The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  Fiona strolled on, relaxed, her eyes measuring the dry-stone wall that separated her fields from the wildwood. Even the moss and lichen belonged to her. It formed the frame of her picture, her composition in green and brown and gray. One stone lay on the sod, pushed loose by the branches of a massive holly just within Maureen's lands.

  That was wrong. The holly shouldn't be taking sides. He was an ancient force, almost a god ruling this corner of the forest. He'd never belonged to Dougal, just as the pasture oak had never belonged to Fiona.

  She replaced the stone and wove a binding on it, using moss and lichen as her threads. She stood for a moment and studied the holly, her eyes narrowed and a frown-line creasing her forehead.

  No, she would never underestimate her enemy again.

  * * *

  The hedge barred her way, thorn and branch and root, sullen, resentful after once tasting freedom. It remembered her defeat, just as the prisoners it held had thought they would find weakness replacing her former strength. She slid her mind into the tangle of thorns and pinched a bud here, a rootlet there, tightening the vascular structure of the stems until leaves knew the thirst of drought. She'd given the plants mind enough to feel fear.

  The nearest rose nodded in surrender, spokes-flower for the whole. Gnarled hawthorns bent and shuffled aside, pulling greenbriar and blackthorn and bramble with them and opening a grassy path where none had existed a moment earlier.

  The path cut through her maze, straight to a dense knot of green. As she strolled along, she felt quivering tension on each side, anticipation like a zoo at feeding time. She kept these plants starved for nitrogen and phosphorous, just as Dougal had kept his dragons hungry. Her hedge craved flesh and blood and bone. Maureen had been too soft to kill an enemy, but Fiona knew that the price of weakness was pain and slavery and death.

  Leaves parted. They revealed a face, broad and brown and feral with wide eyes showing terror. They parted further and showed her a short body, stocky and lumpy with muscles, arms and legs wrapped in the hungry tangling vines that held the gnome-shape tight and waited for her will.

  Fiona smiled. "So. 'Tis little Fergus that's come calling. Welcome to my cottage, love. Too bad you weren't invited."

  Vines trembled as the gnome's muscles bunched and relaxed and twisted. His strength and magic broke two of the greenbriar strands, but four new bindings whipped across and took their places. Two more spiraled around his throat and tightened. His eyes bulged and he fought for breath.

  Again Fiona dipped her thoughts into the hedge. She found the other knot of vines and sent a summons. Screams answered it, and the rattle of thrashing branches as the plants lifted her second enemy from the ground and passed the body along new tunnels through the maze. She cocked her head at the sounds.

  "A friend of yours, love? Sounds female, and too sweet-voiced to match your ugliness." Fiona relaxed the thorns and let him breathe again. Blood trickled down from deep scratches on his throat.

  The hedge rustled as it lifted him, bringing him to eye-level so that she could talk more comfortably. "And what brings you courting death, love, and why shouldn't I be giving it to you and to your sweetheart?"

  The gnome cursed and spat. "No sweetheart. Saw Cáitlin snooping around when I first walked through your fields. One of your kind, not mine." He struggled again, but the thorns gripped firm and he weakened steadily as she held him free of the earth that gave him strength.

  "Cáitlin? Oh, that would be a pairing. I should bind you together with claws free and watch the flying fur, drop the both of you into a bull-pit and charge admission. But I've asked you a question, love, and you didn't answer. What brings you to your death?" She asked the vines to twitch around his neck, and they supplied the proper emphasis.

  He calmed, saving his powers for a better chance. "You still owe me for the stones. Hearth and threshold, cornerstone and keystone to the arch, bound to your will and the harmony of your house. I spoke to them and carved them and set the spells, and you never paid. May their virtue turn against you as a thief!"

  She laughed. "Virtue? Hearth and threshold lie cracked in two pieces, love, and the untrained child who broke them stepped through your spells and never felt the warding. You owe me for that failure, and you're a fool and worse to come asking for your pay."

  "We had a bargain. 'Tis nae my fault you weren't strong enough to hold what others crafted."

