The Summer Country

by James A. Hetley

  Dougal actually smiled. "I think, dear Fiona, it should be entertaining. I hope you won't be upset with me if he gets eaten in the process."

  "Of course not, love. Any blame belongs to darling Sean, for being such a stupid ass."

  She examined the kukri, a vague smile on her face. "Dougal, love, you know so much about weapons. Isn't it considered bad form to sheathe one of these without its steel tasting blood?"

  Dougal blinked. "I didn't know you studied weapons lore. Some believe that, yes."

  "I've studied brother Brian, dear neighbor, everything about him. The strangest things can be a window to the soul."

  The blade caressed Sean's cheek. Brian caught the sudden smell of fear on the breeze and saw the muscles tremble in his half-brother's face as he tried to shrink away.

  "I ought to carve your eyes out, love," she whispered. "I ought to cut off your ears and useless balls and feed them to you. You tried to trick me. You thought you could get away with it, and that is even worse."

  Brian snatched at a glimmer of hope. With Fiona concentrating on the others, maybe he could break free. If she thought he was hurt worse than he really was . . . . He reached out and touched the winds of Power flowing through the Summer Country and jerked back as if he'd tried to grab a live wire.

  She didn't even turn around. "Brian, love, don't try that again, or it will hurt. I've finally got you, and I intend to keep you. You always were such a beautiful child."

  She tipped the kukri up and laid its edge against the soft skin right under Sean's eye. A blink would bring blood, a twitch of her hand would blind him. Brian swallowed convulsively, as if the razor steel touched cold against his own skin.

  "I'd love to do this, sweet twin. But," she sighed, "I may need you again sometime. You can be such a useful snake." She lowered the knife. "Instead, I think I'll let you watch part of my spell-song. It may hurt just as much."

  She turned the blade and slid it along the back of her own wrist, leaving a thread of crimson. One finger dabbed up a drop of her blood and held it to Brian's lips. His jaws opened of their own accord, and his tongue reached out and licked the salty finger clean. The taste burned down his throat and into his belly like a shot of whiskey.

  His right hand reached out for the knife and mirrored her actions, holding his own blood against her matching lipstick. Brian watched the ritual like it was a movie on the screen, his body having no relation to his mind. Fiona had taken over her brother's spell as easily as picking up a book.

  She frowned and turned to Dougal. "You do have that redheaded bitch behind cold iron? She's left her fingerprints all over Brian's lovely soul. This may take a little longer than I thought." Dougal nodded, watching silently.

  Maureen. Brian focused on memories of her face, her gentle hands, her warmth and smell when she was holding him in the innocent acts of nursing. "I love you," he whispered to the memory, raising it as a shield against his sister.

  Humming filled his ears, a gentle vibration against his skin that became music and then a song. Words coiled around his head and blurred his vision until it was filled with Fiona's face, her eyes, her hair. He still held the knife within inches of her heart, but he couldn't have stirred a finger against her will.

  "'S tú mo choill, coill, coill," she whispered, singing the chorus of her spell-song.

  "'S tú mo choill gaineach ban.

  "'S tú mo ghiolla dubh ar luaimh.

  "Os ar ucht tú 'bheith slan."

  Brian heard the words in an obscure out-island dialect and their meaning whispered in his brain: "You're my love, love, love, you're my loved one so fair . . . ." He lost the thread of the song, but the words mattered little anyway. They merely held his ears and set his will apart from his body, sleeping.

  What mattered was her voice singing, her perfect clear voice with a faint touch of fuzz to it like a warm kitten. What mattered were her glance and hands and body caressing him, dancing close around him. He bathed in the light of her face, the warmth of her touch, the intoxicating fragrance of her smell.

  The knife left his hand and found its sheath. She tucked it in Sean's belt and turned her back on it, and Brian wanted to cry out to warn her of her danger but she never asked. The smell of her filled his nostrils and woke fire in him and banished pain into another world.

  "Don't even think about it, Sean," she sang, the words woven into her melody. "If you try for the knife it will turn in your hand and cut your liver out."

