by Eric Ugland
Still a bit short though — unless I stood in the exact center of the room, I had to hunch over.
There were people in the room.
Two other women sat in the overstuffed chairs, one of them with a slim book in her hands, the other knitting something that maybe was a hat. Or a little fox. It might have been a fox hat. They both looked up at me, then back at what they were doing.
Bixby came through, muttering as she brought the door back in place. She set a few things to the side, and then pushed me out of her way so she could plop down in one of the comfy chairs.
“So this is the duke?” the book lady asked. She was rather plump, with a friendly face. At least, it seemed like her face might have been friendly when she wasn’t mad. At present, her eyes narrowed on me, and I had the feeling she was only holding the book as a prop, that she had a finger ready to shoot magic my way.
“He’s quite big,” the knitter said, looking up once or twice and then back at her knitting. She was thin, with long hair pulled up into a tight bun, held in place, naturally, with several knitting needles. I had no doubt she could whip the needles out of her hair and into my body at a moments notice.
“Apologies,” I said, and sat down and crossed my legs.
“No need,” knitter replied. “Your size is your size.”
“But I am curious as to why you are here,” Book asked.
“I explained it all to Ms. Bixby here,” I said, pointing at Bixby.
“He did,” Bixby affirmed. “It was enlightening.”
“And we are swearing fealty to him?” Book asked.
“I thought we might,” Bixby said. “I like some of what he’s chosen to say to me. And I like the idea of having someone else to turn to in times of need.”
“We need no one to help us,” Books said.
“That’s not entirely true,” Knitter interjected. “It would be helpful to get a supply of food here, every once in a while. I grow so tired of what we have in this valley.”
“What about the spiders?” I asked. “No worries about them?”
“They cannot swim, we are safe on our island,” Knitter replied.
“Would you suggest we rejoin the Empire merely to gain access to additional foodstuffs?” Books asked Knitter. “And do we have any reason to think this is not going to wind up with us being pulled into the claws of the Imperium?”
“Only my word as a duke,” I said. “I don’t agree with the Imperial mandates on magic. It seems wrong.”
“And you think you can withstand the wills of the Empire?”
“Certainly as long as there’s no Emperor. Whoever wants the throne needs my votes, and to get those votes I’ll make sure that mandate will not be enforced in my dukedom.”
The three women looked to each other. Bixby lifted her eyebrows, then Knitter nodded. Book sighed, then nodded as well.
“Has anyone spoken to Careena about this?” Book asked.
“Does she deserve a say?” Knitter retorted, full attention back to her knitting.
“It is hardly her fault what happened. She only did what was asked of her — educating those who came to her.”
“A student who had necromantic spells?”
“This is neither here nor there, ladies,” Bixby said. “At present, I believe we need to address the duke and what we need from him.”
“Okay, wait a minute,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
“It would appear you need certain things from us if you are to leave the valley and complete whatever quest it is that brought you here,” Bixby said.
“That’s probably true. I am on a bit of a time crunch. The spiders are going to take my people as soon as it’s dawn, unless, of course, you’re all planning to leave your little island before then.”
“I do not believe that is the course of action we shall take.”
“Okay, so, what’s the plan then?”
“You will need to first speak with the brownies and reach a new Accord with them, as you will be our liege. Which technically invalidates our old Accord, and the fairies are always sticklers for technicalities.”
You have been offered a quest by Cicily Bixby :
Accord-ing to Me
Sign a new accord with the brownies which does not leave the witches worse off.
Reward for success: Bixby’s loyalty, and the witches becoming followers of Coggeshall
Penalty for failure (or refusal): ???
Yes/No
“Is this something you really think I should be doing?” I asked.
“You must,” Bixby said.
“I’m not great at negotiations. I’m usually what gets sent in when negotiations have gone sour.”
“Then imagine they have already gone sour,” Books said, “and do what you would then.”
“I believe he means he is the violence that comes after,” Bixby said.
“Pretty much,” I replied. “I suppose I could go and slaughter the brownies, which is definitely something I’ve done in the past, but I’m guessing that doesn’t help with your overall plan.”
“No, you are required to actually speak to their leader. And make a deal.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. Should you wish us to help you or join you, we need a new Accord.”
“You need me to slay the fucking lindworm as well?”
“Perhaps not this evening, but—”
“He is clearly joking, dear,” Knitter said.
“Is a lindworm like a wyrm or a worm?”
“A worm or a worm?”
“Worm with a y.”
“Ah. It is a relative of a dragon, not a, uh, worm.”
“Why are they homonyms?” I asked. Then I stopped and asked my brain where exactly that word had come from, and somehow, I pulled up a memory of my third grade teacher, Mrs. Zylemaker, teaching us about homonyms and onomatopoeia.
“It is an oddity of Imperial Common, a language made up of a hundred other languages savagely stomped out of existence by Imperial hobnailed boots,” Books said.
“Okay, there are a few things I need to know. Where am I going to speak to these Brownies, and what are y’all’s names?”
