"The rest was just Buddy Johnson?" She spoke softly, to the orange fur, as if naming her fear could summon it.
"Buddy Johnson." Brian repeated the name. He sounded like he was underlining it, in his memory. "I wouldn't say 'just.' Men like him have crippled other women for life. You've survived both him and the battle of living in the wrong world. That takes incredible strength."
"I really can talk to trees?" She picked up the limp cat, hanging his nose in front of hers. "Marmalade cat, take us out of here."
{Can't.}
She dropped him, in shock. The cat tumbled off her lap and glared at her, shaking his ears until they rattled. His tail switched indignantly.
"Ingrate. I gave you cream and scratched your ears all afternoon, and now you won't do us a little favor. You brought me in here, you must know the way out."
{Mistress won't let us.}
"And a cat lets a human tell him what to do?"
{Mistress commands us.}
Maureen shook her head and looked up at Brian. "Can you hear him?"
He smiled at her, tolerantly, not as if he thought she was nuts but more like he was amused at her confusion. "No. I told you I was drained. Obviously, you aren't."
Jeezum! A human commanding a cat? Somebody had better get the morals squad down here. That sure fit the definition of an unnatural act.
Suddenly, little oddities clicked in Maureen's brain, and she looked around herself with fresh eyes. The rowan overhead held the orange berries of autumn against the unblemished leaves of spring. Daffodil bloomed next to chrysanthemum next to climbing rose, ignoring their proper seasons. An apple tree held both blossoms and five kinds of ripe fruit.
Fiona did too keep slaves.
She was less obvious about it than Dougal, was all. She forced her plants and animals out of their natural ways to perform at her whim, like the hedge-maze and her answering service. Maureen laid her hand lightly on the grass next to her and felt pain. It wasn't allowed to grow beyond a golf-green carpet height.
They weren't talking land-ethic and Wicca here. To hell with the unbleached toilet paper. This lady lived on the earth, not in it. Nothing around Fiona's cottage marched to a different drummer. Things stepped out smartly on her beat, or they didn't march at all. She'd break their kneecaps.
How did she control the land? How did she speak to it?
"Brian, what did Dougal do to David?"
His face turned grim. "You've read about the offerings that archaeologists find in bogs? The gifts to the land, to bring fertility?"
She nodded, and he continued. "Sometimes those offerings included human sacrifice. A priest would strangle a man with leather cords, slash a woman's throat. Then they'd give the body to the bog. Most times, the person was a criminal, an outcast, someone condemned to death for good reason. This way, their death could serve a higher purpose.
"Archaeologists love the practice. The acid in the bog embalms the offering, and you get to find all sorts of perishable artifacts, wood and leather and cloth."
He grimaced. "I'm wandering. Sacrifices. In really bad times, the sacrifice needed to be more powerful. An innocent was killed, sometimes even the leader or 'king' had to die to serve his land. Their blood was more potent. It fed the land, soothed the anger of the gods. Even gods have bled and died to renew the world. Jesus held no monopoly on that."
A black pit opened in front of Maureen. "Dougal killed David? To feed his land? My land?" If that was true, she could never speak to the fox again. David's death would always stand between them.
"Worse. David is still alive. The forest is drinking his blood and soul, slowly. The longer he takes to die, the more powerful his sacrifice."
She swallowed sour bile. Suddenly, chopping Dougal into dog-food looked less ugly. Do unto others what they have done unto others.
"Blood is powerful?"
He nodded. "Blood is very powerful."
"Give me your knife."
Memories swam out of decades back, a book about a man who kept an otter. A vengeful lover had cursed his rowan tree. The rowan held the soul of the house, the seat of happiness or sorrow, the magic of threshold and hearth. Maureen twisted around and laid her palms against the tree-trunk behind her.
"Rowan, do you bless this house?"
The answer came clear, heavy with anger.
{No!}
She cut her left palm and barely felt the sting. She smeared her blood on the trunk of the rowan. She leaned her forehead against the cool smooth bark and drew strength from it, drew strength up from its roots and the hidden waters below and the rock beneath it all. Her blood trickled down the bark and dripped from her hand into the soil.
