He supposed that last had not been strictly necessary to add, nor was it even close to being true since they smelled fantastic—or maybe that was the giant salad lounging on the counter. Such insults were unworthy of him, to be honest, but kitchens made him nervous. And there was a tiny fact hidden away in his morass of sass: Lord Toby and Poltro had both sought his death and had died instead. Not through anything he had personally done, of course, but it was sobering to think that this Chosen One aura made him effortlessly deadly.
Gustave became a bit dizzy when he took in the servant types bustling around in the dining room, just adding it all up: Løcher must possess tremendous wealth to have all these people preparing a meal for him and his friends, each one of them smelling clean and dressed smartly and double or triple the worth of a single pooboy. And what was Løcher doing with all this wealth? Nothing tangibly good for the people of Pell. He used a private army to kill folks and sent a pixie around to ruin the lives of farm boys.
He was mentally spooling up a wry commentary on excess and privilege when suddenly, everything happened. They entered a room with a marble floor on which his trotters clopped loudly and created echoes, and there was a drunk guy and a bunch of soldiers, and once the rabbit girl said something like “Look! I have wine,” there was shouting and so much blood. A man in white with a black cloak said, “Protect your king!” and Gustave panicked. Which one was the king? Was it the man in white? Kings talked about themselves in the third person sometimes, he’d heard, and the fellow in white looked pretty regal. It couldn’t be the guy so blistering drunk that he could hardly talk. That must be the evil chamberlain, because why would humans let themselves be led by someone so staggeringly incompetent and mentally absent? He thought he saw a diaper underneath the flowing silks. Yes, that had to be the chamberlain. Or was it the king after all?
Grinda had said something about the king drinking himself to death, but he hadn’t paid close attention because he’d still been daydreaming about the nanny goats. Nah, that must have been some other king she was talking about because this guy, while drunk, wasn’t dead yet. He had to be Løcher, a mean drunk wizard frustrated by his inability to seize the throne or dress in smart cloaks and boots. The drunk guy even had an abnormally large and ornate scepter strapped to his hip, which had to be his magic wand.
And then the fight broke out, and no one paid attention to saving the goat.
Gustave turned to head back the way he’d come but then remembered that the kitchen was back there and he didn’t want to give the cooks either a second chance or the last laugh. He spun around again and saw Grinda spewing curses and firing bolts of eldritch energy at the man in white as he gasped and sneezed and fell awkwardly on his ass. Fia was straight up slaying dudes, her sword slicing and taking lives with juicy, crunchy noises. Some others were trying to draw the drunk guy away, but he shrugged them off and said, “Unhand me! They have my wine!” and added that one or more of them were, perhaps, cretins. Yep, that was Løcher, then. It was his wine because this was his house. He half staggered toward Argabella with a snarl, eyes crazed with madness and hands outstretched for the cask of Amon Tiyado. There was no telling what he’d do to that poor defenseless bunny, who was a vegetarian just like Fia and had never suggested that any harm should come to a saucy goat from the backward earldom of Borix. So Gustave lowered his head toward the drunk chamberlain and charged, intending to ram him out of the way and protect the bard from harm.
But so many things went wrong in those few seconds while he had his head down and his goatly arse-ramming course set.
Argabella, seeing the drunk man coming for her, shifted to the right a wee bit, and he adjusted course to match.
Grinda the possum sand witch unleashed some kind of spell that filled the air with more dust than a fluff-up in the Morningwood. Whatever it was, Gustave was blinded by it and didn’t have hands with which to rub his eyes. While he blinked furiously and kept running toward the chamberlain, the humans threw their hands up to their eyes by reflex. That meant Løcher left his midsection unprotected at the approach of a charging billy goat.
