Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven (30 page)

Using the binding carved into the length of Scáthmhaide, I melt from sight and enter the hospital in search of a suitable host for Laksha.

She hasn’t spoken to me at all since the disaster in the field, and I’m both hurt and relieved by it. She could have taken up residence in my head again but has chosen not to. I wonder if it’s because she’s too weak or if it’s because she doesn’t want to face the questions I have for her. Either way, I don’t want the responsibility for her life in my pocket anymore, and since she seemed partial to choosing a young woman’s body before, I’m hoping to find one here.

Searching the hospital for comatose patients takes me a while. I don’t understand the signs near the doors, which are only occasionally printed in English alongside other scripts. But a few floors and many dead ends later, I find some comatose patients. Two are men, one is a very old lady, but the last is a tall woman in her thirties with sallow skin and lank, stringy hair. Most of her chart is meaningless scribbling to me, but some vitals are also typed in Roman script, such as her name:
Mhathini Palanichamy
.

Deciding that has a nice musical ring to it and that I don’t have nearly the patience for an extended search that I had years ago when we found Selai, I pull out the ruby necklace and settle it about Mhathini’s neck. Once I remove my hand, it becomes visible and looks so very out of place against a white hospital gown.

Checking again to make sure I’m the only conscious person around, I bend lower and speak to the necklace, feeling somewhat silly even though no one can see me.

“Laksha, it’s Granuaile. You’re resting against a comatose patient who will serve as your new body. I’m going to leave the necklace here, so if you want to make sure you retain control of it, slip into this woman’s body right now and wake her up before I go.”

I wait a full minute and nothing happens, so I lean down again and say, “Right now, Laksha. You have one more minute and I’m leaving. I won’t know what will happen to the necklace then.”

With fifteen seconds left, the eyelids flutter open and the beeping of the heart-rate monitor speeds up. I drop my invisibility so that she can see me.

“Welcome back.”

“Whur … mur? Er. Nur?”

“Pardon me?”

“Cur. Tur!” Her hand rises from her side, IV and all, and points first at her mouth, then twirls around her head. Her expression twists in frustration.

“Ah. This woman must have suffered some serious brain damage to the speech centers, I’m guessing. She probably has aphasia. Can you understand me all right? Thumbs up or down.” I get a thumbs-up. “Good. Looks like your motor skills are fine. Shall I assume that you can fix the speech problem with time?”

Another affirmative. “Excellent.” I’m disappointed that we can’t speak right away, but I can hardly blame Laksha for the problem. “I will give you that time and we’ll speak later. You have ways of finding me, so I trust you will do that as soon as you are able. We need to talk.”

“Whur mur nur?”

“Your name is Mhathini Palanichamy. Is that what you were asking?” Thumbs-up. I hear footsteps approaching in the hall, which heralds the arrival of medical staff responding to a change in her vitals. “You’re still in Thanjavur. I’ll leave you to the business of starting over.” I wink out of sight just as a nurse enters and exclaims at the sight of Mhathini’s open eyes. I slide past her and sigh in relief once I get out into the hall, glad to have that burden off my back. I don’t know if Mhathini is still in there, sharing space with Laksha, or if she has moved on, but I suppose I will find out later.

I pick up Orlaith and spend the remainder of the afternoon trying to find some way to help the city recover from the rakshasa plague. The language barrier hinders me, however, and that, coupled
with perhaps a dose or two of paranoia and xenophobia—or else a fear of big dogs—makes us unwelcome.

It’s been a completely frustrating day, and after a desultory dinner I curl up in bed with Orlaith and my father’s diary, working backward through the entries in case they include any mention of Logan. I don’t find anything about him, but I do find something else: an entry on my birthday.

I feel as if I’ve fallen from two stories and landed gut-first on a pommel horse, the air completely gone from my lungs, and when I breathe in again, it’s so very painful that the noise wakes up Orlaith.

It’s okay. Go back to sleep
.

I trace the words with my finger, trying to contact my dad through the ink he scrawled there months ago. I know exactly how he felt, because I’m feeling it now. There’s so much time for regret ahead of me, days and months and years of it. I put the book down, turn on my side, and drape an arm across Orlaith, hoping to sleep away some of that time.

I resolve to track down a possible site north of town for the Lost Arrows of Vayu. If this Logan person is still alive, he might be attacking the earth with a shovel somewhere.

When I wake up, a gray Saturday in India, I shoot off a text to Atticus before I hop into the shower, to let him know he shouldn’t worry about me. To my surprise when I emerge, he’s answered, asking if my father is okay.

His death isn’t something I wish to consign to a text message, so I say,
You don’t need to worry about him either
, and then he does his Shakespeare thing, sweet man, kissing me with a line
from
Troilus and Cressida: The strong base and building of my love / Is as the very centre of the earth
.

It is a game we play, sometimes, to answer one poet’s words with another’s, so that both the bards and we converse. The reply has to make sense in context, of course, but you score bonus points if you use a quote that contains one or more words from the previous one. I send him two lines from Whitman:
Far-swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossom’d earth! / Smile, for your lover comes
. And then I amend that with,
As soon as I can, anyway. Don’t wait up
.

The estates of the Tuatha Dé Danann are proper castles, but they rise straight out of the turf like gray mountains, no walls around them like the few human-built ones I’ve seen on earth. They’re never besieged, so that makes walls unnecessary, I suppose, but I know the true reason the Tuatha Dé Danann don’t build walls around them: They want people to lose their shite and fill their pants when they gaze upon the glory of their architecture, and it makes me laugh. Binding stone together into a seamless tower doesn’t impress me. Show me what ye can do when there’s no wall between us, and maybe then I’ll offer my respect.

