by Kevin Hearne
But she found the rabbit woman’s eyes wide and soft with wonder as she beheld the inner walled garden planted in neat rows of green plants bursting with life, the scent of flowers and rich black loam floating on the air.
“Those vegetables! I’d noticed them before, but now that I’m…different…oh, they smell wonderful!”
“There’s leather down there, too,” Gustave assured them. “And a nice pile of rotted melons.”
“And chickens,” Poltro growled. “Of an indeterminate amount. ’Tis a dismal day indeed.”
“So is this Dark Lord going to mind us being here?” Fia asked, self-consciously pulling the cloak more carefully about her.
“Nah.” Argabella was almost skipping a little. “I told you—he’s very nice. Takes him a while to get to the door, but as long as you bring him something useful, he’s generally glad for the company.”
“Beware, though. The Dark Lord,” Poltro intoned, “does not suffer fools gladly.”
“But he suffers foods just fine. And he’s going to like the young asparagus I picked this morning. His always turns out a bit woody. I only wish we could’ve found some cheese.”
Poltro sighed and deflated a little. “I had some gold tied to my saddle. For food like that. But my nightmare steed is gone, vanished in the—oh. Wait. There he is. Good pony!” Snowflake waited patiently by the gate as if he were accustomed to having it opened for him by the local pooboy so that he might crunch upon his morning grain, a sentiment Gustave deeply understood. Poltro soon had the bag of gold off the saddle and the gate opened, although it was a bit dicey, what with Gustave trying to eat the saddle again and the chickens pecking at Poltro’s breeches for their own breakfast. The huntress eventually untangled herself from the reins, gates, and chickens but did require some help.
Now armed with gold, the group ventured into the nearby town of Dower, just a terrifyingly dark and poisonous wood away, where Argabella sniffed out the best cheese shop and crafted a gift basket of fragrant cheeses, dainty grapes, and the artisanal crackers she said Toby enjoyed most. Finally they stood on the doorstep of the tower, a respectful foot back from the Unwelcome mat, which Poltro claimed was a trapdoor to untold evil and/or the jam cellar. Before they could knock, a postman appeared, dropped a wad of letters on the mat, rapped on the oaken door, and fled before anyone could get a proper look at him.
Argabella reached for the letters, but Poltro stopped her with a hand.
“It is not wise to touch the Dark Lord’s mail.”
Argabella’s nose twitched. “I was just going to hand it to him, helpful-like.”
Poltro shook her head. “The Dark Lord found me rooting through his coupon flyers once.” She lifted her hair to show a jagged cut in her ear that left the lobe in two unattractive flaps. “Once.”
“And he slit your ear for that?” Fia bellowed, the veins standing out on her forehead in rage.
“Naw,” Poltro said, letting her hair fall back down. “He yelled at me, and I tumbled off the steps and landed on my back, and one of the chickens tried to pull out my earring, and I jerked away, and there it is. Mangled for life. You mess with the mail, you get mutilated by those clucking horrors.”
All this time, the sound of spectral footsteps could be heard, tapping down stone stairs as aged and somber as eternity, their middles bowed with the passing of the slippered feet of Dark Lords long past. It really did take an awfully long time, and several attempts at polite conversation were made, but then the sound of tripping and cursing would interrupt, and honestly, only so much time could be spent talking about what a lovely day it was before the day entirely ceased to be lovely.
At last, the sound of a lock snapped on the other side, and the carved wood door creaked inward just a crack.
“Who dares disturb my dark ruminations?” a voice croaked, deep and heavy with foreboding.
Everyone looked to Poltro, but the huntress had skulked around behind Fia and was busy staring at her black-rimmed nails. Oddly enough, it was tremulous Argabella who spoke first.
“Good morning, Crepuscular Lord, sir. I know it’s been five years since I’ve been around to visit, but you won’t believe the asparagus I’ve brought, along with other fine vegetables—”
“Give him the basket,” Fia whispered out the side of her frozen smile.
