Staked

  Krókr scoffed, “So we must join the Æsir, who are even now on their way to kill us all?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “But this is not insurmountable. It’s a misunderstanding. If we can convince them you will fight with them at Ragnarok, there is no need for bloodshed.”

  “We have no wish to fight with them or against them,” Turid pointed out, “or to participate in Ragnarok at all.”

  “So lie,” I said, “and save your people today. Because I’ve seen their armor in action. The Æsir portion of that army call themselves the Glass Knights. They will systematically fire fléchettes once per second and make sure that they hit you when you’re corporeal, and their runed tiles are impervious to your weapons. And then the Black Axes will hack you apart like so much meat once you’re bound to your naked flesh. That’s what happened to your assassins, and it will happen to your entire population if you don’t give them a reason to stop.”

  “I don’t see how we can change Odin’s mind now.”

  “You can worry about changing his mind later. Right now you need to prevent them from wiping you out. They’re incredibly prepared to deny you Sigr af Reykr—Victory from Smoke. But give them anything else and they’ll fall,” I said. “Use conventional weapons. Bring some archers out here and loose a few flights. Arrows will mow them down.”

  “And fire will burn them,” Brighid said, kindling a sphere of flame in the palm of her hand.

  “Good,” Krókr said. “If you’re so anxious to help, we’ll let you stall them while we gather a force together behind the gates.”

  The other dark elves turned their heads and frowned at Krókr’s words but did not gainsay him.

  “We hoped to fight with you rather than for you,” Brighid said.

  “I don’t care if you fight. Sing and dance for them if you want. Just give us as much time to prepare as you can.” His peremptory tone struck me as the sort that would get him barbecued. Delivering orders to Brighid like that marked him as incredibly confident or simply stupid.

  Brighid did not reply to him, however, or set him on fire for his insolence. Instead, she addressed the other Svartálf leaders. “Does Hrafnson speak for all of you in this matter?”

  They paused, exchanged glances, and then Turid said, “He does. We will prepare and be grateful for any time you can give us.”

  “Unbelievable,” I said as they withdrew into the gate, taking the guards with them. Brighid’s mouth dropped open as the door closed in our faces, leaving us out in the literal cold to face an army by ourselves. The guards who had left earlier to scout the army streamed past us as smoke, not pausing to share their intelligence but filtering through the cracks of the doors to report their findings.

  “I think I might know why the dark elves have few allies,” she said.

  “Yep,” I said, turning around. The smudge on the horizon was a definite chunk of something solid now. “Shall we go down to meet them or wait here?”

  “Let’s go down. Quick flight. Are you ready?”

  “I’m still not in great fighting shape, but I’m as ready as I’ll be today, I suppose.”

  We may have looked to the Æsir like the descending wrath of Loki as we approached in a ball of fire—that was my guess judging by their relieved expressions once we landed in front of them and the dissipating flames revealed our figures. But for my money they should not have looked relieved at the appearance of Brighid.

  Leading the army, marching in front, was the red-bearded Runeskald, Fjalar. He didn’t recognize either of us except as people who were not Loki, since we wore armor. He peered at it rather than at our helmeted faces, trying to discern the nature of the etchings. Brighid’s bindings looked nothing like runes, however, so all he could learn from them was that we weren’t Norse. He called a halt to the march and shifted his axe down from his shoulder to a two-handed grip.

  “Who are you?” he said, and I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t go epic with it and give the moment its proper weight. I’d hoped for a “Verily” or a “Tell me in sooth” or something like that.

  Both of us had full helmets on, so we were merely armed warriors to his eyes. And, I realized, since Brighid had her hair tucked up and didn’t forge her armor with the stupid mounds for breasts one sees in video games, he probably didn’t realize she was female, much less a goddess.

  Her head nodded once in my direction, indicating that I should speak for us.

  “You know me, Fjalar. I’m Atticus O’Sullivan, Druid of Gaia.”

  “And who else?”

  “Someone more powerful than I am.”

