Cirque DeVante: Chapter Nine: Farewell To Pragum
The gang makes preparations for the next leg of the tour...and also have much needed heart to heart conversation.
Click HERE for Chapter Eight! They had only one errand left before leaving Pragum. It had been a few hours since the duel, hours spent mostly packing up their belongings in stony silence, and they knew they'd have to get the wagon moving soon, but, contrary to what some people thought, their carriage was not actually magical, it required a team of horses to pull it, same as any other carriage. And, while aquiring horses was a semi regular occurrence, as they often moved place to place, neither Guy nor Talia was especially keen on the idea of full time horse ownership, so they usually settled for some type of horse rental. In the past this had been somewhat difficult to find, but there was now a full time horse-keeper, wisely employed by the Pragum Show Circuit, who made the situation incredibly simple, and was just the man the three of them needed to see before departing.
When Talia announced she was off to retrieve some horses from Hatch Grandelman, Nestor began excitedly jumping up and down, chasing her own tail, saying, “Oh, I love Hatch! He always gives me biscuits!”
“Well, good,” Talia said, smiling at her, “Then, this time, you can be the one to tell him.”
Nestor suddenly quieted, grimacing, “Ew, I don’t like him that much.”
Guy followed after them, attempting to break the wall Talia had thrown up, going, “Wonderful, we can all go together and make it one big party!”
Talia gave him a pouting little look, but said nothing. They crossed to the center of the fairground, where Hatch’s wagon and makeshift stables were, and Nestor ran off, excitedly dashing towards Hatch, jumping up on him and nearly knocking off his crooked top hat as slobber flew from her jowls.
“Whoa, now!” Said Hatch, inadvertantly puffing smoke out of his curved, wooden pipe, “Now, who’s the smartest little doggo there ever was?!”
“Ooh, me, me! I am! I’ll never actually say that to you, but it’s me!”
Hatch retrieved a biscuit the size of a turkey leg out of his leather satchel and tossed it to Nestor who snatched it out of the air with glee and proceeded to devour it.
As Guy and Talia neared Hatch, Guy broke out into exaggerated, operatic song, belting, “Who can sell you ponies with a twinkle in his eye? The Grandelman can!” And then he pitched his voice an octave higher, repeating the last line in a strained falsetto, pretending to be the background chorus, “The Grandelman can!”
Talia looked at him, annoyed, “I’m still mad at you, ya know.”
“Mad at me?” He sputtered, “What did I do?”
She blinked, “Surely, you’re joking.”
“And how are my two favorite customers?” Asked Hatch, adjusting his cape made of strung together raccoon tails.
The two of them looked at each other, disparagingly, then turned back to him.
“Oh, that bad, hmm?”
“Well, Guy just killed someone, so…”
“Oh...well, dang...I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Guy butted in, “He deserved it.”
“Guy!” She shook her head at him as if to say this was probably true, but not appropriate to say outloud, “Anyways, Hatch, we need to rent some horses for the next leg of the tour.”
“Of course ya do. And, um, will you be traveling with the rest of the group or…” He trailed off, looking at Guy, “Needing to stay more hidden?”
She made a face, “I mean, we might start out slightly ahead, but I see no reason why we should leave the highway.”
“Yes, after all, I killed him legally.”
“Guy!” She yelled again.
“Well, I recommend a team of four horses, same as last time, and taking the highway to Copenhausen should take us all about two days, if we have fair weather, so, two copper, per horse, per day runs you to about,” he paused and looked up, pretending to crunch the numbers, “Twenty seven copper!”
Talia laughed, not impolitely, and said, “Um, no, Hatch, I’m actually quite sure that’s more like sixteen copper.”
He made a face as if he’d been gut punched and said, “What? That can’t be right, how can I make a living off that?”
Guy and Talia looked at each other, waiting for Hatch to sort things out himself, because, favorite customers or not, Hatch always started negotiations with a very high number and then somehow, eventually, discounted all the way down to relatively fair price. “Alright, tell you what, I wanna treat ya fair and square so I’ll slap on a ten percent discount and only charge you twenty copper for the whole thing.”
