by Kevin Hearne
“Wait. The Slavic plane was burned by Loki,” I say. “Perun wondered how Loki could have gained access to it.”
Malina nods. “You see what we are thinking. Weles is working with Loki.”
“Loki has a kind of divination shield.”
“We thought as much. We cannot find him either. We are making guesses based on a series of holes where there should be something present.”
“So why would—oh! Maybe a quid pro quo kind of thing is going on. Weles wanted Loki to burn the Slavic plane and almost certainly wanted him to kill Perun. Partially successful there. And Loki hides Weles so that Perun and everyone else will assume he’s dead. But what would Loki want from Weles in return?”
Świętowit and the white horse, of course.”
“Hold on. Are you saying Loki wants the white horse because…?”
“You can ask the white horse if you will win or lose a battle you begin today and it will tell you.”
“Oh, shit!” I cry, as understanding dawns. “He’s using the horse to know when to start Ragnarok!”
“That was our conclusion also. It would be more accurate on matters of war than any other seer. So we want the white horse.”
“Yeah, I think we have the same interests here. We can’t have him endlessly bribing allies until he finds the right combination for victory. If Loki’s going to start something, let him be uncertain about it. Can you not find the horse in your divination?”
“Unfortunately not. It was a long shot to begin with since we didn’t know its name, but we assume Loki has shielded it also. Our best guess is that if you find Świętowit alive, he may be able to tell you where to find his horse. And if they are both dead, then Weles must owe Loki some other service.”
“Where would I begin looking for Świętowit? When was the last time you saw him?”
Malina’s eyes flick to Roksana, and I turn to her for my answer. “We have never seen him,” she says, “nor has anyone in living memory. He has either four heads or four faces on one head, depending on how he manifests. Pretty sure he’d get into the news if he’d been around recently.”
Her dry comment earns a laugh from the coven, but it is marvelous news to my hound.
But he only has one stomach, Orlaith. I’d be worried about four sets of teeth to brush. Or what if he got sick? Four stuffed noses. Ew.
Roksana continues, “I would suggest looking around Jaromarsburg, or speaking with Perun, if you have access to him. He may be able to provide you with some clues.” I nod, thinking I should talk to him in any case. He’d surely be interested to know Weles is likely allied with Loki. It makes more sense than Loki’s assertion that he went after Perun so Ahard simply because he despises thunder gods. There are a buttload of thunder gods in the world’s pantheons. Why single out Perun? He must have had cause. And thinking of causes, I had to question why they were so interested in this horse.
“This is more about giving the finger to Loki than finding the horse, isn’t it?”
The witches all looked to Malina to answer that one. She nodded once. “Both him and Weles. The Zoryas do not often spend much of their time on the Slavic plane but had they been there when Loki set fire to it, they would have been burned. It gives me nightmares. And to think we already had Loki in our power once…” She shook her head. “Well. I would like another chance at that. Or if I can’t have him, at least deny him whatever he desires.”
“All right, then,” I say, and look at Malina. “I find Świętowit or his horse, but preferably the horse, and either bring it to you or confirm it’s dead, and in return you give me a divination cloak.”
“Agreed, but with an amendment: If you find Świętowit dead or alive, we would like to know where he is.”
I extend my hand to her and say, “I accept your proposal.” She shakes it and I smile, because I have a bona fide quest. “If he’s on another plane, I wouldn’t be able to bring him here anyway. Bringing back the horse will be tough enough.”
Malina’s brows draw together. “Why is that?”
“I only have one other headspace in which to carry someone else when I travel the planes. Right now I’ve been using that for Orlaith. I need to memorize a body of work in another language before I can bring someone else along for the ride—it provides structure for the shift because people are put together in specific sequences like words are in literature. I learned how to speak Russian, but so far their literature is pretty dire and gloomy and I haven’t felt like memorizing any of it.”
“Szymborska!” Berta blurts out, and the faces of the other witches light up.
“Yes!” Roksana says, more excited than I’ve seen her. She nods so enthusiastically that I fear for her neck. “You should learn Polish and read Szymborska!”
“I’m sorry, who?”
“Wisława Szymborksa was a Polish poet, and a Nobel Prize winner,” Klaudia explains. “She wrote about small things, details in life that carry great significance. The English translation I saw in America was a good one. Maybe you should try that, and then, if you like her work, learn to read it in Polish.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” Malina says. “Szymborska isn’t a dire nihilist.”
“Thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely look into it.” I rise to my feet, eager to get on with it. “I’ll meet you back here when I have something. I’m sure I won’t have to tell you when—you’ll probably know that before I do, haha.”
They laugh politely, but Malina stops me after a couple of steps. “Before you go, Granuaile, might you have any idea about when Mr. O’Sullivan plans to make good on his promise to rid Poland of vampires?”
“Oh, he’s working on it,” I say. “That’s for sure.”
