“Turkey legs?”

“Hell yeah turkey legs.” She grinned, and I did too. Because what was a Renaissance faire without turkey legs? Nothing, that’s what. I may have been a newbie, but even I knew that.

I put my hands on my hips and surveyed our little clearing. I tried to picture it decked out as a tavern, with the tables and bar the way Stacey described. I didn’t love the idea of working in a bar again, but at least I’d be outside in the fresh air instead of cooped up in a sweaty dark box with lots of twentysomethings wearing too much cologne.

“I like it,” I finally said. “What do we need to do? Obviously there’s nothing to paint yet.”

“Today?” She shrugged. “Nothing, really.”

“So why am I here, exactly?” I hoped my smile took the malice out of my question.

It obviously did, because Stacey answered me in kind. “Because you had to drive your niece here?” She laughed at my sigh of mock defeat. “Come on. I’ll show you where the food vendors are going to be, and then we’ll swing back over toward the front and do some painting.”

We took a path that led deeper into the woods. The trees got thicker, but it never seemed to get darker. The path stayed wide and well trod, and for a few fleeting moments I could ignore the paved part of the path and feel the time period we were going to be portraying. Even with the distant sounds of hammering and voices calling to one another, everything felt simpler out here. I took a few good deep breaths. Even the air seemed cleaner.

Stacey showed me the food vendor area—a much larger clearing than our tavern area. Beyond that was the jousting arena, a giant field at the very back of the grounds. I had to admit my inner fourteen-year-old was very excited at the prospect of seeing a real joust, on actual horses.

“Will I have time to see it at some point?”

“Oh, yeah,” Stacey said. “We won’t be chained to the tavern. The volunteers can handle things by themselves if we take off for a bit. Last year we were able to do some walking around, interacting with patrons. Watching the shows.”

She pointed down a hill to an area she called the Hollow. She explained it was our backstage area, with a couple of changing tents and some tables and chairs, away from the rest of the action, where we could do emergency repairs to costumes and snatch a break here and there.

I squinted down the hill. “And why do we call it the Hollow?” It sounded like fairies should be living there, not a bunch of weary Faire folks.

“Sounds better than ‘backstage’ if someone says it out loud, basically.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“And then this path takes us back up to the front.” She shrugged. “It’s pretty simple.”

“Simple,” I repeated. If she left me here right now, I would die of exposure before finding my way to the front again.

“Believe me, after a weekend or two you’ll know this place blindfolded like the rest of us.”

Since part of me was still looking for an ax murderer behind a tree, I wasn’t sure how much I believed her. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“I’m going to head back up to the front and help put benches together. Why don’t you explore a little more. It might help you get a better handle on things. Then you can come find me and I’ll stick a paintbrush in your hand.”

“Thanks, I think I will.” I watched Stacey stride up the path leading to the perimeter of the grounds and tried not to panic about being left alone. Once she disappeared into the trees I took a different path, not going anywhere specific, just wandering, and the panic faded pretty quickly. There was something about the setting, the way the sun came in through the trees, the way my footsteps rustled on the path, that made me feel more content than I’d been in a long time. Tension I didn’t even know I’d been carrying melted away, and the sun warmed my soul as much as it warmed my skin. Even though it was almost July, it was still early enough that it hadn’t gotten too hot yet, and all the bullshit of the past few months felt as though it were long in the distance.

I was so intent on the trees around me that I didn’t hear the footsteps, and didn’t register someone was approaching until we almost collided. I jumped a step backward with an “Oh!”

Simon had appeared out of nowhere, from a small side path that wound deeper into the forest. He stopped short when he saw me, frowned a little, but didn’t say a word.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”

He squinted at me, as though my voice reminded him who I was. His eyes seemed to be rimmed with red. He scrubbed a hand over his face and sniffed. “What are you doing over here?” His voice was rough and rusty sounding, as though he hadn’t used it in a while and wasn’t quite sure how it worked.

What was his problem? Then I remembered the flask I’d seen before. Whatever he had in there must have been strong; he looked pretty rough. But his eyes were clear and he was standing straight. So, probably not drunk. Allergies, maybe? There had to be a crapload of pollen in these trees. “Just wandering around,” I finally said. “Stacey was showing me where everything’s going to be.”

He made a show of looking behind me, even leaning a little to his right. Then he straightened up and trained those laser-like eyes on me. “I don’t see Stacey.”

“No, well, she went up front to help the others. I’m going to head up there too, I just . . . wanted to get a little more of a feel for the place.” The more I talked, the more annoyed I got, which seemed to be a trend whenever I had a conversation with Simon. Why should I feel defensive that I was walking around the site instead of helping up front? After all, he was walking around out here too. I couldn’t shake the feeling he’d caught me doing something I shouldn’t, and that irritated me even more. Simon was a vicious circle of annoyance.

He sniffed again and shifted from one foot to the other. He glanced over his shoulder the way he’d come, and then it clicked: It wasn’t that he’d caught me. I’d caught him. Now I leaned to my right, an echo of his previous movement. “What’s down there?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. But he glanced over his shoulder again.

“Nothing?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “So why’s there a path going that way?”

“A lane.”

I blinked. “What?”

“A lane,” he repeated. “They’re called lanes at a Faire.”

“Oh. Okay.” Was he trying to distract me or was he being his normal nitpicky self? So hard to tell with Simon. “Then why’s there a lane going that way if there’s nothing there?”

“Well, there’s nothing down there now.” His sigh was short and exasperated. “It’s where some vendors are going to be set up. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

“Okay . . .” I had no idea why he was trying to keep me from going down that side path—sorry, lane—but he sure as hell wasn’t going to confide in me. Maybe it was where all of his drug deals went down. It was always the quiet, clean-cut ones. The ones you didn’t expect to be kingpins.

“So you’re going back up to the front? Where Stacey is now?” His voice didn’t sound friendly, but he didn’t quite sound like he hated me, either. This apparently was Simon making an effort. Now that I saw him up close, I noticed I’d misjudged his slovenliness this morning. The scruff he’d been cultivating recently had been tamed into a neatly trimmed beard that framed his jaw. Out here in the woods, the sunlight threw flashes of burnished red into his brown hair. He looked . . . better out here. “You’re going to want to take this lane back around, and where it curves to the left, there’s a side lane that goes . . .”

“I know.” I sounded more petulant than I wanted, but he wasn’t subtle about wanting me gone. “I can find it, thanks. I don’t think I’ll get lost in a couple acres of woods.” He didn’t need to know I’d been worried about that exact thing five minutes ago.

But I didn’t leave and neither did he, so we looked at each other uncomfortably until he finally sighed again. “Why are you here?” He sounded tired now, not exasperated.

“Um.” I looked around, as though maybe the answer were somewhere in the trees. “We’re all supposed to be here today, right?”

“No. Why are you here? At the Faire? Why haven’t you dropped out yet?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Because I committed to it. If I don’t do Faire, my niece can’t do Faire.”

He gave a long-suffering sigh. “We don’t actually hold people to that. It’s just a way that we make sure that the younger kids who sign up really want to do it. Surely you’ve noticed a bunch of parents have dropped out already.”

I had noticed that, but doing the same hadn’t even crossed my mind. I wasn’t about to admit it to him, but I was actually having fun. “Well, you know me.” He didn’t, but that to me made it even more passively-aggressively bitchy. “I like to help out my community.”

“But it isn’t.” He ran a hand over his jaw again, rubbing at the bristles on his cheek as though he could scrub them out. “This isn’t your community. You don’t live here.”