Unbound (17 page)

He squeezed his eyes tightly closed in disbelief. How had they gotten in here? Weren’t there supposed to be guards protecting him from intruders? Wasn’t he safe even in his own bed?

“Go away!” he repeated.

Filip and Sot. Troublesome even for G’Home Gnomes, a variety of Landoverian Gnomes that were otherwise mostly innocuous. Most Gnomes—the good kind—nested in the northern stretches of Landover, up around the Melchor Mountains. Where they behaved themselves. Where they didn’t eat their neighbors’ pets. Where they didn’t steal everything that wasn’t nailed down. Where they didn’t start fires in people’s living rooms just to see what would happen. All of which the G’Home Gnomes did without a second thought. This was a tribe so reviled by everyone that they had been told so often to “Go Home, Gnomes!” that the name had stuck. Unfortunately, no one, themselves included, could remember by now where that home was or how to get the G’Home Gnomes to go back there.

Ben had tried everything. The complaints had piled up and he had been left with no choice. He had consigned them wholesale to portions of his kingdom north, south, east, and west, at different times but with similar results. He had placed them in compounds in an effort to curtail their wandering ways. He had confined them behind chain-link fencing and, when that failed, barbed wire. He had assigned guards. He had cajoled and threatened and finally given up. You could only do so much; you could only give a problem a certain amount of your time and energy before you were forced to pronounce it a hopeless endeavor.

Filip and Sot were the worst of a bad bunch, the extent of his annoyance enhanced by the fact that they inexplicably worshipped him.

“Great High Lord!” they called out through the door, chanting together. “Mighty High Lord!”

On and on and on.

He gritted his teeth. His thoughts were best left unvoiced, so he kept them that way. Instead, he climbed out of bed to meet his fate, already pretty much knowing what it was. Not in the specific, of course, but generally. Each appearance by these two always prefaced a disaster; only the nature of it varied.

He yanked open the door furiously. Two wizened, somewhat monkey-like faces looked up at him in adoration from three feet down. Eyes wide and adoring, beaming smiles revealing sharpened teeth, they bowed low.

“Great High Lord.”

“Mighty High Lord.”

“Stop saying that!” he snapped, causing them to flinch. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

“Oh, it was easy, High Lord,” Filip explained. “We just climbed the wall.”

“You climbed the . . . Wait. That wall is a hundred feet high!”

“They wouldn’t let us in through the gates, High Lord. They sent us away. They would not tell you we were here. So we climbed. It’s very easy for Gnomes to climb walls.”

Note to self
, Ben thought.
Find a way to make castle walls too slippery to climb.
“What about the guards? Didn’t they see you?”

The Gnomes looked at each other in confusion. “It was very dark. No one could see us.”

Ben stared. “You climbed the wall
last night
?”

“It was necessary, High Lord!” Filip said.

Sot nodded eagerly. “We have a problem, High Lord. We need you to solve it.”

“We couldn’t wait for morning,” Filip added.

“Not out
there
,” Sot declared, gesturing vaguely. “So we climbed the wall and waited outside your door.”

Ben pictured this and was appalled. But only for a second because it was so typically them it didn’t bear dwelling on.

“We have a problem,” Sot repeated.

“We do,” Filip agreed.

“Of course you do.” Ben made a dismissive gesture. “When have you not had a problem? But you have to go through the gates and the front door and ask to see me! You do not get to see me by climbing walls and sneaking around to find my bedroom door and waiting for morning to barge in uninvited! And waking me up! I was sleeping!”

Both Gnomes nodded sagely. “We slept a little too,” Filip announced, missing the point entirely. “Can we tell you about our problem now?”

Ben gave up. “Sure. Why not? Come right on in. No need to stand on ceremony. Mi casa es su casa. Feel free to make yourselves at home.”

He stomped back into his bedroom and threw himself down on the bed. The Gnomes took this as an invitation and jumped up beside him. Ben was too worn down to do anything about it. He did have enough presence of mind to wonder where Willow was. She had been there last night, hadn’t she? Usually that meant she was there in the morning. But for some reason she wasn’t today. Probably heard the Gnomes outside the door and was smart enough to get out while the getting was good. Still, it was strange he hadn’t heard her go.

