Kevin Hearne - Trapped

“Can Freyja get us into Hel without having to fight through legions of draugar ?”

“Yes. You will take the path that the Æsir use.”

For a while, no one spoke. Eyes shifted around the table, measuring expressions, and wood popped and crackled in the hearth.

This was precisely the sort of thing that Odin had requested of me some years before. Since I had been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of many of those tasked to fight in Ragnarok, I had to take on some of their responsibilities. Fenris had to be slain, and we would find no better opportunity than this, while he was still bound in Hel and many of her forces were absent.

“My hound stays here,” I said, “safe and unmolested.”

No. We are not arguing about this. I need you to be safe .

You wouldn’t be in Hel .

“And your apprentice?” Frigg asked.

“She’s not my apprentice anymore. She is a full Druid and may make her own decisions,” I said. I turned to Granuaile and spoke softly: “You are not under any obligation to accompany me. You should remain here and do something heinous to your stepfather’s oil business. Take Oberon with you.”

Granuaile’s green eyes bored into mine. Her head shook minutely and she brought up her left hand to caress my beard. “Idiot. I’m going with you. My decision.”

“Okay.”

No .

Oberon whined.

One of us has to live through this. I always want you to be the one who lives .

Go down to Ouray and find someone there who likes big friendly dogs .

all of them . Atticus, don’t go. Just send a poisoned box of doggie treats to this wolf and forget about it. He hasn’t seen any heist movies.>

That’s actually not a bad idea .

I understand the attraction of forgiving gods. There are times, like this one, during which I wish for nothing so much as forgiveness for my trespasses, and if I could truly feel such forgiveness, I would cling to the source of it like a newborn to his mother’s breast. But Odin doesn’t forgive. Nor do the Tuatha Dé Danann. The attitude of both parties is to make whatever restitution is possible and, in the words of my old archdruid, “stop looking at the entire world as a hole to put your cock in.”

There was no pardon in the face of Frigg either, who amongst the Norse was most likely to offer succor to those who sought it. Her eyes were cold. She would never say to me, “Go now, you are forgiven.”

To seek absolution from humanity would be to seek my own folly. One may speak of forgiveness here, and another may actually mean it there, but legions remain who would condemn a starving man to amputation for pinching a crust of bread. We are petty creatures who seek to aggrandize ourselves by feasting on the dignity of our fellows.

There was nothing to be done; weeping would not mend it, nor would raging. I could only strive to live so that my merit outweighed my discredit. To pay for the lives of nearly five thousand dwarfs slain by my careless words, I had to kill the biggest, baddest wolf in all the world’s stories.

Fenris wouldn’t fall for a bowl of poisoned kibble. He’d probably turn up his nose at a poisoned steak too; he was too smart to be tricked. Had Týr not been willing to sacrifice his arm, he never would have allowed himself to be bound by Gleipnir, the masterwork of Fjalar’s ancestors, the unbreakable dwarven fetter made of six impossible things. Fenris was a wolf that could reason and speak like a man—like an Old Norse man, anyway. He’d trust nothing from the hand of the Norse anymore. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t poison him.

“Give us time to prepare?” I said to Frigg. “Where and when shall we meet Freyja and the Black Axes?”

“On the very tip of the peninsula southeast of Skoghall in Sweden. Östra Takene. You know it?”

“North end of Vänern Lake?”

“Precisely. Say, midnight, Swedish time. Will that be sufficient for your purposes?”

“I think so.”

“Then Freyja will see you there.” Frigg rose, and, belatedly, so did the rest of us. Oberon recognized that our visit was finished.

Fjalar glowered at me from underneath his impressive brows, but the effect was ruined by his comically bald chin. Frigg nodded to us and we thanked her and Fjalar for their hospitality. The dwarf growled at us, which I supposed was the best I could expect from him right then.

I think he’d rather put us in his next recipe .

We showed ourselves out of the foreman’s manse and walked up the hill to our own cabin.

“So we’re going to Hel, eh? How do we prepare for that?”

“We’re going to yet another sporting goods store—one here in the States, preferably without dark elves or vampires inside, where we can get ourselves some bows and arrows. Then we’re going to cook us up a big heaping batch of poison.”

“Let me guess: wolfsbane?”

“Yep. Why should we wear rubber gloves?”

“Because the aconite in the leaves will seep through our skin.”

“Ogma was right,” I said. “You are well trained.” I was expecting a well-deserved punch on the arm, but Granuaile instead sank down and swept my feet out from under me and dropped me on my back. She kept walking and spoke over her shoulder.

“Trained by the best,” she said. I was about to declare that I loved her when she added, “It’s not going to work.”

“What isn’t?”

She stopped and turned around, waiting for me to get up. “Picking him off safely from a distance using poisoned arrows.”

“Why not?”

“Because somebody else would have done it by now if it were that easy. Freyja could go down there by herself with a sniper rifle and put a bullet in his brain if it were that easy. Odin could have used his spear. A hobbit could have chucked a rock at him with such accuracy and velocity that it beggars belief.”

Granuaile petted Oberon and complimented him on his singing voice, while I rose from the ground, brushed myself off, and sighed. “You’re right. It’s wishful thinking on my part. But I still think we should make the poison. I’ll put it on Fragarach’s blade. You can put it on your throwing knives if you get a chance to use them. Maybe we should get you a bowie knife or something while we’re at it. Your staff won’t be able to do much damage to him.”

“It’ll get me close to him,” she said, referring to the invisibility spell.

“True. But you still can’t do it all by yourself. His hearing and sense of smell will be excellent. We’ll need to provide a distraction for you if you’re going to sneak up on him.”

“An army should prove sufficiently distracting, shouldn’t it?”

“Let’s hope.”

“Let’s also hope this goes better than the last time you tried using poison.”

“Definitely.” She was alluding to an unfortunate encounter with skinwalkers in Arizona.

We ran errands after bidding farewell to Oberon. We grabbed some gloves and some bags and shifted to a forest in Germany with plenty of wolfsbane—also known as monkshood and myriad other names. There were species of it in the United States—even in Colorado near our cabin—but this species contained the most concentrated poison.

After a trip to one of those giant retailers that sells luxury camping gear and slippers lined with sheepskin, along with more practical wares, we each had two knives of sufficient size to earn the notice of a wolf like Fenris. We returned to our cabin in Colorado to distill the poison and prepare our blades. Oberon was out hunting for his dinner, so we left him to it and enjoyed a shower together, which included auxiliary exercises that occurred to us along the way. Afterward, I decided I had endured the beard long enough. It had been something of a necessity during Granuaile’s training and even more so during her binding, but now I should be able to keep myself trimmed on a regular basis, so it was back to the goatee.