Besieged



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.

<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.