She turned away, and then turned back. "And you can tell the Welshman that if he wants to act so holy, he can explain some of the innocents that go missing when they touch the border or meet up with the Pendragon's claws. Either that, or admit that the worlds haven't changed since Merlin's day, and my rules are the only ones that I need follow."
Then her mind spoke to the briars, loosing Cáitlin. Fiona waved her captive towards Maureen's forest. "Haunt the place of Sean's dying, love, listen to your winds whispering past branch and leaf. Tell me and your Welshman what they say. Serve my revenge well, and I might set you free."
Fiona dropped her puppet strings for the moment, turned, and stepped through another gap in the maze, into sunshine and the gardens close on her cottage. It waited for her, whitewashed stone and thatch, curiously dead to the eye like the bare-limbed skeleton of the house rowan standing by the kitchen door. She crossed the broken threshold into air cooler than the true temperature, with the clammy touch of a cellar or a grave. Maureen's curse still hung here, the Power holding strong between ridge-pole and foundation.
The red-haired bitch would die for it.
Chapter Four
Maureen lowered the binoculars and stared into her memories. She couldn't see any point where she could have done otherwise.
She ought to love this place -- the clean sweet air, the castle's wealth, the magic, a gentle, loving man who understood just who and what she was and still cared for her, the trees . . . the trees, ancient gray-bearded wise trees she'd only dreamed about in forestry school, trees that talked to her and guarded her and wrapped her in miles of wild green beauty. She ought to love this place. So why did the castle still feel like a trap closing in around her?
And the dragon hated her.
The dragon swam out like some kind of nuclear attack submarine, black and sleek and swift and deadly, one of the most wonderful animals she'd ever seen. It came back wallowing like an overloaded supertanker with engine trouble, almost too fat to clear the channel into port. She couldn't see what happened in between, but she could guess. She'd never thought of dragons as amphibians, but it made a lot of sense.
The dragon laired down in the swamp, vibrant and beautiful and brave, a living wonder, and it wanted to eat her. Maureen tested each step in her memories. Dougal had bound the dragons to defend his keep, sent Liam to kidnap Maureen, trapped Jo in a sinkhole. David had killed the female dragon when he and Brian had come to Dougal's forest in their doomed attempt at rescuing Maureen and Jo.
Maureen stared down at her hand squeezing the binoculars. She set Brian's Leicas on the gray stone of the windowsill and flexed her fingers.
That column of smoke still smudged the sky, far beyond her forest. Brian didn't know what it meant -- probably some feud or other brought to the burning point. Power ruled the Summer Country.
She still didn't understand the soul of this place, what it would accept and what it would reject. Apparently the moose had fit within the rules. God knows, Maine was up to its ass in moose, more than the range could bear. Some years, more people died in car-moose collisions than were murdered. She could kidnap a moose a week to feed the dragon and nobody would notice.
"And that one had brainworm," she whispered to herself. "A lot worse than getting chomped by a dragon."
And she thought there might be advantages to getting the dragon used to looking in Fiona's direction for its next meal.
Test the limits, find out the rules, make a map and get the names down right. Did the dragon have a name? That could be important. Just like there probably was a proper castle term for this narrow slit in a stone bay sticking out from the castle wall, not a window but an arrow slit or a quillon or something.
Brian would know. He was the frigging soldier, fifty years in the British Army with a sideline for the Pendragons, defending humanity against the Old Ones out of Celtic legend. Fifty years with the Gurkhas and the SAS, diddling the records God knows how, over seventy years old, and he still looked like thirty. Just like she looked sixteen, Jo looked eighteen, when their true ages sat to either side of thirty.
Her hand looked like a human hand, looked like it always had, almost a child's hand. She'd had only a couple of weeks to get used to the fact that it wasn't human. Brian wasn't human, she wasn't human, Jo wasn't human. The Old Blood ran in their veins, the race the humans had kicked out of Europe back during the last ice age. It didn't seem real.
The Old Blood had brought her here, to this land out of Grandfather O'Brian's tales of Irish myth. It gave her the power to work magic. She really could talk to trees and discuss the balance of ecosystems with an articulate fox. Magic had made sense out of the voices that had seemed like symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. She felt the needs of the forest, touched the heart of the forest like she never had in forestry school. The Old Blood . . .
Such small hands, to have killed a man. Crushed Dougal's throat, clawed his eyes out of their sockets, hacked him to pieces with a Gurkha kukri. Burned his body to ashes in his own bed, burned his tower and all the blood-soaked bedding in which she'd slept the night. She'd been crazy then, straight from a dungeon cell
