Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  {Ah. And you--are you predator, or prey?}

  A fox would think that way.

  Maureen opened her eyes again, forcing them against her need for sleep. She was so tired . . . .

  "Humans eat anything. You know that. Omnivores."

  The vixen held a dead chipmunk between her paws. That was the forest: one of the cutest critters on God's green earth was also just another snack.

  Maureen could live with that. Simple hunger was so clean compared to the fear she'd carried all her life.

  {I spoke of mind, not food. Are you predator, or prey?}

  "I was prey. I'm done with that. But I refuse to turn into Dougal MacKenzie."

  {In this forest, there is no third choice.}

  Maureen's gaze devoured the fox, marveling at the flick of one pointed ear identifying a distant sound, the twitch of whiskers, the clean daintiness of the paws. Sight had to substitute for feeling the warmth of her red-brown fur, smelling her sharp animal musk. Maureen's fingers itched to caress that fur and soak up the pulse under it.

  The fox radiated alive.

  "I'm a watcher. I'll make a third choice. Steward. Keeper of the balance."

  She paused, then went on as if she was justifying herself to a human listener. "I love chipmunks alive, and I love chipmunks turned into fox. I love this tree standing in the forest, talking with the wind. I love it formed into planks to make a table, glossy with hand-rubbed oil and the careful strokes of a cabinet-maker's tools. I love it burning in a fireplace, or in a hot black wood-stove with the cold January wind howling music down the chimney. And I would love to climb it, if I was feeling strong enough."

  {You claim to be a poet?}

  "You claim to be a fox?"

  The vixen tossed the chipmunk into the air with a flip of her head, caught the body, bit. Bone crunched. No chipmunk.

  {If I am not a fox, what ate that noisy little windbag?}

  "You've got an awfully big vocabulary for a fox."

  A red tongue wiped the spatters clean. Then wicked eyes sparkled up at Maureen, mirroring the foxy smile.

  {Who better? Although many things in this land are not quite what they seem.}

  Maureen stared at emptiness where the fox had been. This time, she did step forward and kneel to touch the ground. She felt warmth, and her fingers found blood and chipmunk fur, but there was no sign of a den or burrow.

  "I wish you hadn't left."

  Damp cold touched her ankle. Maureen swallowed a scream and looked down. Yellow eyes glinted back at her. She felt almost as if the animal was teasing her. Or--courting her?

  Slowly, carefully, she reached back along her leg and touched the cold nose. Her fingers traced the wiry whiskers and caressed the ridges over the vixen's eyes, then moved on to scratch between the ears. Soft fur, smooth fur, silken fur cool at the surface and warm beneath, delighted her fingertips. The vixen closed her eyes, like a cat, and gently leaned into Maureen's touch.

  She felt a pulse, racing at twice the speed of her own. And then the fox vanished.

  I'm hallucinating again. Got to get more sleep.

  Maureen sniffed her fingers. Nothing--no smell of fur, no pungent fox-reek almost as strong as skunk.

  {And the forest? Is this a waking dream as well?}

  The fox looked down on her from a huge moss-covered boulder. The vixen licked one paw and cocked her head as if listening for a mouse.

  Maureen listened.

  She heard the wind brushing the tips of leaves, she heard the stealthy scuffle of beetles under bark, she heard the chitter of a distant squirrel. She heard her own pulse.

  She didn't hear cars, or the thumping National Guard helicopters that made the Naskeag Falls airport their base. She didn't hear the constant background hum of civilization that might as well be distributed on utility poles along with electricity and phone.

  No matter what time of day or night she went into Carlysle Woods, she never heard only forest. Even out in the puckerbrush beyond the last straggling villages of backwoods Maine, there'd always been the distant roar of jets overhead and log-skidders growling over their prey two ridges to the west.

  Camped out in the middle of the mountains, you could hear the Maine Central diesel airhorns at midnight grade-crossings twenty miles away. The voice of man was noise.

  Not this. This was the way forests had sounded before the first machine. Maureen felt peace wash through her. God knows, she'd earned it.