When I shift to the trees ringing the pastures of Manannan Mac Lir’s estate, I see that he’s worked some blue stones in with the gray here and there, swirling patterns of it, and mixed in are some shiny reflective bits of shell, which Siodhachan says is called mother-of-pearl. There’s plenty of that around the entrance to his castle, and it’s worked into the tiles of his floor and his interior walls as well, which I think is a terrible idea. It keeps
flashing and winking at me, and I can’t tell half the time if that’s a piece of shell or a pixie wing in the corner of my eye—which I guess must be the point. It’s a kind of camouflage for them.

His place is fecking lousy with faeries. Flying about the grounds and hovering near the ceiling and hiding under furniture, walking around in livery of two different kinds because some of them serve Fand and some of them serve Manannan. Manannan’s are in blue and gray and tend to be water Fae of some kind or other. Selkies and sea horsemen with big eyes looking around for their ocean but seeing only stone and the small dead bits of other creatures that swam in it once upon a time. Fand’s lot favors maroon and gold and a soft fabric called velvet, and they’re the ones that make me nervous, because she has the fliers. Pixies and assorted airborne irritants, and plenty of the large, man-sized Fae who look as if they have bones made of willow sticks. If I breathe heavily in their general direction, they’ll fall over. But I see that some of them have weapons, oversize bronze needles they use instead of swords.

I notice that their eyes fall to my throat when they first see me and then relax only after they confirm that there’s nothing there. They’re looking for iron. Two of them greet me at the gate and lead me inside to an inner courtyard that has both a tethered tree and a deep pool of salt water.

“What’s that for?” I ask, pointing at the pool. It can’t be for fishing.

“The Lord Manannan sometimes comes and goes that way. He opens a portal underwater and swims directly into the earthly oceans.”

That was handy. If the pool was deep enough, he could shift away—or not—and no one here would know whether he had truly left, without diving in to make sure. And he could also return but not surface until he chose.

There are white benches distributed around the pool, along with sculpted hedgerows and flowering plants. Two figures rise from one and approach. I think I might know who one of them is, but not the other. Best to wait for an introduction. One is a
red-haired woman in a white tunic edged in green bindings around the collar and sleeves, and the other is a giant man with coppery curly hair and a thick beard. He has a leaf stuck in his hair on the left side of his head, but I don’t think it’s my duty to point it out to him. I had seen them both at the Fae Court yesterday, but they had slipped away after my audience and I never got to speak with them.

“Eoghan Ó Cinnéide,” my escort says, “may I present Flidais, of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and Perun, thunder god of the Slavic people.”

I’d been right about the woman. The huntress was wearing a knife at her hip inlaid with green stone, something Siodhachan had mentioned in his story. “It’s an honor,” I say, giving them both a tight nod. It might have been more proper to bow or take a knee or something, but if they truly want their arses kissed, they’ll have to force me to do it.

“Pleased to meet you, Eoghan,” Flidais says, her face a polite mask. It’s a bit pink and puckered here and there, as are parts of her arms; she had been burned by Loki and then driven mad by Bacchus not so long ago, but her physical recovery was almost complete and she wasn’t drooling on her boots. Perun smiles underneath his beard at me.

“Is honor to meet another Druid. I am liking Irish peoples very much.”

“You’ve been visiting for a while, then?” I knew that Loki had set fire to his plane and he was something of a refugee, but I wondered what he would say to a stranger.

“Yes, I am guest here.” Just the basics, then.

Flidais takes his hand and says, “He’s my guest.”

“Oh,” I says, understanding. Siodhachan hadn’t told me about this relationship, so it might be a new development. Or perhaps he thought it wasn’t important. Knowing Flidais’s reputation, I could imagine that Perun had been a very recent guest of hers in the forest, and the leaf in his hair indicated that he’d had a good time. She had to have seen the leaf before this moment, though—it couldn’t be missed—so she had left it there on
purpose. But what purpose, exactly? Was this merely a practical joke on her lover? Was she marking him as hers? Or was this a pointed message, either to me or to our hosts? Since Fand was her daughter, Flidais might enjoy making her uncomfortable with small tokens of promiscuity. I wouldn’t find out unless I waited and watched, so I says, “Well, peace and balance to you both.”

Flidais sees that I notice the leaf and say nothing. She winks at me with her right eye, so that Perun can’t catch it, before giving me a pleasant grin. “Manannan and Fand await us in the dining room,” she says. “Shall we go?”

“You are in for meal of memory,” Perun assures me, and saws the air with his thick hands. “No one sets a table like Fand and Manannan.”

He’s not exaggerating. I’ve never seen so much food, and there’s only the five of us at the table. The strangest thing is that it all seems to be for display instead of for eating. We each get a faery who puts full plates in front of us and takes them away after a couple of bites, only to produce a new dish to sample—but none of it comes from the food already on the table. The plates are brought out from the kitchen. Another team of faeries is in charge of drinks, keeping our glasses full of whatever we wish.

“We will bring any libation you desire,” Fand says as soon as I’m seated, and though I don’t know what the fecking hell a libation is, I guess that it means a drink. I decide to test her on it.

“Can I have a shot of whiskey, something aged at least twenty years?” Siodhachan told me such drinks are rare and expensive because people typically can’t wait that long to drink what they’ve distilled. But Fand is sincere.

“We have nothing so old here,” she says, “but it will be fetched immediately from Ireland.” She turns to find a faery dressed in her livery and nods at him. “Please bring us a selection as soon as you can manage.”

The faery, who I guess is some kind of steward, bows deeply
and says, “Yes, my queen,” then withdraws, presumably to pop off to earth to steal me a few bottles.