  She'd started to turn away from him, bored with the doomed gnome and this game of words. Then a thought crossed her mind and connected with memories and she turned back, measuring his face and build with her eyes. The match would do. Yes, she could make it do. "Strong enough? Bargain? In this land, you hold what you are strong enough to keep. I'm still alive. You're a failure, and your life belongs to me. Think hard on how much living's worth to you."

  Leaves rustled and parted, and her other enemy surfaced through the high walls of the hedge. Fiona hung the woman upside down, elven face beside dwarf face, and studied olive skin drawn over high cheekbones, dark eyes, straight black hair tangled with leaves and matted by sweat. The body, too, slim and boyish, bound by vines and thorny briar. Yes, indeed, the match would do. Sometimes a limited gene-pool could be useful.

  "Ah, the lovely Cáit has come to join our party. And what is it that you'd be wanting of me, love? I don't recall asking you to tea."

  Cáitlin hung there on the hedge, head down and feet to the sky, dark face quiet but her eyes narrowed in hatred. Breezes touched the highest branches and then swirled down in a whirlwind as she summoned her own peculiar Powers. The thorn and bramble simply bent and spilled the attack in a wave of hissing leaves.

  She frowned and shook her head in wry acceptance, upside down. "You betrayed me. I should have known better than to trust you to hold an oath sworn by the Tree and by the Well."

  Fiona stared at the woman for a moment, mind spinning down the branches of choice. Then she let a smile twitch the corners of her mouth. She'd play Cáitlin's game for long enough to learn its nature. "Remember the exact words, love. I said I'd help to bind sweet Kevin, and that I did. I never said I'd help you keep him. He made me a better offer."

  Fiona stepped back from her enemies, and the hedge rustled as it created space for her. Thin tendrils wrapped around Cáitlin's neck and pressed tightly on the arteries, then matched that touch on Fergus, cutting off blood flow to each brain. Fiona held the plants' hunger in check; she didn't want her captives dead. Not yet.

  She told the plants to relax a fraction, waited until thought returned to the glazed eyes, and smiled. "So you heard that I'd lost a battle, and came to pick the bones. Vultures circling over dead meat, you thought, the two of you. What should I be doing with you? Should I hang your rotting heads from my gateposts like Dougal would, a warning to all that come?"

  Her eyes lost focus as she considered. It was strange, how well human science explained their race. Hybrids that lived were rare between the species, and fertile ones still rarer. Ten thousand years of mixing human and Old Blood brought forth those breeds that looked so much alike, the gnomes of earth and fair folk and dark elves. Those were the genes that lived. So Fergus looked much like Dougal, and Cáitlin looked much like Fiona or her dead twin. So Maureen looked like a twin to her older sister or to the young face her mother had long forgotten. Fiona shook her head, then nodded.

  "So, loves, think deep. Do you live or do you die? Dying's such a simple thing. Living may cost more. Give me your blood in binding, your will to mine, your lives to mine, and you'll go on breathing the sweet air. Refuse and you'll feed the hunger of my maze. Think deep."

  Fergus made a wry face, hanging there on her hedge like some shrike's prey impaled on a thorn. "Small choice you give us. 'Tis much like death, living as your slave. I've seen what it means. Yet I'll trade death later for death now. Maybe you'll lose."

  Cáitlin nodded. "I'll cast my bet with his, hoping that this war of yours will end with your black heart silent and all your slaves set free. Think on that
before you sleep and when you wake. She broke your hold once, half dead as she was. I'd not lay good money against her blood now that she's healthy."

  Fiona wondered if Cáitlin was acting, or voicing her true thoughts for a change. Aer witches were notorious liars . . . .

  A quiet smile tugged at Fiona's lips. She couldn't resist taunting them, adding more acid to despair. "Ah, but you don't know all the changes to the balance. I have a large and scaly friend who also hungers for that blood. And then there's the tale told by my belly. I'm pregnant, love, with all that means for the Powers of our kind."

  Both Cáitlin and Fergus blenched. Then the woman took a deep breath and swallowed. Her chin stiffened, and a grim defiance settled into her eyes. "Make good use of it while you have it, love. Soon enough that babe will be draining your Power rather than adding to it. Once it starts to breathe air and suck, you’ll weaken to less than you ever were before. That’s the price you pay for giving birth."