  "I've dreamed of forests like this."

  {The land is yours, if you choose to claim it.}

  Maureen studied the forest, opening her professional eyes. Coming here, the land had been a blur--first the theater backdrop to Sean's glamour, then something vague red-tinted through her rage and fear. She'd never seen it.

  She saw lichen an inch thick on the trees, carpets of reindeer moss on the ground between the bunchberry and the bramble, dens and rocky labyrinths and damp pockets of rotting leaves spiked with lycopodium. Oak. Beech. Maple. Birch. Others she did not know the names of or the uses, European trees she'd never learned. Fir and pine and cedar and spruce. Young trees, old trees, giants and scraggly dwarfs. Beautiful trees, trees with heart and history and character.

  This land waited for her touch, her understanding, and her healing.

  How much land had Dougal held? The view from his keep had shown forest for miles in every direction--rolling green out to the distant tilled fields and the pastures. She traced the furrows of watersheds in her mind, almost stroking their leafy fur with her hand.

  This land was damned near empty. The Old Ones were loners, distrustful of each other and of humans, almost like Daniel Boone and the other American wanderers. It was time to move on when you could see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney on a frosty morning.

  She remembered Fiona in Carlysle Woods, talking of the Summer Country. "Think of it as clay on the potter's wheel, and you the potter."

  The fox offered her a forest to tend, tend by her own rules.

  Old trees to talk to. New trees to learn. The mystery of that wrongness she'd felt, to solve and correct by careful stewardship--psychotherapy for an ecosystem.

  No one to call her crazy when she talked of the soul of a tree. No stockholders to complain when she guided her decisions by what the land needed rather than by numbers on a ledger.

  If some land-management firm in Maine had offered her this job, she'd have killed for it.

  I already have.

  She found her hand on the knife-hilt again, and jerked it away. The fox vanished.

  Magic. Maureen wondered if it was the mundane magic of a red fox startled by her movement, or the true magic of the Summer Country.

  She felt like a mystic blessed by the touch of God.

  {Next time you come here,} the fox whispered, {bring your wooden flute. You'll find it plays a different kind of music in its true home.}

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Maureen struggled to separate reality from illusion.

  Had she conjured the fox out of sleep deprivation and a week of fasting? Could she hold a clear and rational conversation with a beech tree if she was still on medication?

  How does this world define sanity?

  First things first. She had to find Brian. He understood this crazy place.

  She strode off through the forest, straight east. Her hand went to the hilt of the knife again and then massaged her belly underneath it.

  A low stone wall divided the forest from rolling pastures, divided the smell of old leaves and damp forest moss from a breeze full of fresh green grass and wildflowers. Maureen sensed another boundary there, as well, as if she'd be crossing into enemy territory when she climbed over the line of fieldstone.

  Her paranoia revived: they were watching her. She found herself chuckling at the notion. She hadn't realized how much the magic of the land had changed her until the old feeling returned. Now every blade of grass had eyes and ears.

  Maybe this time it was true.

  She sat on
the fence, chewing on an apple while she rested her legs. Her queasy stomach welcomed the food, so she pulled out a chunk of cheese and gnawed on it, then followed up with slices of dried sausage. The warm sun tempted her to lie down in the grass and sleep. A short nap, say a week or maybe two, seemed just about right. Wake up and eat, then sleep again.

  Recover first. Brian could wait. She leaned back against an oak--an ancient white oak rooted firmly on her side of the stone wall--and closed her eyes.

  {That's Fiona talking,} the oak whispered. {You're at the edge of her territory now. She's far more skilled than Dougal was, more subtle. Let the paranoia rule for a little longer. Even paranoids have real enemies.}

  Maureen jerked awake and shook herself. Father Oak never spoke that clearly. He tended to be more like a Greek oracle, all enigmatic and vague. She looked over the landscape with a fresh eye, looking for trouble.

  A chimney poked out of green lumps, a mile or so away. Maureen studied it, picking out the rounded line of a thatched roof pale against the spring shrubs. She'd expected something more impressive, more defensive, something cold and tall on a hill, like the castle she'd left in flames.

