No. She didn't have to take this. She didn't have to stay here. There were rules for hauntings. Those tales bound their ghosts to certain places. She could escape.
Not towards the dragon. Her forest stretched westward, away from the marsh and from Fiona's cottage. She could walk for miles that way and still hold her vow to preserve the land. She staggered to her feet, unsteady with the shock and with the whisky still flowing through her veins. Drunk. That was it, not ghosts but whisky. Another form of seeing spirits.
She didn't touch the oak, though, didn't sink her own spirit into the forest's intricate weave. She didn't feel the need for any more closed-circuit TV images from Tir na Nog. Instead, she shuffled through her pockets and her automatic Great North Woods checklist -- the Bic lighter that Jo always laughed at because neither of them smoked, the combination whistle, match-safe and compass, the Swiss Army Knife and ten yards of parachute cord -- all the gear she'd carried since her first Girl Scout overnight.
And then there was that damned Gurkha knife hanging from her belt, so heavy it felt like it dragged her sideways. Brian told her to always carry the ugly kukri, even in the keep. He seemed completely blind to the memories it brought.
Or maybe he thought it was important enough to be worth the cost.
She turned her back on the keep and all the booze she could ever dream of drinking. She concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other, walking away. One step at a time. One day at a time.
The rain fell, not touching her, steady and slow, no faster than the soil could absorb it. As it soaked in it released the forest's perfume. She drank it straight, the mingled rot and growth of an incredibly complex living thing, deep into her lungs, and felt the clean air and time and exercise wash the whisky from her blood. She walked until the clouds turned dark above her, and twice she caught glimpses of the fox trotting through the woods beside her. Even glimpses were a gift.
As the light faded, she picked out another oak and touched it, gently, not going deep but renewing her bond and her vision of the land close by. She blinked at what she found, and her hand caressed the hilt of the kukri as she thought about it. Not a ghost this time, but she might decide to make it one . . .
She asked the forest for a hollow tree and a pair of rabbits, fat and female, too old to bear another litter of tiny fuzzball bunnies. She walked about fifty yards through the forest and found them in a small open glade. She thanked the rabbits for their gift before she lopped their heads off with the kukri.
A dead limb offered firewood, dry but sound from the core, and she kindled a fire in front of a Maureen-sized hollow in the trunk of a lime-tree large enough that she couldn't span the bole with her outstretched arms. While the fire burned to coals she cleaned and skinned and spitted the rabbits on green maple saplings. The forest watched and waited, guarding her, listening to a frightened heartbeat in the shadows.
The smell of roast meat filled the clearing. She turned the spits every few minutes, watching the fat boil up and sizzle down into the coals, thinking, remembering.
She looked beyond the red glow of her fire, into the darkness under the far trees. "The second rabbit is for you. If I don't decide to kill you first."
One of the shadows detached itself from its tree and stepped forward, becoming a man. She felt his fear. He came closer in spite of it. Maureen clenched her fists, digging fingernails into the pain of her own flesh, as his face took form in the fire's glow. The dungeon walls closed in around her.
Padric. Dougal MacKenzie's master falconer and huntsman, jailer, torturer, slave.
Chapter Nine
Thunder rumbled in the distance, faint but menacing. Khe'sha shivered. The sun faded, bringing an icy touch to the waters of the marsh, and gusts of wind roiled the surface. They whipped the sawgrass flat in flashing whorls and pulled pine-smell down from the forest. A storm was brewing. But he couldn't leave the nest mound. The time of hatching had come.
{All life was an egg, a black egg in darkness,}
{Black inside, black outside, all was the egg.}
{The earth was inside, the earth lay in darkness,}
{The sun was inside, giving no light.}
{Pan'gu was inside, both mother and father,}
{Pan'gu who had laid the dark egg was inside it.}
He chanted the ancient story in mind-speech, binding tradition to the new lives in the nest, tying them to clan and blood across the ages and the edges of the world. Sha'khe should have joined him, repeating the words as they took turns and turns again as the eggs trembled on the edge of hatching, but Sha'khe was dead. Khe'sha had to stay and guard and chant for both of them.
Thunder boomed again over the hilltops, much nearer, and he ducked his head close to the water. Black clouds billowed on the horizon. The rain he feared was coming, coming in a sudden fierce storm that could chill or drown his hatchlings just as they broke forth from their shells. The songs said that he should let such chances happen, praising them as he praised the warmth of the sun. The songs said that luck was as important to a hatchling as strength.
Luck? He glared up at the dark tower on the hilltop. In this land, luck didn't bring storms down upon your head or cause them to pass safely by. The weather was her mood, her whim. The red witch. Someday soon, he would taste her blood.
But now he must stand guard and sing. He told the tiny lives of that first hatching: of Pan'gu
