No Country for Old Gnomes

by Kevin Hearne

“Tennebruss?” Kirsi asked, suddenly feeling a heavy weight hanging in her heart. “That would be on the way to Bruding. Offi’s family is there…I need to tell them what happened. And that it’s safe for them to go home, because of what their son sacrificed.”

  King Gustave held out a hand. “Well, come along, then. We’ve got plenty of room and oodles of oatmeal and muesli. No one gets exploded or constipated on my watch!”

  Kirsi turned to Faucon, but before she could find the words, he smiled. “Go. See your people. And tell Offi’s parents that they should be proud. I shall take care of things here.”

  He held out his hand to shake, but Kirsi wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed, surprising him. “I know you will, silly,” she said. “To do otherwise would be against the law!”

  She also hugged Gerd, which the gryphon allowed, and Agape sighed as if she didn’t want a hug but knew it was inevitable. But, Kirsi noted, the offputting ovitaur hugged her back.

  “Write me from Qul!” Kirsi said. “Promise me!”

  “What will you do if I don’t?” Agape asked. “Fine me?”

  Faucon nodded gravely. “Most definitely.”

  Båggi was a bit too tall and broad for a hug, so to him she bowed. “I hope you enjoy your peace in the High Mountain Home, Master Biins,” she said. “You’ve earned it.”

  “Oh, my tidy tunics!” he replied. “You must know I will sing of you there. Perhaps on some fine day you will hear my song in the wind.”

  Before she could start crying, Kirsi clambered up into the centipod and selected a cushy bench. She was worried she would have to make royal conversation all the way to Tennebruss, but it turned out the king ate a huge vat of oatmeal with maple syrup and fell asleep, and Grinda had far too much work to do, sending out official notices via postale-service flamingo and gnomeric automaatti to all halfling forces in the Skyr, recalling them to the eastern side of the Rumplescharte River. So Kirsi watched the country pass by. It wasn’t as much fun without her friends, but it was rather pleasant to travel without being constantly threatened from alpaca-back. She did her best not to think about Offi, but…well, Offi was all she could think about, really.

  Once the dreary city of Tennebruss opened its gates, King Gustave and Grinda abandoned the royal centipod and let Kirsi continue on alone to Bruding, with only the oatmeal chef for company and some royal funds to arrange her travel from there back to the Skyr. She knocked on the door of the Lord Ergot Living Memorial Refugee Center and Ping-Pong Palace by herself, hoping the new lord would change the name of that place, since traitors should not be allowed memorials and refugees should not have to suffer Ping-Pong. The sadness of seeing Offi’s twin and giving his parents the bad news was balanced by the knowledge that she would be leading her people back to Pavaasik and away from Ping-Pong forever.

  “We’re full,” the human guard barked.

  Kirsi was pleased to hold up the king’s official writ, stamped with his official seal and bearing stains of his official oatmeal.

  “Not anymore,” she told him.

  “It’s rare enough that someone leads such a colorful life that they get a tube of paint named after them, but Offi Numminen was the only being goth enough to get a shade of black named in his honor: Offi Black.”

  —RASMUS LAMPPULA, in Art History of the Skyr, Revised & Expanded Edition

  “Thank you, Suppi. This hot nut pudding is delicious,” Onni said, grinning winsomely at an eldergnome, who blushed and giggled as if she were wee again.

  “Oh, no, Onni. Thank you. I don’t know how you found the nuts or the extra sugar or even how you convinced those wretched humans to give us an entire kitchen, but you’re the only reason we’re not eating gruel pudding tonight.”

  “And look how tidy your cardigan is!” another eldergnome said. “Neat as a pin, feed him pudding again, that’s what they always say. Your parents must be so proud.”

  Feeling warm down to his very toes, Onni looked to where Venla and Old Seppo sat together, heads bowed over the delectable pudding as if it were indeed the thinnest, coldest, least nutty of gruels. Seppo had been in a downward spiral ever since their hatch exploded, but that spiral became a swan dive when Offi disappeared. All this time and still no word. As each new group of refugees entered the Ping-Pong Palace, clutching their belongings and Lord Ergot’s complimentary cabbage rations and looking about at the bare walls in horror, Onni had welcomed them and helped them find their feet. But secretly, every time, he was looking for his twin, hoping for news of a black-clad loner hunching along the road, building machines and spouting adorable rage.

