Staked

“How will stables help?”

“I don’t want to set up our operation here, where someone can come in behind us.”

“What operations?”

“A quick one. You’ll see.” We jog over to the stable, the warhorse watching us from the far side of the pasture, and I ask Orlaith to hide inside the stable.

“Why hide?”

If someone comes in to mess with us, you will be our surprise counterattack, I say, though I truly just want her to be safe. And I need you to guard my clothes and my staff, pretty please.

She agrees and I begin to disrobe. Perun politely turns his back and says, “I think I understand operations now. You will be speaking horse to horse.”

“You got it on the first guess. Wait here, please.” He nods and I shape-shift to a chestnut mare, which I must confess is my favorite animal form. Running is so effortless, and I love the feeling of my mane and tail whipping in the wind—not that there is any wind in this cavern. Just a nervous, twitchy stallion. I figure if I approach him as a horse, he won’t feel immediately threatened and will let me get close enough to make contact and soothe him before he charges at me.

He keeps bucking as I grow closer, however. The sudden appearance of another horse is not as calming as I had hoped. He is a smart horse who knows how to count, and there had not been two horses in this cavern until this very moment. He knows something odd is going on.

Gods below, he’s magnificent. Milk-white hide and a coal-black mane. I switch my vision to the magical spectrum, examine his turbulent aura, and find the threads of his consciousness. I reach out with my own, bind them together, and send him feelings of peace and harmony and my unabashed admiration for him. He rears back at first, pawing at the air with his hooves, but when he returns all four legs to the earth, he snorts once and grows still, open to hearing—or feeling, or seeing—more. I send him visions of the sky above Rügen and an invitation to go there with me. He nods his head, and I also feel his great desire to go. He hates it down here. No sky. No other horses. He has been so very lonely. I respond with happiness at his decision to accompany me and am about to tell him to follow, when movement tears my attention away from him.

Someone is coming through the gate that leads to our exit. He is like a stick of charcoal, dressed all in black and topped with a drape of black hair. Only his forehead, cheeks, and nose are pale; all else is darkness. He glances at me and the horse of Świętowit, dismisses us, and then he spies Perun by the stable. His hands curl into fists, his jaw juts forward, and his teeth are bared in a snarl; Perun does the same when he sees the man in black, who I suppose must be Weles. It’s glaringly obvious that they hate each other.

Perun shouts a challenge at him and I expect to hear Russian, but it’s something older, because these gods are much older than that language. But I do recognize the name Świętowit, and maybe a few others; Perun is most likely demanding to know where they are. I don’t understand anything that Weles says in return. His voice is full of spite, though—he probably told Perun off in the rudest possible terms—and that looks like the end of diplomacy. What happens next is a bit comical: Perun lifts his axe and tries to summon lightning, but that’s a nonstarter underground. Weles spreads his hands to either side, palms up, fingers clutching as if he’s holding an invisible goblet in each, and raises them up in dramatic gesture. When there’s no response to this, he blinks and looks down at the grass, bewildered that nothing has happened. No earth magic for him, no thunder for Perun. I’m thinking they’re going to have to duke it out with good ol’-fashioned fisticuffs, but they surprise me and shape-shift instead. Perun tosses down his axe and takes wing as the biggest damn eagle I’ve ever seen, while Weles flops, twitches, stretches, and becomes a horror-show serpent, a truly gargantuan snake that could swallow me whole as a horse. Perun screeches and the snake hisses, and it makes me shudder.

“Orlaith,” I say, my mental voice slightly changed by my animal form, “don’t come out. Stay hidden and guard my stuff. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Okay,” she says.

I recommend to the warhorse that he stay where he is, and then I circle around the edge of the pasture toward the stable. The serpent doesn’t care: He only has eyes for Perun, who’s circling above, gaining speed, and looking for an opportunity to dive. The snake coils itself to reduce the target area, forcing the eagle to go through the fangs if it wants to get to the body. It bobs and weaves its head, trying not to lose Perun in the glare of the UV lights, but considering the trouble I’m having keeping track of him, I imagine that it’s difficult.

When I’m halfway to the stable, Perun attacks, and it’s so fast that I can’t track what happened exactly—just that the snake is bleeding and there are some feathers left behind afterward. No clear advantage to either.

At the entrance to the stable I change back to my human shape, so that my hooves won’t clop loudly on the floor and draw the snake’s attention. And as soon as I do, I think maybe I should be drawing the snake’s attention, to give Perun a free shot. Putting most of my body behind the stable entrance, I simply peek my head out and shout, “Weles!”

The snake’s head swings around and spies me. It rears back, and I scramble away from the door just as the massive head plunges through, breaking the frame with the power of its strike and snapping its jaws closed on air. And then just as quickly the head is gone, hissing as Perun takes advantage of my distraction and attacks from above.

“Granuaile! Are you okay?”

Yes, I’m all right. But I need Scáthmhaide. I see it resting next to my folded clothes and snatch it up, casting the binding that will turn me invisible.

“I didn’t know snakes were allowed to get that big.”

Me either. Wait here, please.

Sneaking back to the door and peeking around the shattered frame, I realize that while I might be invisible, the snake can still doubtless taste me in the air. It knows I’m around, but its attention is back on the ceiling, keeping track of Perun once more. There’s more blood than there was before. I can see gashes in the snake’s flesh where Perun’s talons or maybe his beak did some damage. But I figure that with Scáthmhaide and an assist from Gaia, I can deliver some serious punishment and give Perun one more chance. There’s no question in my mind that I’m doing the right thing: Any friend of Loki’s is an enemy of mine. So I bound forward, leap up and spin to increase the force, then bring down Scáthmhaide with every ounce of power I can deliver on top of the serpent’s uppermost coil. I hear the spine snap and the impact travels up my arms, and there will be no graceful landing for me. It takes all I have simply to hang on to my staff.

The snake makes a sort of gurgling hiss instead of a cry of pain. Then the light disappears, I’m punched in the gut and the back, and the light returns, all before I hit the ground. Once I’m there, flat on my ass, the agony begins. Not from the fall, but from the two huge fangs that punctured my torso when the snake lashed out on instinct. The left half of its mouth caught my left half; bottom fang into my guts, top fang into my back. There was venom in that bite, which hits a second later, burning like acid in my veins and throwing my muscles into convulsions. I gasp and struggle to reach the cool serenity of a headspace where I can focus on directing my healing while the other headspace suffers. Atticus told me it was a survival skill and had all these distracting tests during my training to make sure I could access the serenity while the chaos raged elsewhere, but there is no distraction quite like genuine, fiery pain. It demands that you give it your full attention and resists being shut out. So it takes several false starts and five to seven precious seconds before I can create that separation in my mind and let one headspace convulse while the other coolly deals with the internal bleeding and breaking down the toxins. And during those few seconds, while I gasp for air on the ground, my head turns to the left, I see the giant snake head of Weles slam to the ground right in front of me, and directly below its jaws, at the top of what could be considered one enormous neck, are a pair of eagle talons. Perun got him because of me, which, honestly, helps me slip into the headspace I need. I can’t talk, since everything is either pain or the healing of it, and that worries Orlaith something awful, because she’s suddenly there and licking my face and trying to say things that I can’t spare the concentration to answer if I want to live.