I cast my eyes back to the front; Coyote and I had basically advanced straight forward from the Álfar position, and we were approaching it now.
“Should be coming up soon,” I told Brighid, “somewhere slightly uphill from us. Loki will use fire at some point and probably shape-shift, so beware.”
“Remain in my shadow,” Brighid replied, “and you will be safe from the fire.”
I wasn’t sure any of us would be safe. After throwing a horde at us, Loki had to be confident of being able to face down Odin and Thor and the rest of them if he wanted to win this thing. He’d been planning for this a long time and wouldn’t have called me to fight him if he wasn’t confident of the outcome. My calculation was twofold: I had it coming, and whatever happened to us, the rest of the assembled gods would see it and know where Loki was. Engaging with us would paint a big target on his back. Or face. Whatever.
And both Brighid and I had backups. She’d kept Ogma behind in Tír na nÓg somewhere to lead the Fae should she fall, and Flidais was in Japan. Granuaile and Owen would continue Druidry if I fell—especially Owen, who had a fine grove going already. I imagined Granuaile would like to add a couple more headspaces before she took on any apprentices. And I hoped she was safe dealing with whatever threats emerged in Taiwan.
The first sign we were close came when an arrow struck the kinetic wards surrounding Coriander and its bladed tip shattered to pieces.
The second, unmistakable sign that we’d found Loki was when he loomed out of the throng, growing to the size of a giant in seconds, and hosed us down with fire that he channeled from his sword—the bow and arrows were nowhere to be seen, nor was Fragarach. Coriander had some rudimentary protection against fire, but as the Arrows of Vayu had been no match for the kinetic ward, his protection was insufficient against the heat Loki was bringing. Likewise for the yewmen, whose only fear was fire. While they all flinched and cried out under the onslaught, Brighid shouted at Coriander to retreat behind her and she charged straight forward, arms spread out, gathering that flame to her and redirecting it to the draugar on either side of Loki. The lord of mischief had to stop soon afterward because Brighid leapt at him, her own sword ready to deliver a killing blow, and he had to deflect that. The metal of their swords screamed as they slid against each other and Loki twisted impossibly to let her pass by, and his push at the end forced her to tumble off balance. But now he had enemies on either side of him, and he couldn’t abide that. He waved at the nearby draugar to either attack us or protect him, and the distinction mattered little. They rushed in from all sides, and that meant I’d have very little ability to attack Loki. He wanted to focus on Brighid, the clearest threat. Once she was out of the picture, he’d be able to fry us without interference.
His head turned away from us even as his left hand pulled out a knife that looked familiar—a cold blue ice knife with a red line along the top of the blade. It was one of the yeti whirling blades—the one he’d stolen from Granuaile in India.
“Oh, no, you fucking don’t,” a voice said behind me, but when I turned all I saw was yewmen, who cannot speak, and beyond them, draugar. But, then, I wouldn’t have seen anything if that voice belonged to who I thought.
“Granuaile?” I said. “Are you here?”
“We’ll talk later,” her disembodied voice replied. “I have a score to settle.”
“I thought you were in Taiwan.”
“We’re going to settle that too, believe me.”
“What?” I got no answer. I got a face full of draugar instead. I fell into a defensive sphere with Coriander and the yewmen and missed Fragarach desperately. Swords that don’t cut through armor can’t compare. That was a fact Loki was finding out in his battle with Brighid. He kept shifting his shape as his blows came in, and Brighid couldn’t react in time to them, so he landed both with his accustomed sword and with the whirling blade. But both were turned back by Brighid’s armor. She disarmed his right hand soon afterward, managing to open up a wound along the inside of his forearm. In need of a new weapon and unable to pick up his old one without exposing himself to attack, he did what any infinitely malleable shape-shifter would do: He reached into his own body and pulled Fragarach out of there, slimed with Loki juices. He met Brighid’s next attack with it and surprised me by being a far better fighter than I thought he’d be. He counterstruck but again slipped past Brighid’s guard with a trick, and that’s when Brighid learned whether the armor she’d forged specifically to withstand Fragarach worked or not.
It sort of did.
Normally, Fragarach treats armor like it’s denim. There’s some small resistance, in other words, but not enough to matter if you are striking well. Brighid had forged that armor at a time when she worried that Fragarach could fall into the hands of her enemies and be used against her. She’d never had it tested until now.
Loki’s blow was a powerful one and it sank into the top of Brighid’s left shoulder plate and the top of her chest, knocking her backward—but she took Fragarach with her, lodged in the armor. Perhaps the blade bit into her and perhaps it didn’t; the armor wasn’t perfect but it did the job, because that would have been a disabling or even killing blow against any other armor. Both Loki and Brighid appeared stunned by the outcome: Loki was once again disarmed, and Brighid had a sword stuck in her kit.
Before either could resume, however, Loki cried out as a sharp crack announced the shattering of his left ulna at the distal end—right at the wrist, in other words, which caused him to drop the whirling blade. He reared back, cradling his arm, his teeth bared in a hiss as he searched for the cause. Granuaile dismissed the binding on Scáthmhaide that kept her invisible, whirling blade in her left hand.
“Hi!” she shouted up at him. “Remember how you stole this from me?” She flashed the ice blade at him. “Ambushed me, broke most of my bones? Lured my father into a death trap?”
“You—”
“Yep, me. Just wanted you to know who gotcha.”
“No!”
Fire bloomed on Loki’s right fist and I hoped Brighid would stop him, control that fire before it could hit Granuaile, because she had no defense against it. But the fire snuffed out as Granuaile whipped the blade at Loki’s thigh, mere feet from where she stood, and it plunged into the muscle above his knee. The vortex in the tip of the blade sucked the soul right out of him into that glowing reservoir, but his was no ordinary spirit. His was the soul of an old god, and it was too much for the whirling blade to contain. It quivered and then shattered into chunks of ice and mist, and the malignant spirit of Loki dispersed with it. Loki’s body, meanwhile, shrank and ejected a number of weapons from his torso as it fell, including the Arrows of Vayu and the bow he’d been using to shoot them.
As when Hel had died, the draugar lost interest in fighting folks who fought back and began to drift away toward the human city. The Norse pantheon, which had bided its time until now, sprang into action. The cloud that had been hiding them from view grew and shifted perceptibly to enshroud the human helicopters, and only once they were screened did the Norse deities emerge, joining the armies in routing the draugar. Valkyries swooped down to sever necks with great axes. Mjöllnir plowed through them from above, crunching them into small craters, and returned to Thor’s hand for another throw. Odin rode out with Hugin and Munin circling above him, Frigg and Freyja flanking either side.
I checked on the yewmen and Coriander: all singed but alive. I left them to see whether Brighid was all right. She’d gotten to her feet and was wrenching Fragarach out of her armor. She won it free as I got there and she offered it to me. There was no fresh blood on the blade. “I think you dropped this,” she deadpanned. I tossed my looted sword aside as I took it from her.
“Yes, I did. I had a hound on my tail at the time.” My head whipped around to the west. “I wonder what happened to him?” I didn’t see him standing above the sea of draugar.
“He may yet live, and if he does, we will return him to Niflheim.”
Grunts and punting noises drew our attention to Granuaile, who was kicking Loki’s still form. “You evil fuck! Ugh! Victory is mine!” She stopped after that and stepped over him, to where the Arrows of Vayu lay on the ground. She scooped them up in her left hand and then glared in our direction, daring us to challenge her right to them. “I deserve to keep these. He tricked my father into going after them, and I suffered quite a bit to find them.”