Tears. She remembered tears in Padric's eyes last night or the night before, when she'd surrendered 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.
