A few minutes’ observation revealed that he never turned around to face the server area unless he had a plate to deliver or a ticket to look at. He kept his attention on the grills otherwise. The two servers spent more time out in the dining area than they did in the kitchen.

The cook eventually put up four plates, two with pork chops and eggs and two with pancakes and bacon. Oberon would be grateful for any of that. But a place like this might serve prime rib sandwiches for lunch. If so, they had to put the slow-cooking prime rib in the oven in the morning. That meant it was available for breakfast if you liked it ultra-rare, which Oberon did.

The oven was behind the serving area but also behind the wood-fire grill’s stone walls, which allowed me to tiptoe back there and open the oven without being seen. The large hunk of meat that greeted me elicited a smile, because I knew how happy Oberon would be. I removed it and rested the prime rib on a prep area next to the oven. I found a couple of carving knives and a plate and sliced off a generous hunk of bloody beef for my friend. Granuaile snagged the pork chop plates and stole the bacon sides from the pancakes while the waiters were out of the kitchen, and the cook never noticed. The pancakes she left behind utterly failed to raise the alarm.

I felt sorry about the inevitable argument that would erupt when our theft was discovered—especially sorry to give the waitress an excuse to yell at the cook—but we were hungry and in a hurry and nobody’s lives were at stake but ours.

Try to chew it slowly and enjoy it, I said, putting the plate down for Oberon.

"Oh, great big bears, Atticus!" he said as he laid into it. "This is the best prime rib ever!" He gave a soft whine of appreciation. "Stolen and succulent, like forbidden fruit when I’m already starving. This shall be known as the Great Meat Heist of Poland That One Time. All future meals will be measured against this one. It’s even better than the Big Juicy Barbecue of Atlanta That Other Time, remember that? Or the Beloved Boar Sausage of Scotland We Had Once. And do you remember the Heinous Worldwide Bacon Shortage of 2013? This totally makes up for it."

Glad you like it, buddy. There’s no shortage of bacon here. In fact, you can have mine.

"You’re giving me prime rib with a side of bacon? I love you, Atticus. If I ever have puppies, I’m going to tell them stories about this food. It’s legendary."

A heated exchange of Polish boiled through the screen door, and my pork chops tasted of guilt sauce. We had to chow down anyway. Any meal at this point could be our last. The waitress and the cook eventually broke it off and she exited the kitchen, no doubt to inform her customers that their breakfasts would take a bit longer.

We were just about finished when two large ravens descended with thunderous backwings that sounded like chopper blades. Each of them had a familiar white gleam in one eye. They landed on the woodpile and squawked at me.

“Hugin and Munin,” I said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” One raven—I couldn’t tell them apart—squawked and shoved his beak in my direction, then squawked again while pointing with his beak to the other raven.

“You want me to talk to that one? Hi there. Oh! I see.” It wanted me to mentally bond with the other raven. Activating my charm for magical sight, I had to blink a little bit at the intensity of white magic emanating from the two birds. But once I could focus, I found the consciousness of the indicated raven and reached out to it. Images slammed into my head, aerial views of Artemis and Diana racing across the Polish border near Dukla, each of them in a fancy new chariot pulled by four golden-horned stags. They were running side by side, following our trail across a familiar alfalfa field, when the earth gave out from under them and they fell into our pit trap. They tried to leap out of the chariots and make it back to solid ground but weren’t in time; they’d been moving quickly, and the stags pulled those floating chariots down. A grind house of gore and screaming ensued. Though I felt sorry for the stags, I didn’t feel the least bit distressed at seeing the goddesses impaled on the wooden pikes we’d left at the bottom. They’d have to heal up from that, somehow get out of the pit, and get yet another brace of chariots and new teams to pull them. They’d be going a bit slower, but they would never give up now that I had personally wounded them. I needed a long-term solution more than ever, and I didn’t have one.

