She searched her deadly spider-web for the touch of her hedge, found the fierce glee of hounds that had brought the fox to bay. The trap had closed, walling her enemy into a tightening noose of green. No, enemies. The brambles told of two pockets, two knots of sweat and fear and hatred. The thorns had drawn blood. She asked the grasses under her hand, and they told her the guests tasted of Old Blood instead of human. Her enemies grew bold and foolish.
Mostly foolish. Of all the Old Ones walking the green grass of the Summer Country, only Maureen and her sex-mad sister had the strength to break through that hedge and live. And the hedge would have remembered their distinctive taste. Maureen had used her own blood in the unbinding spell.
Fiona stood and stretched, a calculated pose smooth and supple like a cat rising, loosening and testing every single bone and muscle and tendon from whiskers to tail-tip, making sure her claws were sharp for the hunt. Her guests could wait. The hedge wouldn't kill them yet. And she might have a use for living bodies bound to her will. It depended on just who had underestimated her.
But they'd suffer, suffer in a way that would spread fear and rumor through the land. She had to dream up some form of exquisite, public humiliation that went beyond mere death. Otherwise there'd be twenty or thirty more following in their steps, today, tomorrow, next week. Just like the ravens feeding at the carcass of the fallen dragon.
Fiona strolled on, relaxed, her eyes measuring the dry-stone wall that separated her fields from the wildwood. Even the moss and lichen belonged to her. It formed the frame of her picture, her composition in green and brown and gray. One stone lay on the sod, pushed loose by the branches of a massive holly just within Maureen's lands.
That was wrong. The holly shouldn't be taking sides. He was an ancient force, almost a god ruling this corner of the forest. He'd never belonged to Dougal, just as the pasture oak had never belonged to Fiona.
She replaced the stone and wove a binding on it, using moss and lichen as her threads. She stood for a moment and studied the holly, her eyes narrowed and a frown-line creasing her forehead.
No, she would never underestimate her enemy again.
* * *
The hedge barred her way, thorn and branch and root, sullen, resentful after once tasting freedom. It remembered her defeat, just as the prisoners it held had thought they would find weakness replacing her former strength. She slid her mind into the tangle of thorns and pinched a bud here, a rootlet there, tightening the vascular structure of the stems until leaves knew the thirst of drought. She'd given the plants mind enough to feel fear.
The nearest rose nodded in surrender, spokes-flower for the whole. Gnarled hawthorns bent and shuffled aside, pulling greenbriar and blackthorn and bramble with them and opening a grassy path where none had existed a moment earlier.
The path cut through her maze, straight to a dense knot of green. As she strolled along, she felt quivering tension on each side, anticipation like a zoo at feeding time. She kept these plants starved for nitrogen and phosphorous, just as Dougal had kept his dragons hungry. Her hedge craved flesh and blood and bone. Maureen had been too soft to kill an enemy, but Fiona knew that the price of weakness was pain and slavery and death.
Leaves parted. They revealed a face, broad and brown and feral with wide eyes showing terror. They parted further and showed her a short body, stocky and lumpy with muscles, arms and legs wrapped in the hungry tangling vines that held the gnome-shape tight and waited for her will.
Fiona smiled. "So. 'Tis little Fergus that's come calling. Welcome to my cottage, love. Too bad you weren't invited."
Vines trembled as the gnome's muscles bunched and relaxed and twisted. His strength and magic broke two of the greenbriar strands, but four new bindings whipped across and took their places. Two more spiraled around his throat and tightened. His eyes bulged and he fought for breath.
Again Fiona dipped her thoughts into the hedge. She found the other knot of vines and sent a summons. Screams answered it, and the rattle of thrashing branches as the plants lifted her second enemy from the ground and passed the body along new tunnels through the maze. She cocked her head at the sounds.
"A friend of yours, love? Sounds female, and too sweet-voiced to match your ugliness." Fiona relaxed the thorns and let him breathe again. Blood trickled down from deep scratches on his throat.
The hedge rustled as it lifted him, bringing him to eye-level so that she could talk more comfortably. "And what brings you courting death, love, and why shouldn't I be giving it to you and to your sweetheart?"
The gnome cursed and spat. "No sweetheart. Saw Cáitlin snooping around when I first walked through your fields. One of your kind, not mine." He struggled again, but the thorns gripped firm and he weakened steadily as she held him free of the earth that gave him strength.
"Cáitlin? Oh, that would be a pairing. I should bind you together with claws free and watch the flying fur, drop the both of you into a bull-pit and charge admission. But I've asked you a question, love, and you didn't answer. What brings you to your death?" She asked the vines to twitch around his neck, and they supplied the proper emphasis.
He calmed, saving his powers for a better chance. "You still owe me for the stones. Hearth and threshold, cornerstone and keystone to the arch, bound to your will and the harmony of your house. I spoke to them and carved
