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Fair enough. Archie would be suspicious of him too. He moved over to the counter. “I can’t do anything too fancy. But maybe some bread?”
Helga didn’t object. He fumbled around for some flour and eggs and started the same recipe he had done more times than he could count. After a while, the woman seemed to relax, telling him not to skimp on the lard or let the bread get too dry. “The Marquis has a richer palate than you’ll find amongst us commoners.”
Archie nodded, still eager to seize on any opening he could. “And what else should I know about him?”
Helga’s face tightened with her steady frown. “The less you know, the better. Just keep your nose down and do your task well, and you might keep your neck.” Then she turned her attention to the girl with the turnips. “Greta. Keep that knife moving.”
The woman left after that, and it wasn’t hard to see why. She wasn’t just the castle’s cook—she also directed the maids and other castle staff and seemed happy to have another set of hands she could order around so she could busy herself elsewhere. Which made sense if the staff in the castle didn’t last long.
Archie would have to try the best he could with the girl she had left behind.
“Your name is Greta?” he tried as he started to knead the bread dough.
Greta nodded but remained silent. Head down. Even the plague orphans in Castletown weren’t so downcast, but he still hoped he could come to befriend her in the same way.
“Would you like me to tell you a story, Greta? It will help the time go faster.”
The girl didn’t agree, but she didn’t disagree either. That might be the best he was going to get. Archie started in with Anderdolf the Dwarf, the first story that came to mind. But as he described the overlooked dwarf, he paused. Anderdolf was often played as foolish, even as he won the princess’s heart. Someone the children could laugh at, even as they cheered him on.
That wasn’t the kind of hero he wanted for Greta.
And it was no longer the kind of hero Archie wanted to be.
The changes weren’t large—not at first. He just dropped the falsetto when speaking the dwarf’s lines and tried to show how clever Anderdolf’s letters to the princess were. How fearless he was to chase his dreams, even the ones that seemed higher than even a normal-sized man could reach. Anderdolf had the heart to be a dragon-slayer, if only he had been given the chance.
And when the girl gave him a hesitant smile, he knew he had gotten it right.
“Do you think . . . could a hero like Anderdolf beat an ogre?” Greta said, still addressing the turnips in her hands.
“I don’t know,” Archie said slowly, kneading the dough more than was strictly necessary. “What’s this ogre like?”
The girl hesitated for another moment. Archie was tempted to let her be—she was a child—but he had to know. He had risked too much already.
“You don’t mind telling me? If it’s just another story?”
The girl thought it over for another moment, but then she started to speak. “The ogre was a man, but he wanted to be king.”
Archie nodded with a bit of his own shame. “A good start. Men often want more than they have, and that can bring all kinds of trouble.”
Greta shook her head. “But he doesn’t look like a man anymore. He has some stolen faerie magic, and he can control any beast he wants. Control them, change them . . . or become them.”
The ogre was a shapeshifter? “Any creature? Like a lion? Or a bear?”
The girl nodded. “Anything. But that isn’t enough to beat a whole army, so he had to make another plan.”
“What kind of plan?”
Greta shrank back, whispering her answer to the turnips. “He has rats.”
Rats? “Like the plague rats?”
“They breed,” she said.
“What?”
“The rats. They breed. Sometimes there are a lot of them, and then there are not.”
Archie’s mind spun with all the implications of the girl’s confession, the words running down his back like ice. “But that didn’t make him king either, did it?” The girl didn’t answer, but he had to know. “Did he try to breed dogs the same way as the rats? Did he become a dog?”
