“Nobody is going to mind a little ass,” she said to me before they arrived, “but it’s hardly necessary to show them the whole package, is it?”

I didn’t see why it mattered, but she did, so I agreed to do it her way.

The kids are so juiced they can’t stand still: A couple of them actually jump up and down and clap. And the parents are happy too, smiling down at their kids, because such joy is infectious.

“Gaia gives Druids these forms to help protect her better—our primary function is to protect the earth. And you do that by watching out for the elementals, and in turn they kind of watch out for you. When you’re bound to the earth, you’ll be able to talk to the elementals directly. But I can let ye talk to the elemental here right now. Flagstaff rests on the Colorado Plateau, so we think of this elemental as Colorado. I’ve already let it know you’ll be here today, and it’s going to give each of you a small sphere of sandstone, which I don’t want you to lose. You will use it to talk to Colorado. First, take off your shoes so the earth can feel your presence.”

I have never seen any group of kids so eager to be barefoot. They all plop down and start tugging at their shoes, and their parents laugh. Once they’re all back on their feet and wriggling their toes in the earth, I send a message to Colorado through my tattoos that the new apprentices are ready and standing opposite me. The ground in front of the kids breaks and crumbles, and spheres of sandstone rise up out of it, each with a slightly different pattern of tans and reds.

“All right, I want ye to pick up the stone, close it in your hand, and concentrate on saying hello to the earth. It doesn’t matter what language you use. It won’t use language to reply back, but you’ll feel it.”

They all bend down to pick up their stones and then scrunch their eyes closed in concentration. I have to admit it’s fecking adorable. After about ten seconds they start laughing and happy-crying when they hear Colorado in their heads, and damn if me own eyes don’t get watery at the edges. It’s tough to not get emotional when ye finally realize that you’re not trapped on the planet with things that want to eat ye or tell ye what to do. All the earth wants ye to do is thrive, and ye feel that love whenever ye contact an elemental.

I look up at the parents and tell them we’ll be at it awhile and they can let us be. “Ye can ask me any other questions ye might have later on.” They say thank you by word or gesture and depart with Greta and Sam, leaving me with the kids and the three translators. I let the kids commune until the parents are out of sight, and then I interrupt them.

“Colorado doesn’t speak in language, ye may have noticed. You get pictures and feelings. You can ask it simple questions, though, and it will understand what ye mean as long as ye think it really hard. Ask Colorado to show ye the places and creatures it loves the most. You will see.”

Some of them whisper the question aloud in their effort to think really hard, but once Colorado begins to answer, their faces switch from awe to surprise to wide smiles and more as images filter through their heads. Whatever they’re seeing, it’s all new to them, since they come from very different parts of the world and would not be familiar with the native plants and animals here.

I give them a few minutes and then thank Colorado, asking it to stop.

“All right, I want ye to tell me what you saw. Tuya, you go first.” One by one, down the line, they tell me about snakes and lizards and scorpions, mule deer and native trout, the blue-green waters of Havasupai Falls in the Grand Canyon, the sandstone buttes of the Navajo Nation and the canyons cut by floodwaters there. Thandi is last, and she begins to tell me about coyotes but then breaks off and her eyes pull away from me face to look at something over me right shoulder. She points and squeaks, “Big ugly man!”

I half expect it to be a joke and get a round of giggles out of them when I turn around to look, but she isn’t kidding. The very definition of big and ugly is coming this way out of the pine trees. It’s that fecking bog troll who says I owe him gold.

“Holy shit,” one of the translators mutters.

“All of ye run back to the house now,” I says. “Find Greta and your parents and tell ’em there’s a troll come calling. Shoo, now, go on!”

The translators herd them away and the kids scurry toward the house with jerky little kid legs, leaving their shoes behind. It’s a grim face I’m wearing when I go to meet the troll. He’s lumbering in long, plodding steps, and he still hasn’t figured out how to hide his dangly bits. What he has figured out is how to find me and get here without using one of the Old Ways, a feat I thought impossible. And it probably still is. What’s really happened is that he’s found someone to help him. And the bastard has also ripped up a young aspen tree to pound me with. Well, we’ll see who does the pounding.

I fish me knuckles out of the robe pocket, slip them on, and charge them up as I walk, and I also mutter the bindings to increase me strength and speed. I’d like to simply go at him, but I need to know first how he got here.

There are bound trees nearby—Siodhachan saw to that—which means one of the Tuatha Dé Danann could have brought him. It certainly wasn’t Granuaile or Siodhachan. It could not have been any of the lesser Fae, because most of them need oak, ash, and thorn to shift, especially if they’re bringing someone else with them, and there isn’t any of that growing together in this part of the country. That leaves two possibilities: He came to earth via one of the Old Ways in Europe and traveled here under a glamour—extremely unlikely—or there’s an Old Way up in the San Francisco Peaks we don’t know about.

I thought there weren’t any Old Ways on this side of the globe, but it’s possible that someone made a new one.

A shiver of dread tickles me spine at a thought and I say to the troll, all smiles, “Mornin’, lad, good mornin’. How was Fand when ye spoke to her?”

“She is fine,” he says without thinking, because trolls are grand at that.

“Good to hear, that is. She’s very helpful, eh? Helping you find me and then arranging a path for you to get here. So kind.”

“She is good, yes.”

“And all that from prison!” A prison, I might add, chosen by meself and her mother, Flidais. I had acted as Brighid’s proxy in that matter to make sure Fand would be secure, and Flidais had come along to make sure her daughter was well treated and the Fae would have no cause to complain on that score. “She’s truly powerful.”

The bog troll’s gnarled gray face squishes and moves around with great effort of thinking. “Prison? She’s not in prison.”

That tickle o’ dread becomes the uncomfortable sound o’ me bowels liquefying, for he had just confirmed me worst fear. At some point Fand had quietly escaped and was now helping bog trolls hunt down Druids, in addition to whatever other shenanigans she could think of. Since starting a war in Tír na nÓg was her last great idea, I don’t like to think of what else she might be up to now.

“Oh!” I says, chuckling at him. “That’s right, I forgot she’s out. Where is she now?”

“She’s at—wait.” The horrible accident of his face turns suspicious. “I’m not supposed to say.”