Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  She scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, Lady Macbeth and her spots of blood. "Out, damned spot! out, I say! What, will these hands ne'er be clean?" And then she realized it wasn't his blood she sought to wash away.

  She stared at her belly, underneath the foam. Nothing she did to her skin would cleanse that.

  Was she pregnant?

  The crackling fire beyond the door answered her. It said, "The moon is right." It said, "You can ask your body, ask the flow of blood to your womb and the balance of your glands." It said, "You have the power to cleanse yourself of his seed, just as you have purified this room."

  Something scratched at the door, as if that severed hand was fighting to escape from the flames. A crash shook the floor, and the scratching stopped.

  She climbed out of the tub, steaming, only half clean. The outer half. The part the world could see. Dripping on the tile, she finished her coffee and stared at the mirror. Maureen stared back, pink and naked and defenseless.

  Smoke seeped around the door to the bedroom, puffing and sucking back as the fire searched for fuel and oxygen. There was a solution. Open the door and let the fire burn her clean of him.

  Father Donovan's voice joined the chorus in her head, the babbling of schizophrenia. "Suicide is a mortal sin," it said. "So is abortion. The baby didn't rape you. The instant egg and sperm are joined, the soul is formed. You have a human child inside you. Thou shalt not kill."

  Her coffee-cup smashed the mirror.

  "This! Baby! Isn't! Human!" The growl of the fire swallowed her scream, turning it into a whisper.

  She dried herself, and dressed herself, and shoved the sheathed knife into the waistband of her jeans. The cold leather rode against her belly, against the unanswered question of her womb. Meanwhile, Padric still waited for her, somewhere out in the tangled stone of the keep and outbuildings. She refused to look at the unbroken mirrors. The woman they showed was a victim, not an avenger.

  The other door was still cool to her touch. She braced her foot against it and slipped the latch, nervously. Dougal might yet laugh at her from the flames, if the fire had spread to block her other exit.

  The landing yawned at her. Worn stone stairs spiraled down around a central column, no hand rails, irregular treads guaranteed to trip any stranger trying to fight his way up. No connection into the bedroom. The stair should lead to the kitchen, to where the coffeepot lived.

  And to the dungeons, as well, the faint cold distant dampness told her.

  She paused at the next landing, hand on the lever latch, unease tugging at her mind. She couldn't remember the way they'd come. How many landings had they climbed, how many sets of stairs, how many twists and turns?

  Smoke seeped through a crack and tickled her nose. She looked up. The door lay directly under the landing to her bath, back into the tower.

  No thanks.

  Down two more flights of stairs, a heavy door led off the opposite side. She tested it, gently, blocking with her foot, and found cool, clear air. A breeze blew into her face, and she thought she heard a growl overhead, the sound of a predator seeing fresh meat: more oxygen to the fire. Chimney effect. People who expected sieges shouldn't live in perfect chimneys. She closed the door behind her.

  A short passage brought her to the kitchen--to empty chaos of food half-ready and pots boiling over on the wood-fired ranges and crocks of milk and flour dropped on the floor by fleeing cooks. She carved off a chunk of fresh bread and layered it with butter, chewing on that while gathering dried sausage from a hanging garland and tossing apples into a cloth bag for a picnic lunch. Cheese, and bottled water, and more bread followed. God, she was hungry.

  Wine. Bottles of wine waited, racked, probably for cooking, but she wasn't picky. Maureen grabbed one, the memory of her thirst wakening and calling out for alcohol. She dragged the cork free with her teeth and swallowed red nectar.

  And suddenly she realized the urge was weak. Wine was nice, yes, but not necessary. Maybe Dougal had forced her through withdrawal and out the other side. She set the bottle down and lifted both her middle fingers to salute him.

  She stared at her wrists, at the red circles that had grown into welts like warming frostbite. The iron bands had drained her power, bound her soul. Dougal wouldn't have taken them off until he was sure she'd use her power for him.

  Now they were gone. She felt different, free, as if she was emerging from a dark, damp tunnel into daylight. She wasn't afraid. She didn't need the drink.

