“Welcome,” she says. “What news?”

“I’m starting a grove, taking on six apprentices to be Druids. Wanted ye to know. Whatever protection ye can afford would be grand.”

“Ah! This pleases me very much, Eoghan. Give the details to my chamberlain and I will see it done. I would speak longer, but I have much to do. Is there anything else?”

I think of how Siodhachan is trying to wipe out vampires and it’s going to be all blood and exploding organs until he’s done, but she probably already knows that since she had Luchta make those stakes and I don’t need to announce it where everyone can hear. So I says, “No, that is all.”

She bids me farewell, and I bow to her and chat off to one side with the chamberlain while the pixies resume their audience. I tell him about the property in Flagstaff and how it needs to be warded and after a few seconds become aware that something huge looms over us and smells like sweaty feet.

A gray-skinned hulk, probably twice me size, stares down at me with tiny black eyes and big tusk-like teeth sticking up out of its mouth. There’s a bit of drool leaking out the side, and there are also patches of lichen or fungus attached to its skin with either mud or shite or both used as an adhesive. It has a cloth wrapped inexpertly around its hips, and it’s doing a terrible job covering up the huge thing it’s supposed to be hiding from view. It’s a great fecking bog troll, the kind that doesn’t care if you see his cheesy dangly dong. The worst kind of troll, in other words.

“I know you,” it rumbles, and its breath is a visible cloud of decay. “You’re a Druid.”

“Ye have a keen eye,” I say. “Would ye excuse us, please?”

“No, we have business. I remember.”

“I don’t think we do.”

“I was on a Time Island. Released with many others. So were you. And you owe me gold.”

“You’re mistaken. I don’t owe you shite.”

“No mistake. You crossed my bridge in the bog and didn’t pay the toll. You look younger now, but I remember. You owe me gold.”

When he says that, it triggers me own memory. He’s right. In the old days I’d been crossing a bog on me way to visit a cousin when this troll pops up in the middle of it and demands that I pay him to cross the rest of the way or it’s over the edge for me. I had no gold and no intention of paying if I did, so I cast camouflage and snuck past him. The troll had cursed me and promised someday he’d make me pay, and I’d told him from a distance that no one’s bollocks should ever smell that bad.

Why Brighid thought releasing trolls would make anything better I cannot fathom. It would only lead to situations like this—bullying people going about their business. This one’s attention had no doubt been drawn when the chamberlain announced me as a Druid of Gaia. Now he knew me name and quite possibly where I lived, if he’d been listening in to our conversation.

To make him go away, I pull out the Canadian money Greta gave me and thrust it at him. “There,” I says. “Take it.”

His eyes shift to me hand, his mind churns like thick pudding, and he finally says, “That’s not gold.”

“It’s better than gold, lad. It’s got the queen of Canada on it, and she walks around wearing pearls, see? It’s like her neck is sweating wealth. And look here: This one has the king of Canada on it. Serious man there, ye can tell by his collar, and this is serious money. Ye can buy anything with this, and it’s a good deal more than any toll I’ve ever heard of.”

“It’s only paper. Worth nothing. You owe me gold.”

“I don’t have any fecking gold, do I? This is all the money I have, so you’ll have to take this or nothing.”

“You bring me gold tomorrow.”

“You take a bath first,” I says, and walk away, shoving the money back in me pocket. The troll won’t throw any punches in the Fae Court. But I see as I push through the crowd that there are several other trolls present, and their eyes all follow me as I edge to the perimeter of the Court’s meadow, where there are bound trees that I can use to get out of there. I recognize some of those trolls—ugly is hard to forget sometimes—and they no doubt recognize me. I’m the guy who never pays to cross a bridge.

Why are there trolls at the Fae Court anyway? They’re not creatures given to courts of any kind. They must have a problem and are hoping for an audience of their own. Their bogs and rivers and bridges are probably all gone by now, and they can’t make the same living that they did in the old days. But I represent that old living to them, and they want to hold on to it more than anything, I expect.

People do that—cling to their past because it’s the only thing they consider safe. Trying something new or just accepting it turns their livers into jelly. But that’s a load of bollocks. Ye take the new and appreciate it if it’s good, like whiskey or poutine or girlfriends who bite, or ye dismiss it as shite if it’s bad, like cell phones and cars, and move on.

O’ course, there’s people like Siodhachan too: He does everything he can to escape his past but can’t seem to do it. He has a lot more past than the average lad, though. Maybe that’s why he looks so fecking haunted all the time.

When I reach the trees, I look back and see the trolls are still watching me. I smile and wave to them before I shift away. They couldn’t come after me that way—they have to use the Old Ways to get to earth, and there aren’t any of those in North America. They’d never get any gold out of me. Time to leave the past in the past, boys.

CHAPTER 8

I nodded off in the healing pool—fairly safe, since the attending faeries come to the rescue if your head slips underwater. But I wasn’t safe from getting splashed in the face, and neither was Oberon, who drifted into slumber behind me. Both of us got a rude awakening.

“Hey!” Oberon said. “What the—oh. Shutting up now.”

When I blinked away the water, I saw that I wasn’t alone in the pool anymore. A woman with jet-black hair and marble-white skin sat across from me. “Hello, Siodhachan,” she said in a throaty rasp.

“Morrigan? You’re alive?”

“Quite dead, yet I cling to a different kind of existence thanks to those who still worship me. Far easier for me to manifest and visit you on this plane.”

“Is something wrong? Am I … Is this the end?”

“No, it’s not the Chooser of the Slain visiting you at this time. It’s a reminder that you have work to do that you haven’t been doing.”

“Ah. Is this visitation but to whet my almost blunted purpose?”

“An odd way to put it, but I suppose so,” she replied, completely missing the allusion to Hamlet. “You must visit the Svartálfs, and do it soon.”

“How soon? I’m getting better, but I’m still a little messed up here.”

“Tomorrow they will be attacked. You must prevent it.”

“Attacked by whom?”

“Dwarfs. Æsir.”

“Æsir as in Odin and Freyja?”

“No, none of the gods. But they have full knowledge of what’s to be done.”

“So by intervening I’ll be contradicting the will of Odin?”