She crawled to Gralin, her tunic snagging on a low branch and holding her. She tugged at the fabric and was instantly free. A healing enchantment rushed through her mind as she closed the distance and touched her fingers to the hobgoblin’s back. Her other hand grasped one of the arrow hafts and pulled.
Be alive, she thought.
Her spell mended the hole left from the extracted arrow as she reached for another shaft, her fingers slick with his blood.
Please be alive.
“Aye, I think I killed it, but there may be more. Best keep a wary eye out.”
Qel worked quickly, but she couldn’t pull the arrow out. It was in too deep, lodged against something hard. She might do more harm than good. She sent waves of cold into Gralin’s form, hoping to stop any internal bleeding. Then her fingers fluttered toward the arrows protruding from his neck.
Please, please, Gralin, be …
“It’s a girl. Put your bows down.”
Dead.
Gralin was beyond her help.
Qel broke the arrow off on Gralin’s back, and yanked the two out of his neck. She turned the hobgoblin over just as six Dark Knights tromped through the brush and surrounded her. She kept from crying over a hobgoblin she hadn’t known very well but had come to like in the past several days. She would show no weakness to the men.
Why did you have to kill him? She wanted to know that, above all.
“Girl, are you all right?” Concern was thick in the knight’s voice.
Qel stood, noticing she had a considerable blood smear on her tunic. “It’s not mine, this blood.”
“Your captor. Telvir and Walen dropped him.”
She wanted to scream at them for killing the young hobgoblin, whose only weapon was a knife that was still stuck in its sheath. But she kept silent and regarded them blankly.
They were all sweating, though the day was not overly warm. It was probably from traveling through the overgrown terrain for hours and hours, maybe traveling for days, she thought. She noted that each man had stubble on his face and grass and dirt smudges along the bottoms of their tabards.
“Do you know where he was taking you, girl?”
Qel knew she looked younger than she really was, and so she didn’t intend to set them right on that point either. She shook her head and looked at her bloody hands. She’d gotten splinters from the arrows.
“Good thing we spotted you and the hob.” That came from the knight who leaned over the hobgoblin and prodded Gralin’s body with his boot tip. He straightened and gave her a curt nod. “We’re in these woods hunting these things.”
“Hobgoblins?” She knew Direfang’s people were worried about the knights.
“Hobs and gobs,” he cut back. “Were you held captive in a goblin camp?”
She shook her head. I was in their city, she thought.
“The hob was probably taking you there, then. They’ve got a camp somewhere around here. Isaam says so.” The knight spun one way then the next. “Where was he taking you?”
She pointed north. Would the gods be angry at all my lies?
“Are you from a village here in the forest? Somewhere near?”
Again, she shook her head. Her mind churned with what she ought to tell them. The truth, she settled on. “Schallsea Island. I was on a ship.”
“That was wrecked,” another knight finished. He was looking one way then the next, obviously in a hurry. He started tapping his foot. “Were there others with you? More prisoners?”
“Only one, from the island. I don’t know where he is now.” That was the truth. She was lost and had no idea where Orvago was.
“The coast isn’t far. You should get there well before sunset. Just keep walking west.” That was said by the knight still looming over the body. He gestured toward what Qel suspected was the west. “Keep walking in that direction, and you’ll reach the shore soon. Certainly before dark. Some ship coming by will see you. Another time and we would help you more. But-”
“We can’t afford to haul you through the woods with us is why. You’d never keep up, and we can’t slow down.” Another knight had spoken, one she hadn’t noticed before. There were seven of them.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I can find my way.”
The knight nudged the hobgoblin’s body with his boot again, gesturing north. “This way you say? We’ll try this direction for a while,” he said. “Telvir, you take point. We’ll see if we can find something.” He gave her another nod then directed the men back into the foliage.
She listened to their tromping for a while, and when she couldn’t hear them any longer, she knelt at Gralin’s side and pulled the knife from its sheath. She cut off two of his fingers and hurled them away.
“Leave nothing intact,” she remembered more than one goblin saying. It wasn’t her belief, but it had been Gralin’s. She finally allowed herself to shed tears over the fallen hobgoblin.
If she’d the time, she would have been more thorough and found a way to burn his body. And if she’d possessed any tracking skills, she would have retraced her steps and found her way back to Direfang’s city.
If she hadn’t left in the first place, Gralin would still be alive.
“Never should have left.” Qel squared her shoulders and headed-she hoped-to the west. She had no way to find the goblin city on her own, she decided; she had no choice but to try to find her way back to Schallsea Island.
“Gralin was right,” she said to herself, choking back tears. “I didn’t get much of a look.”
ABANDONED BY A GOD
Mudwort stood in the center of the ring of trees, slowly spinning and trying to absorb everything. She didn’t want to miss a detail of what could be the most important moment of her life-well, the most important moment since breaking free of the Dark Knight mining camp.
She had to remember all of it.
“T’rendru,” she said. A short goblin word, it carried a lot of meaning: remember, preserve, cherish, engrave, capture, but capture in a positive way. It was a word she hadn’t used in a long time.
The ash trees seemed much larger than when they’d appeared in her vision. Eighty feet tall, they had to be, and each at least half again that wide. Planted in a perfect circle, their limbs entwined like goblins holding hands in an important ceremony.
Their knobby roots extended into the clearing. She glanced at the back of her hand; the roots looked like veins standing out against the mossy ground. Nature hadn’t grown the trees on its own. Someone had helped. Maybe the ancient shaman. Maybe her consort. Maybe Chislev. Mudwort resisted the urge to dig immediately for the spear. She had to prolong the moment.
“T’rendru. Can’t miss anything,” she told herself. “Have to see it all and lock it away forever.”
The rustling of the ash leaves sounded musical, better than birdsong, and there were dozens upon dozens of birds chittering there. She thought she heard distinct words in their conversations, a whisper in the notes, as if the trees and birds were talking to her and she just couldn’t comprehend their language.
“What say?” she tried. Maybe if she spoke to them, they would answer in goblinspeak. “What say to Mudwort? What say, birds? What say, trees?”
After a little bit of concentration, she thought she picked out certain words: divine, danger, hope, and wonder-all in goblinspeak, uttered just for her benefit. T’rendru too. But it might have been her imagination. No, she distinctly heard “hope.” Umay-that was hope in goblinspeak. Mudwort was filled with it-hope. She hoped the spear would be amazing. She would not have urged Direfang to come to the forest otherwise. She would have championed a spot closer to Neraka or perhaps in Northern Ergoth.
“Mudwort’s spear.”
“Hope,” the trees seemed to repeat.
There were other trees, just as she had noted in her vision. But she could see them better, and there was a pattern to them too. Silver birches grew straight, their limbs spreading away to give them the shape of arrowheads. The birch trees around Direfang’s ruined city had curving, artful trunks that didn’t remind her of anything. The trees had a distinct pattern to them, and their leaves twisted in the wind, suggestive of the glittery silver jewelry she’d seen on some of the men and women in Steel Town.