“Oh, right. The basket!” Smacking Gustave away from the fine ribbon he was chewing, Argabella picked up the now ribbonless basket and held it out to the yawning chasm of shadow.
“Is that—” The voice within coughed, cleared its throat, spat into the bushes, and then spoke in an utterly normal voice that wasn’t scary at all but rather smooth and affable like warm milk. “Is that manchego?”
The door opened farther, and out stepped a man who looked to Gustave, judging by his childlike excitement regarding the basket and his general body language, bereft of menace. The Dark Lord was slight and middle-aged, and his skin was pleasantly tawny with copper undertones. He had practically no chin, although something that very much wished to be a beard clung to a tiny moon of flesh that had grand aspirations of chinniness. His eyes were a cheerful if dull brown, not at all the lightning-lit violet or lava-rock black one might expect. Above them, his eyebrows were apparently trying to race his beard for supremacy, as they were bushy with antennalike bits waving around.
“It is manchego,” Argabella said. “And some of those crackers you like with the seeds placed on them by artisans. And a little pot of something jammish, possibly made with dragonfruit.”
She held out the basket, and the Dark Lord took it and giggled. “Oh, goody! This’ll be the perfect amuse-bouche for the grand luncheon upstairs. If you’d all care to join me?”
He looked around from face to face and settled on Gustave, who swallowed the last of the ribbon like a noodle and said, “You’re going to amuse us with boots? Now we’re talking.”
The Dark Lord’s eyes lit up as much as dull brown things can.
“Did that goat,” he asked, “just talk?”
“How observant of you,” Gustave answered. “The name’s Gustave. Now about those amusing boots?”
“Toby, might I introduce my, er, friends,” Argabella said, sounding more confident than she had thus far. “Fia, Gustave, and I believe you already know Poltro.”
Toby’s face abruptly contorted as if he’d been painted by a Cubist living on nothing but weltschmerz and absinthe. “Poltro! Where are you hiding, girl? And did you bring me the farm boy’s—” He paused, his lips twitching. “The farm boy’s herbs. In the specially made herb box.” As he said it, he made little quotation marks with his fingers.
Fia stepped aside to reveal the cowering huntress.
“Ah, yes, my Dark Lord. Well, no, actually. Don’t know much about herbs, to be honest. Argabella found some greenish things, though, so maybe that’ll do you.”
Toby shook his head and stepped closer. “No, Poltro. Remember how I sent you out on an errand to find a certain farm boy who thought he was The Osen-chay One-way, and you were supposed to bring me his ill-stay eating-bay eart-hey?”
Poltro looked befuddled and in profound need of rescue. Gustave rose to the occasion. “He means the dead kid’s heart. And no, we didn’t bring it, because that’s nasty.”
“And rude,” Fia added. “Especially since we were hoping you might bring him back to life.”
Toby raised an eyebrow. “But I wanted him dead.”
Fia also raised an eyebrow. “Well, he is. For now.”
Toby’s face lit up like a firefly’s fundament. “Excellent! Poltro, my huntress, we must celebrate! We must feast! This is your first major success!” He wrapped an arm around Poltro and steered her toward the stairs, shoving her upward. She skittered up a few steps like an ant avoiding the crush of a merciless heel, and he followed, so she kept on skittering. The entire party trotted behin
d, curious to see how things would play out and if there might be any extra cheese to go with the delectable smells wafting from the top of the tower.
The stairs were so many and so steep that no one had the breath to explain the farm boy’s current situation further. Whether for fear or asthma, Poltro didn’t admit that the farm boy’s demise was not reflective of her murderous capabilities. Upward and upward they labored, hundreds and hundreds of stairs. Gustave clattered up behind them, helpfully ejecting a trail of pellets out his back door in case someone should get lost and require a reminder of the way out.
Halfway up the tower, the scent of the food reached peak deliciousness and pulled the humans forward with more alacrity. When at last they burst onto the floor of Toby’s dining room, there was some confusion as to whether or not they’d all simultaneously died of exhaustion and landed in the same heaven.
