Staked

by Kevin Hearne

  “We can either track it by smell, because by all the drunken gods that lad had a powerful scent, or I might get lucky and be able to spot the path in the magical spectrum.”

  “Smell would probably be faster,” she says.

  “Aye. When we find where the trail ends, that’s where he emerged, and then I can either untether the tree or figure how to destroy the Old Way.”

  “How are they different?”

  “Eh. Kind of like the difference between a private and a public road. Only Druids can use tethered trees freely, because we’re bound to Gaia. Lesser Fae can use some of them but have trouble bringing other people along. Old Ways, though, built by the Tuatha Dé Danann, are like your highways. Anyone can travel them, no magical ability required except maybe having some way to see the path. That’s what I think we’re looking for. Trolls can’t use the tethers to Tír na nÓg unless a Druid shifts with them. Good thing too. Last thing we need are trolls swinging their cocks all around the world.”

  “Well, you can’t follow a scent trail the way you are, and if you shape-shift you’re liable to mess up your shoulder even worse, aren’t you? So that means I should probably play the bloodhound.” She sheds her jacket and drops it to the forest floor.

  “What? No, ye don’t have to go through that. I’ll shape-shift and it’ll be fine. I’ll walk on three legs, keep healing and everything.”

  Greta spins in a circle, scanning the area. “It’s no trouble, Owen. Look, we’re already deep enough into the trees that no one from the house will see anything.” Her hands cross over her stomach, grab the bottom of her shirt, and pull it over her head in a fluid motion.

  “I don’t give a loud juicy shite if anyone sees ye.” I begin to unbutton my shirt as fast as I can with one hand. “I don’t want ye to have to go through the pain of the shift when ye don’t have to.”

  “That’s sweet, Owen,” she says, tossing her shirt to the ground on top of her jacket and reaching for the fly of her jeans, “but I stopped fearing the pain a long time ago. It can’t be avoided, so I just accept it as part of my day.”

  “But this can be avoided, Greta. I told ye I’d do it—”

  “No. Shh!” She puts a finger to her lips and then points uphill, her eyes focused on something over me left shoulder. I turn and see a blue-skinned troll stepping from behind a pine onto the hill. He hasn’t seen us yet; he’s motioning to someone unseen, who becomes seen shortly thereafter: another troll, this one with brown leathery skin, stepping from behind a tree that’s not wide enough to hide their bulk. It’s the anchored end point of an Old Way. They’re coming through from one of the Irish planes.

  I start tearing at my clothes now. “Fecking stew me bollocks in the queen’s own cup o’ tea, the bastard had friends! I’ll keep ’em busy while you’re making the change,” I say, since her shift takes much longer than mine. Two more trolls step through. “And if you can call anyone else to help through your pack link, we could probably use it.”

  She nods and continues undressing. As soon as I’m free of me clothes, I shift to a bear and charge up the knuckles. Greta’s bones start to slide and pop, and that draws the trolls’ attention. There are six of them bunched together now, and I roar as I head uphill to face them in an awkward three-legged lope. Two of them have actual weapons, and the other four scurry about to find some—which means they pull up trees. One wraps his arms around the tree anchoring the Old Way, and another slaps him in the back of the head before he can uproot it. “No, not that one! We need it!”

  “Urgh. Too big anyway,” he says, and by that time I am closing fast on the first blue troll. Unlike the bog troll from yesterday, he has his package securely wrapped, bless him, but has instead decided to adorn himself with the skulls of his smaller victims and the teeth of larger ones. These are strung on ropes about his neck, and so he makes hollow clacking noises when he moves. All about showing off, this one. Has a fancy club that looks carved instead of simply pulled out of the earth. I watch him hold it over his shoulder, wait for the swing, and then, when it comes around to clock me, I rear up and meet it with me brass-coated claws. They punch through the wood and shatter it into splinters, leaving the troll with a handful of toothpicks but no injuries. The leather-brown troll steps in and aims a kick at me from the left side, and of course he tags me in the lame shoulder and sends me tumbling across the hill in a new explosion of pain that pierces right through me nerve blocks and tears apart all the work I’d done to bind it together. Damn but trolls are unfairly strong. I can almost hear Dr. Sudarga saying, “I told you we should have immobilized it.”

