of their bedroom curtains spun in circles as she danced her way across the opposite hillside. She was followed by seven children, ranging in age from almost-grown down to precociously, tooth-rottingly adorable and tiny. They all appeared to be wearing cabbage rose curtain clothing as well. The boys were wearing curtain-rose pinafore shorts, and the girls were wearing curtain-rose pinafore dresses. There was a disturbing theme of curtain-rose pinafornication; a weird, uncanny uniform worn by the blond, manically smiling ranks of children, and Calarian couldn’t begin to guess at its dark purpose. He shuddered as he glimpsed their bright, soulless faces.
“What the fuck is going on?” Benji whispered, as the breeze carried faint lyrical strains towards them.
The woman and the children were all singing, and from the sound of it they were singing about...dough? Deer genders? Someone called Ray? Something weird, anyway.
“Let’s get out of here,” Calarian said, his heart thumping fast, and he and Benji gathered their things together quickly, shoving them all into the knapsack.
The strange woman and children vanished around a crest on the other hillside, and Calarian and Benji left their picnic spot and moved quickly in the opposite direction, past a small abandoned hut. There was an unspoken agreement between them to get some space between them and the cabbage-rose weirdos. They hurried, not pausing to speak until they were some distance away.
“What the actual fuck?” Benji asked, still looking shaken.
“I have no idea,” Calarian said, gripping the straps of his knapsack tightly. “There’s clearly some weird shit going on in these mountains.”
Benji nodded, wide-eyed.
Calarian tried to shake off his unease as he walked, but the sharp, clear tones of the weirdos’ singing haunted him long after he could no longer hear them. Benji strode alongside him, uncharacteristically silent for once in his life. It took a lot to rattle Benji.
“I think,” Calarian said, edging closer to Benji as they walked, “that I have some gingerbread in my knapsack still. I was saving it for later, but...” He shrugged.
Benji gave him a narrow-eyed stare, like he knew that Calarian was coddling him and he hated it, but also that he wanted gingerbread. Then, after a moment, his expression became almost hopefully bashful, as though the battle he’d been waging with his internal arsehole had been won by the combined will of his stomach and his sweet tooth. He held his hand out. “Can I have some?”
Calarian slung the knapsack around, wearing it like a pouch while he dug through it. He found the gingerbread at last, and drew it out. “This was made in the castle kitchens, so it might not be as good as Han–”
“Give it to me!” Benji shoved the gingerbread in his face like a snake swallowing a rat. He barely had time to chew before he was swallowing. “It was good. When we burn down the world, we’re sparing all the bakers.”
Calarian smiled. It was good to be included in Benji’s plans again, even if they were for death and destruction. “Okay.”
He knew that Benji had never respected his love of Houses and Humans, and thought it was ridiculous that he liked to go on quests in real life too. Which was unfair, since Benji was living in a fantasy world too, with his revolutionary rhetoric and his call to build barricades and eat the rich. For starters, he was vegetarian and last time Calarian checked the rich hadn’t been made of bean curd. And secondly, Benji had never actually done anything about bringing on the revolution. He’d just sat in his swamp and scribbled away at his manifestos. He’d never even killed a single person until Duke Klaus, and that had been an accident. He didn’t have any right to laugh at Calarian for wasting his life.
But for a brief time there, Benji had started including Calarian in his plans. His talk of revolution and killing all kings had suddenly been less about how many aristocrats Benji could murder in their beds, and more about how many aristocrats they could murder in their beds. And Calarian had liked that a lot, mostly because he’d been fairly certain there was no actual joint murdering in their future. But then, since arriving in Tournel, Benji had turned into a complete dick. Well, more of a complete dick than usual, which was saying something, and he’d stopped talking about all the governments they could overthrow together. Calarian had missed it. It made his chest flood with warmth to hear Benji talk about them