by Kevin Hearne
Fand had clearly run into the same difficulty in divining Granuaile that I had last night. “Why do you think I would ever tell you, even if I knew?”
“So be it.” She cocked back Moralltach and took a step forward, I fumbled for the handle of Fragarach underneath me, and that’s when a slim throwing blade shucked into the side of Fand’s neck, rocking her backward.
“On second thought, I think she might be nearby,” I said, and then our opportunity to escape came as Fand clutched at the knife and yanked it out. The swarm of pixies and the few remaining faeries flew down and enveloped her in a protective cocoon, lifted her a few inches off the ground, and flew her back to safety, out from under the canopy and into the open field in front of the castle. I pointed Fragarach’s tip through the net at the feet of the Fir Bolg guarding me and shouted, “Freagroidh tu!” freezing him in a blue aura of enchantment. Fragarach didn’t care about the iron net—it was already made of iron, and I’d slipped the point through the net, anyway.
Once the Fir Bolg was caught, he couldn’t move to stab me. I could move him, though, and I did, by swinging Fragarach’s tip in the direction of the fourth Fir Bolg, thereby bowling him over and giving me a few precious seconds to extricate myself from the net. Exclamations of surprise and pain boomed from the left as the Fir Bolg guarding Owen got a throwing star in the eye. Something slapped his spear hand at the wrist, forcing him to drop it, then he was swept very heavily off his feet, no doubt by the invisible providence of Scáthmhaide. That gave Owen the chance he needed to scramble out of his net, and Granuaile tossed another couple of stars at the Fir Bolg who’d killed Meara. They weren’t well placed, for some reason, but he clutched at them rather than worrying about the follow-up, which was seeing his spear disappear from Meara’s body and reappear a few seconds later, lodged in his own guts. Just like Meara, he never had a fighting chance. It was justice.
Once free of the net, Owen cannibalized the energy of his own body to shape-shift to a bear and pounce on the Fir Bolg that Granuaile had dropped to the ground, making sure he’d never get up again. I had two of them to finish off. Fragarach’s enchantment kept the one under my control on top of the other guy, so they were both trapped in a very different sort of net and were easily beheaded, one at a time.
Stealing a glance behind me at Fand, I saw that she was still surrounded by a cloud of Fae, but they had stopped halfway between the trees and the castle. She had disengaged for the moment, and it would be wise for us to take advantage.
“Let’s fall back and shift out of here,” I called to Owen and Granuaile, wherever she was. “We need to get some help.”
“Help has arrived, Siodhachan,” a rich female voice said. Whipping my head around, I saw Brighid walking toward me from deeper in the forest, freshly shifted in from the Fae Court. She was fully armored in a kit of her own making and carrying a sword so huge that it rightly belonged in the pages of manga. With her were Flidais, Perun, and Manannan Mac Lir, and also Ogma, Goibhniu, Luchta, and Creidhne. All of them were armed and ready for battle, their eyes taking in the field ahead.
Relief washed through my limbs. “I’m glad to see you, Brighid. There’s a dead zone here, by the way. I don’t know how, but Fand has cut off the flow of energy in this stretch of land. I imagine it doesn’t extend all the way to the castle, or she wouldn’t have stopped in the middle of the field to heal.”
The First among the Fae paused, eyes visible through a visor in her helmet and losing focus for a few seconds as she looked at the ground in the magical spectrum. “Yes. You are on the edge of it. It continues until the pasture begins. She has slipped something underneath the sod. Looks like dead wood.”
Sheets of plywood would do it. A simple maneuver, but nothing we’d ever notice unless we were specifically looking for it.
“Meara,” Manannan breathed, and rushed to kneel by her still form.
“Fand has Moralltach,” I warned them all. They absorbed this information in silence, and then, after a few seconds, Brighid spoke.