  It would be smarter to fight in camouflage now, but Greta’s not finished shifting yet. She’s yelping and howling through the change, and a few of the trolls are wondering what that’s all about—if they were released from Time Islands, like me, they wouldn’t know anything about werewolves. They might be thinking she’s a wounded animal right now—which I suppose she is—instead of an imminent threat. I don’t want them paying too much attention to her, so I have to remain both visible and annoying. I lumber up on me three legs, charge back toward the blue lad, and, with an assist from Gaia, leap up far higher than should be possible—a trick that finally gets Greta to stop calling me Teddy Bear and calling me Air Bear instead. Blue Bones can’t get out from underneath, and he throws up a forearm to block me attack. The brass claws shear right through his arm, rake down his chest, rip apart his skull necklaces, and then dig into his guts, pulling some of them out. He worries about putting them back in with his remaining hand after that, and I don’t have to worry about him. I have five other trolls to worry about, because I have secured their undivided attention. Leather Lad has a real club; the other four have saplings. The guys with actual trees have to slam overhead if they want to hit me; they can’t swing in an arc to catch me, because other trees get in the way. I can dodge them. It’s Leather Lad I have to watch for. He’s got a club with spikes on it, and if he connects I’ll have to go to that fecking hospital again.

  He moves forward, growling, and I hobble in reverse, growling back. He lunges and swings the club in a long, sweeping arc, and I have to leap away and fall on me right side to dodge it, though it still clips me with one of the spikes and leaves a deep scratch. Bears are strong but not terribly agile on the ground, so I’m vulnerable. He steps forward with a “Raahh!” to take advantage, cocking his arm back for another swing, and the lads behind him are grinning and cheering him on, anticipating the kill.

  We’re all surprised, but none more than Leather Lad, when Greta leaps at his unguarded neck and her teeth sink in, taking him to the ground. When he hits the ground, her momentum carries her a bit beyond, but she never lets go of that throat, so she tears it out and takes it with her. She shakes the flesh a couple of times from side to side and then flings it away, showing lots of bloody teeth to the other trolls and barking an angry challenge at them.

  “That’s not a normal wolf,” one of them observes. Quite the scholar for a troll. “Not a normal bear either. Animals shouldn’t be able to do that to us.”

  Ah, he’s referring to the natural armor of troll skin. Well, werewolves shrug off magic, especially low-level stuff like armored hide, and Creidhne’s brass knuckles represent far stronger magic than theirs.

  Four against two now. They’re wary, strong, and slow. It occurs to me that I’m also strong and slow as I struggle to me feet. Greta, though, is faster than a bowel movement after eating a pound of dried figs. She’s also much faster than a troll can think.

  She bunches her muscles and leaps forward, charging the nearest one, and he wastes precious time figuring out that he can’t lift up a tree and smash her with it before she gets to him. So he lifts up the trunk end and hides behind it, effectively blocking Greta from reaching his throat. She bounces off, scurries behind him, and tears up the tendon behind his right ankle, the one that modern people named after some Greek warrior. The troll falls on his arse, and Greta makes sure she isn’t underneath. T
he tree falls down on top of the troll, and while that doesn’t do him terrible damage, it does mean his hands are busy trying to throw it off instead of protecting his throat. Greta tears it out for him and then scampers away as another troll tries to pound her to jelly with his makeshift club. He misses and smashes his friend’s face instead. I’m on the move, though still slow, but the remaining three trolls are not paying attention, because Greta is now far more dangerous in their eyes. They’ve all raised their clubs and are just waiting for Greta to move into smashing range. I’m so hobbled that I can probably do more good as a distraction than anything else, so I position myself behind them and roar as loudly as I can. Two of them are still mighty worried about Greta, but one looks around for me, and he’s the one that Greta goes for. A couple of bounds and a leap and she’s flying at his throat. He catches on at the last split second, instinctively drops the tree, and just swipes at the air in front of his torso in a desperate attempt to ward off her attack. It works: His arm, almost club-like in itself, bats her aside, and she tumbles less than gracefully to the ground.

