Dawn arrived over Thornwall at approximately the time dawn was supposed to arrive, which was one of the few things in the village that operated on schedule and which could be attributed entirely to the sun, an entity that had never once consulted Alderman Fitch's procedural manual and was, for this reason, considerably more reliable than anything that had.

  The sky above the eastern hills shifted from black to indigo to a pale, watery grey that spread westward like tea being poured into a very large and very shallow cup. Stars retreated. Birds stirred. The bell-ringer, who had been given explicit instructions to ring the fifth bell at the fifth bell and who had, for once, internalised the gravity of the occasion, struck it at four minutes past, which was, by his standards, a performance of military precision.

  Levin was already downstairs.

  He had been downstairs since approximately half past the fourth bell, which was to say he had been downstairs since before the concept of "downstairs" had any meaningful distinction from "upstairs," both being equally dark and equally cold and equally populated by the sounds of a building that was settling its timbers and reconsidering its commitment to remaining upright.

  He had made tea.

  He had drunk the tea.

  He had made a second cup, decided against it, poured it out, and then made a third cup because the second cup's absence had created a void in the morning's structure that could only be filled by a third cup, which he was now drinking at the bar while staring at the far wall with the focused intensity of a man who was either deep in thought or had simply forgotten to look at something else.

  The far wall, as always, offered nothing.

  His staff leaned against the bar. The micro-fractures glowed faintly in his enhanced perception — seven hairline faults, memorised, catalogued, and permanently annotated by a skill he had acquired through the act of running a knife along wood and which he could not uninstall any more than he could uninstall his own kneecaps.

  His pack sat on the floor beside the stool. It contained: a change of socks (his only other pair, acquired from a peddler in exchange for clearing a butterfly nest from the peddler's hat, which had been an unusual quest even by Thornwall's standards), a length of rope, a tinderbox, dried meat wrapped in cloth, two of Berta's bread rolls (tactical reserve), and the battered notebook with its twelve pages of observations and its single line about Ria's shield recovery that he had reread four times in the pre-dawn dark and then closed.

  The kitchen door opened and Marda emerged.

  She was dressed in her usual uniform of apron, scowl, and the general atmospheric pressure of a woman who had been awake for ten minutes and had already found the world wanting. Her hair was pinned back with the aggressive efficiency of someone who regarded loose hair as a sign of moral decay. Her boots were laced. Her jaw was set.

  She crossed to the bar without speaking. She reached beneath it — into the space behind the lower shelf where she kept things that were not for general use, things that occupied the private inventory of a woman who had learned, through decades of running an establishment in a village where nothing was reliable, to maintain a personal reserve of items that worked — and produced a waterskin.

  It was not the waterskin Levin had been using for seven weeks.

  That waterskin was leather, cracked, and leaked from a seam near the cap at a rate of approximately one drip per minute, which meant that any journey longer than two hours resulted in a damp trouser leg and the gradual, dispiriting awareness that your water supply was migrating southward without your consent.

  This waterskin was different.

  It was newer. The leather was supple, dark, oiled. The seams were tight. The cap was brass, threaded, and closed with a quarter-turn that produced a satisfying click — the click of engineering that had been done properly by someone who understood that the purpose of a waterskin was to contain water and that any waterskin that failed in this primary objective was, functionally, a leather bag with ambitions above its station.

  Marda set it on the bar.

  She did not look at Levin while she did this. She looked at the waterskin, and then she looked at the shelf behind the bar, and then she looked at a point approximately six inches to the left of Levin's head, which was the closest her gaze came to meeting his and which was, in the complex geography of Marda's emotional expression, the equivalent of sustained eye contact.

  "The good one," she said.

  "Marda—"

  "It doesn't leak. The cap seals and the strap is reinforced. Don't lose it."

  Levin picked up the waterskin. The leather was warm from being stored behind the bar, near the hearth wall. It weighed almost nothing empty. The brass cap caught the candlelight and gleamed.

  "Thank you," he said.

  Marda's hand moved.

  It moved from the bar to the space between them — a distance of perhaps eighteen inches — and then it stopped, hovering, the fingers slightly curled, occupying a position that was neither reaching nor retreating but suspended in the particular limbo of a gesture that had been initiated and then reconsidered mid-execution.

  Her fingers uncurled.

  Her hand landed on the bar top, palm down, approximately four inches from his forearm.

  It rested there for two seconds.

