Staked

by Kevin Hearne

  I shape-shift back to human and lie on my right side so all me tattoos can soak up energy and help me heal. Moving that much makes everything spin again, and I’m sick on the grass. Greta’s face appears in front of mine soon after that, and all I can think is that I probably still have vomit in me beard.

  “Owen? Owen! The kids said this thing is a troll.”

  “Are they safe?”

  “The kids? Yes. You don’t look so good. Your arm’s out of its socket.”

  “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.

  “Is this a binding of some kind?” I asked.

  “Added it last night,” Brighid said. “Protection against fire. I know your aura protects you from my fire to some extent, but that won’t protect the armor itself or your sword. Pointless to have your skin immune and not what you’re wearing. You’ll cook in this otherwise.”

  “Not sure I understand,” I said. “Are you planning to set me on fire?”

  “How do you think we’re getting to Svartálfheim?” Brighid replied. “We’re flying there aflame. We have to follow the roots of Yggdrasil down to Niflheim and then cross a considerable distance to get to the dark doors of Svartálfheim.”

  I tried my best not to geek out. I had always wanted to fly like a mutant superhero, and flying with Brighid was bound to be a smoother ride than the jerky, twitching ascent to Asgard that Perun gave me one time. I covered my excitement by saying, “You know how to get there already?”

  “Aye. Scouted it soon after Eoghan told me the Morrigan’s message. The entrance is guarded.”

  She wrapped the scabbard and handle of Fragarach in a ribbon marked with the same bindings as the armor, and then we were ready. We shifted separately to the same point on earth—or Midgard—where one of the main roots of Yggdrasil was bound. It was an idyllic stretch of Sweden with a fair blue lake that Freyja had turned into a portal when we had to visit Hel. Brighid likewise made a portal next to the root of the Midgard tree that was bound to Yggdrasil’s, albeit a much smaller one.

  “Jump through,” she said, “and I’ll catch up as you fall. I don’t want to set this tree on fire.”

  So I cannonballed through the portal and fell into shockingly cold air, the sky of Midgard gone and replaced by the gray dismal mist of Niflheim. I got about five seconds of free fall next to the root of Yggdrasil before I
was cocooned in warmth and bright orange flame surrounded my vision. Brighid appeared on my right, gesturing that I should straighten out headfirst like her, and once I did she redirected our flight, pulling us into a horizontal trajectory a thousand feet or so above the great wyrm Niddhogg, who was stretched out fatly as he munched at the root of Yggdrasil. We banked west and Brighid pointed out two specific rivers originating from the spring of Hvergelmir.

  “That one is the Vir,” she said, indicating the one on the left, which threw up a curtain of steam into the air, “which borders Muspellheim. We will follow that and then turn north at a waterfall, cross a snowy plain, and find the entrance hidden on a wooded hill. Sentries watch from among the trees.”

  I nodded, not wanting to shout through fire, and watched the miles disappear underneath us. The lava-scorched crags of Muspellheim were occluded by the steam rising from the Vir River, and I hoped we might see a fire giant from a distance. But all too soon we had banked across the vast sea of snow, never sparkling like it does in sunlight but gray, slick, and wet, like mucus under the cloud cover. A few islands of stunted pipe-cleaner trees poked up in the distance—the hills Brighid spoke of—and off to the east was an anomalous blob of black and light blue that somehow managed to wink and gleam in the dishwater light of Niflheim.

  I pointed to the blob on the snow and asked Brighid, “What’s that over there?”

  Her head swiveled to examine the oddity and then, when it didn’t make any sense to her eyes, she altered our course to take a closer look. A minute or more revealed that we had not been seeing a single thing but many things made one by distance. What we were looking at was an army of Æsir in blue glass armor—the Glass Knights—accompanied by a battalion of stout dwarf elite infantry, the Black Axes. They were marching toward Svartálfheim. The dwarfs would have new runes on their axes that could cut a dark elf in smoke form and force him into corporeal solidity; the Glass Knights had defensive runes on their tiled armor that rendered them invulnerable to the dark elves’ knives, much like my cold iron aura. It allowed them to wait in safety until the dark elves could no longer maintain their smoke form and then shoot them with fléchettes as soon as they solidified.

  Once I explained this to Brighid, we pivoted in midair and shot ahead of the army to warn the dark elves.

  The entrance to Svartálfheim boasted no intricately carved stone doors or huge walls, no pillars or obelisks or massive sculptures outside to celebrate and prop up the cultural ego. It was a simple pair of wooden doors set in the hillside, albeit dark like ironwood or ebony, and manned by four bored guards. High enough and wide enough to move in some fabulous furniture but far short of grandiose.

  To their credit, the guards did perk up at the approach of a fireball in the sky. They dissolved into black smoke as we touched down, melting snow into a puddle beneath our feet.

  “Hold!” Brighid said in Old Norse as soon as she extinguished her flame. “I am Brighid, First among the Fae, and I come in peace to bring you news.”

