Chapter 6:
The Castle in the Woods,
by the Quiet Shore
YO, THE NAME’S SHOOTER. I’m thirty-two years old and I’m a slave. Usually I’m put to work as a hunter for my village, but I was recently knighted, so that’s weird. I live in a hunter’s shack with three other people. Picture, if you will, four adults sharing a studio apartment. The hut is incredibly cramped.
“Good morning, Shooter.”
“G’morning. Did you sleep okay?”
“The bed was a little snug, unfortunately,” my principal wife Cassandra answered curtly.
“Um, g-good morning, Tanne d’Arc.”
“Good morning, husband. Your bed is so small, I almost fell out three times last night. Can’t you do something about it? Please?”
“We don’t have much choice. If it weren’t for your dowry, the bed would be an even tighter squeeze for us.”
“Why can’t you ask your barbarian chief to build a new house for you already? Didn’t she say she was giving you a house as a reward?”
In celebration of my marriage to his little sister, the chieftain of the bull-kin clan had given me a double bed that was disproportionately large for our tiny shack. But I only call it large in terms of the standards of this fantasy world. Back in Japan, it might not even classify as twin-size.
My two wives and I had slept pressed up against each other like sardines, and since Tanne d’Arc was the one on the outside, she almost got pushed out of the bed whenever someone shifted during the night. We were going to have to do something about that.
“Kweeee!”
“You can’t fuss like that in the bed, Basil. And if you have to go to the bathroom, you need to wake up your mother or Tanne d’Arc. Understand?”
“Kwee kwee ppthhbbb!”
The baby basilisk had entered a rebellious phase recently, and since Tanne d’Arc had only moved in the previous night, he didn’t yet recognize her as a co-mom. He treated her worse than if she were his older sister. Another fun problem.
“Good morning, Shooter.”
“Hey there. I hope you slept all right, Elpaco.”
“Yeah. But I was a little lonely sleeping by myself.”
“Really? You seemed so cozy, though.”
Animal-eared Elpaco had agreed to sleep in the long, narrow bed I used originally. Back then, Cassandra and I were newlyweds. And now my new wife Tanne d’Arc was part of the equation. It was hard enough that circumstance had forced Elpaco to come live with Cassandra and I right after we got married, but now the kid was stuck spending the night in the same room as a newly polygamous marriage.
Ironic—I rescued him from Wak’wakgoro’s huge goblin family only for him to end up sleeping alone in a house with three newlyweds…which was another fine problem to solve. The hunter shacks were already uniformly cramped, and then we’d crammed a double bed into ours, making the living space even tinier and aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAHHHH I really, really needed to do something about this situation.
We didn’t have a third mattress to rotate anyone onto, either. Before any of this even happened, the village had run out of spare beds for all the new settlers so the village chief had taken away the pallet Cassandra slept on before she married me. Not there was room in our hut for anything superfluous.
“W-well, Elpaco and I will go tend to the fields. The two of you can take care of the laundry.”
“You can’t do that, Shooter. The village chief told you to go meet with her first thing in the morning to discuss our housing situation, remember?” said Cassandra.
“She’s right. I want to move to a bigger house! Stuffing four of us into a tiny shack like this…” Tanne d’Arc folded her arms. “It’s like living in a slave hovel.”
“Now hold on, Tanne! I think it’s a little rude to call my husband’s house a slave hovel.”
“Our husband is a slave. Objectively. We’re married to a slave.”
“That may be true, but it’s rude to say it.”
I was holding my wives away from each other with both arms, but I decided this was a good opportunity to get away. I grabbed Elpaco and hurried out toward the fields. “Let’s go, Elpaco! No need for us men in their conversation. We belong out in the fields!”
“Ow! Sh-Shooter, don’t pull so hard. Shoooooterrrrrrrr!”
Right as we finished up the fieldwork, I received a summons from the village chief. Both my wives had repeatedly reminded me to, “Go talk to the village chief about getting a new house ready as soon as possible!” Defeated, I went to her manor. When I got there, she ordered me to accompany her and I soon found myself on the way to the lakeshore with her, followed by a herd of goblin laborers and enslaved criminals.
Since being appointed a knight in service to Knight Commander Alexandricia, I had expected major changes to my day-to-day life, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case. I went out to the forest to hunt just like always, and the chore of going out to the fields in the morning to weed and water them was no different than before, either. The only real difference was that Alexandricia’s stepson Gimul, who had been in line to inherit leadership of the village, was gone. Without him, Alexandricia summoned me to her house all the time instead.