A Midsummer's Day by Heather Montford Page A

memories of winter life as a barista from his brain.
    Vaughn walked down the Dregs.  There had to be people around who still knew their names.  People who weren’t in on this prank.  People who were still dressed as tourists.  It was just a matter of finding them.
    The Lover’s Bridge was strangely empty.  The Grotto Stage wasn’t.  The backwards speaking storyteller was telling the story of Dindercella the gullery scirl.  Normally the audience was made up of tourist children.
    But now there were only peasant children.  There were no parents minding strollers and cranky infants.  Nobody recorded the act with digital camcorders, or the rapt joy that were missing from these joyless children’s faces.
    Around the corner, the glass blower still performed to a packed house.  But only grim faced nobles and a few peasants watched the show now.  Apparently it was an interesting diversion, but not enjoyable enough for anybody to smile at it.
    “Where in the blazes are all the tourists?” Vaughn whispered.  If this was a hoax, it was a good one.  The instigator would have had to be good to swap out every tourist in a thousand foot radius with an actor.  And to do so in less than a minute...
    Gypsy Way had seen the same switch.  Peasant women wandered the tents, seeking their fortunes much as they had done this morning.  As usual, there were no nobles here.  There were no tourists here.
    Vaughn passed the worn tent where Sammie had gotten her reading.  Inside was the gypsy that kissed Johnny so hard.  That was how she knew who Sammie was.  Sammie had never gotten a reading before.  That was how she knew that Sammie hadn’t found her true love.
    Did the gypsy know anything now?  She gave a palm reading to a young peasant girl.  But she looked up as he passed.  Her eyes bore into him so intently he turned away.  His skin crawled.
    Freaky girl.  He’d go and find his own answers.  If he couldn’t, he’d come back and see what the gypsy knew.  And he’d get some answers about Johnny, too.
    Beyond Gypsy Way was Brigands’ Den, home to the festival’s resident pirates and plunderers.  Normally they did nothing but drink rum and plan raids.  Now they sat in piles of plunder, pilfered from a number of nobles’ pocketbooks or the backs of the dozens of shops on the grounds.  They laughed and called for more rum.
    Vaughn hurried away.  He wasn’t about to find out what they would do if the fancy got to them, now that they were part of this joke.
    A thought came to him.  He smacked himself in the forehead.  “Sammie,” he whispered, a smile playing at his lips.  There was no point in wandering around every path of the festival, looking for tourists.  Sammie would tell him what the in the blazes was going on.  She never kept anything from him, a fact he’d discovered when he was seven and she was six and she told him everything his mother had gotten him for Christmas.  After that, it was a cinch to get her to tell him what he was getting for Christmas and his birthday.
    Sammie would tell him the truth.  She wasn’t cruel enough to play this joke on him.
    He walked through the faire with a purpose.  He stopped looking for tourists; he had an innate feeling that he wouldn’t find any, anyways.  He stopped looking for signs that the actors were part of a prank and fighting the urge to laugh.
    He galloped up the Hill Road.  Sam would be back in the break room, changing after her dunke.
    At the top of the road he ran headlong into a group of nobles.  They gasped and backed away from him as fast as they could.  It was as if he was evil.  Diseased.  They mumbled to each other about the unseemliness of a beggar on the upper levels of the festival.
    A black clad constable appeared.  Somehow Vaughn didn’t think he was there to help him.  “Be gone with thee, slime.  Back to the Pits with thee.”
    The joke had just crossed the line.  It wasn’t cute.  It had never really been funny.