  Her dance continued, close and intimate around him, as erotic through her clothing as if she danced nude. Every touch burned as though it left sparks of phosphorous behind, eating into his skin, and yet the pain of the burning felt like ecstasy.

  Fiona loved him. He loved Fiona. She ran fingers through his hair and soothed away the scrapes and bruises like a mother's kiss, she ran her palms down his thighs and sealed the slash left by the dragon's claw, she gently wrapped her arms around him and the pain of his ribs vanished as if it had never been.

  "Dougal, love," she whispered, "if you think you can do that without my noticing, then go ahead and try. You've had reason enough to fear me, all these years."

  Brian wondered what she'd sensed, how Dougal had tried to manipulate his land and beasts to fight her. She never even looked at Sean and Dougal behind her. Such a wonderful witch, she was, to see so clearly all around her. So powerful and lovely. The strength she had, to hold three men while she enspelled a fourth. Why had he ever denied his love for her?

  Her touch slipped away from Brian, and he ached with longing. Her singing told him all was well; this parting would be short before they came together in her bed. Her will was joy to him. If she wished him to wait, he'd wait forever.

  "Dougal, love, you really ought to learn this. It's much more efficient than your training methods, and it will work on man or beast."

  "My way works." His voice seemed as rough and crude as sharp crushed stone after the honey wine of Fiona's song.

  "Ah," she whispered, with a beautiful smile, "but it will be days before you can taste your bride, and you can never truly trust her. In spite of all your skill, sometimes the falcon does not return to your fist. Of course, I know that's part of the thrill for you."

  "Falcons are animals," Dougal answered. "They have small brains and little understanding. I've never lost a person yet."

  "Yet," she repeated, with a pause full of comment. "Yet. You've never tried to work Blood as powerful as hers or Brian's. This is no glamour I'm casting on him. Once I'm through weaving this fabric, darling Brian will never want to escape from me. Even casting the clay from a new-dug grave between us wouldn't set him free."

  Dougal shook his head. "Once you're through?"

  "Oh, there are a few more rituals to observe. I thought we'd finish in private, if you don't mind. Poor Sean would have a stroke if I forced him to watch."

  She turned to her twin. "Sean, love, you are bound to this forest until I give you leave. Your touch on the Power is bound. Think sweetly on me and on betrayal until we meet again."

  She waved him away. He turned as stiffly as Punch retreating from the Judy puppet, jerking his steps along the path, his hand on the knife but powerless to draw it or to turn. Fiona turned her back on Sean, dismissing him with a shrug. She eyed David, still leaning helpless against the oak.

  "And what do you think about the things you've seen, young human innocent? You've walked from the streets of gritty reality into the pages of myth, you've slain a dragon against all odds and been captured by the evil sorcerer, you've seen betrayal and seduction and wait now for your doom to be spoken on your head. Such a poor fate for a hero out of myth. Such a puzzle we all must seem, to your virgin mind." She laughed, a harsh sound seeming to mix contempt for all of them together, and then waved negation.

  "Don't answer me. I don't really want to know." She turned to Dougal. "What do you plan to do with him?"

  Dougal stared at the dead hulk of his dragon. His face grew hard. "If Brian isn't lying, I'd hate
to chance the death-vengeance of a true bard. The Pendragons rarely lie. Yet this human owes me blood. My land needs renewing. As you point out, he is an innocent as our world reckons such things."

  "Ah. You think of casting the Green Marriage."

  "So quick you are," he smiled. "He will die but live, bringing spring again to my lands and thwarting the curse. We think alike, you and I. Almost I wish we could be friends."

  "Our powers and our interests lie too far apart for that."

  "Maybe. Or maybe our differences would make us better partners." Pain sat in his eyes, and longing. Dougal blinked away the weakness and gestured at Brian. "Can he understand what is happening? Will you permit him to see and hear and care? He deserves it."

  "You are cruel, Dougal, love. And just. He brought the poor boy here. I'll let him care."

  Green Marriage, Brian heard, echoing through his thoughts. The sacrifice of an innocent. The land would swallow David, draw him into itself, destroy him by splitting his life into atoms of feeling and understanding scattered through the root and branch of its own life.

