Street Fair (Fair Folk Chronicles Book 2)

by Jeffrey Cook

  Megan's mother nodded, putting her fingers back to the strings, before pausing, looking thoughtful, as if trying to figure out something she knew that Megan would as well. Finally, with a small nod as she settled on something, she looked to Megan. "I'm pretty sure this has been on the radio when we were both in the car,” she said, before starting to play.

  Megan didn't need the rest of the guitars or the beat, quickly picking up on Better Than Ezra's most famous bassline. The lyrics weren't overly complicated, and while her mother was still imperfect in places, it was easily close enough. She launched into the song about better times, and living in those times with someone who was no longer there. Despite the subject, the song was catchy, and oddly hopeful, which, considering her mother playing, her fingers recalling old times, and her life back then, seemed somehow perfect.

  As she hit the middle of the song, her mother had stopped wavering and missing notes, the playing, while quiet, in perfect time. Not having to divide her attention between singing and playing probably helped, but Megan liked to think a lot of it was simply coming back to her as she got into the song and just let herself play.

  The song ended all too soon, and with it, some of the exhaustion that had been temporarily suspended as she got into the music hit Megan again, and she moved to lean against the back of a chair, catching her breath just a little, though she couldn't have stopped smiling had she wanted to.

  "Megan, that was really, really good. I'm impressed."

  Megan blinked in surprise, then blushed. "Thanks. It runs in the family, though. Cassia said you were really, really good, you know, back when you played. I think you still are."

  "Cassia, Cassia... she's Lani's friend who busks down by the stadium, and plays some shows up in Fremont, right?"

  "Yeah, in Fremont and at a bunch of other local clubs and stuff. They'll be playing at the Fair tomorrow. You should come see them with us." She quickly inhaled and held her breath, realizing what she'd said. Her mother might work in the industry still, for most of the bigger music venues, but she never actually went to shows.

  Sheila O'Reilly paused, drumming her fingers on the bass. Megan could only imagine that much the same thoughts were occurring to her mother.

  Finally, after what was probably several seconds, but seemed far longer to Megan, her mother responded. "Are you sure you want your mom along for that? You're sixteen, aren't you supposed to think I'll embarrass you?" She was smiling, but Megan could see hints of genuine worry in her mother's eyes, as if she was not at all sure about interacting with her daughter on this type of level.

  "What? My mom the former rock-star? I wish I could be that cool."

  Sheila laughed, one brief laugh, caught off guard. "My rock star days are behind me, honey. But if that's really okay with you, I'd love to come and see your friend play."

  Megan sighed with relief, and moved to the couch to hug her mother, leaning across one side of the bass a little. "Thanks, Mom. I'd love to talk more, or try another song, but we, uhm, really walked a lot today. And, uhm, helped carry a lot of stuff around. I should probably get some sleep." Whatever adrenaline she'd had on walking in to see her mother playing had faded with the end of the song, and she was feeling the effects of the long day again.

  "Oh, okay. Sure thing, honey. I'm going to try that song a couple more times. I think I can do better. Then I'll head for bed. I don't want to keep you up."

  Megan smiled wider and shook her head. "Practice as long as you want. I'll sleep just fine. I guarantee it."

  Megan managed to hit the bathroom to brush her teeth and clean up before bed—and was startled to see herself in the mirror. How had her mother not noticed? Her hair was a mess, her hands and arms bore scrapes and a couple shallow cuts, her clothes were muddy, and any kind of close inspection revealed a couple of bloodstains as well.

  Hearing her mother's voice in her head, she did her best to pre-treat the worst stains with water and a bit of soap to try to salvage the outfit, and then managed her way through brushing her hair a little, then brushing her teeth, by rote. By the time she was done, she was staggering to her room. Though she'd had every intention when she left the bathroom of changing for bed, she ended up falling fast asleep within seconds of sitting down on the bed to take her shoes off.

