And it is not simply the taste of the tea that is sensational: It has a clear, immediate effect on my body. My exhaustion disappears and my muscles feel strong and ready again.
“I wish I had the words to express how wonderful this is,” I tell Wukong. “It deserves its own poetry.”
“You enjoy poetry?”
“I do! I’m memorizing Polish poetry right now for my next headspace. I think I would like to study Mandarin afterward, though.”
“Oh, there are many fine poets in that language, especially from the Tang Dynasty. Have you heard of Wang Wei?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“He writes of nature quite often, so I expect you would appreciate him. Let me see—perhaps I can translate a couple of lines you might like?” His voice deepens and rolls across my eardrums like thunder in the prelude to a summer storm.
“Look! I make no plans for the future
but to go back to my forest home again.”
Its brevity surprises me, but I do find it evocative and the sort of plan I would always have for myself, no matter my age. I suddenly miss Orlaith and her puppies, and Atticus and Oberon, and marvel again at the power of a few words to evoke emotion within us. “That sounds lovely.”
“It is,” Wukong agreed. “And it was. Let us hope we have both a future and a forest after this.”
i rather thought that business with the kobolds was enough riskin’ of me life for the day, but almost as soon as I think it and make plans to catch up with me grove, I get a request to investigate some mess back in North America.
I’m starkers, and it’s something that happens so frequently for both of us that Greta set up a clothing cache in the forest near her cabin next to the bound tree, just an old bureau she found at a thrift shop. It’s far enough away from the house that me apprentices wouldn’t see me appear, though that’s not a concern since they’re still on that very long flight home. I shift there long enough to get a fresh pair of jeans and a shirt before following the call of the elemental to the northern United States.
The Lewis Range of the Rocky Mountains, which runs north and south over the border between Montana and Alberta, had a portal open up a wee while ago and temperatures in the region began dropping all out of proportion to what could be called normal. On the Montana side it’s part of Glacier National Park, which I’ve heard tell of before. Mostly I’ve heard that it used to contain glaciers, but in the last century they’ve melted away like Popsicles in an oven.
Once I shift to the area, I ask the elemental what’s the problem.
//Unknown / Source of cold to the north / Find and report//
All right, reconnaissance is easy enough. But I’m feeling the chill already—it’s cold enough for me nipples to be used as diamond saws. It’s still dark here and I cast night vision to see better, but even with the elevation and time of day, it shouldn’t be quite so cold. With a sigh of resignation, I strip off the clothes I just put on and bind me shape to a red kite, taking wing into the freezing air. Curiously, once I get a few hundred feet above the mountaintops, the air actually gets warmer. Not balmy by any means—it’s still fecking cold—but there’s a noticeable difference, and it’s not the natural sort. Normally ye get colder, not warmer, as ye climb higher.
I point meself north and am awestruck by what I see: These Rocky Mountains are beautiful, even in the frigid blue tones of night. I never saw the like before; the Bavarian Alps were fine, make no mistake, but I didn’t get to admire them from above. I surely never got to see such things in Ireland or on me few trips to the European continent in the old days. I saw some grand cliffs and some fantastic hills, but nothing like these mountains. I could see a Druid falling in love with land like this.
The air gets even warmer as I head north, and eventually I’m able to see why: There’s a pack of frost giants on the mountains, actively sucking the cold out of the air and leaving only heat behind, bizarrely creating something close to a thermal updraft. And they’re taking all that cold and moisture and making themselves a bit of a shelter out of ice. They have a lot of bags and parcels scattered around them, and one of them is using a shovel to dig a fire pit—though maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part. I sure could go for a cozy fire.
Watching actual ice and snow crystallize from their outstretched hands to form frozen walls is what identifies them; otherwise I would have thought them nothing more than tall lads with powder blue skin, maybe some kind of Fae. But what are frost giants from the Norse stories doing here? The portal that brought them, at least, seems to have closed—but who opened it?
I begin to circle them, counting on the night and the tendency of people not to look up to keep me concealed, and work through what I know.
The original stories of Ragnarok suggested it was to begin with years of cold, to soften up the human plane—Midgard, they call it—and make it ripe for conquering. Perhaps that’s still a part of the plan, except they’re going to try it on a different continent. Maybe Loki figures once he gets the other hemisphere under control, this one will fall easily later on if it’s frozen out just as spring begins. North America will lose a growing season, and suddenly you’ll have famine conditions in the land of plenty. Weak folks put up a weak fight.
Maybe that’s it. But they don’t look like they are any sort of military force. They have a couple of wee ones with them. Giant kids. These are families.
Bright movement in the sky attracts me gaze eastward. There are streaks of orange in the dark, like a meteor shower passing by so close ye should be screaming, and while many of them pass high overhead in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, heading to points west, methinks some will be landing nearby.
One of them indeed plows into the ground short of our position, maybe a kilometer or more to the east, landing on the side of the mountain in a stand of timber, which immediately ignites a full acre or so—the opposite of a cozy fire. These things are fireballs, not meteors. Landing on a patch of forest like that, where there’s no easy way to fight the fire, means it’s going to burn for days, unless of course these frost giants decide to do something about it.
And they do. There’s some angry grunting and pointing at the sky, then four of the giants break off from the group and take long, loping strides toward the site where the fireball hit. Must mean that the fire giant Surt has emerged from Muspellheim; there’re going to be fires all over the world, and I wonder if any of them will make it down to the Flagstaff area. There’s a whole lot of dry pine around there. Lot of trees everywhere, really. These fires are going to ravage the planet.
I drift away from the frost giants working on the shelter and follow the ones heading for the fire. They have some rough terrain to navigate, but those long legs help them scramble down; it’s probably twenty minutes until they can make it there, and by that time the fire’s not only caught on, it’s spreading. They combine their talents and start throwing snow at the flames, lifting it right off the ground and smothering the tree trunks and branches with it.
It’s going to take them some time, but they’ll have this fire contained and extinguished in an hour, I’m guessing. And that kind of behavior doesn’t fit with them being agents of Loki. If they’re on the same side, they should be laughing about that fire, rubbing their hands together like villains and muttering darkly about how the world will soon be theirs. The shelter they’re building is above the tree line, so they wouldn’t be threatened by it, unless they’re wanting to preserve the habitat here for animals. That’s a different kind of long-term thinking, that is. That’s the sort of thing ye do if ye want to stay. That’s what ye do if ye want to protect your neighborhood.
I circle back around to where the group is working on their shelter and take a closer look. It’s not a bunker or barracks that’s forming up there. That’s a home. Two of the giants—a man and a woman—are putting some decorative touches on the front pillars, little whorls and blossoms in ice. They’re smiling at each other and saying, “Graah,” whatever that means. I wish I could talk to them, but they speak Old Norse, a language I never picked up.