Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles) (24 page)

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. The 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.

F
or the record, Shango is a really super-charming thunder god. I know only the barest sketches of his pantheon, and after he spends a couple of hours telling stories about them and the beliefs of his people, I’m simultaneously enthralled and ashamed. Enthralled for obvious reasons but ashamed that I didn’t know more about the Orishas already. It’s an unfortunate truth that in the Western education system—well, in the Western countries, period—we are sadly deprived of the rich variety of African traditions. So much so that many make the mistake of thinking of the entire continent of Africa as a monoculture rather than the vast collection of disparate cultures that it is. Shango’s people primarily hail from Yorubaland, which spans the southwestern portion of modern-day Nigeria into a couple of neighboring countries, Benin and Togo, though he also has worshippers scattered throughout the world as a legacy of the slave trade. A consequence of that legacy is that he and the other Orishas get out of their homeland quite a bit to keep track of their people and do the odd favor here and there. And I suspect he might be more powerful than Perun, because he continues to enjoy healthy worship from around the world.

Perun, I think, begins to feel outclassed halfway across Poland, because his English is not nearly so good. He shuts up for a while, and what little expression I can see underneath his beard looks sour. I speak to him in Russian, which I am fairly certain Shango does not speak.

“Are you feeling left out, Perun?”

He lifts an eyebrow at me first, throwing some shade, perhaps, but then he dissolves into a sheepish grin. He replies in the same language, in which he has no fluency issues.

“I suppose I am. Silly of me, I know. But we gods of older, smaller pantheons have our insecurities too. My problems with English are persistent, and I have not devoted enough time to eradicate them. So it is my own fault if I am feeling inadequate. Please forgive my mood.”

“Done. But do join in whenever you feel like it. I enjoy hearing from you too.”

When we get to Bydgoszcz, we have to choose whether to follow the southern or northern bank of the Wisła River to get to Warsaw. I choose the south because there are a couple of large forested swaths on the way, according to the elemental, which will allow us to make good time and not have to worry about roads and people staring at the strange group of people running as fast as a horse and hound. And, besides, once in Warsaw, the Wisła River bends south, and we’ll wind up on the side where I met Malina’s coven before.