“Maud Jones,” knitter said. “And my compatriot is Florrie Knight.”
“Maud Jones, Florrie Knight, Cicily Bixby. I am Montana Coggeshall. And I will be your duke if you will have me.”
“We will,” they said.
“Then let’s talk brownies. You guys like the middle or the edges?”
Chapter Thirty-One
They didn’t get my joke. Even explaining it just caused further confusion, which I think, ultimately, made them regret their decision to hitch their wagon to mine. Oh well, too late. Right?
I was thinking things through though; I can imagine it didn’t exactly look like that. The spiders wanted the hags (really witches) gone. I didn’t particularly want to help the spiders, but they were ready and willing to kill the rest of my party, so I needed to keep them busy thinking I was doing their bidding. The witches seemed to have some experience dealing with the spiders, ie, killing them, and I wanted the witches to be on my side and maybe help me kill a bunch of the spiders. But in order to do that, I needed to go deal with the brownies. It was like one of the annoying quest lines, we need X, so do a favor for A. A needs a favor from B before they’ll help you. B needs a random thing R before they’ll help you help A. To get R, you need a favor from C. So you wind up doing all these little stupid things to get others to help you and finally complete the quest. I was in the middle of doing a favor for B to get B to help me kill some big fuck-off spiders just so I could get through the fucking valley and on to the quest I was really trying to complete. This fucking game…
There was no swimming back to shore. Instead, I took one of the number of rafts kept on the island for the students to go back and forth on. A poor young woman was woken to paddle me over. She had no interest in conversation and was in general incredibly unhappy with me. Or with being awake. Which I got.<
br />
When I stepped off the boat, she started paddling back, almost immediately. Which I also got. It was scary in these woods.
I headed over to the southeastern portion of the valley, hoping the brownies wouldn’t shoot me with poison arrows like Wulf said. I wasn’t a fan of poison. Or being shot with arrows, really.
Again, I felt a shift in the forest, going from what I would describe as tamed nature to a more wild but played with sensibility. It was like someone, or many someones, were using magic to fiddle with the forest for their own gain. Pretty cool, if you ask me, but it also a bit disconcerting. I saw trees where leaves had been switched around with flowers. Flowers that were much larger than they should have been. Colors that weren’t natural, like neons and fluorescents. It was magical and amazing and begged the question: who’d taken the time to do this?
I began to notice all kinds of carvings hidden around the area. Almost every single rock had been shaped or molded in some way. Some were actual statues of humanoids, while others were more abstract, like rings that had been carved inside other rings. It was impressive and more than a bit ridiculous.
What I wasn’t seeing, however, were any actual signs of sentient life. I came across a collection of huts in a tree, but they were empty. It looked like they’d been smashed apart, and savagely.
So I just kept on going deeper into the forest. I could tell I was getting closer to the mountains, because the ground began to slope. I crossed a ridge line and then went over a little dip, and ended up looking into a basin of sorts. There were lots of trees around the rim, and a clearing down below with a particularly large tree in the middle. Huge, heavy branches seemed to extend out an impossible distance. And on those branches were small houses and huts. Finally, I made out little figures, who had to be the brownies, running around.
Running, in the middle of the night, because spiders were attacking them. It definitely looked like the brownies were losing.
I reached into my bag and pulled out a few spears. I rolled my shoulders, hoisted the first spear, and threw it as hard as I could at the biggest spider I saw.
It went right through the bulbous abdomen with a sharp crack. Its chitin broke and a wave of green slimy fluid came pouring out. The spider made a sharp shrill sound, trying to figure out who and what had attacked it.
Which was when my second spear went through the spider’s head, and it collapsed immediately. All eight legs wrapped underneath the horse-sized creature in that classic dead spider pose.
The smaller spiders stopped their attack on the brownie colony and turned to see where the new threat was coming from. I didn’t want them to be disappointed.
“Right here, you eight-legged freaks,” I said, switching out the spears for a war hammer. “Come get some.”
And come they did. They swarmed at me. A whole butt-load of spiders that were in the realm of dog-sized. And like dogs, some were Chihuahua-sized and some were more like Great Danes. They were all ugly, with big mandibles and bulging segmented eyes.
And they were all gonna die.
The first spider came in range, and I was already swinging the hammer. Hard.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I thought, perhaps, the spider might go flying. But instead, it just crumpled under the force of my hit. I took a quick step forward and crushed another little fucker who was trying to pounce on me. Then I slammed the hammer down on my left, causing a geyser of green goo.
“Game on!” I shouted, swinging the hammer like a little kid with his first set of nunchucks. It was wild and chaotic, and I sent spiders dying every which way. Some got close enough to try and bite me, but they couldn’t quite get their mandibles open wide enough to do any real damage. Or they couldn’t hold on long enough to pump me full of venom.
