Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven (41 page)

I will have nightmares about the battle cries and death screams, raw ululations of fear and rage and murderous intent directed at Atticus, and over it all the howling of the bean sídhe. And the snarling faces, the bared teeth, and the jets of blood—some of them fountaining because of my hand—those will haunt me also. The snarls would be directed at me if I were visible, I am sure, for Fand announced that this was about cold iron, and I have a measure of it dangling from my neck. I will remember those cries, the fire and the blood, and Fand floating above the field in a cold cocoon of sylphs, until I pass from the world.

I don’t know what spurred Fand to behave this way, but I feel certain this is not a fight that Atticus would have picked. He likes Fand and so do I, which is why I didn’t put that knife through her eye and into her brain. I knew she could heal from the neck wound and hoped it would make her rethink. I guess I screwed up from a strategic standpoint: I had the chance to end
it and flubbed it. But who among us saw this coming? Atticus said in his note that he had come here seeking peace. I suppose Fand came here seeking war, and she found it.

And Manannan still loves her. He and I are on the left edge, and I can hear him moaning and crying through his Cloak of Mists—saying, “No, stop, Fand, don’t do this”—and when the mists part long enough to give me a glimpse of his face, I see torment and grief written there, not anger. He doesn’t attack but rather kills anything that enters the mist. I don’t think the goblins are especially after him, but he’s protecting Owen’s left side, and some of them try to get to the bear through him and fail. Those who choose to flank Manannan and go around to his left run into me, their feet leaving the ground when the staff they never see coming hits them between the eyes.

I can keep up with it—it’s safe here—so I have to leave. Atticus is right in the center of the line, and I can tell he’s barely holding on. He can’t clear a path the way the gods can. Perun is taking care of some to his left and Luchta is knocking down a few to his right, but Atticus is still in trouble, and when I see how bad it is, I abandon my position, confident that Manannan will be fine, and scurry around the back to help.

Since the goblins have the weaponry to do him serious damage, Atticus is rightly focused on them, taking a risk that none of the fliers will be able to get through Brighid’s defenses and take off his head. But as I run, I see a pixie slip in under Brighid’s inferno and stab him underneath the collarbone with a bronze needle sword. He swats her and she crumbles into ash. He can’t take time to pluck it out; he has to keep parrying and swinging at the goblins and a Fir Darrig who leaps at his head. But then a small formation of sidheóg archers follow up in the pixie’s wake, flying below the ceiling of flames, and unleash a volley of miniature arrows at him, kind of like toothpicks but much sharper. I imagine they’d be foiled by a thick wool sweater, but of course Atticus is fighting naked. The arrows prickle the left side of his upper torso en masse, and many of them lodge in his face and
neck, sticking out like porcupine quills. There’s no serious damage, but it makes him flinch and miss the incoming swing of a goblin’s axe.

I cry out a warning, but it’s too late. The axe—a bronze number with notches in the blade—hits Atticus high up on his left arm, almost at the shoulder. It lodges in the bone and stays there as he falls to his right. The goblin lets go of the handle, partially because Atticus’s fall yanked it from his grip and partially because he’s surprised he made contact, and so he’s standing there, frozen, when I arrive. I treat his head like a fungo and swing for the center-field wall. His skull crunches and he falls like timber, and I redirect the swing to clock another two goblins upside the head in quick succession. They’re coming in, axes high and unguarded, thinking that they’ll finish off Atticus while he is down. They go down instead.

“Get up, Atticus! I’ve got your left side!”

He doesn’t waste time, just grunts as he pushes himself up and gets to his feet, knocking aside the thrust of a goblin sword to the right and opening the creature’s throat as he sweeps left. He keeps going because the goblins keep coming, checking his swing to the left to make sure he doesn’t hit me, and I do my best to lay the gobs out and give us some space. The axe is still buried in his left arm, which hangs useless at his side.

“Think you can pull … pull out the axe?” he says, blinking furiously as he deflects a blow from a spriggan who hopped over the lead goblin, hoping to surprise him.

“Sure,” I reply, switching Scáthmhaide to a left-hand grip. “Hold on.”