  Fiona seemed to keep a lower profile than Dougal had. Basic psychology said it meant she was more confident--probably with good reason.

  Maureen heaved herself upright again, groaning quietly. Spending a week or so in a dungeon hadn't done anything good for her stamina. Her legs were sore. She felt more tired than she had any right to be, after walking only a mile or two.

  Also, she seemed to have done something nasty to her right shoulder in the process of hacking Dougal into bits. That was typical. Every time she tried something new, like canoeing, bicycling, or simply killing people, she seemed to find muscles she'd never used before.

  There was no way to hide, so she went openly. The fields spread out around her as she walked, neat stone-walled pastures like velvet lawns with no sign of any cattle or sheep to keep them mowed, no smell of the barnyard, no meadow muffins. The grass was part of a picture, she decided, a setting rather than a working farm. Fiona had said that she kept gardens.

  The hedges around the house mirrored that casual perfection. Tangles of hawthorn and wild rose laced together with briar and grape; they built solid walls with the precise and studied wildness of a Japanese garden. The hedge hummed with bees floating from one sweet pink rose to another.

  Maureen remembered a history course, Patton's armor cutting through France after D-Day. The hedgerows there could stop a tank. These looked like they would even stop a rabbit. She circled the house, warily, in and out around the wanderings of the green fence.

  Finally, she decided it really was a castle--one made of soft, living stone that would bend but never break. You'd need an army to get in, flame-throwers, bulldozers, a commando assault team with blasting charges, if you weren't invited.

  She wondered what protected it from the air. Long odds, you couldn't just fly in.

  An orange cat lay sunning his belly by one of the two white gates. Maureen held out her hand for sniffing and learned that a chin-scratch would be appropriate toll. She spent a few minutes at the task--you never knew when you'd need a friend in a tight corner. She was rewarded with a purr like an idling Ferrari.

  It was a damn shame the apartment had a "no pets" lease. The world was a better place with cats in it. And if Fiona kept a cat as her gatekeeper, she couldn't be all bad.

  Cats, plural, Maureen amended, when she opened the gate and slipped inside. A gray and white female joined them, tail up in a greeting question-mark. They were probably sentries. She'd just rung the doorbell, but she was too tired to really care.

  The hedges apparently formed a maze. Just inside the gate, she faced a blank wall of green and the option of right or left down a flagstone path. Each way ended in a sharp turn that blocked any further view.

  Even if she'd been desperate enough to climb the thorny hedge, it arched over to form a barbed-wire tunnel. Fiona's defenses might be prettier than Castle MacKenzie’s, but close up, they looked just as strong.

  The thorns are probably poisoned as well, she thought. Or maybe the pretty blossoms breathe out narcotic vapors, like the poppy fields on the way to the Emerald City, or the bees carry stone-fish toxin in their stingers. Brian told you the job was dangerous when you took it.

  She had two choices. She could follow the right-hand rule or follow the cats. If she looked like a person who might operate a can-opener, the cats would probably lead her straight to the kitchen. Humans were as obsolete as Homo habilis if cats ever evolved an opposable thumb.

  More likely they'll lead you straight over a pit-trap set for human weight, her paranoia answered. They are Fiona's cats, after all, familiars of a powerful witch.

  The cats went right. Maureen went right, accompanied by a round of ankle-polishing. It was either that or flip a coin, and she'd left her purse at the Quick Shop, back in another world.

  Right again, the gray and white led, and Maureen shook her head. The hedge hadn't bumped out in that area. She turned around and checked behind. From this side, the turn still went right. Her head spun--the hedge looked like a mirror rather than "real" life.

  The orange tom leaned against her leg, and she scratched his ears. He looked up with eyes filled with lazy scorn at her insistence on the laws of physics and geometry. She shrugged.

  Right again, and right again, and right again, she followed the cats. Maureen gave up on mapping an impossible spiral. The hedge shrank down to just above her head, open now to the sun and the butterflies. She had a sneaking suspicion the walls would be just above anybody's head, even a seven-six NBA center. It would always be high enough so you couldn't see where you were going.