  Chapter 19: Rushed and Real

  Megan woke with a start to her mother's voice. "Megan, get ready. Breakfast in fifteen minutes!" She started to get up, then dropped back to her pillow with a groan. Everything hurt, most especially her feet. A little more time was spent debating how long she could stay in bed and still get downstairs in time.

  Then she thought of her reflection in the mirror, the mud, the bloodstains, the scrapes and the messy, tangled hair. She decided a hot shower might be the best option for aching muscles and making sure that her mother didn't ask too many awkward questions. Rediscovering the bass the previous night might have distracted her from thinking too much about Megan's appearance, but it couldn't last forever.

  The water was almost scalding, but it did ease some of the sore muscles. She bandaged her scrapes as subtly as she could, then had to spend longer than she wanted trying to get her hair untangled and brushed out. Her mother was calling her down for breakfast, and then saying she was 5 minutes late and it was getting cold, by the time she finished pulling on a new shirt and jeans. She tried to dash towards the dining room to show she was hurrying, before it turned into a bit of a quick limp instead.

  It was only when she saw the layout that she paused to consider the oddity of her mother cooking breakfast. The O'Reillys certainly recognized 'the most important meal of the day,' but it was usually a meal of boring cereals, milk, and fruit, served with vitamins. There were exceptions, but they usually didn't involve pancakes, scrambled eggs, ham, and makeshift hashbrowns.

  "What's the occasion?" she asked as she sat down, wincing and wishing she'd been more careful with her words, as if this new take on her mother could break at any moment, and the woman she'd left before the fair could return if she said or did anything wrong.

  "Going to my first concert in..." she paused, trying to count the years, "Going to a concert with my daughter. I thought something a little special was in order. And you'll need your energy. I looked up Sax & Violins on the internet last night. Apparently it's a very high energy show."

  Of course she'd looked them up. Megan also noted bits of green amidst the eggs, which turned out, on closer examination, to be spinach, and diced apples in the pancakes. When the glass of milk was added, the breakfast might be unusually extravagant, but it was still balanced—despite the changes, this Sheila O'Reilly was still definitely her mother, and somehow that made Megan feel a lot better. The two sides of her had apparently coexisted well enough, as the obsessively organized album liner notes and extra band supplies in storage had attested.

  "Yeah,” Megan finally said. “This is going to be fun." She was sure of it. And once breakfast was done, she went back upstairs and took her medication, saving half of the multi-colored pills for later.

  “I think that's Lani's car pulling up outside,” her mother called eventually. “I'll meet you for the concert at 5.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” Megan hobbled back down the stairs and straight for the front door. “Yeah, that's Space Ship! So I'll see you then.”

  Justin, in his full Seahawks livery, was already stepping out to get Megan's door. Seeing him and Lani—who looked every bit as worn as Megan felt, and with even more scrapes and bruises evident—brought her mind back to the situation.

  “So... what do we do until the concert?” she asked as she sat down.

  “Take in the Fremont Fair,” Lani said.

  “Right.” After all the excitement yesterday, it seemed like there should be something more, or something big and obvious happening. The dead didn't rise from their graves every day, after all, at least as far as she knew. Likewise, Ashling apparently hadn't seen her former captor in years, and suddenly he just turned up.

  She tried
to settle her racing thoughts by assuring herself that they'd foiled the Butterfly Collector's attempts to collect all the shrouds... for whatever reason he wanted them. Her thoughts quickly responded back that he still had half the map, and maybe he only needed one or two of them, or that he might try and send the other wights for the ones he hadn't collected.

  As Megan stared out the window, pondering this and keeping an eye out for the Center of the Universe, she heard the edge of conversation—and as she slowly realized what it was, she was all the more determined to keep her eyes out the window.

  “You're not married, are you, Justin?” Lani asked.

  “No, my family were landed and respectable, but I wasn't the heir to a dukedom or anything that would require marrying young. I certainly wasn't even going to start thinking of that sort of stuff until I'd earned my knighthood.”

