“Well, after dinner, Väinämöinen told us that story about the sea serpent. And I didn’t say anything then, but there is this old time-bomb prophecy that the sirens spoke to Odysseus when he was tied to the mast—the only one that hasn’t come true yet, and I thought the clock started ticking then. The prophecy goes like this: ‘Thirteen years from the date a white beard sups on hares and talks of sea serpents, the world will burn.’ ”

“That’s weird,” Granuaile said.

“Is more than weird. Is unhappy stomach from spicy food. Is ass on fire,” Perun asserted.

“What?” Granuaile cried, unused to Perun’s attempts to be colorful in English.

Perun shrugged and tried again. “I mean is much discomfort. Ass on fire is very bad, yes?”

“Agreed,” I said, “but those same sirens accurately predicted the rise of Genghis Khan, the American Revolution, and the bombing of Hiroshima. That pattern suggests they’re talking about something bigger than a small fire, camp or ass or otherwise.”

"That reminds me! I never did muster my horde on the Mongolian steppes."

“You think my world is world of this prophecy?” Perun asked.

“No, I don’t think the sirens would speak of planes other than this one. Plus we’re a year too early. But that’s what has me worried: The prophecies regarding Ragnarok aren’t worth a damn anymore, yet it still might happen now that Loki’s free. The sirens of Odysseus were always right, but maybe this time they’re going to be wrong—or maybe just off by a year. I don’t know. Killing the Norns screwed up everything. I suppose all I know is that there’s a tsunami of shit heading toward a ten-dollar fan and we’re standing on the fan. Jesus spoke to me of cataclysms, plural, and maybe we could avoid them if we got rid of both Loki and Hel, but who knows if Ganesha and his gang will let me pursue that now, because I promised I’d wait until—”

“Atticus,” Granuaile said, touching me gently on the arm. “You’ve stopped making sense. Calm down.”

“Right. Thanks. I need to slow down. You know what sucks about prophecies?”

“They never predict anything fun,” Granuaile answered. “Just once I’d like to hear a prophet tell someone, ‘Thou shalt win a bitchin’ Camaro on a game show.’ ”

“Good point, but I was going to say that everybody has them. Prophets have been around as long as prostitutes.”

"Often in the same bed, ba-doom-boom!"

“You can’t figure out who to believe,” I continued, “so you wind up treating all the prophets like Cassandras, but some of them really are correct. Hitting on the right one before their prophecy comes true, though—that’s the trick. Worse odds than roulette.”

“You hit women named Cassandra?” Perun said, frowning. “Is not right to hit women, even if name is ugly.”

“What? Perun, I think you misunderstood.”

“Oh.” He looked crestfallen. “I am reminded many times. English is not best language for me.”

“I speak Russian now, though it’s not my best language either,” Granuaile said. “We could switch to that if you’d like, if you would talk slowly and pronounce everything clearly.”

Perun grinned. “Da, that would be wonderful!” We made the switch, and I tried to speak slowly for Granuaile’s benefit.

“I’ve been thinking for a while now,” I said, “that this prophecy about the world burning might be linked to Ragnarok, thanks to what we did in Asgard. That’s why seeing Loki free is seriously disturbing. His release was always the trigger of Ragnarok in the old tales.”

Granuaile frowned. “Yeah, but wasn’t he supposed to ride a ship of the dead up to the Field of Vigrid, and it was a ship made of toenails or something?”

“He was,” I said, nodding, “but nothing is going to go the way it was supposed to now. Regardless of any prophecies, a free Loki isn’t a good thing for anyone. How’d he get to your plane, Perun?”

The great Russian god shrugged, his impressive personal thatching communicating the depths of his frustration.

“I don’t know. I was in Alaska in the form of an eagle, eating a trout I’d just caught from a river, when I felt that something was wrong. I went to my plane and found Loki there, setting fire to everything. I threw lightning at him and he laughed. He was not hurt at all, and he said he was waiting for me.”