Again, the mirror of another time entered her, the sense of having been here before. Maureen felt words force themselves between her lips.
"Rowan, I curse this house. I break its hold over you. I sever the threads that bind you to it. I free the plants and creatures of this land from bondage to this house and to its owner. I call the earth below to witness this. I call the sky above to witness this. I call the winds to speak of it, I call the rains to write it in the dust, I call the sun and moon and stars to shine upon it. I curse this house. You stand free."
Again the feeling came to her, the way she used to hear Father Oak speaking silently.
{Yes!}
A whip cracked in her ear, and her eyes snapped open. The worn stone threshold under Fiona's door had split in half.
Dark spots wove through her sight. She fought to hold her balance. She felt Brian take the knife from her, and then he knelt beside her, wrapping his arms around her, loaning her warmth and strength. She sank into it, gratefully.
"Remind me," he whispered, "to stay on your good side."
"Beloved, right now you are my good side." She shook her head, trying to clear the daze.
Rough wetness rasped over her cut hand. She pried one eye open and forced it to reconnect. Cats. Marmalade Tom licked her blood, then Tiger Stripe, then Gray Spot. Animals licked wounds, didn't they? To keep them clean?
Maureen staggered to her feet, using the rowan as a guide to vertical. Her head spun and her knees seemed to lack some essential parts.
"I thought being a witch was more fun. Don't I get to lure children into my gingerbread house and bake them for dinner?"
"I don't know. I've never been a witch. Some of the noises you made earlier seemed to imply pleasure."
She blushed. "I think we can talk to the hedge now."
Brian was staring at the cracked threshold. "Leaving behind a house filled with turmoil and strife. You don't mind smashing a walnut with a sledgehammer, do you? My dear sister may find it easier just to move someplace else. How did you do that?"
"I don't know." Shivers danced along her spine. "Words came to me. The blood, the rowan tree, the words, all came to me. Power seems to use me, more than the other way around."
He shook his head. "With the Blood, as with other things, power is a matter of will. Most of us have to learn spells as a focus."
{We go now.}
The cats strolled across the lawn, tails up, stopping to sniff this and that as if to imply total mastery of the situation. Maureen found the strength for a faint grin. It was such a typical cat attitude: "We're leaving now. You may follow us if you wish. Take it or leave it."
Brian tucked an arm around her waist, and they accepted the offer. She leaned on him in a pose that might have been a casual snuggle but actually was nine-tenths of her support. Her hand dripped red into the grass and she watched each drop fall, fascinated with the way the ground drank it in without a trace. Her sight pulsed with fatigue, the grass approaching and receding as if the ground was a heart beating in time with her own.
The cats padded quietly into a gap in the hedge and turned right, where no gap had stood a minute earlier. Right and right and right again they turned, impossibly, just like entering, and then they faced the dead-end again.
This time it was Fiona instead of a blank wall of hedge.
>
Maureen blinked twice to be sure. The hallucination spoke.
"So that's what set off the alarm. It would be you," she said. "With Dougal dead, it would be you. I warned him."
Brian's hand twitched toward his knife and then froze. Maureen's heart froze with it.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, embarrassed by her stupidity even as she mouthed the words.
"I live here," Fiona answered. "What's your excuse?"
"I came for Brian."
Fiona laughed. "He's not yours, love. You didn't want him, when you had the chance. Now you've changed your mind, but you're not strong enough to make it stick."
Strong enough? Maureen thought. I'm not even strong enough to stand. Brian was holding me up.
She felt his rigid hand slipping up along her waist, across her ribs, brushing past her breast. She felt like Jell-O oozing out of his grip, down the length of his body, unable to even lift a hand to grab him like a tree. She slipped to her knees and then toppled sideways in a quiet thump. Even the flagstones of the path felt soft and inviting.
She looked up into Fiona's face and saw pity there--pity and detached amusement. This isn't Fiona, she thought. This isn't magic. I'm just used up. No food. No sleep. Long day. Tired.