  It happened slowly. It happened with great pain. Moons from now, one with the Blood running in his veins would be able to talk to David through the touch of water and stone, the whisper of wind, the rattle of branch against woody branch in the stillness of the night.

  Gradually he would fade, as the grains of a sand-castle crumbled in the rising tide, fading as his soul spread thinner and thinner until he vanished into the murmur of unthinking life, as the molded sand returned to the featureless sweep of the beach.

  Brian's heart chilled at such a devious way of evading the death-curse of a bard. He screamed in the distant locked closet of his mind that Fiona allowed him, the small space that let him care. Guilt crashed down on him and threw the charges in his face. He had brought the boy here, unprotected, untaught, brought this sacrifice as a crutch for his own injuries. He should suffer and die, not David.

  He still owned a tiny fraction of himself. That fraction wailed with grief and remorse over David, over Maureen, and Jo, and even the simple hungers and desires of the dragon, so rare and beautiful and now so dead.

  Dougal grabbed David's arm, the arm of the injured elbow, and jerked him across the splintered trail to a clump of greenbriar. The boy moved woodenly, stumbling as his feet chased after his balance and barely caught it before falling into another step and then another.

  His last step failed to catch him, and he fell face-first into the briars, arms flopping loose at his sides. The briars tore at him, and he screamed as if their touch was acid.

  Tension and control seemed to flow back into his body, and he fought against the tangle, against the biting thorns and against the twisting, slithering vines that whipped around his arms and legs and throat and tied him like a bundle. Blood dripped from his bare skin and stained the cloth of his shirt and jeans where the vines touched him, as if each touch-point was a wound and the briars sucked his blood through hollow needles.

  He screamed, a harsh grating sound as if he tore the fabric of his lungs and forced it up his throat. Brian had heard such screams before, as men died in torment, and he’d never understood where they found the air to keep on so long.

  The green coils tightened on David, wrapping again and again around him until he barely jerked. Dougal or Fiona kept his chest free; kept his throat and tongue and mouth free enough to howl his agony. But the thorny fingers invaded his nose, his eyes, his ears, writhing inside his clothing until Brian knew with sickening clarity that they penetrated bowel and bladder as well and sucked at the fertility they found there.

  Brian pounded against the door of his closet, trying to escape, to regain his body, to find the use of hands to plug his ears and cover his eyes. The sight, the sound, the thought of David's torture reached into Brian and grabbed his gut and twisted. Fiona held him, dry-eyed, rigid, a spectator. She turned to him and smiled, showing teeth as sharp as any vampire's, and he knew she saw inside his hidden corner and loved what she saw there.

  Briars root where their canes touch fertile soil, where they bend down and meet the damp earth under matted leaves. The briars rooted in David's body.

  They cased him in green. The roots ate into him until a green man lay still on the forest floor, a shape woven of living wicker. The screaming finally stopped.

  Brian hunched over his stomach, and Fiona let him vomit. Then the fog returned, even in his hidden closet.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The cell measured eight feet by ten feet, Maureen guessed. She was a shade over five-two and couldn't quite lie the length of her prison twice. It worked out to five paces plus turning space, anyway, with the shackles on her legs. Call it five hundred lengths to the mile. She did ten miles one day, five thousand lengths, and blistered both her feet with the constant turning.

  Then they took her boots away, "to prevent an infection." The bastards had taken her clothes away, too, "for cleaning." That seemed like weeks ago.

  So she ruled eighty square feet, more or less. She shared it with one iron bunk hanging from iron chains set into the stone wall, one iron-sheathed door with a peephole just about big enough to put her hand through, and one electric light high overhead that must be powered by the solar panels she'd glimpsed when they carried her in. She also owned one stinking hole in the floor that she only used when she was about to burst because it required squatting in full view of the peephole, and they never gave her any toilet paper.

  Stone paving covered the floor, ninety-seven random-sized rectangles, and the prime number bothered her. She thought she'd prefer a smoother number, maybe ninety-six. Eight times twelve, or four times twenty-four, so many ways to factor it: ninety-six would be a satisfying number. Either that, or the sixty-four squares of a chess board.