The long, wooden table was simply covered in food, drink, and unnecessarily ornate candelabras. Flagons of wine twinkled like liquid gems, and greased-up birds were suggestively splayed on pewter platters, onions and apples spilling from their assorted orifices. An entire peacock somehow had been emptied out, cooked, and stuffed back inside its own gorgeous plumage, and it didn’t look particularly happy about the situation. A centerpiece of artfully arranged hedgehogs and turtles quivered but did not seem edible or interested in mating. Tiny moist quails, lollipops of lamb, and a pile of baby chickens that appeared to have been fried whole, feathers and all, lolled on their plates. Quivering cubes of meat sat upon particularly small plates, and wee whole fish rested upon large plates scribbled over with glimmering sauces. Watermelons carved as warships carried bananas in full armor, sailing on seas of aspic and gelatin and compote. Truncheons of roasted vegetables, cauldrons of savory dips, skulls of fondue, and tureens of glistening soup waited, their ladles practically begging to be used. Pâté jiggled, pork gelatin wiggled, and fig jam figgled.
“Where are the blasted boots?” Gustave complained. “This is the worst lunch I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s magnificent,” Argabella breathed, her nose quivering with keen arousal. “Toby, you’ve really outdone yourself this time.”
“Where are the other guests?” Fia asked, clutching her cloak to her chest and trying not to drool.
“Other guests?” Toby sat down at the head of the table and looked up at her curiously. “What other guests?”
Fia gesticulated at the laden table. “This is enough food for an army.”
“This is enough food for me,” Toby said warningly. “Be glad you brought the cheese and crackers.”
The party gazed at him with existential despair as he sat down, stone-faced, and tucked a napkin into his neckline before a spread that was many times the size of a human stomach. Eventually he could bear it no longer, and he laughed, pointing at them. “You should see your faces! Priceless! No, of course you must join me. Please, be seated and fall to!”
And then they dined.
Fia asked so many questions regarding what was and was not fried in animal fat that Toby cast an enchantment enrobing all the vegan items with a greenish glow. She began with an assortment of blistered folk seaweed, inhaled a sublimated plum bun, then annihilated a platter of sheltered orecchiette. Her every action was shrouded in some sort of violence.
Poltro took advantage of the glow to freely plunder the many meaty delicacies, such as the ox marrow bombs glazed with snail paste and exploded salt, the sungold fish dumplings steamed in butter smoke, and the invigorated ham jam for which Borix was famed throughout Pell. The Dark Lord demanded that she put on a lobster bib when she threatened to destroy her fine costume with a distressed anchovy dressing.
Argabella made no beef about her current disinterest in meats but instead quietly joined Fia in enjoying the vegetarian offerings. She started with a winter acorn and hand-rubbed arugula toss, followed with a naïve kimchi medley, then graduated to a frightened farfalle swimming in tormented eggplant liqueur and surprised truffle drippings. She nibbled and moaned in turn, her whiskers twitching happily.
Gustave was given an old boot, once bespoke and very chic but now used and soleless; the Dark Lord claimed it was too expensive to be thrown out even though its mate was long gone.
“This is the finest boot I’ve ever beheld or smelled,” Gustave whispered. “I can practically taste the brains in which the leather was tanned. And there’s a soupçon of foot sweat impregnating the uppers. Mmm.”
“What are these?” Fia asked, pointing to a big platter of circular breads topped with savory fillings and crumbles of cheese.
“I call them take-Os,” Toby said proudly, rolling one up and stuffing it in his mouth. After a moment of chewing, he sighed blissfully. “Because they’re circles that you can take with you. My own invention.”
“They’re called tacos, and you didn’t invent them,” Gustave said, midboot.
“I can turn you into gravlax,” Toby warned.
“Bleat,” Gustave said. “Or baa. Whatever. I’m very impressed with your take-Os.”
At some point, they all fell back in their chairs, clutching their bellies and groaning. Only Toby continued in his gustatory glory, drowning something fried in duck fat in a piquant dipping sauce accented with a sprinkle of fondled pine nuts.
