The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  But his timing was off. Open the outside door, the inner one wouldn't budge. Try again. Inner door opened, but outer wouldn't move. Black lizard darted into the chamber and out again, faster than David could blink. Like a rattlesnake striking.

  Notches in the levers, had to move just right or the metal rods wouldn't pass each other. He blinked and concentrated, made the mistake of breathing deep again, and doubled over coughing. Get out. Clear your head. Try again.

  But the tiny dragon coughed and staggered. It would die if it stayed here, same reason.

  Hands on levers, focus, push both slowly, aim metal tab at metal slot, insert Tab A into Slot B, interlock clicks, both doors.

  Dragon in portable cage. Lock door. Bug out. Small cage rattles, won't move. Still latched to big cage. Brain going, going, gone.

  He flipped one latch, then the other, clicks barely heard. Made sure that the door was still locked. Turned away. Moved towards the light. Bumped up against cold metal. Light was on the wall, overhead, glowing one-eyed headlight of a battery pack. He was lost.

  He staggered against another bench, shattering glass. It held him up, and he pushed along it with his free hand, searching out another light. This one grew, developed ragged edges, turned white instead of glowing yellow. He crawled over shattered stone and clattering metal, dragging the small cage behind him as a dead weight chained to his hand. One hand, one leg, one hand, other leg, he crawled through the vapor and the murk. Light drew him. Gas hissed in his ears, and cold washed across his cheek.

  He crawled across jagged edges out onto soft damp dirt. A paw as large as his own body gently dragged him out of the hole. He flopped on the grass and concentrated on breathing. The fresh air tasted like fine wine.

  Fire. If Fiona had been playing around with germs and bio-war, they'd better sterilize the place. He staggered to his feet, head still ringing with oxygen deficit or whatever poisons he'd been trying to breathe. He found a drum of kerosene and a fuel can in the garden shed, filled one from the other, made trips to the kitchen and the study and the bedroom, soaking everything in sight. Khe'sha pulled the barrel out and batted it into the basement hole with glugging holes from his claws. The fuel reek spread.

  He searched for matches, found none, and then remembered that they wouldn't work in this land of magic anyway. But he found live coals in the stove, and blew them into flame, and touched fire to soaked curtains and rugs. Outside again, he tossed his homemade torch into the cellar lab and watched orange flame spread into darkness. Whatever the gas was, or the spell, that had tried to suffocate him, it didn't hinder fire. Something flared blue in the shadows with a whomp of volatility, some solvent like acetone or alcohol. A string of soft booms followed, a chain reaction marching down a lab bench.

  They retreated, dragon and Bard and hatchling hissing defiance in her cage, and stared as the flames soaked into wood beams and flooring and thatch and raised black smoke to the sky. They'd done it. They'd walked into the witch's lair and walked out again, alive.

  {Singer, you are bleeding.}

  Something had shredded his left sleeve. Blood welled up from long scratches and short, deep punctures. Chemicals stained the cloth and the skin beneath it. He stared at his arm in stupid disbelief, until a dull ache throbbed into pain and built until it slashed him like a hot knife. The wounds were real.

  It couldn't be a bite. He'd kept the hatchling safely caged. It couldn't be a bite. But God alone knew what he'd broken, down in that lab. God and Fiona only knew what she'd left, poisons or tissue cultures or spells, scattered across those benches and tables.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A bee lumbered past Fiona's nose, heavy with nectar and with its pollen baskets stuffed round and yellow. It had buzzed close enough that she felt the brush of its wings, but she was used to bees. They never bothered her. Her own hives teemed with her sentinels and spies, carrying pain in their tails. Sometimes she told them to mob intruders. They would kill, if she wished.

  She froze in mid step, a chill shaking her shoulder blades. That wasn't her bee. Not here, not in this forest. Just like those weren't her hawthorns and briars and climbing roses.

  Low humming sounded from the tree next to her, and she eased away from it. She traced the tiny bodies, in and out, in and out, a steady stream focused on a knothole above arm's reach. Now that she'd paused to notice, she could even smell the sweet-sour hive tang on the forest air. And she noticed small dots circling her, closer behind and farther in front, circling three times before moving on to the bee-tree or out to forage. A second shudder ran down her back. They knew her, watched her, waited for a command. She backed away from the tree, step by slow step, barely checking where she put each foot.

