"FIIIOONNNAAA!"
His scream died off in a strangled gargle, and he sank under the waves of pain. His thoughts splintered into sparkling atoms and fled like a cloud.
Darkness took them.
* * *
Maureen pushed herself up, groggily. Trees. Brian. Noise. Stench. Pain. Hunger.
She squatted on hands and knees. She sorted out her senses.
The noises stopped. The stink didn't. Rotting meat. She'd smelled that before. The forest. She shook her head, trying to focus. Blood dripped from a bundle of vines and briars a few feet from where Brian lay. The bundle twitched once, then twice, then settled as if whatever hid inside it had lost all tension.
"What? Happened?"
Single words seemed to be her limit. Her head pounded, and her left hand throbbed in time with the beat. She focused on the hand. A red line crossed it, a half-healed wound. It wasn't still bleeding, she noted with relief. She might have gotten around to worrying about that, some time.
Brian stirred. His head rolled from side to side. He sat up, jerkily, as if parts of him rejoined the whole like pieces of a puzzle. He shook his head again, a groggy owl staring around. He peered at Maureen.
"I could have sworn you were asleep."
She stared at him. "What happened?"
He waved at the bloody bundle. "Sean attacked us. You killed him."
She shook her head. "I didn't do anything."
"Bugger that. I bleeding well didn't. That leaves you."
"Bullshit. Last thing I did was faint into your arms like Scarlett O'Hara. I dreamed I was strangling Sean. Jo and David held him down. Then I woke up with a bump on my head. Whatever happened to him, I didn't do it."
Brian stood up, moving slowly. He shook his hands and feet as if they tingled from returning circulation. He knelt and poked at the wrapped form that must have been Sean, using the tip of his knife.
"Dead." He looked up at her and studied her face, as if he was reading the mixture of fierce joy and loathing she felt. He shook his head. "You seem to think Sean was your worst enemy. That poor sod may have been a nasty piece of work, but he was really just a puppet. Fiona's the one who made him, and you had to leave her alive behind our backs. Alive and very angry."
Maureen stared at the bloody vines and refused to worry about Fiona. She was tomorrow's problem. "Is that what Dougal did to David?"
"No. This just killed him, fast. David may even still be alive."
"Show me."
He offered her a hand and pulled her up. Maureen leaned on him again, tucking herself under his arm. He felt hard and warm and reassuring, support she could rely on. It felt like leaning on Father Oak, only with a heartbeat.
The dragon still stank like the devil's own cesspool. Crows and ravens and vultures perched all through the trees, too gorged to fly. The birds barely even followed the two of them with their black sated eyes.
Brian stopped. "My God!"
Jo sat there, next to another bundle of vines. She didn't move. Maureen traced the greenbriar looped around her sister's wrist and saw the fine rootlets bonded to her skin. Her eyes were open but blank. A faint breath stirred her chest, and then another.
Maureen remembered a vegetable in a nursing home, fed by a tube. Psych. class field trip. Catatonic withdrawal. Lights on, nobody home.
She vomited. She barely had enough strength to keep the vile mess off her clothes. A part of her body snarled at the silly waste of food.
Brian held her. Brian spoke soothing noises. Finally, the noises made words. "Jo found him. She forced herself into the bond, to track him through the land. They're both alive."
She forced a whisper. "How do we get them out?"
"I don't know if we can. I don't know if anybody ever has broken this kind of bonding. Their bodies are here, but their thoughts are scattered throughout the forest. They've become the forest."
The flash of insight felt just like a cartoon lightbulb. "Jo and David killed Sean. They saved us. We've got to save them."
Brian shook his head. "Maureen, you may be the most powerful witch in the Summer Country, but you're damn near dead. You have to rest. You have to eat, and sleep, and rebuild your Power before you're ready to try anything like this."
"No." She knew, with cold hard certainty, that Jo and David couldn't wait. She felt it. They'd die. "You said I own these lands? I take over from Dougal because I killed him? All that feudal shit of force majeure?"
"Yes."
"Then I'm going to be a feudal lord." She found some strength, somewhere, and staggered over to the nearest tree. She stared at the trunk, too exhausted for emotion, thinking about the spells she'd worked.
The Power didn't come, this time. The words didn't force themselves on her. She didn't have the strength.
The bark of the beech was smooth under her hands. She'd asked a beech for directions, earlier today. She hoped it wasn't this one. If she'd just walked right by Jo and David . . .
"Give them back to me. You've got Sean. You've got your blood. In their place, I swear to act for the good of this forest. Give them back." Nothing happened.
"I don't have the strength or time to argue with you. I am the ruler of this land. I command you to give them back."
Still nothing. This world seemed to require threats.
"If you don't send Jo and David back into their bodies, I swear I will burn every last tree and bush and clump of moss in this forest. I will burn this land as bare as the knob of rock where Dougal set his tower. It may take me the rest of my life to do it, but I will do it, as surely
