She needed a drink.
Instead, she grabbed her rabbit from the fire, juggling hot grease on the green wooden spit until she found a spot that was both cooked and cool enough to eat. Tough, gamy, unsalted and no herbs, she chewed and criticized her cooking. And her mind listed bay and sorrel and sage that she'd seen, and bushes of rosemary, that's for remembrance, and sweet maple sap and apples and a salt lick -- running off on culinary tangents to escape the twin questions of Padric and blood. Her back-brain saw him and saw Dougal behind him and sent her hand twitching for the knife.
She could live out here without the keep. The forest welcomed and protected her. Something heavy nudged her elbow, and she looked down into deep yellow pools of eyes set in ebony fur. The black leopard settled warm under her arm, purring in an earthquake rumble and staring across the fire at his former master. Padric and the cat studied each other, quiet and appraising, as if their eyes renegotiated their old relationship of one slave to another. The cat yawned. Padric took another bite, and chewed.
Slave. Dougal had been a beast-master, able to force the cat and the dragons to obey his will, owning Padric's soul. For Dougal, even Maureen had been just another dangerous animal to tame. That was why she'd let Padric walk away. But it would be so fucking easy to gut him like one of those suicidal bunnies. Part of her wanted that so much she quivered with the tension.
Maureen lowered one end of her spit, letting the rabbit slide off under the leopard's nose. He sniffed at it, looked back at her with a faint quizzical tilt to his whiskers that seemed to ask why she'd cooked all the goodness out of it if she wasn't going to eat it, and then licked his chops.
"Not hungry." If she ate now, she'd probably just puke the meat back up when she butchered Padric. If.
The rabbit vanished in one gulp. Padric stared the carcass down the cat's throat as if he was tempted to dive in after it. He looked hungry.
But he nodded. "More than one way to tame a cat."
"Apparently he comes with the castle." The whole scene shimmered with surrealism, something by Kafka or Dali. Maureen wondered if she'd ever break free of the dissociation and depersonalization that was almost, but not quite, schizophrenia. PTSD.
And she was about to commit another act of trauma. Getting good at it, aren't we? Practice makes perfect? Pretty soon you'll turn into Fiona, so hardened that nothing outside yourself has any meaning.
She rested her hand on the kukri, caressing its solid reliable coldness.
"What the hell you want?"
He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket and then his hands on his pants. So much for manners. But then, she hadn't provided napkins or finger bowls.
Then he reached up and unwound the scarf from his neck. It turned into a rope. Fresh shiny hemp, ending in a hangman's noose. "I've come to ask for help, with my life as the price."
You had to give him points for drama. Maureen's stomach twisted in her belly, and she dropped her hand from the knife. The cat shoved his head under her fingers, and she scratched his ears and forehead reflexively. He purred again. She felt the vibration in her teeth.
"What kind of help? For who?"
"Long story. The short answer is, for slaves."
Well, he knew the hot buttons. "Okay, you've bought the time for the long version."
He eyed the knife and the cat. Did he prefer them to the rope? Faster? Maureen didn't know if she had the guts to hang a man. That took premeditation, and she wasn't strong on malice aforethought. Offering her the rope was a good choice. Psychology.
He looked like he was picking words. "Slaves run away. Some of them even survive. There is a keep . . . was a keep, where they were welcome. A couple of Old Ones who treated humans like people. Like they say you do." He shrugged.
"About three hundred of them, men, women, children. I got there just after it happened. A few of the neighboring Lords and Ladies decided we were powerful enough to be a threat. End of keep. End of village. End of a couple of hundred lives."
He paused and shuddered, as if unable to talk for a moment. "Dougal had been part of the plot, another one of his games. That's how I knew about it, how I knew where to find them. Men burned to the bone but still walking, holding dead children but not knowing they were dead because smoke and fire had destroyed sight and their own pain kept them from feeling the cold seeping through the body. Women with empty faces and skirts soaked in blood. A child bound to a post by his own guts and left alive for the ravens."
Silence hung between them, and the images he'd invoked, and lasted long. Maureen had read enough about ancient warfare that she could see it. Crude stuff, almost Biblical, and she'd bet that the Old Ones didn't pretty it up any.
The shadows had darkened as the small fire died down to red coals shrouded in ash. Now Padric's face glowed faintly in the night, and the rope around his neck glistened like fresh blood. Screw the symbolism. "What the fuck you want me to do about it? Think I'm the Second Coming of Jesus, here to raise the dead?"
He crossed himself. She remembered him crossing himself when he'd met her with Dougal's falcon on his wrist and her with the knife bare in her hand. But all he'd asked for was the time to release all the birds before he died. Freedom for them, nothing for himself. Instead, she'd set him free.
Must be damned hard to hold your faith in God in a place like this.
"Some survived. Some got away and
