Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

I can’t help thinking it was kind of a dick move. But there are still oaks there to this day, replanted by this monarch or that. We should be able to go there and call him.”
    
    “Well, it might be wise to refrain from marking them. Herne had a whole pack of hounds. They might take issue with you claiming their trees as your own.”
    
    “Not sure, but it’s best to be polite.”
    “How do we call Herne, exactly?” Granuaile asked.
    “We’ll ask Albion to help us out.”
    I did my best to sound confident. In truth, I didn’tknow how we were supposed to call him or how he could possibly help us against two immortals. The Morrigan’s assurance that Herne could help us somehow seemed hollow now that she was dead and we’d been unable to do anything to the Olympians except inconvenience them. But I knew he was for real. Just before the whole business with Aenghus Óg exploded, Flidais had come to visit me with a warning, and she casually mentioned that she’d been guesting in Herne’s forest. She wouldn’t have called it that if Herne weren’t a force to be reckoned with. She would have called it a forest in Albion, or perhaps simply Windsor Forest.
    Like most of the world, Windsor Great Park used to be wild, but its size had dwindled over the centuries to the present 4,800 protected acres. North of Frogmore House—which was itself a bit south of the castle—lay the historical location of Herne’s death. The oak that had been pulled down on the orders of King George III had been replanted by King Edward VII. It was there I would attempt to call him.
    I didn’t know much about Herne, having never met him; I’d heard the same legends as everyone else. The attempts to explain his existence were many and varied. In the view of some, he was a corrupted form of the horned god Cernunnos, or perhaps a twist on Odin, who also led a form of the Wild Hunt and had experience hanging from trees. Many of these theories had something to do with Herne’s penchant for wearing antlers and connecting dots between the name
Herne
and old words for
horn
. To others, he was an historical figure, a ranger or gamekeeper for one of the old kings, led by disgrace of some kind to hang himself and haunt the woods ever after. Shakespeare gave him a shout-out in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, but he didn’t lay down the definitive legend so much as give Herne a different kind of immortality.
    We padded down the grass from Snow Hill into the row of trees lining the eastern side of the Long Walk, where puffy strands of mist clung to the trunks like torn cotton balls. Some insects buzzed and an owl hooted, but otherwise the only sound was our soft footfalls on the turf.
    We veered to the northeast, across trimmed expanses of grass to the slightly more verdant grounds of Frogmore House, a sometime residence for members of the royal family. A serpentine pond wound behind it, with plenty of willows weeping on the banks and hedges growing to please the gardener who loved them.
    We must have tripped a passive security alarm on our way across, because a couple of guards with flashlights and guns came looking for us. The flashlights told us right where the guards were, and Granuaile and I decided to mess with them a bit. Approaching in camouflage, we snatched their guns and chucked them into the pond.
    “Bloody hell!” one shouted. A trip, a takedown, and a Druid Doomhold later, and they were both sleeping peacefully on the exquisite back lawn.
    “They had guns,” Granuaile remarked. That was somewhat unusual for security in the UK. “But I guess they weren’t MI6.”
    “No, they were pretty low-rent. Means the royals aren’t here. That’s good.”
    The few oaks north of Frogmore were truly magnificent, even if they looked a bit lonely in the too-tidy landscape of Home Park. We were in a restricted area now but had already subdued the closest security. Thick trunks and wide, strong branches formed impressive canopies, and in the mist they managed to take on a slight character of menace. Despite this, they were as susceptible to the ravages of pandemonium as the rest of the world’s trees. I hoped the efforts of the Olympianswouldn’t prevent Herne from appearing now. His specific tree—or rather the big tree that was supposedly planted in the precise spot of the original—was circled by an iron