The collision was not the sort that Gustave was used to. Normally there was a loud crack accompanying the impact and the sort of rebound one expects when bone hits bone. This was different. It was a tear and a squelch and a hot puddle on his noggin, followed by a horrible scream. Blood dripped down into his eyes and a heavy weight fell onto his head, dragging him to the marble floor. Gustave lowered his head even farther, the weight still on top of him, so he locked his knees and drew back, realizing with horror that he had not merely rammed the chamberlain as he’d intended but impaled him. Gustave’s horns somehow had become mired in intestines, and his withdrawal yanked them out of the abdomen of the gurgling drunken man, who was no longer concerned with casks or indeed anything else but putting his parts back where they were supposed to be, his eyes panicked and his mouth a tiny o of surprise as he fell back, feebly clutching at his innards.
“Oh, gods! The king!” someone shouted, and Gustave looked around, shaking blood and entrails from his head. Where was the king? What had happened to him? There certainly were many dead people to choose from at this point. Where was the man in white? Ah, there he was! On the ground over there, coughing, with visible streams of dirt flowing into his nose and mouth. But no one appeared to be trying to help him. That was odd.
Fia was some distance away, surrounded by bodies, staring at him in horror. Argabella looked panicked about something seen over his shoulder. Gustave whirled around to see a cadre of armored guys who’d been trying to hold the drunk man back. Their expressions were distinctly unhappy. They looked not unlike Worstley’s mother and father when they’d been intent on slaying him for exhibiting signs of evil magic. The men had sharp pointy things in their hands, and they were coming for him even though their eyes were watery and they were blinking furiously.
Gustave turned tail to run and a split second later had a portion of his tail sheared away by one of the mad soldiers. Another connected more effectively, a stinging cut to his right haunch that buckled his leg and sent him spinning spread-eagled on the slick stone floor. He grimly recalled that Grinda had warned him about this, that an aura didn’t guarantee freedom from harm, that he’d probably be hurt and possibly crippled before he died so long as the spell fulfilled its purpose. She had said, in fact, that most Chosen Ones died very soon after removing the king, and from what he understood, that meant that the king was already dead or in dire straits. This might be the end. That chef in the kitchen might soon be butchering him for tomorrow’s luncheon and gloating over his bones.
But the bunny woman threw the wine cask at the leading swordsman and hit him square in the face, knocking him out, bursting the cask, and spilling a supposed fortune in the process. The possum sand witch scurried past to clamber up pant legs and latch her sharp teeth on to the throat of the choking man in white, which told Gustave that he couldn’t be the king after all, since Grinda would never do that—she’d been trying to protect the king from Løcher all this time! That man must’ve been the captain of the guard or something. Five more snarling madmen rushed for Gustave, determined to do more than slice at his back leg. It was the end of his time, he supposed, but at least it had been far more exciting and full of delicious boots than he would have enjoyed otherwise had he awaited his fate in Borix. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t go out like that sow, resigned to her own slaughter. He’d seen the world, and he had no regrets except that he’d never get to party with Beatrix and her crew.
And then Fia landed among the soldiers, a sword scything through necks and plunging underneath arms into gaps in their armor, and Gustave understood that they all died not because Fia was honoring her oath to protect him but because they were vaguely threatening Argabella on their way to get to him. And the tall warrior did it with only one hand, for she kept her left clutched on the scabbard of her old sword, now sheathed, whil
e she wielded a new one that painted death among the soldiers like a manic artist working in red.
And when they were all dead—all except for Grinda, Argabella, and Fia—Gustave felt distinctly uncomfortable deep in his belly, and he wondered if he’d been wounded there, too, even though it was his tail and his right leg that stung with the sharp pain of torn tissue. He was, for once, utterly devoid of pellets.
The discomfort grew into piercing agony, and he bleated in distress, but there was a strange warmth as well, and Gustave remembered the softly glowing boot of glory he’d eaten back at the Braided Beard: he had called it The Boot, in fact. It was coming back on him now like spoiled seafood.
“Oh, poo,” he muttered, and he thought those were mighty fine last words compared with most others, like “Hey, what?” or “Ouch!” or “Wait, not yet!”