  Fiona’s smile broadened. "Maybe, love, maybe. Or maybe I’ll swap the wee bairn into some human’s cradle like a cuckoo and let her pay the price of motherhood. Then I’ll go back and fetch my changeling when she’s old enough to be worth the bother."

  She reached out to run a finger along Cáitlin's cheek. "So make your choice, love -- your will to mine, your heart to mine, your flesh and blood and bone to mine, sworn on that self-same blood. Or die. It's your own free choice I'm offering to you, but you don't want me to get bored with waiting for your word. I might start thinking of other games to play."

  Cáitlin squinched her eyes shut, took a deep breath, and nodded. Beside her, Fergus growled "choice" in a fashion that made it sound like cursing. Then he also nodded, with a bitter twist to his mouth as if he was chewing wormwood.

  Fiona nodded back at her captives, smiling like a cat with a broken-winged bird trapped between her paws. "So. Say the words. You know the ritual as well as any."

  She reached out a finger and gathered a drop of blood from Cáitlin's scratched cheek. The salty sweetness burned on her tongue as the power of the binding flowed through it. A second touch brought the blood of Fergus with its faint tinge of earth and stone. Fiona cocked an eyebrow at her new slaves, willing them to speak the ritual even though the fetters were already woven.

  In unison, hoarse-voiced, they whispered, "In return for the gift of my life, I pledge my thoughts, my deeds, my will, my flesh and blood and bone to Fiona of the Maze, whenever she requires them. I give my blood as token of my body, in bondage until she frees me or until death."

  Then Fiona reached out again, both hands, taking Cáitlin's face between her palms and kneading flesh and bone as if they were clay and she the sculptor. The woman screamed and screamed and screamed again, her body and face molding into Sean's remembered image, a slim and androgynous twin mirror of Fiona's dark beauty. Pain-sweat sheened the new-formed mask when she was done, and tears tracked lines down Cáitlin's face.

  Fiona smiled, and turned to Fergus. Her fingers traced scars into his body, white shiny welts and purple furrows of claw or fang trailing her fingers to show the beast-master's history and trade. His body flowed in subtle ways until Dougal hung before her, trembling and weeping with terror at what she'd done. His shrieks of pain still echoed back from the hills. Perhaps Maureen would hear them from her tower and wonder at the meaning.

  The dark witch stepped back and admired her handiwork. The warmth of creation washed over her, and she relaxed into it. Flesh could be clay, in the hands of a skilled witch. Doomed clay, but molding it could hold the same fascination as the more lasting sculpture that was her garden realm.

  "I'll add one more touch," she said, "and that's the easy part. When people look at you, they'll see what they expect to see. It's easy, because that's what people mostly do.

  "Fergus, love, they'll not just see our late lamented Dougal. Maureen will see the Dougal she left behind her, brought back to life as her memories would make him rise from his funeral pyre. And Cáitlin, dear Cáitlin, they'll see what my dear Sean looked like after the forest got through with him."

  She waved dismissal. "Go now, Fergus, and haunt the halls and towers where you died. Serve as my eyes and ears, serve as my hands and feet, bring news to me and send messages of fear to my enemies."

  The brambles unwound from his body and Fiona's new-minted slave moved, uncertain in his changed form. He turned and the hedge opened before him, recognizing his blood now and allowing it to pass.

  Fiona turned her back on him and studied Cáitlin where she still hung on the hedge's thorns. She stepped closer, close enough to smell the fear-sweat and the bitter sap from broken hawthorn. "So, love, what's it really now? I never swear help to another, twisting words or no. What would you be hiding from our little Fergus? What brings you into my hedge, looking for your death?"

  "I've come asking a favor for a favor. There's a question someone wanted asked of you, someone both you and I might find useful to have in our debt. Your plants let me past before."

  "Ah, but I've had to make a change or two. Surely your winds have told you that. I've learned I was too trusting."

  Cáitlin's nose wrinkled, as if that last sentence tainted the air around them. "You and I aren't rivals, love. We each stick to our own realms. Now will you let me down and break the binding?"

  Fiona tilted her head to one side and studied her captive. "I think not, cousin. You shouldn't have come sneaking like a thief. Now what's this question, and who might it be that's asking?"