  He gazed at Brighid, who is in fact taller than me, and might have guessed her identity if he leapt immediately to the Irish pantheon. “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re here to ask you to turn around. I hardly think you have a peaceful mission to the dark elves with that army behind you.”

  “I can’t turn around. I have orders from Odin himself.”

  “But surely you have battlefield command. Call it a strategic withdrawal. The situation’s changed and you need to reassess—as does Odin.”

  “And how has the situation changed?”

  “The dark elves are under my protection. And the Tuatha Dé Danann’s.”

  Again Fjalar shifted his eyes to Brighid, trying to gauge the threat level she represented. It should be radioactive.

  “Why? What makes you care about them?”

  “They deserve to live until Ragnarok like everyone else.”

  “But they’re on the side of Loki and Hel!”

  “They claim to be on no one’s side but their own.”

  “Of course they say that! But skulking, creeping, they fill all that is not light like the darkness they are—”

  “Ah, there’s the skald talking now! And it’s all poetic bullshit covering up the fact that you want to walk in and murder people because they might do something at an ill-defined point in the future and because you don’t like the way they look. Go back and rethink this.”

  “If Odin, in his wisdom, is satisfied that this is the right course, I will not question him.”

  “Meaning you’re not thinking for yourself. And also assuming that Odin has all the facts, when he may not. Have you tried talking to the Svartálfar?”

  “It’s not my place. Nor is it my place to listen to you. There are two sides: Asgard’s and theirs. On which side will you stand?”

  “First, that’s bullshit either-or thinking. And second, I’ve already told you that the Svartálfar are not on the side of Hel any more than they are on yours. They’re neutral, and if you’d take the time to talk to them instead of marching on them, we could spare a lot of lives here.”

  “I asked where you stand, Druid.”

  “Right here in front of you, demanding that you not attempt genocide.”

  Fjalar paused and craned his neck to look at the gray ceiling of clouds. “So you would defy Odin?” He spied and then pointed to Hugin and Munin, circling above us. They had not been there earlier. “He’s watching.”

  “Then he can watch me say this: I would defy anyone who wished to commit genocide, including Brighid.” In fact, I was starting to wonder about Odin. Loki wanted to burn the world, and Odin wanted to just wipe out part of it. There was a difference of scale, but the sentiment was the same—denying people their right to live because you didn’t like them. It gave me pause to think about what I was doing: Do vampires have a right to, uh, unlive? Was my situation any different? I supposed it was: Theophilus had actively sent Werner Drasche and others to kill my friends and me, and he would doubtless do so again. He intended me to be the last victim of a genocide he’d carried out centuries ago with the help of the Roman legions, marching to do his bidding much as Fjalar and company were marching to Odin’s. But my rationale of an active self-defense was perilously close to Odin’s, and could bear some further scrutiny later.

  “I certainly hope you would defy me in such a case,” Brighid said, igniting her left fi
st. It did much to draw Fjalar’s attention, as did her three-level voice, in which she could speak only truth and could be quite persuasive. “I am Brighid, First among the Fae, and I also will protect the right of the Svartálfar to exist. Withdraw and let us talk calmly of these matters and come to an accord.”

  “No,” Fjalar replied. “You underestimate the will of Asgard. The time for talk has past. We must prepare for Ragnarok.”

  I cocked my head at him and said, “When was the time for talk, exactly? Because I must have missed it. Seems like you haven’t talked to the Svartálfar at all.”

  “Enough! You insert yourselves into matters that don’t concern you. Move aside.”

  “Be very concerned, Runeskald,” Brighid warned in her three-part voice. “If you move forward, you will be the first to die an unnecessary death. I can read those runes well enough to know your armor does not protect against fire.”

  “You may send me to Valhalla if you wish,” Fjalar said. “Either way, I will fight in Ragnarok.”

  I raised my left hand in a plea for him to stop. “Fjalar, no. Wait—”

  The Runeskald lifted his axe high and shouted, “Æsir!” As soon as he brought it down, pointing it at Brighid and shouting, “Forward!” the goddess of fire lit him up like a stump, just as she had promised, and I wondered why people who believed in the next life were so anxious to start living it instead of enjoying the one they had.

