The Princess Beard

by Kevin Hearne

  “What’s up with that?” Al had to ask. “You’re saying that like it’s an acronym, and elves are really not into acronyms. I’m kind of shocked that you are. Or is it about flatbread? Either way, you’re outlaws, aren’t you?”

  “No! PITA stands for the Pains in the Arse,” the female elf said. “Or so the humans told us in Cape Gannet when selling us these shirts. We fight for animal rights. They caught us spying on the EATUM operation and confiscated all our glitter and whoopee cushions. And, hooboy, you wouldn’t believe what they do here. They kill the otters with—”

  “Say no more.” Al bashed the lock with his sword a few times, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Finally, with a sigh of annoyance, he blew some elvish glitter into the lock and watched it crack open like an egg.

  The elves leaped from the cage, shrugged out of their robes to show their PITA shirts, and struck a pose, intoning, “Team PITA!”

  “So now what?” Al said. “Can we go? If you’re done…posing?”

  “I vote we follow the parrot riding the centaur,” the elf woman said, pointing up ahead. “Those guys really seem to know how to party. And by party, I mean take down this capitalistic paean to greed and unethical meat production.”

  Al watched all his friends up ahead, weapons out, running toward a phalanx of security guards.

  “If that’s partying, then let’s party,” he said.

  The other elves shouted, “PITA party!” but Al politely ignored that. And ran.

  It was perhaps the strangest moment of Tempest’s life so far, and she’d watched her father eat a unicorn once, starting with the end that wasn’t pointy. Along with the entire crew of their ship, she was running up the dock toward a dour industrial building of dirty brick, headed directly for a group of brawny men in matching black jerkins emblazoned with the words MAUL SECURITY. She noticed this as if in a dream, as if she’d been standing just behind herself, watching the inevitable occur with no way to affect the outcome. It wasn’t real until a beefy fellow in black with cauliflower ears was hacking at her with his sword, at which point she acquired a strange sort of laser focus, merged her dream-self and her watching-self into one body, and felt her lips curl into a bloodthirsty snarl.

  So this was a fight.

  A real fight.

  Not a barroom pie fight, not a friendly pirate skirmish, not being picked off by the swinging logs of madmen on a desert island, but a fight to the death between two groups of people who wanted diametrically opposite things and were determined to win or perish.

  Tempest’s arms became rock-hard bark, and without really thinking, she threw a forearm up to hack down at the man’s biceps before the sword could slice into her soft bits. Both her arms were armored in bark now, hard as a thousand-year-old redwood, and she swung wide and bashed at the fellow’s head, surprised and far too delighted to watch it cave in like a ripe melon.

  “Bloooood,” she cooed to herself.

  “What’s that?” Morgan called from a little bit away, where she expertly jabbed and parried with her rapier like a normal pirate, not one who was part murdertree.

  Tempest forced her tongue back in her mouth and stepped away from the man—oh, dear. The corpse.

  “Blood. Food! No, I meant good,” she said. “That’s it. I said good. As in, it’s good that this guy didn’t kill me. Need some help?”

  Morgan hadn’t taken her eyes off her opponent, thank goodness, so she hadn’t seen the doom Tempest had so casually wrought.

  “I’ve got it,” Morgan said, adding almost under her breath, “or not? Who knows? It’s a curse.”

  Tempest desperately wanted to know more about that odd little addendum, but a fight to the death wasn’t a great time for a heart-to-heart with the person who’d become her closest friend since leaving her sisters. She spun around to pummel a security guard harrying Hayu and one of his red-shirted friends, landing a branch across the man’s spine and driving him to the ground, where he flailed with his arms but not his legs.

  “That’s some weapon!” Hayn explained.

  “Well, I do have the right to bear arms,” she replied.

  The Maul Security lads were not as scary as Tempest had first thought—or maybe that was because the deck was stacked in the favor of The Pearly Clam. Whereas the dudes in uniform were all human and burly, the pirate crew had a similar number of effective humans with weapons plus a rearing centaur, an angry dryad, Milly Dread, back from otter duty and armed with a toilet plunger and an elf—no. Three elves now?