  She remembered a time like that once. A time when she thought and acted like a normal person. A time when the world smiled at her. A change had started when she unlocked the iron bands. The magic of the Summer Country seemed to blend with her mind and was working to heal her madness.

  This is where you belong, she thought. Madness is like a weed, a plant out of place. When you march to a different drummer, the world calls you crazy. Your blood tried to change the world into the Summer Country and retreated into madness when it failed.

  Doors led into pantries, into twisting stone passages, into damp stone stairways that probably led to wine and root cellars. Maureen fumbled her way out through a labyrinth of afterthoughts and additions until she finally found sun and sky and an open yard. She looked up.

  The round stone tower of the central keep loomed overhead, four or five stories of defiant fortress. It belched flame and smoke like a blast furnace. Chimney, indeed. The idiot had built a chimney and filled it with fuel and lived in it. That was why so many real castles had cold stone floors and arrow-slits for windows. It made them damned hard to burn.

  Something rumbled deep inside the tower, like bolts rolling around on a kettledrum. Sparks fountained into the sky, and then the smoke thinned to gray instead of black. More air, she guessed, less fuel. For all the smoke and burning, she still smelled the lavender of the bath, the onions and garlic and roasting meat of the kitchen. The tower carried the smoke straight into the sky.

  Men and women bustled around the yard, hauling buckets of water and spraying thatched roofs with garden hoses against the slow rain of embers. She wondered why the hell they fought to save their prison and then realized it was probably the only home they had.

  Someone spotted her and grabbed another's arm, and a spreading pool of faces turned towards her. They backed away, dozens of them, fear written in their wide eyes. "That's the one," she heard them whisper. "That's the red-headed witch who killed the Master. What kinds of pain will she bring to us? What are the games she plays?"

  She shook her head and turned toward the castle gate and the forest beyond. She didn't want to think about the slaves. She didn't want to think about her belly, either. She'd only done what she had to do.

  A man stepped out of a stone outbuilding and jerked to a stop, breaking her funk. She blinked twice before the picture registered, the mixture of terror and resignation on his face. It was Padric.

  He carried a peregrine on his wrist, a beautiful huge bird of slate gray and a white breast mottled with black. He carried a pair of heavy scissors. He stared at her bare wrists and neck, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He crossed himself with his free hand.

  Maureen pulled the knife from her waistband. The cold hiss of steel sliding out of its sheath overwhelmed the roar of the fire and the crowd fighting it. She felt the greasy warmth of blood on her hands, felt the frenzy of hacking Dougal into chunks of crawling meat, and almost vomited. Could she kill again, without the madness driving her?

  He studied her face and blinked at what he saw there. "Please let me free all the birds, Lady, before you kill me." He snipped scraps of leather from the falcon's ankles and flung her into the air.

  The peregrine circled, puzzled for an instant, and then climbed steadily into the sky. It was beautiful. It was free. Maureen followed it with her heart, until it dwindled into a speck and vanished in the smoke against the morning sun. Her eyes blurred.

  Tears. She remembered tears in Padric's eyes last night or the night before, when she'd surr
endered to Dougal. She remembered the blood on his face, and the scars from whipping. He was a slave.

  She'd had to kill Dougal, to save her own life and soul. He'd left her no other choice. No one was forcing her now. She didn't have to kill again.

  "Let the birds go, Padric. Then leave. You're free. We're all free."

  She turned her back on him and sheathed the knife, knowing she was safe, and looked down from the hill into the tops of trees. It was good to smell trees again, and grass, and the slow fire of rotting leaves. The forest echoed the swells and hollows of the land beneath, spreading out on either side, and encircled a distant checkerboard of fields and gardens. Fiona's place, she guessed. Where Brian was.

  Brian!

  The name sent a jolt of fire through her and left icy darkness behind it. Brian, and Jo, and David. She'd forgotten them. They were out there, somewhere, all of them in danger. Whatever else she might think about Dougal, she didn't think he'd lied about that.