“Forward to the field,” she said, and though it was an order we all dreaded, no one thought of contradicting it. Flidais winked out of sight, going invisible like Granuaile, while Ogma and the three craftsmen all unbound their clothes and let them fall away so that Fand would have nothing to bind. I did the same; I’d worn clothes to demonstrate my peaceful intentions, but that time was past now. Owen remained a bear, but Perun only tore off his shirt and hefted his axe in his right hand. He wore black pantaloons stolen from an eighties’ music video tucked into some knee-high powder-blue suede boots, which he must have lifted from the pages of a comic book in the same era. We quick-marched across the dead zone until we could feel the earth’s energy underneath our feet again, forming a company front with Brighid in the center. Brighid’s voice—the voice in which she could not lie, the voice of finality—rang out across the field in three tones.
“Fand, for the murders of Midhir and numerous Fae, some in the past few minutes, surrender now and face your judgment. You cannot win.”
Fand magnified her voice as well, though it did not have the three notes of Brighid’s. The Fae obscuring her flew in a pattern now that let her form appear in flickers behind them, still performing their duty as a shield but lending Fand some presence. Part of that presence, to me, was the simple fact that she could speak so confidently after having a knife in her neck. She had always been amongst the best healers of the Tuatha Dé Danann, but it was still impressive.
“I disagree. I rather think you should surrender. I know you believe I’ve committed treason, but it is you who betrayed us long ago. You’ve married yourself to iron and do not deserve to be First among the Fae. And most important, Brighid, is this simple fact: The Fae agree with me. You’re relieved of your throne. I’m taking it today.”
It was a ludicrous statement. There was no way she could defeat all of us with a small cloud of pixies and a few faeries. Brighid took a breath and said, “You—” but whatever she was about to say died in her throat as a fountain of Fae spewed from the castle walls, a sun-blotting mass of sidheógs and sprites and bean sídhes.
None of these on their own would present a threat, no more than a single bee would offer mortal peril to a human without allergies. But a swarm of bees could take most anyone down, and many swarms of angry flying Fae were up there.
But Fand had infantry waiting too. As the drone of thousands of wings fanned the air, a horde of goblins, spriggans, and Fir Darrigs erupted from the ground outside the walls and charged us.
These weren’t the goblins from the Peter Jackson films based on Tolkien. These were older creatures, earth-dwelling and given to tinkering, at home with all the metals but bereft of any true magic—I’d say instead that they had affinities. They liked their subterranean tunnels on earth hidden in the hills but visited Tír na nÓg often via Old Ways. Gray-skinned and diminutive except for their noses and ears, they didn’t limp or suffer from misshapen spines or other afflictions meant to emphasize their corruption in stories. They moved quite well, though without anything resembling unit cohesion, wearing a hodgepodge of homemade armor and bristling with a wide array of weapons. They had probably been promised riches for their role in the fights, and that accounted for their presence along with the Fir Darrigs.
Noticeably absent from the army were leprechauns, though that was in keeping with their character. They’re always up for shenanigans but would never engage in war, owing to their solitary natures and the fact that they’d rather annoy people to death than club them to death. I guessed that there were three or four thousand of the goblins and mere hundreds of the spriggans and Fir Darrigs. All of them looked hungry for violence.
Fand had planned a revolution for the common Fae, and I was standing with the aristocrats as the mob advanced.
“Damn it,” I muttered, gritting my teeth. Neither side was going to back down, and that meant a lot of blood would be shed.
“Flidais,” Brighid said, no longer projecti
ng her voice. “I would not ask, except that we can end this quickly.”
A ragged sob to my right gave me a vague idea of where Flidais stood. “Understood,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. A twang, and then an arrow soared through the air toward Fand. It missed, but not because of poor aim: Fand wasn’t in that space by the time the arrow arrived. She was borne into the air by the Fae and, I saw when I triggered my magical sight, by several sylphs, air-based Fae who were invisible to the unaided eye. They whirled around, forming a protective cyclone of wind with Fand floating in the eye of it, and this caused a second shaft of Flidais’s to skew awry and miss. Flidais didn’t have time for another, and it would have been pointless, anyway. There was a charge of infantry to break, and it would be on us in ten seconds or so. The flying Fae would get here before them. Where, I wondered, was the cavalry?
