Once divested of our clothing, with our weapons lying on the ground in front of us, we shifted to our hooved forms—a stag and a chestnut mare—and picked up our weapons in our mouths.
<Heh! You guys better hope we don’t run into a thick patch where the trees grow really close together,> Oberon said.
I didn’t have a reply for that, but Granuaile must have, because Oberon followed that up with an outraged <What? Seriously? Do I have to?> She obviously said he did, for he continued, <We need to get you some saddlebags or something.> He picked up one of Granuaile’s thigh holsters, where she kept three leaf-bladed throwing knives. <You know how ridiculous we look, right? I know a horse whisperer, and I’m totally going to give him a call about you.>
The one-sided banter continued as we began to run, and I was grateful for it. Someone I had thought of as eternal had abruptly ended, and it rocked me. I couldn’t have summoned a single playful riposte to Oberon’s comments. There was simply too much else for me to deal with, not least of which was figuring out how we would continue to survive.
Once out of the foothills of the Apuseni Mountains, we were able to pour on the speed, skirting along the edge of a small plateau and then, descending out of the wilderness, running across flat cultivated lands. We bore northwest to avoid crossing more hills and slowing down. We kept to the vineyards and alfalfa and cereal crops and avoided the villages. We swam across two rivers and crossed into Hungary by running south of Oradea as the sun set. Through Oberon, I relayed to Granuaile what the Morrigan had said—the bits about getting to Herne’s forest, anyway.
Her question to me: <What route shall we take to get there?>
Our best chance was in simple speed, unless we could somehow find an Old Way to Tír na nÓg that wasn’t monitored. I had no doubt that those would all be watched. The people behind planning this wanted to make sure they got us, and they wouldn’t be able to if we could get to Tír na nÓg and then shift to another plane entirely. The Romans had done the same thing to the ancient Druids when they tried to wipe us out with the help of vampires and the Roman goddess Minerva. Step one had been to burn all the sacred groves on the continent, which were the only tethers to Tír na nÓg at the time; step two was to guard all the Old Ways; and step three was to use Minerva’s aid to see through our camouflage. I’d managed to escape them by running north beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. I would not be surprised to learn that Minerva had advised Pan, Faunus, and the huntresses how to hunt us now.
But I had never tried to run across Europe before. I’d hiked it once and stayed in youth hostels and put little patches on my backpack because I thought it was a funny disguise, but I took my time doing that, and climbing up mountains was an experience to be savored. I rather thought dealing with mountains now would do nothing but slow us down, and, besides, I didn’t want to telegraph our intended destination. To get to the Strait of Dover directly, we could simply run north of west and hit it. But that route would present us not only with several mountain ranges but plenty of well-paved cities like Budapest and Vienna. We needed misdirection and the ability to keep in touch with the earth at all times. That’s why I took a sharp turn north at the Hungarian border: Once we crossed the Carpathians, we could stick to flattish land or, at the worst, low rolling hills all the way to France. While we moved northwest through Poland and Germany, we’d keep them thinking we were headed for Sweden via Denmark. To get the best possible route, however, avoiding the majority of villages while also minimizing our exposure to survivalists in the woods awaiting the apocalypse, I would need to consult elementals along the way. Using my Latin headspace, I reached out to the Carpathian elemental, who was dominant across several human political borders that were meaningless to Gaia.
//Druids run / Need guidance / Avoid people and cities if possible//
After some back-and-forth with Carpathia, we settled on a route that would take us north through rural areas of Hungary and Slovakia until we reached the proper Carpathian Mountains.
With a plan in place and an hour of trail behind us, I had time to feel, and much of that feeling leaked out of my eyes as I ran. I had spent nearly my entire life worshipping the Morrigan, and, in recent years, more than that. She was the darkness for me, an unexpectedly beautiful harbinger of doom and pain who forced me to struggle, who pushed me to improve myself. She was a necessary balance to Brighid, not something merely to be feared but to be treasured. As Brighid brought light and craft and poetry to our lives, the Morrigan brought an edge, a tangible sharpness to my existence by sharing hers with me.
With the clarity of hindsight, I saw the signs that the Morrigan had favored me far more than she had the average mortal. Six years ago, especially, when she took me away from Granuaile to repair the tattoos on the back of my hand, she’d been uncharacteristically candid with me, but I had dismissed it because we were in a room enchanted with bindings that encouraged harmony. Now I saw that our interlude there had been haunting her ever since. As soon as she left that room, she reverted to her cruel self, when she had not necessarily wished to do so. And that was what made her snap—not her love for some dude but her lack of freedom to love or not as she desired.
I’d tried to be her friend, which probably made it all worse. We’d gone to a few baseball games together simply to hang out, and she couldn’t keep herself from remarking on the fear of failure the players felt, or their guilt or despair at poor performance, and only noticed their triumphs when I observed them aloud. Each time I did, she cringed, taking it as a rebuke. She seemed to think she should have seen it first, or at least at the same time, but she had a filter blocking all such things from her sight. Each time we’d gone out to the ballpark, she began the night flushed with optimism, convinced that this time she would be able to enjoy the competition and my company on a purely superficial level and ignore all the feelings she was attuned to feel as a goddess associated with death and war and lust. Usually that optimism had fled by the third inning and she sat in silence, distrusting herself to say anything lest it be perceived as accentuating the negative. My attempts to cheer her up with happy observations only emphasized that she lacked the social facility to engage on that level.
We caught a game in St. Louis once, and after a quick visit to the team shop I was struck by how different she looked in a Cardinals jersey and cap. She looked damn cute—not hot or sultry or sexy but the sort of innocent, wholesome beauty that lifts your spirit and makes you grateful to be alive to see it. But when I told the Morrigan she looked cute, she didn’t understand the nuance, nor did she appreciate it when I tried to explain it to her. She thought I was asking for sex, discovered that I wasn’t, and then we both felt frustrated and embarrassed. Despite these failures, I thought that we were making progress, becoming friends after two millennia of being uneasy allies against Aenghus Óg. I suppose the Morrigan didn’t feel the progress was sufficient or of the right kind.
Perhaps just as frustrating for her was the inability to enlist the aid of an iron elemental in binding a cold iron amulet to her aura. No matter how she tried, she could not free herself from the conditions of her godhood and project friendliness.
I supposed she was free now—most importantly, free of those constraints and, to a lesser extent, of an idiot Druid who never recognized her true feelings. If I had looked at her in the magical spectrum, I might have seen those emotional bonds, much as Granuaile had seen them between us soon after she’d gained her magical sight. But I never dared to look at the Morrigan that way. She would know and consider it an invasion of privacy, and she dealt with such invasions harshly.