Her internal critic was back. She'd used to think that was the voice of schizophrenia. Normal people don't hold debates with themselves. Then Brian had pointed out that post-traumatic stress disorder explained everything except the Powers of the Blood. All the shrinks had misdiagnosed her case because she'd lied to them. Telling about Buddy would have let Jo in for a dose of Dad's black leather belt, probably would have beaten her to death.
Hell, Maureen remembered, you even lied to yourself. She'd taken a minor in Psych. in college, knew all the PTSD stuff about trauma and nightmares and waking flashbacks and startle reflexes, but that hadn't applied to her. Buddy Johnson didn't exist.
But she didn't have to hide him now. Brian knew. Even Jo had figured out what Buddy did, how he'd poisoned Maureen's mind for nearly twenty years. God, that had been a scene. No wonder Jo didn't want to stay.
Plus, David was a human. A bard, maybe, but still a human bard, a more valuable brand of slave. Jo didn't care, but this freaky place ranked humans as a trainable class of monkey. After all, he couldn't do magic, work with Power.
So they'd gone home, leaving green grass and sunshine and summer to go back to fucking Maine in the middle of fucking winter.
She stared into the bottom of her glass and wished that somebody had bothered to explain the concept of Happily Ever After to the scriptwriter of this play. She ought to follow Brian, help him, learn more about the history and secrets of this land. But that cell waited down there, stone walls closing in from all four sides, stone ceiling so heavy over her head . . .
I could be bounded in a nutshell, were it not that I have bad dreams. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
The room blurred, and tears scalded her cheeks again.
Chapter Five
Brian studied the walls of the narrow corridor, holding his flashlight close and running fingertips over cold dry stone. The left side showed raw sandstone ledge, rough-dressed and still bearing gouges from the picks and drills that carved these cellars out of the hilltop. Right side was dry-stone masonry as tight-fitted as those Inca walls he'd seen in Cuzco. He couldn't slide a fingernail between the blocks. A masonry arch formed the ceiling, age-blackened from the smoke of torches and ribbed with enough reinforcing that he could be under the keep walls.
He knelt down and pulled a brush from his back pocket, cleaning thick dust from the floor. The cleared spot showed smooth stone paving here, patterned in red and green slate, a diamond tessellation with small square insets of gray at the corners. Excellent craftsmanship. Some areas had mosaics, looked like Greek or Roman work. He wondered just who had first lived on this site and drawn on the power that flowed up from the earth. So far, the underground layout seemed more like a Roman villa than a Celtic keep -- a rich villa deliberately buried and hidden beneath rude huts and a plain stone tower.
The Old Blood loved hidden things and secrets, like Fiona with her "cottage." The Pendragons showed their ancestry in that, as paranoid and ruthless as the KGB when their secrets were in danger. Agents disappeared, and no one ever asked because people who asked too many questions also disappeared.
Like these passages and the feet that had walked them had disappeared, centuries ago. But the keep was thoroughly Irish now. For probably the twentieth time, Brian considered inviting a clúrichán to haunt these musty cellars and drain every drop of alcohol in the keep. Maybe then Maureen could throw away the crutch that kept her from knowing her true strength.
But she wouldn't thank him. Besides, it wouldn't work. She had to face her own devils and best them, two falls out of three. And if she wanted a drink, she could summon enough booze to drown the thirstiest Irish elf. That was how the Summer Country worked, for one with the Old Blood strong in her veins.
She still didn't understand the power of her wishes. If she fancied baked ham for dinner, there was a smoked and sugar-cured specimen of Smithfield's finest in the larder, waiting for the cooks. That was the taste she imagined, so some warehouse in Virginia came up short on inventory.
She wondered why Dougal's slaves were anxious to stay and work, once she'd freed them? She fed them. She was spending energy every day, just maintaining the keep and everyone who lived there. She wanted them to be happy, so she fed them better than Dougal ever had, not even knowing what she did, and they weren't about to walk away from easy labor without a whip to drive it. They knew the choices a human could expect, in this land.
Brian, however, had choices. He turned his flashlight back to the stone wall of the corridor, wryly comparing it to this new woman in his life. She had about as much give in her as that sandstone. She was as abrasive, and as brittle, and usually as cold. All in all, not a comfortable person to find on the other side of your bed when you woke up in the morning.
And dangerous. Life with her was walking through a minefield. Oh, he knew why she showed the world nothing but detonators and foul language. The things she'd been through would have killed a lesser woman, or driven her insane. That didn't drop the tension to a level he could bear.
Her drinking could, for a little while. But when she sobered up she was more dangerous than before. So he mostly tried to get out of her way, be someplace quiet and relatively safe like this dusty dark rabbit-warren of ancient tunnels and rooms that twisted around under the hilltop and keep like Fiona's green maze.