  Maybe Maureen hadn't witched those bees. Maybe they were the only thing in this forest that was innocent, but somehow Fiona doubted that.

  She glanced up at the sky, turned, and stopped. No. The sun shouldn't be on her right shoulder. It had been on her left. Dougal's keep was west of her cottage. Straight west and uphill. Now uphill lay to the east. She knew she hadn't circled the hill, couldn't be coming at it from the other side.

  Fiona could swear fluently in seven languages, and she used all of them -- independently and in mixed combinations. Sweat stung the scratches on her cheeks and hands and up her arms, and tufts of snagged wool destroyed the sleek curves of her sweater and slacks. Tangles and dead scraps of brush matted the elegance of her hair. She couldn't spare the Power to repair either her clothing or her own flesh.

  She was lost. This was not possible. She'd never been lost, in all the long decades and strange lands she'd walked -- always knew just where she was, where she'd been, where she was going. But the trees were wrong, the slope was wrong, the angle of the sun lied to her, even the air and the loam under her feet and the leaves she touched smelled strange.

  She heard that waterfall again, off to her right. That wasn't possible. She hadn't crossed back over the stream, and there had been only one. Only one in Dougal's forest, that was. Maureen could have witched another, or even twisted these trees into a different world. Maureen had done something to this forest, anyway. She certainly hadn't just set it free. And Fiona couldn't believe that a novice to Power could have hidden her traps and manipulations this well. No matter how strong the Blood she bore. She had to have had help.

  And it seemed like it had been hours since Fiona had last heard news of that dragon. Either the beast was dead, or it had betrayed her. Likewise with her other allies.

  She faced a dense wall of thornbush and hooked briar, opaque and interwoven like her own hedge. Dead leaves rattled against limbs in the depths of it, and she felt her own trademark turned into a blade against her. She'd killed that hawthorn once already. Killed it and the blackthorn tangled with it and forced a path to lead past it -- how could it have moved ahead of her and joined a thicket and have fresh green-golden buds bursting out of dead wood and wilting leaves?

  Her head spun, and she squeezed her eyes shut until the vertigo passed. Downhill lay on her right hand, not her left. She needed to climb, climb the stony knob and reach the old keep that had crowned it for time out of mind. But the damned redhead's enchantment had kept forcing her to the left, left, left, across the slope and down. Now it shone a fun-house mirror in her face and forced her to her right.

  It drank Power. Each step dragged at her, cold hands clutching her feet and ankles and calves as if she waded hip-deep through the rotting mucky bottom of the dragon's marsh. She reached into the child within her belly, drawing on it to help her battle forward another step and another.

  Forward, not back, a conquistador with his ships burning on the beach behind him. Fiona shivered. She'd heard feet walking her fields, across the distance and the forest, feet the grass had never known before, and the hedge had screamed terror and pain before the touch of it twanged like a broken harp-string and went silent. That had stolen her last sense of reference and direction, cast her loose from the one firm anchor in her worlds. />
  She was lost. She was scared. She'd never been lost or scared before, in over a century of spells and wanderings and bitter enemies. That redheaded bitch would pay for this.

  The baby kicked at her again, and she hated it. Her back ached from the swell and awkwardness hanging low in front of her, her ankles and feet hurt from the unaccustomed weight, her stomach and bladder and bowels complained of its crowding presence. It was a parasite, gnawing away inside her belly.

  And it hadn't given her the strength that the legends had promised. Oh, her Power had swelled with her belly, but not enough. Not doubled. Not if this forest was any gauge.

  She stared at her hand, flexing each muscle, each joint, spreading her fingers, feeling the throb of her racing heartbeat in them, a beginner's exercise in control and concentration that she hadn't needed since Brian was in diapers. She closed her eyes and followed the threads of Power flowing from those fingers, flowing to those fingers, the threads tying her to Cáitlin and Fergus and the dragon hatchlings, the threads pulling Power from the air and soil and stone around her. Cáitlin and the stupid little horrors in the swamp hung as blind lumps at the ends of her puppet strings, unconscious, while Fergus had vanished into death. She wondered why Cáitlin hadn't died yet.