  Yes, that was what she was seeing. Fighting alongside Al, tossing out sneezing powder from one of his bags and kicking men in the groins, were two far more elfly-looking elves in ragged shirts that said PITA for some reason. Did they sell pitas or were they just militant enthusiasts, Tempest wondered?

  But there wasn’t much time to think about how young elves could be so easily radicalized by their love of flatbreads, as a new contingent of opponents was pouring out of the dour factory: workers. Dozens of men wearing MMA aprons appeared, holding improvised weapons that nevertheless boded poorly for otters. Sticks, long forks, rakes, pooper-scoopers, and sharp oyster shells hot-glued to broomsticks. Tempest would’ve been frightened if she’d still been mostly human—and if the workers had looked at all willing to fight. They exited the factory screaming, but the moment they were under the afternoon sun, they went silent and looked up at the sky like they hadn’t seen it in years. Knowing how poorly the MMA appeared to treat anything and everything with a pulse, it would not have been a surprise.

  “Are you having a stroke?” Tempest asked a man nearby, who clutched a broomstick covered in oyster shells. His eyes were huge, and his mouth flapped open and closed as he watched Vic spray a Maul Security man with tea so hot that his face melted off like a variety of pink crayons.

  “Dunno how to fight, missus,” he answered, his voice quite tremulous. “But the boss says it must be done, so I suppose…?” He looked back at the factory, turned to Tempest, and batted at her with his broomstick in a halfhearted manner. She snapped it in half with a mighty arm.

  “You should find a better job,” she said, fighting her instinct to pop off his head and suck out the goo inside as if his neck were a straw.

  “S’not a job,” he allowed. “S’prison. Penal colony. Work or get tossed into the sea. And the otters, mum.” He leaned in conspiratorially, which was a very foolish move. “They got a long memory for revenge.”

  As if to prove his point, a romp of otters romped out of the doors, blinked at the sunlight, focused on the crowd, squeaked squeaks of rage, and latched on to a variety of men in aprons, squealing and biting their disapproval into tender bits of flesh. Tempest sucked in a breath—well she knew that for all his cuteness, Otto had claws and teeth that could leave their mark. The otters could do a lot of damage once they were out of their cages, and they were going, very specifically, for the workers, most of whom weren’t fighting but were instead just hopping around and screaming apologies, their improvised weapons forgotten as the otters spat out chunks of ankle and various pinky fingers.

  “Don’t hurt the workers,” Tempest called to her pirate compatriots; she knew the otters weren’t listening. “These men are fighting against their will!”

  “Little does that matterrrr to me, lass!” Luc called as he tore off a Maul Security man’s ear with his talons. “If they fight us, they be enemies!”

  “They’re not fighting us, though,” Morgan called, dispatching one Maul Security guard and then catching her breath as she sought her next foe.

  All the men in black were on the ground, and most of the workmen who hadn’t managed to run away were grappling with otters. Tempest was surprised there weren’t more fighting men, but then she remembered: This island didn’t officially exist, it wasn’t on maps, and even if someone did stumble across it, they had to get through the magic barrier. Security wasn’
t going to be the highest priority for the MMA, because the MMA was set up to be entirely secret and never require defending.

  Luc must’ve come to the same conclusion, as he shouted, “Inside, crrrrew! Onwarrrrd!” And in true Luc fashion, he flapped ahead, leading the pack.

  Vic was right behind him, not even sweating from the fight, shoving thick oatmeal cookies into his mouth for energy. Al and his new elf friends were likewise unharmed and on the run, and Morgan appeared by Tempest’s side.

  “Your arms,” she said, gently touching one of Tempest’s branches—er, arms. “Does it hurt?”

  “They’re better for fighting,” Tempest explained. “They’ll go back to normal once we’re safe.” Even to her ears, it sounded like the truth. But she knew well enough that that particular truth had an expiration date. One day, possibly soon, they wouldn’t go back. With each use of her powers, the brown scaly patch spread farther up her wrist, and that transformation couldn’t be reversed. Still, she’d lost Brawny Billy, and she couldn’t let the otters or the others in her crew suffer anymore if she could stop it.

