Kill the Farm Boy

by Kevin Hearne

  “Wow. Did that just happen?” Worstley gagged, trying to wave away the pixie’s parting gift.

  “Sure did,” the billy goat said. “Say, why don’t you begin your quest to change the world by giving me something good to eat for a change. Go in the house and fetch your father’s boots. They smell delicious.”

  At the sound of the goat’s voice, Worstley whipped his head around so fast that he heard something pop in his neck. “So I wasn’t imagining it. You really can talk now.”

  “Boots, Pooboy. Now. Read my lips.”

  “Your lips don’t match your words very well.”

  “Goat lips are different, aren’t they? Now hurry up.”

  Worstley wasn’t about to argue with a goat—no, wait. He totally was.

  “Forget that noise! You heard Staph. I’m the Chosen One. That means I’m done with this barnyard. Done with you. Done with this life! I’m going to go to that tower and things are going to be better. I’ll be able to go up to the baker in town and ask for a slice of real cake! The fancy kind, with frosting and no mold!”

  Gustave snorted. “You really ought to think that one through, okay? You have trouble defending yourself against me and a couple of geese. You have no weapons and no armor. You’re like, what, ninety pounds? World out there is gonna crush you.”

  “Nah, it’ll all work out. I was chosen. I have a destiny. You’ll see.”

  “No, I really won’t. I’m staying right here, where it’s safe.”

  “Okay. Stay if you want, but my parents are planning to eat you in a couple weeks. Mom won’t shut up about all the curry recipes.”

  Gustave stared at Worstley so long that the farm boy thought the goat had lost the ability to talk.

  “You know what?” the goat finally said. “I’m tired of this barnyard, too. Can’t remember the last time I saw a she-goat. Maybe they’re all in that tower we’re supposed to go find. An entire tower of goatly delight. Sweet nannies galore.”

  “Yeah! Let’s go! I just need to pack a few things.”

  “Don’t forget your father’s boots.”

  Worstley’s parents, unfortunately, were less than understanding about his announcement that he was off to seek his fortune as the Chosen One, anointed by Staph the pixie. A bit of flailing and wrestling ensued as they tried to lock him up in the root cellar “for his own good,” but when Gustave intervened and told them to let him go, they tried instead to set the goat aflame.

  “Evil magic!” his mother shrieked. “Evil in our home! Kill it with fire!”

  Worstley’s father let him out of a choke hold and dashed to the hearth, fetching out a burning branch.

  “Get thee gone, demon!” the decrepit and toothless thirty-two-year-old man shouted, waving his torch.

  “Y’all are intense,” Gustave said, backing out the door and dropping a batch of emergency plops in self-defense. Worstley’s father followed, and then came Worstley himself, all gangly limbs and wild eyes, clutching a loaf of bread and a jar of pickled herring. The goat and the boy quickly outpaced their elders down the road toward the village.

  “That’s all you got?” Gustave said, eyeing Worstley’s bundles and trying very hard to frown but lacking the proper facial musculature.

  “I just grabbed what I could on the way out the door.”

  “You could have gotten the boots!”

  “He was wearing them, and he wanted to burn you alive.”

  “That’s no excuse. You just had your arse anointed by an honest-to-gods pixie. You ought to have better luck than this.”

  “Well, I’m sure we’ll do better in town. Look at the sky. The clouds are parting for once! It’s an omen, Gus!”

  “Or it’s just weather. And again, the name is Gustave.”

  “Fine, Gustave it is. But I think you’re both right and wrong. You’re right that I should have better luck. And I will, when there’s something I truly need. I don’t need my father’s boots—”

  “Yes, you do. You need to give them to me.”

  “No, I don’t. I need to go to that tower and score the first notch in my hero’s belt. And once I’ve got that experience, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to find Lord Ergot and make him pay for killing Bestley. Because a Chosen One sets things right.”

  “I thought a Chosen One just leaves a trail of blood and chaos behind him.”

  “What do you know about it? You’re a goat! You’re wrong about that—and wrong about the weather, too, which is what I meant to say before you interrupted me! That break in the clouds is an omen! Of justice! Of light beating back the darkness! Of the dawn of the age of Worstley! Does that not sound noble?”