  "The question? Why are you looking to destroy a certain castle beyond the one that's closest by? The humans mean nothing to you. As far as 'who,' there's a Welshman who takes an interest in the Christians."

  Fiona studied that statement from all sides. "Naming no names, love, for the trees to hear -- I wonder if this Welshman might bear a gold banner with a red dragon blazoned on it?"

  "He might."

  Fiona shook her head. "Your Welshman should see Dougal behind that war, not me. Free humans offended him. They turned into an obsession. He had more than one obsession, some of them unwise. Some even fatal."

  Cáitlin studied one of the briars that bound her wrist, and then spoke as if to it. "Some of the Welshman's friends seem to think you've taken up the cause. They seem to feel they have reason to watch and listen around your new neighbors."

  "'Tis no business of theirs, love. The Pendragons simply guard the border between the lands. If they start meddling inside the Summer Country, the rules will change. And not to their advantage."

  Fiona smiled, baring her teeth. "But if I were to carry on Dougal's war, there'd be a simple reason. Strategy, love, an answer that your military Welshman ought to understand. Before I open battle, I make sure my enemy has no allies who can attack my back or flanks. Even ones she doesn't know are there. You can pass that word across the winds."

  She turned away, and then turned back. "And you can tell the Welshman that if he wants to act so holy, he can explain some of the innocents that go missing when they touch the border or meet up with the Pendragon's claws. Either that, or admit that the worlds haven't changed since Merlin's day, and my rules are the only ones that I need follow."

  Then her mind spoke to the briars, loosing Cáitlin. Fiona waved her captive towards Maureen's forest. "Haunt the place of Sean's dying, love, listen to your winds whispering past branch and leaf. Tell me and your Welshman what they say. Serve my revenge well, and I might set you free."

  Fiona dropped her puppet strings for the moment, turned, and stepped through another gap in the maze, into sunshine and the gardens close on her cottage. It waited for her, whitewashed stone and thatch, curiously dead to the eye like the bare-limbed skeleton of the house rowan standing by the kitchen door. She crossed the broken threshold into air cooler than the true temperature, with the clammy touch of a cellar or a grave. Maureen's curse still hung here, the Power holding strong between ridge-pole and foundation.

  The red-haired bitch would die for it.

  Cha
pter Four

  Maureen lowered the binoculars and stared into her memories. She couldn't see any point where she could have done otherwise.

  She ought to love this place -- the clean sweet air, the castle's wealth, the magic, a gentle, loving man who understood just who and what she was and still cared for her, the trees . . . the trees, ancient gray-bearded wise trees she'd only dreamed about in forestry school, trees that talked to her and guarded her and wrapped her in miles of wild green beauty. She ought to love this place. So why did the castle still feel like a trap closing in around her?

  And the dragon hated her.

  The dragon swam out like some kind of nuclear attack submarine, black and sleek and swift and deadly, one of the most wonderful animals she'd ever seen. It came back wallowing like an overloaded supertanker with engine trouble, almost too fat to clear the channel into port. She couldn't see what happened in between, but she could guess. She'd never thought of dragons as amphibians, but it made a lot of sense.

  The dragon laired down in the swamp, vibrant and beautiful and brave, a living wonder, and it wanted to eat her. Maureen tested each step in her memories. Dougal had bound the dragons to defend his keep, sent Liam to kidnap Maureen, trapped Jo in a sinkhole. David had killed the female dragon when he and Brian had come to Dougal's forest in their doomed attempt at rescuing Maureen and Jo.

  Maureen stared down at her hand squeezing the binoculars. She set Brian's Leicas on the gray stone of the windowsill and flexed her fingers.

  That column of smoke still smudged the sky, far beyond her forest. Brian didn't know what it meant -- probably some feud or other brought to the burning point. Power ruled the Summer Country.

  She still didn't understand the soul of this place, what it would accept and what it would reject. Apparently the moose had fit within the rules. God knows, Maine was up to its ass in moose, more than the range could bear. Some years, more people died in car-moose collisions than were murdered. She could kidnap a moose a week to feed the dragon and nobody would notice.