Elf Defence (Adventures in Aguillon #2) - Lisa Henry Page 0,49

to latch that one?” Benji asked, as his imprisonment suddenly became a lot more real.

Gretchen shook her head as she locked the shackle. “No chance, cutie pie. If you did manage to escape, I don’t trust you not to get yourself in more trouble.”

“But think of Lars and Calarian,” Benji pleaded. “Someone has to make sure they’re okay. I’m the only one who’s lived alone in the Swamp of Death. I’m the only one with any survival skills. They’ll be lost without me. They’ll probably die in a meadow, choked to death on buttercups, or trampled by dairy cows.” His stomach churned at the thought of it. He was only just getting used to this ‘caring about other people’ business and was dismayed to discover that the downside to caring was, well, caring.

Gretchen sighed and rubbed a hand down the side of her face. “I’ll tell you what,” she finally said. “I’ll go find them, make sure they’re okay and keep them safe from Gunther, if you promise to stay here, sit tight, and not piss anybody off.”

Benji groaned. “Really?”

“That’s the deal. And if you’re a very good boy and get out of this alive, I’ll tell you all the embarrassing stories about Lars as a child. And there are plenty,” Gretchen said with a wink.

Benji managed a weak smile and tried to convince himself that everything would be fine. When Gretchen left though, and the door was locked and the cell seemed somehow darker than before, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was kidding himself.

The best thing about being the only prisoner in living memory in Tournel was that clearly nobody had told the guard commander that Benji was supposed to be existing on bread and water. His dinner, when it arrived, came in a wicker basket inlaid with a red checked cloth and bursting with bread, cheese, hot potato pancakes, and a bottle of beer. And, since it was delivered by Hannah, there was a gingerbread man as big as Benji’s head nestled in the basket as well.

Hannah sat with Benji on the floor of his cell and unpacked his dinner for him. She thrust a loaf of dick-shaped bread in his direction.

“Is there a knife baked into this?” Benji asked hopefully. “A file? The key to the cell? Anything?”

“No,” Hannah said, patting him on the hand. “And Gretchen says you’re to stay here and keep out of trouble, remember?”

Benji sighed, and consoled himself with a bite of potato pancake. “At least when I was living in the swamp, I had my manifesto to keep me busy.”

Hannah gave him an encouraging smile. “You could tell me about it, if you wanted.”

“No,” Benji sighed again. “It seems sort of silly now.”

If he was being honest with himself, Benji’s hunger for bloody revolution had faded a lot in recent months. It had been easy to maintain the rage while living in the Swamp of Death, mostly because everything there had been so gross and awful, but Callier had ruined the idea of revolution a bit for Benji. It was hard to want to murder all kings when they were giving him food and shelter, and they didn’t even mind when he stole their wedding silverware. Coming to Tournel had weakened his revolutionary principles even further, because everyone here was too busy being happy and looked after to remember they were oppressed peasants.

Benji had always believed that revolution meant burning everything down and starting over, but that wasn’t what had happened in Tournel at all. Duke Klaus hadn’t burned anything down. He’d just tweaked the existing system and somehow created a burgeoning sociocracy based on a system of dynamic governance.

“I’ve had so many epiphanies lately,” he grumbled. “I don’t like it. It’s very unsettling.”

Hannah passed him the bottle of beer.

“I was always so sure I had all the answers,” Benji said, his thoughts drifting away from revolution and to Calarian and Lars. “I thought I was right about everything and everyone else was stupid.” He took a swig of the beer. “But maybe I wasn’t right. Maybe I was the stupid one.”

He’d thought that love was stupid and unnecessary, something selfish and childish, something an enlightened elf knew better than to believe in. But then Calarian had barrelled back into his life, and he’d somehow started to matter. Benji hadn’t even realised how much he’d mattered until he’d seen the way Calarian had acted around Lars, and felt those awful stings of jealousy. And then Lars had mattered too, complicating