I switched to my owl form briefly and did an aerial scout above the trees to figure out where the nearest diner was. I spied a likely spot five miles away in Osinalice.
A half hour’s steady run with my sandals off brought me into town. It was a charming collection of timbered cottages, a few cocks crowing at the dawn, and a single road winding through its length, nestled in a narrow valley. There wasn’t really a diner in a small place like this, just a bed-and-breakfast catering to ecotourists and writers eager to escape the oppression of modern cities. The innkeeper, who was also the cook, was a short, jovial, spherical man who spoke Russian and loved his business. He had food stains on his apron and a ready smile under a salt-and-pepper mustache. He cooked me a big breakfast in exchange for some work around the inn—degreasing the fryers in the kitchen and cleaning behind the oven, chopping some wood out back for the fireplace in their common room. His daughter was the hostess, and she flirted with me as I ate. She equated me with the road out of town, and any road out of that tiny, beautiful place was a good road to her. I reflected on the paradox of nature: Some people wanted to escape it and others couldn’t wait to get back to it, never realizing that it said more about their nature than about nature itself.
The lodgers, who were eating breakfast communally in the dining room, tried not to stare at me and did a miserable job of it. Maybe they smelled the werewolf on my clothes, or the vampire—not consciously, mind, because their noses weren’t that good. They might have smelled something a bit off about me, giving them a vague sense that I traveled with monsters as a matter of course. They made no attempt to speak to me.
I thanked the owner and his daughter and felt everyone’s eyes on my back as the little bell on the door announced my exit from the inn. I crossed the single road in town and slipped into the forest. They’d make up stories about me in their minds, and that was fine. If my ephemeral presence in their lives made it a smidge more interesting for them, so be it.
I took my time returning to the tree marked with Gunnar’s vomit. There was no hurry; until Leif returned, we could not proceed. I walked with my hands in my pockets, enjoying the feel of these woods. I hadn’t heard from the elemental of this region in a long time, and I sent it a greeting and wished it well.
Near the rendezvous point, but far enough away that I wouldn’t have to smell the acid remains of Gunnar’s stomach, I assembled a rough lean-to—it’s much easier to do when one can bind the branches together magically. I planned to indulge in a good day’s sleep, since it was now my bedtime in Arizona, and the lean-to would provide shelter from aerial surveillance more than from the elements. Lacking a teddy bear or a pillow or even Oberon, I took small comfort snuggling up with Fragarach.
The forest floor was cold; snow would be coming soon …
Gunnar was sprawled nearby on his back when I awoke, his paws splayed comically in the air and his tongue lolling out to one side. He was snoring a bit. I wished I had a camera. One with a big flash, because it was past sundown. Something had woken me up—but, oddly, not the werewolf.
Turning on my faerie specs, I scanned the night without moving my body or creating any noise. I saw nothing and heard nothing. Maybe the pressure on my bladder had roused me, and nothing more. Still, I was convinced something was outside the lean-to, watching—perhaps waiting for me to stick my head out.
I wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction. I’d prefer to wake up the werewolf instead and then exit while it was distracted with the problems that startled werewolves tend to present. Shifting the ground underneath him ought to wake him quickly. I placed my palm flat against the earth and was about to issue a command through it to disturb Gunnar’s sleep when a voice spoke and did the job for me.
“Calm yourself, Atticus. And you too, Gunnar. It is I.” Leif stepped into view from behind a tree as Gunnar and I rose to meet him, a bit miffed by his entrance. This seemed to please him, judging by the smirk on his face. “Did you have a nice day?”
“Slept through most of it,” Gunnar growled.
“That’s what I always do,” Leif said. “Sleep like the dead.”
“How was Zdenik?” I asked.
“Impeccably tailored. Surprised to see me. Annoyed that I defended my territory so publicly. Gratified that I paid him proper respect. Shall we go on to Nadym?”
I released the bindings keeping my lean-to together and wandered off to relieve myself, then returned and pronounced myself ready.
“Can you shift us quickly out of Tír na nÓg?” Gunnar asked. “Perhaps I can vomit only once and pay for both trips at the same time.”