  Then it withdrew, and Marda turned back toward the kitchen, and the moment passed with the quiet brevity of a candle flame guttering once in a draught and then steadying.

  Something shifted behind Levin's sternum.

  It was small. Warm. Unrelated to mana, untracked by any blue box or teal notification, unmeasured by any system that the universe had seen fit to install in his perception. It sat in the space where the reservoir hummed and occupied a frequency that was entirely its own. The same thing he felt when Ria shrugged at his level.

  He clipped the waterskin to his pack.

  "Come back with it," Marda said, from the kitchen doorway, her back to him. "The waterskin. I want it back."

  She disappeared through the door.

  Levin sat at the bar for another thirty seconds. He finished his tea. He set the cup down with the careful finality that had become, over seven weeks, the gesture that separated one part of his day from the next.

  He picked up his staff. He shouldered his pack and then walked to the front door of the Leaky Sovereign and opened it.

  The dawn was fully committed now — pale gold light spilling across the valley, catching the rooftops, gilding the mud, and performing the daily miracle of making Thornwall look, for approximately fifteen minutes, like a place where you might actually want to live.

  The village square — which was less a square and more a roughly trapezoidal area of packed earth where three roads met and where the village's entire civic life occurred, including markets, arguments, goat escapes, and the occasional impromptu performance by a travelling bard who had taken a wrong turn at Millhaven — was occupied.

  Levin stopped in the doorway.

  He counted.

  There were eleven of them.

  Eleven villagers, assembled in the pre-dawn square with the particular energy of people who had volunteered for something the previous evening while buoyed by ale and community spirit and were now, in the cold clarity of morning, confronting the full implications of their decision and finding that the implications were larger and more goblin-shaped than they had anticipated.

  Dorin was there.

  He had his woodcutting axe over one shoulder and a leather jerkin that he had presumably dug out of a chest somewhere, because it had the slightly stiff, slightly musty quality of clothing that had been stored for years and was adjusting to the concept of being worn again with visible reluctance. The jerkin fit him the way a tent fits a barrel — technically covering the relevant surfaces, but with significant architectural disagreements about shape.

  Aldric was there.

  He carried a pitchfork and the expression of a man who had spent the night lying awake, staring at his ceiling, and having a long and detailed conversation with himself about whether recovering his grain had created an obligation that extended to marching into a goblin-infested forest, and had concluded, at approximately three in the morning, that it had, and was now regretting the conclusion but honouring it anyway, because Aldric was, fundamentally, a man who paid his debts even when the debts were stupid.

  Tommas was there.

  He had a staff — a proper walking staff, thick and gnarled, the kind of staff that a goatherd carries for decades until it becomes less a tool and more an extension of the arm, worn smooth at the grip and dark with the oil of ten thousand goat-related emergencies.

  He also had his permanent squint, which gave him the appearance of a man who was perpetually trying to read something written in very small print on the horizon.

  Berta was there.

  Rolling pin.

  Apron.

  The bread-based arsenal that she had been carrying since the first goblin report and that she showed no signs of relinquishing.

  She had also brought a canvas sack that clinked when she moved, and Levin suspected — with the quiet certainty of a man who had eaten her bread — that the sack contained additional rolls, and that the rolls were not intended for consumption.

  The remaining seven were a cross-section of Thornwall's available manpower, which was to say they were farmers, tradespeople, merchants, and one retired fisherman named Pol who was sixty-eight years old, deaf in the left ear, and carrying a boat hook that he had last used to pull a sheep out of the river in 1349 and that he now held with the nostalgic fondness of a man reuniting with a trusted weapon.

  Their armaments were, collectively, a study in improvisation.

  Two had actual swords — short swords, old, maintained with varying degrees of commitment. One of the swords had a leather-wrapped grip that was coming unwound. The other had a blade that was sharp on one side and optimistic on the other.

  Three had wooden practice swords — training weapons from the guild hall's equipment closet, which Harwick had apparently unlocked and distributed the previous evening with the resigned generosity of a man who understood that wooden swords against goblins were approximately as effective as stern language against weather, but who also understood that people who volunteer to march into danger deserve to hold something, even if the something is primarily decorative.

  One had a hoe.

  One had the rake.

  The rake man — Levin recognised him now as the same man who had brought the rake to the treeline after the goblin clearance, and who had, on that occasion, set the rake down and distanced himself from it — had apparently reconciled with the rake in the intervening days and was now carrying it with a grip that communicated renewed commitment, or possibly the absence of alternatives.

  Ria stood at the front of the group.

