That’s an expression Siodhachan taught me, but I don’t rightly understand it. I have so many questions. Sometimes people leave off the surname and say, “Ye don’t know Jack,” but everyone knows you’re not talking about Jack Black or Jack Daniel’s or Jack Be Nimble—nay! When someone says, “Ye don’t know Jack,” it’s automatically understood that they’re talking about Jack Shite. But it makes ye wonder why anyone would walk around this world with the surname of Shite. If ye have such an awful name, wouldn’t that be a fine excuse to change it to Jones or something common and boring and unrelated to feces? And what’s really confusing to me is whether we should know a lad named Jack Shite or not. Sometimes people say, “Ye don’t know Jack Shite,” and ye can tell by their tone that you’re practically the only person that doesn’t. But sometimes people sneer at ye and say, “You know Jack Shite,” and the scorn in their voice lets ye know that ye should have never been introduced to him, even by accident. Well, I don’t know Jack Shite yet, and I’m mighty conflicted about whether I want to meet him or not. He’s a controversial figure. I’m wondering if Sam and Ty know Jack Shite and I realize they must because they know so much about wine, so I don’t ask them out loud.
The conversations fade until Greta shouts me name and I startle straight up. “Eh? What?”
“You need to go to bed,” she says. “You’ve drifted off twice now.”
“I have? When was…first time?”
“Just go. You’ve been mumbling about not knowing Jack Shite.”
“But Slomo—”
“She’ll be fine. The kids will let us know if she needs anything, and if she does, we’ll wake you. She probably needs to sleep too, and there’s nothing out here that will mess with her.”
“No, ye definitely don’t want to mess with her,” I says.
Greta asks Thandi’s dad, Sonkwe, to finish up the pancakes and store them while she pulls me from my seat and escorts me to the bedroom. Me limbs feel like lead weights and me vision’s all blurry. Me brain knows I’m somewhere safe and it just wants to shut down and recover.
“Don’t want to mess with me either,” Greta says, which is all too true. Once I collapse on the bed, I feel her lips press against mine briefly. “Thanks for coming back safe to me, Teddy Bear.”
“Oaken,” I mumble, on the edge of slumber.
“What?”
“ ’M Oaken now.”
“All right, Oaken Teddy Bear.”
Something about that isn’t quite right, but it’s not worth climbing back to consciousness to figure it out. I have a wee space to meself to enjoy some peace and I’m going to wallow in it as long as I’m allowed, because after that, we have so much fecking work to do. And puppies to raise. Can’t forget Orlaith’s puppies. Me grove will be so pleased…
for the record, and at risk of stating the obvious: Looting corpses is nothing like the way it’s presented in video games. You click, get a little sound effect and a tiny hit of serotonin, and coins are automatically put in your purse and items go into your giant bag of holding, possibly to be equipped, possibly to be sold later to an NPC for meager ducats. It’s fast, bloodless, and carries little risk of disease or septicemia. No interaction with an actual corpse is necessary. Which is true of every aspect of games—there’s no actual anything. But looting has always been a casual pastime in games, one of the fun parts, and I guess I wish it wasn’t, because it turns us into vultures.
If you want to loot a corpse, make sure you know from the start that it’s going to be literal deadweight and that you might pull a muscle. There’s going to be blood and there’s going to be shit—not the mere stink of shit, but actual shit. Might be some brains lying around too. It’s going to take far longer than a mouse click to get the job done, and when you finally get the armor that you need off the corpse, you will probably find it doesn’t fit well. And the weapon won’t be a legendary blade like Fragarach either.
So it was that I searched several Fae corpses for adequate replacements. I settled for the third, finding a sleeveless shirt to wear under a cuirass and some basic breeches, over which I secured a hardened leather skirt to protect the legs, fastened by a belt. Boots that fit took another three tries. I did find a sword with a whiff of magic about it, and a look at the bindings in the magical spectrum revealed that it was an unbreakable blade. I picked up a shield too. Considering myself to be at least partially protected, I sought out Brighid.
I couldn’t wait to finish this, to bring an end to the danger I’d put everyone in by making two disastrous trips to Asgard years ago. The people fighting Surt’s fires around the world or who may have perished in them—that was on me. Everyone who’d fallen here, or who fell elsewhere in some battle provoked by Loki’s allies—that was on me too. Fand and Manannan and the three yeti and so many more. There was really no way I could ethically walk away from this, despite my attempts to rationalize doing just that. To be fair, I should be facing Ragnarok all alone. I was the one who killed the Norns and set this snowball rolling, so I should be the one who stood in the path of the avalanche.
It took some time to make my way to the front without killing any of the Fae with my iron aura. The yewmen had no such vulnerabilities, however, and it was they who protected Brighid on either flank as she swung her sword at the necks of draugar and let her armor take the occasional hit. On her immediate left, however, was a curious figure in green and silver livery, one of the Fae, who held no weapon nor tried to attack. He simply existed and had some incredible kinetic wards. Every time the draugar tried to attack him, their force was returned upon them with degrees of magnitude. I came around to Brighid’s right to make sure I didn’t disturb him.
“Brighid! It’s Siodhachan!” I had to repeat this several times to get through to her, but once she spared a glance my way, she pulled back and let the yewmen close up the gap.
“Siodhachan. What has happened? Why does Loki have your sword?”
“I had to leave it where we killed Hel.”
“Ah. I wondered if he spoke true when his voice rolled across the field and said you’d killed his children. But who are ‘we’?”
“One of the Native American Coyotes helped me. He’s the forward-looking sort, didn’t want this mess coming to his continent. He’s had enough of being invaded.”
“I see. Is he still here?”
“No, he’s decided he’s done enough. Did you also hear Loki’s challenge to me?”
“Everyone heard it.”
“I know where he is and can lead you to him. Do you want your shot at winning the Girl Scout Cookies?”
Brighid shrugged. “I want the victory and honor more than the cookies.” At a sudden thought, she frowned at me. “But why help me? You bet on Athena.”
“Yes, but Athena will get fried almost instantly. You won’t. And I bet you have wards that will deflect those arrows he’s letting loose.”
The goddess of poetry, fire, and the forge smiled. “Yes. He has already attempted to slay me with one from afar.”
“Excellent. Shall I usher you, then, to a fight worthy of your skill, which will burnish your reputation and live on in the songs of bards?”
“Absolutely, Siodhachan. Usher away. Let us form a detail.”
Her eyes slid away from me for a moment and she smiled over my right shoulder, but when I looked behind me all I saw was a tightly packed throng of Fae, keeping their distance. When I looked back she had turned to shout orders at the yewmen and the Fae lad in livery, whom she called Coriander. They formed a sphere of protection around us, with Coriander at the point, and rather than hold the line, we pushed forward into the throng of draugar and began a slow jog, the yewmen batting aside the undead instead of trying to decapitate them and Coriander plowing through them like a cowcatcher on the front of a train. We were not trying to win by attrition now; we had a destination in mind. I directed them straight ahead until we got to the base of the volcano, which was essentially the edge of the former lake, and then we turned right. I did not see Garm anywhere, and even though he’d tried to eat me on two separate occasions, I hoped he was okay and recovering.