  The forest walled her off from Sight, squeezed the flow of Power to a trickle. It had always brimmed with magic and deception, the Enchanted Forest of a thousand legends, home to dragons and unicorns. It couldn't bar her totally from Power, but she felt its hostile guard like a dam across a river. It hated her.

  She considered killing the small dragons. She could do it, simply close her fingers on the pulses of their threads and send the pressure down those lines of Power. Their hearts and lungs would stop. But that would take more Power than simply holding them. She didn't have that Power to waste.

  And she was beginning to think she might need them as barter. Barter for her own life.

  Does Maureen save Cáitlin for a slave? Will she try the same with me? Stronger or not, that will never happen. She'll have to kill me. She didn't have the guts for that, the last time we met.

  And when we're face to face this time, the brat in my belly could provide a final surprise.

  Fiona smiled quietly, her eyes narrowing as she surveyed the forest around her. This game still played on. Some things Maureen wouldn't know. Some things she wouldn't consider even if she knew. The redheaded bitch might be stronger than Fiona had believed possible, but humans and Christians always turned weak when it counted. They believed in foolish things like setting rules for war.

  Survival doesn't have rules.

  The baby kicked again, a strange feeling that began high in Fiona's belly and rippled down to her hips like a wave. Hot liquid gushed between her thighs. She bent around the cramping in her belly and stared in horror at her ruined slacks.

  I can't go into labor now!

  Another wave buckled her knees to the turf. This should start slower. All the books said it should start slower, with minutes or even hours between the cramps. Labor can go on for days.

  But she'd never given birth before. Because of the hybrid curse, few witches ever quickened, and none she'd trusted with her plans. She'd studied human books.

  And she'd rushed the pregnancy.

  She wobbled to her feet, grunting with the effort. Her Power drew into itself, into the ungainly balloon lump of her belly, and ignored her. The voice of the stream called to her. It offered cool solace for her sweat and the heat flashing through her body. And the forest opened a way, passing her to stagger downhill, step by step. She paused as the next wave surged through her belly and she moaned with the cramping pain of it.

  It passed through darkness and left her head spinning. She knelt in a clearing, in sunlight on soft grass, gathering the fragments of her thoughts together. Grass, in Dougal's forest? I've never seen this place before. The only grass was on the crest, a clear field of fire around his walls.

  It was a trap. It had to be a trap. The forest had fought her for hours -- for days, it seemed. It had never been a safe place for strangers, under Dougal's hand or for generations out of time. Now it turned gentle and offered her a soft bed for birthing?

  She felt the jaws of the trap closing around her. It forced her to her feet, and she wobbled on, cradling her belly in both hands, each step a focus and an effort. Water. She needed water -- cool, cleansing, reviving water. That would clear her head.

  Another cramp surged through her womb, and she dropped onto all fours, hands and knees splashing into cold. The stream tugged at her, swift and wet up to her elbows and her thighs. She didn't ask how she'd come to it, just lowered her face into it and drank and ducked her head and let the soothing cool flow down her neck. She burned with a fever centered behind her navel, pulsing with the ripples of each contraction.

  Power. That was Power she felt, and she sucked on it and used it, heedless of the baby, dragging her zombie-stiff body back to the stream's edge and out on thick soft moss. The cramp passed, and she flopped on her side, so limp that she felt boneless.

  Cold wet wool clammy around her thighs and calves, pressure in her bowels and bladder, mindless frenzy stripping off her slacks and stockings and underwear to squat awkward on the moss, fouling her own legs. Instinct sent her crawling back into the stream to wash and huddle, half-naked, in the icy water as another cramp rolled from her breasts all the way down to her knees.

  Soothing water flowed around her legs, her hips, easing the cramps and washing mess away. She splashed it on her belly, up under her sweater on her damp hot aching breasts, cupped it and tossed it in her face and on her neck and soaked it into her hair. She felt it draining Power from her, from her belly and from the child there, and knew the forest's trap. It would draw her weakness in and suck the baby from her womb and drown both of them, pull their bones down into Dougal's sinkhole and the black caverns that drained the base of the waterfall.