“Why?” Granuaile asked.

“He was mad because I helped to kill Thor,” Perun explained.

“But he hated Thor,” I said.

“I know. He said that killing Thor himself became his dream during those years he was tied down under the great snake. Then he said, since I had taken away his dream, he would take away my people’s dream. He left me a harvest of ashes.”

“That’s terrible,” Granuaile said.

Perun nodded at her, grateful for the sympathy. “After that he said, ‘You are like Thor, so I will kill you instead.’ He attacked me, and he was very strong. Stronger than I thought he would be. I began to fear him, and I panicked. I asked the earth to find you.”

That didn’t quite compute. “You never heard that I died?”

Perun looked at me curiously. “When was this?” He poked me with a finger to make sure I was real. “You do not feel like a ghost.”

“No, I mean I faked my death. You never heard about that?”

The thunder god shook his head. “I have been an eagle for too long, I think. I lost track of the years.”

I knew what he meant; it was dangerous to spend too much time in animal form, because it became so easy to focus on the basic needs of survival and let all one’s other cares drift away. And once those cares left, the memories began to drift away too, until even one’s identity faded to oblivion and nothing remained but finding the day’s meal in the forest. My archdruid had called it the “last shift.” It was how Druids committed suicide.

“So you have no idea who set Loki free?”

Perun grimaced in regret. “He did not say. I knew nothing until I felt my world … burning.”

Someone cleared his throat to my right. I turned to behold a faery—one of the flying kind, dressed up in the pompous green and silver livery of the Fae Court—hovering just out of throttling range. Gods below, how had he found me?

“Hail, Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin,” he said, his voice redolent of scorn and aristocratic disgust, enunciated with such precision that one could hear capital letters, “the Supposedly Deceased. Brighid, First Among the Fae, summons you to an audience in her Court forthwith, there to answer Certain Questions, among which are Why are you still alive? and More Importantly, Why did you not inform Brighid of this Rather Important Fact?”

I briefly considered making this messenger disappear. I could shake his hand—or otherwise make contact with him—and, as a creature made of magic, he would crumble to ash from the cold iron in my aura. But then Brighid would know something had happened to him, and she’d send more after me. Whatever displeasure she currently felt would only grow if I made her wait too long. Still, this was an extraordinarily inconvenient time to ask me over for tea—or whipping, or whatever else she had in mind.

“I see. I am indisposed at the moment to attend the Fae Court. Will you bear her a message for me?”

“No. I am to bear you to the Court or nothing withal.”

His tone—especially combined with Elizabethan diction—finally annoyed me. Perhaps he needed to be reminded that I was not one of Brighid’s subjects. “Do you truly have the power to bear me there?” I asked him. “Are you immune to cold iron, sir?”

His confident, supercilious manner withered, and he gulped. “No,” he admitted.

“So this talk of bearing me hence is nothing more than bluster, yes?” I took a step toward him, and he back-winged. I gave him a thin smile.

“Yes,” he said.

“Good,” I said, and began to mock his affected accent and language. “It is most unfortunate that you may bear no messages back to your liege. Peradventure you may ask her a question, instead, the answer to which may speed my arrival thither. May I bring my companions—those you see here, including my hound—to Tír na nÓg under her personal aegis? I need a guarantee of safe conduct for us all to and from the Court. An affirmative answer will assure my immediate arrival.”

“I will inquire.”

“I will await her reply for five minutes only.”

The faery nodded, said nothing, and touched the same tree we had used to shift here. He winked out of sight, shifting away, and I drew my sword.

“Spread yourselves and be on your guard,” I said. “He may come back with friends. Or gods.”

Oberon asked, "What if he comes back with snacks?"

Chapter 3

Granuaile didn’t say anything, but I caught a tiny smile on her face as she palmed a throwing knife. I couldn’t read her mind, but I could read her expression well enough: She was thinking, Finally, some action. After twelve years of training and sparring with no one but me, here was the possibility of a real scrap. She took cover behind a different tree and crouched down.