  They’d heard nothing.

  But the gnomes needed a leader, so Onni led, even as his heart felt as crumpled as an old, dirty pair of coveralls.

  Suddenly, the room went silent, and Onni heard dozens of gnomes swallow their mouthfuls of pudding and drop their spoons, in exactly that order. He looked up, expecting an angry human or possibly another contingent of refugees.

  What he saw was Kirsi Noogensen.

  She wasn’t exactly the same as he remembered her. Kirsi had been known for her neat cardigan, quick answers, and ability to get along with anyone. And surely she was that still, for all that she was road-worn and a bit dirty around the collar. But the way she stood—it was like she was taller than all the other gnomes and fierce somehow. She was also missing a rather large chunk of her beard. And when Onni looked in her eyes and saw the depths of grief there, he, too, dropped his spoon.

  “Kirsi?” he said, standing from his gnome-crafted chair.

  She gave him a weak and relieved smile and hurried to take his hands and perform a ceremonial nose-rubbing, which didn’t bode well.

  “Hello, Onni.” She swallowed hard. “That pudding smells nice. But we need to…I mean…are your parents here?”

  Onni walked her over to where Old Seppo and Venla sat. They hadn’t even looked up at the commotion, and they still didn’t look up, until Onni gently squeezed their shoulders.

  “Mama, Papa, this is Kirsi, from back home. She…has something to tell us, I think.”

  His heart was sinking fast, and it didn’t help when Kirsi reached into her pack and pulled out a medal. At first, Onni assumed it was somehow for him, because that’s how medals tended to work in his orbit. But this one was new and shining gold, and Kirsi laid it on the table with great reverence.

  KING GUSTAVE’S BEST GNOME IN PELL MEDAL, Onni read, tracing the letters with a finger. A rampant goat was stamped in the center, and when he turned the medal over, he saw his brother’s name chiseled in the shining gold.

  “Oh, Offi,” he murmured, his eyes filling with tears. For if the medal was here and Offi was not and the ever-cheerful Kirsi was crying, that could mean only one thing.

  “What’s he done now?” Seppo grumbled. “Invented a machine that makes medals? You tell that boy to come home and eat his gruel pudding, by dinkus. Giving his mother fits, he is. Nobody can keep their cardigan straight anymore.”

  Kirsi shook her head, making her glossy red beard wag. “No, Mr. Numminen. I’m so sorry, but Offi is…that is, he…”

  “He was a hero.”

  Spoons that had been picked up dropped again, and when Onni turned to the voice, he found a strange personage in the doorway, wearing a golden circlet and the fanciest duds he’d ever seen. The man’s eyes were a little strange and his teeth had obviously required extensive oral surgery and his ears seemed far too large, but still, Onni recognized his king. He immediately knelt, his head bowed. All the other gnomes followed.

  Kirsi said, “King Gustave, I’m glad you’re here. This is Offi’s brother, Onni, and his parents, Seppo and Venla Numminen.”

  “Er, hi,” King Gustave said, fidgeting a bit. “Turned out the earl in Tennebruss had some centipods they use for parades, so I just took them because they let me do stuff like that now, and I follo
wed you here to help with relocation. So, wow, y’all are intense. I never know what to do when people kneel. Should I kneel too? It’s so awkward. Please stand, and do stop clutching your sweaters as if I’m going to steal them. I don’t think they would fit and I don’t eat them anymore. Although that one with the boots on it is terribly fetching.”

  Onni stood, as did his parents. “We clutch our cardigans to keep them off the ground, sir. And I feel certain someone could knit up a nice cardigan for you, if you wish.” He was careful to keep his voice even and warm, for all that his innards felt colder than a shaved alpaca’s tummy.

