Hammered

after you’ve had a couple Big Boys. I’m indebted to the owner, Tracy Quick, for a tour of downtown that included a rare glimpse of the old secret tunnels beneath the streets.
    You can find me at www.kevinhearne.com. I’m also on Twitter (@kevinhearne), and I hope to see you at a spiffy shindig of some kind. Maybe we’ll meet at a sci-fi/fantasy or comics convention, catch a glimpse of Neil Gaiman, and squee in ultrasonic stereo.
    Read on for a bonus short story from Kevin Hearne …

A Test of Mettle
    Already I am made wholly new. Though I probably do not look any different, I feel as if the world   must   see me in a new way now that I can see the world as it truly is. I am no longer a barmaid or a philosophy major but a Druid initiate, and it feels as though I have emerged from a long and febrile sleep in a poorly made cocoon. The name Granuaile MacTiernan hardly matters anymore; it is just something that people call me. The elemental, Sonora, calls me Druidchild, and that is who I am now.
      The cottonwoods drinking from the East Verde River are poets even without their leaves.
    Their branches speak to me of silence and death and a promised renewal that will come in its own season. And time is measured in those seasons, in buds and flowers and seeds, not in the gears of a clock or in the turning of a calendar page.
    Their rough bark speaks to me of wind and rain and protecting oneself from harm.
    Their roots are fingers that do not clutch but rather clasp in friendship, and they say to the soil: Here will I grow and be nourished for a span of seasons, and soon enough I will nourish you. All that is given shall be returned.
    I see that they are like Druids, and tears spill down my cheeks to think that now I am like them, and not the leech on this world I once was.
      It is good that I have this labor of Sisyphus to perform, else I think I might go mad in that British Tom o’ Bedlam way. I worry about Atticus. What if he doesn’t come back? But of course this is yet another test. All of it is a test, and all of it is beautiful, babbling madness. I have lost my coat of normality and am set naked in the wild—
    These are but wild and whirling words, my lord—
    //There// Sonora says in my mind, and my attention is drawn to a rock sloping gently out of the dark green waters of the East Verde River, a curling eddy downstream forming a whitecap like a shot of whipped cream on coffee. With Sonora’s guidance, sensed through the turquoise sphere at the base of my throat, I can feel the flow of water there, feel the gentle slowness under the rock, the place where a large crawdad has made its home. A crawdad from the Midwest that doesn’t belong on this side of the continental divide, an invasive species that’s been killing off the native fish by eating their eggs. Elementary school kids dumped them in here at the end of their crustacean unit, and their teachers, who should have known better, let them ravage an ecosystem in the process.
    I flick my wrist, and the baited line whips upstream with its lead sinker to drop into the current and drift past the rock. The fish guts on the hook call to the crawdad like a siren: It emerges from its shelter and latches on with its pincers, and I gently pull it out of the water to dangle it over a white bucket until its tiny brain realizes it is no longer in the water and it lets go. It joins dozens of its brethren there, and I feel a tiny pulse of satisfaction from Sonora.
    I smile until my cheeks hurt. Recycling can feel good, or conserving electricity, but it is nothing like this, receiving personal thanks from the earth for something you have done to help.
    Atticus has an expression that sounds a bit weird— » May harmony find you, «   he says, and people look at him like he’s trying to say   » May the Force be with you «   and failing—but now those words make perfect sense. That is the joy I feel, the fulfillment, the purity of thought and deed perfectly matched, the grateful acknowledgment and acceptance of my place on earth: It is harmony.
    I never knew it until today. My eyes blur at the enormity of my good fortune, and the river becomes an Impressionist canvas of water-soft edges and earth tones kissed by the sun.
    It is just as well Atticus is gone while I acclimate myself to these feelings. I have alternately giggled and wept since I got here, and he probably would doubt my fitness for Druidry—or my fitness for anything—if he saw how much my