by Kevin Hearne
Since I’m the only real Druid left, the witches are getting away with a lot more than they used to, and I confess I tend to look at them all as guilty until proven innocent, though I realize that’s not very fair of me.
This witch couldn’t read auras very well, if at all, or she would have shown some sign as she passed me. Aura readers always give me a double take, because mine doesn’t match the twenty-one-year-old redheaded lad that I look like.
Hey, Oberon, there’s a young woman coming out with three coffees who’s pretty weird, I called in my mind. See what you can smell on her.
Definitely not. You don’t want to do that.
I beg your pardon? What stuff from my shop?
Which plants?
And a most excellent hound you are. I appreciate your help. Can you tell me if the plants you smelled were floral and sweet smelling, or perhaps bitter, maybe earthy?
That told me she wasn’t into love potions, and she wasn’t into siccing demons on people or sending plagues and agues either. It meant she probably wasn’t up to anything too dangerous at the moment, and I could ignore her safely. Thank you, Oberon, that’s very interesting. You just earned yourself a sausage.
It’s a deal. I’ll be out soon, the line’s moving.
Once I got to the counter, I bought a blue handmade ceramic mug and had the supercrunchy barista, Xypop, fix my San Francisco cappuccino in it. Since I enjoyed saying her name so much, I asked her to get me a few more things (“Xypop, do you still sell Cosmic Ray’s guide to mountain bike trails?”) and wound up buying stuff I didn’t need. She even sold me some baked vegan dog biscuits, which I purchased gleefully as a joke. I’d wait for Oberon to choke a couple down, then I’d tell him they were meatless and it was all Xypop’s fault.
I forgot about the three-coffee witch for ten whole minutes. Just before we left town to the east and the road curved north and turned to Highway 89, I saw her in the passenger seat of a maroon Honda Civic that was waiting for an opportunity to pull out of a gas station. That opportunity came right behind me, and I quickly checked out her companions in the rearview mirror to see if I’d been right about the maiden-mother-crone thing.
I hadn’t. “Damn it, now I’m paranoid,” I said aloud.
“What? Where’d you hear about Thorazine?”
“I need to get you some new movies to watch while I’m at work,” I said, keeping one eye on the witch—or witches—in my mirror. The other two were just as young as the first one, just as attractive, and their auras were the same angry red as well, except I couldn’t discern in the mirror whether they had the thin sliver of white interference about their heads. It raised many questions in my mind, but Oberon derailed me temporarily from considering them.
“I don’t like them,” I said. “I watch them for research so that I can figure out how these people think and talk. It takes a lot of work to make people think I grew up here, you know. I should make you watch Jane Austen dramas for a week, and then you’ll be begging me to bring back Juno.”
“You want sensible? Fine. Sense and Sensibility it is. We’ll see how you like it.”
I returned my attention to the rearview mirror. Three young women raised unsettling possibilities when I couldn’t see their auras well. It was possible—even likely—that the other two were simply sorority sisters of Coffee Witch (as I’d come to think of her), and not witches themselves. But since they had almost identical auras to Coffee Witch, and they were also wearing velour tracksuits, it suggested to me a unity of purpose for which covens are known. The driver was blond and had a pink suit on and dark sunglasses—I’d call her Pinky. She had really thin lips and she was flapping them in an irritated manner, arguing about something with one or both of her passengers. In the backseat, on the passenger side, sat another brunette in a royal blue tracksuit with a deep tan. I named her Coppertone, and she was leaning forward to better hear what Pinky had to say, a frown on her face.
I really hoped I wasn’t looking at a coven of young witches. With auras like that and the illusion of invincibility that all young people have, they were liable to try something immensely stupid. In maiden-mother-crone covens, the mother figure tends to balance out the other two. The maiden says hell, let’s do some unspeakable shit because I’m strong and I’ll survive the consequences if things go wrong, and the crone says why not, let’s do some unspeakable shit because I’m going to die soon anyway, but the mother usually says let’s all chill out and think about this, hedge our bets and play it safe.
Whatever their argument was, they subsided after a while, and drove in silence behind me all the way onto the plateau. It actually made me nervous: Were they following me for some reason, or was this merely a coincidence? Had they spotted my aura after all, and now they wanted to find out exactly why the guy who looked twenty-one had an energy signature of extreme maturity and magical power?
The few people in Tempe who know what I really am have secrets of their own to keep, so I didn’t think they’d tell anyone (much less these youngsters) that I’m older than the New Testament. But you never know: It seems like everyone wants the secret of eternal youth, and they’re willing to do most anything to lay hold of it. Maybe somebody suggested to these ladies that I had the answer. Or maybe their trip was nothing more than what it appeared to be, three college girls taking a trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
I took Highway 67 for a short stretch south of Highway 89, then cut west on Forest Service Road 461 toward Jacob Lake. At that point I finally lost my tail: I took FSR 282 south, skirting Jacob Lake and continuing down a sinuous dirt track for several miles, while Coffee Witch & co. continued on 461, presumably to visit the inn above the lake. I relaxed and pushed them out of my mind; they were doubtless going there for a slice of the famous pie before they drove down to the North Rim.