  “Hey, I’d never turn down a brown sweater,” Gustave said, stroking his little beard. “But that’s not why I’m here. First of all, I wanted to see what’s so great about Ping-Pong, which is literally nothing. Secondly, I wanted to let you all know that I have personally dissolved a corrupt kanssa-jaarli and will be enforcing new laws to ensure the safety and continued unexplodedness of all gnomes in the Skyr. You guys can go home, and we’ll send help to rebuild any destroyed hatches.” He knelt before the Numminens and looked deeply into Onni’s eyes. “But most important, I wanted to make sure you knew that Offi Numminen saved our entire country. He saved my life, and he fought for the Skyr, and I don’t know if you guys put famous gnomes on muesli boxes or what, but he was a really great guy.”

  Old Seppo looked up, tears streaming down his face. “Was?”

  Kirsi put a hand on Seppo’s shoulder. “He jumped between an assassin and the king. He knew what he was doing and why he was doing it. He died happy to save his people. And he wanted you to be proud of him.”

  “I was always proud of him!” Seppo roared, throwing off Kirsi’s hand. The old gnome stood tall, or at least as tall as he could manage, his hands in fists and his moist eyes ablaze. “Offi was a great son, a great inventor. Sure, he was a little weird, but he knew we loved him. He knew!”

  “So proud,” Venla murmured, stroking the medal. “We were always so proud.”

  “I was cruel to him,” Onni said, head down, weeping. He went for his pack and pulled out a black cardigan, neatly folded, with bats embroidered on the pockets. “I told him he couldn’t wear this sweater he made. I was embarrassed that he was strange and ungnomeric. And he was so gnomeric that he died to save us. I’m an awful brother.”

  “Onni,” Kirsi said gently, taking the cardigan from him. “Please stop making it about you. This is about Offi and what he accomplished. And as the temporary kanssa-jaarli, I’m going to ask King Gustave to rename this place the Offi Numminen Center for Gnomeric Understanding. Let those humans who wish to celebrate gnomes come here to see our work and learn from us, and let those gnomes who perhaps don’t fit in come here to study, find their place in the world, and do great and possibly ungnomeric things.”

  “I totally rename it that thing you just said,” Gustave added in a kingly sort of voice, “and I kinda wish I’d thought of it first.”

  Onni hiccupped a sob and looked down at his empty hands. “So we can go home now?” he asked.

  “You can go—” Kirsi started.

  “You can—” Gustave said at almost exactly the same time.

  Kirsi bowed and gave Gustave an amused smile.

  “You can go wherever you wish,” the king finished grandly. “Although I wouldn’t recommend the terrible places, like Yglyk or even the area around the Toot Towers, which is just jam-packed with halflings and abattoirs. Like, just stick to this side of the Rumplescharte River. And stay away from any catacombs you might find, because leeches, my gnomey. Acid leeches.”

  Tucking Offi’s tear-damp black cardigan under her arm, Kirsi smiled at the roomful of gnomes and forgotten pudding.

  “I am here to lead you home,” she said, “and we’ll leave as soon as you’re ready. That is, when you’ve finished your pudding. And if there might be two more bowlfuls?”

  She looked at King Gustave and winked. Two young gnomes hurried to prepare bowls of steaming hot nut pudding and presented them to Kirsi and the king with much bowing and coquettish beard-swishing.

  “Hey, this stuff is pretty great,” Gustave said as the rich white pudding dripped down his beard and onto his velvet tunic. “Nutty but sweet. Hot and moist. A bit dribbly. But great.”

  “Of course it is,” Seppo said, his back now straight, his chin pugnaciously uplifted, and his eyes ablaze. “Gnomes made it.”

  Onni went back to his pudding, tracing his twin’s name on the medal with one finger.

  “He was pretty special, wasn’t he?” he asked Kirsi.

  She dabbed the pudding away from her beard and said, “Yeah, he really was.”

  “I really was,” a new voice said.

  With a squawk of surprise, Onni tumbled backward out of his chair, which mortified him for disrupting an important moment in gnomeric history. But no one seemed to notice. When he stood again, he found a ghostly blue shape standing quite close to Kirsi, who was grinning at the newcomer and the bat-covered cardigan he wore.

  “I’ve been waiting my whole life to be better than you at something,” Offi’s ghost said, poking Onni in the chest with a spectral finger that tickled a bit. “And now I’ve got the biggest medal of all.”