She reached out with her cut left hand and grasped the stem of a rose in the hedge. I tried to set you free, she thought. You, and the cats, and the rowan tree, and Brian. I'm sorry. I just wasn't strong enough.
{Kill!} echoed in her head, the only answer.
Maureen tried to snatch her hand back from Fiona's trap. The muscles wouldn't obey. Her whole arm just flopped into the tangle of stems and roots at the base of the hedge.
The rose didn't follow it. Blood still beaded on her cut palm and oozed slowly down to drip into the soil, to touch the grass at the edge of the path and vanish into the land. Maureen followed a drop along that road, and then another, and another.
Strange, she thought. It isn't clotting right. Women don't get hemophilia, they just transmit it. Must be short on vitamin K or something.
A sound like wind rustled through the hedge, followed by grunts of pain. She tore her attention away from the minor magic of her own blood and refocused higher, on Fiona battling with strands of thorny green.
Maureen blinked, woozily. The hedge was attacking Fiona. She stared at it, unbelieving. I'm not doing anything! Brian's not doing anything! She's still fighting for her life!
Green whips lashed at the dark witch and shriveled into black powder, only to be replaced by new legions. Vines clutched at her legs and sought her throat. Tufts of wool stood out from her sweater, and scratches lined her face and arms. Her face snapped from side to side, flaming with rage but with a touch of frantic madness. Even her hair stood out in tangles that mocked her usual cool elegance.
Brian stirred. His hand reached his knife, drew half an inch of steel, an inch. Sweat popped out on his face and dripped to his chest. Fiona screamed some inarticulate noise of power.
His hand froze and then retreated, eclipsing the steel in its sheath. The hedge attacked with a fresh spasm of vines and thorns.
Maureen forced herself to stir, to drag herself to hands and knees, to crawl across the rough stones of the path. She grabbed Fiona's ankle. She couldn't reach higher. She pulled her face up against the cool silk of Fiona's stockings and bared her teeth and bit down, hard.
She tasted blood. She couldn't tell if it was hers or Fiona's.
She tumbled sideways, her head ringing from a kick and Fiona's scream. When her eyes cleared, Brian had his knife clear of the sheath.
Maureen fought her way back to a crouch and scraped up the strength to speak. "You've . . . got a choice," she gasped. "You can fight . . . the hedge and me . . . or you . . . can hold Brian. The hedge . . . wants to kill you. Brian . . . will probably . . . let you live. Make up . . . your mind."
She grabbed the trunk of a hawthorn and thought of earth and rock and water. "Strength," she whispered. "Give me strength. Give me the strength that splits rocks and drives roots deep and sends leaves to the sky. Build a wall of the stone heart of the earth to block Fiona's power, weave a spell of life around her and draw off the essence of her blood and leave her helpless. Loop vines out to seize her wrists and ankles, thread the hooked thorns of her roses against her own throat and eyes. Hold her."
{Kill!}
The copper taste of Fiona's blood filled Maureen's mouth. She couldn't tell if it was from her own bite or tasted through the hawthorn's sap.
Blood. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? She stood over Dougal's bed, drenched in clotting gore and with the knife heavy in her hand. She spread her own blood on the rowan's trunk, and dripped red on the grass. Everything was blood. Everything was death. She had to find another way, if she was going to live with her memories. Dougal had given her no choice. Here, she had choices.
Power seethed through the blood in her mouth, searching out its differences, hunting for any weapon she could use against Fiona. She unraveled the cells, and something in the traces spoke to her.
Fiona was pregnant. The child was Brian's. It was a girl.
{Kill!}
"NO!"
Maureen dragged herself upright, using the hawthorn as a crutch. It didn't scratch her.
"Don't kill her," she whispered.
Brian's knife pressed against Fiona's throat. The hedge held her pinned against its green wall. Tendrils locked her arms and legs, encircled her waist, threaded through her hair. Her skin shimmered as if she was wrapped in some kind of supernatural plastic film.
"Don't kill her," Maureen repeated, searching for an argument that even rage could hear. "Let the baby live."