“We know he’s been eliminating vampires elsewhere,” she replies. “But he’s not doing it here, where he said he would.”
“I haven’t seen or spoken to him for a while, but I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten and I’m sure he has a plan.”
“Do remind him for us the next time you speak, won’t you?”
“I will,” I promise. “See you later, Sisters. Enjoy your picnic.”
Germany. You know they have sausages in vending machines there?
CHAPTER 10
I didn’t tell Oberon how worried I was about him as I ran the bathwater. I just reminded him not to lick his chops until I said it was safe and to let me know if he felt any pain. I’d had to trigger my healing charm already to combat ichor poisoning; a couple of Diana’s bone splinters had cut my skin, and the insidious stuff had entered my bloodstream. Trace amounts like that I could take care of, but if Oberon ingested a mouthful I’d be hard pressed to deal with that.
Sam and Ty had one of those detachable showerheads with a ringed metal hose that visually suggested a steel caterpillar. Turning the water on full blast to get the most pressure I could, I told Oberon to close his eyes so I could focus on his snout first.
“Keep still, buddy. We have to get this off you quickly.”
“It’s worse than that.”
“I’m working on it, Oberon.”
“All right, we’re heading back in time to seventeenth-century France, at the court of Louis the Fourteenth.”
“What?”
“I don’t think he was embarrassed about it. He was the king.”
The court of a king is littered with pages waiting to do small errands for the nobility. You’re tripping over them quite often, and someone has to train them how to get out of the way and conduct themselves properly. That task fell to the father of our heroine, who trained his daughter with all the pages of the court to fence and take insult and give it right back. Her name was Julie d’Aubigny, and she was married very young to a man named Maupin, who was sent to the south of France for work while she remained in Paris. She was known as Mademoiselle Maupin after that, a famous opera singer, lover, and duelist.
She often dressed as a man but did not disguise her face or do anything else to pretend she was actually male; she sang for her supper in local taverns and participated in fencing exhibitions with a man she traveled with for a while. But when she tired of him, she began a torrid affair with a young woman, and eventually her lover’s family found out and decided to solve what they saw as a problem by sending the young woman to a convent. Mademoiselle Maupin did not give up, however—she was in love. She applied to this convent in Avignon herself, taking her vows and reuniting with the young woman. She immediately began plotting their escape and came up with a simple plan: Set something on fire. What she set on fire was the body of another nun—already dead—in the bed of her young lover, thereby covering their escape. They had another three months of passion together before their own flame flickered out and the girl returned to her family. Mademoiselle Maupin, in the meantime, was charged with arson and body snatching, the penalty for which was to be burned alive. She never faced those charges, though—she got pardoned by Louis XIV later, thanks to her connections at court.
Mademoiselle Maupin hit the road again, singing, taking a series of male lovers, and occasionally kicking someone’s ass in a duel, until she arrived in Paris and joined the opera there. Her life was only mildly tempestuous for a while—she had to beat the hell out of a misogynistic actor once and her landlord on another occasion—but then she landed in serious trouble again when she attended a fancy ball dressed as a man and kissed a young woman there in front of nobility. This was quite offensive according to the social customs of the time, and she was promptly challenged to a duel by three different men. She went outside and beat them all, one after the other; while they bled in the street, she went back inside and kissed the girl again.
Kissing the girl wasn’t the true problem: The problem was that she had very publicly broken the king’s law against dueling within the limits of Paris and had to leave the country for a time. She relocated to Brussels, sang in the opera there, had several more affairs, and then returned to France, where she sang in the Paris Opera until 1705. Her final affair was with a woman who died in an untimely fashion, and she took her lover’s death quite hard and retired from the opera altogether. She entered a convent, in fact, and died a couple of years later at the young age of thirty-three. It was a short, violent, but passionate life she led. She didn’t give a damn about gender roles, and she kissed and fought whomever she felt like kissing or fighting, and she sang beautifully and snatched bodies when she needed to. That was Julie d’Aubigny, or Mademoiselle Maupin.
“I did not meet her personally, but I did see her perform Tancrède at the Paris Opera in 1702.”
“Oh, she was very good. And you are very good. We almost have all this gunk off you. How are you feeling?”
I examined the area, parting the fur with my fingers, and found a shallow scratch from a bone splinter there. I’d taken the brunt of it, but Oberon hadn’t escaped completely. There was some yellow discoloration around the scratch, which meant that it had indeed been ichor-covered and some of it had managed to get into Oberon. I would have to directly heal him or else it would get worse. Ichor poisoning functioned like cancer in that it turned a mortal body against itself, and even small amounts could be fatal eventually. There wasn’t an herbal remedy for it that I knew of, so I’d have to break it down inside him, as I’d done to myself.
“Okay, you’re cut up here. Don’t shake yourself off or talk or anything. I need to concentrate to deal with this. Just let me know when it stops stinging.”