  “Well, you earned your knighthood a few years early, as it happens. Granted, a few centuries late chronologically, but a few years early in your life.”

  “Yes, well, with all due respect to him, his Majesty cheated some there.”

  Getting to the fair was a welcome relief. By the time they found parking, they had a walk of several blocks, but the spectacle was already coming to them. Flags flew everywhere, with even more rainbows than usual for Fremont. Jugglers filled the air with asymmetrically rhythmic color, and buskers filled it with music.

  People thronged the sidewalks, thousands upon thousands of very human people. Megan briefly found herself walking near a green woman. She wasn't about to mistake her for a jade statue, though. The body paint had none of the eerie perfection of some Faerie complexions. With all that had been going on, part of her found something very comforting about that.

  There were also numerous pauses as they moved, so Megan, Justin, or often both could say hello to some of the many dogs being taken down to the fair, once they verified with the various owners that it was all right to do so. Megan spared a moment to hope Cassia'd have no problem carrying the basket of kittens from her home to the stage, but with so much adorable fur needing scritches, a moment was all she could spare.

  Once they reached the various canopy tents lining the street, bedecked with streamers and bead curtains, they spent a while window shopping. Lani picked up some rosehip-scented liniment at an apothecary, applying it to one wrist and elbow before offering it to Megan. "This is good stuff. Better than aspirin. You should try it." she suggested, gesturing back to the middle-aged woman in the booth. "She does good work."

  “What did you pay for it with?” Megan asked as she reached for the bottle.

  “Cash,” Lani said with a sigh. “But asking is a good sign, even if in the wrong place.”

  They skipped buying anything else, but Megan spent a lot of time examining the various arts and crafts, which were in abundance at the fair, while Lani had to stop every time they passed a booth selling books. Eventually, tired feet and sore muscles won out, and they bought drinks and went to sit on the grass for a while, listening to the music coming from a rooftop party across the street from the fair.

  Parts of the crowd were just starting to drift towards the parade route when Lani insisted they'd done enough resting, and should go find a good spot to watch the parade from.

  "My feet still hurt. Five more minutes?" Megan asked.

  "You at least have a hope of seeing over someone if we don't get right in front. I don't want to spend another year hearing about it second hand later. Let's go."

  And soon there were marching bands, their different songs blending and un-blending with the rooftop parties and everything else. There were dancing troupes and hula hoops. There were many, many packs of bicyclists, some of them even fully clothed. Either way, the colors were bright.

  “Lani?” Megan asked quietly—as quietly as the ruckus from the interweaving musics would allow.

  “What?”

  “How much of … all this... is... People Like Us? And like Cassia?”

  Lani sighed. “Megan, yes: a lot of the community of … Folk are going to come to something like this. So will 59,900 other people. We're not the predominant force. People Like Us play an important role, but the whole revelry and creative spark can still be 99% human.

  “Yeah, I guess it can.” And Megan smiled and looked forward to her mother's arrival.

  Chapter 20: Sax & Violins

  "Megan, honey, can you draw Mack another maze? He solved the last one you did. Well, eventually. He kept running into your minotaur on purpose over and over."

  Megan nodded to Mrs. Kahale's request cheerfully and set into making a new maze while Mrs. Kahale explained the rules for the concert, though the list was fairly short, since Megan's mother was going to be there. The teens nodded their understanding, or the girls did, while Justin solemnly swore his. He verified he'd keep an eye on the girls, since they were more prone to getting lost or pinned in by the crowd.

  As she, Lani, and Justin started to mill through people towards the stage, Megan could manage to hear Mack navigating his LEGO figure through the maze, this time complete with a LEGO dragon on his treasure horde.

  "What's that about?” She caught her mother asking. “Keeps him busy, obviously, but..."

  “Megan draws them for him whenever I'm trying to tell the girls something important,” Mrs. Kahale answered, sighing as Mack voiced his LEGO man's death scene when he ran into the dragon the first time.

