by Kevin Hearne
“We’ll have to take a potty break later,” I said. “Distance is key right now.”
“And I’m guessing stealth isn’t? This is going to be an easy trail to follow the way we’re moving through the forest.”
“We’ll get crafty when we have the space to do so.”
The Morrigan’s raspy voice entered my head. It wasn’t my favorite habit of hers, but it was convenient at the moment. Her tone was exultant.
Here is a battle worthy of remembrance! How I wish there were witnesses and a bard like Amergin to put it down in song!
Morrigan—
Listen, Siodhachan. I can keep them from pursuing you for some while. But they will hunt again soon enough.
They will? What about you?
I am better than they. But not immortal. My end is near; I have seen it. But what an end it will be!
I slowed down and looked back. Granuaile and Oberon paused too. You’re going to die?
Don’t stop running, you fool! Run and listen and do not sleep. You know how to stave off the need to sleep, don’t you?
Yes. Prevent the buildup of adenosine in the brain and—
Enough with the modern words. You know. Now you must either find one of the Old Ways to Tír na nÓg—one that isn’t guarded—or make your way to the forest of Herne the Hunter.
The forest of Herne? You mean Windsor Forest? That’s a hell of a run across Europe.
You can always die instead, the Morrigan pointed out.
No thanks. But Windsor is not much of a wilderness anymore. It’s more like a groomed park. People drink tea there. They might even play croquet. That’s not a forest.
It will suffice. Herne is there. He will defend it. And he will bring friends. And, Siodhachan, remember that Gaia loves us more than she loves the Olympians. They have given her nothing in all their long lives. Even now they traumatize her with pandemonium. I am unbinding their chariots; they will be afoot for some while until their smith gods can make them anew. Take advantage and give yourself as much of a lead as possible.
Something didn’t compute. Morrigan, if you saw this coming, why didn’t you warn me?
You were with your woman.
My woman? If I tried to call Granuaile that, I would promptly lose some teeth. She’s not mine. You can’t possess anyone.
I have learned that lesson very well.
Fine, then what does that have to do with this ridiculous fight with the Olympians? We could have avoided it all.
No. It was always going to come. Delaying would do no good.
Are you kidding? That’s what living is. Delaying death. Let’s get you some Prozac.
Hush. I have for you what modern people call a lovely parting gift.
I shuddered to think what the Morrigan considered lovely, so I simply said, A parting gift?
In Tír na nÓg there is a Time Island with the following address. A vision appeared in my head of a short stone obelisk etched with Ogham script. Do you see it?
Yes, but—
Record it well in your memory. Circle the island. On the side facing upstream, look closely at the tree line and you will see someone there you might wish to retrieve. If you do, ask Goibhniu for help.
Morrigan. Why?
Because I am trapped and this is the only way out. And because you have chosen, and you have chosen well. I cannot fault her.
I lost a step or two as the import of her words sank in. Granuaile shot a worried glance at me and I shook my head once, reassuring her that nothing was wrong. But … Morrigan, you never said anything.
Would it have mattered? Would you have ever chosen me?
I don’t know. But I didn’t get a chance.
Every day was a chance, Siodhachan. Two thousand years of days. If you were interested, you had ample opportunity to express it. I understand. I frighten you. I frighten everyone, and that is a fact I cannot escape, however I may wish otherwise.
Well … yeah. You’re fighting off two Olympians right now and having this conversation. That’s frightening.
They came prepared. Their fabrics are synthetic. I cannot bind them. And they are very skilled, trying to wound my right side and affect my magic.
Morrigan, just get out of there. You saved me and we have a lead now.
No. This is the choice I have made. It is only recently I have tried to change in earnest—I mean since you slew Aenghus Óg—and discovered that somehow change has become impossible for me. I cannot make friends. I cannot be gentle except under the most extraordinary circumstances. My nature will not allow it. All I can do is terrify, seduce, and choose the slain. Is that not strange? Long ago I was merely a Druid like you and could do whatever I wished. But once I became a goddess, certain expectations came with the power. Call them chains, rather. I didn’t notice them until I tried to break free. My nature now is no longer my own to do with as I please. I can be only what my people want me to be.
I’m sorry. I didn’t know.
I tell you so that you may grow wiser. It is a hidden law of godhood, and woe unto she who finds it. I have been trying to deny its reality, but it has asserted itself too often to be anything but the truth. Yet I have some comfort now.
You do?
Here is my victory, Siodhachan: I am permitted to do battle, and I do not need a reason. Still, I usually have one, and that reason can be whatever I wish. So today I do not fight for glory or honor or bloodlust or vengeance. I fight for … something else.
I understand. But say it anyway. For the win.
Love.
Morrigan, I—
I felt as if something popped softly in my head, like the release of tension when a taut cord is cut. Or a binding. There was a sudden emptiness, and an overwhelming sense of vertigo caused me to stumble over a root and execute a graceless face-plant.
Morrigan? The silence in my head pointed to only one conclusion. Our mental bond had been like the soft electric hum of kitchen appliances or computers that you never notice until they stop. During a rather painful ritual that had regenerated an ear I’d lost to a demon, she’d slipped in the binding that allowed her to speak to me telepathically. It was gone now.
