“All right,” she said. She narrowed her eyes and pointed her fork at me, jabbing it forward to punctuate her words. “But if you’re going to try to convince me to give up being a Druid again, you can forget it.”
I shook my head with a rueful grin. “You don’t have all the information yet.” She’d already heard about Ratatosk and Yggdrasil and I’d shared the general look of the plane with her, but I hadn’t explained what really happened other than that I’d successfully stolen an apple. Now I recounted everything.
“So Hugin and Munin are looking for you right now?” she asked after I’d finished.
“As we speak, no doubt. The only reason they haven’t found me already is that they don’t know what to look for. But if Odin ever suspects it was a Druid that slew the Norns and his favorite horsie, he’ll make noise around Tír na nÓg and then they’ll find me quickly, because everyone there knows where I am now. I have to move.”
“Of course you do, but”—her face clouded—“that means I have to move too.”
“Right.” I nodded. “And change your name. And cut off all contact with your family and friends to protect them. Unless you like having a family and friends. Then you should give up this dream of being a Druid and live happily ever after.”
Granuaile slammed her fork down. “Damn it, sensei, I’m not giving that up, I told you!”
“How will your loved ones take this, Granuaile? Look at it from their perspective for a moment. To them it’s going to look like I’ve kidnapped you or that you’ve joined a cult.”
“Well … it kind of is a cult, isn’t it?” she joked.
I chuckled. “I suppose. A very tiny one—here we all are. You can shave your head if you like for verisimilitude.”
Granuaile’s jaw dropped. “I thought you liked my hair.”
Oh, damn. She’d noticed. There’s no winning this, change the subject.…
“You never answered my question. Aren’t your parents going to worry? You won’t be able to contact them often, if at all.”
She shrugged and puffed a soft dismissal past her lips. “I don’t talk to them much as it is. They’re divorced. Dad is always on a dig somewhere in the cradle of civilization, and Mom is busy raising her new family in bloody Kansas.” The way she spat out Kansas led me to believe she did not consider it the cradle of civilization. “I let them know I wanted my independence early on and they gave it to me.”
“They seem to have set you up well,” I remarked, flicking my eyes around.
“Oh, yeah. How does a barmaid afford a condo like this, right? Well, it’s paid for by dinosaurs. Mom’s new husband is an oily oil man. So greasy he looks like he sleeps in a jar of Vaseline. He has one clump of hair that he’s grown really long, and he combs it over pathetically to try to cover up his shiny bald head. I despise him and he loathes me. When I said I wanted to attend ASU, he was only too happy to pay all the bills so long as I agreed to stay out here.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. Clearly she wasn’t going to miss much of her old life. I’d gone and caught myself an ideal candidate for Druidry. Still, it was best to be thorough, and I still had a couple of disincentives to offer her.
“Granuaile. Did I ever tell you what happened to my last apprentice?”
“No, but I think you’re probably going to tell me he died horribly.”
“Tragically, yes. Cut down by Moors in the kingdom of Galicia in 997. He was only a couple months away from getting his tattoos and becoming a full Druid. He was utterly vulnerable, you see. Utterly defenseless. And that’s what you’re going to be for twelve more years. There aren’t many shortcuts we can take. This isn’t like the movies where you can just feel the Force or learn everything you need to know in a three-minute montage, or those novels where the young hero masters advanced swordplay in a couple of months of lessons on the trail. And all that time you’ll be a target in a way I never was, in a way Cíbran never was.”
“Cíbran was your apprentice?”
“Yes. I trained him in secret. The locals all thought I was a staunch Christian, the rock of the neighborhood, and never suspected for a moment what I truly was. And back when I was in training, before Christianity, it was perfectly safe to be a Druid. Best possible thing that could happen to a lad, in fact. But you’re not in that situation. I’m currently a high-value target, and I’m going to be the gods’ most wanted after this next trip to Asgard, no matter how it turns out. If things don’t go well, you’re almost certainly going down with me. You could be throwing away your whole life.”
Granuaile pressed her lips together and smiled tightly. “Nope, you’re not scaring me away. Correct me if I’m wrong, but so far the score is Atticus 5, gods 0.”
“That’s a poor analogy. If they score one, I’m dead and they win.”
“Whatever.” She held up a hand. “My point is that you kick ass, and it reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to ask you: How did the Romans ever manage to wipe out the Druids? You can travel to different planes, camouflage yourselves, shape-shift, and fight without ever getting tired—so what happened?”
“Caesar and Minerva,” I said. “That’s what happened.” Granuaile said nothing. She picked up her wineglass and took a sip, raising her eyebrows expectantly, waiting for me to elaborate.
“There was more to it than that,” I admitted. “I think there were vampires behind it too. But what I know for certain is that Caesar tromped through Gaul, burning all the sacred groves, and that effectively prevented most Druids from shifting planes and escaping easily. We didn’t have the freedom to use any healthy forest we wanted at the time—that became my project afterward. The fires didn’t simply burn the wood, you see, they burned away the tethers to Tír na nÓg. It left all the continental Druids stranded here on this plane. Once that was accomplished, Minerva screwed us over by giving Roman scouts the ability to see through our camouflage, and then they could chase us down. The ability to fight without tiring doesn’t help when a cohort of legionnaires surrounds you and thrusts their spears from every direction. And that’s what they did, make no mistake. It was a systematic slaughter. Some tried to fly away in their bird forms, but they were shot down by archers.”
“But surely some of you escaped.”
“Oh, aye. Druidry struggled on, especially in Ireland, because it was isolated from the Romans. But then Saint Patrick came along, you know, spreading Catholicism. Lots of lads looked at twelve years of hard study and responsibility, weighed it against the instant acceptance and fellowship of the Christians, and chose the easier faith. And then it was just a matter of attrition. None of the other Druids knew the herblore of Airmid, and they eventually died of old age, if the Romans didn’t get them. And one day, the last Druid except for me died without leaving behind a trained Druid to take his place. I couldn’t tell you precisely when it happened, but it was most likely the sixth or seventh century.”
Granuaile put down her glass and leaned forward. “But you should have destroyed them all! You had the power of the whole earth at your command! You see how things are bound together. Why couldn’t you, you know …” She faltered, making lame gestures of something breaking apart with her hands.
“Go ahead and ask. Every initiate does at some point.”
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