It doesn’t matter whether we make love or war or both when we go running together in the woods; Greta always likes to snuggle up afterward for something she calls “pillow talk,” even though we never have any pillows with us. Perhaps it’s because we are so fecking savage when we play together, and she wants a quiet time of conversation to set aside the beast and reassert her humanity. I don’t know; that might be reading more into the bones of the thing than are really there. But, like her, I have come to look forward to our talks as much as the fighting and the sex. She has some wild fecking stories, the kind of thing you’re sure can’t be real except in the fevered dreams of a talk radio host armed only with a microphone and two handfuls of batshit.

Hunting down wendigos in Manitoba, for instance. Negotiating with ghouls to make sure the pack has access to efficient body disposal. And she claims they had to destroy an actual modern-day necromancer who had raised the dead in Phoenix just to make him tacos and margaritas, and he had to die before he decided to use his power for something more sinister.

She tells me it’s me turn to share as we lie naked and bleeding on the slopes of Mount Humphreys near Flagstaff. She still shudders from the pain of her shift from wolf to human and clasps me hand as we stare up at a blue sky through the pickets of white-trunked aspens. Seen from the forest floor like that, they seem to be the clutching finger bones of giants long buried in the earth, reaching for one last fine day in the sun.

When I point this out to her, she squints up at them as if there’s something wrong with her vision. “What if that were true?” she says, and nestles into the crook of me arm. “How do you suppose they would come to be here, lying in the cold ground?”

I snort at the question. “Might as well ask how we came to be here, lying on top of it.”

Her head raises enough to look me in the eye. “All right, then. I’ll ask: How did we get here?”

“What? Are ye serious? Ye already know that. Siodhachan fetched me off that fecking timesuck in Tír na nÓg, and we met at Hal’s house.”

“Right. And I was turned into a werewolf by Gunnar and Hal a long time ago. It’s one hell of a chain of cause and effect. But you’ve never shared with me a crucial link of that chain.”

“And what link is that?”

“How did you become the archdruid of Atticus O’Sullivan? Is there a story worth telling behind that? Or was it an ordinary thing, like your archdruid assigned him to you?”

“Ye really want to hear about Siodhachan and me? I thought ye would rather milk a cockroach than hear tell of him again.”

She shakes her head once. “I want to hear about you. What brought you to cross his path and take him on as an apprentice? I mean, I know you said his father got killed in a cattle raid, but there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?”

“Oh, aye, there was a right load of ox shite that led me to his blasted door, and that’s no lie. That’s a proper story for ye, I suppose.”

Her head drops back down to the crook of me arm, her hands roam in the curls of me chest, and she calls me that pet name. “Tell me every little thing, Teddy Bear.”

If I have it right, this would have been seventy years before this Common Era of yours began. Or something. We weren’t thinking at that time that we would have an entirely new calendar in a few centuries; we were very much in tune with the seasons and solstices but didn’t call the months and years what ye call them now.

I was a fairly young Druid, in me twenties, the younger and stupid side of it if I’m being honest, and me own archdruid had assigned me to tend to the needs of a village in what I believe is now County Offaly. They hadn’t had a Druid around for some while, and they were doing some daft shite and turning the land into a giant peat bog. Clearing away trees, ye know, that were keeping everything balanced, sucking up all that rain, but with them gone, the soil turned acidic and the ground became waterlogged. I think ye have some modern term for it now … Yes! Clear-cutting. Does tremendous damage.

By the time I got there, the bog was already bigger than a king’s ego and at night darker and more dangerous than a badger’s arsehole—ye just really didn’t want to be pokin’ around in there. I was supposed to keep ’em from makin’ it worse and maybe do something to heal the soil.

Problem was, the villagers didn’t want to hear that they had anything to do with that bog. Way they told it, the bog owed them a few dozen head of sheep and cattle and maybe ten girls and boys over the years.

“Ye mean ye lost all that in the bog?” I asks them, and this red-faced knob of a man says no, ye giant tit, they were stolen.

“Stolen?” I says. “By who?” Or whom, whatever is proper— feck all the rules of this shite language ye have me speakin’ anyways.

