Staked

She bunches her muscles and leaps forward, charging the nearest one, and he wastes precious time figuring out that he can’t lift up a tree and smash her with it before she gets to him. So he lifts up the trunk end and hides behind it, effectively blocking Greta from reaching his throat. She bounces off, scurries behind him, and tears up the tendon behind his right ankle, the one that modern people named after some Greek warrior. The troll falls on his arse, and Greta makes sure she isn’t underneath. The tree falls down on top of the troll, and while that doesn’t do him terrible damage, it does mean his hands are busy trying to throw it off instead of protecting his throat. Greta tears it out for him and then scampers away as another troll tries to pound her to jelly with his makeshift club. He misses and smashes his friend’s face instead. I’m on the move, though still slow, but the remaining three trolls are not paying attention, because Greta is now far more dangerous in their eyes. They’ve all raised their clubs and are just waiting for Greta to move into smashing range. I’m so hobbled that I can probably do more good as a distraction than anything else, so I position myself behind them and roar as loudly as I can. Two of them are still mighty worried about Greta, but one looks around for me, and he’s the one that Greta goes for. A couple of bounds and a leap and she’s flying at his throat. He catches on at the last split second, instinctively drops the tree, and just swipes at the air in front of his torso in a desperate attempt to ward off her attack. It works: His arm, almost club-like in itself, bats her aside, and she tumbles less than gracefully to the ground.

“Ha!” one of them crows. “Now we smash—” But he is so very wrong. By choice, Greta’s not a pack leader, but she has all the charisma of one, and in the absence of Sam and Ty her wishes are paramount. Through the pack link she called the parents of me apprentices and their translators, and they arrive in time to swarm the last three trolls and tear them up. A couple start to come for me—they’re so excited they can’t tell friend from foe right now—but they pull up short and turn their heads to Greta. She has them firmly under control. They return to finish off Blue Bones and make sure all the trolls are well and truly a buffet for vultures.

It’s awkward to stay in bear form with me shoulder so messed up, so I shift back to human and yell about it because the pain gets amplified—an out-o’-place bone shard can wind up somewhere tender during a shape-shift and make the problem worse. Still, that’s six trolls down and the kids were never threatened. I shout, “I love it when we kick arse together!” Greta shakes herself all over and lets her tongue loll out to the side in a canine smile. “I’m going to get me clothes and check out that Old Way.” She lifts her head a couple times in an approximation of a nod and I pick me way downhill, wincing, trying to figure out how to get me cocked-up shoulder bones back to playing nicely together again. It’s going to bother me a good while.

Getting into me pants takes so long I don’t bother with the shirt, and I just carry it with me. Greta’s waiting by the tree the trolls appeared behind and shifting back to human. I wait for the process to finish before I try talking to her.

“Siodhachan says that werewolves have trouble traveling the planes. Gunnar used to get powerful sick. The theory is that your protections against magic fight against the plane-shifting and make ye queasy. So it’s best if I go alone.”

“Careful,” she says, still shuddering from the change.

“I will be. And I’ll be back as soon as I can manage.”

Flipping me vision to the magical spectrum, I can see the Old Way laid out before me, lit up like a trail of fireflies at dusk. Six steps forward, turn right three steps, quick left and another left, then right, and with every step the cooling bodies and the pines fade and the lush eternal summer of Tír na nÓg gets closer.

When I reach the end, I find meself in a nondescript area of Tír na nÓg. There are no helpful signs pointing me to Fand, nor any Fae nearby that I can question about it. It’s hidden perfectly because it’s smack in the middle of nothing special. Cursing at the necessity to shift to a bear again, I shuck off me pants, shift, and follow the trail of troll stench down to the river. That means the trolls arrived by boat from elsewhere, then. A dead end.

But at least while I’m here I can visit Fand’s prison to see if she left any clues there. And maybe figure out how she escaped.

Flidais and I put her on one of the Irish planes seldom visited by the winged Fae that adored her so much. It used to have a bonny name long ago, but now it’s a lawless place they call the Badlands, where the trolls and Fir Bolgs and other assorted nasties have chosen to live. It’s connected to Tír na nÓg by a well-guarded Old Way. Popular wisdom holds that you follow the rules if you use it to enter Tír na nÓg, and feck all the rules once you enter the Badlands. Lots of banditry and preying upon one another as soon as you set foot there. If you can make it through that, you tend never to come back again—too much trouble to fight through—and the various beings live as hermits as much as possible in jealously guarded territories. Flidais and I figured that if we hid Fand on that plane far from the Old Way, no one would even find her, much less engineer her escape. Flidais crafted a new Old Way in secret, accessed by hidden cave entrances on either end, and then set what we thought were incorruptible guards on her. The cell she was in was dead material—all glass—and utterly disconnected from the earth: It hung from iron chains set in the ceiling of rock. To ensure she couldn’t stretch out through that tenuous link and connect to the earth, we lined the ceiling with layers of hard plastic. Deprived of energy, she couldn’t unbind anything to escape. Her guards were in iron armor to further discourage binding and even had a hunk of cold iron to use as a talisman should they need it. She was to be given food, water, and anything she wanted to read, and that’s all. She had a chamber pot and had to lock herself up in iron manacles if she wanted the guards to empty it.

Imagine me surprise when I arrived at her secret prison to find her still in it. I look at the guards—four of them—and they’re the same ones we originally set upon her. Nothing different there. But nothing about this happy scene matches with the fact that I have an Old Way leading to me Grove and a troll who as much as admitted Fand had helped him get there.

“It’s been a while since I’ve visited, lads. Anything to report? Anything unusual?”

The guards all tell me no. Fand stares at me from her cell, hatred burning in her eyes, and still blindingly beautiful, like ice crystals in the sun. She hasn’t a stitch on her.

“When’s the last time ye emptied the chamber pot?” I ask the guards.

“Few days ago. She hasn’t asked.”

It gets me thinking. If that isn’t really Fand but an imposter, she wouldn’t want to be chained up in iron. That would mess with the glamour.

“Time to empty it, I’d say.” I go to the cell and tell her to chain herself up. She’s slow to comply but she does it, and there isn’t a flicker of a change to her appearance.

“Huh.” Either that really is her or it’s an exceptional illusion to withstand the touch of iron. Still, it can be done. An extra dose of caution is warranted.