Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(22)
<You can hum the theme music from Chariots of Fire once we hit full stride. It will make the antelope run in slow motion like the movie, and then it will be easy.>
I’m not sure it works like that.
Red hair dyed black and shoved underneath a Colorado Rockies cap pulled low, Granuaile had already taken care of her most distinguishable feature in one go. She had on a pair of those ridiculously oversize sunglasses too, which hid her green eyes and the freckles high up on her cheeks. A shirt from Dry Dock Brewing in Aurora, a pair of khaki shorts, and sandals suggested that she was a crunchy hippie type from the Denver area. I was dressed similarly, but I wore my Rockies cap backward because Granuaile said it made me look clueless, and that’s precisely what I wanted. If I was a clueless crunchy guy, then I couldn’t be a Druid more than two thousand years old who was also supposed to have died in the Arizona desert six years before.
Everybody in Wellington knew Granuaile’s mom, because everyone knew her stepfather. Beau Thatcher was something of an oil baron and employed a large percentage of those locals who weren’t wheat farmers. A few inquiries here and there with the right gossips—we posed as friends of her late daughter—and small-town nosiness did most of the work for us. According to reports, her mother was properly mournful without having locked herself in her house with pills and booze. She was taking it all about as well as could be expected, and once we expressed an entirely fake interest in dropping by to pay her a visit, we were ruefully informed by one of her “best friends” that she was off on a Caribbean cruise right now or else she’d be at the festival.
I hoped my relief didn’t show too plainly. Though I’d wrung a promise from Granuaile that we wouldn’t visit her house, there had still been a chance of an unfortunate meeting somewhere in town. Now I could relax a bit and bask in the success of our passive spying in the vein of Polonius: And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out …
Having satisfied Granuaile’s need to know that her mother was adjusting well, if not her need to see her in person, we enjoyed the festivities, which included chucking cow patties at a target for fabulous prizes. Oberon didn’t understand the attraction.
<I don’t get it. You guys look down on chimps for flinging their own poo, but you think it’s fine to fling other kinds of poo around? I mean, you get opposable thumbs and this is what you do with them?>
The town had invited an old-fashioned carnival to set up alongside the more bland wheat-related events. It had some rides that looked capable of triggering a rush of adrenaline, so once the sun had set, we passed through the rented fencing to see if we could be entertained. Since sunglasses weren’t practical at night, Granuaile just kept her hat pulled low.
Though health codes didn’t seem all that important to this particular operation, I cast camouflage on Oberon so that we wouldn’t get barred from the venue. The spell bound Oberon’s pigments to the ones of his surroundings, which rendered him invisible when motionless and as good as invisible at night, even when on the move.
It’s odd how a dog roaming around is a health code violation but serving fried death on a stick isn’t. The food vendors didn’t seem to rank using wholesome wheaty-wheat in their foodstuffs high in their priorities, despite the name of the festival to which they were catering. Salt and grease and sugar were the main offerings, tied together here and there with animal bits or highly processed starches.
Bright lights and garish painted colors on the rides and game booths did their best to distract patrons from the layer of grime coating everything. The metal parts on the rides groaned and squealed; they’d taken punishment for years and had been disassembled and assembled again with a minimum of care—and a minimum of lubricant.
The carnies working the game booths were universally afflicted with rotting teeth and gingivitis, a dire warning of what would happen if one ate the carnival food and failed to find a toothbrush afterward. They made no effort to be charming; sneers and leers were all they could manage for the people they had been trained to see as marks instead of humans. Granuaile wanted to chuck softballs at steel milk bottles.
“You go ahead. I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because the carnie will mock me for not winning his rigged game, and then I’ll be tempted to cheat and unbind the bottles a bit so that they all fall over, which would mean I’d receive something enormous and fluffy.”
“If the game’s rigged, then you’re not cheating. You’re leveling the playing field. And if you decided to reward your apprentice with something enormous and fluffy for all of her hard work, then there’s really no downside.”
<Hey, Atticus, I’m enormous! And if you adopted a poodle bitch, then she would be fluffy. You could make us both happy with a poodle, see?>
“The downside is I’m not on good terms with the elemental here. Using the earth’s magic for something trivial like that would hardly improve matters. Camouflaging Oberon so he can walk around with us is bad enough.”
<I’d be happy to walk around in plain sight, Atticus.>
You might scare the children.
<What? But I’m cuddly! “Single Irish wolfhound likes long walks on the beach and belly rubs.”>
Granuaile went a few rounds with the milk bottles, and the carnie tried to chivy me into “rescuing” her. My apprentice nearly assaulted him for that but showed admirable restraint.