Well, the knob looks at his wife and she nods at him, and he looks at his friends and they nod too, which means he has everyone’s permission to go ahead and say it out loud to a stranger.

“There’s something out there,” he says. “A bogeyman.”

“Do ye mean one o’ the Fae?” I asks him. “If it’s one o’ the Fae, there might be something I can do about that.”

“Like what?” he sneers at me. “Are ye goin’ to give us a hunk of iron? We’re not as simple as ye think, Eoghan Ó Cinnéide. We’ve already taken all the precautions, and given all the offerings, and said all the prayers, and still it’s been happening. And not just to us, not just here. All the villages near this fecking bog suffer, to the south and east and maybe the west too. During the night they lose a cow here, a sheep there, and every so often we lose a lad or a lass too. There’s a gods-cursed bogeyman out there, sure as I have a cock to piss with, and if ye want us to give a single sad shite about your advice, which we never asked for, then ye will shuffle your bony arse into that bog and kill what’s been killing us for all these years.”

The others all grunted their assent and I saw that there was no help for it. I couldn’t do Gaia’s business until I attended to theirs. And in truth I thought Gaia’s business could wait. Kids should be allowed to grow up in peace or else no one has any, do they? The desolate looks on those faces glaring back at me, well, there was only one way to fix them: justice. Whoever took those kids had stolen their parents’ joy and their hope for the future along with them.

“All right,” I says to them, and it’s a good thing I did, because they were ready to tell me to feck the oldest goat in the meadow if I said anything else. “I want to hear some details, please. But one at a time. The more specific ye can be about times and places of property or children stolen—especially the children—the more it will help me. Because I do want to help ye, and that’s no lie.”

And that, me love, was what got me on the soggy, squelchy road to meeting Siodhachan, though I sure had no inkling of it at the time.

They gave me a lodge of earth and wood to work in, and there I received them, one by one, to hear stories of loss and mourning.

What grabbed me most was the tale of Saoirse, who had lost her daughter, Siobhan, not a fortnight before. A thin and underfed thing, as most of the villagers were, she wiped tears and snot away from her face as she sobbed out her tale in gulping fits and starts.

“ ’Twas thirteen nights ago, sir. I puts her to bed and gives her a kiss on the cheek and tells her she’s loved, for she is. And I have me worries like we all do but I’m thinkin’ she’s safe, for who is sleepin’ next to her but me an’ her own da? She has the iron about her neck, and we says the prayers to Brighid and the Morrigan and all the gods below, and nary a peep out o’ her all the night long. But when the dawn comes and the cocks are scolding the sun, she’s gone! Her blanket turned down, her doll left behind, and no answer to our calls. We checks the grounds, ye know, to make sure she’s not out relieving herself, but she is nowhere to be found, is she? Not anywhere. Nowhere in the village. We rouse the lot of it, but Siobhan is vanished. So what can it be, sir, but the bogeyman of Boora Bog what’s been plaguing us for years now?”

“Are ye sure as ye can be in your most secret of hearts, Saoirse,” I asks her, “that the Fae cannot be involved in this? Have ye, or perhaps your husband, done anything to draw down their wrath in years past?”

“I can’t be positive, now can I, sir, when what offends them is so often a trifle what humans would never understand. But in me heart I’m sure I can’t think of anything that would invite such a punishment upon our heads.”

“I understand,” I says, and nod to indicate that I’m in the same room, looking at the same facts. “Now think back to that morning ye found her gone; were there any footprints or anything at all unusual?”

“Oh, aye. We followed a pair of footprints right into the bog. But it wasn’t a stretch of a hundred steps before we lost the trail. The waters, sir, are worse than clouds at covering up what ye wish to see.”

“But these footprints, now: Were they a man’s, a woman’s, or something else?”

“Oh, it was too difficult to tell, sir, beyond they being human and full-grown.”

“How old is Siobhan? Could they have been her footprints?”

