Maureen fought her way back to a crouch and scraped up the strength to speak. "You've . . . got a choice," she gasped. "You can fight . . . the hedge and me . . . or you . . . can hold Brian. The hedge . . . wants to kill you. Brian . . . will probably . . . let you live. Make up . . . your mind."
She grabbed the trunk of a hawthorn and thought of earth and rock and water. "Strength," she whispered. "Give me strength. Give me the strength that splits rocks and drives roots deep and sends leaves to the sky. Build a wall of the stone heart of the earth to block Fiona's power, weave a spell of life around her and draw off the essence of her blood and leave her helpless. Loop vines out to seize her wrists and ankles, thread the hooked thorns of her roses against her own throat and eyes. Hold her."
{Kill!}
The copper taste of Fiona's blood filled Maureen's mouth. She couldn't tell if it was from her own bite or tasted through the hawthorn's sap.
Blood. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? She stood over Dougal's bed, drenched in clotting gore and with the knife heavy in her hand. She spread her own blood on the rowan's trunk, and dripped red on the grass. Everything was blood. Everything was death. She had to find another way, if she was going to live with her memories. Dougal had given her no choice. Here, she had choices.
Power seethed through the blood in her mouth, searching out its differences, hunting for any weapon she could use against Fiona. She unraveled the cells, and something in the traces spoke to her.
Fiona was pregnant. The child was Brian's. It was a girl.
{Kill!}
"NO!"
Maureen dragged herself upright, using the hawthorn as a crutch. It didn't scratch her.
"Don't kill her," she whispered.
Brian's knife pressed against Fiona's throat. The hedge held her pinned against its green wall. Tendrils locked her arms and legs, encircled her waist, threaded through her hair. Her skin shimmered as if she was wrapped in some kind of supernatural plastic film.
"Don't kill her," Maureen repeated, searching for an argument that even rage could hear. "Let the baby live."
Brian blinked and shook his head, as if Maureen had punched him between the eyes. Then he relaxed a fraction. The plants eased their hold. Fiona's eyes opened, locking with Maureen's in a glare of fear and rage and cunning.
Maureen forced words through her exhaustion. "Do you yield?"
The archaic phrase nearly made Maureen smile, but she couldn't waste the strength. Still, it sounded right.
The cunning shone brighter. "What are your terms?"
Amazing. Hanging on the edge of death, and the woman wanted to bargain. So be it.
"Brian leaves. I leave. The cats go where they will. We have a cease-fire. That's all."
"Cease-fire. If I don't bother you, you won't bother me?"
Maureen blinked, slowly, forcing her eyes to keep working. Her knees wanted to quit, too. This is the Armistice at the end of World War I, she thought. Both sides are dying, bled dry, but one is just a shade drier than the other. If you take too much, you set up another war. And I can't kill her.
"That's what I meant," she said.
Fiona gave her a sly, calculating grin. "I can live with that. Besides my own belly, I've got enough of my dear brother's sperm in liquid nitrogen for a few decades of selective breeding. You may find him kind of useless for a few days, love. I've been making him work hard."
"Exercise builds up muscles," Maureen heard Jo's voice shoot back. "I found his performances satisfactory."
Fiona's eyebrows quirked up. "Performances, love? If you must know, I thought he was kind of boring."
"Ah, well." Maureen shook her head. "As the fox commented, those grapes were probably sour, anyway. You had his body, but you didn't have his soul. There's a difference, love."
"Meow. Now that we've got past our little catfight, love, will you please let me go? This is a touch uncomfortable."
Brian tested the vines around Fiona's wrists and ankles. "I don't think so, sister dear. It's not that I don't trust you, it's just that I don't trust you. I think we'll leave Maureen's bindings on your body and your Power, at least until we're safely off your lands. You have a nasty reputation for treachery. Nearly as bad as your twin." He sheathed his knife, apparently satisfied with what he found.
Maureen felt the last of the adrenaline wash out of her and take every trace of starch with it. Her eyes started tracking things that weren't really there. She sagged away from her hawthorn crutch. Brian caught her, lifting her in his arms as if she was a doll. Neandertal, she thought. Or something close to it. He's designed for carrying mastodon quarters back to the cave. Sometimes it comes in handy.
She forced herself back out of the warm grayness of fatigue. "One last thing on our agreement. The cease-fire doesn't cover Sean."
Fiona smiled faintly, and her eyebrows lifted in a way that said Sean was totally expendable. "I never thought it would."
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Brian shifted Maureen gently in his arms, resting one set of muscles by throwing another to the wolves. His eyes measured the distance to Maureen's forest and relative safety. No matter how he added it up, the answer depressed him.
When he'd first stepped outside of Fiona's hedge, he'd wanted to dance like a demented gypsy in celebration. The world glowed. He owned his mind again. He owned his body again. He was free!
Instead, he walked slowly and smoothly, with a sleeping woman wrapped in his arms. She snored quietly and snuggled tighter against his chest.
It made a romantic picture. Problem was, whoever posed the scene had
