“She’s being more accommodating,” a winged faery explains, “after Fand’s attempted coup. We may have lost our queen, but at least the First among the Fae is listening to us now. And Fand may return someday, just as these others have.”
She’s probably right about that. Fand won’t remain imprisoned forever. The Fae will start asking soon when she might be released, and eventually their questions will turn into demands. And the same goes for her husband, Manannan Mac Lir. Brighid can delay only so long before this temporary goodwill turns to ashes. But I’m not sure letting a bunch of prisoners free will do anything to keep the peace. Some of them are going to be grateful, sure, and be a grand addition to society. But some are going to be resentful and start throwing shite at things. She’d better be ready to duck.
But perhaps Brighid’s thinking that she can simply imprison them again and say, “Well, I gave them a chance, didn’t I? Not my fault if they’re stupid gits.”
I find a chamberlain figure near the front of the crush of beings, dressed all fancy and doused in perfume. I tell him I’d like a brief audience with Brighid, and his eyes stray down to me tattoos. They widen as he recognizes I’m bound to Gaia. “You’re a Druid?” he says.
“Aye. Eoghan ó Cinnéide.”
“She’s left instructions to bring you before her immediately should you appear. Please come with me.”
That’s a pleasant surprise, and I ignore the scowls I get from a group of pixie widows as the chamberlain interrupts their audience to introduce me—not just to Brighid but to everyone, since he shouts my name. I notice Brighid’s wearing a new kit. It’s a set of lighter armor instead of the heavy stuff she wore during the coup attempt, painted a metallic blue. It leaves her arms and legs largely unprotected, but her vital organs are under wraps. And the area around her throne is warded tighter than a hedgehog’s rolled-up arse anyway; I can feel the bindings warning me away from it.
“Welcome,” she says. “What news?”
“I’m starting a grove, taking on six apprentices to be Druids. Wanted ye to know. Whatever protection ye can afford would be grand.”
“Ah! This pleases me very much, Eoghan. Give the details to my chamberlain and I will see it done. I would speak longer, but I have much to do. Is there anything else?”
I think of how Siodhachan is trying to wipe out vampires and it’s going to be all blood and exploding organs until he’s done, but she probably already knows that since she had Luchta make those stakes and I don’t need to announce it where everyone can hear. So I says, “No, that is all.”
She bids me farewell, and I bow to her and chat off to one side with the chamberlain while the pixies resume their audience. I tell him about the property in Flagstaff and how it needs to be warded and after a few seconds become aware that something huge looms over us and smells like sweaty feet.
A gray-skinned hulk, probably twice me size, stares down at me with tiny black eyes and big tusk-like teeth sticking up out of its mouth. There’s a bit of drool leaking out the side, and there are also patches of lichen or fungus attached to its skin with either mud or shite or both used as an adhesive. It has a cloth wrapped inexpertly around its hips, and it’s doing a terrible job covering up the huge thing it’s supposed to be hiding from view. It’s a great fecking bog troll, the kind that doesn’t care if you see his cheesy dangly dong. The worst kind of troll, in other words.
“I know you,” it rumbles, and its breath is a visible cloud of decay. “You’re a Druid.”
“Ye have a keen eye,” I say. “Would ye excuse us, please?”
“No, we have business. I remember.”
“I don’t think we do.”
“I was on a Time Island. Released with many others. So were you. And you owe me gold.”
“You’re mistaken. I don’t owe you shite.”
“No mistake. You crossed my bridge in the bog and didn’t pay the toll. You look younger now, but I remember. You owe me gold.”
When he says that, it triggers me own memory. He’s right. In the old days I’d been crossing a bog on me way to visit a cousin when this troll pops up in the middle of it and demands that I pay him to cross the rest of the way or it’s over the edge for me. I had no gold and no intention of paying if I did, so I cast camouflage and snuck past him. The troll had cursed me and promised someday he’d make me pay, and I’d told him from a distance that no one’s bollocks should ever smell that bad.
Why Brighid thought releasing trolls would make anything better I cannot fathom. It would only lead to situations like this—bullying people going about their business. This one’s attention had no doubt been drawn when the chamberlain announced me as a Druid of Gaia. Now he knew me name and quite possibly where I lived, if he’d been listening in to our conversation.
To make him go away, I pull out the Canadian money Greta gave me and thrust it at him. “There,” I says. “Take it.”