Revolting Rose

Chapter 17/Part 1 - Call to Arms

Zaech wondered how he had not noticed such an enormous pile of yellow curls around The Duchess of his Desires before, unless she was a new addition to her staff.

"Yar, if ye eyeblobs weren't glued to me Lady's erse ye might've noticed me!" Goldilocks jeered at him, but he felt no shame in his appreciation of Anastasia's exquisite body parts.

How he longed to have his eyes glued there again.

"Is she here with you?" Zaech said, peering back into the dark house, his apprehension turned to anticipation.

"Nay, I were just doing some veggie checks for 'er," Goldilocks replied disappointingly.

With that, Zaech quickly lost interest in lingering around, but Skarra was still stuck fast. His beady eyes were twinkling at Goldilocks, though she was oblivious to it, and instead had her eyes on his precious lensbox.

"What's that ye 'ave thar?"

Zaech made a quick grab at the device, but she was faster and before he could stop her, the vile creature had it in her lumpy mitts.

"Hand that back before you hurt yourself!" he squawked at her.

"What would the pair o' ye be doin' with a dangerous box-a-ma-jig, yar?" Goldilocks snorted back.

She lifted it and somehow operated the device, but the lensbox did not respond to the poking of its pusher quite as Zaech intended it to. There was not a single, loud click, but a lot of small clicks, not unlike someone very small knitting something reasonably sized. Which, oddly enough, was exactly what was happening.

Where a pictograph was supposed to fall out, there was a sock being knitted by the lensbox. And rather unlike a pictograph which depicted exactly what the box had been clicked at, the weave instead showed a chicken hitting a pigeon over the head with a broom. Goldilocks pushed the box's cutter along the knitted strip to free the sock, then scampered away down a skinny stalk with the stolen lensbox.

Zaech hit Skarra with the broom and made him well aware this whole situation had been his fault, then ran after her. He could barely squeeze through the tight spaces between the shrooms this deep in the city, so it was not hard for that thieving goblin to slip out of sight. She seemed to be heading further downwards, so that was the direction he took until there was an abrupt swerve in all the stalks as they bent to avoid growing too near the slums.

Skarra hopped down onto a fungal branch beside him and muttered some apology that Zaech was in no mind to accept. The grey bird's blunder had left his feathers so flustered that he was more of a mess than a moulting mallard.

"Preen me," Zaech snapped, but the lunk of a pigeon almost made his plumage worse by dragging the bristles of his broom down the back of his wings. "Not with that!"

After a few more strokes he realised the instrument was actually quite nice. If Anastasia enjoyed sweeping with brooms like other humble folk, perhaps she would consider preening him with one.

A rude snorting sound stirred Zaech from his wandering thoughts, then he heard the clicking of his lensbox. That wretched Goldilocks had snapped a sock of Skarra sweeping him like a feathered rug. He missed his chance to snatch it back again as she dropped into the slums below.

"At least not all of the Drakuur are gone," Skarra said, as if Goldilocks' survival was in any way a blessing. "And Anastasia seems to appreciate her—"

"Why you! You meant to give her my lensbox! You have feelings that creature, don't you?"

Zaech could not believe it, his closest companion had put his own love interest first, after all his suffering in pursuit of Anastasia. Never in his life had he felt so betrayed. He tugged one of the brooms from Skarra's hands, then went down alone.