A Princess of Landover

He started to turn away, heading for the castle, and she was forced to reach out and grab his arm. “Wait! You can come with me!”

He tried to jerk his arm free and failed. “Why would I do that?” he demanded, stopping where he was. “Why would I come with you?”

“Because we’re friends!”

That silenced him for a moment, and he stood there looking at her as if she had just turned into a bog wump.

“Friends don’t leave friends behind,” she continued. “You were right about my decision to leave without you. I was being selfish. You should come with me.”

He seemed suddenly confused. “I was right, wasn’t I? I knew I was. But …” He stopped again, trying to think it through. “You’re going to see your grandfather? The River Master? You want me to go with you to the lake country? But they don’t like G’home Gnomes there. They like them there even less than they do everywhere else.” He paused. “Except maybe in the Deep Fell, where the witch lives.”

“We’re not going to the Deep Fell,” she assured him, although suddenly she was thinking that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. With Nightshade still not returned from wherever her misguided magic had dispatched her almost five years earlier, the Deep Fell was safe enough. Well, maybe not all that safe, she conceded.

“I think this is a bad idea,” he continued. “You shouldn’t leave home like this. You should tell someone or they will worry and come hunting for you. If they find you, they’ll find me and I’ll get all the blame!”

She was massively irritated with his whining, but she recognized that there was a reason for it and that she had brought the whole thing on herself by involving him in the first place.

“What if I write you a note?” she asked him.

“A note? What sort of note?”

“One that says you are not to blame for this. They would know my handwriting. They would know it was genuine.”

He thought about it a moment. “I think I will just come with you and take my chances,” he said finally.

She almost started arguing against it, then remembered it had been her suggestion in the first place. “Well, that’s settled then. Can I have my bag now, please?”

Grudgingly, he released his grip and shoved it toward her. “Here. Take the old thing. Do what you want with it.” Surly and grumpy-faced, he lurched to his feet. “Let’s get going while we still can.”

She started off without speaking, already determined to get rid of him at the first opportunity.

MISERY LOVES COMPANY

Whatever reservations Mistaya might have harbored about her decision to allow Poggwydd to accompany her on her journey to the River Master were quickly proved insufficient.

He started to annoy her almost immediately by talking without taking a breath. He didn’t appear to have any idea at all that it was possible to travel in silence. It began to seem after the first hour that his mouth was somehow connected to his feet, and that if one moved, the other must naturally follow suit. He talked about everything—about things he was seeing, about what he was thinking, about his worries and hopes and expectations, about his aches and pains, about his struggles to get by in life, but mostly about the undeserved lot of all G’home Gnomes.

“We have been set upon relentlessly, Princess,” he declared, shaking his finger at her as if she were somehow to blame. “We are persecuted from the day we are born until the day we die, and there is never any letup in the effort. All creatures feel it is their bound duty to make our lives miserable. They do so without compunction and without reason. I think it is a game with them—an evil, malicious exercise. They consider it a pastime, an activity in which all must participate and from which great enjoyment is to be gained. They see us as toys—small playthings made for their amusement.”

She tried to slow him down. “Perhaps if you—”

“There is no ‘perhaps’ about any of it,” he continued, cutting her short. “Do not try to change the reality, Princess, with encouraging words and empty promises of better days ahead. We Gnomes know better. It is our lot in life to be abused, and however unfair and arbitrary, we have learned to accept it. Teasing and taunting, sticks and stones, beating and flaying, even the burning of our homes”—this one slowed her down a bit, since G’home Gnomes lived in burrows in the ground—”are all part and parcel of our everyday lives. We bear up nobly under our burden. You will not see a G’home Gnome flinch or hear him cry out. You will not witness a moment of despair revealed in our faces.”

She could hardly believe what she was hearing, but she decided not to get into an argument about it. “Yet you continue to steal what isn’t yours, which just encourages your mistreatment by others?”