  “It sounds like an era of shame and incontinence.”

  Worstley scoffed. “You have no ear for poetry.”

  “Maybe not, but I have an ear for nonsense.”

  “I was chosen. Wait and see.”

  “I don’t have to wait to see that you’re putting too much faith in a drunken pixie.”

  “Wrong again.”

  But Gustave was right—about the weather, at least. It soon began raining in a very nonmagical style. There were no rainbows, no leprechauns, and, after a few brief moments, no gleaming sun parting the clouds. Just a boy and his goat taking their first muddy steps toward a moist, squelching destiny.

  The Dark Lord took a break from studying the esoteric movements of the magical spheres of portent and went to the cupboard for some crackers. Lo, he found none. And he was very angry.

  “Dementria, where the gadzooks are the crackers?” he shouted into the night, and then wondered if he should have said “zounds” instead.

  When no answer wafted his way, he glared at the hourglass, forgetting when last he’d turned it. It was probably past six, and his wizened servant had already departed for the night.

  “The world is a terrible place,” Toby said to a hedgehog squatting sadly in a cage on the table. “What’s the point of being a potentially all-powerful wizard if you can’t even have cheese and crackers when you really, really deserve them?”

  The hedgehog merely tightened into a bristly ball and said nothing, seeing as how Staph had not visited and bestowed the gift of speech upon it. Even if she had, the hedgehog mostly would’ve whimpered, having been the subject of Toby’s wizardly attentions all day. And then the hedgehog would’ve uncurled, poked a tiny finger in the wizard’s chest, and explained that hedgehogs and box turtles couldn’t mate, and even if they could, shoving them at one another and shouting at them for hours wasn’t exactly considered seductive. The turtle, for his part, was playing dead, and rather convincingly. The hedgehog liked the turtle better that way, but she still had a boyfriend back home in the garden and wasn’t interested.

  “I AM THE ALL-POWERFUL DARK LORD, AND I WILL HAVE CRACKERS!” Toby shouted, green bolts of magic issuing from his fingertips and leaping to a nearby platter, where something almost exactly like crackers appeared in an artistic sort of arrangement. Unfortunately, one of the green bolts also hit the cage, and its energy traveled all along the metal and wound up shocking the nethers of its occupants. The hedgehog squeaked in anger. That was not the way to turn anyone on. The turtle, for his part, just crackled a bit. Turning away from his recalcitrant captives, Toby fetched a wheel of cheese from his magical cabinet and began paring off slivers to eat with his almost-crackers.

  “If you two would just breed like reasonable creatures,” he said to the hedgehog, “I’d have the magical familiar I require to fully access my abilities, and then I could conjure real crackers. The kind with seeds placed on them by artisans. Or maybe the seeds were grown by artisans. Regardless, they’d be artisanal. Because I’d have an armored, spiny, talking turtlehog familiar, and my magic would be boundless, and I could lure the finest cheesemongers to my very door. No more ordering from catalogs!”

  He took a bi
te of cheese and pseudo-cracker and munched thoughtfully, almost-crumbs peppering his almost-beard. He stroked it—what few pathetic hairs there were—and his spirits sank. If only he had a beard, he wouldn’t need the turtlehog. He would already have the magic he desired, and he’d be able to summon true crackers from the aether—and a lot more. Darkness! Storm clouds! Storks! But he had to admit, at his ripening age, that such a beard would never be his unless he managed to stumble across a particularly hirsute dwarf corpse while holding a very sharp knife in an area with little foot traffic.

  There were many such ways to become a true wizard if one was born with the knack, but they all depended on something random, dangerous, or impossible. Among them: connect with a mystical animal that agreed to be your familiar; grow a stupendously long beard; find a crystal wand; be blessed by a pixie; fall into a vat of glowing green spiders; or climb a beanstalk and steal a golden goose. Thus far, Lord Toby had utterly failed to secure the means to really pump up his power and make his dreams come true. He’d never left this little corner of Pell, as he’d heard the ill-kept roads were chock-full of highwaymen and unsavory halflings. Even his decently fat purse wasn’t enough to secure a true crystal wand, and so he’d spent years trying to breed strange animals while hunting for beard oils and unguents to encourage follicle growth, but it was all for naught. His oily little goatee would barely look respectable on a billy goat. And he hated billy goats, except to eat.

