The man might have been a sneering streak of misery, but he wasn’t stupid. He turned to Lars, clearly expecting to find an ally. “These men don’t know how the duchy works, Your Grace.” He was clearly aiming for pleasant but instead came off as condescending. “Surely you’d like one of your own to advise you, someone who knows our ways?”
Lars looked from the man to Benji and Calarian, and Benji did his best to look earnest and trustworthy, and not like he just wanted this over with so he could bang Calarian like a barn door in a hurricane. It must have been at least slightly convincing, because Lars said, “I don’t know, Gunther. Maybe it would be good to get a fresh viewpoint?” and beckoned them forward.
Benji stepped up to the side of the throne and Calarian flanked the other side, much to the displeasure of the man—Gunther, Benji reminded himself, not Cottage Cheese Man.
“Master Baker,” Lars said, his handsome face pulled into an expression of genuine concern. “Please tell us again what the problem between you and your apprentice is?”
“Master Baker,” Benji mouthed at Calarian, delighted. Then, in case Calarian didn’t get it, he added some gestures with some enthusiastic elbow action and that pull-and-twist manoeuvre with his hand that Calarian liked so much.
Calarian pointedly ignored him. He was probably trying to look all royal and advisory, Benji decided, and it definitely wasn’t because he was annoyed at Benji calling him out earlier over ogling Lars in leather. Benji made the gesture again, and this time it earned a slight quirk of Calarian’s lips. Not annoyed, then, Benji surmised, and refused to wonder why he cared.
The baker in question poked his apprentice, a woman in maybe her early twenties who was wearing a mischievous expression, sharply in the chest with a thick finger. “Hannah here is making my famous Tournel loaves into a laughing-stock, and she won’t stop.”
The apprentice tossed her flaming red hair defiantly. “I’m keeping things interesting,” she argued.
“This isn’t interesting! This is obscene!” The baker picked up a bag and pulled out three loaves, and Benji immediately saw the issue. He elbowed Calarian, eyes wide, and Calarian snickered at the sight of fresh, crusty loaves, lovingly shaped into penises.
Lars blinked. “Um…”
“Very creative,” Benji said smoothly. “A credit to your dough handling skills.”
“But they’re meant to be oval,” the baker snapped. “Tournel loaves are oval!”
‘Do they sell?” Calarian asked, picking up the biggest loaf and running both hands over it in a way that reminded Benji forcibly of their plans for later.
“Well, yes, but…” the baker hesitated. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he decided.
Benji personally thought it was hilarious, but he could also see the line of people waiting and he wasn’t going to pretend he was morally outraged by dick bread, so he made a snap decision. “Hannah, you’ll make what you’re told,” he said, and when she opened her mouth to object he added, “except on Fridays. On Fridays you can shape the bread how you like. As a treat.”
Hannah nodded eagerly.
Benji turned to the baker. “Does that work?”
The man looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he decided. “On Fridays she can even make her giant strudels.”
“People do love a giant strudel,” Benji agreed, “especially when it’s made by a Master Baker.” He made the hand gesture again and Calarian snickered. Even Lars gave a grin, his face lighting up, and Benji tilted his head curiously and wondered why it felt so nice to make the new duke smile.
Weird.
The baker and his apprentice gave a tiny bow and scurried off, and Calarian called, “Next!”
They spent the afternoon sorting through the problems of Tournel’s citizens, and the line 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?”