Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(21)
“The words alone wouldn’t have been sufficient to do the deed, would they?”
“Not initially; I was worried about the cumulative effect. With such frequent invocation, the goddess might have grown stronger and chosen to manifest at any time, with or without a sacrifice, and you don’t want that version of Hecate to appear in a packed theatre.”
Granuaile shook her head. “No, you don’t. Why did they curse the play, then?”
“Shakespeare never saw Hecate summoned but knew that the witches looked to her somehow, so she got written into Macbeth. The Hecate in his play is a single character and not particularly fearsome or strong. They thought his portrayal was demeaning, and that inspired the curse.”
“So they remained in England?”
“Long enough to see the play, yes. I don’t think they realized that they had met the playwright in the past; they simply took grave offense and foolishly cursed it in concert within the hearing of others. They were caught and burned soon afterward.”
<I’m kind of glad I didn’t live in that time, Atticus,> Oberon said. <Over-boiled sausages are so disappointing. Dry and flavorless like kibble.>
That was your takeaway? Bad sausage at the White Hart Inn?
<Wasn’t that the climax to your tragedy? Or was it the end where you and Shakespeare never even took a spoonful of what they were cooking in that cauldron?>
It wasn’t a tragedy, Oberon. Nobody died except for those three guys, and that was only because they were too stupid to leave us alone.
<Nobody ate anything delicious either, so it sounded like a tragedy to me. I mean, you had witches smeared with blood and fat, so there had to be some meat cooking in there.>
It truly was a rough time. Luckily, your circumstances are different. You got to eat what we cooked over the fire.
Oberon rolled over, presenting his belly, and stretched. <Yeah, I guess I have it pretty good. But shouldn’t you be getting to work, Atticus? This belly isn’t going to rub itself, you know.>
I obliged my hound and asked Granuaile if she felt like round two. She nodded and tossed me another beer from the cooler, grabbing one for herself. The pop and hiss of the cans sounded loud in the darkness, but after that it was only the occasional snap of the comfortably orange fire and the song that Gaia decided to sing to us under the unveiled stars.
This story, narrated by Atticus, takes place six years after Tricked, Book 4 of The Iron Druid Chronicles, and two weeks after the events of the novella Two Ravens and One Crow. It was originally published in the Carniepunk anthology and has since been slightly revised and expanded from that version.
I fear Kansas. It’s not a toe-curling type of fear, where shoulders tense with an incipient cringe; it’s more of a vague apprehension, an expectation that something will go pear-shaped and cause me great inconvenience. It’s like the dread you feel when going to meet a girl’s father: Though it’s probably going to be just fine, you’re aware that no matter how broadly he smiles, part of him wants you to be a eunuch, and he wouldn’t mind performing the operation himself. Kansas is like that for me. But I hear lots of nice things about it from other people. My anxiety stems from impolitic thinking a long time ago. I am usually quite careful to shield my thoughts and think strictly business in my Latin headspace, because that’s the one I use to talk with the elementals who grant me my powers as a Druid. But once—and all it takes is once—I let slip the opinion that I thought the American central plains were a bit boring. The elemental—whom I’ve thought of as “Amber” since the early twentieth century, thanks to the “amber waves of grain” thing—heard me, and I’ve been paying for it ever since. The magic doesn’t flow as well for me there anymore. Sometimes my bindings fizzle for no apparent reason, and I know it’s just Amber messing with me. As a result, I look uncomfortable whenever I visit, and people wonder if I’m suffering from dyspepsia. Or maybe they stare because I don’t look like a local. I’d fit right in on a beach in California with my surfer dude fa?ade, but at the Kansas Wheat Festival, not so much.
Said Wheat Festival was in Wellington, Kansas, the hometown of my apprentice, Granuaile MacTiernan. We were visiting in disguise because she wanted to check up on her mother. We’d faked Granuaile’s death a few years ago—for very good reasons—but now she was worried about how her mom was coping. For the past few years she’d been satisfied by updates from private investigators willing to do some long-distance stalking, but an overwhelming urge to lay eyes on her mother in person had overtaken her. I hadn’t been able to fully persuade her that it was a bad idea to visit people who thought you were dead, so I tagged along in case she managed to get into trouble. Granuaile said I could look at it as a vacation from the rigors of training her, and since I’d recently escaped death in Oslo by the breadth of a whisker, I hadn’t needed much convincing to take a break for my mental health. We brought my Irish wolfhound, Oberon, along with us and promised him that we’d go hunting.
<Set me loose on a colony of prairie dogs, Atticus. I’ll show them what a real dog is,> he told me. <Or point me at some antelope. Can we go after antelope?>
Sure, buddy, I replied through our mental link. But that’s going to be quite a run. Hard to sneak up on anything in a land like this.