“What is your will, m’lord?” she asked. She meant to kneel in respect but misjudged the distance and ended up with her face just a little too close to Toby’s crotch.
He cleared his throat and backed away. “My huntsman, I command you to find the Chosen One, take his life, and bring me his still-beating heart,” he said, sounding just as grand as he imagined he would.
In the silence afterward, a few chickens clucked, and the one Poltro had fallen on sort of fluttered to indicate it was trying.
“A fine errand for a Tuesday, m’lord! But, uh. Just so there’s no misunderstanding, do you mean, like, kill him, and then bring you his heart? Because I was fairly certain that when you killed someone, their heart stopped beating. Cutter led me to believe it was a sort of cause-and-effect thing and no way around it. So I feel like I could bring you his not-beating heart, or maybe I could like tie him up and bring him, and then kill him in front of you, and you’d know his heart was still beating right up until he died?”
Toby considered that and was frustrated by how much sense it made. When Poltro started talking sense, it usually meant one had drunk too much.
“Fair enough. I then command that you kill the Chosen One and bring me his heart. Not beating. But if it was, that would be okay, too.”
“But it won’t be,” she argued.
“Fine. Just…the heart.”
“Why his heart, my lord? Could a kidney work, or maybe a lymph node?”
Toby barely stopped himself from spluttering. “Because…well…I need to know he’s dead.”
“Oh, so my word isn’t good enough for you? I tell you someone’s dead, and you would doubt that? My lord, I find your lack of confidence very insulting.”
Toby’s fingers spasmed and his voice cracked, but he most certainly did not shoot green lightning at Poltro, because even if she was terribly clumsy and rather annoying, she was an excellent and effective tracker who would soon have this Chosen One in hand, as long as he wasn’t a chicken.
“A Chosen One,” he said slowly, “is a very tricky thing, my dear. I will need his heart for…” He almost said “personal reasons” but realized that sounded a bit creepy. “Magical reasons,” he finished, but afterward realized that sounded equally stupid.
“Magical reasons,” Poltro repeated. “Well, can’t argue with magic. What can you tell me of this Chosen One, my lord?”
Toby squinted at the sheaf of papers in his other hand, trying to remember the pertinent details drawn from the pages and pages of purple prose he’d read. “His name is Worstley. He smells of dung. He’s traveling with a black goat that may or may not talk. Worstley is eighteen, white as milk, and tall and strong with wavy blond hair and earnest blue eyes that sparkle with a call to greatness.” He paused to wrinkle his nose. “Gadzooks, who writes this trash? He was last seen in a jerkin and breeches the color of mud and smeared with barnyard waste, with a cloak to match, headed out with a jar of pickled herring to save the world while breaking his poor parents’ hearts. Honestly, he sounds terrible.”
“He sounds like every other lad about the countryside. Pickled herring is right popular for good reason. But the talking goat might give me an edge,” Poltro mused. “Where will I find him?”
“The return address suggests he lives somewhere to the west, so I suppose this tower he’s headed toward is the earl’s—the one all covered in thorns and whatnot. Only a Chosen One would be foolish enough to try to penetrate that wily thatch.”
Poltro rose to her feet and struck a proud pose, with one boot pointed. “Head toward the tower entangled in a wily thatch, find the Chosen One, and kill him. Got it.” She took a few stalwart steps, then turned back around. “What about the goat?”
Toby shook his head. “What about the goat?”
“Do you want its heart, too, and if so, can I eat the rest of it? And if so, will you be wanting some? I mean, how are we going to divide this guy’s goat friend? And how do you feel about curry?”
Rubbing the place where a headache was brewing, Toby said, “You may keep whatever parts of the goat you wish. I just want this farm boy’s heart.”
“So the rest of him is up for grabs?”
“The rest of the goat?”
“No, the rest of the…yeah, the goat. The goat. Good eating, goat.”