I launched the hammer at a particularly dangerous looking spider with red glowing eyes. The dude went end-over-end until it resulted in the end of the spider, and made a wet gooey mess across the grass. I ripped the mandibles out of a nearby spider, which was also the cause of his death — or her, might have been a her, didn’t check — and then used the mandibles for a quick round of stabby-stabby-knifey-spooney. Except I was all out of spoons.
After a solid ten minutes of violence, I was all out of spiders. I could see one trying to make a run for it, so I grabbed the hammer and swung in a single motion, nailing the spider in the back of the abdomen about twenty yards distant.
The poor thing was still trying to get away, despite the massive hole in itself, trailing its innards behind.
I walked over to it and stomped on its head.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “I’m bad.”
I wiped the hammer off on the grass, then slid it back into my bag. I thought about picking through the spider bits, see if there was anything useful, but then I saw the figures all staring at me from the safety of their tree.
“Howdy,” I said, with a wave that whipped a hunk of green gloop across my face. Always making a dynamite first impression — that’s my style.
“Who are you that does battle for us?” came a shrill voice.
It was hard to make out who was talking, or what was talking, so with my hands outstretched to make it super clear I had no weapons nor a desire to commit more violence, I walked closer to the tree.
“My name is Montana,” I said. “Yours?”
“I am the king of this realm, Axis Pepperbush,” came the reply. Finally I picked out a small humanoid, about ten or eleven inches tall, standing on a branch nearly ten feet from the ground.
“Ah, your highness,” I said and I gave a bow. I didn’t get much in the way of fairy tales when I was a wee tot, but I heard enough to know that one thing you should always be with fairies is polite.
The little guy seemed to like that, and he bowed a smidge in return.
“It would seem we owe you for saving us from the accursed arachnids,” Pepperbush said. He hopped from the branch towards the trunk of the tree, and roughly at my eye-height, just a slight bit above, a ledge grew out of the tree. He landed on it deftly, and then sat down. “You may approach, human.”
I did, taking a few steps closer and got a good look at the wee guy. He had a sharp nose, outsized eyes, a head that was a bit too large for his body, long pointed ears, and a drooping mustache. He was old, or at least he appeared old, but his hair was iridescent, even in the moonlight. His clothes were an interesting mixture of leather and leaves, but they weren’t poorly made — they’d been expertly tailored. He carried no obvious weapons. In fact, he had no metal of any kind on him.
“Not exactly human,” I told him.
“Oh?” he asked, his bushy eyebrows shooting up. He leaned forward and peered at me. “Interesting. I have not met one of your kind before.”
“And I can say the same.”
A big smile spread across his face. “It is a great pleasure I might be your first. How did you stumble upon our small enclave?”
“To be honest,” I said, trying to do this as politely as I could, “this valley wasn’t exactly my destination. I’m actually on a bit of a quest for, uh, a goddess.”
“Oh? How very exciting. I find most goddesses quite delicious to deal with. They are always so passionate.”
“Do you have a lot of goddess interactions?”
“Enough.”
“Sure. Okay, makes sense. You’re a king, probably—”
“A fairy king.”
“Right, I didn’t want to uh, you know, claim to know who you were or, uh, what you are.”
“I am a fairy, of the brownie persuasion.”
“It is, indeed, a pleasure, to meet you, Pepperbush.”
There was a bit of bowing from him to me and then me to him. Neither of us seemed clear on what to do next. Which felt a little odd.
“So,” I said, “looks like you’ve got some, uh, spider problems.”
“Yes. That is putting it lightly.”
“How bad are things?” I asked.
“You are looking at
the last of us,” he replied, head down. “I have been unable to save my people, and now we are making our last stand. I invite you to stand with us.”
“No offense, but that doesn’t exactly sound like my kind of party. I mean, it’s a little like my kind of party, but I usually prefer leaving the party alive.”
He smiled at that. “There is no offense in preferring survival.”
“Are you committed to dying?” I asked.
“I would prefer otherwise, but it seems my fate is sealed. Unless, of course, you know another way?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “I am the duke of this area, as far as the Empire goes. The witches in the middle of the lake have sworn fealty to me. So I am here to discuss a new Accord with you.”
“Well,” he said, ”that does offer a change. Would your Accord be us swearing fealty to you, a human?”
“Not human,” I said trying to smile.
“You all tend to look alike.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty true.”
“What is it you would like to agree upon?”
“Depends on what you need. And, I guess, what you want.”
He looked up into the tree, and I followed his gaze. There were a lot of little people looking down at us, including the cutest little baby brownies.
“We would like to survive,” he said. “Most of us would prefer to return home, to where we might find safety and regrow ourselves.”
“This isn’t home?” I asked.
“Home is the Feedoheem.”
“Is that the name for the fairy world?”
“It is a name for the fairy world.”
Immediately, I thought about fairy tales. About terrible things the fairy world held. Creatures of nightmare and magic. Things with way too much power for any human to deal with. Of bizarre rules and kidnapped babies. If there was a chance this Feedoheem was the same as the fairy world rumored to have once existed alongside Earth, it wasn’t a place I wanted to truck with, in the slightest.