  In some perverse way, all this macho rapist shit was better than living with the endless fears of paranoia. Dougal and Padric were real, here and now. She could kill the slimeballs, if she could just figure out a way. They weren't Buddy Johnson, always giving her the finger from behind the protection of her nightmares, always lurking in the shadows and vanishing when she tried to pin him down.

  She smiled grimly to herself and settled deeper into the dissociation that was the only good thing insanity had ever done for her. All these things were happening to that other woman, over there. The dissociation helped Maureen hide within her head, helped her wait and study and scheme.

  Meanwhile, numbers and mental chess games comforted her. They kept an elemental purity that didn't change with the whims of her jailers.

  She had saved the counting of each wall for next week. She could spend a day on each one, counting and recounting the patterns of dressed stone masonry that looked like any classic dungeon complete with the rusty iron staples and hanging chains that should have held a shackled skeleton, forgotten. She hadn't even tried gouging out the mortar with her own irons: that would be a waste of time and energy. Maybe she'd save that for next week, too.

  She wondered if weeks held any meaning. They had taken her watch right at the first, and there wasn't a window to give her hints to day or night. The light dimmed on an unknown schedule but never went completely dark. Sometimes she felt as if her life had been twisted onto one of those endless loops she'd made in geometry class in high school.

  All her meals were identical, and their timing didn't seem to have any relationship to the light. No clue there. All Padric ever gave her was small fragments of brown bread and hard yellow cheese and a cup of murky, flat-tasting water--about what she'd eat for a light snack at home. She didn't need that hole in the floor much; nothing was left over when her gut got done with the crumbs.

  The cold iron ate at her wrists and ankles, gnawing red sores when she paced. Dougal worried about them, during his infrequent visits--asked her not to hurt herself, not to scar herself. He healed them with a touch, whenever she held still enough for him to touch her. Padric was her real jailer, and he only sneered at her. Whatever fear her curse had laid
on him was now dead and buried. He'd seen how weak she was, unable to back up her words with action.

  She shivered. She took the coarse wool blanket off her bunk and wrapped it around her shoulders, huddling her warmth to herself. The fabric scratched her bare skin, itchy and crawling with her own filth. The stone cell was far too cold for a bra and panties, but Padric refused to give her back her jeans and shirt. He told her she could wear a dress like a proper woman or wear nothing at all like the whore she was.

  Dougal and Padric played good-cop, bad-cop. She'd read enough stories to know the routine. One cop beats the poor slob senseless with a rubber hose, the other one comes in and screams bloody murder at his partner and gives the suspect a cup of coffee or a shot of booze from a smuggled pocket flask and wants to be a friend. Repeat and vary, as needed.

  Guess who got the alleged perpetrator's confession? Next prisoner, they swapped roles.

  Of course, what Dougal wanted was her ass. She'd see him in hell, first. If only they'd let her sleep . . .

  The lock snapped behind her, and Padric filled the doorway, snarling. "Blanket stays on bed! You know rules!"

  He pointed toward the corner of the cell, the one with the hole in the floor. Bath time again, with a bucket of water that always felt like it came from the bottom end of a glacier. As usual, he carried some harsh soap, a scrap of towel, and a brush fit for scrubbing elephants. She was supposed to strip and wash, wash all over, while he watched.

  It was calculated humiliation, just like shitting and pissing in full view, like an animal. She wondered what would happen when her period started. At least that would give her a measure of time men couldn't steal.

  Padric could talk better than his ape-man impersonation. She'd overheard him, once. The whole fucking thing was an act, Dr. Frankenstein's Igor.

  She turned toward the corner, her shoulders slumped in submission, and then spun back using her chains as a flail. One link caught him across the cheek, and she saw a glint of blood before his fist smashed into her breast, setting it on fire. She staggered back against the wall, whimpering. Another fist in her gut drove the breath from her body and then a third blow caught her just as she started to gasp. The stone floor jolted her knees.