Saoirse shakes her head. “I doubt it. She’s fourteen and wee for her age. And she knows better than to go wanderin’ in the bog anyway. And me husband said, look at the depth of those prints, now, for sure they was made by someone powerful heavy—or else someone carrying Siobhan! Me daughter could never make heavy prints like that.”

The interviews with the others are all of a kind; whatever they lost, they lost in the night, and no clues except for the occasional footprints trailing off into Boora Bog before getting lost in standing waters. Well, that and the almost visible holes torn in their spirits. This wasn’t like the mourning of men and women who’d lost their partners in a battle, where ye knew the risk and knew that death was to be expected and borne. This was the terror of the innocent, at the mercy of a world gone mad, and the way they looked at me, like I was the only one who could give them a reason to carry on in the mud and the rain and the infinite fog of their despair—well, it near stabbed me in the guts.

I’m still thinkin’ it’s some kind o’ rogue Fae that’s clever enough to glamour itself into a human shape, for I can’t imagine what else might have an appetite for humans—unless it’s a fecking vampire. Once I think o’ that, the possibility grows in me mind. I had yet to meet one then, but the Druids on the continent said they were nasty and creeping north with some very disciplined armies—the Romans, ye know. The method fit with what I had heard about them: They hunted at night and had a strange ability to charm people into doing what they wished.

I had to hunt down this bogeyman regardless of what it turned out to be, and after a night’s sleep that was about as restful as a Scotsman dancing on me stones and playing the bagpipe, I cadged a cheese here and a hunk of salted beef there and sloshed into Boora Bog, which is even bigger today than it was back then.

As soon as I’m out o’ sight and I find a patch o’ turf that’s moderately dry and sprouting heather, I strip down and shove me clothes into me bag and shape-shift into a red kite. The bag isn’t heavy by human standards—the food is the heaviest part of it, because I don’t have a weapon—but it’s still a boulder’s worth of weight to me as a kite. I struggle to get off the ground with it, and I can tell I will have to land every so often to replenish me energy from the earth, but it’s still far faster to look for trouble this way than wade through sucking mud and mosquitos.

It’s miles and hours and clouds of midges like low-flying thunderheads before I see anything worth investigating. A lone figure trudges through the muck, heading roughly southwest, and when I circle closer he cranes his neck around and watches me. It’s not long before he waves at me like we are old friends. That’s stranger than a skunk dropping in on a Franciscan friar sex party, so I spiral in even closer. He holds up his arm, back of the hand toward me, and I see the familiar healing triskele of a Druid. He knows what I am because red kites don’t glide over bogs with a bag of provisions clutched in their talons.

Disappointed and relieved at the same time, I pick a small rise of earth that practically counts as a hill out there and swoop down for a landing. It gives me time to shift and pull on me clothes while he jogs over to say hello.

He’s older than me, a single shock of gray pouring down one side of his beard like he fell asleep with a mouthful of gravy and it dribbled out while he slept. He’s taller and broader than me too, his frame packed with muscle, and he’s got both an axe and a short sword slung about him, as well as a pack significantly larger than mine. With all those trappings he can’t be shifting easily to haul them around, which is no doubt why I saw him traveling by foot out here, far from any grove that would let him travel where he wished. He greets me with a huge grin, happy to see another Druid out here.

“Well met, sir!” he calls when he’s close enough to shout. “Gaia’s blessings be upon ye!”

“Blessed be,” I reply, and when we’re near we clasp forearms and smile like we grew up together, though we had never met before. Up close, I see his face is grimy and dotted with what is either something nasty from the bog or dried blood. Poor lad hasn’t seen a bath or his own reflection in a long while, I expect, nor even a river.

“Dubhlainn Ó Meara,” he says, his voice bright as a child given a puppy to play with.

“Eoghan Ó Cinnéide,” I says. Me eyes automatically stray to his right arm, looking at the bands around his biceps to see what animal forms he can take. It’s always interesting, because Gaia chooses each Druid’s forms, and they are often not animals ye might find in Ireland. His eyes do the same, dropping down to me arm. As always, I get asked about me water form.

“Your water shape is something with tusks?” he asks.