“Atticus, behind us!” I heard Granuaile call, though I couldn’t see her. “Big dogs! Manannan, watch out!”
The god of the sea was still mourning Meara and would be first to meet the onrush of a pack of barghests emerging from the forest. The large black semi-spectral dogs are about the size of Oberon but with much sharper teeth and glowing red eyes—semi-spectral because they appear solid and certainly hit you and bite that way, but most weapons tend to pass through them as if they were ghosts. One of Granuaile’s throwing knives demonstrated the principle admirably, passing through the body of the lead barghest as if it were so much vapor. Barghests have to be killed by hand or by special weapons like Fragarach, so, better equipped than anyone else to take them on, I turned my back on the horde to meet the barghests.
Manannan rose and spun inside his Cloak of Mists, and the barghests that entered his space came out again after a few seconds, broken. I twisted around the charge of the first one that came after me and clipped him on the back of the neck as he passed, then, with the backswing of that stroke, tore through the face of the one following behind. Three others bounded past me to leap onto the backs of Perun, Owen, and Goibhniu. Perun was annoyed but not particularly troubled; he bowed his back under the weight of the creature, then reached up behind his head, sank his fingers into the fur, and yanked forward. The barghest was launched bodily into the vanguard of the goblin line. Owen roared and rolled his shoulders, and his barghest tumbled off in front of him; a powerful swipe of his claws—his natural hand, not a weapon—put an end to it. Goibhniu, however, was not so lucky, and when he fell facedown with a barghest on his back and a bean sídhe screeched his name, signaling his doom, I wasn’t the only one who rushed to help him. His brother Luchta turned his back on the approaching horde to help, as Creidhne and Ogma shifted over to cover him. Brighid blasted the sky with broad ribbons of fire, turning the leading edge of Fae air support into ash and powdered bone and giving those that followed cause to worry about sudden climate change.
The barghest sank its teeth into Goibhniu’s left shoulder and he rolled right, forcing the barghest to choose whether to let go and try for the throat or to hold on and be flipped onto its side, giving up the dominant position. It chose to let go, and Goibhniu blocked access to his throat with his forearm. I reached them a second before Luchta did, rammed Fragarach into the ribs from the side, and yanked it back out as the barghest fell over. But as I was doing that, the main body of the infantry arrived, and while most of them met wet, crunchy ends by the weapons of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a spriggan leapt high over the reach of Creidhne and landed on the back of Luchta.
Spriggans are nasty things, wood Fae on which the Morrigan based her design for the yewmen, ambulatory lumber with lots of sharp protuberances and very little photosynthesis going on. They don’t have flesh so much as sap-filled green cellulose; their limbs and body are shaped like the flat ribs of saguaro cacti but always with yellow glowing eyes—the kind of eyes you see in cartoons meant to scare children from going into the forest at night.
It landed on Luchta in mid-stride, catching him off-balance, and he twisted right as he fell so that the spriggan would be thrown off, and it was, with considerable speed. It landed on its back but on top of Goibhniu, in the direction he was most vulnerable: perpendicular, as if crossing the letter t. The sharp spine of wood that swept back from its elbow like a stake punched through Goibhniu’s chest and crushed his heart.
Goibhniu coughed blood once and died, and beheading the spriggan that had killed him did nothing to soften the blow I felt in my own chest at his passing. Luchta and I both bellowed, confirmed that his aura was fading and there was no saving him, and then threw ourselves at the Fae with abandon. Our tears washed away the blood that splattered our cheeks as we hacked and stabbed, and we knew that nothing we did would replace Goibhniu or Meara and that we wouldn’t feel the least bit better by dealing death to creatures who thought they were fighting for freedom or something shiny.