  “Can anyone else see you, or just me?” he asked.

  “Just you. And Kirsi. And King Gustave. There’s something about magic that just makes ghosts more ghosty, you know?”

  Onni swallowed hard. “N-no?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m your first ghost. But the good news is that I’m not going to haunt you forever or anything creepy like that. I just wanted to tell you something important before I moved on.”

  Onni sat forward, his skin all prickled over and his head and heart doing somersaults. “Yes, Offi. I’m listening.”

  “Oh, I already told you. It’s just that my medal is bigger than any of yours and I’m a public hero and all that. It’s my brotherly duty to rub it in.”

  Onni rolled his eyes. “Okay, Offi. Whatever. You win at dying.”

  Offi grinned. “I do. I do win at dying. And that is the most goth thing of all. Bye.”

  With that, Offi winked out of existence, leaving Onni with the feeling that he would be vaguely annoyed his whole life.

  “To Offi!” Kirsi called, raising her pudding spoon.

  “To Offi!” King Gustave bleated.

  “To Offi!” everyone else answered before slurping down their pudding.

  “To Offi,” Onni said, but he couldn’t be excited about it.

  His entire world had changed in the span of an hour.

  His twin was gone. Offi was a hero. The gnomes were free.

  Now Onni just had to figure out what to do with the rest of his life that would honor his brother’s sacrifice.

  “Can I see that?” he asked Kirsi.

  She slid the package across the table and smiled as Onni put on Offi’s black cardigan.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  High among the peaks of the Korpås Range, there were no elves or humans, no gnomes or halflings. There were only dwarves and gryphons and the creatures of the alpine meadows and woods. There were terraced fields of vegetables and herbs and there were lakes full of shining fish, and of course there were the Korpås trees, magic suffused in every grain of their wood.

  But there were no cities in the mountains—those were for the valleys below, for the dwarves who craved other things. Here, high above the clouds, there was only what the dwarves called the High Mountain Home, a huge tract of land in which individual dwellings or sometimes warrens were cut into the rock. And outside of these shelters were shelves of granite on which the dwarves spent much of their time listening to the wind murmuring the secrets of the world, and they sang to the wind in turn.

  But to make sense of the wind and to understand the bees, one’s mind and spirit must be at peace. When a dw
arf was young, the wind would let them read a chapter from the book of knowledge; to read more, they had to master themselves as adults.

  Many never got to hear the full story of the wind but instead made their own stories in the lowlands.

  Båggi Biins was going to hear the full story.

  He smiled as he climbed the long and winding road from Grundelbård to the High Mountain Home, showing the sentinels the bee and star engraved in his Telling Cudgel, returning their congratulations with heartfelt thanks, and introducing them to his new raccoon friend, whom he had named Ms. Herring, after her favorite pickled fish. He often needed to dash a tear from his cheeks, so happy was he.

  And when he reunited with his sister, Tåffi Biins, and his parents as well, he had so much news to share and brought them gifts of gnomeric hats woven from alpaca wool.

  They feasted and drank and talked and slept, and in the morning, Båggi was led to his own personal dwelling, a bachelor’s cove in the rock with a wind shelf that faced the south. On the slope of the hill above the shelf, he planted his Telling Cudgel of Korpåswood and told the bees that he would be very pleased if one day a queen came to establish a hive in the new tree it would someday become.

  Then he faced east and sang of his joy to be home and of his love for Pell and its many wonders. He turned south and repeated this, then to the west and the north, and then he sat on his shelf and waited. He was ready to listen and he was prepared to wait. When the sun reached its zenith, the wind tugged at his beard and then found his ears and began to whisper in them:

  A lady sleeping under a long enchantment disappeared from a tower in Borix, and no one but the wind knew where she was. Soon, the gusts confided with a chuckle, she would reappear in a distant land and Pell would never be the same.

  A governess named Hurlga returned to Songlen and King Gustave’s service. The king also recovered his minstrels from Bruding and there was much rejoicing of the hootenanny kind. Hurlga’s brother, Ralphee, returned safely to his masonry apprenticeship but could find no one willing to explain to him what exactly went on in a tooty bar.