“Aye. It’s called a walrus. I rarely use it.”

“And your predator?”

“Ah, that’s a bear. I like that one. What’s yours, then? Some kind of big cat?”

“Aye. I’m told it’s a tiger, though they don’t live anywhere on the continent, much less here. Some part of the great wide world I’ll never see, I suppose.”

“Ah, now, don’t be sayin’ that. Looks like ye have it in mind to see a good portion of it. Where are ye headed, all loaded down like that?”

“Back to me camp. It’s not far. Want to come along, share a cup and a story or two? I have some mead and root vegetables to munch on if we don’t come across a hare or two for dinner.”

“Sounds grand. I have some cheese and salted beef. But why would ye be camping out here?”

Dubhlainn shrugs. “I’ve been asked to do something about this bog. It’s been growing and it will just keep at it if we don’t amend the fecking soil.”

“I’m to do the same. But I also have to convince a village to stop creating these conditions with their constant clearing of trees. How far is your camp?”

He squints into the afternoon sun. “Probably another hour’s slog through the bog to the southwest.”

“All right, let’s go, then.”

Turns out, as we waded through the slime and shared our backgrounds, that Dubhlainn grew up in Erainn, or what’s called Munster now, near the southern port of Cork. And his archdruid knew mine—which made sense, since they had both sent their apprentices out to prevent the island from becoming one giant bog from coast to coast.

“Imagine,” I says to him, “if there weren’t any Druids around to tell people they’re cocking up the earth and teach them how to fix it. Everything would be shite.”

He shudders and agrees. “Shite in the air, shite in the water, folk getting sick because there’s no end to the shite. May the Morrigan take me before I ever see such a day.”

And o’ course I remember him sayin’ that now because the Morrigan made sure I did see such a day, skipping over two thousand years just so I could see how badly humans could cock up the planet without Druids. Dubhlainn had been right, damn his eyes.

His camp, when we reach it, is largely underground, built no doubt with the help of the elemental, solid stone all around to prevent water from seeping in. For a good fifty paces all around, the land is solid and balanced. He even has a garden.

“It looks like you’ve been at it a while,” I says, and he nods.

“More of a home than a camp at this point,” he admits. “It’s slow work. It took hundreds of years to get this bad, and I can’t fix it in a week or three. I keep calling it a camp out of optimism, but it may turn out to be me life’s work.”

“Ah, I can see where ye might be worried. But I’m on it now too, and I would wager there will be more soon, and before too much longer ye may be able to move on to someplace drier.”

He takes a large ceramic jug down from a shelf and tears the cork out with his teeth, spitting it into a corner because we’ll presumably be finishing the whole thing. He pours two cups of mellow yellow, hands one to me, and says, “May the gods below make it so.”

“Sláinte, lad,” I says, and we drain our cups, being more thirsty than a whale swimming in the Sahara, and he refills them. I look around and see a wee straw tick for sleeping, some odds and ends, what looks like a woman’s fancy jewelry box, and some wicker baskets of vegetables, kept cool and dry in the usual darkness. He also has a hearth and a stack of wood next to it for fires, though I saw a fire pit aboveground that looked like it got more frequent use. He follows me gaze and shrugs when he next catches me eye.

“Not much to look at, I know. The chief luxury here is staying dry and warm when it’s cold and wet outside. I prefer it out there, honestly. Shall we build a fire up top?” he asks, and I quickly agree. After the open sky, a shelter can seem like a prison when it’s fine out.

We haul up an armful of wood and get the lot of it popping and crackling before the sun goes down. The cheese isn’t going to last long, so I offer him a wedge and he gives me an onion that I eat like an apple, which was perfectly normal back then.

“Are ye familiar with the village up north of here, on the edge of the bog?” I asks him when we have filled our bellies.

“Aye. They keep clearing land for their cattle and goats.”

“Right. But they seem to be mighty vexed about something in the bog. I nearly cut meself on the sharp words they had for me; never heard so much as a ‘good day’ when I came to town. Have ye seen any Fae in these parts what would give these people fits?”

