She looked at her wrist. The vixen's bite had healed, leaving faint pale scars on top and bottom where fangs had torn her skin. Thanks for the memories. Memories of the sweet oblivion of booze.
Alcohol. Alcoholic. A shudder ran down her spine. Sobriety looked like a black gap as wide as the Grand Canyon. Never take another drink? Where the hell had that notion come from?
The forest wanted her sober.
That bite grabbed her attention more than Brian's quiet protests ever had. He'd been too polite to say what needed saying. He'd stayed with her, far too long. Trust Mother Nature for "tough love," personified by a true bitch goddess.
The air still reeked of whisky. She eyed the bottle, sitting upside down against the trunk of the old beech. Right side up, there'd be a trickle of nectar gathering in the bottom by now, the film from the glass walls sliding down. You could get a few more drops that way . . .
Jesus, what a lush!
How do you stay sober? Classic AA question. She'd been to the meetings. You stay sober one drink at a time. The next one. That's all. Turning down one drink isn't hard. You've done that a thousand times before.
She knew the rules. Whatever "hitting bottom" meant, she thought she qualified. Admit that you're an alcoholic. One day at a time. She didn't know about that "higher power" shit. Her image of God was too mixed up with Daddy, not a good concept for positive reinforcement. Maybe she should hand her problem to the forest, instead. She believed in it.
What did the forest want of her? She stopped next to an oak, rough-barked and thick and ancient but not the patriarch of the forest. Not the Summer Country's incarnation of Father Oak. Her hands explored the trunk, tasting the bitterness of oak-tannin through her palms, feeling deep into the xylem and phloem, the lignin and cellulose in rings of summer and winter wood even here in the unchanging Summer Country.
It welcomed the rain. It wanted more. Dougal had held tight control on everything that way, just like he'd starved her to control her and weaken her magic.
Maureen relaxed into the land, the currents of water beneath it and the flow of air above and the life between the two. She summoned clouds again, but gentle this time. The rain pattered down around her, rustling the leaves and soaking slowly into the ground and raising the damp healthy mould-rot incense from the soil. No storms, not another toad-strangler with lightning stabbing down to mirror her rage. A gentle spring rain.
Deep into the heart of the forest, she asked how much and how long before the roots and surface sponge could take no more. An inch seemed to be the answer, spread over a day or maybe two. That wouldn't cause the swamp to rise, not with the natural capacity of an old-growth forest to retard runoff. That wouldn't bring danger to the dragon's nest. The oak would like more, to recharge aquifers and the deep subsoil that its taproot touched, but she voted for a balance. The dragon hated her, but she didn't hate the dragon.
That was the other thing. She remembered that her forest wasn't just wood and leaf and stone and small crawling decomposers. It defended her, and she had enemies. It saw and smelled and felt what passed within it. God knows, it could stop trespassers and kill them if it wished. Just ask Jo and David.
Or Sean. His skeleton lay somewhere close by, slowly adding calcium to the soil as the leafy acid loam dissolved it. Best use he'd ever had.
Maureen shuddered. Sometimes she thought this land was one long booze-induced DT session as her pickled brain-cells tried to detox in a drunk ward of Naskeag General's Kelly Four. Or maybe she was spaced out on one of those psycho-drugs the shrinks had tried.
{It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you.}
Now the fox was quoting Maureen's flip clichés back at her. She wished the forest had picked up a little less of Jo's personality from their bonding.
But it was a good point. She let her thoughts slip into the tree again, and through the tree into the net of rootlets and mycelium that intertwined for miles around and bound the entire wildwood into one living unit. If she had defenses, she ought to use them. If she had ears, she damned well ought to listen.
Or use her million eyes. A slim shadow slipped through the woods, short dark hair and olive skin, androgynous. It wore gray rags, torn by thorns and briars.
Sick memory settled in Maureen's belly. Fiona's twin, that was, the treacherous bastard who'd bewitched her into Dougal's hands. Sean's etched crumbling skeleton brought back to life. How much could healing magic do?
Or necromancy? But the forest still touched his bones, still wrapped them in briars and rootlets and fungi hungry for the minerals he bore. He was dead. The forest told her that, for true.
Then what walked her lands?
What, not who. Celtic myth told many tales of ghosts. The ones she remembered did not call them good omens.
It could be worse. It could be Dougal, back to gnaw at your soul and sanity.
As if the thought had given him form, the forest showed her another scene. A small gnarled man watched the keep's open gate through the rain. Old scars curled around his arms and seamed his body. Dark empty pits replaced his eyes, even though he acted as if he had full sight, and a raw line of red crossed the joining of his neck to his body.
Maureen broke her bond with the tree. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed into a shivering huddle among the roots.
Dougal. She stared at her hands, seeing blood fresh and dripping, feeling the warm slick stickiness of it. She smelled smoke, not the clean sharp aromatic smoke of the kitchen cookstoves or a campfire stoked with well-dried yellow birch but the
