The Winter Oak Read online

  She started to heave the empty bottle against a rock, sort of like christening her ship of tentative sobriety, but her environmental conscience intervened. She set it down unbroken against the tree-trunk, stared at it for a moment, and then inverted it. Sort of like flying a flag upside down.

  And that was that. She turned her back on the keep. I'd rather drink muddy water, and sleep in a hollowed-out log . . . She wondered what song that line came from. David would know. David, back in Naskeag Falls with Jo and with a normal life to live.

  She looked at her wrist. The vixen's bite had healed, leaving faint pale scars on top and bottom where fangs had torn her skin. Thanks for the memories. Memories of the sweet oblivion of booze.

  Alcohol. Alcoholic. A shudder ran down her spine. Sobriety looked like a black gap as wide as the Grand Canyon. Never take another drink? Where the hell had that notion come from?

  The forest wanted her sober.

  That bite grabbed her attention more than Brian's quiet protests ever had. He'd been too polite to say what needed saying. He'd stayed with her, far too long. Trust Mother Nature for "tough love," personified by a true bitch goddess.

  The air still reeked of whisky. She eyed the bottle, sitting upside down against the trunk of the old beech. Right side up, there'd be a trickle of nectar gathering in the bottom by now, the film from the glass walls sliding down. You could get a few more drops that way . . .

  Jesus, what a lush!

  How do you stay sober? Classic AA question. She'd been to the meetings. You stay sober one drink at a time. The next one. That's all. Turning down one drink isn't hard. You've done that a thousand times before.

  She knew the rules. Whatever "hitting bottom" meant, she thought she qualified. Admit that you're an alcoholic. One day at a time. She didn't know about that "higher power" shit. Her image of God was too mixed up with Daddy, not a good concept for positive reinforcement. Maybe she should hand her problem to the forest, instead. She believed in it.

  What did the forest want of her? She stopped next to an oak, rough-barked and thick and ancient but not the patriarch of the forest. Not the Summer Country's incarnation of Father Oak. Her hands explored the trunk, tasting the bitterness of oak-tannin through her palms, feeling deep into the xylem and phloem, the lignin and cellulose in rings of summer and winter wood even here in the unchanging Summer Country.

  It welcomed the rain. It wanted more. Dougal had held tight control on everything that way, just like he'd starved her to control her and weaken her magic.

  Maureen relaxed into the land, the currents of water beneath it and the flow of air above and the life between the two. She summoned clouds again, but gentle this time. The rain pattered down around her, rustling the leaves and soaking slowly into the ground and raising the damp healthy mould-rot incense from the soil. No storms, not another toad-strangler with lightning stabbing down to mirror her rage. A gentle spring rain.

  Deep into the heart of the forest, she asked how much and how long before the roots and surface sponge could take no more. An inch seemed to be the answer, spread over a day or maybe two. That wouldn't cause the swamp to rise, not with the natural capacity of an old-growth forest to retard runoff. That wouldn't bring danger to the dragon's nest. The oak would like more, to recharge aquifers and the deep subsoil that its taproot touched, but she voted for a balance. The dragon hated her, but she didn't hate the dragon.

  That was the other thing. She remembered that her forest wasn't just wood and leaf and stone and small crawling decomposers. It defended her, and she had enemies. It saw and smelled and felt what passed within it. God knows, it could stop trespassers and kill them if it wished. Just ask Jo and David.

  Or Sean. His skeleton lay somewhere close by, slowly adding calcium to the soil as the leafy acid loam dissolved it. Best use he'd ever had.

  Maureen shuddered. Sometimes she thought this land was one long booze-induced DT session as her pickled brain-cells tried to detox in a drunk ward of Naskeag General's Kelly Four. Or maybe she was spaced out on one of those psycho-drugs the shrinks had tried.

  {It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you.}

  Now the fox was quoting Maureen's flip clichés back at her. She wished the forest had picked up a little less of Jo's personality from their bonding.

  But it was a good point. She let her thoughts slip into the tree again, and through the tree into the net of rootlets and mycelium that intertwined for miles around and bound the entire wildwood into one living unit. If she had defenses, she ought to use them. If she had ears, she damned well ought to listen.

