Etienne de la Fee was a few inches shorter than Griffen and much thinner, with a dusky skin that an artist might have called olive, attesting to a heritage mixed from several different lines. His tightly curled hair, cut fairly short, spoke of African descent, but the color, dirty blond, attested to at least one European ancestor. His wide, light brown eyes had a wild look in them, but he spoke in the calm, loping cadence of a lifelong Louisianan. Though the morning weather was relatively cool, about the middle fifties, he wore olive khakis and a bronze-colored polo shirt. "Been decades since the Krewe of Fafnir was last active, but it was time to get it goin'. Seems as though you the man to help make it all happen again. Been nothin' to it, gettin' it all together again, like it never stopped. Mardi Gras is big business in N'awlins, Mr. McCandles. Everybody's excited to see it back up and going. Already started, a lot of it. You can see the lead float over dere, just about done." Etienne pointed to a corner. Griffen almost jumped out of his skin to see an enormous gold dragon with a curling purple tongue jutting out between lips lined with fire-engine red and rows of pointed white teeth longer than his hand. Smaller dragons jutted out around it as if they were its young riding on its shoulders. A young woman with a long black ponytail and clad in a paint-stained denim shirt outlined the dragons' scales with brilliant green. "Dat'd be the float you'd be ridin', right behind me and the committee. We'd be on horseback, of course."

"Wow!" Griffen said, admiring the dragon. "That looks real!"

"You know anybody like dat?" Etienne asked, curiously.

"No, I mean, it looks like it could get up and fly around," Griffen said hastily.

Etienne smiled with understandable pride. "These artists here are some o' de best o' de best workin', Mr. McCandles." His manner of speaking came from the deepest reaches of the Cajun backcountry, so that he tended to drop or soften consonants.