“Is this because of something your apprentice did?” Her expression darkens just referring to him like that, and I think sometimes she would blame Siodhachan for bad weather if she could.

“No, love, not this time. This time it’s me own fault. My fault I never fed the trolls. My fault that Fand escaped and sent him here. I’m sorry.”

“How is it your fault that Fand escaped?”

“I was responsible for keeping her locked up. However she managed to spring free, I should have thought of it first.”

“Pfft. I hate that shoulda-woulda-coulda crap, Owen. You can never go back. You can only go forward. Like this arm here. You can’t go back to when it was never dislocated. You can only shove it back in and hope it heals all right. I’m going to do that now,” she says, grabbing me near the elbow.

“Easy, now. I’m handsome and concussed.”

Maybe she tries to go easy and maybe she doesn’t. It fecking hurts regardless, and I howl about it when it pops back in. She doesn’t apologize, though, because there’s simply no help for some pain: Sometimes ye just have to clench your teeth and endure it.

“What are we going to do about this body?” she says. “We can’t leave it here.”

“I’ll have the earth take it in,” I answer. “The kids don’t need to see it all torn up like that. And they don’t need to see me like this either. You’ll keep ’em away until I’m healed, won’t ye, love?”

“Yes, I will. Or their parents will. They’re all at the house now. Except for Mohammed, I guess, because here he comes.”

Mohammed’s a lad of Greta’s mind about the past: He doesn’t ask what happened but rather asks what needs to be done next. Greta requests a new set of clothes for me and some water, and he dashes away to fetch them.

But in doing so—moving forward, in Greta’s mind—he’s still dealing with the past. It’s always strung out behind us, innit, attached to our arses like a roll of toilet paper we trail out of the bathroom, pointing the way to the giant shite we just took. It doesn’t matter if we flushed it down: Everyone still knows what we did there. So it’s fine to say it’s all done and you have no connection with the past, that you’re a new person every second, but silly in my view to pretend that person isn’t made of the old one.

I know I can’t feed meself that plate of bollocks and swallow it. I can go forward and maybe put Fand back in prison before she does any more harm, but I can’t pretend I’m not at least partially responsible for her escaping in the first place.

And I can’t pretend that I don’t understand Siodhachan anymore. The lad’s got himself mired in a bog far worse than the one this troll used to live in and he doesn’t know how or even if he’s going to get out of it. I have to tell Brighid that her enemy is loose, and I don’t know how I’ll manage that without dying of shame, but it’s nothing compared to what me old apprentice is facing.

Times were a whole lot simpler back when they were frozen for me.

CHAPTER 12

Fand had recently set the dark elves after me as part of her effort to rid the Fae of one Iron Druid, and I had barely escaped my encounters with them. Had they not relied on their magical weapons, against which my cold iron aura proved to be excellent armor, they would have ended me for sure. They were strong and fast and, unlike the average Bond villain, not given to conversation; rather, they were silent and implacable, like the nameless thing you used to fear was hiding in your closet or under your bed, childhood nightmares made of flesh and smoke.

I had never been to Svartálfheim but knew in theory where it was—Manannan Mac Lir had given me a map of the nine realms, which placed the entrance in Niflheim between the Vir and Ylgr rivers. It wasn’t to scale, however, and I doubted very much that the entrance would be as plainly visible as it was on the map. And since we would have no luck putting Svartálfheim into a GPS app, I was somewhat worried that we might spend significant time just figuring out how to get there.

Brighid was waiting for me at her throne in the Fae Court when I arrived, already dressed for battle and leaning on the sort of massive oversize sword one saw in anime. Unlike the diminutive protagonists of those dramas, she had the muscle to swing such a massive weapon. She also had a set of armor and a shield ready for me—Goibhniu’s old kit, in fact, which fit me well and assured me instantly of its quality. She helped me into it, since none of her Fae attendants could get close to me without turning to ash. As she did so, I noticed that there appeared to be fresh etchings in the armor, laid down on top of the old decorative patterns; some of the edges were still raw.

“Is this a binding of some kind?” I asked.

“Added it last night,” Brighid said. “Protection against fire. I know your aura protects you from my fire to some extent, but that won’t protect the armor itself or your sword. Pointless to have your skin immune and not what you’re wearing. You’ll cook in this otherwise.”

“Not sure I understand,” I said. “Are you planning to set me on fire?”

“How do you think we’re getting to Svartálfheim?” Brighid replied. “We’re flying there aflame. We have to follow the roots of Yggdrasil down to Niflheim and then cross a considerable distance to get to the dark doors of Svartálfheim.”

I tried my best not to geek out. I had always wanted to fly like a mutant superhero, and flying with Brighid was bound to be a smoother ride than the jerky, twitching ascent to Asgard that Perun gave me one time. I covered my excitement by saying, “You know how to get there already?”

“Aye. Scouted it soon after Eoghan told me the Morrigan’s message. The entrance is guarded.”

She wrapped the scabbard and handle of Fragarach in a ribbon marked with the same bindings as the armor, and then we were ready. We shifted separately to the same point on earth—or Midgard—where one of the main roots of Yggdrasil was bound. It was an idyllic stretch of Sweden with a fair blue lake that Freyja had turned into a portal when we had to visit Hel. Brighid likewise made a portal next to the root of the Midgard tree that was bound to Yggdrasil’s, albeit a much smaller one.

“Jump through,” she said, “and I’ll catch up as you fall. I don’t want to set this tree on fire.”

So I cannonballed through the portal and fell into shockingly cold air, the sky of Midgard gone and replaced by the gray dismal mist of Niflheim. I got about five seconds of free fall next to the root of Yggdrasil before I was cocooned in warmth and bright orange flame surrounded my vision. Brighid appeared on my right, gesturing that I should straighten out headfirst like her, and once I did she redirected our flight, pulling us into a horizontal trajectory a thousand feet or so above the great wyrm Niddhogg, who was stretched out fatly as he munched at the root of Yggdrasil. We banked west and Brighid pointed out two specific rivers originating from the spring of Hvergelmir.

“That one is the Vir,” she said, indicating the one on the left, which threw up a curtain of steam into the air, “which borders Muspellheim. We will follow that and then turn north at a waterfall, cross a snowy plain, and find the entrance hidden on a wooded hill. Sentries watch from among the trees.”