  Or use her million eyes. A slim shadow slipped through the woods, short dark hair and olive skin, androgynous. It wore gray rags, torn by thorns and briars.

  Sick memory settled in Maureen's belly. Fiona's twin, that was, the treacherous bastard who'd bewitched her into Dougal's hands. Sean's etched crumbling skeleton brought back to life. How much could healing magic do?

  Or necromancy? But the forest still touched his bones, still wrapped them in briars and rootlets and fungi hungry for the minerals he bore. He was dead. The forest told her that, for true.

  Then what walked her lands?

  What, not who. Celtic myth told many tales of ghosts. The ones she remembered did not call them good omens.

  It could be worse. It could be Dougal, back to gnaw at your soul and sanity.

  As if the thought had given him form, the forest showed her another scene. A small gnarled man watched the keep's open gate through the rain. Old scars curled around his arms and seamed his body. Dark empty pits replaced his eyes, even though he acted as if he had full sight, and a raw line of red crossed the joining of his neck to his body.

  Maureen broke her bond with the tree. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed into a shivering huddle among the roots.

  Dougal. She stared at her hands, seeing blood fresh and dripping, feeling the warm slick stickiness of it. She smelled smoke, not the clean sharp aromatic smoke of the kitchen cookstoves or a campfire stoked with well-dried yellow birch but the acrid reek of a burning building with charred meat in it.

  No. She didn't have to take this. She didn't have to stay here. There were rules for hauntings. Those tales bound their ghosts to certain places. She could escape.

  Not towards the dragon. Her forest stretched westward, away from the marsh and from Fiona's cottage. She could walk for miles that way and still hold her vow to preserve the land. She staggered to her feet, unsteady with the shock and with the whisky still flowing through her veins. Drunk. That was it, not ghosts but whisky. Another form of seeing spirits.

  She didn't touch the oak, though, didn't sink her own spirit into the forest's intricate weave. She didn't feel the need for any more closed-circuit TV images from Tir na Nog. Instead, she shuffled through her pockets and her automatic Great North Woods checklist -- the Bic lighter that Jo always laughed at because neither of them smoked, the combination whistle, match-safe and compass, the Swiss Army Knife and ten yards of parachute cord -- all the gear she'd carried since her first Girl Scout overnight.

  And then there was that damned Gurkha knife hanging from her belt, so heavy it felt like it dragged her sideways. Brian told her to always carry the ugly kukri, even in the keep. He seemed completely blind to the memories it brought.

  Or maybe he thought it was important enough to be worth the cost.

  She turned her back on the keep and all the booze she could ever dream of drinking. She concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other, walking away. One step at a time. One day at a time.

  The rain fell, not touching her, steady and slow, no faster than the soil could absorb it. As it soaked in it released the forest's perfume. She drank it straight, the mingled rot and growth of an incredibly complex living thing, deep into her lungs, and felt the clean air and time and exercise wash the whisky from her blood. She walked until the clouds turned dark above her, and twice she caught glimpses of the fox trotting through the woods beside her. E
ven glimpses were a gift.

  As the light faded, she picked out another oak and touched it, gently, not going deep but renewing her bond and her vision of the land close by. She blinked at what she found, and her hand caressed the hilt of the kukri as she thought about it. Not a ghost this time, but she might decide to make it one . . .

  She asked the forest for a hollow tree and a pair of rabbits, fat and female, too old to bear another litter of tiny fuzzball bunnies. She walked about fifty yards through the forest and found them in a small open glade. She thanked the rabbits for their gift before she lopped their heads off with the kukri.

  A dead limb offered firewood, dry but sound from the core, and she kindled a fire in front of a Maureen-sized hollow in the trunk of a lime-tree large enough that she couldn't span the bole with her outstretched arms. While the fire burned to coals she cleaned and skinned and spitted the rabbits on green maple saplings. The forest watched and waited, guarding her, listening to a frightened heartbeat in the shadows.

  The smell of roast meat filled the clearing. She turned the spits every few minutes, watching the fat boil up and sizzle down into the coals, thinking, remembering.