“I’ll do my best,” I told him.
We shifted, and I spent as little time as I could in Tír na nÓg before hauling us east to the forest south of Nadym. Gunnar was violently ill immediately upon arrival. Leif and I stepped off to give him some privacy and save our noses.
Once Gunnar announced himself ready to proceed, we ran north underneath a clear starlit sky, arriving at the rendezvous point near midnight. Leif graciously offered to carry my sword and our clothes so that Gunnar and I could run in our shifted forms. We kept an eye on the sky above, watching for telltale signs of storm clouds gathering, but apparently the Norse were searching for me elsewhere. It made sense: They were expecting me to hide as far away as possible from Asgard, not to attempt a return trip. As the lake came into view, we spied a campfire licking at the night, setting the branches of a familiar tree on the shore into sharp relief. There should have been three people waiting for us, but I spied only two. Perhaps Leif had not managed to get hold of them all and tell them where to meet. Two elderly-looking men sat on either side of the fire, apparently unafraid of what might be lurking in the darkness outside its glow.
“I see we are the last to arrive,” Leif said. Either he was expecting only two or he saw the third man somewhere. “Come. Shift to your human forms and I will introduce you.” Gunnar and I shifted and dressed, and together we approached the fire. Leif hailed the two old men, and they turned toward the sound of his voice. Betraying no sign of arthritis or poor eyesight, they rose fluidly from the rocks they’d been sitting on.
One of the men was Asian, presumably Zhang Guo Lao. Wispy tendrils of white hair grew sparsely along his jaw and in a nimbus around his temples, reminiscent of half-formed clouds through which the sky is still visible. He wore traditional garb in the formal shenyi style, royal blue embroidered with a silver and gold chrysanthemum pattern, save for bands of sky blue at the collar, belt, and the edge of his sleeves. Though clearly advanced in years, he seemed faintly amused that we might think him frail because of it. I knew from experience that the loose folds of those clothes often disguised the true movements of shoulders and elbows, even fists. I would leave it to Leif and Gunnar to underestimate him; I was not deceived. His English, when he spoke, was quite excellent and only slightly accented. He bowed to us and said, “You honor me with your presence.”
The other man was Väinämöinen. He gestured at my goatee and said, “Cute beard.” His own was white and epically intimidating. I couldn’t possibly call it cute; he could be hiding anything in there. There might be weapons or exploding powder pellets to help him disappear in a cloud of smoke, or there might just as easily be a family of starlings nesting in it. Beginning under his sharply bladed cheekbones, it flowed like an avalanche all the way down to his belly. His mustache was an even brighter shade of white than his beard, and it draped luxuriously over his upper lip, falling in thin tendrils on either side of his chin like ridges of fresh powdered snow.
His eyebrows were similarly impressive and snow white. They hung like rolled-up awnings over a prominent brow and deep-set sockets. His eyes were thus completely cast in shadow, pools of ink that were as likely to be amiable as angry. A black skullcap of the Finnish cut with earflaps on the sides was fastened with a bright red band around his forehead, giving the overall impression that he was a fearsome man to cross. He looked like an evil version of Santa Claus, lean and hungry and only liable to say “Ho-ho-ho!” when he was jumping up and down on your face.
He wore a tunic of forest green belted in black leather at the waist, and over this he wore a sturdy red wool cloak, clasped invisibly somewhere underneath his beard. A short sword rested in a scabbard attached to his belt, and he wore light-brown cloth breeches tucked into knee-high furred boots, which were cross-tied down to his ankles.
His grip was strong as I shook hands with him. “That hat is darling,” I told him. If he wanted to damn me with faint praise, I had no compunction about doing the same. This was not a diplomatic mission. Besides, I had a feeling he was jockeying for baddest of the badasses.
Väinämöinen confirmed this when he turned to Gunnar and said, “What happened to your shirt?” as if it were more manly to be well dressed than to not care about the cold.
“It was astonishingly ugly,” I explained, implying that at some point it had been destroyed and no one had mourned its passing. Gunnar glared at me as he shook hands with the Finn, but he let the comment stand.
