Staked (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #8)(41)
“It is? Well, it’s worse than that on the inside.”
“Owen, your eyes aren’t tracking me. Can you see me?”
“Aye, all four—no, five of you.”
“You’re concussed.”
That’s a new word for me and I tell her so. “I don’t know what that means. Hope it means I’m handsome.”
“Of course you are. But tell me, are you healing right now?”
“Aye. Trying to.”
“Focus your efforts on your brain. It’s probably swelling. And don’t go to sleep.”
“Funny ye should say that, because I’m quite sleepy.”
“No, no, don’t sleep. Talk to me. Why is there a troll here?”
“I owed him money. He didn’t want Canadian money, though. Showed him the queen and the king of Canada and everything, but he wouldn’t take it.”
“What? You’re not making sense.”
“It’s because of Fand. She escaped. She’s free. We have to find her.”
“Which one is Fand again?”
“The one who wants to kill us all because we aren’t living in the past.”
“Is this because of something your apprentice did?” Her expression darkens just referring to him like that, and I think sometimes she would blame Siodhachan for bad weather if she could.
“No, love, not this time. This time it’s me own fault. My fault I never fed the trolls. My fault that Fand escaped and sent him here. I’m sorry.”
“How is it your fault that Fand escaped?”
“I was responsible for keeping her locked up. However she managed to spring free, I should have thought of it first.”
“Pfft. I hate that shoulda-woulda-coulda crap, Owen. You can never go back. You can only go forward. Like this arm here. You can’t go back to when it was never dislocated. You can only shove it back in and hope it heals all right. I’m going to do that now,” she says, grabbing me near the elbow.
“Easy, now. I’m handsome and concussed.”
Maybe she tries to go easy and maybe she doesn’t. It fecking hurts regardless, and I howl about it when it pops back in. She doesn’t apologize, though, because there’s simply no help for some pain: Sometimes ye just have to clench your teeth and endure it.
“What are we going to do about this body?” she says. “We can’t leave it here.”
“I’ll have the earth take it in,” I answer. “The kids don’t need to see it all torn up like that. And they don’t need to see me like this either. You’ll keep ’em away until I’m healed, won’t ye, love?”
“Yes, I will. Or their parents will. They’re all at the house now. Except for Mohammed, I guess, because here he comes.”
Mohammed’s a lad of Greta’s mind about the past: He doesn’t ask what happened but rather asks what needs to be done next. Greta requests a new set of clothes for me and some water, and he dashes away to fetch them.
But in doing so—moving forward, in Greta’s mind—he’s still dealing with the past. It’s always strung out behind us, innit, attached to our arses like a roll of toilet paper we trail out of the bathroom, pointing the way to the giant shite we just took. It doesn’t matter if we flushed it down: Everyone still knows what we did there. So it’s fine to say it’s all done and you have no connection with the past, that you’re a new person every second, but silly in my view to pretend that person isn’t made of the old one.
I know I can’t feed meself that plate of bollocks and swallow it. I can go forward and maybe put Fand back in prison before she does any more harm, but I can’t pretend I’m not at least partially responsible for her escaping in the first place.
And I can’t pretend that I don’t understand Siodhachan anymore. The lad’s got himself mired in a bog far worse than the one this troll used to live in and he doesn’t know how or even if he’s going to get out of it. I have to tell Brighid that her enemy is loose, and I don’t know how I’ll manage that without dying of shame, but it’s nothing compared to what me old apprentice is facing.
Times were a whole lot simpler back when they were frozen for me.
CHAPTER 12
Fand had recently set the dark elves after me as part of her effort to rid the Fae of one Iron Druid, and I had barely escaped my encounters with them. Had they not relied on their magical weapons, against which my cold iron aura proved to be excellent armor, they would have ended me for sure. They were strong and fast and, unlike the average Bond villain, not given to conversation; rather, they were silent and implacable, like the nameless thing you used to fear was hiding in your closet or under your bed, childhood nightmares made of flesh and smoke.
I had never been to Svartálfheim but knew in theory where it was—Manannan Mac Lir had given me a map of the nine realms, which placed the entrance in Niflheim between the Vir and Ylgr rivers. It wasn’t to scale, however, and I doubted very much that the entrance would be as plainly visible as it was on the map. And since we would have no luck putting Svartálfheim into a GPS app, I was somewhat worried that we might spend significant time just figuring out how to get there.
Brighid was waiting for me at her throne in the Fae Court when I arrived, already dressed for battle and leaning on the sort of massive oversize sword one saw in anime. Unlike the diminutive protagonists of those dramas, she had the muscle to swing such a massive weapon. She also had a set of armor and a shield ready for me—Goibhniu’s old kit, in fact, which fit me well and assured me instantly of its quality. She helped me into it, since none of her Fae attendants could get close to me without turning to ash. As she did so, I noticed that there appeared to be fresh etchings in the armor, laid down on top of the old decorative patterns; some of the edges were still raw.