  Facing no more resistance, they ran into the factory and stopped short. It was not what they were expecting: It was a huge foundry of hissing steam and molten metal. There were no otters at all on the foundry floor; there were cannons being cast and pyramids of shot stacked and waiting to be crated; it was an armory, the fires for the forges producing the belching black smoke they’d seen. The MMA was in the arms business as well. No one was tending the fires at the moment, since the workers had come out to face them.

  “There has to be more,” Morgan muttered as she led the way across the foundry to double doors on the other side. Once she threw those open, she beheld a vast room like the foundry, but the scene was one of grisly horror. It was so much worse than Tempest had imagined. On the far side were stacks and stacks of drums, lined up on pallets and stamped with the word EATUM—the sheer amount of meat they represented made Tempest’s stomach turn. All along the left side were racks of cages full of live otters, sorted by size so that the big ones, the medium ones, and the little ones and babies were all spread out. Many a brown paw reached from one cage toward another, accompanied by soft, desperate mewling. Metal vacuum tubes were affixed at the back of each cage, which sucked out the occupants upon demand and deposited them on a conveyor belt with steep, slick sides that dumped the victims into a giant drum that whirred and clanked like a tornado of blades. The drum had three more tubes leading out of it to lower containers: one deposited hunks of bloody brown fur into a drum, another deposited bones, and the last was a huge vat filled with…Gads. Tempest didn’t want to look at it, or at the pink-stained conveyor belt that paraded out of it. The entire thing made her sick. At least she could tell it hadn’t been designed or built by gnomeric hands—it was a rough thing, ugly and ungraceful, with crooked beads of solder and rusty rivets, no doubt created from scratch in the foundry next door. The walls around the room included various tables, workbenches, aprons, and a variety of terrifying instruments that would’ve been at home in a butcher’s stall. When she turned away toward the otters and their terrified squealing, she could feel her cheeks going cold and wooden and hard with rage.

  “Who’s in charge here?” she asked, and her voice had the same ancient, soughing tone as her father’s last words.

  “Whoever it is, I bet they’re that way!” Morgan shouted, pointing at a large metal door that read ADMINISTRATION.

  “You therrrre!” Luc called to the red shirts of his crew, who always seemed to be hanging a little behind ever since their time on Mack Guphinne. “Rrrrelease the otterrrrs! Herrrrd ’em out o’ the gates! Get ’em to the ship, if ye can! Lurrrre ’em with chum if ye must!”

  As soon as the cages were open and the otters were streaking out the door, herded and abetted by the red shirts, Vic grasped the handle of the Administration door and heaved it open, his muscles bulging with the effort. Tempest noticed he had Brawny Billy’s machete as he held open the heavy door to let the rest of the crew pass through. They were all flush with victory. And why not? They’d bested the dock stevedores, destroyed the Maul Security guards, and cowed the workers—and without losing anyone or taking major damage. All that was left were these mysterious administrators, who would no doubt be cowering behind their desks and shouting for their managers.

  The hallway on the other side of the door was all stone, tall and wide and echoing. A reception desk stood empty aside from a small sign that said GLADYS IS AT LUNCH; BACK AT 2-ISH. Smaller doors opened off the hall beyond at regular intervals, their plaques reading SALES or ACCOUNTS PAYABLE or ADVERTISING or OTTER BONE POWDER TEST KITCHEN, which only made Tempest’s blood boil to sap. They checked each room but found them all empty, despite the fact that ink was still drying on inventory sheets and someone had made a new pot of coffee in Ye Olde Breake Room. Milly Dread attempted to snag a donut from a pink box, and Luc squawked at her.

  “Ye just passed the test kitchen, fool! I’ll give ye thrrrree guesses what kind of powderrrr’s on that donut.”

  For the first time ever, Tempest saw Milly Dread put back a piece of food without licking it.

  Soon they all stood before the final door, which was the equal of the giant one that had led to the hall. THE BOSS, it read. But when Vic flung it open, they faced a wide set of shallow stairs that climbed up many floors.

  “Why do you always have to pass so many levels to get to the big boss?” Milly Dread groaned.

  “Because some people always think they’re higher up than other people,” Qobayne answered her.

