charm on my neck. “Remember this? It actually worked.”
She dropped Scáthmhaide too and tackled me to the ground. Oberon took it as an invitation to dog pile and landed heavily on the both of us.
Granuaile kissed me, and I got to enjoy it for maybe two seconds before Oberon decided to drool on our faces.
“Ew! Oberon!” Granuaile said, as we both wiped away the slime from our cheeks.
“Don’t you
dare
hump my leg!” Granuaile warned. “And please give us some time to ourselves.”
Oberon’s tail was still waving madly back and forth, but he graciously removed his weight from us.
“Granuaile, it’s okay, we need to go anyway.”
“We do?”
“Oh, yes. This isn’t over. They’re not dead any more than I am. We have to keep running. We should be able to make it to France at least.”
Granuaile rolled off me and stood, then offered her hand to help me up. “How are they going to heal up a decapitation?”
“They’ll get help from the other Olympians. I bet Hermes and Mercury will put them back together again.”
“Why not simply start over with another body?”
“Because their current bodies are in great condition. They’re just missing heads. While I was running to catch up, I was thinking about their rules for regeneration—it can’t be arbitrary. They can’t simply wish themselves a new body. They have to suffer a certain amount of catastrophic damage.”
“Decapitation isn’t catastrophic?”
“Not for them. Remember the tale of Orpheus, whose head was washed out to sea and floated around until he was plucked out by women doing their washing at the shore? Their ability to remain functional is mojo on a scale we can only dream of. Probably has a lot to do with having ichor instead of blood. I bet you they’re still conscious and can hear us right now.”
“That is
so
disturbing.”
“I have a plan,” I said, picking up Fragarach. Granuaile retrieved her throwing knife and Scáthmhaide.
“Of course you do.”
“Sure. What is it?”
Granuaile and I traded weapons to humor him and I stood as he instructed.
It was too silly and I couldn’t do it, though I tried. I didn’t have the gravitas; I dissolved into laughter before I could finish.
“I’m sorry, Oberon. We really need to move.”
“So what’s the plan?” Granuaile asked.
“Same as the last one, except now we run with heads tucked under our arms like footballs.”
“We run naked in plain sight with severed heads? A murder streak?”
“Heh! No, we’ll go camouflaged if we have to escape, but I’d rather keep in plain sight for now. It’s part of the plan. And so is speaking in Old Irish from now on, to keep the goddesses from listening in. Either that or communicating mentally through Oberon.”
“All right. Give me a sec.”
She jogged over to the sad collection of hounds, presumably in search of her other two throwing knives. I found a way to keep myself occupied while she was busy doing that. The chariots of the huntresses, along with their teams, still waited a couple hundred yards away. Grinning to myself, I unbound the chariots to hunks of metal and set the stags free by unbinding their harnesses and giving them quick mental shoves:
You’re free. Run
. They took off, and I wondered how willing Hephaestus and Vulcan would be to forge the huntresses yet another chariot.
Granuaile returned and declared herself ready.
“Okay, which one do you want?” I asked.
“I’ll take Artemis.”
“Watch out for the mouths. I’m sure they’ll bite if you give them the chance. Old Irish from now on.”
She looked doubtful. “Are you sure it’s safe? What if they know it?”
“Old Irish never spread beyond Ireland, unless you want to count Scots Gaelic. The Olympians would have had no reason to learn it, especially since the Tuatha Dé Danann took pains to learn Greek and English. And by the time the Greeks and Irish intermingled in any
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