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