Nestor looked up from her biscuit just long enough to say, “Lovely man, but not very good with mathematics.”
“Eh, I don’t know,” Talia mused, confident she could get him to go lower.
“Oh, and I’ll throw in one of those humble roots you like so much, big one, found it fresh this morning!”
“You found wild humble root here in Pragum?!”
“Sure I did! Or, rather, Fred did.” He turned back to his carriage and yelled, “Say hi, Fred!”
The carriage quaked and what must’ve been a four hundred pound, pink pig stuck its head out the doorway, surveying them with beady little eyes from underneath his chef’s toke and gave a loud, snort!
Nestor looked up, mouth dropping open and cried out, “He has a hat!” She looked excitedly at Guy and Talia and then back to Fred in his puffy white hat and said, “Wait a minute, can you also…?”
Fred stared back at her, blank faced and made another, snort! Before popping back inside the carriage and continuing on with his business.
Hatch then pulled a tuberous root the size of a small pumpkin out of his satchel and presented it to Talia who greedily took it and cradled it in her arms, expounding, “Oh, would you look at it! I can make at least two humble pies with this one! Imagine...cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg all held together inside a crust by the magical, luscious filling that is humble root!”
Guy just tilted his head and went, “Meh.”
“What do you mean, meh?! Do you even have taste buds, Guy?”
He held his hands up in surrender, “Look, I like humble pie as much as the next guy, but, when you think about it, it pretty much just tastes like sweet potatoes and sugar.”
Her mouth actually dropped open, “Sweet potatoes and sug-” She let the sentence hang, too disturbed to finish it, “I ask again, do you even have taste buds?!”
“Soooo,” Hatch broke in, “Should I bring over you horses now? Or…?”
“That would be best.” Guy said, counting out twenty copper pieces. He handed them to Hatch, then he and Talia began walking back to their carriage, bickering about the nuances of flavor in humble pie as Hatch began to gather up four large, well muscled horses.
Nestor glanced around, careful to make sure no one was watching her, then padded over to Hatch’s carriage and stuck her head into the entrance coming face to face with the giant head and chef’s toke of Fred the pig.
She stared at him a moment, transfixed, and said, “If you can understand me, blink twice.”
The pig stared at her, blank faced, totally and obviously devoid of understanding, but he did give out one final, snort! As she stood there staring at him.
Her face fell and she sighed, “Oi, vei, not today, piggy, not today.” Then she turned around and ran after Guy and Talia before they could notice she was missing.
Not two hours later and they were on the road, Talia holding the reins and driving the horses as she loved to do. Nestor was just inside the carriage, curled up on the floor and, apparently, snoozing again, not that you could really see, because of the barely separated drapes that hung between the front of the carriage and the driver’s bench, but she was making such an incessant racket with her snoring that it would be hard to think otherwise. Guy accompanied Talia up on the wooden driver’s bench, plucking on his broken violin, careful not to sit too close to her as she seemed to be desiring some distance. He kept looking over at her as he plinked and planked the out of tune strings, clearly trying to get her attention, but miserably failing at attracting anything other than an irritated glare. He leaned forward, trying to catch her eyes and went plink, plink, plank, plink, plink.
She gave him the side eye and then stared straight ahead, ignoring him.
Plink, plank, plink...plank, plink.
She wrinkled her nose at him, then shook her head, looking the other way.
Plink...plank, plink.
Nothing.
Disgusted, Guy chucked the violin over his shoulder and into the wagon behind him, narrowly missing Nestor, which gave him a small scare, but the broken fiddle whizzing past and clanging on the floor beside her seemed to not even wake the poor dear, so he turned back ahead and went about his business. “Alright, I can’t take the silence anymore, so let’s have it out, right now! I’ll go first.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t expect you to like what I did...I don’t even expect you to understand it, but I do need you to accept it.”
“I do accept it, Guy...Syd, I might even be able to understand it, but…” She shook her head, “It’s just, you know what your problem is? You always just do whatever you want! And...and you always do it so...unapologetically!”
He looked a little hurt, so she continued, “Believe it or not, that’s actually one of my favorite things about you.”
He beamed.
