Trapped

Not everyone can be bribed with meat, Oberon.

No, they eat meat. It simply doesn’t sway their decision-making process.

“All right. So we need to look for oak trees that are bound to dryads. It’s easy. The heart of the tree will be white.”

“So it’s okay to use magic now?”

“Well, it’s not exactly safe. We’re taking the calculated risk that we can get this done before the Bacchants or anyone else zeroes in on us. We had a couple of weeks or more to work with the first two times. It’s probably okay to scurry around for a few hours.”

We hiked a quarter mile up the gentle lower slopes of Olympus, until we found a tree with a bright white center in the magical spectrum. Having explained the plan to Granuaile on the way, I created a tether to Tír na nÓg first, and we shifted there to scout a suitable location for our shenanigans along the river of time.

“That will do nicely,” I said, pointing to an unoccupied island pretty far upstream. “Time moves so slowly there that they’ll spend a century saying, ‘Wait,’ when they’re trying to say, ‘Wait, don’t leave me here!’ ”

“How do you use the islands?”

“See the obelisk at the edge of the shore with the Ogham script on it? That’s its address. Using that, you open portals to it wherever you are and shove stuff through. We have to use portals instead of trees because we don’t want to teleport ourselves into that timestream.”

“Nice thinking.”

“We learned from someone else’s mistake. I think the first person who used a tree on an island to shift is still stuck there. But word is he ought to be able to shift himself out of there in another decade or so.”

He’s been there longer than I’ve been alive.

I memorized the Ogham address, and we shifted back to the oak tree with the white center—except we shifted to the one growing on the Roman plane. The dryad was nowhere in sight.

“Where is she?” Granuaile asked as she turned around, scanning the area.

I shrugged. “Nearby. Or maybe on the Greek plane. She’ll let us know where she’s at once we start to unbind her from the tree.”

“Are you sure this won’t hurt her?”

“It’ll hurt a little bit. She has to feel it. But it won’t be life-threatening the way we’re doing it.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because while she’s frozen in time, her tree will be frozen too. When we bind them back together, it will be as if only a few seconds passed.”

Granuaile was unconvinced. “I think we’re going to be doomed.”

“Nonsense. Remember, you’re going to speak soothingly in Latin when the Dryad shows up, so I can cast the portal.”

“Got it.”

Focusing on the white light, I zoomed in my focus to examine the structure of the binding.

It was beautiful stuff. The Greeks approached magic differently than the Celts did, of course, relying on structures reminiscent of their architecture: lots of straight lines, sharp angles, triangles, and mathematical precision; columns of cubes that could be endlessly halved and halved again; and a bloody tesseract at the heart of it all, tying together an oak and a dryad. Funny thing about columns is the lack of redundancy one finds in more organic structures. Knock out a few columns and the integrity is seriously compromised. I unbound a triangle knot and felt a small tremor in the tree. I unraveled a column and felt it shudder more violently.

A cultured voice spoke from behind me in perfect Latin. “Please stop.”

I turned and beheld a woman who shone with white around her heart. It was clearly the dryad belonging to the tree, so I dispelled my magical sight and beheld her as she hoped to be seen. She flinched upon seeing my burned features.

She had something akin to a soft-focus filter about her; gazing on her form was like looking at a Waterhouse painting, full of depth and pathos yet suffused with the visual silk of a rose petal, delicate and ethereal and inspiring anxiety in the viewer—I felt I mustn’t stare too intently or else I might crush her beauty forever, and I’d pine away until I died of guilt.

Her hair, dark and abundant and festooned with a flowering vine woven throughout, tumbled in a loose braid down her left breast until it ended at her waist. Another flowering vine circled her body, fastening a loose white tunic of thin material about her. Her legs and feet were bare; her eyes implored us to leave in peace.

Hers was the kind of beauty that, once glimpsed, convinced a person that divinity had a hand in it. I have often wondered if this might not be the answer to all of Granuaile’s philosophical questions: We are here to create and witness beauty. Gaia creates it every day, and as part of Gaia, it is our task as well. Beethoven saw the truth of it. Van Gogh as well, daffy as he was, and so many others.

“We will stop,” Granuaile said. “Thank you for coming to see us.”

“Who are you?” the dryad asked.

While my apprentice kept the dryad occupied, I quietly spoke in Old Irish to open a portal to Tír na nÓg directly behind her. Once it shimmered into existence, we didn’t even have to force her through. I merely smiled a half-melted smile at her and took a few steps forward, and she backed right into it, fearful of my intentions. I closed the portal once she was through and congratulated Granuaile.

“Well done.”

“How much damage did you do?”

“Hardly any. Easy to fix. Let’s go do some more.”

We kept moving and sent five more dryads away from their customary planes. The Olympians would not be able to divine their presence in Tír na nÓg. They’d worry that the dryads were dying, but both they and their trees were effectively frozen in time. Since the bond between them was only weakened, not broken, what was true for the dryads was also true for the trees.

On the last tree we left two notes—one on the Roman plane and one on earth. We purposely left out the Greek plane, to make it clear we knew who was truly responsible and we didn’t wish to involve Dionysus or Pan. With any luck, the Greeks would put pressure on the Romans to resolve the situation in our favor. It read thus:

My lord Bacchus is mad, and his actions have caused some dryads to go on vacation. If you wish them to come back unharmed, Lord Faunus, cease all pandemonium for three months. Rest assured that they will be returned in perfect health if you comply.

I then asked Olympia to relay a simpler message through the European elementals to Faunus, wherever he was: “Some of your dryads seem to have disappeared.”

Granuaile, Oberon, and I shifted to Mag Mell, where I spent the night soaking in the healing springs at Cnoc an Óir and doing all I could to revitalize my skin. In the morning, the Fae were abuzz with the news that “Lord Grundlebeard’s Curse” had ended, and now they—and we—could shift anywhere in Europe.