  She turned back for Padric. The man was a tracker, a gamekeeper. He knew this forest. He could work off some of his karma finding them.

  He was gone.

  The door of the building stood open, empty. She stepped inside, through some kind of a clerk's room of books and tables and piles of records, and found nothing but an outsized chicken-coop lined with wooden perches and a workbench covered with scraps of leather.

  The only man who could help her was fleeing for his life.

  From her.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The forest set Maureen's teeth on edge, like someone scratching fingernails across a chalkboard. She felt weirdness twisting over her skin as she walked along.

  A battle raged under the deceptive calm, as if the wild grapes tried to strangle the squirrels and the pines staged root-warfare against the foxes in their dens. The forest touched her and yet did not, reached out to her and pushed her away at the same time.

  It was like setting her against Padric. That was how Dougal had ruled his land. He'd twisted the balances until the forest was at war with itself. It even smelled wrong.

  Her nose wrinkled. The stench of death touched her again, thick and sickening. She angled further upwind, giving some colossal heap of carrion a wide berth.

  Whatever the crows fought over here, she didn't need that adding to the queasy feeling in her stomach. Maybe it was the result of eating too much after starvation. Either that or it was psychosomatic morning sickness: her belly thought vomiting could purge it of poisons that came in the other way. Too early for the real thing.

  Her hand kept returning to the cold hilt of the knife and then slipping off to caress the skin of her belly. Was she pregnant? Half of that baby is you, she thought. Half of it is Dougal. Yang and yin, black and white, Ahriman and Ormazd battle in my womb. The forces of darkness wrestle with the forces of light. Do I damage my soul more by joining the fight or by staying neutral?

  I don't even know if there is a baby, she answered.

  That's because you're afraid to look, the whispers muttered. You're hoping the moon and your body's tides are wrong, you're hoping for implant rejection or a defective egg or the side-effects of starvation, you're hoping for any one of the thousands of reasons why women don't get knocked up every time they fuck.

  You're hoping for a spontaneous abortion so you don't have to create one yourself.

  She gritted her teeth and reminded herself to let the dead past bury its dead. Or cremate them. She didn't have to decide anything for weeks or even months. Like, maybe, eight of them, and then there were adoption agencies for after that. Right now, she had more urgent worries: Brian, and Jo, and David.

  She touched a tree, a smooth-barked beech with a kind face wrinkled into its gray elephant's hide, and asked the way to Fiona's land. {Straight to the morning sun,} the tree said, clearly. {Go through the woods and across the pasture. You'll see the roof and chimneys over her hedges, and the top branches of the house-rowan spreading against the sky.}

  Fiona.

  Dougal had said the dark-haired woman was his enemy. He'd blamed Fiona and Sean for the dangers to Brian and David and Jo. Sean, yes. Maureen could believe Sean poisoned Socrates, crucified Christ, and shot Lincoln and both the Kennedys one morning before stepping out for lunch. But the one time Maureen had talked to her, Brian's sister hadn't seemed all that bad.

  Kinky, yes. Who the hell wanted a baby by her brother?

  Ruthless, yes. Fiona had used a street gang to try and kidnap Brian.

  Brian had explained that as a lack of any moral sense, of conscience, as if the Old Ones lacked souls. Brian was an Old One. It sounded like a philosopher's paradox.

  You are an Old One, Maureen's mental voice reminded her. You have the powers to prove it.

  She shuddered. Walking down the hillside from the smoking chimney that had been Dougal's keep, she had touched each mounted skull as she passed it. The bleached bones had powdered into dust, giving up a sigh as if each touch released a bound soul.

  Souls, souls, souls. Did she even have a soul, she wondered? What percentage of human blood made a soul? There was a question for Father Donovan and his black-robed Jesuits.

  Enough. She needed to keep track of priorities. Find Brian, free him: he knew this land. Find David and Jo with his help. Get the fuck to someplace safe before her legs gave out and dumped her on her ass. Anything else was secondary.

  She touched another tree, a rough-barked ancient European maple her professors would have graded as a prime veneer log and valued by the inch. Did trees have souls?

