Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven (27 page)

When I fall silent, Brighid frowns. “That is all?”

“Aye.”

“Tell me everything else she said or did.”

“There’s not much else. She opened a portal behind me and said I would owe a great debt to Siodhachan, and then she pushed me through as I was about to tell her how I felt about that.”

“And Siodhachan knows nothing of this?”

“No. The message was for you, and you can tell him or not, as ye please. But he’s spent some time telling me about recent events, and I had to pretend to be surprised when he told me the Morrigan was dead.”

“I see. You have done the Tuatha Dé Danann a service. What would you have in return, Eoghan Ó Cinnéide?”

I hadn’t expected a favor. I thought getting to extend my life
was payment enough, but it would be a shame to pass on an opportunity like this.

“I have a question,” I says, “and I would like ye to answer it truthfully in that three-part voice o’ yours. Ye have my word I won’t repeat it to anyone.”

She eyes me warily and gives the faintest of nods. “Ask.”

“What do ye know about the death of Midhir?”

Brighid sits up straight with a jerk, and her eyes light up all blue. She speaks simultaneously in three different registers: “Nothing. I did not even know he was dead, nor did I realize anyone wished to kill him.”

She couldn’t lie with that voice. I can safely cross her off the list of suspects.

“He’s been dead for at least a couple weeks now, maybe more. He’s hangin’ upside down in his bedroom, strung up in iron chains with his throat cut.”

I catch her up on some of the things Siodhachan shared with me while I was touching up his tattoos—and I reveal to her that I’m his archdruid, figuring it’s safe to do so now that I’m sure she doesn’t have it out for him. When I finish, she sighs and says, “You’ve given me much to think about and much to investigate, but I will need to keep this secret until I know more. Therefore, you will present yourself formally at the Court this morning, say nothing of these things, and I will welcome you and give you my blessing to follow your own desires. What are they, by the way, now that you have discharged your duty to the Morrigan and to me?”

“I’d like to get back to the world and take on apprentices. We need more Druids.”

She looks surprised at first but then relaxes with a happy sigh. “I will have no trouble blessing that. It is precisely what I would wish myself.”

“Would it be rude of me,” I says, “to ask if I might dine with you and your boys? An informal thing, of course.”

“Not at all. I invite you now.”

“Excellent.”

She leaves me in the care of a steward while we wait for dawn. I’m able to grab a few hours’ sleep before it’s time to go to Court and pretend this is the first time we’ve spoken. I feel hundreds of eyes on me, judging and calculating and scheming already. I am judging them in return. In front of the Court, Brighid invites me to dine with her and a few others, and my acceptability is immediately established. Manannan Mac Lir extends an invitation to join him the next night, and I accept. I catch more sleep after that in preparation for the evening, and I have no doubt that Brighid is investigating Midhir’s estate as I do so.

Ogma joins us for dinner, which consists of some magnificent whiskey and some other things that I don’t remember but which were chewier than the whiskey. I’m paying far more attention to my company than to the food. Ogma sits on my right and Brighid to my left; facing us across the table are the brothers Goibhniu, Creidhne, and Luchta. They’re all dark-eyed and mischievous, but I think it’s the good-natured type of mischief they prefer. They seem to have made a wager amongst themselves as to what kind of weapon I’d ask them to make, even though no such idea had crossed me mind. Their disappointment when they learn that I have no epic project for them to tackle is so profound that I feel guilty.

“Wait,” Goibhniu says. “I know how to settle this. Eoghan, when you fight, what is your preferred weapon?”

“Well, I like to fight with me fists, if ye can believe it,” I say. “Especially now that the ache in me knuckles is gone.”

Creidhne whoops in victory. “That’s it! Brass knuckles! That’s my job, brothers! Victory is mine!”

“What’s all this, then?” I ask.

They confess that they cannot wait for more Druids to walk the earth, because we offer them new challenges as craftsmen.

“Goibhniu and I had such fun crafting Scáthmhaide for Granuaile,” Luchta says, “that we were a bit sad when we finished it.”

“I was left out of that project entirely,” Creidhne says, “but
this will make up for it. I’ll take your measurements after dinner and we will speak of what might be done.”

Apparently I’m not to be given a choice in the matter. These boys are artists who love life for the beauty it shows them. They spend their days wondering how they can be creative rather than destructive. I have always secretly admired such people and their vision and wished I possessed a quarter measure of what their eyes perceive. I cross them off my list.

“So what do you do to keep yourself busy these days, Ogma?” I ask. He’s big and bald and fond of gold hoop earrings. At first I think that’s a tempting target for an opponent, but then I realize he
wants
you to reach for them and see what happens.

“These days I dance among the planes on behalf of Brighid, an ambassador of the Fae. Not the sort of heroic thing I was used to doing in the old days, but the other pantheons need to know the Tuatha Dé Danann are serious, and sending a liveried faery to represent us somehow doesn’t have the same gravitas.”

“Ah, I see. And you’re scouting, of course, while you’re there. Wherever you’ve been going, I mean.”

He looks at me, I think, for the first time. He’d been avoiding eye contact and until that moment had given the impression that sitting down to table with me was a duty rather than a pleasure. Suddenly, dinner was interesting.

“Of course,” he says, a small smile tugging on one side of his mouth.

“Because if ye want to lay the hurt on someone, it’s best to know where they’re hiding their soft bits.”

“Precisely.”

I raise my cup and says, “To punchin’ ’em in the pillows,” and he smiles heartily at that and drinks with me.

“Do you know of the Wendish gods?” he asks.

“No, I don’t even know the Wendish people.”