“But did you ever stop to think, just once, about the consequences of you getting involved in all of this again? Hmm? Olivari will be coming after us, never mind that he can’t do so legally, he’s the Sydding inspector of Pragum, he’ll find a way!”
“I have been thinking about that,” Guy said, sincere, “And I think that...well I think that you and Nestor should go away for a little while.”
She turned to him with an expression of such deep hurt and shock that he immediately back-pedaled, “Or I’ll go...or...regardless, he wants me and I see no reason why you and Nestor should have to get hurt over something that was my doing. So, I...should probably go figure things out on my own...for awhile.”
She thought this over for a second and concluded that it was a terrible idea, but, nonetheless, a terrible idea stated with good intentions.
They both stared ahead at the road, silent, and, before she quite knew what she was doing, she reached down and placed her hand on top of Guy’s. He froze and cleared his throat, suddenly having an epiphany. As he looked down at her hand on top of his he realized that there was love there. Maybe it wasn’t the romantic kind...maybe it didn’t need to be, but it was love. It was the kind of love you see when someone feeds the hungry or takes care of the elderly or simply offers someone their shoulder to cry on. It was the kind of love that says, “I’m here for you, for no other reason than because I love you.”
This sentiment passed between them without words, because they didn’t need words, then, finally, Talia leaned forward to try and meet his eyes and said, “Guy.”
He didn’t answer, because he didn’t know if it was a statement or a question, so she tried again, “Guy, look at me?”
He did so and, as their eyes met, she searched his for something, he didn’t know what, then asked, “Is that really what you want?”
He was about to spout off another hideous lie, but found he couldn’t...not to her...and not over this. So he stared at his feet and hung his head, mulling over his perceived failure before saying, “Not even a little.”
There was another moment of silence before she said, “Well...aren’t you going to ask me what I want?”
He turned and looked at her again, “What do you want, Talia?”
“I want to finish out the Pragum show circuit...all three of us...together…” She leaned toward him and bumped his shoulder with her own, “As a family.”
He chuckled, noting her reference to the fake temper tantrum he had thrown the day before...or had it been real? Then, after a moment, he spoke up, addressing the elephant in the room, “Well...I suppose we should wake Nestor and find out what she wants…”
“Oh, I’ve been awake the whole time!” Nestor poked her head through the mostly closed drapes and caused both of them to jump, with Talia cursing, “Sydding Bees! Nestor! Do you have to do that?!”
“Oh, ballyhoo,” Nestor brushed her off and continued, “Anyways, yes, I think it’s a fantastic idea! In fact, I’ve found the new drama over the last few days to be positively riveting! Honestly, I think it’s the piece that’s been missing from our little group this whole time!”
Guy and Talia chuckled, a little unsure how to respond, but finally Guy asked, “So...to clarify, you want to travel with us? In spite of the potential danger?”
Nestor glanced back and forth between them, as if that were the stupidest question in the entire world, and said, “Where else would I go?”
Guy thought the moment too precious to ruin with the overly cheesy sound of an audible “Aww”, but the affection in the dog’s voice was not unnoticed by he or Talia.
“Alright then,” said Guy, “That settles it. We will complete the circuit, unfettered and unbound by the unwanted shackles of dreary emotion.”
“Here we go,” said Talia, sensing a full blown, unnecessarily dramatic speech.
“We will persevere in spite of all the obstacles!”
“Yep.”
“We will conquer any and all who stand in our way!”
“Very nice.”
“We will travel to the ends of the earth if need be! And we will perform an uncountable host of marvelous shows! Because we are incredible! We are amazing! We are the-!”
“Oh, please, let me say it!” Begged Nestor, “Please, please, please!”
“Yes, Guy, let her say it, she never gets to!”
Guy paused and squinted his eyes, as if visibly in pain over the interruption, then, shaking his head, with the faintest hint of a smile, relented and said, “Oh, alright.”
Nestor grinned and sat up straight, clearing her throat and shooting her little brown paw out over the bench to rest on top their clasped hands. She looked at them each in turn, then gazed ahead, determinedly, crying out in a loud, emphatic voice, “We...are the Sydding...Cirque ...Devante!”
THE END OF SEASON ONE