And then he felt more pain than he thought was possible, ripped what he hoped was the most explosive fart in history, and gave one last despairing bleat. A huge burst of light engulfed the room, a sudden wind lifted Gustave up in a tornado of golden sunbeams, and glitter rained down, sticking in the blood on the marble floor and drifting about everywhere, as glitter is wont to do.
But Gustave wasn’t dead.
He felt distinctly strange as his eyes blinked open, giving him his first taste of binocular vision from eyeballs pointed in the same direction.
Gustave had utterly ceased to be a black billy goat.
He was instead something else that dropped back to the floor with a smacking sound.
Something without hooves.
Something with…fingers? And toes? Spread out facedown on the cold marble?
“Aw, newt poots,” he said. “This is not good.”
When he’d eaten The Boot, he had wished to be anything other than a billy goat. But not a pig and not a rooster. In that regard, his wish had come true.
He drew his new hands under his chest, pushed against the floor, and utterly failed to stand up. His right leg didn’t work that well. He fell flat once more.
“Gah! This is dumber than Poltro! How do you people even function on two legs?”
“Gustave?” Argabella’s voice quailed.
“Name’s still the same. Help me up!”
“Your hair’s all gone.”
That wasn’t precisely true, Gustave thought. It wasn’t gone: it just wasn’t on him anymore. He was surrounded by his former goat coat, his lush locks lying still and dead on the frigid marble of Løcher’s entrance hall, mixed in with glitter and blood.
“Yes, and it’s damn cold,” he noted. “Now help me stand, will you?”
Argabella and Fia hooked arms under his and helped him to a pair of unsteady, fleshy feet. Both of the women were spattered with gallons of blood that rubbed off on him in the process of trying to get him upright.
He wobbled even with their support and instructions to lock his knees.
“This is a terrible idea,” he said.
“What is?” Fia asked.
“Bipeds. Why are you not spending your lives wishing for four legs instead of these completely inadequate two?”
“Look down,” Fia said. Gustave looked down and sighed in relief.
“Whew. At least I’m still black. Or dark brown, at least. And there appear to be some dangly bits.”
“See?”
“Well, yes, I see, Fia. But I’m not impressed.”
“Have you ever seen your dangly bits before?”
“Oh. Well, no, I guess I haven’t.”
“That’s just one reason we don’t mind two legs. You see things you wouldn’t see otherwise. Plus, there are thumbs.”
“What are they good for?”
“You’ll find out.” He supposed he would. The sow had said something about that. Humans had thumbs and weapons, and that, to her at least, settled the matter of who had the right to rule. Though many other peoples had thumbs and weapons, too. That couldn’t be the only reason humans seemed to be running everything— jingly bits and thumbs. There had to be some other reason.
To his left, Grinda made some spitting and hacking noises, trying to get pieces of the now dead man’s throat out of her teeth. “I’ll have nightmares and dental bills for the rest of my life, but Løcher is dead, so it was worth it. Or it will be if we survive the aftermath.”
“What aftermath?”
“We’re going to be found soon, and we’ll have to explain this. We’re going to say Løcher planned to poison the king with bad wine and Gustave uncovered the plot and ran here to stop it. At that point Løcher ordered his men to attack, and one of them managed to disembowel the king. If they buy it, we stay. If they don’t, we run.”
“I don’t think I can run on these legs,” Gustave said. “Especially since one of them is sliced up a bit.”
“Then lie convincingly.”
“Lie? If it’s on the floor, you got it. But just to clarify: Which one was the king?”
“The one you killed, of course.”
“The drunk guy was the king, not the chamberlain?” Replaying the reactions to his accidental goring of that man, it made sense—and it fit with his role as the Chosen One. Løcher’s plan had worked in that sense. And it also meant that he had committed regicide and no longer had any protections. Gustave’s stupid knees buckled, and he would have fallen had Fia and Argabella not been supporting him. “Gah! See, I told you I shouldn’t have come here! But you humans didn’t listen to me.”