His bottom lip juts out and his brows come together as he considers, then he shakes his head. “Not for years. There was a bog troll some years back, but I convinced him to relocate.”

“Some natural predator, then? Though I don’t know what it could be. An animal wouldn’t fit the facts.”

“What facts do ye have, then?”

“Missing cattle. The stray goat or sheep.”

“Animals could do that. Though wolves are scarce now and on their way to dying out on the island if I’m not mistaken.”

“Aye. The wolfhounds are too fecking good at their jobs, eh?”

We have a chuckle about that and I ask for another refill of that honey mead of his. He left the jug below, so he goes down to fetch it while I grab an iron poker to stir up the fire a bit and throw on another log. I notice he’s got quite a deep bed of ashes in the pit and he should empty it soon. There are bits of charred bone in there, which I don’t think is unusual, until it registers that these aren’t the bones of a hare or even a sheep or goat. They’re undeniably human.

Even with the evidence in front of me, I can’t believe it. Me first thought is, Who put these bones in Dubhlainn’s fire? As if it weren’t himself all along. And then the facts assemble themselves like a well-made boot and it fits him perfectly.

If the Fae weren’t responsible, then it had to be a man; neither wolves nor trolls left human footprints, and neither can sneak a child out of her village without someone seeing or hearing something. A Druid can, though, and Dubhlainn was the only one living in the middle of Boora Bog with bones in his fire pit. He’d been there for years, and he could strike at any of the villages surrounding the bog whenever the fancy took him.

I toss down the poker and rise, stepping away from the fire as Dubhlainn returns with the jug of mead.

“Ah, that’s what I need,” I say as I hold out me cup, even though I have no plans to drink another drop. I wouldn’t put it past him to have poisoned it while out of me sight.

He pours himself another and raises his glass to me. “Sláinte.” I mirror him and bring the cup to me lips and pretend to drink, while asking the elemental through me tattoos if there are any bodies buried nearby, specifying human remains.

//Yes// the reply comes, and far too quickly for me comfort. //Many juvenile humans//

I lower the cup and drop my pretense with it, watching his eyes.

“Is Siobhan still alive?” I asks him, and for a wee fraction of a second his eyes widen in surprise, but then he tries to deflect.

“Siobhan who?”

I throw the cup at him, mead spilling out and splashing his face. Those spots on his cheek I thought might be the dried blood of some animal were probably the blood of poor Siobhan.

“I’m talkin’ about the girl ye took from that village two weeks ago! Is she still alive, ye poxy pair o’ bollocks, or have ye already eaten her, ye feckin’ heartless monster?”

For a small moment, there’s fear in those eyes. Maybe a flash of guilt too, for he’s been caught and he knows it. I’m expecting him to lash out at me, but instead he throws back his head and laughs, and ye could have shoveled me jaw off the ground, I was that surprised.

“You’re so young and full of yourself!” he says, and beams at me. “I’m doing Gaia’s work out here and nothing else matters, ye see? This goat, or that cow, or that girl Siobhan—they’re all just meat to Gaia, and ye know it to be as true as Brighid speakin’ in three voices. If Gaia gave a damn about what I ate one day and shat the next, I wouldn’t be here now, would I? The earth wants to be healed, Eoghan, and who’s makin’ it hurt like this? Those same fecking villagers on whose behalf ye come here, all full of outrage. Where’s the outrage for this great big bog, lad, that we are supposed to fix because they’re too stupid to think of the long term?”

“We can fix the land and we can educate the villagers and we can sacrifice when we have to, but we can’t become the horrors we’re supposed to be fighting. There’s a reason that Druidic law overlays the laws of Gaia! How can ye stand there and tell me it doesn’t matter?”

“Because it doesn’t,” he replies, his voice cold as a penguin pecker in an Antarctic winter. “And besides: Children are delicious.”

Well, after that, there wasn’t much use for talking. It was going to be a fight and nothing for it, except it’s not often that two Druids try to end one another. If we face off in a cattle raid, we don’t do much apart from trying to give our side an advantage or make things tough for the enemy—summoning some fog or softening the earth, that sort of thing. We rarely attack one another directly, because the truth is we are bound to Gaia, not this king or that warlord.