With that, she saluted him with the wrong hand and set off toward the west. Toby watched her go, feeling a lightness in his heart as the huntress hopped over the fence and landed on her face. As she stalked into the sunset, he called after her.
“Poltro?”
From far away, she turned, cape billowing in the early evening wind.
“Yes, Dark Lord?”
“Did you want to take your horse?”
She shouted a very rude word and jogged back toward the barn to saddle her coal-black steed. Toby waited, watching his chickens and sheep, all black as night, peck at the ground. When Poltro finally rode out of the barn, her stallion prancing, the Dark Lord walked up to her and held out a small bag he’d untied from his belt.
“What’s this, my lord? Provisions?”
“No, Poltro. You can take your own provisions from the larder in your quarters. These are a few potions to aid you on your journey. They are carefully labeled and sealed with wax. One is an invisibility potion that will hide you from any enemy. One is a sleeping potion; taken in its entirety, the victim will sleep for a year. And the third is a healing elixir that will heal any wound or sickness.”
He didn’t mention it, but he’d purchased them through a mail order potion purveyor and was too frightened to use them himself.
Poltro took the bag and peered inside as her horse snorted and danced. “How do they work?”
“Read the labels.”
“But do I drink them? Or do they go…” She made a poking motion with one finger. “Up the other way? Me mum used to give us one like that.”
“Read the labels. None of them are to be taken rectally.”
“Good,” she said, nodding and tying the bag onto her belt. “Anything else, my lord?”
“Just kill the farm boy, Poltro, and bring me his heart. When you return, you will be well rewarded. What will you claim as your bounty?”
Her chin raised as she looked off into the sunset, a fierce creature with eyes always on the horizon.
“A world without chickens,” she breathed.
“I could probably build you a lean-to in the south pasture,” he said. “But you’ll have to keep the chickens out yourself.”
“Such is my fate. Onward, Snowflake!”
Digging her heels into the black stallion’s ribs, she took off at a mad gallop before stopping short at the gate, dismounting, fumbling with the latch, opening the gate, remounting, riding through the gate, dismounting, closing the gate, catching her horse after he wandered off to crop grass, and remounting. With another ferocious war cry, she kicked the horse again and galloped off into the outer reaches of his estate, completely forgetting to take any provisions.
There were three more gates to navigate before the road, which required an obscene amount of mounting of both the re- and dis- varieties.
Toby gave up and began the long climb upstairs. For just a moment, he considered going after the Chosen One himself. But he’d never left his tower before, and the papers and best-selling books he ordered seemed to suggest that life happened on the other side of the doorstep and that said life generally involved a lot of getting robbed and killed. One of the lovely things about being the Dark Lord was that one could choose to stay at home, masterminding various dark deeds from the comfort of one’s own armchair. Even if one always felt a bit left out and couldn’t quite manage the right sort of crackers. Home had been good enough for his father, and home would be good enough for Toby.
The Chosen One was, for the moment, out of his hands.
But maybe the hedgehog could still be coaxed.
One of the many downsides to chain-mail bikinis, Fia thought, was their utter uselessness as protective gear against a tower of thorns. To be sure, they were utterly useless as protective gear against most things, including inclement weather, and this blasted gloomy northern province had been rainy and cold for days. Her skin had developed long-standing goose bumps the size of angry pimples. But her purse was more than unusually light as she’d put down a significant sum with a blacksmith for some real armor, and whatever she found in this tower was going to pay off the balance of it. Fia had recently ventured north and west from the warm eastern lands to seek her fortune, and her dark brown skin, impressive height, and ability to pound xenophobes to pulp had already become legendary. She’d even gotten a hot tip from a shady halfling in the capital that most everyone inside this castle was asleep. It was ripe for the picking.
Fia had challenged him on that point. “If it’s so ripe, why hasn’t it been picked already by someone else?”
