“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.”
<Alert! Much fear apprentice shows! Adopt Yoda syntax you must!>
“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:
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.
Chapter 20
I spent World War II helping Jewish families escape Vichy France by sneaking them into Spain and thence to Portugal. I smuggled them through the Atlantic Pyrenees using one pass or another, and in the process I learned the lay of the land very well. Because of that experience, I knew of the perfect spot to bind Granuaile.
The Pyrenees—pronounced the French way, like
The Morrigan had told me to keep my magic use to a minimum throughout WWII, because she was going to be damn busy choosing the slain and couldn’t shield me from Aenghus Óg. The Pyrenees elemental was sympathetic to this and was anxious to help; who knew when I’d ever make it back if I got chased out of the area?
I needed to keep my draws on the earth to a minimum; both the Fae and the Tuatha Dé Danann could feel such draws if they were nearby, and thus I could accidentally be discovered. The Pyrenees helped me hide by doing plenty of things for me. If an elemental exercised its own magic, that was just the earth doing its thing, not someone exercising his binding to the earth.
An officer among the Germans had heard tales that someone named the Green Man was helping Jews escape, and he gave them enough credence to send a few squads looking for me. This was in 1941; they had France sewn up and the United States hadn’t gotten involved yet, so the soldiers were a bit bored and snipe hunts were a luxury they could indulge. Normally they would not have given me any trouble, but they caught me by surprise when they walked right into my camp while I was sleeping. They had automatic weapons, and I had skin that was fantastically vulnerable to bullets.
I cast camouflage right away and asked the elemental Pyrenees to help somehow. After a few seconds had passed, he caused a minor rockslide south of my position, during which the Germans thankfully did not hose the area with gunfire. They hadn’t yet determined I was the Green Man; I was just some crazy bastard sleeping in the woods. They shouted a lot, wondering where I went, and some of them stomped off to investigate the noise to the south. A few stayed in the camp, however, to see what they could turn up. They turned up Fragarach, and I almost broke my silence and begged them not to take it.
Sensing my distress, Pyrenees made me an extraordinary offer. On the other side of the rock wall I crouched against was a cavern with no outside access nearby. He’d grant me access by creating a door in the mountain and would disguise the whole business by massaging the crust underneath the soldiers’ feet for a minute. They’d think it was an earthquake.
I agreed and the chaos began. The ground near my campsite was suddenly unsteady, and one soldier squeezed off a round in surprise as he lost his footing. It took out one of his companions, then all the soldiers were