I hoped it wouldn’t come to any sort of fight. This was precisely the crucial period when I’d lost my last apprentice, Cíbran—at the end of his training but before I could get him bound to the earth and give him access to magic. Granuaile had trained both her mind and body extremely well, but she wouldn’t be able to survive the throw-downs I was used to fighting until she was able to speed herself up, boost her strength, and heal quickly using the magic of the earth.

Perun and I took up positions elsewhere, and Oberon lay down, sphinxlike, watching the tree bound to Tír na nÓg, ready to spring up and attack.

Stop wagging your tail. The movement will give away your position.

"But this is so exciting! I might get to pounce on a faery!"

Something much more powerful than a faery might come through there, so don’t jump until you know what you’re jumping on, okay?

"Okay, I’ll wait until you say sic ’em."

It was an excellent precaution, because the faery herald didn’t return. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, but when I whipped around, Moralltach at the ready, I didn’t see anyone. A soft snort of amusement was my only clue that someone was actually there.

“Calm yourself and be at ease, Atticus,” a woman’s voice said, and then Flidais, Irish goddess of the hunt, dissolved the binding that granted her true invisibility. “It’s only me. I’m to escort you and your companions to the Court. I am Brighid’s guarantee no harm will befall them in Tír na nÓg. Good enough?”

It was entirely satisfactory, even if Flidais wasn’t dressed in her customary fashion. She had made some effort to appear courtly; usually she was dressed in her hunting leathers, her bow and quiver were prominently on display, and her red hair was frizzy and wildly adorned with random bits of vegetation that could charitably be called camouflage. Now, however, she wore a plain woven tunic, cream colored, with a band of green embroidered knotwork around the neck and down the sides, underneath either arm. This was belted at the waist, and she wore a large knife there with a handle wrought in polished malachite and mother-of-pearl. I had never seen it before; it was either a recent acquisition or something she wore only to Court. Her hair had been recently washed and brushed, and the flowers in it were clearly put there on purpose instead of resting there accidentally. I noted privately that when she was cleaned up like this, she looked quite a bit like Granuaile. Instead of a skirt, Flidais wore loose cotton pants—like those from a martial-arts uniform—dyed brown to match her belt; she was barefoot. I suspected that the rest of the Tuatha Dé Danann would be similarly dressed. The Celtic ideal for clothing was that it had to be easy to move in if you needed to fight and easy to take off if you wanted a quickie.

“Of course we’d be honored by your escort,” I said. “But why did Brighid send you rather than her herald to fetch us?”

Flidais arched an eyebrow at me. “You were lying in wait for him, were you not? You and your friends out there? Brighid didn’t want him to die.”

“I wouldn’t have killed him,” I said.

Flidais shrugged a shoulder, a wry smirk on her face. “Perhaps not. It was safer to send me invisibly to prevent an accident,” she said. She looked over my shoulder and called, “You can come out now; it’s safe.”

"Is this the lady we can’t really trust because you never know what side she’s on?" Oberon asked, rising from his position and trotting over to us.

Yes, but I’ll keep it simple: Don’t trust anyone except Granuaile and me.

"Okay. I sure won’t trust Brighid. Remember how she set your kitchen on fire last year?"

That was almost twelve years ago, but, yes, I remember. Better stick next to me, buddy.

"Word."

“Is this the same hound you had when last I saw you?” Flidais asked.

“It is.”

“Hello again,” Flidais said to Oberon. “Perhaps we will have occasion to hunt together soon.” After a small pause, she frowned, because she had just tuned in to hear Oberon’s thoughts in the same way I could.

“You forbade him to hunt with me?” A flash of temper sparked in her eyes.

“Forgive me, Flidais, but the last time we hunted with you, someone died. I’d rather avoid a second accident.”