  Fjalar cried out in agony and the Black Axes roared in response, charging right through a wall of flame that Brighid laid down between us. They went from orderly to berserk in less than a second and didn’t care how hot she could make it for them; they were going to take a swing at us no matter what.

  Brighid unhitched that monstrous sword of hers and swept aside the first few axes. I likewise was able to parry a couple of swings with Fragarach, but the tide coming against us was too huge, and the third dwarf who missed kicked me in the right knee—the leg that was already uncertain thanks to Werner Drasche—and I went down. Axes clanged on my cuirass and failed to penetrate, but I still felt them like powerful punches to the ribs. I took a kick to the head, which rung the belfry pretty good, but Fragarach’s enchantment allowed me to cut off at the knees the dwarf who did it, slicing clean through his armor. Brighid helped out by setting those immediately around me on fire—the pain distracted them long enough to delay a coup de grâce—and then she bowled through them, hooked her arm underneath one of mine to scoop me up, and turned on the fire jets. We only rose twenty feet or so and hovered, facing the army now unable to reach us, their front line on fire and rolling around in the snow to try to extinguish themselves. The back lines of Glass Knights fired a volley of fléchettes at us, some of which went wide or short. The darts that did hit us pinged harmlessly off our armor.

  “Not my best diplomatic achievement,” I told Brighid.

  “They won’t listen while they can choose the path of glorious battle,” she replied.

  “Ugh. Yeah. Maybe we can shut that path down.”

  “I don’t wish to set them all on fire. Relations with Odin are going to be strained enough as it is.”

  “I don’t want that either. We could immobilize them from here by binding their legs together, or whatever. I’ll take the leather, you take the glass? Then we talk to Hugin and Munin.”

  “I like this plan.”

  “Then let’s make it so,” I said, with my best attempt at imitating Sir Patrick Stewart.

  We both began to speak in Old Irish, crafting bindings that would force swaths of leather or glass to adhere to another one we targeted nearby. I started with the nearest fully bearded dwarf I could see in the second rank, zeroing in on the leather jerkin peeking through the joints of his armor and binding it to his neighbor. When they were yanked off balance by the binding and then collided, they fell down into the snow, with much cursing and confusion. I repeated the binding on two more nearby soldiers and made an ungainly grouping of four hopping-mad dwarfs, spitting at each other as they tried to win free. Then I moved on to repeat the process with four more and saw that Brighid was operating in much the same way, though a lot faster. The Glass Knights were covered all over in those runed glass tiles, whereas the leather on the dwarfs was a bit more difficult to pinpoint. It took a half hour or so, but we eventually had the entire army tied up into clusters that could still move if they cooperated but could certainly not fight. They were having some pretty epic tantrums about it too; I didn’t think the spirit of cooperation was going to blossom anytime soon.

  “Now,” Brighid said, projecting her voice over the field as only the goddess of poetry could, “let us discuss how we can all go home alive after this.”

  She lowered us to the ground slowly, and it would have been awesome except that when I touched down, my right leg would not support my weight. Besides the gammy hamstring, my knee had been thrashed, so it was simply saying “nope” to helping me stay upright. Toppling over sideways did not make me look like a badass. Luckily, Brighid was commanding enough for the both of us.

  Her helmet tilted back and she found the ravens circling above. “Hugin and Munin. Odin. Listen well, for I speak true.” Her voice boomed in three registers. “We bear Asgard no ill will and regret the injuries and death sustained today. We acted to prevent war and save life rather than take it. We wish the Svartálfar to join us against Loki and Hel on the day that Ragnarok arrives. We believe they will play a pivotal role once they become our allies instead of a neutral third party. Bringing them to our side will require effort, but it is an effort we feel you should make, so that both they and the Æsir can continue to thrive.”

  Some jeers and epithets got hurled in our direction at that, but Brighid ignored them.