  It might be time, he thought, to figure out some other career. His father—the elder Toby, a true Dark Lord with a luxurious beard—had died in a freak pitchfork accident, cutting short a life of macabre magnificence, and Toby was now that same age and had accomplished not nearly half so much. All his life, Toby had longed to follow in his father’s dread footsteps, save for the last one on the pitchfork. But until his magical powers were secured, he couldn’t print DARK LORD on his stationery without summoning the wrath of the Council of Merlins. Privately calling himself the Dark Lord, however…well, that would be hard to give up. He might have to grow accustomed to being merely an Ominous Adept. And perhaps he needed a convertible carriage with a bespoke leather interior to distract him from this disappointment.

  Just then, a sonorous bell rang, echoing around and up the jet-black stones of the Dark Lord’s tower. Toby perked up, straightening his robes and smoothing the crumbs from the embroidered stars on his velvet lapels.

  “Ah,” he said, drawing himself up tall and looking very wise. “ ’Tis the mail.”

  Ignoring the traumatized creatures in the cage, he clambered down the stairs of his tower, noting that towers were really a very stupid kind of building, as they required three times as many steps as anything else, and one day, if all went well, he would be a white-bearded wizard and fall down and down and around and break his back and die in a puddle of wizard blood. This time, at least, he made it down all six hundred thirteen steps to throw open the carved oaken doors to reveal neat rows of roses and hedges and a very angry male hedgehog and an Unwelcome mat.

  “Who dares disturb the might—”

  But the mail carrier was long gone, considering it had taken Toby nearly half an hour to navigate his own home. There on the step he found a packet of missives filled with dark tidings, including several bills and foul solicitations for charity. One letter stood out, and he slit the wax seal with a particularly creepy pinkie nail he’d grown out long for just such an occasion.

  “Dear sir or madam,” it began. “Dost thou have the power to kill thine enemies? For I need just such a wizard.” Toby brightened considerably, pleased that word of his powers—or almost-powers—had spread. But when he read, “Payment shalle be in chickens,” he ripped the letter in half and set it on fire with a candle guttering in a sconce in his foyer. He hated chickens. The ones in his barnyard were exceptionally awful. They wouldn’t breed with hedgehogs, either. The only worse payment than chickens was exposure, and Toby didn’t like to talk about his seamy past in the Lordling of the Month calendars.

  The last letter seemed rather promising, being heavy in the sort of way that indicated it might contain actual currency, but Toby quickly noted that it was addressed to someone else, a “Grinda the Goode Witche” who lived at Malefic Beach, whereas Toby lived at Malefic Reach; it was a simple enough mistake. Weighing the bundle in his hand, Toby stroked what little beard he had.

  “The Dark Lord does what he will,” he finally said, and there was no one around to suggest that perhaps the Dark Lord shouldn’t open someone else’s mail.

  Unfortunately, the letter’s weight wasn’t owing to a bundle of writs or deeds or the secret recipe for Glandalf’s Great Goatee Growing Grease. No, the envelope, in fact, held the most horrific thing the Dark Lord could imagine: a very detailed letter of woe. “My Dear Systere Grinda,” it began. “Woe unto Usse, for Worstley hath runneth offeth. He is our last remaining Sonne, and who shalle now Clean up the Dungg?”

  Normally, Toby would’ve stopped reading immediately, but something caught his eye in the next sentence: “He hath told Usse he is the Chosen One and taken with him our Laste Foine Goat, which is truly an Evil Creature, as it hath begunneth Talking, and spraying mine floore with Panic Shite.”

  Mesmerized, Toby read on, wincing at the horrible grammar and utter abuse of capital letters and extra Es. After several pages of ranting and bemoaning her many recipes for goat stew that would never be used and the loss of an important bottle of fish, he had learned one fact that now overshadowed even his need for crackers and a proper turtlehog empire: the boy, Worstley, had been designated the Chosen One. Toby was very familiar with Staph the pixie and her proclamations. It was she who had first suggested that he “go home to grow his beard and fiddle with his pillar,” which was obviously a reference to his future as a wizard living in a properly terrifying tower.