The staff whirls and staggers two goblins, who are in time to get caught in a chain-lightning blast from Perun. The enemy’s charge slows in front of us, the goblins behind the fallen front lines realizing that something unseen is kicking their asses. They’re squinting, searching for a target, and it gives me time to grab the axe handle and yank it out of Atticus’s arm. It tears him up a bit, and an awful lot of blood comes with it, along with a grunt of pain, but at least now he can heal it.

As a bonus, the axe turns invisible when I touch it, so to the goblins approaching warily, it looks as if it simply ceases to exist. It exists again once I throw it at the head of the nearest one, but by the time he sees it, all he can do is duck. His buddy behind him doesn’t have enough time to duck—it splits his face, and I leap in, sweeping the end of my staff up from the ground to connect with the ducking goblin’s chin as he rises. He sprawls backward with a broken jaw, teeth popping out in bloody parabolas before landing on his body. That gives some other goblins ideas about where I am, and they hack blindly in my general direction. I back up and feed their throats a couple of knives. As they fall, I deliver sharp strikes to the soft bits of the next rank. Atticus is still slashing with Fragarach next to me, though the movements look jerky and undisciplined.

“Nnneurotoxin in the nnnneedles,” he says. “Heal it ff. Fast if you geh. Geh. Get hit. I got lots. Sssslowing down.” He steps back and barely avoids the swipe of another axeman, but that unbalances him and he takes another step and another, staggering away from the fight until he keels over backward. Fragarach falls from his hand.

“Atticus!”

I find meself royally pissed and quite happy about it. This is the kind of battle the bards were always singin’ songs about in the old days, where everybody’s mad and thinks they have a good reason to be that way. Me uncle would have loved it and wrote a song for sure. He’d call it “Rivers and Lakes and Bogs of Blood” or something. Probably something else—I’m shite at makin’ up songs. But I’m sure we’ll be stepping in large pools of blood soon, because the goblins keep coming and I keep killing them. I’m not sure they realize I’m a Druid, with an infinite energy supply and the ability to heal quickly. They don’t seem to expect me to move the way I do. They might be thinkin’ I’m the average bear.

The reason I favor the form so much is that I’m damn hard to kill this way, without a lucky spear thrust or one o’ those fancy hand grenades the modern soldiers like so much. If ye have a sword or an axe, there’s almost no way ye can get close enough to hit me without giving me a chance to hit you first. And if ye
do hit me, why, you have to hack through a few inches of fat before ye get to something that matters. So I keep my head up and out of reach as much as possible, take the odd hits here and there, and kill the fecking bastards, because a bear’s strength multiplied with the earth’s strength equals a one-way trip to the dirt for the lads who run into me claws.

That’s not sayin’ I’m havin’ an easy time of it. I have three weapons stuck in me hide now, none of them feels good, and I expect there will be more before we’re through. Maybe a lot more. Maybe too many.

I could die here soon. I should have worked harder to convince Siodhachan to bring help, because feck a handsome chicken if I wasn’t right about Fand. But ye know what’s strange? I’m lovin’ the fight I knew was coming, with only one real regret: I wish Greta was here to fight alongside me. She’s already under me skin far deeper than these crude goblin blades.

Instead, I have a weepy Manannan Mac Lir on me left and a fiery Brighid on me right. I don’t feel sympathy for either of them, because none of us would be here now if they hadn’t spent so many years refusing to see the truth.

Strategically, the truth is that we are bent over and waiting to be pounded. We Druids have incredible power, but we’re not gods, and as such we’ll be the first to fall. The tide of foes doesn’t seem to end, and eventually one of them will push me under and I won’t get up. And while the Tuatha Dé Danann might last longer, they can fall, too, against odds like this. Brighid must have come to the same conclusion, for she stops spraying fire in the sky and
becomes
the fire in the sky, rocketing from the ground wreathed in flame and on a collision course with Fand. It’s impossible to miss, and as soon as she takes to the air, the crush of the charge stops, because no one wants to miss the show—it’s all about whether Brighid or Fand is left standing, anyway.