The halfling ordered another pint on her tab before answering, but he didn’t dodge the question. He leaned over the table at the inn, his foul breath making Fia curl her lip in disgust, and for the first time that evening looked her in the eye. “I’ll walk you through it, my tall drink of mead. Most people do not appreciate the extent to which thorns truly suck. If you have just a single rosebush to deal with, then they’re no big deal. You just go around, right? But the entire tower is covered in thick vines—heck, the entire castle is—and each vine bristles with thorns that can only be described as deluxe, and you have to climb the tower to gain access through a window. The door is impregnable. Invisible, actually. No one can find it.”
Ignoring the paradox of an architect who forgot to include such essentials as doors in his designs, Fia adjusted her chain-mail wedgie and said, “I don’t see the problem. Bushes and vines are flammable.”
“True enough! That’s no lie. But if you start a fire, you’re asking for other trouble. You lose all hope of stealth, for one thing. You might wind up burning down the stuff inside you want to steal, and besides that, fire always brings the neighbors outdoors to see if they can help put it out. You don’t want witnesses, now, do you? And there’s evidence that not everything sleeps inside that tower. There’s someone—or something—most certainly, definitely, indubitably awake in there, and whoever or whatever it is, they are not afraid to sing horrible songs.”
Fia scoffed. “What do I care about songs?”
The halfling grinned. “Oh, these are no mere ditties. The melodies are laced with magic of a most powerful and potent nature. And the singer of said songs never sleeps. We have confirmed this through long observation.”
“Why don’t you just fly to the window on one of those giant eagles or a dragon?”
The halfling’s casual amusement vanished, and his voice grew intense. “Do you have access to any creatures willing to perform such services? Because if you do, I assure you we would pay well for an introduction.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
The halfling waved the question away. “A consortium of like-minded individuals.” He looked pleased with himself, as if he’d just learned the word consortium the day before and had been waiting for an opportunity to use it.
“Well, no, I don’t know any flying creatures, sorry.” The halfling deflated, and his eyes drifted down from her face and toward the tiny triangles of her top, perhaps in an effort to cheer himself up. Fia resolutely ignored this, adding, “And I guess you don’t know any either. But how about a ladder?”
The halfling picked up his pint, which was nearly the size of his head, and answered with the cup to his lips, making his voice ring hollow: “We’ve tried that. Three times. We sent out teams with ladders. Ropes and grappling hooks, too, before you ask. Real quality stuff. None returned. As I said, these are truly deluxe thorns.”
Well, Fia had listened to that halfling, and she had taken what he said to heart. She now wore a pair of rose-repelling metal gauntlets as she stood right at the base of the aforementioned tower in the middle of a ferocious and properly dramatic downpour. The halfling had been willing to lend these so-called deluxe gauntlets to her for an outrageous forty percent of whatever she got out of the tower. He’d first demanded eighty percent, but she’d pointed out that she’d generously allowed him to stare at her chest all night without smashing his brains into pudding, and that should be worth something. To protect her feet, she had wrapped up the soles of her boots in belts of the toughest leather she could find. Now she just had to get past the deluxe thorns in the cold rain while still mostly naked. No big deal, she told herself. Although…up close these particular thorns seemed a step up from your average rose thorns in the way that a rabid wolfhound seemed a step up from a pug.
The halfling, against his better nature, had been telling the truth.
The vines had been growing for so long and had wrapped themselves so tightly around the tower that they could serve as a natural ladder, providing a convenient way to climb up—convenient, that is, apart from the thorns. Because there were many smaller, thinner vines flourishing and flowering on top of the thick, trunklike ones, forming a dense thicket of doom. A tricky tangle, Fia thought, for she’d have to reach in there with clever fingers. A most wily thatch concealing the tender flower she so desired.
And to think: she was doing all this for a single rose.
As it turned out, the two things Fia most wanted in the world were armor and peace. If everything went according to plan, the heart rose of this enchanted tower would give her both, thanks to a generous prize to be awarded at the celebrated Pell Smells Rose Show. With the heavily perfumed bag of gold in hand, she’d be unstoppable. Or more stoppable, actually, as she would finally be able to stop fighting and settle down. A prizewinning rose garden in a quiet hamlet where nobody knew her past, and the ability to defend said garden from anyone who wanted to take it from her: that was Fia’s idea of earthly paradise.