  Then she caught up with the cats. They sat in a pool of sunlight, daintily washing their paws, at a blank dead end.

  Maureen turned around. Instead of the path she had walked between the hedges, she faced another dead end. Butterflies and bees danced across a solid wall of green dotted with pale pink roses. The hedge had boxed her into a trap.

  She squatted, nose to nose with the orange tom. He went back to washing his ears with one paw, a study in calm confidence.

  "Okay, fuzz-face, what gives?"

  "You wouldn't have gotten this far if the cats thought you were dangerous."

  Maureen jerked at the voice, nearly falling backwards into the hedge. A face formed in the leaves, sort of a Cheshire Cat in green, and smiled at her. It could have been Fiona.

  "I've always hated answering machines, love," the face said, "so I've decided to make mine more personal. I'm not in, right now, but you can leave a message. What makes my service more personal is this: the message will be you. You can't leave until I release you."

  Something furry butted Maureen's hand, and she supplied scratching service automatically. Then she realized she could still see two cats. A third had joined them, a gray tiger-stripe. She couldn't see any gaps in the hedge around her.

  "If," the green voice went on, "you're anybody I really want to meet, you'll figure out how to get on to the house and have a cup of tea while you wait. Otherwise, tough shit."

  The hedge-face melded back into the wall of green, from the edges inward, leaving a smile. Somebody had been reading too much Alice.

  "Oh, by the way," the smile added, as the eyes returned. "I wouldn't recommend touching anything purple, love. I've decided the color doesn't go with my complexion."

  The face faded out completely. Maureen shook her head and looked around, at a sunlit box of greenery and three smug cats grooming themselves. Bees hummed from flower to flower and then rose up to float away south, probably to their hive.

  Purple? What the hell had she meant, don't touch anything purple? Poison?

  The gray tiger-stripe batted at a butterfly, leaping up with paws spread wide. She missed, landed with a flip of her tail that said, "I meant to do that," and cocked her ears at the fluttering cat-toy. The yellow ribbing of the tiger swallowtail turned purple.
It wavered its way past Maureen's ear and into the bush, where it perched on a purple rose-blossom, sipping nectar.

  All of the blossoms were purple, now. They had been pink a minute ago.

  Another purple swallowtail fluttered across Maureen's nose. She brushed it away. Fire flashed up her arm, and she stared at the red blotch left on the back of her hand. It throbbed like a hornet sting.

  Hot coals touched her neck and arm, feathery touches that left acid running up her nerves. Butterflies flitted across, an inch from her eyes, brushing her ears, lighting on her knees to fan their wings. She felt the heat of them even through the denim of her jeans.

  The hedge inched closer. She could have lain down crosswise in the path, before, and never come near the bushes. Now she could touch the thorns on each side with her outstretched arms. More blossoms spattered the walls with purple. More butterflies filled the air. Maureen huddled in on herself.

  The cats ignored it all. She wondered how they judged which visitors were dangerous and which could pass into the maze. Two of them sat in loaves, with tails and paws tucked in, watching her like feline Buddhas. The third, the orange tom, had vanished through a cat-door into a parallel dimension.

  Poe, not Lewis Carroll, she thought. Fiona had created her own version of "The Pit and the Pendulum." The problem was, nobody was going to show up to arrest the Inquisition.

  Purple, that was the problem. Nothing had happened until the first butterfly turned purple. She glared at the lavender roses. Pink, she screamed in her mind. You were pink!

  They stayed purple. She singled out one, ignoring the heat of a score of fiery butterflies perched on her blouse and pants. Something brushed her cheek and left a swelling welt. She squinted against the pain and tears, thinking of nothing but the single blossom. If she couldn't return to the past, maybe she could change the future . . . .

  She snarled at the flower. "Okay, dammit, you're yellow. I'll paint all you bastards yellow, like the cards in Alice painting the roses red."

  Maureen leaned closer, her eyes crossing as she held the blossom centered in her sight. Her breath rustled the leaves and shivered the fragile petals of the rose.