The scene shifted; Artemis and Diana in the gray sky of an early dawn—it must have been the same one we experienced a few hours ago—looking none the worse for suffering what would be mortal wounds to anyone else and gathering themselves to begin again outside the pit. They had new chariots, new stags, and now a pack of seven hounds each. I remembered the hounds from mythology; they had been gifts from Pan and Faunus. Each goddess blew into a horn, and the hounds leapt ahead on our trail. They waited for a few seconds and then followed behind in their chariots. If we tried another pit trap, the hounds would fall in first and the huntresses would be able to see that in time to avoid it.

But it had worked. It had taken us about eight hours to get from the pit trap to here, and it was about three hours after dawn now, so if the huntresses began at dawn, that meant they were about five or maybe six hours behind us now.

The link broke and the raven I’d bonded with—clearly Munin, since I’d seen a memory—pointed at the other one, Hugin. Hugin’s aura was a bit more intense—the current thoughts of Odin would of course be more active than his memories. I didn’t think Hugin represented the totality of Odin’s thoughts, but it had to be a relatively huge chunk of his consciousness, or else it wouldn’t have put Odin in a coma for years when I’d speared the first Hugin back in Asgard. I had no idea how Odin thought of him, but from a Druidic perspective, Hugin was a headspace in Odin’s mind—with wings. And in a similar sense Munin was a headspace as well. Both ravens had to report back to Odin periodically to recharge and reunite all the fragments of his consciousness, but it wasn’t as if he sat with all the life of a mannequin while they were gone. Though they did embody the mind of Odin, they weren’t the full sum of it.

I connected with the bird’s bright threads of consciousness, and the aged whiskey voice of the Gray Wanderer filled my head with Old Norse.

"Keep running. You cannot ever stop for long. We are doing what we can to prevent the Svartálfar from interfering further."

That’s very kind. But how did you hear I was in trouble?

"The Morrigan told me."

The Morrigan is dead.

"Precisely. Nine months after we met in Oslo, she returned and gave me a ruby that was bound to her. It glowed with power. “Someday,” she told me, “this ruby will cease to glow and you will know that I am dead. And when that happens, you must protect the Druids from the dark elves if you wish them to fight with you in Ragnarok.” It did not make sense at the time—she said “Druids,” but there was only you. And I did not understand why the Svartálfar would be so important. But now it makes sense. You have enough problems without the Svartálfar on top of them."

She foresaw this five or six years ago?

"She was a deeper one than any of us suspected."

I let that eulogy pass unremarked. Odin, how did you find me? I’m shielded from divination.

"Your woman isn’t."

She’s not mine. She belongs to herself.

"I care not. Run now. I want you to fight in Ragnarok. Or I want to watch the huntresses flay you alive. I find myself deliciously ambivalent."

You’ve been watching?

"Of course. The view is quite lovely from Hlidskjálf," he said, referring to the silver throne from which he could observe events in most of the nine realms. "I am not the only one with an interest here. And you should probably be informed: The Olympians have claimed the right to take your life. But there are gods of other pantheons who wish to keep you alive for other purposes—myself among them."

What other gods?

Odin continued as if I hadn’t spoken. "After the Morrigan fell, these other gods informed Olympus that if you are to die, it must be accomplished through skill and not overwhelming force. They are permitted to hunt you, in other words, and if they are successful, so be it, but the Olympians may not fly here en masse to confront you."

Who can dictate this to the Olympians?

"Humanity has created more powerful gods. The Olympians would not wish to cross them, nor would I. Zeus and Jupiter saw you building that pit trap, you know. And we saw them see it. They were going to warn the huntresses and spoil the surprise. But we stopped them. That wouldn’t have been fair. Or half so amusing."

Thinking back to a particularly vivid dream I had twelve years ago in Flagstaff, I asked, Might one of those gods be Ganesha?

Odin ignored me again. "It works the other way too, so I caution you against using modern transport. The Olympians insisted you must escape under your own power. Should you board an aircraft or a vehicle, the Olympians will be allowed to stop you."

So we are entertainment for the gods? We run for your sport?

"You must understand how rare this is. Your actions cannot be divined or reliably predicted. The outcome cannot be known, and thus it is exciting. And there are others interested in your demise apart from the Olympians, which makes this more interesting."

What others?

