Trapped

Chapter 24

We shifted to the first dryad’s tree in Olympus and cautiously scanned the area. Seeing no one, I opened a portal to the island of slow time, with the admonition to Granuaile that she should watch. “I’m going to have you do the later ones.”

“Okay. Why don’t we just open portals wherever we want?”

“You can’t open them at all if you’re not in an area that’s been bound to Tír na nÓg. But we avoid them because it takes longer to open one and uses far more energy. We shift via trees because it requires the least amount of the earth’s power. That’s why Aenghus Óg’s huge portal to hell drained the earth and killed it.”

Parts of the dead land around Tony Cabin were functioning on a basic level again, but large patches were still dead, and it had taken us years of toil to bring it back even to weak levels of life.

The first dryad we’d separated from her tree stared uncertainly back at us, suspended in midair a few feet above the ground of the Time Island. Her arms were splayed out toward us in a final, desperate bid to grab hold of this plane. I held on to Granuaile’s left hand and told her to reach through and pull the dryad back with her other.

“I don’t need some kind of long pole or something?”

“No, as long as half of you stays here, you won’t get pulled into that timestream.”

“What about pulling her out, though? Won’t that cause whiplash or something?”

“No, in that timestream she’s only begun to fall. Gravity just figured out she’s in the air above the island, but she hasn’t even had a full second to fall five yards or so. Look at her. She’s hardly moved, and it’s been almost two months for us. So yanking her back right now would be no worse than one of those tango moves where you extend your arm and then pull your partner back to you. Grab her gently. Remember, to her we’re a blur in the sky.”

“All right.” Granuaile reached through the portal and took her time wrapping her fingers around the dryad’s wrist. “Ready?”

“Yep. Do it.”

Granuaile pulled, the dryad found her feet on solid ground again, then reeled as soon as Granuaile let her go. The dryad blinked and sat down heavily underneath the canopy of her tree.

“What happened? My head spins.”

“Sorry about that,” I said in Latin.

She peered at me and her eyes widened. “Your face. Wasn’t half of it scarred and melted a moment ago?” She noticed that Granuaile looked different too. “And now you have strange markings on your arm. What magic is this?”

“It is the magic of the earth and of the Fae,” I replied. “I apologize for the inconvenience and whatever pain you might have felt. I was forced to use you to get the attention of Faunus. He wasn’t allowing me to bind my apprentice to the earth, you see. But all is well now, or will be shortly. I’m going to mend the broken bonds with your tree.”

“How?”

“The same way I unbound them, except backward. Are you capable of seeing your bond with the tree?”

“No. I just feel it.”

“Please tell me if you feel better, then. This shouldn’t take long.”

Granuaile offered to help the dryad to her feet, but she shied away. “No, thank you,” the dryad said. “I’ll manage by myself.”

“Okay,” Granuaile said, backing away with a friendly grin on her face. She continued chatting and apologizing while I turned my attention to the magical spectrum and sought to restore order to the small bit of chaos I’d brought to the tree’s binding with the dryad. It took a little longer than unbinding, for creation is always more difficult than destruction, but it wasn’t like visiting a modern doctor’s office either, where patients must learn the true meaning of patience before they can get treated. The dryad admitted she felt whole again once I was finished.

“Excellent. Again, I’m sorry for the necessity, but I’m very relieved we could restore you completely. We have to perform this same operation on five more of your sisters and need the time and space to do it in. If you would refrain from calling to Faunus or any other god for two hours, that would give us sufficient time to rebind all dryads to their trees without interference, and then, when everyone’s safe, you can call to Faunus and receive an enthusiastic welcome back, which will no doubt include several erotic terms for which the Latin language is still renowned today.”

The dryad’s jaw dropped. Granuaile flashed her a Spock salute and wished her long life and prosperity.

“Who are you?” the dryad asked. “I’m so confused.”

“I’ve had many names throughout the centuries,” I began, but Granuaile was reminded of one in particular and jumped in.

“In Toronto they called him Nigel,” she said.

“Ugh. You never want to be Nigel in Toronto,” I told her. “Trust me.”

“I don’t know where Toronto is,” the dryad said, looking lost.

“It’s a place across the ocean with a great film festival and a bad hockey team,” I explained, but she still looked bewildered. “Their ticket prices are sky-high, but they haven’t hefted the Stanley Cup since 1967. I know there’s always next year, but, damn, you know?” None of this helped. The dryad looked ready to go fetal, so I thought it best to leave her alone and move on to the next one. I gestured to Granuaile, and we shifted to the next dryad’s tree and repeated the procedure. We tried to keep the chitchat to a minimum but were unfailingly polite and very apologetic. I let Granuaile do the last two, portal and all. She left the portals open while she was binding the dryads back to their trees, but I’d speak to her about it later.

The last dryad was a bit more miffed at us than the others, who had been more bemused than anything else. She wasn’t afraid of us, and neither was she above threatening us a little bit. After I finished mending her bond to her oak, she said, “You’ll suffer as no mortal has suffered in an age.”

“But I fixed everything,” I protested.

“It was arrogance from beginning to end,” she replied, slipping into her tree. Her voice changed once she was inside. “Suffer,” she said, or rather the leaves seemed to say it, no more than a husky whisper and rustle on a windless day.

I looked at Granuaile and she shrugged. “It’s done,” she said in English.

“I don’t know. That was weird. You’d think that she’d be nicer to us, since I’ve already demonstrated that I can destroy her bond to the oak.”

“It’s because she has friends here,” a voice said from behind.

Granuaile and I turned around and saw no one at first. But then a large group of women draped in white shimmered into view, with a single smirking figure in the center of them.

“I swore I’d tear you apart with my own hands, Druid,” Bacchus said. “I may be mad, but I tend to remember things like that.”