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“Who are they?” I asked, gesturing at the robots again.
“Daisy has already introduced herself, I believe,” he said sourly. “That’s Sam.”
“Servant, ma’am,” the old gent muttered, and emerged the rest of the way out of the clock. He had a portly body covered by a starched blue uniform. “I left it outside,” he told the man, I guess talking about Big Red. “Do y’want me to go back, see if I can salvage anything?”
“I don’t know.” My host looked at me. “Is there anything left?”
“Of the other one?” I guessed.
He nodded.
I thought about it. “The hat?”
He scowled. “No,” he told the colonel, who muttered something and went over to give Pritkin the hairy eyeball.
“What did we destroy?” I asked, in between stuffing my face. The cookies were homemade. God, so good.
“Do they not feed you in your time?” my host demanded.
“Not often,” I said honestly.
He joined the colonel in scowling at Pritkin.
“What was that thing?” I asked again as the kettle went off.
“My gardener,” he told me, getting up to attend to it. “Your—my wife,” he amended, glancing at Pritkin, “is fond of the woods. But there was not much left when we arrived. The former owners had cleared some land for farming and more to build the main house. And then Tony burnt a bunch of the rest in order to have an open field of fire, in case any of his enemies tried to sneak up on him.”
That sounded like Tony.
“We managed to reverse much of the damage, but it requires upkeep to maintain. And more now,” he said dryly, pulling down a couple of brightly colored pottery mugs.
“Then the potions . . .”
“Were fertilizer, yes.”
“Some fertilizer!”
He frowned and slopped water in a teapot that matched the mugs. “It functions perfectly well in the correct amount. Maybe next time you should take a moment to find out what you’re attacking!”
“We didn’t attack anything,” I said, remembered fear sharpening my voice. “Why did you tell it to target us? You had to have recognized me!”
“I wasn’t there,” he said, setting the teapot down on a tray, harder than necessary.
“Then you’re telling me that creature did all that on its own?”
“That’s the point of a homunculus—it has a will of its own. Too much sometimes.” He shot a look at Daisy.
“I was just trying to trap you,” she told me, looking sheepish.
“That was . . . wait.” I took the mug I was offered, because my throat was full of cookie crumbs, and I could barely talk. But as soon as I gulped down some truly scalding tea, I put it down. “That was you?”
“Well, it wasn’t me,” the colonel said. “A good soldier knows when to act, and when to ask for instructions!”
“Too bad I’m not a soldier,” Daisy huffed.
“As you continually demonstrate.”
“And I wasn’t expecting you,” she told me, ignoring him. “I was just doing a little pruning, tidying up and such, and then the alarms went off and practically scared me to—well, not death, but you know what I—”
