falling to the ground on purpose and shooting into the forest, making the admirably paranoid conclusion that they were under attack. Fragarach was carelessly tossed to the ground, useless against machine guns. I created a binding between the leather of the scabbard and the skin on my palm, and it flew to my hand. I ducked into the darkness, and Pyrenees closed the door behind me. Good-bye, cruel world!
The darkness was so complete that casting night vision wouldn’t have helped. There was no light inside the mountain. The air wasn’t bad, though, so it was ventilated somehow. And it was damp in there—rather chilly too. Since I could not hear or see anything, I settled down to a fitful sleep. Pyrenees informed me when it was dawn.
I emerged from the side of the mountain, squinting, smelling pine, and listening to the morning song of birds. My camp was wiped out; the German soldiers had stolen all my stuff. It took me a week to resupply and get back there, but I had to make the trip; I wanted to see something no one had ever seen before. Pyrenees had kept this secret since before man roamed the mountains, and now he was sharing it with me.
I brought several lanterns and Pyrenees welcomed me back, opening the door for me once again. My breath caught when I saw what was inside.
There was no war and no genocide. No gods to please or offend. Just a cavern decorated by a few geological time periods. Keats wrote the perfect words for it, though he wrote them for something else: It was a
Small pools of dark water reflected my lamplight, and Pyrenees asked that I avoid them. The water was fine to drink, but there were five undiscovered species living in there. As I moved carefully through the cavern, I discovered that air flowed in from several different holes in the back, all of which were too small to admit a human body. Pyrenees explained that these eventually opened up into caves on the Spanish side, and that’s why I was able to breathe. I didn’t stay in there for long, just an hour or so, admiring the artistry and the patience it took to create such a space. I thanked Pyrenees effusively for showing me.
Almost eighty years later, I still remembered how to get to Green Man’s Retreat as if I had made the trip the day before.
Granuaile and I took lanterns and food up there after we shifted to earth from Tír na nÓg. When we arrived, Pyrenees was ready to do his part for Druidry—that is, move some rocks and dirt around.
Thornbushes don’t grow in the absence of sunlight, and there weren’t any conveniently close by the cave, as we had found on the slopes of Olympus. We had to descend downhill approximately three football fields before we found one. Pyrenees messed with the slope a little bit, building up a berm on the far side of the thornbush, creating a sort of cradle that would keep us completely concealed from anyone looking up the mountain. In order to see us, someone would have to draw even or approach from above. Oberon would be able to watch all approaches and give us plenty of warning during the day, and we’d take breaks at night and stay in Green Man’s Retreat to let the “scent of magic” fade, even though I doubted the Pyrenees would be infested with Bacchants anytime soon. I just wanted to ensure we’d be able to finish this time, and if that meant spending a little less time each day, so be it. I still kept healing my burns around the clock and already looked less frightening.
When we reconnected with Gaia and were ready to continue the binding where we left off, Granuaile said nothing about removing her underwear. She pulled up the fabric high on her hip for as long as it was practicable, and then, when it was necessary, she moved it down on top of the raw wounds without comment. She winced but made no sound.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, hoping against all my prior experience that she would understand the wealth of meaning behind the two words. A few minutes passed in silence as I slowly filled in the knotwork, one agonizing stab at a time. When she spoke, long after I expected any response, it startled me a bit.
“You’re welcome,” she murmured. And that did it. I stopped filtering my magical sight and let myself take a good look at the bonds between us. They were rich and complex and numerous, and somehow, without me tutoring her about what they all meant, Granuaile had discerned their meanings.
I sighed and spoke in low tones. “I owe you an apology, Granuaile—no, fuck hedging and weasel words, okay? I apologize,” I said. “I just plain apologize. It’s been a long time for me—many normal lifetimes—since I haven’t had to pretend to be something I’m not. Once you pass fifty and you still look like you’re in your twenties, every moment you spend in another person’s sight becomes a performance. You never leave the stage, and people notice when you slip out of character. The last woman I loved who knew I was a Druid was my wife, Tahirah. But she never became a Druid, and so she couldn’t see what you’re seeing. I’ve never had to deal with that. And she had no idea of the things I could see.”
“You must see so much more than I do,” Granuaile said. Her voice was small, as if she feared I’d stop talking if she raised the volume.
“No. If anything, I think it’s the other way around. The sight itself is the same for everyone; it’s how you filter and interpret what you see that matters, and it’s clear that you have an intuitive knack for interpreting what you see, now that you’ve had time to get used to it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have understood everything I meant when I said ‘thank you.’ ”
“It was more than keeping my pants on,” she said. “It was more than just us. It had something to do with the past. You’re afraid for some reason.”
That startled me. She’d seen even more than I suspected—it was akin to telepathy. Was that all it was, interpreting the bindings of consciousness? But I recovered and said, “Yes. I never got to bind my last apprentice, and I know I’ve told you that before. It’s just that we were interrupted and he didn’t survive the interruption. I don’t want history to repeat itself.”
“And you think a romance would be an interruption.”
“Wouldn’t it?” I smirked at her. “After twelve years of repression and denial, once we began, when would we stop?”
She chuckled softly. “That’s a fair point. Two people who can replenish their strength from the earth and heal the ravages of extended friction? It would be Homeric. Three books of
I laughed at this, and she dissolved into giggles. I rested my forehead for a moment in the crook of her elbow and enjoyed the release of tension. Then, as we both wound down, I planted a soft kiss high up on her shoulder. She quieted and a question formed in her expression.
“Bear with my fears for a while longer?” I asked. “For your sake and mine?”
“Yes,” she said. Despite myself, I almost fell into the green of her eyes. Then she turned away and added, “Sensei,” and I shook myself and continued to bind her to the earth.
A month after that talk, unmolested by gods or men, we were past the merely painful part and into the part where a side dish of excitement came along with the pain. I’d faithfully stabbed every point of Gaia’s knotwork all the way up Granuaile’s side, past the curve of her breast, up to the top of her shoulder like a soldier’s braid, and then it began to fall to the shape-shifting loops around the biceps.
A Druid’s animal forms are chosen not by the Druid but rather by Gaia. During the process of the binding, Gaia gradually gets to know the Druid and determines for herself which forms would be most suitable. The first band at the very top of the biceps is always the human shape—necessary so that we can shift back to human form. Below that, the Druid gets a hoofed animal, a land-based predator, a flying form, and an aquatic form. Gaia doesn’t say ahead of time what the forms will be, so we both had to wait for the tattoos to take shape before we could tell what Granuaile could shift to.
She asked for updates about every three minutes once I began the second band on her arm.
“Can you tell what it is yet?” she asked.
“No, sorry.”
“How about now?”
“Not yet. A little anxious, are we?”
“Maybe a little. Can’t you at least guess?”
“You’ll have hooves.”
“I hate you.”
I smiled wryly. “No, you don’t.”
“No, you’re right.”