  This brat may die, but not for someone else's purpose.

  Back to the streamside, crawling, whimpering like a beaten dog, climbing the bank suddenly steep and greasy against her, again drawing Power from the baby to sink her fingers and toes into moss and mud, reverting to an animal as each cramp stripped away more of her mind and will. She forced herself into a single core, diamond hard and diamond bright, survival at whatever price.

  Strength flowed from hate and focused on Maureen. That redheaded bitch had formed a trap, lied and lured and schemed with the dragon and the forest. Must draw her to this place, draw her to gloat in triumph, turn that triumph into defeat through one last twist of Power only hinted at in legend. The bitch would never think of it, never believe and expect it even if she knew. No mother would do that.

  A black shadow formed under the trees, sleek and flowing and deadly. Dougal's mutated leopard. Cáitlin had seen it haunting the forest. Seen it acting as Maureen's pet, a set of eyes and ears and fangs to do the forest's bidding. It sat on its haunches and watched, cool, detached, grooming one paw with a fraction of its attention.

  Another pang surged through her belly, blanking all thought, and she panted against the wrenching pain. Tears and sweat stung her eyes to blurring, and when she could see again a fox waited, ears alert, on the far side of the clearing from the leopard, looking to sneak scraps from the big cat's kill. Ravens croaked down into the clearing, rattling their feathers into place after they swooped to land in the surrounding branches. All of the predators and scavengers gathered, smelling the birth, smelling the chance of a feast with both mother and child weakened beyond fighting. They saw an easy meal.

  But she kept a few surprises in reserve.

  Time vanished and became eternity, and the sun moved by ratcheted jumps across the sky between one contraction and the next. And then one scream and the next. Her universe shrank to her belly and the dilating gap between her legs. With each contraction, Power swelled to the flood and then shrank away like the tides, but it ignored her and she couldn't touch it.

  A wave too
k her squatting, screaming through clenched teeth, and she fell forward on her hands and knees again and forced her jaws open to gasp for breath. Pain ripped at her crotch. Instinct tightened her belly and the muscles in her hips, and she forced the lump down, down, down, ridding herself of the burden. Wet slimy flesh extruded between her legs and paused and extruded and paused with the troughs of the pulsing waves and then slipped free.

  She collapsed on her side.

  Now the leopard would attack. She didn't care. Her mind lay blank -- survival and cunning and revenge wiped clear by exhaustion. A mild wave took her belly and it felt soothing by comparison, cleansing, ridding her body of tissue and blood and fluids no longer needed. And another, weaker still.

  Now Maureen would come. Now, when her enemy lay in exhausted sweat, bleeding, helpless. Now she'd come and gloat and kill.

  Fiona groped blindly, feeling through hot slime. She found the lump of the baby, stirring feebly, coughing in thin whines. It didn't even have the strength to cry.

  She brought it to her belly, to her chest, to her face, found the cord with her teeth, bit. The blood gushed sweet in her mouth, and she sucked it, feeling Power and strength flow back into her. Something moved in the corner of her eye, and her teeth darted to the baby's throat. Just one bite . . .

  She smelled the blood, smelled the Power, hungered for it, trembled for it. The baby was too weak to live. It could still serve her, feed her emptiness. Her jaws locked, unable to close.

  "You will not kill that child!"

  The red fur of the fox morphed into red hair around blazing rage. She'd never seen a face like that, never dreamed one of her enemies could show such naked Power. Fiona cringed, holding her frozen jaws tight in the notch between the baby's chin and shoulder. She tasted skin, tasted her own blood and fluids on it, felt a thin pulse against her tongue and lips, but she couldn't bite.

  Her right hand pressed the baby to her mouth. She tried to claw at the child, spilling its precious Power on her own skin if she couldn't swallow it. Maureen's fingers grabbed hers, bending, trembling, holding with muscle while Power flowed elsewhere. Fiona pulled her strength into hand and jaw and eyes, glaring rage at her enemy above the child's body. Face to face, nose to nose, sweat and smell mixing, they froze into a standoff.