"You have already seen them. Vampires. Dark elves. As to the latter, the Ljósálfar are coming to Midgard to keep the Svartálfar out of your way. They are anxious to fight their dark brethren on neutral ground, and, for once, they know roughly where to find them—wherever you’re headed."

So we’re not only entertainment, we’re a method by which someone gets to pursue a personal grudge?

"It is a role you’ve played before. The Æsir were on the receiving end, if you recall. A small matter involving Thor."

I recalled. It was not my finest hour.

I suppose you won’t be helping us, then.

"On the contrary. As I said, we will do our best to take care of the dark elves. And I also told you to run, which was outstanding advice."

The link broke and the ravens’ wings blatted into the morning sky like fat motorcycle engines.

The Morrigan’s assertion that we had to run the whole way made a bit more sense now. The gods had decided Europe was their Colosseum and we were the gladiators.

“No rest for the Druids,” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”

Chapter 8

So much for my theory about faery tails. We were being watched constantly through divination, and Granuaile was the antenna. What Odin could do, others could do just as well, so Odin’s point that there were other interested parties was well taken. The reason we had a vampire and dark elves waiting for us near the Slovakian border was because someone in Tír na nÓg was coolly divining Granuaile’s location, quite correctly assuming I’d be nearby, and then dispatching assorted evil minions to slay us. They’d done this repeatedly in Greece while we were trying to get Granuaile bound to the earth; we’d shaken them for a while in the French Pyrenees, perhaps because we were spending nights inside a mountain and the scryer could not figure out where we were, but eventually they must have zeroed in on us. We’d left just ahead of an oncoming horde of vampires, if Oberon’s nose could be trusted, and it usually could.

After we raided Hel and killed Fenris, Granuaile and I had been left alone in Mexico for a couple of blissful weeks—why was that? I’m sure her presence there would have been as easy to divine as anywhere else, and I was most certainly very close to her during that time. It must have been because the puppet master, whoever it was, couldn’t get minions out to us in Mexico. If that was correct, then that told me quite a bit.

I had bound Mexico to Tír na nÓg long ago, back when the Maya were still running around and building future tourist sites. The Fae could have shifted and found us in short order if they wished. And Mexico certainly had its share of vampires; if they had wanted to find us, there would be no reason for it to take two days to locate us, much less two weeks. So this mysterious person was not using local vampires and wasn’t shifting minions around using tethered trees. Instead, he or she was using a specific set of vampires—perhaps a specific set of Fae and dark elves too—and shifting them around using the Old Ways in Europe. That meant Mexico was safe territory. The whole New World was safe territory. And now that I knew that, Faunus had made sure that safe territory was unreachable.

It also meant that there was something important about the Old Ways that I was missing.

"Hey, Oberon."

"Hey, Atticus."

"Ask Granuaile if she’s willing to investigate one of the Old Ways in Germany and see if we can escape through one."

"Escaping would be good." A few moments passed and then Oberon said, "Clever Girl reminds you the Morrigan said they were all collapsed or guarded."

"Most likely that’s true. I’m actually more interested in finding out who’s guarding them. This is recon more than a genuine attempt to escape."

"I’ve been meaning to tell you that when I chew on things it’s recon more than a genuine attempt to destroy your stuff."

"Just tell her, please?"

"Okay, she says let’s do it."

"Follow me."

Eastern Germany had an Old Way to Tír na nÓg—several, in fact, hidden among the river valleys of the Ore Mountains, which divided Saxony from Bohemia. But the nearest was a wee bit southwest of the city of Hoyerswerda in Dubringer Moor, a wetland populated around the edges with birch, pine, and alder, spreading their roots in its marshy soil. Unlike the vast majority of the Old Ways, it wasn’t in a cave. A few, like this one, were open-air mazes without walls. Walk through the birches in a certain pattern, end at a particular alder tree and circle it thrice, and you’d be in Tír na nÓg. It wasn’t the sort of Old Way that you could collapse with an earthquake. You could clear-cut the trees or set fire to the landscape, and perhaps we would find something like that had happened, but it was more likely to be guarded.