Brian blinked and shook his head, as if Maureen had punched him between the eyes. Then he relaxed a fraction. The plants eased their hold. Fiona's eyes opened, locking with Maureen's in a glare of fear and rage and cunning.
Maureen forced words through her exhaustion. "Do you yield?"
The archaic phrase nearly made Maureen smile, but she couldn't waste the strength. Still, it sounded right.
The cunning shone brighter. "What are your terms?"
Amazing. Hanging on the edge of death, and the woman wanted to bargain. So be it.
"Brian leaves. I leave. The cats go where they will. We have a cease-fire. That's all."
"Cease-fire. If I don't bother you, you won't bother me?"
Maureen blinked, slowly, forcing her eyes to keep working. Her knees wanted to quit, too. This is the Armistice at the end of World War I, she thought. Both sides are dying, bled dry, but one is just a shade drier than the other. If you take too much, you set up another war. And I can't kill her.
"That's what I meant," she said.
Fiona gave her a sly, calculating grin. "I can live with that. Besides my own belly, I've got enough of my dear brother's sperm in liquid nitrogen for a few decades of selective breeding. You may find him kind of useless for a few days, love. I've been making him work hard."
"Exercise builds up muscles," Maureen heard Jo's voice shoot back. "I found his performances satisfactory."
Fiona's eyebrows quirked up. "Performances, love? If you must know, I thought he was kind of boring."
"Ah, well." Maureen shook her head. "As the fox commented, those grapes were probably sour, anyway. You had his body, but you didn't have his soul. There's a difference, love."
"Meow. Now that we've got past our little catfight, love, will you please let me go? This is a touch uncomfortable."
Brian tested the vines around Fiona's wrists and ankles. "I don't think so, sister dear. It's not that I don't trust you, it's just that I don't trust you. I think we'll leave Maureen's bindings on your body and your Power, at least until we're safely off your lands. You have a nasty reputation for treachery. Nearly as bad as your twin." He sheathed his knife, apparently satisfied with what he found.
Maureen felt the last of the adrenaline wash out of her and take every trace of starch w
ith it. Her eyes started tracking things that weren't really there. She sagged away from her hawthorn crutch. Brian caught her, lifting her in his arms as if she was a doll. Neandertal, she thought. Or something close to it. He's designed for carrying mastodon quarters back to the cave. Sometimes it comes in handy.
She forced herself back out of the warm grayness of fatigue. "One last thing on our agreement. The cease-fire doesn't cover Sean."
Fiona smiled faintly, and her eyebrows lifted in a way that said Sean was totally expendable. "I never thought it would."
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Brian shifted Maureen gently in his arms, resting one set of muscles by throwing another to the wolves. His eyes measured the distance to Maureen's forest and relative safety. No matter how he added it up, the answer depressed him.
When he'd first stepped outside of Fiona's hedge, he'd wanted to dance like a demented gypsy in celebration. The world glowed. He owned his mind again. He owned his body again. He was free!
Instead, he walked slowly and smoothly, with a sleeping woman wrapped in his arms. She snored quietly and snuggled tighter against his chest.
It made a romantic picture. Problem was, whoever posed the scene had never needed to carry a body for miles, cross-country. Flaming tension spread across his shoulders and ice-picks stabbed his biceps. He couldn't carry her all the way. At least not like this.
Brian sneered at his self-image. He wasn't modeling for the cover of a novel, ripped-shirt masculinity cradling the swooning heroine in his embrace. He shifted her into a fireman's carry across his shoulders. It might not be as elegant or as comfortable for her, but life's like that. If she didn't like it, she could consider the alternative.
She didn't stir. She didn't even whimper. He felt her heartbeat against his neck, felt her breathing, so she hadn't done something soap-opera stupid like dying in his arms. She was warm, and her body-smell wrapped itself around him, a reminder of intimacy and promise of reward.
Maureen's hips poked into his shoulder, bony, no padding. He could wrap one hand around both her wrists. He thought about her eyes, sunken in purple hollows above knife-blade sharp cheekbones. Her skin was as thin as parchment, and her clothes hung on her like rags on a stick scarecrow. What it all boiled down to was, he was carrying a warm skeleton.
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