“You’re human now. How did you manage that, by the way?” Grinda asked.
“That magic boot I ate, probably.”
“I don’t suppose there was a matching one lying around? I could use a transformation myself.”
“No, there wasn’t—”
“Hellooo! I have the chamberlain’s mail!” Someone knocked twice on the door and it swung open, revealing a grizzled postman with a heavy sack slung over his shoulder and a wad of letters in his hand. He drew up short when he spied a naked man, a mostly naked woman, a half rabbit, and a possum, all smeared with blood and surrounded by dead bodies.
“Ah. Palace intrigue is finally out in the open, I see. How refreshing! And who might you be? The leaders of a coup?”
“Oh, no, no,” Grinda said, and the postman merely blinked at the talking possum. “It was Løcher who planned the coup, and we were here to foil it and save the king.”
Grinda spun her tale after providing her bona fides as a trusted alderman of Malefic Beach, and the postman listened attentively, following along until she wound down, when he held up a finger. “One question,” he said, and stared directly into Gustave’s eyes. “Why are you naked and covered in glitter?”
“Oh. That. Well, I’d been recovering from one heck of a party the night before, you see, sleeping in until late, and once I heard the king was on his way to Løcher’s, there was no time to get dressed. It was an emergency.”
“Ah, yes, of course, of course,” the postman said, smiling and nodding as if he remembered fondly the halcyon days of his youth, when he had regularly been awakened from a comfortable slumber to join in battle, all nude and sparkling.
“If it hadn’t been for him,” Argabella said, “these traitors would have gotten away with it!”
The postman’s eyes shifted to the wide staring eyes of King Benedick and pointed his chin at the body. “Well, er…didn’t they? The king’s dead, after all.”
Argabella jumped in. “Yes! Yes, he is! But so are the traitors! Gustave made sure they paid for their crimes! He prevented an evil cabal from taking over the entire realm! They were in cahoots with trolls, my good man. Trolls! Can you imagine the world run by trolls?” Argabella shook her furry fist at the sky. “Forbid it, ye gods! That’s why I’m so glad Gustave arrived in time to prevent it. It’s that kind of decisive, sober leadership that Pell needs right now! That’s right:
I said sober! You ask me, good sir, Gustave here should be the next king!”
“Hey, what?” Gustave said, forgetting that moments earlier he had thought they were among the worst possible last words a person could utter.
“I agree,” Fia chimed in, making it worse. “Many’s the time I’ve heard Gustave comment that postmen are underpaid and underappreciated. But that goes for most everyone. Most people don’t get the credit they deserve, do they, Gustave?”
“No?” he guessed.
“That’s right! Things will be different from now on. No, they’ll be better with Gustave running things!” Fia asserted. Gustave couldn’t help noticing that Argabella was singing softly under her breath; he only caught the chorus of “Forsooth, forsooth, it’s all the truth!”
Hope bloomed on the postman’s face like sun striking the tulip fields of Teabring. “You know what? I think they will. Things will be better without that drunken fool in charge. How could they not be? I’m going to tell everyone. The old king is dead. Long live King Gustave!”
The postman threw his handful of mail into the air, not caring since every letter was addressed to a dead man, and waved cheerily at them before departing. The letters fluttered down dramatically and sank into a bog of blood, innards, and glitter. Many a valiant catalog was lost that day. Gustave’s knees gave out again, and he demanded that Fia and Argabella let him sit on the floor, his strength all gone.
“I’m doomed now,” he told them. “I’m not the Chosen One anymore. Right, Grinda? The aura’s all gone, isn’t it?”
The possum squinted at him for a moment and confirmed, “It is.”
“Great. So I’m just the guy who killed the king. And you know what happens to guys who kill the king? They get killed in turn. Dang it. I wanted to party with Beatrix.”