  "Oh, I'm sorry she wasn't paying attention."

  "Oh, she was. That's why I give her the paper, so she'll draw instead of daydream."

  "...Oh. That's...that's good. Really good."

  Megan focused on keeping up with Lani and Justin.

  They got up to the stage early, despite the protests of Megan's feet. Somehow, resting and having an early dinner of fair food out on the grass from the end of the parade to the start of the concert didn't do a lot to ease the pain, but for this, she managed. Megan's mother, not having to deal with aching muscles and swollen feet, caught up not long after. They reached the barricade, but only barely, as the concert area filled up quickly, leaving only a little room to move.

  The crowd quieted as the first violin notes echoed out from one edge of the stage, then went silent. A moment later, it was answered by a violin with a slightly deeper tone, playing from the other edge. At first, the sounds were classical, almost precisely what one might expect when attending a show featuring violins, save the fact they were obviously electric and amped. After four back and forths, with increasingly complex progressions, the violins sped up, still playing the classical melody, but at a much more rapid pace.

  Three more musical duels of challenge and answer, and the music shifted entirely, as the two violinists finally came on stage, battling it out with familiar rock chords. The two players closed in on one another, moving to the time of their music, one approaching as the other stilled, until they were up close and glaring at one another, sawing on their bows.

  Another figure, smaller than either, wearing green robes, stepped between them. Until she shoved the violinists apart, Megan hadn't seen her, but supposed that had the most to do with the dueling pair making a spectacle of themselves.

  Her attention was pulled away again, as Cassia played a wail on her saxophone. Megan quickly realized that the band had taken their spots on stage while the violinists played. The pair who were now stepping backwards in time to the start of a drumbeat, not taking their eyes off of one another.

  Finally, Nell threw off the green robes, revealing jeans and a band t-shirt beneath. Cassia's saxophone wail trailed off. The drums stopped, and as the beat ended, the violinists froze in place, fixed, unblinking, glaring across the stage at one another.

  Nell grabbed the microphone, but let the silence reign for several more seconds. Then she began to sing. Her voice carried, far more than Megan had expected from such a small woman. Even as the other instruments kicked back in, she had no trouble being heard, and her words understood, above them. The sounds of the band's “Soft Dr
ink Conspiracy” rose and fell. YouTube hadn't done it justice. Nell sang high and low, displaying a startling range. Throughout it all, she stood almost stock still at the mic stand, closing her eyes, and just letting her voice sweep out over the crowd like an incoming tide.

  Though Nell might have become the visual focal point as she started singing, the original spotlight stealers quickly took visual attention back. The two violins circled her, circled Cassia, and moved about the stage. Aside from the occasional theatrical spin, they never took their eyes off of each other, and from the expressions and motions, Megan swore that at any moment, they might forget the violins and start swordfighting with one another with the bows. As often as not, they mirrored each other, advancing and retreating, stalking and circling, playing all the while with a feverish intensity.

  Cassia was much more stationary—instead of stalking and dancing about the stage, her sheer presence and skill with the sax dragged the imaginary spotlight to her at times. Perhaps it was the contrast between her muscular bulk and the tiny singer, or just Cassia's personality, but she almost loomed, and the sax alternately blasted or wailed its notes.

  It took Megan a few moments to notice that the violinists' footfalls were not just rhythmic, but were still perfectly timed to the drumbeats, picking up and slowing down as if the drums might be the echo of footfalls about the stage, timed with the song, even matching the occasional furious assault on the drums.

  And the bass... well, Megan had to admit Erin was good. Possibly very good. She hit all the notes. She kept up with the band. It still seemed a little bit to Megan like watching the band teacher jamming with a bunch of seasoned pro rockers. Nothing was actually out of place, but she was just playing, occasionally looking at her bass, occasionally watching the show the others put on. The more Megan watched, the more she realized that Sax & Violins were playing a set, sure, but more than that, this was theater.