  “But that just means they’ve got farther to fall,” Tempest finished.

  From his perch on Feng’s shoulder, a ruffled Captain Luc said, “Speakin’ o which. Vic, lad, if ye need to stay behind and guarrrrd ourrrr flank, that would suit. Can’t have ye gettin’ stuck up therrrre. We need ye back on the ship.”

  Vic grinned with pride but shook his head. “Thanks but no thanks, Captain. There could still be more guys up there, and if so, you’ll need my magic. These steps aren’t too steep for me. I’d like to have a talk with this Angus Otterman guy and give him a piece of my hoof in his mind.”

  With that, Vic tried to leap dramatically up the stairs but found it woefully awkward. He had to sort of dance up, but he kept to the right so everyone else could hurry past him. They didn’t hurry too fast, though—everyone was aware that between his swole bulk and his tea magic, he was their finest fighter. So mostly they just slowed down and let Vic lead the way.

  The stairs hit a landing and turned, and that’s when the first arrow thwacked into play, taking Vic in the shoulder. Six more thwonked harmlessly into the wall.

  “Grah!” the centaur cried, throwing both of his arms forward in a veritable tidal wave of hot black tea. Tempest peeked around the corner and saw another dozen Maul Security guards in black armor, bristling with weapons that were currently useless, thanks to the fact that all the men were staggering and screaming things like “My eyes! My eyes!” and “It burns!” and “Where did this white-chocolate cranberry biscotti come from?”

  “Vic—” Tempest said, going for the bolt in his shoulder.

  He wrenched it out, tossed it on the ground, and shouted, “Don’t worry about me. We’ve got to take those guys down before they get their bows again!” And then he charged up the remaining stairs, hooves slipping everywhere, screaming as he pelted the security guards with bran muffins the size of melons. When he hit the next landing, the men were still too dazed and boiled to do much but stand there flailing as he struck out with fists and hooves, a one-centaur killing machine. By the time Tempest joined him, there was no one left to fight and a heck of a mess for the janitorial crew.

  “Be carrrreful now,” Luc warned them, flapping overhead. “The closerrrr ye get to the boss, the morrrre dangerrrrous his underrrrlings become!”

  As if on cue, just as the pirat
es had all navigated onto the landing and Vic had moved a bit up the next flight of stairs to make room, seven middle managers in black business jerkins rappelled from the ceiling far above, each one holding that rarest and most coveted weapon, a blunderbuss.

  “Now, see here,” the lead one said, hopping around a little as he awkwardly stepped out of his harness. “You are trespassing on private property, and since the security guards failed to roust you, I must now command you to leave the premises at once or face legal repercussions.” He turned his weapon on each of them, not quite sure whom to aim for, his hand shaking. All of the middle managers’ hands were shaking, Tempest noticed. The youngest one had donut crumbs and sprinkles all over his jerkin. There was very little room, after all, since the landings were generous but not designed to harbor so many people. Some of the managers had to perch awkwardly on the stair railings, holding on to their rappelling lines with one hand and their blunderbuss with the other.

  Tempest stepped forward, her wooden hands up. “Now, now. Let’s not be hasty and go shooting people. Do you have the property deed?”

  The man blinked. “The what now?”

  “You said it was private property, but I’ve seen no posted signs, so I’m requesting the property deed. Or any legal papers regarding ownership of this island and proper filing of form MYN1007, which would grant the island’s proper sovereign the right to defend his property from aggressive visitors and door-to-door sales-elves.”

  “Well…I…um…you see…” the man spluttered.

  Tempest gave her calmest smile. “Or perhaps your attorney is present? Or the property manager?”

  At that the man rose up on his tiptoes, attempting to look down at Tempest and failing. “I am the head accountant, madam, the senior administrator on staff, and I am ordering you to leave.”

  “As the captain, I’m disinclined to acquiesce to yourrrr demand,” Luc said, flapping his wings from Feng’s shoulder and giving the man a steely glare. “Means nope. So you and yourrrr juniorrrr accountants can drrrrop those guns and get out of the way orrrr face the wrrrrath of ourrrr wizarrrrd.”