  “Ha!” one of them crows. “Now we smash—” But he is so very wrong. By choice, Greta’s not a pack leader, but she has all the charisma of one, and in the absence of Sam and Ty her wishes are paramount. Through the pack link she called the parents of me apprentices and their translators, and they arrive in time to swarm the last three trolls and tear them up. A couple start to come for me—they’re so excited they can’t tell friend from foe right now—but they pull up short and turn their heads to Greta. She has them firmly under control. They return to finish off Blue Bones and make sure all the trolls are well and truly a buffet for vultures.

  It’s awkward to stay in bear form with me shoulder so messed up, so I shift back to human and yell about it because the pain gets amplified—an out-o’-place bone shard can wind up somewhere tender during a shape-shift and make the problem worse. Still, that’s six trolls down and the kids were never threatened. I shout, “I love it when we kick arse together!” Greta shakes herself all over and lets her tongue loll out to the side in a canine smile. “I’m going to get me clothes and check out that Old Way.” She lifts her head a couple times in an approximation of a nod and I pick me way downhill, wincing, trying to figure out how to get me cocked-up shoulder bones back to playing nicely together again. It’s going to bother me a good while.

  Getting into me pants takes so long I don’t bother with the shirt, and I just carry it with me. Greta’s waiting by the tree the trolls appeared behind and shifting back to human. I wait for the process to finish before I try talking to her.

  “Siodhachan says that werewolves have trouble traveling the planes. Gunnar used to get powerful sick. The theory is that your protections against magic fight against the plane-shifting and make ye queasy. So it’s best if I go alone.”

  “Careful,” she says, still shuddering from the change.

  “I will be. And I’ll be back as soon as I can manage.”

  Flipping me vision to the magical spectrum, I can see the Old Way laid out before me, lit up like a trail of fireflies at dusk. Six steps forward, turn right three steps, quick left and another left, then right, and with every step the cooling bodies and the pines fade and the lush eternal summer of Tír na nÓg gets closer.

  When I reach the end, I find meself in a nondescript area of Tír na nÓg. There are no helpful signs pointing me to Fand, nor any Fae nearby that I can question about it. It’s hidden perfectly because it’s smack in the middle of nothing special. Cursing at the necessity to shift to a bear again, I shuck off me pants, shift, and follow the trail of troll stench down to the river. That means the trolls arrived by boat from elsewhere, then. A dead end.

  But at least while I’m here I can visit Fand’s prison to see if she left any clues there. And maybe figure out how she escaped.

  Flidais and I put her on one of the Irish planes seldom visited by the winged Fae that adored her so much. It used to have a bonny name long ago, but now it’s a lawless place they call the Badlands, where the trolls and Fir Bolgs and other assorted nasties have chosen to live. It’s connected to Tír na nÓg by a well-guarded Old Way. Popular wisdom holds that you follow the rules if you use it to enter Tír na nÓg, and feck all the rules once you enter the Badlands. Lots of banditry and preying upon one another as soon as you set foot there. If you can make it through that, you tend never to come back again—too much trouble to fight through—and the various beings live as hermits as much as possible in jealously guarded territories. Flidais and I figured that if we hid Fand on that plane far from the Old Way, no one would even find her, much less engineer her escape. Flidais crafted a new Old Way in secret, accessed by hidden cave entrances on either end, and then set what we thought were incorruptible guards on her. The cell she was in was dead material—all glass—and utterly disconnected from the earth: It hung from iron chains set in the ceiling of rock. To ensure she couldn’t stretch out through that tenuous link and connect to the earth, we lined the ceiling with layers of hard plastic. Deprived of energy, she couldn’t unbind anything to escape. Her guards were in iron armor to further discourage binding and even had a hunk of cold iron to use as a talisman should they need it. She was to be given food, water, and anything she wanted to read, and that’s all. She had a chamber pot and had to lock herself up in iron manacles if she wanted the guards to empty it.

  Imagine me surprise when I arrived at her secret prison to find her still in it. I look at the guards—four of them—and they’re the same ones we originally set upon her. Nothing different there. But nothing about this happy scene matches with the fact that I have an Old Way leading to me Grove and a troll who as much as admitted Fand had helped him get there.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve visited, lads. Anything to report? Anything unusual?”

