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 in 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."
{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
