by Kevin Hearne
“I spoke my true feelings at the time. I did not want to hurt them,” I answer. “I was trying to think of a way out that did not involve killing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of one.”
Flidais nods in approval. “Respect for life. Good.”
I want to ask where her respect for life is, why she thinks it is all right to treat animals like puppets and force me to kill one of them in some sort of sick game. But Atticus told me never to sass one of the Tuatha Dé Danann no matter how much they might deserve it. And Brighid chooses to answer some of the unspoken questions anyway.
“Granuaile MacTiernan, you just underwent the Baolach Cruatan, the Dangerous Trial. All initiates must pass it to continue their training. It is always administered by a Druid unknown to the initiate in conditions similar to these. Explain why.”
Another test.
“An initiate’s master may have difficulty administering a properly dangerous trial,” I say, immediately recognizing the truth of it. “And the initiate must believe herself alone and in true danger for the test to be effective.”
A curt nod from Flidais. “What is the purpose of the test?”
“It is a test of courage and resourcefulness in a situation where magic and weapons are unavailable.” Then, remembering how Flidais questioned me on my pause, I add quickly, “And, to a lesser extent, morality.”
I get a patient redirection for my efforts. “That is the nature of the test, but not its purpose.”
Oh. I am supposed to provide them with a rationale for what they just did to me—and to Oberon, the javelinas, and the mountain lion. This time I don’t have a quick answer.
“Will you release Oberon to me, please, while I think about it?” I ask.
Flidais looks to Brighid to inquire if she approves. The First among the Fae gives the barest nod, and Flidais drops her vision to Oberon, who gets up and hurries over to me, his head and tail lowered in shame. I bend down to greet him and whisper, “Hey, head up. You did nothing wrong.” I cup my hand underneath his jaw and smile into his eyes. His tail wags weakly in response.
“How long have you been conducting this Baolach Cruatan?” I ask the goddesses.
“Since the Tuatha Dé came to Ireland,” Brighid says.
I nod and consider, trying not to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of years that represented. Atticus would have gone through this same trial, and he must have known that I would have to face it before long. He might have even arranged for this to happen during his absence, and I saw how he had tried to prepare me for it, showing me all that gore and death back at Tony Cabin and warning me that magic users rarely die in their sleep. I remember him forcing me to look on the severed head of a witch held in a werewolf’s jaws, and my answer comes.
“It is character evaluation through crisis,” I say. “You cannot take a person’s true measure until they are threatened.”
“Yes. And why must we measure you this way?” Flidais presses.
“I will be bound to the earth someday,” I reply. “You can let neither the cowardly nor the bloodthirsty be bound in such a way.”
“Excellent,” Brighid says. “I am satisfied. Are you hurt?”
For the first time, I examine my calf, which is beginning to throb painfully now that I’m warming up. The cold had numbed the pain somewhat, and adrenaline had let me ignore the rest. It is a shallow cut up the outside of my calf that would have been much deeper if the wet suit hadn’t taken the brunt of the damage. It’s still bleeding and needs stitches I don’t have.
“I got scratched pretty well here.”
“We will leave you to heal,” Flidais says. “You have passed the Baolach Cruatan. Congratulations. We look forward to the day when you are bound with the earth.”
“May harmony find you,” Brighid adds.
“And you,” I manage to reply before they wink out of sight, thanks to Flidais.
They probably will linger and observe me for a while, but I don’t care. I am more concerned about the mountain lion. It rises underneath my gaze, gives a parting hiss to Oberon, and jumps back into the river, leaving us alone with the dead javelina.
I give Oberon a hug around the neck. “You are a fabulous hound. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I know you wanted to help, but you couldn’t. You were under Flidais’s control once before, weren’t you?”
Oberon gives a small whine. I almost join in, because it occurs to me then to wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t passed the Baolach Cruatan.
Sonora interrupts my morbid thoughts with an observation that puts to rest what might have happened if I’d failed: //Druidchild lives / Joy / Relief//
//Yes / Regret / Cannot work now / Must fix suit first//
//Must fix leg / Sonora will heal//
That was excellent news, because I hadn’t been looking forward to pulling a Rambo and performing surgery on myself. //Gratitude / Harmony// I send.
//Harmony// Sonora replies.
Oberon is so sweet. He doesn’t leave my side now. He watches me try to sew up the gash in my wet suit with fishing line and hooks, which I’m sure must be about as exciting to him as watching grass grow. Or maybe he’s just waiting for me to stab myself. There will still be some flushing no matter what I do, but not, I hope, to the point where I’m in danger of succumbing to hypothermia. I feel nice and warm now, thanks to whatever Brighid did, but I suspect that once I get back in the river, I won’t be very warm again until we return to the rented truck.
I have killed hundreds of crawdads and felt nothing, but I still feel guilty about the javelina. He will haunt my dreams, I think.
A javelina is a collared peccary, which sounds like pecker, which sounds exactly like Beau Thatcher, my stepfather.