“They have largely disappeared as a distinct ethnicity, assimilated into Germanic and Slavic cultures,” he says. I don’t know those peoples either, but I hold me tongue and let him keep
going. “Their pagan shrines were attacked and destroyed by surrounding Christians. They have been out of any significant worship for centuries and they’re very weak, so I cannot imagine why they would want to pick a fight with us. One of Brighid’s faeries went to their plane recently, however, and never came back. I went to investigate and just returned.”

And as he speaks of Wendish strengths and weaknesses on their plane, I can see that he’s a fine military mind, but it is straightforward thinking and lacks subtlety. He has no ideas about how to outthink and outmaneuver them, only about how to overpower them. It’s not that his ideas aren’t fine—I admire them and can’t find fault—it’s just that they are of a particular flavor, and it’s not the one I’m looking for. Ogma is clever, but he’s not a mastermind; he’s the competent guy the mastermind sends in to pound your organs into jelly.

I stay the night at Creidhne’s place after he’s finished measuring me hands and making molds and so on, and as I drift off to sleep, I catch myself wondering what Greta is doing. Even in my subjective timeline, it has been a long while since I cared enough about anyone to wonder such things. I wonder next if I might be the only man who ever made a deal with the Morrigan and came out ahead.

After concluding my chat with Rebecca Dane, I fled north to Flagstaff, grabbed a slice at Alpine Pizza on Leroux Street, and then drove my rental car to a winding forest road behind the mountains on the north side of town. I planted myself in Lockett Meadow underneath a stand of aspens, to think of how best to act now that Inari and her cabal o’ gods had given me the green light to do as I wished. But I couldn’t focus. Lockett Meadow is a popular place, and since the first snow hadn’t fallen yet, there were other people around—only nine hardy campers, mind you, but that was enough distraction for me at the moment.

Every so often I have to get away to a quiet place to think, take my brain somewhere that the noise of the modern world cannot be heard, and seek clarity in an unspoiled environment without a hint of cell phone service. Rebecca Dane’s revelation required a good long think, and I knew just the place. There’s a waterfall in Glacier National Park that they call Bird Woman Falls these days, reachable by car in the summertime only but reachable by
me year-round via plane-shifting. I’d bound the trees there long before it was a national park or the falls somehow became associated with a bird woman. It has a view of Heaven’s Peak, snowcapped and jutting defiantly above the clouds. Once I’d shifted there with Oberon, a breathtaking panorama of natural beauty was spread before me, and I didn’t have to share it with anyone. Going-to-the-Sun Road was closed off at this time of the year, so there was no traffic passing below the falls at all. The only noises were the companionable rush of the falls and the friendly whispers of the wind in the trees. I was all alone with my hound.

For five whole minutes.

“Hola, amigo,”
a voice called from behind me, just as I was proposing hypotheticals to myself. Startled, I rolled left and turned, old instincts taking over, and searched for the owner of the voice. A short Latino man with a wide smile waved at me, a gold wristwatch band shining on his arm. He also had a gold crucifix on a thick chain hanging around his neck, and this rested on a button-up linen shirt that was entirely out of place on this cold mountaintop in Montana. Of course, I wasn’t dressed for the weather either.

Oberon barked once, as startled as I was.

I don’t know, buddy
.

The stranger’s smile was friendly and infectious. He had large, kind eyes. A thin, wispy mustache rested on his upper lip, but a fuller beard ran along his jaw, and his dark hair was long and gently wavy, tied back in a queue. I looked down at the bottom of his chinos and noticed that he had made the impossible decision to wear flat sandals. I wear sandals most everywhere but get strange looks for it—especially in a place like this, where one expects to see hiking boots.

“Hola,”
I replied, on my guard. He continued to smile and speak in Spanish.

“Es un placer volverte a ver, Siodhachan.”
Then he switched from Spanish to English, speaking with a subtle accent in a rich, confident voice. “To answer the question you were thinking, I
did not hike up here at all. I used … other methods. The last time we spoke, we enjoyed fish and chips and a very fine whiskey together in Arizona. I also healed a rather grievous knife wound, after which I gave you some advice that you chose not to follow.”

Whoa. I squinted at him. “Jesus? Is that you?”

He laughed and put his hands in his pockets. “Well, during this particular visit I suppose you should call me
Jesus
,” he said, pronouncing it the Spanish way,
hay-suse
. “But, yes, it is I. Do you not like this body I have chosen to wear? I got it from a delightful Mexican woman living in Whitefish. Her name is Gina and she worries about her son a lot, prays that he would love me the way she does. Very few love me as purely as she does, however.” He removed a hand from his pocket and swept it from his chest down toward the ground, presenting himself like a gameshow prize. “This is how she sees me, and I tell you truly, I like the way she thinks. It is an uncommon visualization, and I appreciate the modern quirks. I have this wristwatch, for example. I do not truly need it, and Gina herself is unsure why I’d have one, but she thought it would look nice on me and I cannot argue the point.”

Yes. He’s the Christian god, Jesus. You weren’t with me the last time we met
.

Jesus was always quick to identify himself using things only he and I would know, so that I wouldn’t hurt myself looking at him in the magical spectrum. Most of the old gods seared my sight a little with the bright white of the magic suffusing their bodies; one of the current A-listers like Jesus would probably blind me if I tried to check him out.

“It is good to see you, indeed,” I said, returning his smile and stepping forward to shake hands. “A very pleasant surprise.”

“Shall we sit and have a drink? This time the drinks are on me.” He reached into his right pocket and pulled out a tall bottle of amber Milagro, an extra añejo sipping tequila, which could not possibly have been waiting there before. From his left pocket he produced two small crystal goblets lined with a gold frosting
along the rims, which also could not have been clinking around in there previously. He handed them to me while he uncorked the tequila.