Directly healing another creature by the old laying-on-of-hands is always a tricky business. The Hippocratic maxim of “First, do no harm” is especially true when it comes to using Gaia’s energy, since she frowns rather severely on using the earth’s magic to do any direct injury. But finding what was not Oberon and was clearly invasive wasn’t that difficult—it simply required patience and thorough attention. It turned out there were only a few milligrams of ichor inside him, nothing to send him into shock or seizures now, but enough to do the job eventually if I didn’t stop it. Unbinding the molecular chains of the ichor into their components left a few random proteins coursing through him—they would eventually get flushed out—and rendered the rest of it inert. Oberon was shivering by the time I was finished.
“Okay, buddy, sorry that it took so long. You can shake off now and roll around on a towel. I have to trade places with you and wash myself.”
Once I scoured myself several times and my skin stung all over with the raw thrill of exfoliation, we emerged damp but refreshed from the bathroom. I borrowed Ty’s phone to call Hal Hauk and tell him my Sean Flanagan identity was toast. “I’m going to need a new set of papers,” I told him.
“I’m going to need money for that, and you can’t afford it anymore,” he said. “Your accounts are drier than a high-desert well since Drasche got access through Kodiak Black and emptied them. You’re going to owe me.”
“Understood. I’m good for it, Hal. It’s this war with the vampires. It’s so very draining, hahaha.”
“Gods.” Hal’s voice was weary. “I sentence you to three centuries in pun prison for that.”
“You are the very best of attorneys.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“How’s the Oregon deal progressing?” Kodiak Black hadn’t managed quite everything of mine, and that’s where most of my remaining funds had gone—a cabin property in the Willamette National Forest. For me, the entire point of building up multiple accounts had always been for precisely this purpose: to pay for a new hiding place the next time I had to run. I couldn’t flip houses; I had to abandon them along with my identity every time I ran, and that took cash. Once we had our new safehouse settled, I wouldn’t need to impose on anyone else.
“Almost finished. Few more days. I’ll bring your ID up to Flagstaff when it’s ready.”
“Thanks, Hal.”
We rang off and I turned to find Sam and Ty standing behind me, arms crossed and staring as if I’d trespassed somehow.
“What did I do?” I asked.
“You tell us,” Sam said. “Which Olympian’s ichor did you just wash down our drain?”
“Diana’s.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “The huntress Diana? You have her on your trail—a trail that leads to our door?”
“I certainly hope not. Jupiter said he’d take care of it.”
“Jupiter can’t even control his own urges,” Ty pointed out. “What makes you think he’ll be able to rein in Diana’s?”
He echoed my own worries about the situation, but I didn’t want to openly agree. “Look, fellas, I’m leaving in a few minutes. I have this thing to do with Brighid on one of the Norse planes. If Diana shows up—and that’s a big if—you’re welcome to tell her I’m in Svartálfheim.”
Sam’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “You’re seriously going to visit the dark elves?”
“It’s either that or displease the Morrigan. I really don’t want to annoy the Chooser of the Slain. But I can’t take Oberon with me. It’s too dangerous.” I clasped my hands together and gave them my best pleading, hopeful expres
sion.
I have to. Svartálfheim is no place for a hound. It’s no place for a Druid either.
Sam shook his head and Ty sighed. “You really are a giant pain in the arse, like Owen says.”
“I’ll find a way to make it up to you,” I promised.
“Oh, no, we’ll think up something ourselves,” Ty countered.
“Thank you very sincerely for watching him. But I gotta warn you guys: After the bathtime story I just told him, Oberon may try to hump your leg and then challenge you to a duel. Or vice versa.”
CHAPTER 11
I’ve had a few days to prepare, but me palms are sweaty when I see the families approaching from the house. I hope I look competent to their modern eyes and not like some wild cock-up of a man. I’m in a robe, since I plan to be shape-shifting, and me bare feet are chilled while the rest of me feels overheated. Sam and Greta are with the group and they smile at me, happy over what is to begin here, but the families and the children look as nervous as I feel. Or maybe they’re just tired; they all had long trips to get here on short notice.
Not a one of them looks Irish or anything close to it, and I think that’s grand. It’s best, methinks, to have Druids from all over Gaia; that way they’ll each have a special stretch of the earth calling to their hearts. It’s what we should have done back in the old days, if we’d been thinking properly, but instead of actively trying to spread Druidry everywhere, we just assumed it would grow outward from Ireland and keep going. It never got out of the European continent, and that’s a mistake we don’t need to repeat.
I’m standing a good distance from the house in a field of bunch grass already gone dormant for the winter. Pines stand tall behind me in formations leading up the mountain, and the air is crisp. There are worse places I could start a grove. Greta presents me to them all, and I nod once and say, “Welcome.” I get a few nods and a couple of shy smiles in return. Then the introductions begin.