“Hello?” Sigrid called again. “Is anyone at home?”
The dim light flickered as impish shadows sprang up on the tunnel walls, followed by the pitter-patter of quite a lot of feet. Sigrid tried to stand as tall as she could, her offerings clutched tight to her skirts. She affected a resolute expression, though her heart was racing with the knowledge that she could soon be hacked to tiny pieces by the underground folk.
They came three abreast, as small as children dressed like an army of cookware. Red-faced and large-eyed, the creatures waved six sharp spears under her nose, threatening and jabbing at the air. Behind them, a fatter one in robes followed with a lantern. The fat one scowled terribly at her and chattered like a squirrel.
"I’m sorry, I don’t-" Sigrid started saying, and the spear-bearers began to snicker. Sigrid frowned and looked imploringly at the fat one, whose smirk suggested to her a clever mind. "Come now, do try," she said. "I’ve come in good faith."
“We know you,” the fat one said with a clipped accent, eyeing the milk with cunning. “You the missus with the angry cow.”
“Yes,” Sigrid replied. “I suppose I am. I am Sigrid Ulafsdottir and I live over your heads.”
“I am Tchit Kit Tan,” the fat one said, then rhymed off a barrage of chirps to introduce the armed ones as well. “Siggid Ulfsotter, what has made you come visit? We gots nothing of yours.” This last bit sounded defensive and Sigrid was quite sure she didn’t believe it. But it didn’t matter. She scuttled her suspicions and swallowed her pride.
“I want to say…I want to say-” Sigrid held out the bucket of milk and loaf of bread. “- I’m sorry. Esja was upset and I wasn’t very neighbourly towards you. But you didn’t hurt anyone until I sent—until we barged into your home. That wasn’t right.” The big kobold looked very suspiciously at her, so Sigrid forged on. “I see now we’re all in this together, we little people. Just trying to live. So I brought milk. I’m sorry.”
Tchit Kit Tan raised an eyebrow with surprise. “Are you going to poison me?”
“What?” Sigrid answered quickly as the spears tickled her chin, “No, of course not! Are you going to cut me to pieces?” She countered.
Tchit Kit Tan paused indecisively. “No,” she finally said. The forest of spears lowered as their bearers looked for instruction. Tchit Kit Tan beaconed with one hand. “Okay, come. Maybe you take back dat big meaty baby too.”
“Meaty…baby?” Sigrid asked cautiously. Flanked by tiny, clinking guards, she followed her host into the tunnels deep under the mountain, surprised by the familiar smells of baking and hearth-fire ahead of her. In the red light of the cavernous hall, by an iron oven big enough for an ox, she saw poor Grann Jordsson, peppered with moss-patched cuts and blubbering like an infant. “Ah,” Sigrid said.
“He knock Tsak Tan inna brain wit dat hoe, like as she carrots.” Tchit Kit Tan snorted. “Stupid baby.”
“Yes,” Sigrid agreed, only relieved to see the boy alive. “That was stupid. But we won’t do anything like that again.”
“No good, no good,” Tchit Kit Tan tutted from her basket-like rocking chair by the cook-fire. A pair of little ones, cute as naked rats, brought warmed milk to all three of them and stared at Sigrid as if she had six heads. “Nothing we can do to move the One-Eyed One. The westerly ways open into the woman’s coldrooms and there’s nothing in them but dead things.” Tchit Kit Tan stopped rocking and looked at Sigrid very seriously. “And those are not good eating!”
Sigrid turned a little paler but could not disagree. “If you can’t starve her out, maybe you could, I don’t know, steal all her swords. Or her horses!” Sigrid tried to imagine what mischief could dissuade an entire army and found herself out of her depth. Tchit Kit Tan looked sympathetic in a gruff sort of way.
“No. When angry bodies clatter and stomp, we plug up the ways and wait. They wear themselves down. Always do.” Tchit Kit Tan continued, shrugging. “Some will starve, but that’s the way.”
“That’s it, then?” Sigrid said. “You huddle down here and I get overrun by armies?” Tchit Kit Tan nodded and the little ones gave her bread a mercenary look. Sigrid stood. “Well, that’s nonsense. I’m moving down here with you.” Grann sniffled from the tiny stool he sat on, looking miserably into his bowl of milk. “We all will,” Sigrid corrected herself.
The armies came just after the harvest and just before the snows. Sigrid counted herself lucky that she had been able to get the barley up in time, with the help of the kobolds. Sigrid watched bale after bale disappear down the hole with satisfaction. Groa and the Jarl can grow their own bloody crops.
Grann’s parents were quite willing, but getting Esja down the hole was another matter. The old cow had a particular distaste for kobolds, and kicked and lowed even as the sound of grinding bones and metal rained down over the valley from Groa’s keep. It wasn’t until the first frozen outriders on their steeds of shadow and bone came clattering down the road that Esja decided she liked corpses even worse.
One frightened step at a time, Sigrid drew the cow down the tunnels to the under-mountain, where her few neighbours had joined more kobolds than she had ever imagined in tall, wide caves lit with red lanterns. It was dark and it was hot, but when Groa’s nair and the Jarl’s soldier’s clashed on the fields and foothills, they were safe. Sigrid baked bread and churned sour butter and lost herself in the chores of maintaining a tidy lair. They replaced the sad trapdoor with a sturdier one from her farmhouse, mere days before the building was razed to the ground.
It was into the second or third week of spring, once the snows clogging the passes had turned to glacier-blue streams and the first crocuses and merryweathers had really started to paint the hills, that Sigrid discovered Ogmund in the ruins of their home. She was in the habit of coming to the surface at least once a day, ostensibly to draw water from the well, but truly to enjoy some sun. Lifting her old back door off the hole and climbing into her fields, she often felt as if she were still at home.
She hid behind the well’s walls when she first heard the rumbling vibrations of his voice, thinking it was the Jarl’s men around again to press people into service, but when she recognized the rhythm of a single voice weeping, she crept out and made for the remains of the old house.
Ogmund was seated on the stone hearth with his back to her, crying rather noisily in full armour of burnished steel. Sigrid didn’t think there was any way she could tactfully interrupt him without embarrassing him, so she got straight to the point:
“Ogmund!” she cried, “what on earth are you doing?”
The big man leapt to his feet and drew his longest sword, the two-fisted beast he wore strapped to his back. She could see the whites of his eyes from twenty paces as he realized what he was looking at.
“Sigrid?” he said, confused. “You’re alive?”
“Well, yes, I’m—there, there,” Sigrid started as Ogmund swept her up in a fierce hug, trying to return the embrace without pinching herself on his armour, “Yes, yes, I’m alive, I’m alive.”
“Good lord, woman!” When Ogmund pulled back, he still had tears in his eyes, but he grinned like a madman. Sigrid could see he’d lost several teeth, but had them replaced with gold. “Why didn’t you come to the capital? Or send word? As my wife, you might have stayed with Prince-”
"I’ve been just fine right here, Ogmund." Sigrid cut him off. "I’ve been staying—uh, with the neighbours. Esja’s there too." Ogmund looked confused, so she narrowed her eyes and reminded him. "My cow. Anyway, Groa tells me the Jarl’s about ready to surrender the valley to her, so I-”