The sylphs protecting Fand and allowing her to float in midair lower her to the ground as Brighid dives down to confront her. When Fand plants her feet, she still stands head and shoulders
over the goblins, and on me hind legs I stand eight feet tall, so I can see them well over the horde between us.

Fand sidesteps Brighid’s landing and stands unflinching as the goddess of fire attempts to barbecue her without the benefit of sauce. The sylphs bear the brunt of it, blowing the flames back and to either side. Seeing that it’s pointless to continue, Brighid douses the fire and has a go at Fand with the giant sword. I don’t expect it to last long, because Brighid has far more experience in battle and is fully armored, whereas Fand rarely fights and is naked. But Fand doesn’t try to parry or fence; she dodges and ducks every blow, inhumanly fast—faster than Brighid, her Druidic speed aided by sylphs—and she keeps looking for an opening in Brighid’s guard. Her eyes often flick to Brighid’s helmet, the only place where there is a gap in the armor, and I understand. She wants to make one strike with Moralltach, a solid hit that slips through the helmet and ends it—any strike that broke the skin would be sufficient, and she would never be able to penetrate Brighid’s guard any other way. The armor Brighid wears was designed and warded to fend off blows from Fragarach, which supposedly could cut through any armor, so I doubted Mortalltach would have any chance of penetrating it.

Tension rises as the duel lengthens, Brighid always missing but in guarded fashion, Fand doing nothing but dodging and waiting for an opening. Neither of them would ever tire, so it’s much more a duel of wits and skill. It takes a minute of this—a long time in battle—for me to realize that something is profoundly wrong. Why haven’t the bean sídhe screamed out the name of who was going to die? It’s not like their predictions of death are voluntary; when they know they have to shout it, and they’ve been yelling their throats raw during the whole battle. Now they’re silent, and it’s fecking creepy.

Me answer comes in the next five seconds. Seeing an opportunity after an overhead strike from Brighid misses and leaves the oversize sword edge in the dirt, Fand darts in and thrusts at the thin strip of space that allows Brighid to see through her helmet.
Realizing that this was perhaps the only time she did not want to keep her eyes on her opponent, Brighid turns and bows her head as much as possible, and the tip of Moralltach strikes and etches a groove in the metal as it glances off. Fand tries to dance back out of range, but she had committed too fully, drawn just a hair too close. Brighid’s backhand sweep catches Fand underneath her own extended right arm and draws a red line across the tops of her breasts. It’s not fatal, but it rips loose a cry of pain from Fand and demonstrates that she’s overmatched. So she surprises everyone and scarpers without a word. The sylphs lift her up out of the circle and whisk her away at top speed to the far pasture, where a line of trees on the other side will allow her to shift away.

Brighid doesn’t have the best range of vision through that helmet of hers, and it takes her a few seconds to process that Fand has abandoned the field, leaving her army behind. By that time it’s too late for her to catch up, and she has her own people to worry about, besides being surrounded by a host of the Fae in rebellion. Everyone is stunned—especially the Fae, who just witnessed their leader flee after getting scratched—but at least we know now why the bean sídhe were silent.

Brighid is the first to recover. She shoots into the sky and hovers above the field in a nimbus of flame, her three-note voice booming over our heads. “It is over. Fand is gone, and I give all Fae a simple choice: You may have forgiveness or fire. If you wish forgiveness, leave the field and send an emissary to Court tomorrow to discuss with me in candid terms how I may best serve the Fae in the future. I truly wish to be a better leader for you and am eager to hear how I can become one. If you wish fire, however, continue to fight. Choose now.”

They choose forgiveness with fecking alacrity. The front line of goblins and spriggans cast nervous glances back at me, wondering if I’ll be bound by Brighid’s words or not. I nod and put all four paws on the ground, signaling that I have no wish to open up their bellies. The surviving airborne Fae, including the
bean sídhe, disperse almost immediately, leaving the troops with no air support and only Brighid floating above them. They couldn’t wait to flee. The spriggans and Fir Darrigs take to the surrounding forest, and the goblins drain into the holes in the ground from which they’d spewed. That’s when I look off to me right and see that Siodhachan is down.