  She looked beyond the red glow of her fire, into the darkness under the far trees. "The second rabbit is for you. If I don't decide to kill you first."

  One of the shadows detached itself from its tree and stepped forward, becoming a man. She felt his fear. He came closer in spite of it. Maureen clenched her fists, digging fingernails into the pain of her own flesh, as his face took form in the fire's glow. The dungeon walls closed in around her.

  Padric. Dougal MacKenzie's master falconer and huntsman, jailer, torturer, slave.

  Chapter Nine

  Thunder rumbled in the distance, faint but menacing. Khe'sha shivered. The sun faded, bringing an icy touch to the waters of the marsh, and gusts of wind roiled the surface. They whipped the sawgrass flat in flashing whorls and pulled pine-smell down from the forest. A storm was brewing. But he couldn't leave the nest mound. The time of hatching had come.

  {All life was an egg, a black egg in darkness,}

  {Black inside, black outside, all was the egg.}

  {The earth was inside, the earth lay in darkness,}

  {The sun was inside, giving no light.}

  {Pan'gu was inside, both mother and father,}

  {Pan'gu who had laid the dark egg was inside it.}

  He chanted the ancient story in mind-speech, binding tradition to the new lives in the nest, tying them to clan and blood across the ages and the edges of the world. Sha'khe should have joined him, repeating the words as they took turns and turns again as the eggs trembled on the edge of hatching, but Sha'khe was dead. Khe'sha had to stay and guard and chant for both of them.

  Thunder boomed again over the hilltops, much nearer, and he ducked his head close to the water. Black clouds billowed on the horizon. The rain he feared was coming, coming in a sudden fierce storm that could chill or drown his hatchlings just as they broke forth from their shells. The songs said that he should let such chances happen, praising them as he praised the warmth of the sun. The songs said that luck was as important to a hatchling as strength.

  Luck? He glared up at the dark tower on the hilltop. In this land, luck didn't bring storms down upon your head or cause them to pass safely by. The weather was her mood, her whim. The red witch. Someday soon, he would taste her blood.

  But now he must stand guard and sing. He told the tiny lives of that first hatching: of Pan'gu breaking out of the egg he/she had laid, of Pan'gu igniting the sun and casting it into the heavens and following it with the moon and the stars, of she/he forming the oceans and the dry lands and all that lived within them.

  Chanting the slow deep lines, he told of how the tribes and clans grew, of the long lineages father to son, mother to daughter, through ages and ages to Khe'sha and Sha'khe and the nest mound in this swamp of exile. Of how the bloodlines would flow on and on until the end of time and the coming of Pan'gu yet again, to lay the final egg of the world and slip inside it for rebirth.

  Beginning and end, and yet endless as the telling should be endless until the last egg lay as empty fragments of shell. Even the form of the telling was ancient, the Kunja form used only for the hatching song.

  A white flash dazzled him for an instant, lightning against the darkness boiling over the crest of the hill. Rain hissed across the sky in dark slanting lines against the blazing outlines of the backlit thunderclouds. But their main fury missed the swamp. Witch winds battled overhead, holding the storm at bay and deflecting it into the forest to soak the moss and dry duff among the roots. The lightning and the driving rain set his nerves tingling, as if he felt the charge of those clouds gathering on his crest to draw fire from the sky. His kind feared lightning, one of the few things they did fear.

  The shiver turned into that prickly feeling of hostile eyes. Someone watched, out there in the rain. Khe'sha squinted against the raindrops, looking up towards the keep and his enemy. Clouds shrouded the hilltop now, veiling everything in formless gray.

  He lifted his head, nervous from the storm, and looked around. The edge of the marsh lay gray and faint under low clouds. The mists parted. A figure stood on a nearby point, untouched by the rain and wind, watching him, watching the nest, watching the hatching. Dark cloth covered the form's head and shadowed its face.

  He couldn't see the color of its hair.

  * * *

  Cáitlin shivered. She hated being cold and wet. And she'd never had to put up with it before. Though her cottage stood exposed on a lonely tor surrounded by bog and rolling moorland, the breeze always caressed her cheek with a warm and gentle touch and the peat fire burned clean and clear. And anytime she wished, she could walk the warm coral sands of Bora Bora and listen to the gossip the trade winds whispered in her ears.