I do not normally wallow in symbolism, but perhaps I can save myself a trip to the therapist and indulge myself this once. In an odd way, perhaps the Baolach Cruatan has shown me how I can defeat him; if he stands against me, then the thing to do is act, not wait and hope he leaves.
When I chose to become a Druid, I picked up the rock. And when I am bound to the earth twelve years hence, I will be able to throw it in such a way that he loses everything, all to which he clings so tightly—except for his life. He will get to keep his life. No matter how much he squeals, there will be no mercy killing.
It takes two more days to finish clearing the river and return to the rental truck. Sonora is pleased with me, and I am pleased with myself, aside from the fact that I desperately need a hot bath and a whole cake of soap.
“You know what, Oberon? After four days of living on nothing but water and jerky, I think we deserve a steak. A tenderloin wrapped in bacon and maybe a side of bacon for dessert. What do you think?”
He barks enthusiastically, and his tail scythes the air; he clearly believes this to be a fantastic idea.
“And that episode with Brighid and Flidais? Should we tell Atticus about that when he gets back?”
Oberon’s ears droop, his tail goes still, and he barks twice for no.
“Yeah. I’m with you. Let’s keep that bit our secret.”
Tricked is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey eBook Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Kevin Hearne
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53463-7
www.delreybooks.com
Cover illustration: © Gene Mollica
v3.1_r2
Contents
Master Table of Contents
Tricked
Title Page
Copyright
Pronunciation Guide
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Pronunciation Guide
There’s a reason the Navajo Code Talkers were so invaluable to the Marines in WWII. Their language, while beautiful, is really difficult to describe, filled with little glottal stops and special characters and mind-shredding verb constructions like the optative-semelfactive. They have no adjectives but rather use their verbs in an adjectival way. To illustrate how complicated it can get, there is no Navajo word for the verb to give but rather eleven different words that vary depending on the size and shape of what is being given. I don’t use many words of their language in this book, but I’ve done my best to give you a clue about the few you’ll see below. None of them are verbs. Also note that there are regional differences in pronunciation, just as there are different dialects in English, so some of these pronunciations may differ slightly depending on where you are in the Navajo Nation.
Navajo
Áłtsé Hashké = Aht SEH hash KEH (Translates to First Angry, or perhaps First Mad or First Scolder. It’s the proper name of one of the First People, Coyote.)
Áńł’įįh = unn TEE (Means the Witchery Way, or the Corpse-Poison Way.)
ch’įįdii = CHEE dee (A ghost, but specifically the part of one’s spirit that wasn’t in harmony with the universe at the time of death.)
Diné = dih NEH (Means the People. It’s what the Navajo call themselves; the term Navajo was slapped on them by the Spanish and it stuck. In this book, art will imitate life; the Diné will call themselves Diné, and everyone else—including Atticus—will call them Navajo.)
Diné Bahane’ = dih NEH bah HAH neh (Means Story of the People. It is the Navajo creation story, parts of which are sung in various ceremonies.)
Hataałii = hah TAH hlee (This translates to singer, a person who sings at ceremonial occasions and creates sandpaintings, important in many rituals from blessing structures to restoring balance in those who have lost it; in crude terms, a medicine man.)
Hózh = hoh ZHOH (This means very good, or great energy, everything spiffy and balanced in the world, which English sometimes translates to blessing. To be honest, it doesn’t translate well into English; it’s just one of those words that are too big for Anglo-Saxon noises.)
Hózhji = hoh ZHOH jee (This means Blessing Way.)
Nílch’i = NIL cheh (Literally, air, but in stories this is the name of the wind. And, yeah, that l with the cross through it doesn’t really get pronounced like an English l, but it’s more of a guttural noise behind your molars; using an l is just an expedient approximation.)
Stunning Sandstone Edifices
Tyende = tee YEH in DEH (This mesa is located about ten miles southwest of Kayenta. Incredibly beautiful sandstone—just don’t be in a wash after a rain. Get to the high ground FAST, because they aren’t kidding about flash floods.)
Wolverines of Especial Interest
Faolan = FWAY lawn (This isn’t a Navajo name, by the way; we’re back to the Irish here.)
Tuatha Dé Danann
Ogma = OG mah (Pronounced og as in log. It’s not like the Ó in Aenghus Óg. That had a diacritical mark over it so you’d pronounce it as a long O. This one’s short. Ogma is credited with teaching Druids Ogham script, among other things.)
Chapter 1
The best trick I ever pulled off was watching myself die. I did a respectable job of it too—the dying, I mean, not the watching.
The key to dying well is to make a final verbal ejaculation that is full of rage and pain but not tainted in the least by squeals of terror or pleas for mercy. This was my father’s wisdom—about the only shred of it that has managed to lodge firmly in my mind all these years. He died while trying to steal somebody else’s cows.