  One guard solidified and spoke, though he was nude now. Their clothes had all fallen away when their bodies turned to gases.

  “You do not come dressed for peace,” he said.

  “My armor and sword are not for you. They are for the army of Æsir and dwarfs approaching your doors even now.”

  He cocked his head in disbelief. “The Æsir have come to Niflheim?”

  “Yes. And we are here to fight for the Svartálfs. Please alert whoever needs to know and either allow us entry or bid them come here.”

  The other three Svartálfs solidified, and the guard who spoke to Brighid told one of them to fetch help. He immediately dissolved again and filtered through a gap in the doors without ever opening them for us. The remaining guards didn’t speak, knowing that it wasn’t really their place to question us. They’d challenged us and sent word to leaders inside, and now it was their task to watch us and wait in silence, like assassins are wont to do, until given further orders.

  I sloshed out of the puddle of meltwater onto some firmer powder and checked the eastern horizon to see if the army was visible yet. A slightly darker smudge might be them or might not. Niflheim is by and large a bleak smudge of a landscape to begin with.

  Brighid likewise moved out of the puddle so her feet wouldn’t freeze in the ice, and eventually a muffled voice called from behind the doors, asking if it was clear. One of the guards responded with something that must have been a code phrase and the doors opened, allowing the egress of five dark elves dressed in identical shimmering white robes that were tied with sashes of varying colors. They also had circlets on their foreheads, affixed with a stone in the center matching the color of their sashes. I guessed that they represented a guild or governmental structure, though I recalled no one mentioning it before. Probably because so few people visited Svartálfheim and lived to tell about it.

  The woman leading them announced herself to be Turid Einarsdottir. She had a blue stone and sash and she made introductions without stating titles. One name in particular grabbed my attention: Krókr Hrafnson.

  “Krókr?” I said. “Head of the assassins?”

  He wore a black sash and a piece of polished obsidian in his circlet. He tensed as if he expected me to jump at him, but he answered, “Yes. Who might you be?”

  “I’m the Druid that Fand of the Tuatha Dé Danann hired you to kill. None of your assassins came back, did they?”

  His expression hardened and he shook his head by way of reply.

  “Well, their deaths weren’t entirely my doing. Most of them were taken out by Æsir and a single dwarf Runeskald. This Runeskald has figured out how to protect against your black blades and also cut you while you’re in your smoke form, making you vulnerable to a killing blow after that.”

  The dark elves scoffed in unison. “Impossible,” Krókr said.

  “I witnessed it with my own eyes. He appeared with several axes inscribed with different runes and waded right into the middle of your men. They tried to pierce his armor but could not. Meanwhile, he tested each axe in turn. I believe his fourth one worked. Tore right through smoke, and then a Svartálf took shape with a shallow gash across his chest. He couldn’t go back after that, and the dwarf finished him.”

  “And now there’s an army in similar armor,” Brighid said, “no doubt with similar weapons, designed to destroy you and marching here to do just that.”

  “Why?” Turid asked. “We’ve done nothing to them.”

  “It’s not what you have done. It’s what they fear you will do. They believe you will fight against them when Ragnarok arrives, and they would rather fight you today, when they have an advantage, than on the day they are beset on all sides.”

  “We have no plans for Ragnarok other than survival,” the dark elf leader protested.

  “You mean you are neutral? The Æsir do not see it that way. They are assuming that since you are not actively on their side, you must be on the other side, with Hel and Loki.”

  “That’s narrow-minded thinking. This is done with Odin’s approval?”

  “We do not know for certain since we have not spoken with him,” Brighid replied, “but it is difficult to imagine that he is unaware of this. The fact that such a force marches at all implies his approval.”

  “Where is this force now?” Krókr asked.

  I pointed behind me. “See that smudge on the horizon?”

  Krókr squinted, then turned to a couple of the guards and asked them to scout the army, admonishing them to stay out of range and not engage.

  “Assuming that truly is the army you speak of, why are you here to warn us?” Turid asked Brighid after the guards had departed. “The Tuatha Dé Danann have never shown us kindness before.”

  “That is true. And I am not here to be kind now either,” Brighid said. “I am here because I am sworn to protect Gaia, and she would suffer greatly if the Svartálfs remain neutral or fight on the side of darkness during Ragnarok.”

  The Svartálfs exc
hanged glances with one another and shrugged, leaving Turid with no advice on how to proceed. “You seem to know more of the future than we do. Why do we matter so much?”

  “That I do not know. All I know is that one of our best seers, the Morrigan, said that you must join the side of the Æsir if Gaia is to have a chance of surviving.”

  Turid’s brows drew together and her mouth drooped in a frown. “What do we care if Midgard falls?”

  “I did not speak of Midgard. I spoke of Gaia, the anchor for Yggdrasil and the nine realms and the anchor for all other planes dreamed up by human minds. If Gaia falls, then so do the nine realms, you understand? It is in everyone’s interest to ensure Gaia’s survival.”