I pulled off to the side of the road and parked once we got to a densely forested area. I sucked in a lungful of early-autumn air and admired the trees before me. Mostly old-growth ponderosa with a few mixed conifers here and there; pockets of aspen were scattered about, the thin white fingers of their trunks waving hello in the wind.
After I let Oberon out, I kicked off my sandals and sent a greeting to the earth through my knotted tattoos, which were much more than personal decoration: They were the visual evidence of my magical bond to the earth. The indigo knotwork began—if Celtic knots can be said to begin anywhere—on the back of my right hand, then the threads of it traveled up my arm, circled beneath my shoulder, and continued down my right side all the way to the sole of my foot. While in contact with the earth, I had all its power on t
ap if I needed it, for as I am bound to the earth, it is bound to me.
Talking to the earth is tricky, because it doesn’t follow the syntax of human language and it works in geological time. If I want to commune directly with what people call Gaia, it takes a deep trance and about a week to say hello. What I do instead is speak to her proxies, the elementals who dwell in a defined ecosystem. It’s akin to talking to a worker bee instead of the queen, since the queen is rarely available and the bee in this case can speak for her.
The speaking itself is not speaking at all. It’s more like pheromone emissions containing my emotions bundled into nouns and verbs—though that explanation doesn’t really cover it, and it leaches away a good deal of the fun. It’s simpler to just call it Druidry, the magic of binding the natural world. It’s tough to render such communication into mere words, but here’s an approximation of what I sent to the local elemental: //Druid greets Kaibab / Health / Harmony / Query:: Hunt?//
The response thrummed quickly through my tattoos. //Kaibab greets Druid / Welcome / Rest / Hunt / Nourish self / Harmony//
You don’t know what warm fuzzies are until you get personally welcomed to a forest by its avatar. //Gratitude / Contentment / Harmony// I replied.
He didn’t have to ask me twice. I shucked off my clothes and put them in the trunk, then I hid the car keys inside the front tire well. Going onto all fours, I triggered the transformation into a wolfhound and sneezed, because the abrupt ability to smell fifty times better can do that to a fella. I can bind myself to four different animal shapes, but when I’m a hound I have a thick red coat with dark markings on my right side where my tattoos are. We lit out into the woods with gusto, a red dog and a gray dog, friends in the forest padding across a carpet of needles and drinking in the crisp scent of pine.
We caught the scent of the Kaibab deer herd after about a half hour, and we split up. I drove a three-point buck south to Oberon, and he pounced on him successfully and brought him down. I’m not a huge fan of raw venison, even in hound form, so I let Oberon go to it and found a nice spot in a meadow to sun myself some distance away.
I was rolling around on my back, enjoying the smell and tickle of the grass, the sound of my own playful thrashing, when terror and loathing seized me.
//Kaibab needs Druid / Jacob Lake / Help / Discord//
The air rushed out of my lungs and all sound stopped, as if there were a temporary vacuum. The chirp of birds and hum of insects, the wind whispering in the trees—all of it was gone. The sounds came back tentatively after a few seconds, but a deeper silence remained.
//Query:: Kaibab?// I got no answer, not even to repeated calls.
Worry clenched at my heart. Had I become unbound from the earth, unbound from my friend? I tried something else. Oberon, can you hear me?
Yes. I need you in the meadow to the east.
There is trouble at Jacob Lake. Coffee Witch came immediately to mind, but I had no idea what she and her friends could have done to upset Kaibab. Can you find your way there by getting back to the road and following it north?
I’m going to fly there. I unloosed the knot that bound me to hound form and tied myself to a different shape, this time a great horned owl. Look for me nearby or wait by the lakeshore if you don’t see me.
I don’t know. Maybe.
Oberon trotted into the meadow as I leapt into the air, flapping hard to gain altitude.
Thanks, buddy. I’ll see you soon. I circled to the north and tried to gain speed. Owls are more renowned for their silence than their swiftness, but I still figured it was the fastest way for me to get back to Jacob Lake, and if there was trouble there, then a silent approach would serve me well.
Jacob Lake is actually a dissolution sinkhole formed in the limestone of the plateau. It’s been there for ages, and it’s the main watering hole for wild animals in the area. A large meadow surrounds it, and farther back the ponderosas and aspens give it a majestic skyline. There’s also a tiny village by the same name a bit to the north, where the inn is located, so I didn’t know if the trouble was by the actual lake or “in town.”
