His sigils did.
A rope of magic flew from Titania’s hand and coiled around Hrokr. He screeched, and one of her gags followed.
Another rope coiled by my side.
I didn’t think. I reacted. I sunk both of my hands into the snake of fae magic reaching for Ellie. I grasped. I shook. I needed to get it to turn away.
It didn’t. It bit.
The dusting mate magic around my hands sucked away into Titania’s magic. It pulled off me, away from my skin, and off my soul. Only a hole remained where connection should have been.
She still held tight to my waist. She still breathed against my arm. I heard her cries and smelled the salt of her tears, but my soul thought it nothing more than memories.
Like the dryads, Ellie was lost in an illusion of distance I could not understand.
“Mother!” she yelled. “Let him go!”
Titania looked at her hand as if she, too, saw her dreadful snake and the mate magic it consumed. Her lips rounded. “Huh,” she said.
“You dare hunt on my lands?” Arne reached over his shoulder to draw Sal.
Titania pointed at him. “Do you want a war, Odinsson? If an Odin aspect uses that axe against a fae you know damned well all fae will descend on your little fiefdom.”
Arne held Sal’s handle but did not lift her off his back. “Leave, Titania. Alone.”
“And what?” she asked. “Be strategic? Make plans? Operate under the rules of the game?” She thrust out her chin. “Rules do not apply to my husband.” She looked back at us. “I can’t leave you with them,” she said. “I can’t have his wrath fall on you.”
Arne’s eyes widened in surprise as if he realized once again that Ellie had to be here—which meant he probably realized once more that I was here, also.
Hrokr struggled against his rope, but it did no good. “No no no…” he whimpered through the gag.
“Mom!” Ellie shrieked. “Don’t!”
Titania raised her hands to the sky as if to call down the clouds themselves, and… the magic shifted. The fae magic. The elven magic. All the residual kami and spirit magic around the sheep. It all took on the same red and green, feral energy of the cottage. The same sense of living under understanding I’d been given in the lucid dream I’d had last night. The one where the other magic wanted me to learn.
To be aware.
But I had no way of doing so. No way to hook into any magic no matter its origins, because I was not myself magical.
I was reconstituted and mundane. I was more science than art. And Ellie was about to be yanked from me forever.
She gulped and held tighter to my waist. “If you do this, I will never forgive you, Mom. Never.”
“I’ll go with her!” I yelled. Maybe Titania would listen. Maybe she’d send me, too.
I knew what the hole was. Each individual part of me had been inside it before my father’s brew of chemistry and power had jolted my stitched-together body to life. I’d walked inside it in The Land of the Dead. I’d stared it down when I lost Rose.
If Titania stole Ellie from me, maybe I’d remember. Or maybe the enchantments would reestablish and I’d forget. But the hole, the loss, the black depth draining away my soul would never leave.
It would roil underneath, unfettered and feral.
Titania cocked her head until her antlers touched her shoulder. “My husband will smell the elves on you, young man.”
She threw her arms wide.
The sigil’s around Arne’s hands brightened. “You can fix this, son,” he said.
His words were meant for Hrokr. I was sure they were meant for Hrokr, because Hrokr was his son with the magic. Yet Arne looked at me.
I didn’t have time for my screaming raccoon, nor did I have time for Hrokr’s menagerie of biting and hissing internal ferals, but they were all here with us anyway. The Loki elf and I were the princesses at the center of our own very special circle of dancing forest creatures, and ours weren’t going to clean anyone’s house.
I looked to Hrokr. “You protect the vulnerable,” I said. He’d done it before. He could do it again, even coiled in Titania’s magic rope.
And Ellie Jones, my half-fae mate, backpack on her back and Maura’s silly bright yellow knit hat with the huge white pompom on her head, clung to my side as if this really was the end of the world.
Ellie’s cottage—the magic of the cottage—had tried to teach me that we were all part of the same universe, the same magical ecosystem. We were all interlaced. Some parts were more local than others, but no part held more importance, even the old, old parts that cared nothing for humanity or its magicals.
The land answered the two dryads’ calls. The trees mapped space and time. They sheltered their skittering things, and they held firm to this world.
So the trees did what they should not have been able to do. Maybe they responded to the presence of the fae. Or the angry elves. Or perhaps they noticed the layers of overlapping concealment enchantments. Or maybe, just maybe, the old parts under all magic responded.
The King and Queen of the Fae weren’t the only non-elven magicals to take notice.
And no one wanted this to end in the ash and hell of yet another Ragnarok.
Hrokr’s hands flickered. He added something to his father’s sigils.
I wrapped myself around Ellie. Please help, I whispered into the ether, to the other magic. To the other pantheons who had taken notice while I was in St. Martin’s bubble with Axlam and Dagrun. To Raven, too, if she cared to listen.
Please don’t open this wound. Please.
Branches reached. Portals snared. My Yggdrasil tattoo felt as if it uprooted from my skin. And we moved, all us emotional racoons, menageries, and angry All-Fathers.
We moved someplace just across a border from Alfheim, Minnesota.
Chapter 14
I enlisted in the Fifth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment on the third day of
