Hunted

Chapter 7

I really wish castles had never become passé. I didn’t shed a tear at the passing of the feudal system or the chamber pot, but I’ve always loved the castles themselves. They’re so much fun to invade and take down from within, and they often have secret passages and catacombs and a tower, ivory or not, in which Someone Important usually lives and rarely comes down. Sometimes they have libraries with old tomes written in a crabbed Latin script full of alchemical recipes or musings on the mysteries of magical arts, complete with idiosyncratic spellings. I get nostalgic for the old days whenever I see European architecture that evokes the age of castles, and Poland is liberally peppered with those sorts of buildings. Perhaps it was nostalgia, along with a gnawing rumble of hunger, that encouraged me to stray from the fields and enter a small town in search of food. Well, that and the insistence of my hound. Aside from a side trip into Katowice to snag some knives for Granuaile, we had run all through the night, and Malina’s coven—presumably with Loki—was more than two hundred miles behind us. Around midmorning, my hound snapped us out of the running zone we were in.

Oberon said.

After a moment he added, obviously speaking to Granuaile, like horseradish? Well, I guess you have a good excuse, being a horse, but that doesn’t explain why anybody else likes it.>

with a side of bacon? I love you, Atticus. If I ever have puppies, I’m going to tell them stories about this food. It’s legendary.>

A heated exchange of Polish boiled through the screen door, and my pork chops tasted of guilt sauce. We had to chow down anyway. Any meal at this point could be our last. The waitress and the cook eventually broke it off and she exited the kitchen, no doubt to inform her customers that their breakfasts would take a bit longer.

We were just about finished when two large ravens descended with thunderous backwings that sounded like chopper blades. Each of them had a familiar white gleam in one eye. They landed on the woodpile and squawked at me.

“Hugin and Munin,” I said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” One raven—I couldn’t tell them apart—squawked and shoved his beak in my direction, then squawked again while pointing with his beak to the other raven.

“You want me to talk to that one? Hi there. Oh! I see.” It wanted me to mentally bond with the other raven. Activating my charm for magical sight, I had to blink a little bit at the intensity of white magic emanating from the two birds. But once I could focus, I found the consciousness of the indicated raven and reached out to it. Images slammed into my head, aerial views of Artemis and Diana racing across the Polish border near Dukla, each of them in a fancy new chariot pulled by four golden-horned stags. They were running side by side, following our trail across a familiar alfalfa field, when the earth gave out from under them and they fell into our pit trap. They tried to leap out of the chariots and make it back to solid ground but weren’t in time; they’d been moving quickly, and the stags pulled those floating chariots down. A grind house of gore and screaming ensued. Though I felt sorry for the stags, I didn’t feel the least bit distressed at seeing the goddesses impaled on the wooden pikes we’d left at the bottom. They’d have to heal up from that, somehow get out of the pit, and get yet another brace of chariots and new teams to pull them. They’d be going a bit slower, but they would never give up now that I had personally wounded them. I needed a long-term solution more than ever, and I didn’t have one.

The scene shifted; Artemis and Diana in the gray sky of an early dawn—it must have been the same one we experienced a few hours ago—looking none the worse for suffering what would be mortal wounds to anyone else and gathering themselves to begin again outside the pit. They had new chariots, new stags, and now a pack of seven hounds each. I remembered the hounds from mythology; they had been gifts from Pan and Faunus. Each goddess blew into a horn, and the hounds leapt ahead on our trail. They waited for a few seconds and then followed behind in their chariots. If we tried another pit trap, the hounds would fall in first and the huntresses would be able to see that in time to avoid it.

But it had worked. It had taken us about eight hours to get from the pit trap to here, and it was about three hours after dawn now, so if the huntresses began at dawn, that meant they were about five or maybe six hours behind us now.

The link broke and the raven I’d bonded with—clearly Munin, since I’d seen a memory—pointed at the other one, Hugin. Hugin’s aura was a bit more intense—the current thoughts of Odin would of course be more active than his memories. I didn’t think Hugin represented the totality of Odin’s thoughts, but it had to be a relatively huge chunk of his consciousness, or else it wouldn’t have put Odin in a coma for years when I’d speared the first Hugin back in Asgard. I had no idea how Odin thought of him, but from a Druidic perspective, Hugin was a headspace in Odin’s mind—with wings. And in a similar sense Munin was a headspace as well. Both ravens had to report back to Odin periodically to recharge and reunite all the fragments of his consciousness, but it wasn’t as if he sat with all the life of a mannequin while they were gone. Though they did embody the mind of Odin, they weren’t the full sum of it.

I connected with the bird’s bright threads of consciousness, and the aged whiskey voice of the Gray Wanderer filled my head with Old Norse.

That’s very kind. But how did you hear I was in trouble?

The Morrigan is dead.

She foresaw this five or six years ago?

I let that eulogy pass unremarked. Odin, how did you find me? I’m shielded from divination.

She’s not mine. She belongs to herself.