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
