Besieged

  While I waited for them, I knelt and checked on Shakespeare. He was unharmed except for his drunken oblivion; he’d likely have a monstrous hangover. But while he was out of immediate physical danger, he still needed magical protection. The witches might not be able to curse me, but they could curse him, and it would occur to them to try before I left the field. But the piece of cold iron in my purse that I’d been anxious to hold on to earlier would do me yeoman service now. I fished it out and, having no string or chain on me, bound it to his skin at the hollow of his throat and made it a talisman against direct hexes. It wouldn’t save him from more carefully crafted curses using his blood or hair, but I’d address that next.

  The witches huddled together and eyed me through their bearded masks as I hefted Shakespeare over his horse’s back, a task made more difficult by my wound. I did what I could to hide his face from their view and was particularly careful about leaving anything behind for them to use against us later. I located Shakespeare’s vomit and my blood and, with the elemental’s aid, made sure that everything got turned into the earth and buried deep.

  I snuffed out the fire too, binding dirt to the wood to smother the unnatural flames, and that not only left the crossroads really dark but prevented the witches from doing much else that night. They complained loudly that they needed it to heal.

  “Don’t try to summon Hecate in England again,” I called over their cursing, giving the horses a mental nudge to walk on. “England and Ireland are under my protection. I won’t be so merciful a second time.”

  A tap on my cold iron amulet warned me that one or more of them had just tried to hex me. Since Shakespeare didn’t immediately burst into flames or otherwise die a gruesome death, I assumed his talisman protected him as well.

  “Good night, now,” I called cheerfully, just to let them know they’d failed, and we left them there to contemplate the profound disadvantages of summoning rituals. The risks are almost always greater than the reward.

  Once we were well out of their sight and hearing, I paused to recover my cold iron talisman and place it back in my purse. Shakespeare helpfully remained unconscious until we returned to the stables and his feet touched ground. He was bleary-eyed and vomited again, much to the disgust of the stable boy, but rose gradually to lucidity as his synapses fired and memories returned.

  “Marquis! You live! I live!” he said as I led him away to the White Hart, where I would gladly fall into bed in my room. His eyes dropped, and he raised his hands and wiggled his fingers the way people do when they want to make sure that everything still works. “What happened?”

  I remembered just in time that I was supposed to have a French accent. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “The witches—”

  “Shh—keep your voice down!”

  More quietly, he said, “The witches—they killed those men.”

  “Yes, they did. Is that all?”

  His eyes drifted up for a moment, trying to access more details, but then dropped back down to me and he nodded. “That’s the last thing I remember.”

  Fantastic! That was my cue to fabricate something. “Well, they threw the men in the cauldron, of course, while I threw you over my shoulder to sneak out of there.”

  “What? But what happened? Did they eat the men?”

  “No, no, it was all divination, the blackest divination possible, powered by blood. They were asking Hecate to reveal the future for them.”

  “Zounds, God has surely preserved me from damnation. And you! Thank you, sir, for my life. But what did they say?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What matters did the hags seek to learn? The future of England?”

  “I heard nothing beyond a general request to let the veil of time be withdrawn, that sort of thing. They were out of earshot before they got to specifics.”

  “But the chanting, before—you heard all of that; you translated some of it for me. What were their words, exactly—I need a quill and some ink!” He staggered into the White Hart Inn to find some, time of day be damned.

  And that put me in the uncomfortable position of creating something that sounded like a spell but wasn’t. I couldn’t very well provide Shakespeare with the words one needed to summon Triple Hecate, knowing that he would immortalize them in ink.

  So once he found his writing materials and demanded that I recount everything I could recall, providing a literal translation of the witches’ chanting, I spun him some doggerel and he wrote it down: Double, double toil and trouble…

  —

  “And now you know why I shivered, Granuaile, when you said, ‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’ ”

  Granuaile cried, “You wrote the witches’ lines? No way!”

  Shrugging and allowing myself a half grin, I said, “You’re right. Shakespeare didn’t write what I said into Macbeth verbatim. He played around with it a bit and made it fit his meter. Much better than what I said, to be sure. And the mystery of Hecate’s summoning remained a mystery.”

  “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.”

  Oberon said.

  That was your takeaway? Bad sausage at the White Hart Inn?

 

  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.

 

  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.

  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 façade, 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.

  he told me.

  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.

 

  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.

 

  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.”

 

  “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.”

 

  You might scare the children.

 

  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.

  “Whatsa matter, can’t hit the ground if you fell out of a plane?” he called to me.

  “Whatsa matter, employers don’t provide a dental plan?” I responded.

  He didn’t want to open his mouth after that, and Granuaile finished her game play scowling.

&nbs
p; “It’s funny,” she said as we walked away. “People come here to be happy, but I bet they wind up in a fouler mood than when they walked in. Kids want plushies and rides and sugar, and parents want to hang on to their money and their kids. And everybody wants to go away without digestive problems, but that’s not gonna happen.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “So why do people come here?”

  I shrugged. “Because we pursue happiness even when it runs away from us.”

  We passed several booths, ignored the pitches of more carnies with alarming hygiene issues, and examined the faces of people walking by. There were no smiles, only stress and anger and frustration.

  “See, there’s no happiness here,” Granuaile pointed out.

  Distant screams of terror reached us from the rides. “Maybe you would find it amusing to experience the joys of centrifugal force.” I waved toward the flashing lights of the carnival’s midway. “Allow the machinery to jostle the fluid in your inner ear.”

  “Oh.” She grinned at me. “Well, if you put it like that, it sounds irresistible.”

  “Step right here!” a voice cut into our conversation. “Priceless entertainment for only three dollars! Gape at the Impossibly Whiskered Woman! Thrill at the Three-Armed Man and watch those hands! Chunder with the force of thunder at the Conjoined Quintuplets! Guaranteed to harrow your soul for only three dollars!”

  The barker hawking hyperbole was a dwarf on stilts. Dark pinstriped pants and oversize clown shoes masked his wooden limbs and remained very still while his torso gesticulated and waved wee, chubby, white-sleeved arms at potential spectators. A red paisley waistcoat flashed and caught lights from the midway, giving his torso the appearance of flickering flames. His eyes were shadowed by a bowler hat, but his mouth never stopped moving, and it was effective. A line of people queued outside a yellow pavilion tent, drawn there as much by the barker as by curiosity over the stunned people coming out the other side.

  “Amazin’,” one mumbled as he staggered past me. His eyes were unfocused and his mouth hung slack in disturbing fashion. He didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular. “Incredible. Whadda trip. Sirsley. I mean rilly. Nothin’ like it.”