  The guards all tell me no. Fand stares at me from her cell, hatred burning in her eyes, and still blindingly beautiful, like ice crystals in the sun. She hasn’t a stitch on her.

  “When’s the last time ye emptied the chamber pot?” I ask the guards.

  “Few days ago. She hasn’t asked.”

  It gets me thinking. If that isn’t really Fand but an imposter, she wouldn’t want to be chained up in iron. That would mess with the glamour.

  “Time to empty it, I’d say.” I go to the cell and tell her to chain herself up. She’s slow to comply but she does it, and there isn’t a flicker of a change to her appearance.

  “Huh.” Either that really is her or it’s an exceptional illusion to withstand the touch of iron. Still, it can be done. An extra dose of caution is warranted.

  “Give me the hunk of cold iron, lads. I’m going in.”

  Fand’s eyes widen somewhat when she sees me approach with the cold iron in me hand, but she says nothing. When I hunker down and stretch out with the iron to place it against her foot, she shrinks away.

  “Come on, now. I just want to make sure you’re Fand. Are ye someone who’d be killed by the touch o’ cold iron?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “Then let me do this or I’ll have the lads in here to immobilize you completely.”

  She nods and keeps still as I touch the cold iron to her right foot. The skin shudders, then ripples, and her appearance changes as the glamour is dispelled, flowing up from the leg, until I’m left with a human but definitely not Fand. It’s a rather ordinary-looking pale woman with mussed dark hair and a large nose.

  “I figured,” I says. “Who are ye, then, since ye aren’t Fand?”

  “I’m a selkie.”

  “A selkie?” That would make sense, since they were one of the few kinds of lesser Fae that weren’t killed by cold iron. Their human side protected them. But that pointed to a larger problem. “One of Manannan’s?”

  “Aye.”

  “He cast the seeming on ye himself?”

  “Aye.”

  “Fecking hells.”

  I round on the guards. “When was Manannan Mac
Lir here?”

  They exchange glances and say he never was there at all. I wince. Of course not.

  “Then who was the last visitor?”

  “Flidais was here a few days ago,” one says.

  Back to the selkie: “So Manannan came here glamoured as Flidais, brought you with him, visited Fand, switched your appearances, and walked out with Fand?”

  She nods. “Except I was glamoured as Perun, not my true shape.” Meaning Manannan and Fand walked out together disguised as Flidais and Perun. They might still be glamoured that way and be up to all kinds of mischief.

  “And you’ve had no visitors since?”

  “No.”

  So Flidais doesn’t know that Fand’s escaped with Manannan’s help, and neither does Brighid.

  “Ye can stay here as ye are,” I say. “I’ll let someone else pass judgment.” I toss the key to the shackles on the floor near enough for her to reach. “Unlock yourself after I’m out.”

  And who, I wonder, will pass judgment on me? I imagine Brighid might have something to say after trusting me with keeping Fand secure. But I surely did not expect Manannan to still be so in love with her that he would spring her from prison after she tried to kill him and all his selkies. And how did he find out she was here, anyway? I suppose it doesn’t matter. If and when we find them, we can worry about it then.

  I toss the cold iron back to the guards when I exit the cell. “You lads were suckered good with a glamour. From now on, everybody gets touched with the cold iron before they go in. Make sure ye know who you’re dealing with.”

  It’s a long shot, but I visit Manannan’s estate just in case he’s foolish enough to be there. He isn’t. Place is entirely empty, wards all dispelled. The pigs and sheep are all gone from the grounds. Not a selkie or a faery in sight. That means they’re off somewhere, plotting together, and they either have an entourage or they killed them all to make sure no one told any secrets.

  “Well, this is a sad sack of shite,” I say in the silent castle kitchen, once a hub of frenzied activity. “We’re all going to take it up the arse and probably won’t even get our pants pulled down first.” Me eyes spy some fine whiskey on the shelf, and I remember saying to Dr. Sudarga that all I wanted was a shot and a good long rest in bed. I pull out a glass and take the bottle down. Sleep will have to wait, but I might as well have that drink now.