Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

there from
Romania
?”
    “That’s right.”
    “We can’t take a train or boost a car or something?”
    “No. You heard what the Morrigan said. The only way she saw us survive is running the whole way.”
    “That doesn’t make sense.”
    “When it comes to our survival, I don’t want to betagainst the Morrigan’s visions. She tends—I mean, tended to be accurate on matters of life and death.”
    “I’m not trying to argue the truth of what she said. I just want to understand why it’s true.”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know the answer yet. We’ll find out as we go. My guess is that we’ll have to figure out everything on the run.”
    Once divested of our clothing, with our weapons lying on the ground in front of us, we shifted to our hooved forms—a stag and a chestnut mare—and picked up our weapons in our mouths.
     Oberon said.
    I didn’t have a reply for that, but Granuaile must have, because Oberon followed that up with an outraged She obviously said he did, for he continued, He picked up one of Granuaile’s thigh holsters, where she kept three leaf-bladed throwing knives.
    The one-sided banter continued as we began to run, and I was grateful for it. Someone I had thought of as eternal had abruptly ended, and it rocked me. I couldn’t have summoned a single playful riposte to Oberon’s comments. There was simply too much else for me to deal with, not least of which was figuring out how we would continue to survive.
    Once out of the foothills of the Apuseni Mountains, we were able to pour on the speed, skirting along the edge of a small plateau and then, descending out of the wilderness, running across flat cultivated lands. We bore northwest to avoid crossing more hills and slowing down. We kept to the vineyards and alfalfa and cerealcrops and avoided the villages. We swam across two rivers and crossed into Hungary by running south of Oradea as the sun set. Through Oberon, I relayed to Granuaile what the Morrigan had said—the bits about getting to Herne’s forest, anyway.
    Her question to me:
    Our best chance was in simple speed, unless we could somehow find an Old Way to Tír na nÓg that wasn’t monitored. I had no doubt that those would all be watched. The people behind planning this wanted to make sure they got us, and they wouldn’t be able to if we could get to Tír na nÓg and then shift to another plane entirely. The Romans had done the same thing to the ancient Druids when they tried to wipe us out with the help of vampires and the Roman goddess Minerva. Step one had been to burn all the sacred groves on the continent, which were the only tethers to Tír na nÓg at the time; step two was to guard all the Old Ways; and step three was to use Minerva’s aid to see through our camouflage. I’d managed to escape them by running north beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. I would not be surprised to learn that Minerva had advised Pan, Faunus, and the huntresses how to hunt us now.
    But I had never tried to run across Europe before. I’d hiked it once and stayed in youth hostels and put little patches on my backpack because I thought it was a funny disguise, but I took my time doing that, and climbing up mountains was an experience to be savored. I rather thought dealing with mountains now would do nothing but slow us down, and, besides, I didn’t want to telegraph our intended destination. To get to the Strait of Dover directly, we could simply run north of west and hit it. But that route would present us not only with several mountain ranges but plenty of well-paved citieslike Budapest and Vienna. We needed misdirection and the ability to keep in touch with the earth at all times. That’s why I took a sharp turn north at the Hungarian border: Once we crossed the Carpathians, we could stick to flattish land or, at the worst, low rolling hills all the way to France. While we moved northwest through Poland and Germany, we’d keep them thinking we were headed for Sweden via Denmark. To get the best possible route, however, avoiding the majority of villages while also minimizing our exposure to survivalists in the woods awaiting