But Dubhlainn had somehow decided this meant he was no longer bound to humanity. I knew he had to be torn from the world before he could tear apart any more lives.

I shift me shape into a bear and he shifts to a tiger and we try our best to rip up the other guy’s flesh faster than he can heal it—for what else can we do? If we cast camouflage, the aura is still visible in magical sight.

He scratches up an eye and blinds me on one side, but I back up and keep the other eye on him while it heals. He keeps coming, thinking to press his advantage, but he’s never fought a bear before and doesn’t realize I’m perfectly happy to swipe at him while I’m back on me heels. He charges right into a timed haymaker, and me claws—powered by a whole lot of muscle and more than me usual store of anger—take off most of his nose and knock out a tooth as well, spraying his blood into the fire, where it sizzles and hisses. That makes him pull back and think some.

While we circle and regroup, I contact the elemental and ask that Dubhlainn’s access to energy be cut off. It asks me why and I explain that he’s broken Druidic law by eating the children of those he’s supposed to protect. The answer is basically, //So what?// and it chills me—changes me too. Dubhlainn had been right: He hadn’t used bindings to commit murder, and he was doing what he could to amend the soil, so according to Gaia he was finer than a frog’s hair. It threw into question all the pillars of morality I’d been taught: Me archdruid had presented everything as if it had been received wisdom from Gaia herself.

If I wanted him dead, I’d have to somehow prove to be more savage than he was. And if I failed, he’d probably not be bothered, much less challenged, for years, free to prey on all the villages around Boora Bog.

I charge at him, head cocked to keep me good eye on him, thinking I will take whatever he wants to dish out so long as I can give him an answer. Tough to anticipate whether he will try to sidestep and come at me blind side or take a swipe at the target of me other eye—he’d surely love to have a blind opponent, but maybe he’s the type of fighter to attack weakness every time. I try to be ready for either: I’m going to be taking claws to the head regardless, so it’s kind of like choosing whether to place your head in a hippo’s mouth or up its arse.

Just before I reach him, his muscles bunch and give me a tell: Tigers aren’t built to sidestep, and that blow’s going to come at me good right eye. I rise up on me back legs a bit and lift a paw in time to take the brunt of his attack. It knocks me near off me feet, but he’s committed to it so hard that the follow-through has him out of guard and vulnerable. He sees me left coming but can’t avoid it because I still have plenty of momentum left from me charge. It catches him square on the side of the head, ear to bottom of the jaw, and there’s a crunch and a deep gouge left behind, no chance of him opening that mouth to bite me for a while, and he tumbles over besides.

I press in before he can regain his feet, me teeth at his throat. He tears into me with all the claws, ripping open me belly in a desperate bid to repel me, and I back away all right, but not without taking his jugular out for some fresh air.

That proves too much for him and he bleeds out before he can heal it up, and I spit out the flesh in me teeth before I can vomit.

As I collapse and try to focus on me healing, a crow spirals down and lands on Dubhlainn’s face. It wastes no time but plucks out the eyes and swallows them. I’m thinkin’ that crow better not try such shenanigans with me when a scratchy voice enters me head, as if in answer.

Ye have nothing to fear from the Morrigan today, Eoghan Ó Cinnéide. The head turns and the eyes glow red and I realize I’m looking at the Chooser of the Slain herself. Me hackles rise and I shudder in fear, no help for it. And then I wonder if the Morrigan had anything to do with me victory.

I may have helped a bit, she says, answering me thoughts again. But it was still you who found him, and it was your choice to fight.

I want to shift to human so I might be able to talk, but I worry that it might slow me healing or make something worse if I do. I’d really like to know if other Druids had found Dubhlainn, seen what he was, and chose not to fight him. I needn’t have worried; the Morrigan read that in me mind as well.

