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Igor was always having to deal with problems for the vampire Countess, and what was one more?
It didn't matter that this one was perhaps more serious than the usual run of mobs of villagers with pitchforks and torches, packs of werewolves with a grudge, or picketing dwarves with a contract dispute. This one could be a true threat to the Countess's rule of her county here in Uberwald.
To get crop circles, you had to have crops, and Uberwald mostly had, instead, forest. The villagers didn't farm much: they kept orchards and gardens and livestock, but no fields of grain. The dwarves mined, and in the schmaltz mines they could mine their food as well. The trolls ate stone, and the werewolves hunted prey.
So in Uberwald hardly anyone got a warning when the elves were coming. Those fae creatures, those mind-reading, glamour-wielding monsters, the ones even the ordinary monsters feared: they just showed up and took someone over. Usually the neighbors got a clue by the time it was too late and simply burned the whole thing down, let the brambles grow over it and a hundred years later, someone would move in again. By that time the elves probably had got bored and gone somewhere more entertaining.
Because no one would, or could, actually fight them, that was known.
Igor, though, did not like the sound of that. Igor had his own ideas of why people hadn't wanted to fight. And, best of all, Igor had crops. A whole cave full of mushrooms under the south wing of the keep.
There had been circles in it for a week. That meant they, the Fair Folk, were almost here.
Igor had started to have presentiments. He didn't like them very much. They gave him gas. He could have obtained a replacement intestine for himself, but he had his hands full dealing with the elf invasion thank you very much, and couldn't take a break for self-care when his home was at risk. His duty was to protect the Countess. If it meant he broke wind more often than he would prefer, so be it.
He knew where the doorway was, or trap door might be a more accurate name: it was where his seed crop had come from, a mushroom circle in a tiny clearing on a steep yet still thickly wooded hillside. Igor put a sentry there, a mostly senseless construct made of a spare hand into which he'd put a beetle's brain. It'd dug in and made a nest for itself, and when it was disturbed, it'd let him know. But the elves wouldn't pay attention to the mind of an insect, beneath their notice and hidden in the mass of insect minds in the forest if the elf was so bored.
Igor was serving the Countess's evening meal when he received the warning. His beetle-hand construct startled him with the intensity of its terror. He had not realized beetles were capable of that quality of fear. Perhaps only when watching the Faerie Queen emerge from a circle of mushrooms and casually call a songbird down from the nearest tree, then proceed to pet its head and enchant it to pull out its own tail feathers one by one, ever so slowly, presenting each to her as a gift. The Queen placed each feather individually into her cloud of wild hair.
"Mithtreth," Igor said to the evening meal, "I am called away forthwith. Pleathe do not thtruggle with your manacleth, Mithtreth. The Counteth would not approve."
The meal quieted down when Igor held the cloth soaked in perfumed sedative to her face. He thought that would hold her until the Countess woke that evening. He hoped the Countess would not be too annoyed at the chemical scent of the sedation. She preferred her meals untainted with such, but Igor rather thought she also preferred her domain unburned and uninfested.
He swiftly made his way to the wood to ensure it remained so, pausing only to remove a certain dental appliance. The fae would not expect, or appreciate, Igorish lisping. They were from too far away.
By the time Igor reached the hillside door, the Elf Queen had reduced the bird to a bloody plucked rag, still alive but barely. She had also found the animated hand. She was dangling it by the pinkie, admiring its vain struggles to free itself from her.
"Please unhand that creature," Igor said. He made the mistake of looking directly at her.
It was not so much that their eyes met. The metaphorical handshake of meeting might be replaced by one party (the Queen) reaching out to grasp the other (Igor) by the throat.
Her mind ransacked his for scraps of which she might make use. Not the sort of thing Igor considered useful, surgical methods or medical plants, but what elves found useful: emotional hooks they might tug on within lesser beings. Elves believed everyone else to be lesser beings.
In Igor's mind, she found little to seize. You are less than nothing, she thought in his head, you must grovel and serve me. But to an Igor, groveling service was completely respectable. I am your superior in all ways, she thought. But to an Igor, superiority was quite different, having nothing to do with physical beauty or supernatural ability, but only practical things that were beneath fae notice.
There were many ways Igor might provide entertainment to the Queen of the Fae. He might find her a human to take apart, and help her keep the human alive while she did it. She saw that thought go through his mind. "Do you think to distract me from harming you by offering someone else in your place, creature?" she asked idly. She still held his hand in hers. The beetle mind in it went unconscious with the intensity of its fear, and she finally dropped it. The hand crumpled as it fell to the forest floor.
"Igors are known for our ability to satisfy young women," Igor said.
"Young?" She laughed. "I am ageless."
"Yet you appear young and beautiful," he said.
"You appear ugly," she told him.
"Use your glamour to make me appear however you wish."
"It might be amusing to let you try your wiles on me. Perhaps your failure will torment you in some unusual way." The Fae Queen beckoned Igor closer.
He saw his opening. Igors have their ways. It may be that if she had not given him that chance, he thought later, she might have taken over his allegiance, stolen the Countess's supper for her games, infested the castle, made the vampire lady her servant, and it could all have ended the way such things usually did, with the neighbors setting the whole surrounding forest ablaze and leaving it to grow back from ashes.
But she did give Igor his chance. Once he had made full use of his especially long and thick tongue, as well as the other equipment he had provided himself with after the funeral of a particularly well-beloved young man of the villages, the Elf Queen pronounced herself, to her own surprise, entirely satisfied. "I shall grant you a boon," she said magnanimously. "If it sounds fun."
"There is this doorway in Lancre," he said. He had seen it in one of the presentiments, memories that weren't his own, but were those of alternate versions of himself: one from a world in which he'd left Uberwald and settled in a tiny foreign village, ending up tending the graveyard there. "So many opportunities for fun there."
"It is too near my husband's place," she complained, but then one eyebrow raised. "But perhaps he has grown a bit complacent. I might like to cause him some trouble with the locals."
The Queen nodded decisively and dropped Igor from her lap, where he had been reclining. He fell gracelessly to the ground, where he looked rather like an assorted heap of body parts. And wasn't that what an Igor essentially was?
She told him this, with a thought image, and then vanished into the ring of mushrooms.
Igor's mind was fully his own again, and he leapt up in relief. That had been far too close a call. But it was done. He had better get back quickly to the castle to deal with tomorrow night's dinner.