“We have a new pet,” Filip began, and right away Ben held up his hand.

“Tell me you didn’t eat it.”

“No, no, it’s
my
pet.”

“When has that ever stopped you?”

“It is a special pet,” Filip announced.

“A special pet,” Sot echoed.

“I found it,” Filip added.

“Sort of,” Sot said.

They looked at him, waiting.

“So what’s the problem?” Ben asked cautiously.

“My pet was stolen,” Filip announced, a frown adding further displacement to his wizened features.

“Sort of,” Sot repeated.

There was a nuance to these last two words that Ben didn’t miss. “Stolen or not?” he pressed, none too gently. Time was wasting.

Filip was looking daggers at Sot. “It was my pet!” he snapped.

“You both found it,” Sot replied.

“It was mine!”

“It was his too!”

“Wait a minute,” Ben interrupted. “Someone else was with you when you found it?”

Filip made a freshly reworked expression of disgust by clearing his throat loudly. “Shoopdiesel.”

Another G’Home Gnome that was always making unfortunate decisions and wreaking havoc as a result. Mistaya had encountered this one after her discharge from Carrington. But it was Ben, still in Landover, who was now stuck with him. Still, unlike Filip and Sot, Shoopdiesel never spoke. As far as Ben was concerned, it was his sole virtue.

Ben rubbed his eyes wearily, wishing he were back asleep. “So you and Shoopdiesel found this pet together?”

“He is my pet!” Filip declared vehemently. “I want him back!”

It was at this point that the bedroom door opened and Willow walked in. His wife took in the sight of her husband sitting in bed with a pair of G’Home Gnomes and raised an eyebrow.

“This isn’t what it seems,” Ben said quickly.

Willow, ever calm and steady, nodded. “Is it about the pet?”

Ben stared. Well, who knew?

* * * * *

Once the guards had been summoned and the G’Home Gnomes had been carted off to await Ben’s call to bring them back (would he actually do something that foolish?), Willow sat him down to explain what she knew about this pet business. It was hard for Ben to ever avoid being distracted by his wife when they had these sorts of conversations. She was an exotic creature and he was desperately in love with her, so his distraction was understandable. Born to a woodland nymph so wild she refused afterward to remain behind to raise her daughter, and a river sprite that had spent his life trying to persuade her to come back, WIllow had told Ben on their first meeting that in accordance with arcane fairy lore he was meant for her. She subsequently provided further evidence of her exotic nature when she demonstrated quite abruptly that she could change into the tree for which she was named, explaining that the transformation was a part of her genetic makeup. In order for her to survive, she was required periodically to take root in the soil of her birth world, something that seemed very odd even in Landover.

All this had a tendency to stay with you, married or not, children or not, King of Landover or not, and it did so with Ben. His fascination with his wife was further enhanced by the fact that she was beautiful and smart and altogether too headstrong. Where Willow was concerned, you never wanted to take anything for granted or assume she would do what you expected.

So in the matter of the mysterious pet, he was not caught off guard entirely when she surprised him once more.

“The pet belongs to Shoopdiesel, and I gave it back to him,” she said. “He had it on a leash, it had his name on its collar, and he took it back from Filip when Filip stole it from him.”

“Wait, wait.” Ben held up both hands. “How did you get involved with all this in the first place? The last thing I remember was you sleeping next to me in bed.”

She gave her emerald hair a shake. “Caeris woke me early to tell me there was a Gnome with a strange animal at the gate asking to see me. She thought I should speak with him right away. She wasn’t wrong about this. I found him in a very distraught state.”

Caeris. Her new handmaiden from her home in the Lake Country recently arrived to provide her with a companion and helpmate. Ben had approved. “She just came into our bedroom and woke you in the middle of the night?”

Willow shrugged. “She has my permission to do so, when she judges it important and does not in any significant way disturb us. I trust her.”

Ben hesitated. There was nowhere reasonable to go with this. “So you spoke to Shoopdiesel? But how did you do that. He doesn’t talk.”

“He signs. His own Gnomish language, which I can understand. He doesn’t need words with me.”