Two others found him, knew him for a villain, and left him alone. They do not have much longer to live. The next time they fight—and I will make sure it’s soon—I will take them and eat their hearts, for they looked this evil in the eye and did nothing but let it pass them by and grow. But you, Eoghan, will have a long, productive life. I know this to be true. We will speak again, years hence, well before it is your time to move on. Harmony until then.

That was the only hint she ever gave me that she planned to park me arse on a time island later. She takes off after that, apparently only interested in his tiger eyes. I hoped she stowed Dubhlainn’s spirit somewhere dark.

It’s no small thing, killing another Druid and having a death goddess give ye an “attaboy!” I take a few days to heal and think over what it all means. I search Dubhlainn’s house, such as it is, and find that he’s been keeping souvenirs in that jewelry box: It’s full of finger bones. I haven’t trusted men in bogs ever since, nor any other hermit out in the wilderness.

I leave the tiger’s body for carrion and fly back north, bag of clothes gripped in me talons. On the way to the village, I figure I’ll only stay long enough to give them the news and assure them that the bogeyman is dead. They’re to give me no welcome after I tell them it was a Druid that had been feasting on them all this while. Even if they believe I’m nothing like Dubhlainn, every time they see me they will think of who and what they’ve lost, and that’s no way for any of us to live.

With me guts back in their proper place and me left eye healed up, I have no trouble seeing there’s a cattle raid in progress when I arrive—or, rather, a raid that’s nearly over, and failed to boot. The attackers have been routed and they’re scrambling away from the bodies of the fallen. The defenders aren’t keen on pursuing, but I’m keen to know where those attackers might hail from.

Ignoring the village for the moment, I fly ahead of the three men headed home and land in front of them, shifting to human so that they know right away I’m a Druid. They veer away to either side, terrified, but I hold up a hand and call out that I merely wish to talk, their safety guaranteed.

“Would I be right in thinking,” I asks them, “that your village could use a Druid on its side now? Because ye sure don’t have one, judging by what I saw back there.”

They admit I would have been most welcome a few minutes ago.

“If I’d been here a few minutes ago I would have been on the other side, and every fecking one o’ ye would be dead,” I says. “But I’m looking to move on and give help where it’s needed. So what do ye say? Will ye put up a Druid and let me teach and honor the gods below? I won’t come where I’m not welcome.”

They agree, and I tell them to wait while I say me farewells to the villagers and help them bury their dead as well as the dead raiders.

Saoirse screams and attacks me with her fists when I tell her Siobhan is dead—that they’re all dead, the livestock and children alike. I don’t blame her; there’s no one else to receive the rage she must set free before it gnaws away her insides. Some of the other parents who lost their children much earlier well up, shed some tears, but wind up thanking me, because at least now they know. But no one is sorry to see me go.

As I take me leave to join the three surviving raiders, I think that Dubhlainn was only half right: Gaia might not give a damn about human laws, but that doesn’t mean human laws are meaningless or serve no valid purpose. On the contrary, we can hardly serve Gaia and be stewards of the earth if we do not have law and civility.

The survivors lead me back to their village, on the eastern side of the bog, a wee poor place of half-starved citizens with hollow cheeks and haunted eyes. Unlike the other village, which was more prosperous, they are quite ready to accept help and instruction.

Some of them are wrecks when they hear that their fathers or brothers or husbands fell. One woman and her fire-headed son, however, are not sorry at all. They trade a look of relief, and maybe there’s a glimmer of hope in their expressions too. Whoever they lost, he must have been a shite father and husband. The purpling under the mother’s left eye tells me more than enough.

I meet the lad formally the next day. He’s seven, sharp as a knife’s point, and curious about everything. I can hardly finish a sentence without him asking me another question, and when I take him to task for it, he grins at me. “Sorry, Archdruid,” he says, even though I wasn’t one yet—he knew how to flatter and manipulate straightaway. “It’s just that I haven’t had anyone around who would answer me before.”

So that’s how I met Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin and took him on as an apprentice. I’d buried his father back there and his life would have been shite, sure, and his whole village would have suffered too, if I hadn’t come along to help them through those lean times. His life would certainly have been much shorter, and I imagine the world would be much different without him swinging his cock around for two thousand years. But just different, mind: no way to know if it would be better or worse.

