Elf Defence (Adventures in Aguillon #2) - Lisa Henry Page 0,7

moved remarkably quickly once Benji figured out that most of the time what people really wanted was to be told by someone in authority that they were right, that their neighbour practicing the alphorn at three in the morning was unreasonable, even if they didn’t like the part where they were told that no, that didn’t mean they could hit said neighbour in the head with a brick, no matter how tempting it was.

Humans were stupid, and their problems were stupid, but they were mostly easily solved as well. No wonder they didn’t bother rebelling, Benji reflected, if they thought their biggest issue was a dispute over the paternity of their not-so-purebred schnauzer pups. (Benji still wasn’t sure how that dachshund had managed it.) These people were so used to being oppressed they didn’t even know it.

Benji sighed and called “Next!” and was then forced to pretend to listen to the old man who was petitioning for all houses to have their facades painted the same colour, warbling on about encouraging uniformity and community spirit, as though the difference between robin’s egg blue and duck egg blue was even discernible. Look, Benji loved nothing more than a rousing argument that balanced on the knife’s edge of semantics, but he just couldn’t see why house colours mattered. Then again, the last house he’d lived in had been made entirely of charcoal, so his only choices had been black and black. And black and black were his favourite colours, followed closely by black.

And yet still the people warbled on, but once Benji and Calarian found their feet, they dispatched the queue quickly enough. And it was weirdly satisfying, Benji had to admit, when there was an Actual Decision to be made and he got to spit in the eye of the establishment by persuading Lars to grant ducal permission for the daughter of the nobleman to marry the son of the chicken farmer. Watching them kiss in front of her disapproving father did his anarchistic little heart good, honestly.

The most frustrating thing of the entire process though was that Benji was actually starting to see the point of the feudal system. Obviously humans were incredibly stupid and docile, and obviously they needed to be told to listen to someone smarter than them. That was fine, when the smarter someone was Benji, but most times it wasn’t Benji, so he supposed he could still burn down the parts of the establishment that he wasn’t in charge of, and it wouldn’t be hypocritical. He thought. He was probably going to have to reflect on that a little longer at some point.

It helped soothe his conscience a bit that Lars was watching him and Calarian with open admiration, and Benji might have preened a bit at that. He knew they were both unfairly attractive, so it came as no surprise, but he still enjoyed the attention. As they dispatched the last human and their request for permission to make specialty cheeses, he tossed his hair over his shoulders and raised an eyebrow at Calarian. “Can we go and fuck now?”

Calarian smirked. “Absolutely.”

Benji turned to Lars. “So okay, you’ve got the hang of this, right?”

Lars turned wide eyes on him, and to Benji’s horror, his bottom lip started to quiver. “No!” he burst out. “You have to stay! I have no idea how to rule—I’m just a cowherd!”

“Aw, I’m sure you’ve very brave when you need to be,” Calarian soothed.

“No, I herd cows. I get them to go where they need to go, because they're too thick to figure it out themselves,” Lars clarified.

Benji’s brow furrowed. “How is that different from ruling a bunch of stupid humans?”

“That’s incredibly rude, not to mention speciesist,” snapped Gunther, shooting Benji a glare.

“Royal privilege by proxy, I can say what I want,” Benji shot back, feeling only slightly hypocritical about it. He turned his attention back to Lars. “You’ll do fine. Just make it up as you go along. You look the part, and that’s what matters!”

He did look the part, too, when he was trying. In those brief moments, Benji could have sworn that Lars was a terrible upper-class noble who deserved to be deposed for crushing the common folk under his bootheel while laughing at their fate and profiting from their misery. Except the facade didn’t hold for more than a few minutes in a row before Lars suddenly seemed to remember where he was and the enormity of what he was doing, and then he suddenly looked