He gave a dramatic sigh and covered his eyes with one hand while he spoke so he didn’t have to look at us. There was pain in his voice as he explained, “There is not really any excrement per se, nor any contraction of the bowel. There is just … this…” The fingers of one hand flailed about like lost moths, as if in search for the proper words, and then clenched upon finding them. He nearly wept: “…unseemly discharge.”
Granuaile promptly threw her head back to laugh and fell backward in her chair. She rolled over and slapped the floor with her palm, carried away not so much by the content but by Leif’s evident disgust at speaking the truth aloud.
Owen and I had a good chuckle out of it too, and I was glad Granuaile had remembered to ask him. He would never have answered except at that very moment.
Leif produced a pen and wrote in the addendums to the contract, while we tried to get control of ourselves. We all signed and he countersigned and then we schooled our expressions to look dignified, though for our parts it may have come across as three parts pain and two parts weariness.
“Thank you all,” he said, folding the contract. His gaze turned to me and he smirked. “We should not part without a few words from the Bard. Now breathe we, lords: good fortune bids us pause, and smooth the frowns of war with peaceful looks. Who said it?”
“King Edward IV in Henry VI, Part III.” I spoke the next words slowly, making a special effort to enunciate clearly in spite of my injuries. “I will raise you a quote from Cymbeline: Laud we the gods; and let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils from our blest altars. Publish we this peace to all our subjects.”
“Well spoken,” Leif said, his smirk widening to a broad smile. Waggling the contract, he said, “I will send you copies of this wherever you wish. For now I have much to do. A publishing of the peace, as you said.” He rose slowly from his chair, so as not to alarm Owen or Granuaile, and bowed. “Do keep in touch. Farewell.”
Once he was out of sight we all visibly relaxed, but we didn’t say anything until we were sure he couldn’t overhear us. I closed my eyes and gave silent thanks to Brighid, the Morrigan, and all the gods below for this moment of peace that was centuries in the making—not that they had anything to do with it, apart from Brighid’s idea about the stakes. Sometimes you simply need to say thank you to someone, to be grateful for the road behind and the road ahead and the place you’re at, and gods are very good at accepting those feelings. And for all that humanity asks them for intercession with this crisis or that, it’s important when things go well to be thankful or at least conscious of your good fortune, whether the gods deserve the gratitude or not. We strive so much to achieve these small slivers of balance that it would be a shame not to look around and appreciate them when they happen.
“We did it,” I said, a tinge of wonder in my voice. “Three Druids againsht the vampire who nearly wiped ush out and we finally got to him. Two thoushand years of hiding and waiting and then a lot of maneuvering and blood, but we got him.” I turned to the others. “Thank you both for your help.”
“Right. Can we fecking leave this festering shite of a city now?” Owen asked.
“Yeah,” Granuaile said. “Let’s get our bruised and battered asses to a green place and stay there for a while.”
Well, maybe it wasn’t such a great moment for them. They didn’t have to live through the two thousand years to get here. They also couldn’t grasp the sheer number of lives lost to Theophilus’s war—only Hal Hauk, I suspect, mattered to them, as he mattered to me. Yet so many others had fallen and they deserved to be remembered too, so I would do it. And I still had a huge debt to work off for the yewmen’s aid, and the Rabbi Yosef Bialik was due some remuneration. But I will pay it all gladly and be rid of this old fear. It had shackled my consciousness for so long that I didn’t realize how much it weighed until I won free of it.
“Good idea,” I said, a painful grin spreading my smashed lips. “I think I’d like nothing sho much as to play with my hound right now.”
EPILOGUE
Three weeks later, after the winter solstice and the New Year, it was such a clear blue day in the Pacific Northwest that I didn’t mind the winter chill. Thanks to the new treaty with Leif, Owen would be able to get to the serious business of training apprentices in peace—which included the peace that came with my absence. And since Granuaile, like me, was effectively shielded from divination, Fand and Manannan Mac Lir wouldn’t be able to find us at the new place in Oregon, if that was on their list of things to do. I hadn’t heard anything about their recapture and didn’t plan to inquire. My plan was to ignore them until I couldn’t.