But looking back on it now, it was what happened at Boora Bog that made Siodhachan turn out the way he did. Because I didn’t train him the same way as I’d been taught, did I? I didn’t present Gaia’s law and Druidic law as one big monolith that must be followed at all times. I taught him that sometimes ye could break those Druidic laws—or other laws, for that matter—and get away with it if ye truly needed to, because Gaia wouldn’t care.

So that’s why he had the stones to steal Fragarach from the Tuatha Dé Danann and make this deal and that awful bargain. If he was going to be the best Druid he could be, he needed to stay alive and grow powerful, and if he broke all the rules and cheesed off all the Fae in the process, well, it was justified to his way of thinking, because he always served Gaia.

Greta props herself up on an elbow and stares at me. “Are you telling me that you’re responsible for his behavior?”

“Nay, he’s responsible for his own bollocks. I’m to blame for teaching him to question authority, its priorities and motivations, and to fight that authority when he saw it conflicting with Gaia’s interests.”

Me love frowns and gives a tiny shake of her head. “Why would you do that when it could turn him into the same kind of monster that Dubhlainn was—a lawless predator?”

“Because I didn’t want him to become a bitter cynic like me, disillusioned and questioning me whole training like it was all a lie! I wanted him to have the whole truth and be a skeptic, which is a very different thing. And besides, I knew going into it that if he did turn out bad, the Morrigan would make sure he got cut down. But that’s clearly not what happened. The way he tells it, the Morrigan actually wound up protecting him for a long time.”

Greta blinks, trying to absorb that information and make it fit with her experience of him.

“It comes down to the fact that he serves a different value system than any human one. I pointed out that Gaia was interested in protecting the vitality and variety of life on the whole planet. Broadly speaking that’s difficult to argue, because unless you’re falling prey to this predator or that, that basic value is pure and good and beneficial to all concerned, if ye take the long and wide view. But humans, I taught him, rarely take that view. Human laws think of protecting humans first. Though if ye look closely at most human laws, they tend to benefit a narrow few over the good of all humans. I’m sure ye can think of a law or three that protects someone’s personal profit rather than what’s good for everyone.”

Greta rolls her eyes. “That’s easy. The tax code protects the rich, and lots of voting laws protect a white majority, and arbitration clauses protect corporations from getting sued when they rip people off, and we could go on all day.”

“Good, so ye see me point. That’s basically the core of what I taught him: Protect Gaia first, protect humans second, and question everything else. That probably led him to construct a strange moral compass. And looking at Granuaile, I wonder if he might have taught her in an even more extreme fashion—that Gaia’s law is all that matters and human laws are just shite to carefully step over in pursuit of defending the planet.”

“Huh. We kind of think that way too. The pack, I mean. We step around the law constantly to protect our own interests. What I want to know is this: Are you planning on teaching your current apprentices the same way?”

“I don’t know. Well, no—it’s already different. I’m not half so angry as I used to be. I’m still boiling over what’s been done to the planet since the Morrigan put me in long-term storage, but I think I understand that all people are protecting what’s theirs and rarely think beyond what they’re going to eat in the next week. And I understand that training minds to think differently is a long road, but at least I have the time to walk it. These are good kids and we’re in a good place now.”

“Yes.” Greta pats me chest a couple times, falls back and looks up at the sky with me, and sighs her contentment. “That we are, Owen.”

“I’m glad I get to walk this long road with you, love.”

Greta giggles, which is not the reaction I’d hoped for. “Are you getting sentimental on me, Teddy Bear?”

“Nah, I just injured me gob. I have no idea what the hell just happened. I was trying to grunt and it came out all wrong.”

She chuckles and drapes a leg across me, planting a kiss on me cheek. “I think someone’s told you about foreplay.”

“I thought the fighting was the foreplay.”

“Ha!” She kisses me again. “You’re not still bleeding anywhere, are you?”

“I’m good to go.”

She shifts all her weight on top of me, cups me face in her hands, and says nose-to-nose, “Let’s have that long walk, then.”