“Atticus, what happened?” Granuaile helped me to my feet and gasped when she saw my face. “Are you hurt? Why are you crying?”
She let go of my arm and then had to grab it again when I swayed on my feet, still a bit dizzy. “The Morrigan is dead,” I said.
Chapter 2
“Think you can carry your staff in your mouth as a horse?” I asked, to forestall any questions about what happened. I rubbed away my tears with the heel of my palm. Granuaile understood and didn’t press the issue, though her voice sounded hollowed out by shock.
“I suppose I could.”
“Good. Leave your clothes here.” I began to strip and tried to clear my head of its dizziness by taking several deep breaths. “We really need to make time. We’ll hoof it and recharge from the earth as we go.”
Granuaile peeled off her shirt. “The Morrigan said the Old Ways would be collapsed or guarded,” she said, recalling what the goddess had said to us before we took off running. “Are we going to fight our way through and use one of those?”
“I think we’ll be running all the way to England. Or to France, anyway, then we’ll swim the channel.”
“We’re seriously running there from Romania?”
“That’s right.”
“We can’t take a train or boost a car or something?”
“No. You heard what the Morrigan said. The only way she saw us survive is running the whole way.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“When it comes to our survival, I don’t want to bet against the Morrigan’s visions. She tends—I mean, tended to be accurate on matters of life and death.”
“I’m not trying to argue the truth of what she said. I just want to understand why it’s true.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know the answer yet. We’ll find out as we go. My guess is that we’
ll have to figure out everything on the run.”
Once divested of our clothing, with our weapons lying on the ground in front of us, we shifted to our hooved forms—a stag and a chestnut mare—and picked up our weapons in our mouths.
I didn’t have a reply for that, but Granuaile must have, because Oberon followed that up with an outraged
The one-sided banter continued as we began to run, and I was grateful for it. Someone I had thought of as eternal had abruptly ended, and it rocked me. I couldn’t have summoned a single playful riposte to Oberon’s comments. There was simply too much else for me to deal with, not least of which was figuring out how we would continue to survive.
Once out of the foothills of the Apuseni Mountains, we were able to pour on the speed, skirting along the edge of a small plateau and then, descending out of the wilderness, running across flat cultivated lands. We bore northwest to avoid crossing more hills and slowing down. We kept to the vineyards and alfalfa and cereal crops and avoided the villages. We swam across two rivers and crossed into Hungary by running south of Oradea as the sun set. Through Oberon, I relayed to Granuaile what the Morrigan had said—the bits about getting to Herne’s forest, anyway.
Her question to me:
Our best chance was in simple speed, unless we could somehow find an Old Way to Tír na nÓg that wasn’t monitored. I had no doubt that those would all be watched. The people behind planning this wanted to make sure they got us, and they wouldn’t be able to if we could get to Tír na nÓg and then shift to another plane entirely. The Romans had done the same thing to the ancient Druids when they tried to wipe us out with the help of vampires and the Roman goddess Minerva. Step one had been to burn all the sacred groves on the continent, which were the only tethers to Tír na nÓg at the time; step two was to guard all the Old Ways; and step three was to use Minerva’s aid to see through our camouflage. I’d managed to escape them by running north beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. I would not be surprised to learn that Minerva had advised Pan, Faunus, and the huntresses how to hunt us now.
But I had never tried to run across Europe before. I’d hiked it once and stayed in youth hostels and put little patches on my backpack because I thought it was a funny disguise, but I took my time doing that, and climbing up mountains was an experience to be savored. I rather thought dealing with mountains now would do nothing but slow us down, and, besides, I didn’t want to telegraph our intended destination. To get to the Strait of Dover directly, we could simply run north of west and hit it. But that route would present us not only with several mountain ranges but plenty of well-paved cities like Budapest and Vienna. We needed misdirection and the ability to keep in touch with the earth at all times. That’s why I took a sharp turn north at the Hungarian border: Once we crossed the Carpathians, we could stick to flattish land or, at the worst, low rolling hills all the way to France. While we moved northwest through Poland and Germany, we’d keep them thinking we were headed for Sweden via Denmark. To get the best possible route, however, avoiding the majority of villages while also minimizing our exposure to survivalists in the woods awaiting the apocalypse, I would need to consult elementals along the way. Using my Latin headspace, I reached out to the Carpathian elemental, who was dominant across several human political borders that were meaningless to Gaia.
//Druids run / Need guidance / Avoid people and cities if possible//
After some back-and-forth with Carpathia, we settled on a route that would take us north through rural areas of Hungary and Slovakia until we reached the proper Carpathian Mountains.
With a plan in place and an hour of trail behind us, I had time to feel, and much of that feeling leaked out of my eyes as I ran. I had spent nearly my entire life worshipping the Morrigan, and, in recent years, more than that. She was the darkness for me, an unexpectedly beautiful harbinger of doom and pain who forced me to struggle, who pushed me to improve myself. She was a necessary balance to Brighid, not something merely to be feared but to be treasured. As Brighid brought light and craft and poetry to our lives, the Morrigan brought an edge, a tangible sharpness to my existence by sharing hers with me.