It would be an ignominious end today, but before the common era in Ireland, it was honorable and manly to die in a cattle raid, as such theft was called. Before he left to meet his doom, my father must have had some dark premonition about it, because he shared with me all his opinions about dying properly, and I will never forget his final words: “A man’s supposed to shit himself after he dies, son, not before. Try to remember that, lad, so that when your time comes, you won’t make a right girly mess of it. Now fuck off and go play in the bog.”
Like many silly codes of bravery and manliness, the meat of my father’s instruction on how to die well can be distilled to a simple slogan: Die angry at maximum volume. (Dying silently is out of the question; the world’s last Druid should not go gentle into that good night.)
During infrequent spates of morbidity, I used to speculate on my eventual manner of death. I figured it would happen on a city street somewhere, cut off from the power of the earth, unable to summon a magical mulligan that would let me see the sunrise. But at the same time, I hoped it would be in a cool city with a bitchin’ name, like Kathmandu or Bangkok or maybe Climax, Michigan. I never thought it would be in a dried-up place called Tuba City.
Situated in the southwestern portion of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Tuba City rests on a red sandstone mesa with no visible means of economic support. The first question I asked when I saw it—besides “Where are all the tubas?”—was, “Why is anybody living here?” The red rocks may have a stark beauty to them, but beyond that Tuba City is nearly treeless, dusty, and notably lacking in modern amenities of dubious worth, like golf courses and cafeteria-style dining. It does have a reservoir and some pastures nestled into a canyon, but otherwise it’s puzzling why nine thousand souls would adopt an address there.
On the north end of town, where the BIA Road intersects with Indian Route 6220, a large white water tower juts out of the desert. It overlooks a few dilapidated trailers on the very edge of the city, and then there is naught but a rocky mesa with scattered shrubs gamely trying to make a living in a few inches of sandy soil. I’d flown to the top of the tower as an owl, carrying a wee pair of binoculars in my talons, and now I was camouflaged in my human form, lying flat, and peering northeast into the barren waste where I was about to die.
The dying had to be done. The Morrigan had seen it in a lucid vision, and she doesn’t get those unless it’s really dire and inevitable, like James Earl Jones telling you in his Darth Vader voice, “It is your desss-tiny.” And, frankly, I probably deserved it. I’d been very naughty recently and, in retrospect, epically stupid. Because I couldn’t bear to break my word, I’d taken Leif Helgarson to Asgard to kill Thor and he managed to pull it off, but we killed a few extra Æsir in the process and turned Odin into a drooling vegetable. Now the remaining Æsir were slavering for me to shuffle off my mortal coil, as were several other thunder gods who took Thor’s demise as a personal affront to all things thundery.
After building flaming funeral ships for their dead and resolving to avenge them—for some people approach vengeance like an all-you-can-eat buffet—the Æsir sent Týr and Vidar after the surviving members of our company. I had no idea where Perun or Zhang Guo Lao were hiding, and I hadn’t an inkling of whether Hrym and the frost giants ever made it out of Asgard. Leif was safe, because they saw Thor smash his skull with Mjöllnir; thanks to the peculiar regeneration capabilities of vampires and the dutiful attentions of Dr. Snorri Jodursson, Leif hadn’t quite died, but it would be some time b
efore we knew if he’d make a full recovery.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t safe at all, because I had people to look out for. Perun could spend the next century as an eagle and they’d never find him. Zhang Guo Lao, I’d heard, was capable of true invisibility when he stood still; since he could go full ninja, they’d never get him either. I could go to a nice plane somewhere and be safe—I could even take Oberon and Granuaile with me—but without true contact with the elementals of earth, Granuaile wouldn’t be able to advance her training as a Druid, and the world desperately needs more Druids. So my choices were to stay on earth and die or leave earth and let the world slowly die of neglect—which wouldn’t truly help, since all planes connected to earth would die at the same time.
I decided to stay and die. Loudly.
Týr and Vidar found me quickly enough once they knew who to ask for. I’d blown my cover somewhat spectacularly some months earlier by killing Aenghus Óg, so by now almost anyone paranormal or supernatural could have pointed them to Arizona. They chased me up to Tuba City, towing along five thunder gods for backup: Ukko from Finland, Indra from India, Lei Gong from China, Raijin from Japan, and Shango from Nigeria. All of them are very powerful gods and quite beloved by their people, but few are the tales in which we hear of their wit or perception.
Indra was quite the character, for example, and undoubtedly the most powerful of the lot currently. He had a reputation for lovin’ the ladies, a tendency I couldn’t criticize myself, but he got himself into some awful trouble for it once. He chose to lay down with the wife of a magician, who of course found out immediately that Indra was “in da house” and assigned him a punishment worthy of Dante: Since the thunder god could think of nothing but vaginas, the cuckolded husband cursed Indra with a thousand vaginas all over his body. Indra had to walk around like that for a while, until Krishna took pity on him and commuted the sentence by turning all the vaginas into eyes. Still, think of the optometrist appointments.