“But you should have woken me. I would have gone with you.”

She smiled and ran her fingers though his hair. Silken strands of moss (she was various attractive shades of green all over) trailed across his skin, tickling him. “What sense would that make? Do you really need yet another problem to add to those you already have?”

He had to admit he did not. Even though now, it appeared, he had one anyway. “Filip seems to think the pet belongs to him. Are you sure about Shoopdiesel?”

She shook back her long green hair and leaned down to give him a meaningful kiss, making it last long enough that he was soon kissing her back.

“Does any of this really matter just now,” she whispered, pressing up against him.

He was pretty sure it didn’t.

When he went down a bit later to announce his decision regarding the fate of the mysterious pet, he was feeling considerably better about things. He noticed as he was giving his verdict to Filip that Sot was nodding along agreeably, even while Filip was shaking his head in disgust. That pretty much confirmed what Willow had told him and he already suspected—the pet was indeed not Filip’s. He emphasized that this was the end of the matter and he fervently hoped never to hear another word about it.

Then he sent them packing.

It was only later in the day that he thought to ask Willow what sort of pet the Gnomes were fighting over.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Some sort of lizard, I think. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“Didn’t they tell you what it was?”

“I’m not sure they knew.”

For reasons he could not explain, this was vaguely troubling.

* * * * *

An entire week passed without further involvement with the three G’Home Gnomes. During that time, Ben tended to the business of the Kingdom and gave little thought to the mysterious pet. Willow left for a visit with her father in the Lake Country, where she also planned a surreptitious rendezvous with her feral mother. Court Wizard Questor Thews announced the beginning of yet another attempt to change Court Scribe Abernathy back into a human (he was currently a dog). Bunion, the Kobold scout and Ben’s personal bodyguard, caught a bog wump prowling outside the castle grounds and dispatched it. A delegation of Lords of the Greensward appeared to negotiate for higher rates on the farm crops their serfs grew in the rich black earth of the midlands, and a second delegation, this one from the River Master, came knocking to complain about the Greensward’s ecologically damaging farming methods.

Things were back to normal.

Until day eight, when the G’Home Gnomes reappeared, all three at once, and none of them were looking very happy. They managed not to climb the walls to Ben’s bedroom, but simply showed up at the gates during business hours and were allowed into the throne room to present their latest request, demand, complaint, announcement, or whatever it turned out to be this time. On this occasion, it was a little of each.

“Great High Lord,” Filip declared, bowing low.

“Mighty High Lord,” Sot added, bowing even lower.

Shoopdiesel, as usual, said nothing.

Ben was sitting on his throne, something he did not much care for save when he wished to impart a certain impression, which he very much felt was necessary with these three
. I am King; you are not. I am not to be trifled with; you are not to waste my time
. He sat tall and straight and tried hard to look stern. He just hoped that his demeanor would suggest to them that they would get on with it and depart as quickly as possible.

As if.

There was a momentary pause in the proceedings as Sot prepared to speak, and then suddenly Shoopdiesel threw himself on Filip and began beating him. Filip, who already looked like he might have gone a few rounds, fought back valiantly but sustained a number of fresh bruises and cuts before Sot could pull Shoopdiesel off.

Once separated, all three stood panting hard and looking at the floor.

“I thought you were friends,” Ben said finally, still a little dazed by the sudden display of violence.

“Hah!” snapped Filip.

Shoopdiesel stomped his foot.

Sot stepped forward. “Filip ate Shoopdiesel’s pet.”

At that moment Willow walked into the room, heard Sot’s pronouncement, shook her head in dismay and, having clearly decided this was nothing she wanted to become involved in, turned around and walked out. Ben wished he could do the same.

“Why did you do that, Filip?” he asked the offender.

Filip pouted and refused to speak. Ben looked at Sot.

“He was angry, High Lord. He thought the pet was his and should have been given to him. So he ate it.” A small hesitation. “He wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Nothing new there. None of these three was given to clear thinking. It might well seem as if they weren’t given to thinking at all, but only to acting impulsively. “All right,” he said after further thought, “what do you want me to do about it?”