Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(46)
A slow grin spread across Granuaile’s face, and her eyes reflected the light of the fire. “Yes. I’ll be happy to help as soon as I’m able.”
This story, narrated by Archdruid Owen Kennedy, takes place after Staked, Book 8 of The Iron Druid Chronicles, but before the events of Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries:
The Purloined Poodle.
It doesn’t matter whether we make love or war or both when we go running together in the woods; Greta always likes to snuggle up afterward for something she calls “pillow talk,” even though we never have any pillows with us. Perhaps it’s because we are so fecking savage when we play together, and she wants a quiet time of conversation to set aside the beast and reassert her humanity. I don’t know; that might be reading more into the bones of the thing than are really there. But, like her, I have come to look forward to our talks as much as the fighting and the sex. She has some wild fecking stories, the kind of thing you’re sure can’t be real except in the fevered dreams of a talk radio host armed only with a microphone and two handfuls of batshit.
Hunting down wendigos in Manitoba, for instance. Negotiating with ghouls to make sure the pack has access to efficient body disposal. And she claims they had to destroy an actual modern-day necromancer who had raised the dead in Phoenix just to make him tacos and margaritas, and he had to die before he decided to use his power for something more sinister.
She tells me it’s me turn to share as we lie naked and bleeding on the slopes of Mount Humphreys near Flagstaff. She still shudders from the pain of her shift from wolf to human and clasps me hand as we stare up at a blue sky through the pickets of white-trunked aspens. Seen from the forest floor like that, they seem to be the clutching finger bones of giants long buried in the earth, reaching for one last fine day in the sun.
When I point this out to her, she squints up at them as if there’s something wrong with her vision. “What if that were true?” she says, and nestles into the crook of me arm. “How do you suppose they would come to be here, lying in the cold ground?”
I snort at the question. “Might as well ask how we came to be here, lying on top of it.”
Her head raises enough to look me in the eye. “All right, then. I’ll ask: How did we get here?”
“What? Are ye serious? Ye already know that. Siodhachan fetched me off that fecking timesuck in Tír na nóg, and we met at Hal’s house.”
“Right. And I was turned into a werewolf by Gunnar and Hal a long time ago. It’s one hell of a chain of cause and effect. But you’ve never shared with me a crucial link of that chain.”
“And what link is that?”
“How did you become the archdruid of Atticus O’Sullivan? Is there a story worth telling behind that? Or was it an ordinary thing, like your archdruid assigned him to you?”
“Ye really want to hear about Siodhachan and me? I thought ye would rather milk a cockroach than hear tell of him again.”
She shakes her head once. “I want to hear about you. What brought you to cross his path and take him on as an apprentice? I mean, I know you said his father got killed in a cattle raid, but there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?”
“Oh, aye, there was a right load of ox shite that led me to his blasted door, and that’s no lie. That’s a proper story for ye, I suppose.”
Her head drops back down to the crook of me arm, her hands roam in the curls of me chest, and she calls me that pet name. “Tell me every little thing, Teddy Bear.”
If I have it right, this would have been seventy years before this Common Era of yours began. Or something. We weren’t thinking at that time that we would have an entirely new calendar in a few centuries; we were very much in tune with the seasons and solstices but didn’t call the months and years what ye call them now.
I was a fairly young Druid, in me twenties, the younger and stupid side of it if I’m being honest, and me own archdruid had assigned me to tend to the needs of a village in what I believe is now County Offaly. They hadn’t had a Druid around for some while, and they were doing some daft shite and turning the land into a giant peat bog. Clearing away trees, ye know, that were keeping everything balanced, sucking up all that rain, but with them gone, the soil turned acidic and the ground became waterlogged. I think ye have some modern term for it now … Yes! Clear-cutting. Does tremendous damage.
By the time I got there, the bog was already bigger than a king’s ego and at night darker and more dangerous than a badger’s arsehole—ye just really didn’t want to be pokin’ around in there. I was supposed to keep ’em from makin’ it worse and maybe do something to heal the soil.
Problem was, the villagers didn’t want to hear that they had anything to do with that bog. Way they told it, the bog owed them a few dozen head of sheep and cattle and maybe ten girls and boys over the years.
“Ye mean ye lost all that in the bog?” I asks them, and this red-faced knob of a man says no, ye giant tit, they were stolen.
“Stolen?” I says. “By who?” Or whom, whatever is proper— feck all the rules of this shite language ye have me speakin’ anyways.
Well, the knob looks at his wife and she nods at him, and he looks at his friends and they nod too, which means he has everyone’s permission to go ahead and say it out loud to a stranger.