It had been a really nice conversation with Laurie, up until she finally explained why she’d come by, and then he’d gotten miffed. That wasn’t entirely fair, because ithadbeen a nice conversation up until that point, and if she’d really been trying to actively avoid him she would have sent Damien up to talk to him about the screes. Damien, like Doll, was a snow leopard, so he was as agile and capable in the mountains as Bree herself was.
Her goat looked dubiously at her, and Briana rolled her eyes.Differently capable, but snow leopards are amazing mountaineers.
Hrmph. And you worry too much about what our mate thinks.
He did get that itchy patch of wool off our spine,Briana reminded it, and her goathrmphed even more loudly.
That spot was always the worst. It needed a low-hanging branch atexactlythe right height, or a pair of hands to deal with it. Rolling around on her back had never gotten rid of it properly, no matter how hard Briana tried. Eventually it fell off because ofthe new growth beneath it, but it was so much nicer to be free of it. Now she could be nice and short-white-fluffy-furred for the rest of the summer.
It wasn’t a very long walk to the smithy, down the hill a little ways and toward the base of the mountain a bit more. A runoff stream cut right behind the smithy building, which was part of why they’d been situated there: when you were dealing with fire, having water on hand was always a good idea. That stream was flooded now, its little banks overflowing and the ground around it so wet it squelched when someone walked across it. Briana and Damien had started taking bets on Tuesday about whether it would reach the smithy’s back wall. When it started to look like itwould, Damien brought some extra sandbags from his main smithy and they built a wall to help contain the stream. Now the sandbags were completely sodden, but they were holding the water back, at least.
Damien was working on a project of his own, since there were no fairgoers in the downpour. Briana leaned on the half-wall between the shop and the forge, watching, until he was ready to talk instead of just work. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, the Torbens will alert the authorities about the mountain conditions. I might go around and suggest that people pack up, but I don’t know if they’ll listen without an official warning.”
“You can always head-butt them off the site if they don’t,” Damien suggested.
Briana laughed. “That’d be a lot of people to herd, even if there are basically no visitors.” Still, she spent the next couple of hours doing just that. A lot of the vendors had already tucked their wares into plastic tote bins and heavy-duty plastic bags for protection against the weather, but she left them securing the sides of those bins with duct tape, or layering everything into anextra bag, just in case, and many of them said they would head out afterward.
It was probably overkill, but Briana knew how much work went into the products, many of which were hand-made. She figured the best-case scenario was that the rain would stop and everybody would just have to unpack everything, laughing over how cautious they’d been. In the worst scenario, packing everything up might mean wares that would otherwise have been destroyed by the weather would survive. It felt like a win either way.
She was working her way up the far side of the fairgrounds, where hopefully there was less potential danger anyway, when she saw Laurie coming the opposite direction. From how he was stopping at vendor booths, it was pretty clear he was doing the same thing she was, and when they met, she pushed wet hair out of her face and looked up at him curiously.
He was so blond that even with his hair wet, he was still obviouslyblond,whereas Briana’s dark brown hair looked pretty much black when wet. Water was dripping off his nose, but he looked cheerful in the same way Briana felt: like she was doing something useful, and it made her happy. “You talked to the patrols?”
Laurie nodded. “I talked to somebody in the know and told them you’d been up there right on the ground and were worried about the conditions. They’re sending a team up to check it out, but said that in the meantime we should get the vendors and all six attendees ready to evacuate, if necessary.”
Briana couldn’t help a smile. “All six of them, huh? Are you sure there are that many here?”
“I’ve talked to at least two of them,” Laurie said solemnly, then glanced back toward one of the vendor shops he’d been visiting. “Although they might be more friends of the business than attendees, honestly. God, it’s wet.”
“It’s so much better walking around as a goat,” Briana confessed in a mutter. “Even with my summer coat it keeps the rain from soaking me through.”
“Bears just get wet,” Laurie said. “So I’m screwed either way. You’ve been talking to people, too?”
“Yeah, about half the vendors are packed up, at this point. I need to cut back through the middle of the fairgrounds to catch everybody there, but this is the future, shouldn’t we have a huge chat group we can just tell everybody through?”
Laurie put a hand inside his doublet, which was also wet, though not as wet as the white shirt he wore beneath it, which made Briana realizeshewasalsowearing a white shirt. She looked down at herself and winced. She didn’t even have a doublet to cover up how the fabric stuck to every inch of her torso. But Laurie was doing a manful job of pretending he didn’t notice, she guessed, because all he did was take his phone out and display a chat group which clearly did have a lot of the vendors in it. “Not everybody listens, or is in the group, though, so the personal rounds seemed like a good idea. A ton of people on the chat have said they’re leaving, though. Nobody wants to be caught in a flash flood.”
“Good. And I guess we should split up, then, because…” Briana waved at the fairgrounds like the gesture clarified everything. And it did, kind of, because the Renaissance Faire was set up in a sort of meandering grid, and she’d only done most of the perimeter. There were other vendors to talk to inside the grid.
“Yeah. Look, Jon’s making hot cider if you and Damien want to come up and dry off after we’ve done the rounds? Some of the other shifters are joining us,” he said more quietly. “Since if something goes wrong, we’re useful to have on the ground, you know?”
Briana almost surprised herself by saying, “Okay,” and thendidsurprise herself by adding, “look, why don’t you give me your number, and that way we can check in about whether we’ve missed anybody?”
She could tell Laurie was trying not to totally light up, and bit the inside of her cheek so she wouldn’t laugh. He gave her his number and she texted to make sure she’d put it in right, got a thumbs-up both in person and in response to the text, and then they split up, Briana taking the lower part of the grid and Laurie heading back the way he’d come to go through the upper part.
Clearly a number of people had already gotten the message, because a considerable percentage of the booths were already shut down and empty for the day, and most of the rest were minutes away from leaving. Briana was incredibly glad, partly because she wanted everybody to be safe and partly because she was soaked to the skin and getting tired from the cold rain, and didn’t want to stay out in it any longer than she had to. At least the actual air temperature wasn't quitecold, even with the rain.
Kids die from rain and cold air,her goat said, which was true enough, though humans would call that dying of exposure.
I know. I’m not a kid, though, and as soon as we’re done talking to people I’ll find somewhere private to shift and that’ll help dry me off.It was a little like healing, although it took concentration to dry off, whereas the shift just healed minor injuries effortlessly.
Her goat made a satisfied grunting sort of sound, and Briana cast a worried glance at the sky as the clouds got darker instead of thinning as she’d hoped. By the time she got back to the smithy, shifted to dry off, and wrapped a cloak around her shoulders, she was convinced the whole Faire would need to be closed for the weekend for safety’s sake.
Damien had been putting off packing the shop up, but even he'd given in to what felt like the inevitable, and said, "I mighttake the actual forge with me when I head out this evening, especially if they decide to close the mountain."
Briana couldn't help a sort of grim chuckle. "I've never heard that phrase used in the summer, you know?"
