to die. Nothing compared to having your brain sucked out of your head and distributed around the landscape. Still alive.
Been there, done that. Don't want to go back for the encore.
For that matter, his nightmares didn't have much good to say about the prospect of being served up as Purina Dragon Chow. He'd been down that road as well, and he'd still be running if he could have figured out someplace to run to. And
Maureen had happily informed Jo that the other dragon guarded a nest and eggs out in the swamp. Maureen seemed to think it was like having pandas or some other cute cuddly endangered species in her back yard.
He shuddered at the thought. Endangering went the other way, this time. He'd killed the one only through sheer luck goosed by desperation.
He'd been terrified. He'd pissed his pants, but Brian had been too polite to notice it. He'd pissed his pants and run away, and then had to listen to all that Red Badge of Courage crap about being a dragon-slaying hero.
He knew otherwise.
David roused himself enough to look both ways, then loped across the highway to another disused sidewalk. Naskeag Falls spent very little on sidewalk maintenance, on the reasonable belief that the average American citizen spent very little time walking. He was some kind of subversive, not owning a car. Part of a conspiracy of subversives. Jo didn't own one, either, and Maureen's Toyota could scarcely be called a car.
Besides, it was parked behind a chain-link fence in the evidence lot next to the police station. So Jo couldn't have driven anywhere.
He scuffed at the winter's accumulation of sand and dead leaves. Coward. You know where Jo went. You know she needs you. You even have a clue as to how to get there. You just don't want to do it.
Just thinking about it made his sphincter clench. That cop sergeant said she'd been in an office, he'd been talking to the psychologist just outside the door, they'd turned and opened the door, and she was gone.
Now, David could either believe that two competent professionals hadn't noticed an hysterical woman walking out that door, that nobody else in that crime-scene nursing-home riot had noticed a beautiful redheaded damsel in distress walking through the halls and out the entry and past the meat wagons, or he could believe that Jo took those three steps between the "real" world and the Summer Country and left the office by way of her Blood Power. No doors needed.
One other place she might have gone. He was grasping at straws, but she'd dug up Maureen's survey of the town forest out at Carlysle Woods. She'd mentioned maybe going out there to find some peace, draw on the calm Maureen had sometimes borrowed from the trees, ask some questions of the patriarch oak. Talk like that made David's skin crawl. He had too much experience with plants that were more aware than they had any right to be.
Grass heaved and split the asphalt in front of him, thin brown tendrils with the power to break stone. They didn't move, didn't search and trap and strangle, but he could swear they hadn't been there a second earlier. He kicked at the ridge, and the grass tore off and lay dead in the rotting leaves drifted across the sidewalk.
You can't go home again. The world had changed, and he had changed, and he did not sleep well.
Maureen had set him and Jo free from the forest. She'd threatened fire against it, and then offered it a bribe. She'd help it, heal it, balance it, protect it, but she wouldn't control it. She'd make the forest more dangerous than it was before.
She loved trees more than she loved people. Always had.
And that was where Jo had gone. Vanished from an office without walking out the door. Taken his heart with her.
Like the last time.
"Bound by duty, bound by magic,
"Blazing ebon in sun's glow,
"Teeth and claws by power shackled,
"Set by fate against fate's foe."
He wiped his palms on his jeans. The poem was taking on its own life. Change a word here, a line there, the sky darkened and sunbeams centered like spotlights on the actors. And the scene froze his heart. He faced the dragon again, jerked an arrow wild into the trees again, threw away the bow and quiver and pack again, and ran.
No. He couldn't go through that . . . again.
The world formed around him, crappy mud-season Maine, and he walked on. Damn good thing Carlysle woods sat five miles from the apartment. Damn good thing he didn't have a car. Otherwise he'd be there already, facing facts. Fact that Jo wasn't there. Fact that there was only one other place she could be. Fact that he was a coward and didn't dare follow her.
And even if he dared, he wouldn't be able to. He was human. She was an Old One. He couldn't do magic. She could. That wall always stood between them, the wall between reality and fantasy.
He only hoped that words could breach it. That he could find the words, words strong enough to substitute for the magic in her blood. Words strong enough to frame a door and open it and allow him to step through. Through to that fire-haired temptress who owned his heart.
"Hair of fire and temper matching,
"Passion and clear eyes well wed.
"Witch blood drawing ever onward,
"Past obsidian armored head."
Shivers ran down his spine, as if he stared into that great yellow eye again. And he would, if he formed that door and passed through it. The other dragon waited, and hated, and felt no shackles around its legs.