But first she had to get inside.
She noted a small collection of rusty hatchets at the base of the tower. Not stacked neatly; they looked as if they’d fallen there randomly from the sky, although even in this strange place, it didn’t generally rain basic lumberjack supplies. A few frogs here or there, but such was weather. Fia had brought a hatchet, too, expecting to clear away some of the branches, but now she reconsidered, thinking of the halfling teams that had never returned and noting that there were also a few assorted bones mixed in with the hatchets, as well as some rotting pieces of wood that had no doubt, at one time, formed a ladder. Squinting up through the rain, she saw scraps of blue and yellow cloth snagged upon some of the vines, along with a sprinkling of tarnished metal medallions. And there were pale flashes of white caught in the boscage, which proved to be the latticed rib cages of other thieves, forever imprisoned in verdigris and roses. That was not merely gruesome; it was strange.
“If they died while trying to climb up,” Fia mused, as she often talked out her problems, “they’d have to fall. Especially if they were on ladders. There’s no way a few thorns can hold up that much dead weight. I should be seeing full skeletons down here. So that means the vines had to overgrow them…while they were still alive. Trapping them. Hells, that’d have to be a quick-growing bush. But it’s not growing now, is it?”
It most certainly was not. At least not visibly so. That meant that something had triggered the rapid and clearly fatal growth. And that something was probably the collection of hatchets at the base of the tower. Hack at the magical vines and they would quickly respond with a thorny embrace, hugging you close until something vital was pierced or you simply bled to death.
Hugs shouldn’t hurt, mighty Fia thought. Much less kill you.
Fia added her hatchet to the pile but kept her sword lashed to her back in its leather scabbard. She also had some pocket shears hanging from a belt in c
ase things got snippy. Reaching out one steel gauntlet toward the thicket, she laid hold of a thick rope of vine and heard the dull click of a thorn snapping beneath her hand. She paused, grimacing, waiting for the vine to strike like a snake, but the vine just did what normal vines do, which is not much. And that was good.
She looked down, seeing that there was still a smidgen of space between her body and the mass of thorns. Such was the benefit of being seven feet tall with an impressive reach, and such was the supportive power of chain mail. She grinned in the rain and took a deep breath of the rosewater air. The blossoms beyond the vines must truly be remarkable.
Fia had neglected to tell the halfling that she wasn’t there for gold or kisses or the usual booty. No, all Fia wanted was that heart rose. With her large green thumb, she could create a hybrid that didn’t want to murder everyone but still promised bright blooms and strong stems. Unfortunately, a small clipping from the tangle simply wouldn’t do; no, she needed the heart rose, which was almost certainly inside. And she’d happily suffer some scratches to get it. The leering halfling scum could have forty percent of her cuttings if he wanted; he wouldn’t know what to do with them. Fia, though, would turn those cuttings into profit. And turn that profit into a snug little house to come home to, surrounded by sensible fortifications and prizewinning roses. Any scars she earned in the process she’d wear with pride. Wenches, after all, dug scars.
Best be about it. She couldn’t maintain her distance while she climbed, so she would necessarily need to hug the wall a bit during her ascent and get stabbed and scratched. She could mitigate that, though, by sucking in her belly and carefully collecting and pushing thorny branches back to the wall with her metal gauntlets as she searched for a new handhold.
Purposely beginning to one side of the window so she wouldn’t have to climb over halfling remains dripping with cheap jewelry, Fia grunted and cursed as she slowly worked her way up the tower, her leather-wrapped boots finding protected toeholds among the vines but the rest of her getting finely shredded. The pain gave her a boost of energy on top of her already formidable strength, and she found the rain refreshing instead of oppressive. She wasn’t getting tired; she could take her time.