Apparently he made an effective ghost. He wondered what the woman had seen. Old scars, yes, everyone who knew Dougal would know those. Those had to match. His new scars itched like true healing wounds, wrist and neck and belly. No way of knowing how Fiona chose that pattern, whether she drew memories out of the redhead's blood scattered through the hedge maze or had just guessed at the death-cuts.
According to rumor, only Maureen would know what she'd left behind to wait for the flames. No one else had seen Dougal's corpse. But gossip about his death spread on the winds of magic and flowed through the waters beneath the land, just as the news of Fiona's defeat had followed close behind. The land knew many things.
He wondered what the tower would say. Even within the Old Blood, Fergus knew that his skills were rare. Few believed that stone could see and hear and speak. He knew otherwise. You just had to ask the right questions and have the Power to listen.
Stones as old as these would have seen a lot of blood. They wouldn't think in terms of days or weeks or even years. Centuries, yes, rain and wind eating the walls grain by patient grain -- that they'd notice. They would remember Dougal's coming and the changes that he'd made. They would remember a thing as rare as fire.
Fergus trailed his hand along the wall, listening, walking slowly through the rain. Old, older, younger, older, the stones told him how they'd stood and the fleeting lives they'd framed.
And the Power that flowed through them.
Fiona had lost interest in him. She wanted news of her half-brother and this new witch. If they went elsewhere, her mind went elsewhere, following them. Fiona was riding Cáitlin now.
Fiona didn't care about stone, about the craft and art and magic of working it, about the ways to draw it up and pile it high and delve it deep and frame air and light with it and stand it strong against the ages. Above all, she didn't understand the Power in it. He felt that Power. He felt that life. He felt pain and long-simmering anger, deep down beneath, and a flicker of hope that he could be the healing touch it needed.
He followed that sense, to older stone and yet older, deeper into the heart of the keep. He felt the fear around him, peeking from between the slats of shuttered windows. Dougal's ghost walked his cobbled courtyard, and the humans listened to the rumbles of departing thunder and heard death in them. He could go where he willed, take whatever time was necessary. No one dared to face him.
Old oak waited for him, set strong in old stone and bound about with old iron and old spells. The door was locked. He closed his eyes and set his hand on the pull-ring. Iron. Only one like Fergus could do this, talking to the cold hard crystals that sucked magic into themselves and gave back pain to the Old Blood. He felt the icy fire burning the palm of his hand, but as the metal drew Power from him he used it to align crystal with crystal, stress with stress, until the lock answered him and opened.
The way led downward, to anger that had darkened these stones for centuries.
* * *
Fiona chewed on her lip. She studied the branching diagram on her laptop screen, typed in a few words, added another branch, and frowned.
Something like genetics, this was, a decision tree that broadened with every step. When she charted genealogy, each level narrowed from past to present. She found that more pleasing. She liked to narrow people's choices until nothing remained but the path she set for them.
She pushed her chair back from the computer and rested her eyes. Shadows formed out of the darkness beyond the pool of lamplight -- Cáitlin squatting inelegant on her haunches, wincing with pain and wishing herself closer to a fire, Fergus stirring soaked ash inside a burned-out tower. Nothing interesting. She left them to their boredom.
The orange lamplight glinted off of stainless steel, gray and green enamel, the curve of Dewar flask and Petrie dish and test tube. These instruments gave her facts, but more importantly they fed her image as a scientific witch.
None of this uncertainty. Who would have predicted that Maureen would leave her castle to eat scorched rabbit and sleep in a hollow tree? Who would have predicted that Brian would simply disappear before her eyes?
It had been such an elegant plot. And it had separated him from his darling Maureen. But she'd really rather know exactly where he was, or better, have him back under her control. She'd tried to trace him through the mists of the layered worlds, drawing on the blood ties between them and the tissue samples she'd stored in liquid nitrogen. She'd come up empty.
Oh, she'd lost him before, once and then again, smelling out the faint traces as he stepped through this gate or that, but she'd always known whether he was alive or dead. Even dead meat would carry their shared DNA. She'd know a vector even if she lacked the distance to place him on the map. But now he had walked behind some wall and vanished totally.
She frowned again and added another "what if" to the branching flow chart. "What if" he hadn't left at all, but had simply learned to hide from her the same way that she hid from him? She didn't like that one. It implied he was turning from brute force to finesse, from his lifelong study of weapons and the fighting arts to the heritage of his blood. That he was starting to use his brain, a disused tool in his kit. Then he'd have both.
Then he would have to die.
That was a pity. He was a beautiful boy, and he carried such interesting genes. She wanted a son to mate with