With the clarity of hindsight, I saw the signs that the Morrigan had favored me far more than she had the average mortal. Six years ago, especially, when she took me away from Granuaile to repair the tattoos on the back of my hand, she’d been uncharacteristically candid with me, but I had dismissed it because we were in a room enchanted with bindings that encouraged harmony. Now I saw that our interlude there had been haunting her ever since. As soon as she left that room, she reverted to her cruel self, when she had not necessarily wished to do so. And that was what made her snap—not her love for some dude but her lack of freedom to love or not as she desired.
I’d tried to be her friend, which probably made it all worse. We’d gone to a few baseball games together simply to hang out, and she couldn’t keep herself from remarking on the fear of failure the players felt, or their guilt or despair at poor performance, and only noticed their triumphs when I observed them aloud. Each time I did, she cringed, taking it as a rebuke. She seemed to think she should have seen it first, or at least at the same time, but she had a filter blocking all such things from her sight. Each time we’d gone out to the ballpark, she began the night flushed with optimism, convinced that this time she would be able to enjoy the competition and my company on a purely superficial level and ignore all the feelings she was attuned to feel as a goddess associated with death and war and lust. Usually that optimism had fled by the third inning and she sat in silence, distrusting herself to say anything lest it be perceived as accentuating the negative. My attempts to cheer her up with happy observations only emphasized that she lacked the social facility to engage on that level.
We caught a game in St. Louis once, and after a quick visit to the team shop I was struck by how different she looked in a Cardinals jersey and cap. She looked damn cute—not hot or sultry or sexy but the sort of innocent, wholesome beauty that lifts your spirit and makes you grateful to be alive to see it. But when I told the Morrigan she looked cute, she didn’t understand the nuance, nor did she appreciate it when I tried to explain it to her. She thought I was asking for sex, discovered that I wasn’t, and then we both felt frustrated and embarrassed. Despite these failures, I thought that we were making progress, becoming friends after two millennia of being uneasy allies against Aenghus Óg. I suppose the Morrigan didn’t feel the progress was sufficient or of the right kind.
Perhaps just as frustrating for her was the inability to enlist the aid of an iron elemental in binding a cold iron amulet to her aura. No matter how she tried, she could not free herself from the conditions of her godhood and project friendliness.
I supposed she was free now—most importantly, free of those constraints and, to a lesser extent, of an idiot Druid who never recognized her true feelings. If I had looked at her in the magical spectrum, I might have seen those emotional bonds, much as Granuaile had seen them between us soon after she’d gained her magical sight. But I never dared to look at the Morrigan that way. She would know and consider it an invasion of privacy, and she dealt with such invasions harshly.
I supposed I was free now, too, but, unlike the Morrigan, I didn’t want to be. Ridiculous as it seemed, I wanted to see her eyes flash red at me again and tell me I was doomed. I wanted to see another baseball game with her and train her in the hallowed yet disgusting art of chewing sunflower seeds.
And, admittedly, I wanted to feel protected again. She’d bee
n the only one looking out for me. Without the Morrigan’s aegis, I was once again vulnerable to violent death. That had been the case for the vast majority of my long life, of course, but I knew I would miss the last twelve years of relative security. The frequency of attempts on my life had increased dramatically since I’d decided to stop running from Aenghus Óg, and having a goddess in my corner had been a comfort. Her aid had been sporadic and never free of pain, but without it I would certainly already be dead. With her gone now and two immortals on my trail, perhaps the sand in my hourglass was finally running out.
We quickly discovered that all three of us running in concealment was impractical. We lost one another and spread out unintentionally or even bumped into each other. I remained visible, since a stag running through fields was not all that remarkable and decidedly no cause for alarm. Someone might try to round up Granuaile as a horse, however, and Oberon might be reported as a stray. It was easiest for Granuaile to remain completely invisible and Oberon camouflaged, and in such a fashion they followed my lead.
Unaided, we were pretty fast critters; each of us could reach thirty miles an hour and maintain that for perhaps a mile or three before we had to rest. But with Gaia’s help, we could push that to forty to forty-five miles an hour and keep it up indefinitely, replenishing spent muscles and preventing oxygen debt.
The eastern half of Slovakia is largely rural and we had an easy time of it, especially after everyone had gone home for the evening. We slowed down to cross the occasional road or vault a low fence but otherwise stayed in a zone and ran without speaking, hopefully developing a gap that the huntresses would never be able to close. Our first trouble waited for us to the north of a lake called Vel’ká Domaša.
Domaša was oriented north to south, formed by a dam on the Ondava River. It was about eight miles long, and its surface, silvered with reflected moonlight, had slid by on our left as we ran through the forested hills on its eastern side. It was one of those mature forests that give humans a sense of security, because the undergrowth had been either choked out or taught to mind its manners and couldn’t hide large, man-eating predators. People hiked through it and preyed on wild mushrooms instead.
