Which brings us back to:
“Let me go!” Mack cried. He pulled at the chulks, but no, he wasn’t pulling his way out of this one. The Brembles had him. Valin had him.
And the ants had him.
A second ant stung.
A third.
And now the stinging signal went out through all the ants.
Mack was about to die a most terrible death.
Really.
A fourth and fifth sting made Mack yell and thrash wildly. But now there was no more counting; the stings came fast and furious, a wave of them, pain upon pain, and already Mack felt himself swelling up, felt his airway constrict, felt his heart hammering way too fast, felt . . .
. . . felt death itself approaching, extending its bony claw to snuff the life from him.
“Hug! Ligean dó dul!”
Which obviously is Irish for, “Hey, let him go!”
Mack could barely see—that one ant was still right on his eyeball, and he was dying, after all—but across the field came Sean Patrick MacAvoy. He was armed with a sword and went charging straight at Valin.
Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout raised his cane-sword, preparing to stab Sean Patrick through the heart. Of course this was happening slowly, so unless Sean Patrick stopped to take a short nap, he wasn’t in too much danger from the Nafia assassin.
But the Brembles were a different story entirely. All four of the massive, terrifying, evil (soon to be extinct) creatures drew themselves up, ready for a fight. This meant pulling their chulks from the ground, which in turn freed Mack, who was gasping for breath, swelling up, thinking seriously about vomiting, and starting to wonder why the whole world was spinning around and around and around.
The Brembles made an interesting sound. It went like this: KIIIIIILLLLLL!
The funny thing is that Brembles don’t know any actual words, so it’s totally coincidental that their wordless, incoherent, oddly high-pitched shriek sounds like a drawn-out version of the word kill.
Then again, even though they don’t know the word kill, that’s obviously what they mean when they shriek that way and begin bounding like nightmare hyenas brandishing their chulks and the surrounding tangle of thorns and baring their six rows of teeth.37
Sean Patrick stopped running then because . . . well, because he was about to be killed, that’s why. His face was pale as a ghost. Mack was pretty bleary but he thought he might be seeing knees actually knocking together.
“Noooooooo!” Valin cried. “Brembles! To me!”
The Brembles didn’t seem to hear; they were about three big bounces away from hitting Sean Patrick like a freight train full of pain.
“Subze-ma Brembles!”
Valin had used Vargran meaning “Freeze, Brembles!” And sure enough, the Brembles stopped cold. Like statues. Frozen in midslaver.
“You can’t kill him! He may still be my great-great-great-great-great-great—”
Mack detected a note of impatience from the Brembles despite the fact that they were frozen.
“—great-great-great-grandfather!”
Sean Patrick, to his credit, had recovered his composure, and you almost couldn’t see the spot where he had peed his breeches. He had not dropped his sword, and now he advanced with a step that was somewhere about halfway between a swagger and a mince.
“Yeah,” he said, but in Irish. “Take that. You monsters! I’m not afraid of you!”
And then, though his vision was pretty sketchy, Mack was sure he saw Stefan and Xiao walking toward them. With them was Boguslawa.
Boguslawa broke into a run. Stefan started to go after her, but Xiao held him back.
Boguslawa ran to Sean Patrick.
“You are so brave!”
“Go raibh maith agat,” Sean Patrick said. “Thanks.”
“I am now loving you,” she said, and looked shyly at Sean Patrick.
“I thought you thought I was a weakling and a coward,” Sean Patrick said. “That’s why I was going to break up with you. I couldn’t spend my life with someone who thought I was a coward.”
“Of course, when you were weak, scaredy not-a-man, I was contempting you. I am daughter of great Taras Bulba! I am Cossack princess! But now you are not coward, but brave like angry buffalo! So now I am loving you.”
Meanwhile, while all this was going on, Mack was dying of ant venom. In fact he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. It certainly was strange enough to be a hallucination. And how was it Sean Patrick could speak English now?
Xiao knelt beside him and spoke some Vargran words that he almost didn’t hear because his ears were swollen shut from the stings.
And then he was fine.
This is the excellent thing about magic as opposed to medicine: it works much faster.
“So you’ll marry Boguslawa?” Valin asked.
Sean Patrick shrugged. “If she’ll have me. I thought she despised me. I can’t marry someone who despises me.”
“I am not despising you, you are brave and handsome!” Boguslawa cried, and hugged him.
So it was happiness all over except for the fact that Sean Patrick, overcome with joy, started to say something. He started to say:
“This is wonderful. Now I can realize my dream of becoming a—”
And that’s when Xiao tripped and plowed into him in such a way that she accidentally punched him in the jaw.
“So sorry!” Xiao said. “But, moving on, such a happy day!”
Valin, suddenly very formal, said, “Mack MacAvoy, this resolves the feud that has existed between our families for—”
“A feud I knew nothing about and had nothing to do with!” Mack pointed out. If by “pointed out” you mean “angrily asserted.”
“I hereby declare the blood feud over!” Valin said.
“Oh no you . . . ,” Paddy “Nine Iron” said, and reached for his mask.
And breathed.
And breathed.
And breathed.
“Don’t!” And with that he raised his sword-cane, pointed it at Valin, and yelled, “Traitor!”
He plunged the sword into Valin’s heart. In his imagination.
Put it this way: he intended to plunge the sword into Valin’s heart. But between the moment when Paddy decided on that course of action and when he actually did the whole plunging thing, something like sixty seconds passed. During which time Valin had stepped out of the way, patted Paddy on the shoulder, and said, “You’ve been a good mentor to me. Let’s not spoil it with a long good-bye.”
“We need to get back to our own time,” Mack said. The truth was he was feeling very cranky, very resentful, even peeved at Valin. He had a strong desire to punch the crazy kid in the stomach. But he had a job to do. There was a world to be saved, and the clock was ticking. So he swallowed hard, gritted his teeth, and said, “Are you with us, Valin?”
Valin did a sort of bow, a rather dramatic move really. Then he drew his sword and laid it at Mack’s feet. “I am yours.”
While that was happening, Paddy made another try at stabbing Valin, and Stefan had to deflect the blade with a stick he had time to fetch.
“I know the way,” Valin said. “We shall all return to our present day. The breach has been healed! The wrong has been undone! My patrimony is assured! My family’s shame is negated! I am free! Free as never before!”
Valin went on with more of that, but Mack kind of stopped listening. He was going to need a bit more time to get over the fact that Valin had very nearly killed him. But he needed Valin, and sometimes, when necessity demands it, you have to move past your petty grudges.
“Swell,” Mack said. As they headed off to the lake where they had first emerged in this time and place, Mack pulled Xiao aside. “What was it that Sean Patrick was about to say to Boguslawa?”
“That he has been taking classes from a man who hopes to pass his business on to Sean Patrick. A man who hopes Sean Patrick will be like the son he never had and carry the honored family name forward.”
“Are you about to tell me . . . ?”
Xiao nodded. “Yes. Sean Patrick has been apprentice to a clown.”
“Um . . .”
“He says if he studies hard and gets good enough, he will inherit the title of . . . Izmir the Clown.”
“Whatever you do—” Mack warned.
“Not a word to Valin,” Xiao swore. “Not a word.”
Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout was at a loss. He didn’t want to live in the year 1634. There were medications and ointments in the twenty-first century that he would have a hard time finding here. On the other hand, he also didn’t want to face the wrath of the Pale Queen when she learned he had let Valin join the Magnificent Twelve.
He thought it over quickly, but by the time he reached a conclusion the next morning, he was alone.