“So what's your point with all this, other than chopping down my self-esteem like a fir tree?”
“My point, Gen, is that you don't get out often enough, and that the celebration tomorrow is the perfect place to start.”
Genevieve's eyelids lowered until they showed only thin crescents. “And you felt it necessary to point out that I should have more friends-besides you-as a way of convincing me to go to the celebration with you?”
The younger woman grinned widely. “You got it.”
“Widdershins, you have absolutely lost your mind. I couldn't think of a less logical argument if I sat down and worked at it.”
“Perfect! If it's not logical, you can't argue with it. I'll be at your place at noon.”
The door slammed, and she was gone.
Genevieve shook her head, bemused. There was a great deal to be done before opening. And as for next week…Well, she hated to disappoint her friend, but there was no help for it. She was absolutely, positively, not going to that stupid parade. Not a chance. No way. Under no circumstances. No.
“Isn't this fun?” Widdershins shouted happily. “I told you you should get out!”
Genevieve gritted her teeth and tried to think about something other than throttling Widdershins with her bare hands.
She still wasn't sure precisely how this had even happened. One moment she was flopped out blissfully in bed, sleeping off a hectic but profitable night of drink-filling and food-slinging at the Flippant Witch, without a care in the world, snugly cocooned against the late autumn chill.
The next, Widdershins was in her bedroom, having picked the bloody lock, and practically dancing with excitement, shouting at Genevieve to hurry up and get dressed. It was barely after noon-the depth of night, as far as the tavern keep was concerned. This was absolutely outrageous behavior, even from a close friend, and Gen resolved to berate the thief soundly, just as soon as she had a moment to fully wake up, to regain her equilibrium, to…
They were outside and halfway through the marketplace before Genevieve reassembled her scrambled wits sufficiently to speak. And by then, of course, it was far too late. Genevieve smiled a tight, closed-mouth smile, wondered briefly how Widdershins had managed to get her dressed (with most of the laces tied properly, even!), and then grudgingly went along.
A decision she now bitterly regretted as the inexorable press of the gathering crowds hurled the pair this way and that, two floating bottles on the seas of Davillon's populace. The crowd was a living thing, moving and even breathing as one. The sensation was unpleasantly akin to that of being swept away by a very loud and sweaty tide.
Speech was very nearly impossible: lean over, shout at the top of your lungs in your friend's ear, scream your throat as raw as if you'd gargled with glass shavings, and it was still necessary to repeat yourself two or four times before the object of your comment (which probably wasn't all that important anyway) wandered out of view.
It was hot, too. Not the heat of the day-it wasn't all that long until winter-but the heat of thousands of bodies, each pressed uncomfortably close in a macabre parody of intimacy. The miasma of perspiration and perfume was enough to fell an ox at thirty paces.
Sweating in unladylike rivulets, jostled by strangers, bruised in uncountable tender areas by the morass of accidental blows, Genevieve hunched her shoulders against the storm of sound and fury and struggled to imagine a worse sort of hell.
Widdershins, of course, seemed perfectly happy, but Widdershins was weird.
“Hey, Olgun!” Widdershins whispered, confident he could hear no matter what. “Isn't this neat?”
The god's reply felt vaguely patronizing. She felt very much like she'd just been told, in all maternal seriousness, “Yes, dear, it's very nice. Why don't you go play over there for a while?”
“You don't think this is impressive?” she asked incredulously, drawing a curious stare from a nearby merchant who, through some fluke of acoustics, heard her clearly. The flabby, pasty-faced widower, flattered that a young woman might look his way, had opened his mouth to reply when it finally dawned on him that the girl was talking to herself, not to him.
Lunatic.
Olgun, during this time, had expressed to Widdershins, in no uncertain emotions, that nothing humans did impressed him-present company excluded, of course-and that a larger concentration of clowns might make them funnier, but generally not any more awe-inspiring.
“Oh, so we're clowns, are we? Just put here for your amusement? A little different than the way the creation myth tells it, yes?”
Widdershins's private deity smiled an amused smile, and refused to emote any further on the topic.
The obstinate thief wasn't about to let the subject drop, but as she opened her mouth to shout some witty rejoinder at her little pocket god, she felt Genevieve's fingers clenching on her arm.
“What is it?” she asked, hoping her expression would be enough to carry her meaning, since the words almost certainly would not.
Genevieve, eyes wide with a contagious anticipation that she'd tried her damnedest to elude, pointed over the heads of the crowd toward the heavy, iron-bound gates that were Davillon's main ingress. Huge pennants slowly rose and unfurled to wave majestically over the nearby buildings. The Eternal Eye stared down from several banners, as though it could clearly see their every thought, and didn't much approve of a one of them.
The crowd surged ahead, prevented from becoming a stampede only by the lack of space to build momentum. Truth be told, it would be more accurate to say that the crowd shuffled forward, a glacier of clothes and flesh. Whispers, audible only because so many people repeated them, scampered through the ranks of the waiting masses.
“Did you see that?”
“The banners went up! He's here!”
“Here? He can't be here! It's but two hours past noon!”
“He's early! Did you hear? The archbishop's arriving early!”
And then the whispers were blown from the air like so much skeet by the blast of two dozen trumpets, announcing the arrival of His Eminence, the esteemed William de Laurent, archbishop of Chevareaux.
Music blared, banners waved, and thousands of people shouted their unbridled joy (even if most were celebrating not the archbishop's arrival-which meant little to them-but simply the opportunity to celebrate). Only those who'd waited since the earliest hours of the morning, ensuring that they got a street-side view or high vantage, would actually see the pristine white carriage, flanked by a dozen horsemen and followed by another seven or eight coaches carrying the archbishop's staff. The rest of the crowd would see nothing more exciting than the back of someone else's head.
One hand locked with bulldog determination on Genevieve's wrist, Widdershins slipped, slid, twisted, squeezed, weaseled, pushed, shoved, elbowed, and otherwise forced her way through the living barricade isolating her from her goal. She even went so far, on occasion, as to call on Olgun: here a woman broke into a sneezing fit, forcing her to stagger aside and allowing Widdershins to slip through the gap; that fellow there felt his belt buckle give way, once more clearing a path as he fled, red-faced, holding his pants up with his hands. In a surprisingly brief span, the barkeep and the burglar forced their way street-side, gaining an unobstructed view of…
“A carriage,” Genevieve muttered in her companion's ear, shaking her head. “All that, and you get to see a carriage. I hope you're happy, Shins. I know I haven't been this excited in minutes.”
“It's not the carriage, Gen!” Widdershins announced gleefully, refusing to look away from the snowy stallions, the luxuriously curtained windows, the ponderous gilded wheels. “It's the passenger!”
“But you can't very well see the passenger, now, can you?” Sometimes I just don't understand that girl!