  He had followed her suggestion immediately, and he still wasn’t done fiddling with his tower. He had many improvements to make, in fact, and assumed he’d be fiddling with his tower and grooming the shrubbery around it until he was a doddering old man and his tower was falling down.

  Staph, for all her unpleasantness, was never wrong.

  And that meant…there was a Chosen One.

  And one of the many unusual ways to become a fully puissant wizard involved possessing the heart of a Chosen One.

  It seemed like a ghastly way to breed magic, but Toby wasn’t complaining. After all, there were other benefits to killing a Chosen One, so he’d be doing a public service.

  For one thing, Chosen Ones were very bad for business. One couldn’t have them mucking about, seeking their destinies and screwing up everything for the hardworking folk who didn’t think they were the center of the world. Whether or not they succeeded on their quests, Chosen Ones upset the status quo, and Toby the Dark Lord was rather happy with the status quo at the moment. Maybe not as related to crackers, hedgehogs, and turtles, but when it came to the current political climate, the common man was prospering. On one side of Toby’s tower, the king of Pell was a silly, unambitious man who paid more attention to liquor and horses than to his actual kingdom. And on the other side, the fatuous Earl of Borix was resting, as it were, under a sleeping spell. Lord Ergot of Bruding was mostly running things while the earl was napping, and Lord Ergot was quite easily bribed when one needed a wee favor, at least in regards to building codes and tower improvements.

  Peace and quiet and magic. That was what a Dark Lord wanted. Or quiet and magic and a thriving market for crossbred animals. Get a bunch of Chosen Ones running about unchecked, and one of the lot was certain to start gunning for the Darkest Lord around, assuming he had all sorts of terrible plans to call forth demons from the underworld and steal princesses and…honestly, that was just a lot of work. Toby was quite content, and that meant he now had one goal: kill the farm boy.

  For the general economy, of course. For the good of the people.

  And
if the Chosen One’s heart should disappear, most likely no one would notice.

  They’d be too busy cheering to have the wicked little busybody safely out of the way.

  “Poltro!” Toby shouted, stepping carefully over his unwelcome mat to glower in the direction of his barn.

  Part of the Dark Lord’s contentment stemmed from a tidy insurance settlement (they paid double for pitchfork accidents) that had financed many improvements in his demesne, as well as a few servants bound to his land. Dementria went home at night to soak her bunions, but his own un-Chosen farm boy shared the hayloft with his sister, Poltro. The girl appeared now, cutting a charming figure as she leapt from the barn’s double doors. Her livery was all black, her sword and dagger hanging at her side as her cloak swept dramatically behind her. Her hair, dark as a raven’s wing, rippled back from an olive brow, her eyes as sharp as an eagle’s. Toby had paid handsomely to have her fostered to a huntsman named Cutter, and as he watched her approach, he felt that his money had been well spent.

  Right up until she tripped over a chicken and fell on her face in the muck.

  “Cor,” she muttered, sitting up on her knees to wipe chicken dung from her lips. “I bloody hate chickens. Stealthy things, they are.”

  Toby’s fingers twitched, but he used his hard-won control to firm them up into a fist.

  “Poltro, I’ve a job for you,” he said, sounding mysterious and magnanimous.

  She stood, wobbling, and tried to wipe the various stains from her costume. “Hope it ain’t chickens,” she said. “Never trust ’em, what with their poky beaks. And their buttfruit. I tell you, sire, it’s unnatural, eggs is.” She cocked an eyebrow. “But if it’s eggs you want, I have a source.” Her eyes slid over to a chicken coop. “You didn’t hear it from me, but I find a bucket of eggs by the henhouse every morning. I do suspect foul play.”

  Toby swallowed hard and counted to ten. Between her brother and Poltro, Poltro was still the better bet. And the job he had for her was a tricky, delicate thing. He beckoned her closer, and Poltro managed to make it across the yard without tripping on another chicken, although she did have quite a standoff with a sheep. Finally, she stood before him, cloak thrown back to undulate in the wind.