  “Send an envoy—unarmed—to negotiate in good faith. I will guarantee safe conduct for both sides. Your army will remain here until I hear a reply. They will be released to return to Asgard once that envoy appears. That is all.”

  Hugin and Munin squawked and spiraled into the clouds, ascending up the root of Yggdrasil to return to Odin.

  Brighid surveyed the army for potential threats, saw that they remained akimbo in the snow and supremely cheesed at us, and nodded in satisfaction before turning to check on me.

  “How fare you, Druid?”

  “Leg is pretty messed up, but I’ll be able to limp out of here eventually. Working on it. Is Fjalar truly dead, or can we save him?”

  She took in the charred remains of those she had set aflame; I could smell the cooked flesh and saw smoke rising from the corpses, but I had hope that perhaps he was merely unconscious. Brighid evaluated the bodies for a few seconds and shook her head. “Fire is unforgiving, and I did not hold back.”

  “Oh.” I was sorry for that and wished Fjalar would have been more reasonable. Silence fell between us, except for the uncomfortable shifting of bodies in the army and the dark curses muttered at us from various quarters.

  “Shall we go visit the Svartálfs while we wait?” I said. “Sitting here in front of the army is getting awkward fast.”

  “Very well.”

  We flew back to the dark doors of Svartálfheim and called out that we had good news: The army had been halted and an envoy would arrive soon for talks.

  “No one else need die today,” Brighid said. “We can talk in peace of a more lasting accord.” With her permission, I stood behind her right shoulder, kept my weight on my left leg, and surreptitiously leaned on her back for support. Soon the doors opened and the leaders of the Svartálfar reemerged. This time, they deigned to favor Brighid with a shallow bow, and she in turn did the same and removed her helmet. If I stopped leaning on Brighid to remove mine, I would fall over, so I kept my helmet on.

  It was poetry after that. Brighid was much better at slinging words around than I was, and before long we had a pavilion set up outside with tables and chairs and hot drinks and nobody killing anybody else. I got to sit, Brighid melted some snow away so that I could put my bare foot down on the eart
h and draw some strained energy from Gaia to aid my healing, and then she employed that honey-throated voice of hers to convince Turid and Krókr that fighting against the hordes of Hel would be better for the Svartálfar in the long run than sitting it out—the logic being that it was quite possibly going to be the end of the world, and you didn’t want that one to go the wrong way. She actually made them smile and laugh a couple of times, until the envoy from Asgard showed up an hour later.

  It was not who we expected. Not that we expected anyone in particular, just that we did not expect that particular envoy. It was a man dressed entirely in gray with a beard like a cliff wall and a patch over one eye, with two ravens riding along on his shoulder: Odin himself. Everyone tried to be cool, but it’s difficult not to sit up a bit straighter when Odin joins your party. Sort of like if you’re relaxing with your friends and Neil deGrasse Tyson walks up, you suddenly want to talk about science: His arrival changes the subject. Two dark elves flanked him and one carried Gungnir, Odin’s spear.

  “I come in peace,” Odin said right away, his head tilting toward the guard for a moment. “I gave up my weapon willingly.”

  Introductions were made all around. When attention fell on me, Odin’s remaining eye narrowed but he said nothing. That was enough to communicate his displeasure with me, however.

  “Excellent,” Brighid said. “Before we begin, can we all agree that saving the world would be better than allowing Loki to torch Midgard and all the nine realms to bring Gaia under his and Hel’s control?”

  Everyone nodded or grunted assent, and Brighid beamed. “Good. That’s a strong foundation to build upon. The fact that the leaders are here and we don’t need to use go-betweens is also good. Let’s proceed.”

  Hours of grievances and apologies followed, together with arguments and concessions and more than two trips into the trees to relieve bladders filled by hot spiced cocoa. I only mention those trips because they were perilous journeys for me, which I hopped at first and then gingerly limped through. At no point did we enter the doors of Svartálfheim.

  Near the end I must have dozed off, lulled by the drone of carefully controlled voices, because Brighid had to shout me awake. “Siodhachan!”