  Brian, she asked it. Have you seen Brian? She closed her eyes and called up an image of his stocky body, his shaggy blond hair, his blue eyes as deep as a mountain sky. Her heart felt strange when she thought of those eyes, and the warmth of his hand seemed to touch her arm.

  Her pulse beat through her fingers into the bark, and pictures returned: Brian in the forest, Brian and David and Dougal and Sean, and then Fiona. Fiona danced around Brian, rubbing against him, singing words Maureen didn't understand in a voice that tore her soul.

  Seduction spell, her growing sense of witchcraft said. You can’t understand the language because it’s weaving magic as strong as the land itself. Fiona had spun a web of words to bind Brian to her.

  If you want him, you'll have to fight for him.

  Maureen's eyes snapped open. A faint aroma teased her, just above the dry bitterness of the bark and lichen under her nose. Her memory flashed back to Jo's apartment, and she stood weeping over the rumpled sheets of a bed. Lust and sweat blended with the paired scents of Jo's Passionflower perfume and David's after-shave, the morning after she'd met Brian.

  They were here.

  She spun around. Nothing. The scent faded as her hand left the maple. She turned back to it, touched it, and grabbed the barest hint of the scent returning. She smelled them through the tree, through the breath of the forest.

  What she smelled was magic: the magic of her blood, the magic of this land. It called to her--seductive, dark, and private.

  {Trees have souls. You have a soul. Everything alive has a soul, and some things that have never lived.}

  Maureen's hand jerked from the bark, as if the tree had tried to bite her.

  {Not that slow sleeping chunk of firewood, woman with fur like mine. It thinks in pictures only. If you want words, I'd recommend an oak.}

  Maureen traced out the speaker, a muzzle and sharp bright eyes and radar ears separating out from the shadows of the undergrowth. It was a picture puzzle, an illusion of camouflage in which bush became fox and fox became bush, each time she shifted her eyes. Once she saw the animal, she wondered how she'd ever missed it.

  {You only see me because I wish it. The forest wonders about you. What better animal to satisfy that curiosity than a fox?}

  A thrill of joy ran down her spine and out to each finger and toe. She'd always thought the fox was the spirit of the forest, the expression of its soul. She'd only seen glimpses of them in Carlysle Woods or out i
n the Experimental Forest. They were as shy as ghosts.

  Cross fox, her mental catalog named it: Vulpes fulva, a color variant on the more common red fox, known by the dark cross-marking on the back. Reddish body, light underside, white tail tip and dark legs.

  {You have the naming sickness. Wild magic doesn't work that way. Putting a name on me doesn't give you power.}

  Without moving, it vanished into the shadows.

  Maureen jerked as if waking from a dream. She started to search the brush for a den entrance, then shook her head at the image of following Alice down into Wonderland. A fox's den probably wouldn't lead to the same sort of place as The Rabbit Hole.

  "Come back," she whispered, half to herself.

  {How can I? I never left.}

  And the fox mask poked out of the forest gloom, in the same briar-tangled shadow underneath a kind of dogwood Maureen didn't recognize. She traced out the body, with lumps down chest and belly. It was a vixen, with recent kits hidden somewhere near.

  Maureen willed the fox to stay, to continue this blessed instant. Talking with a fox was almost worth the cost of Dougal.

  "I don't name things to gain power over them. A name helps me to think about you, remember you, gain understanding of how you live and what you need and how you affect the forest in which you live."

  {You killed the Master.}

  How could she condense kidnap, torture, and rape into something a fox would understand? "He kept me in a cage."

  {Ah.}

  The fox settled into a sphinx-pose, almost like a cat. Maureen wasn't fooled: twitch a hand and the vixen would vanish without a sound.

  "What does the Master's death mean to you?"

  {It depends on what replaces him. He was a hunter. I understand hunting. Life and death are two sides of the paw. The Master did more. He controlled. Are you one of those?}

  Maureen closed her eyes and shuddered. "The falcons are free. All the cages are broken. The skulls are empty dust."