The wind gusted sleet into his face, stinging cold. He looked up from the dirt and dangerous grass, to find clouds massing and dark on the horizon. Maine spring.
Rain drove through the sleet, and fat wet snowflakes, a sudden squall as mixed up as his brain. Or schizo weather, as Maureen would say. Ask the expert. Another reason to give up, turn tail and run back to the apartment.
He was an expert at running away. He even ran away from his own poems.
"From the terror deep and searing,
"Trembling, forcing strength to turn,
"Came again the desperate poet,
"Found his bow amidst the fern."
Did he have the guts even to work though that in words? He wiped the sweat off his palms, heartbeat racing. The crushed green bitterness of bracken filled his nose for an instant, and then cold rain washed him back into reality. Fools died in this kind of weather, thinking spring or summer came on the calendar.
No hat, no gloves, spring jacket. He'd better turn back. His fingertips tingled already, and icy trickles dripped down his nose and the back of his neck. Only a fool would keep on walking.
Only a fool or a desperate man. Desperation killed the dragon, not that fool poet -- desperation and the vision of Jo somewhere on the other side of all those teeth and claws.
And Jo waited somewhere on the other side of this spring storm, somewhere on the other side of Carlysle Woods. He had to go on. He hunched his shoulders and blinked rain out of his eyes and walked forward instead of back.
And Carlysle Woods rose in front of him, the muddy parking lot and overflowing trashcans and graffiti-carved trail signs dangling sideways off their posts, rattling in the wind. An old man, fat and bald and sallow, sat in a beat-up Chevy with the radio thumping away as loud as any teenager's boom box. Must be deaf.
Snowbanks trailed off into slush and glacial moraines of stained foam coffee cups and fast food wrappers. He skirted puddles that aspired to the status of ponds, sorting through three trailheads in his mind. Dog turds graced the yellow snow by all of them. This was Maureen's sacred grove?
The right-hand trail felt right. He climbed a rain-hardened snowbank and followed tracks between two birches and the car radio faded behind him, so fast the old man must have turned it down out of politeness. David held Maureen's map in his head, tracing the labyrinth of trails with a mental fingertip. Someone had laid out the system to give the illusion of a much larger park, with twists and turns that stretched one mile into five or six while still keeping distance between the loops. You'd think you were alone even if a hundred other people walked the path.
Trees arched overhead, breaking the wind, and the rain switched back to snowflakes as big as cotton balls. His ears and fingers warmed again, sheltered now. If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes.
Now the place looked like a cathedral in living stone, gray columns of tree trunks rising up to an interlacing roof of branches that filtered the falling snow into grace. His feet crunched on the packed melting drifts, and chickadees flitted and chattered from branch to branch in case he stirred
up something interesting. Tension leaked out of his shoulders. Quiet and calm wrapped around him, and he understood what Maureen had found here. It seemed . . . uncanny . . . so close to downtown.
{Come.}
He froze in his tracks, fists clenched so hard he could feel his fingernails biting into his palms. He remembered that voice whispering in the back of his head. There'd been an oak . . . an oak and a fox, deep in the dreams when Jo had joined him in the forest's weave, an oak and a fox had fought on Maureen's side to free him from the binding.
{My roots drink the waters of many worlds.}
David shivered. Why'd he get involved with this family of psychos? Jo had told him some about her dad, some about her mom. A lot more about Maureen. The police sergeant had told him what had happened at the nursing home, added his conclusions on what led up to it. Cops had to learn a lot about damaged families and abused children, know how they hid and lied for safety's sake, lied even to those who might protect them. From that angle the pieces fitted better, assembling a jig-saw puzzle straight out of hell. Now that officer had seemed inclined to cut Maureen and Jo some slack. Sympathetic.
Jo had hidden it better than Maureen, built a picture of strength and freedom that she showed the world, but she was just as scarred as her sister.
Just as dangerous.
He stood in the snow, shaking. Jo had told the police that she killed her father. They didn't believe her. Wrote the confession off as psychiatric trauma. Didn't fit the facts they saw.
David believed.
He'd been afraid of Brian, when they first met. Brian was a Doberman, trained and lethal, a weapon sculpted out of flesh and guided by calculation. Totally controlled. But Maureen and Jo were something else entirely, avalanche slopes overloaded and ready to explode at the slightest sound. Forces of nature, uncontrollable.
The Winter Oak Page 18