Charred pixies and sprites fell from the sky, some of them still on fire as Brighid effectively neutralized their air power with a wall of flame. Off to my right, Ogma wielded two heavy maces that walloped three or more goblins at a time, and these in turn mowed down the ranks behind them so that he was clogging the charge lanes and giving himself time to swing again. Creidhne and Luchta were doing their share next to me, using magical weapons of their own craft that seemed every bit as effective as Ogma’s maces at dispatching multiple opponents at a time.
Their rage was unsettling, and I wasn’t sure they would know when to stop. I needed them at my side, however, or I would have been overwhelmed in short order. Fragarach was great at slicing through armor into flesh, but I couldn’t handle more than one opponent at a time, and they were rushing me like it was cold outside and I was the last pair of mittens. I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t wounded yet, but I could see it happening soon—the numbers in front of me were too great.
To my left, between Brighid and me, was Perun, who had charged his axe with lightning. Whenever he sank it into the body of a goblin, bolts of electricity arced into the armored friends following behind, thereby always keeping space clear in front of him while adding to the scent of charred flesh and burnt ozone already present in the air from Brighid’s efforts. The spriggans and Fir Darrigs didn’t attract lightning and got past the bolts to visit Perun up close, but these he smacked away with powerful sweeps of his left hand; they landed far back in the ranks, to be trampled or impaled by the rest of the army.
Owen was on the far side of Brighid, raking his claws across faces and occasionally ripping out the throat of a goblin who managed to get inside his guard and take a swipe at him. Like me, he was in danger of being overwhelmed. He already had a couple of short swords sticking out of him. Granuaile and Flidais were out there somewhere, too, taking their toll invisibly. Manannan held the far left flank now, using one of the Fir Bolg spears as a weapon, and the tiny flash of his face that I spied through the churn of battle and his own cloak looked much as I imagined mine did: frozen in a grimace of pain, fighting with a mixture of grief and rage and guilt.
Yes, I felt guilt. Somehow I had pushed Fand to the precipice without realizing it, and had I not been so blind, perhaps she wouldn’t be trying to pull us all over the edge with her now. I was sure Manannan felt it too—the crushing questions of how we got to this place and whether we could have avoided it, where we went wrong, and whether we would ever learn how not to cock up other people’s lives in the course of living our own.
I will have nightmares about the battle cries and death screams, raw ululations of fear and rage and murderous intent directed at Atticus, and over it all the howling of the bean sídhe. And the snarling faces, the bared teeth, and the jets of blood—some of them fountaining because of my hand—those will haunt me also. The snarls would be directed at me if I were visible, I am sure, for Fand announced that this was about cold iron, and I have a measure of it dangling from my neck. I will remember those cries, the fire and the blood, and Fand floating above the field in a cold cocoon of sylphs, until I pass from the world.
I don’t know what s
purred Fand to behave this way, but I feel certain this is not a fight that Atticus would have picked. He likes Fand and so do I, which is why I didn’t put that knife through her eye and into her brain. I knew she could heal from the neck wound and hoped it would make her rethink. I guess I screwed up from a strategic standpoint: I had the chance to end it and flubbed it. But who among us saw this coming? Atticus said in his note that he had come here seeking peace. I suppose Fand came here seeking war, and she found it.
And Manannan still loves her. He and I are on the left edge, and I can hear him moaning and crying through his Cloak of Mists—saying, “No, stop, Fand, don’t do this”—and when the mists part long enough to give me a glimpse of his face, I see torment and grief written there, not anger. He doesn’t attack but rather kills anything that enters the mist. I don’t think the goblins are especially after him, but he’s protecting Owen’s left side, and some of them try to get to the bear through him and fail. Those who choose to flank Manannan and go around to his left run into me, their feet leaving the ground when the staff they never see coming hits them between the eyes.
I can keep up with it—it’s safe here—so I have to leave. Atticus is right in the center of the line, and I can tell he’s barely holding on. He can’t clear a path the way the gods can. Perun is taking care of some to his left and Luchta is knocking down a few to his right, but Atticus is still in trouble, and when I see how bad it is, I abandon my position, confident that Manannan will be fine, and scurry around the back to help.