Any additional efforts by Väinämöinen to proclaim himself Manliest of Men were forestalled by the arrival of a bona fide deity. An eagle swooped out of the night sky—presumably from a perch in the tree above—and shifted before our eyes to a heavily muscled thunder god. It wasn’t Thor; it was the Russian god, Perun, and the third man I had missed.
His name—or some variation of it—still means “thunderbolt” in many Slavic languages today. His muscles moved like slabs of architecture, sculpted yet not smooth; the sharp lines of muscle were blurred by thick thatches of hair, for he was impressively hirsute, with hair growing even on the tops of his shoulders. His beard was full and copper-colored; the tangles on his head were wild and full of bravado.
His blue eyes crackled briefly with lightning, a much more impressive version of the special effect they did on the eyes in Stargate, and then he beamed merrily at all of us. Suddenly I could see him in a Saturday morning cartoon vehicle: He’d be Perun, the Happy Hairy Thunder God.
He asked us in cultured Russian if he could speak to us in that language. Looking at the blank stares on the faces of Leif and Gunnar, I explained to him in Russian that not everyone could speak it.
“English, then?” he said, his accent thick. We all nodded or murmured assent. “Is bad luck for me. Not my good language.” He shrugged off his misfortune. “I make work.”
Perun shook hands with everyone, delivering tiny shocks to us all and chuckling softly at our reactions. Then he held up what looked like stone straws.
“I bring gift,” he said, and passed one out to each of us. “I am not knowing English word for these. They are shield for lightning.”
Comprehension followed quickly. “Ah, they’re fulgurites,” I said—hollow tubes of lightning-struck sand, superheated to smooth glass on the inside, rough on the outside.
Perun asked me to repeat the term and I did so. He practiced it a few times, then said, “Keep fulgurite with you always, protect you from Thor. Now his lightning no bother. See?”
Leif looked at his fulgurite doubtfully. “This will protect me from a lightning strike?”
“Wonderful!” Perun clapped and smiled at Leif. “We have volunteer for demonstration.”
“I beg your pardon?” Leif said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. Perun raised an axe that he’d had strapped to his back into the air. I’m not sure where that had been when he was an eagle; I wondered if he’d teach me how he did it. “I think he means it works like a talisman.”
“You may recall that the last talisman I had failed to protect me fully,” Leif pointed out with some asperity. He spoke of the cold iron amulet I’d given him to protect from hellfire-throwing witches. “My flesh is highly combus—” At this point, a thunderbolt struck Leif square on the head. We saw the lightning travel down his body and dissipate into the ground. The crack of thunder startled us all, and I, for one, thought surely that Leif would keel over, a smoking, charred ruin. Curiously, though, he was fine. “—tible?” he finished on a querying note.
“Ha! You see?” Perun cried. “Better than shield. You feel no heat, no spark, yes?”
“It … sort of … tickled,” Leif said.
Everyone grinned. “That is most extraordinary,” Väinämöinen said. “Will you strike me next?”
Perun’s answer was another thunderbolt from the sky. Not a hair on the Finn’s face was singed. This time we all voiced our appreciation effusively. Perun seemed to glow with validation, and he proceeded to strike the rest of us with our very own bolt of lightning “for practice.”
“Do these have a limit to their protection?” I asked, pointing to my fulgurite. “Good for only twelve strikes or something like that?”
“No, these blessed for all time by me,” Perun assured us. “You safe from all lightning in future. Thor, Zeus, you name, no lightning bother you as long as you carry.”
“Begging your pardon, exalted one, but do you speak of carrying it in a pouch or some other pack?” Zhang Guo Lao wondered.
“Eh?” Perun’s brows met together like amorous hairy caterpillars. “No. Must touch skin somewhere. Hand, foot, backside, no matter. Place in pack, fulgurite protect pack, not you.”
The enormity of the gift began to sink in, and we thanked him effusively.
“Is no big deal,” he said, though it was clear he enjoyed the big deal we were making of it.