  Spiteful downdrafts chasing smoke back into the kitchen to sting your eyes, bitter searching winter winds, the clammy creep of fog that chilled you to the bone and left you wandering lost through mires that spelled death to the unwary -- those had always been for others. Being an aer witch had its benefits.

  Her nod of agreement and the blood gift had ended that. Fiona had swallowed Cáitlin's blood and swallowed Cáitlin's will with it in a rite as binding as Communion. Things once connected remained connected. Cáitlin could still command the winds, but only in Fiona's service.

  Or when the dark witch focused her attention elsewhere. Even then, Cáitlin didn't try to work the winds in this forest. She wasn't sure she could. Few Old Ones cared to waste their power in extravagant displays like a thunderstorm. Dougal's killer wrote her rage across the sky and underlined it with a lightning bolt. If Cáitlin touched her fingers to the weaving of the aer, this forest would know it in an instant and pass word to its new mistress. So Cáitlin bit her tongue and lived with the cold.

  Cold, and wet, and her bones ached. Walking hurt, jabbing knives into her joints and tendons. Even standing left her with a dull red throb like arthritis or fever where her hips and shoulders grew used to the changes Fiona had wrought in molding this body to a semblance of a man. Cáitlin felt awkward every time she moved, a stranger in her own skin. She could never forget.

  I have made a mistake. That was supposed to be one of the deepest expressions of shame in the Japanese language. The phrase should be followed by a formal apology in exquisite calligraphy, and suicide. Well, the Old Blood often treated mistakes as ritual suicide.

  Her mistake lay in thinking that Fiona wanted allies in her war, that the old custom of trading favor for favor still ruled the land. However, Fiona seemed to think her Power met her needs. She certainly hadn't needed any help to reduce that rebel keep to smoking rubble. Slaves and pawns had done the job quite thoroughly.

  Pawns could wear many forms. Cáitlin turned and studied a black shadow sprawled along one limb of a massive oak, sheltering from the rain. The shadow blinked lazily back at her and then licked its paw, its pink tongue framed by white fangs l
onger than her fingers. The winds said that it was one of Dougal's pets, a mutated leopard trained to guard the keep and kill trespassers. It scrubbed behind one ear with the damp paw, a housecat magnified a hundredfold. But it watched her through the entire move. Apparently it wasn't hungry. Yet. Death walked this forest in a dozen different bodies.

  Or none at all. Cáitlin's shiver turned into a shudder of distaste. She stared down at the moldering skeleton that now served as the center of her life. Brambles still bound the form like a Druid's sacrifice wrapped in wicker, and rootlets fuzzed across each bone and flowed acid into the porous calcium to etch it into dust. That had been a living man a few days past. Now it looked as if it had lain on the forest floor for centuries. No, she did not want to attract the redhead's attention.

  Instead of talking to the winds, she listened, hearing words the branches creaked when they flexed and shed the storm's raindrops, words the leaves whispered as the air brushed past. The forest told her where the redhead walked, and Cáitlin slipped quietly away in the opposite direction, moving with the gentle flow of a breeze, moving like a ghost reluctant to show itself to living eyes. For her, stealth came easy. No one ever saw the wind. Fiona's command meshed perfectly with Cáitlin's tattered remnants of self-preservation.

  That command bound Cáitlin to a hundred double paces in any direction through the woods, a soft-edged circle with the skeleton as its focus. Fiona had commanded her to haunt the place of Sean's dying. When Cáitlin neared the limit, each further step became a battle until she gasped with the effort of another inch. That was as far as Fiona thought her ghost should roam without direct command.

  Cáitlin roamed to her limit, then, the safer limit farthest from Maureen's aura, and her winds carried what she saw to Fiona's cottage and to Llewes, the Welshman she'd spoken of, wherever the Pendragon's master wove his webs. The dark wet stones of Dougal's keep loomed through the trees, and she wondered why Maureen would stray so far away from home and comfort and safety. That witch had a lot of faith in her powers.