I floated just above the tops of the trees so that I wouldn’t waste any time in maneuvers, taking the straightest line to the lake. Once in range of the meadow and the lake in the center of it, I spied nothing down there but a dozen wild horses munching on the last grasses of the season. I thought a circuit of the lake would be prudent, so I began to circle it counterclockwise, staying above the trees and looking below. When I got around to the west side—nine o’clock in dogfighter’s terms—I saw a flash of pale flesh below the canopy and banked around to take a better look. I heard odd screeching noises, too, and then tense voices:
“I don’t think you should kill it, because that will be like releasing it.”
“It can’t break the circle even if it escapes the animal. It’ll still be bound.”
“Fine, but how do we get its power into us?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t expect this half-assed splicing of spells to work!”
“So you didn’t even plan for the eventuality?”
The voices belonged to three familiar naked women, who were all witches beyond a doubt now. They were clustered around something on the ground, and I decided to light in a pine tree behind them to take stock of the situation and prevent them from seeing me accidentally. What little noise I made upon landing was masked, no doubt, by the frantic animal cries coming from the vicinity of the women. Their bodies were blocking whatever was making the cries, and they were the types of bodies that cause distraction.
They were easy to tell apart even without their tracksuits on. Coffee was on the left, pale with an occasional dark freckle and her hair still tied in a ponytail; the blond, thin-lipped one whom I called Pinky was in the center, and Coppertone stood on the right—tanned all over, I noticed. None of them had neglected to visit the gym regularly. “No, I didn’t,” said Pinky with some asperity. “And neither did either of you, so you can aim that blame somewhere else.”
“Well, we have to try something,” said Coffee.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Pinky snapped.
Though I thought I knew what was going on, I couldn’t quite believe that they had managed it. I needed to know more before I leapt to any conclusions. I glided silently to the earth and released myself from the owl shape, back to my human form again.
I quietly cast camouflage on myself, which is the nearest I can come to invisibility. It binds my pigment to my surroundings, so that I become practically invisible when I remain still. People can see me if I move quickly, but if I imitate the Rock of Gibraltar they have to really know I’m there to spot me. I figured it was best: Naked women rarely welcome the approach of strange naked men, except in porn movies.
Tiptoeing around to the left of the trio, my suspicions were confirmed: Somehow, this coven of callow witches had succeeded in capturing and binding a forest elemental. A small metal cage was fairly bouncing on the forest floor, and inside was frenzied Kaibab squirrel in the most exquisite pain, because it was trying to contain the spirit of the entire forest in its wee little body. Kaibab squirrels are unique to the plateau, with white fluffy tails and black, tufted ears that look like tassels. They evolved there in geographic isolation and occupy a vital ecological niche—they’re the face of the plateau, in many ways—but they aren’t constitutionally capable of holding an elemental inside of them. I think the only reason this one was still alive w
as because the elemental really wanted it that way. Its fur rippled and its eyes bulged, it twitched and spasmed and chittered in terror, and I felt sorry for it.
And angry.
I looked around to see if I could discern how they had managed this. There wasn’t an obvious cauldron hanging over a fire with an unholy stench bubbling forth; there wasn’t a stone altar with a sacrifice on it, bleeding its life away. They had to have used some mechanism to bind Kaibab—they could not have simply bid him to come and take up residence in a squirrel. Finally I spotted it: Carved carefully into the bark of the ponderosa behind the stone circle was the Seal of Arielis, a pernicious seal from the Seventh Book of Moses originally intended to bind one of the Seven Great Princes of Hell. Since its publication in nineteenth-century Germany, witches of various stripes had been using it to bind all manner of spirits and compel their obedience. They’d found it to be one of the few fail-safes in magic: Either the spirit would come and be firmly bound by the Seal, or it wouldn’t work, period, and all they’d lose was some time and maybe an eye of newt. These witches had traced the carving with crushed knotweed, a common herb used in binding spells, and the same Seal was printed on a piece of parchment resting underneath the squirrel’s cage.
I sighed. “You know, when that elemental gets out of there,” I said, “you’re going to wish you’d left well enough alone.”
“Who said that?” Coffee spun in my direction but utterly failed to see me as I remained still. Pinky and Coppertone started looking all around, even up in the trees, but they had no better luck than Coffee did.
“Where are you?” Coppertone asked.
“Who are you?” Pinky called.
“Who I am doesn’t matter. What I am is a Druid, and you’ve broken Druidic law by binding an elemental against its will.”
And they’d picked one of the weaker, more vulnerable ones, probably on purpose. I doubt they would have been able to bind Amazon, for example, or Appalachia. They’d settled for one of the smallest elementals on earth, thinking perhaps its wee size and isolation would keep anyone from noticing what they were doing. But I would have heard Kaibab’s call from anyplace on the planet and come running; it was their bad luck they’d tried it when I was so close by.