“Now that you’ve dined, I have bad news, my friends,” he said between bites.
“There’s another course?” Fia moaned.
“Or another curse?” Argabella asked. “It was in the food, wasn’t it? And it’s going to turn us into newts?”
Toby smiled, gratified to finally have someone besides hedgehogs and turtles to share his meal and also pleased that they thought him capable of turning them into newts. “Neither. It’s just that…well, if I understand correctly, this farm boy, Worstley, is dead?”
“Really dead,” Fia said.
“Like, ostentatiously dead,” Gustave added. “Eyes open. Tongue hanging out. Bones in places bones shouldn’t be. Smells worse than normal.”
Lord Toby rubbed his hands together with glee.
“And Poltro, this was your doing?”
All eyes looked to the huntress, whose face was smeared with an expressed sardine and ramp reduction. “Er,” was all she managed.
“I fell on him,” Fia finally admitted, “while trying to enter the sleeping castle. It was an accident.”
“And he just died, easy as that?”
“Well, judging by the bones poking out of his mushier bits, I don’t think it was easy for him,” Gustave said.
Toby licked a finger and held it up, cocking his head as if listening for a far-off song. “Yet I sense that the winds of destiny have not changed course. Which means that either this Worstley was not actually the Chosen One, or that he’s not really dead, or that whoever proclaimed him Chosen was lying.”
“It was Staph the pixie,” Gustave offered. “And honestly, she didn’t strike me as particularly trustworthy. She had only one sock.”
Toby stroked the thing that he probably thought of as a beard. “Her fashion shortcomings are legendary, but when it comes to the bequeathal of auras, Staph is never wrong. The boy must be revivified. Alas, my powers are not yet strong enough to accomplish that sort of thing. If I consorted with the darkest of forces, I could probably turn him into some sort of shambling, brainless zombie—”
“Nature beat you to it,” Gustave mumbled under his breath.
“But that sort of creature could never fulfill the destiny of the Chosen One. I will require an influx of power.” Toby cracked his knuckles and turned to Gustave with an air of destiny. “Goat of many magicks, will you agree to act as my familiar?”
“What does that entail, exactly? More boots?”
Toby grinned a dark grin. “You will be bonded to me, body and soul, our auras merged in the service of the Dark Lord’s otherworldly powers.”
&n
bsp; “Um,” Gustave sputtered. “How about no?”
Looking flustered but still somewhat hopeful, Toby looked to Argabella. “Would you, Argabella, consider cleaving yourself unto me?”
“I think maybe you’re getting a bit too familiar,” Fia growled.
“What? Toby, no,” Argabella said, drawing back from the table. “Gross.”
“But if I had a true magical familiar,” Toby started, sounding pretty whiny for a Dark Lord, “I could bring the Chosen One back to life! Be a real necromancer! Grow a real beard!”
“We’re people,” Argabella argued. “Not animals. I’m sorry your turtles and hedgehogs never worked out their differences, but…that body-and-soul-binding business just sounds icky. I like you, but not in that way.”
Toby’s shoulders slumped, which seemed to be their normal mode. “Well, then. The bad news is I can’t help you.”
“That’s okay,” Argabella said, a dark look in her eyes. “We’ll just go see Grinda the Sand Witch instead, and perhaps she has the right sort of powers. She’s the one who enchanted the castle, after all, so she owes me. Waking up a farm boy should be nothing for someone that impressive and powerful.”
The look on Toby’s face suggested that he was considering smiting her for assuming that Grinda was more powerful than he was, but then he started thinking out loud, which made Gustave deeply uncomfortable. When humans began to think out loud, they often confessed their interest in doing horrible things, especially to nearby succulent goats.
“Hmm. I can’t smite the rabbit girl, considering how often she used to bring me mail and cheese before the whole curse thing. But this Grinda is definitely a problem. Grinda. Hmm. Where have I heard that name before? Grinda…Grinda the Sand Witch…Grinda the Sand Witch of Malefic Beach, aunt of the Chosen One and possessor of a terrible postman!”