  She was wearing her travelling clothes — the dress with the patched elbows, the boots that were better than Levin's, the satchel with the bronze medallion glinting on its strap. Her braid was tight. Her pack was full. Her chin was at the angle that Levin had come to recognise as her operational setting — the angle that said I am here, I am ready, and I have brought rosemary.

  She had, in fact, brought rosemary. He could smell it from the doorway.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  "Morning," Levin said.

  Eleven faces turned toward him.

  The turning produced a range of expressions that spanned the full emotional spectrum from "determined" to "regretting everything" with several stops at "wondering if it's too late to develop a sudden and diplomatically convenient illness."

  "Morning," Ria said. She was smiling.

  "Everyone's here," she said. "I did a headcount. Twice. Eleven volunteers plus us makes thirteen. Berta brought bread. Dorin brought rope. Tommas brought a compass, but it points southeast regardless of which direction you face, so we're using the sun instead. Pol brought the boat hook."

  "I see the boat hook," Levin said.

  "It's a good boat hook," Pol said, from somewhere near the back of the group. His voice had the carrying quality of a man who had spent decades shouting across water and who applied the same volume to all terrestrial conversations regardless of distance. "Pulled a sheep out of the river with this hook. Forty-nine. Big ewe. Current had her. One pull." He demonstrated the pulling motion. The boat hook swung in an arc that caused the two people nearest to him to duck. "One pull."

  "Pol," Ria said.

  "Hm?"

  "Please don't swing the boat hook near people's heads."

  "Right. Sorry. Instinct."

  Levin descended the tavern's front steps and crossed the square to where the group was assembled. He moved through them — not around because moving around would have added distance and moving through communicated something that moving around did not, though he could not have articulated what that something was and did not try.

  He reached the front and turned to face them.

  Eleven volunteers. People who had farms and shops and families and beds and every reason in the world to be in those beds right now, and who were instead standing in a village square at dawn holding pitchforks and rakes and wooden swords and a boat hook, because a Level 1 Mage had said he would handle the goblin problem and they had decided, for reasons that defied the level system and the Guild's classification charts and every piece of official documentation that governed the relationship between threat levels and adventurer capabilities, to come with him.

  He looked at them.

  They looked at him.

  "Right," Levin said. "A few things."

  He held up one finger.

  "First. You are not here to fight goblins. You are here to watch me fight goblins, and to make sure that any goblins who run do not run toward Thornwall. You are a perimeter. A fence. A net. You stand where I tell you to stand, you hold the line I tell you to hold, and if a goblin comes toward you, you make noise — shout, bang your weapons together, sing, recite poetry, whatever produces the most volume with the least personal risk. Goblins are cowards. Noise confuses them. Confusion makes them run in circles. Circles are not toward you."

  He held up a second finger.

  "Second. Stay behind me. Always. At all times. If I move forward, you stay. If I move left, you stay. If I move right, you stay. If I turn around and walk back toward you, you move backward at the same pace I'm moving forward, maintaining the gap. The gap is thirty feet. Minimum. If the gap closes to less than thirty feet, you are too close, and things that happen to goblins at close range will happen to you, and I would prefer that they didn't."

  A third finger.

  "Third. Ria is in command of the perimeter. What she says, you do. If she tells you to move, you move. If she tells you to stop, you stop. If she tells you to run, you run. She has a shield spell and better judgement than most of you, and I include myself in that assessment."

  Ria's chin rose by approximately two degrees.

  The medallion flashed.

  "Fourth." A fourth finger. "If you see something that frightens you — and you will see things that frighten you, because goblins are frightening in the way that all things are frightening when there are enough of them and they're angry and they smell like a compost arrangement that has achieved sentience — remember that fear is a signal, and the signal says 'pay attention,' and paying attention is the single most useful thing you can do in a dangerous situation. Fear is not weakness. Fear is your body telling you that the world has become interesting and that you should be alert. Listen to it. Then stay where Ria tells you to stay."

  He lowered his hand.

  "Questions?"

  Silence met him as they milled about.

  The silence of eleven people who had questions — many questions, urgent questions, questions about survival and tactics and whether the rake was going to be sufficient and whether Pol's boat hook constituted a genuine weapon or a maritime souvenir — but who had decided, collectively and without consultation, that the man standing in front of them had spoken with a clarity and a calm that made the questions feel smaller than they had been a moment ago.

  Dorin shifted his axe on his shoulder. "What about the fifth thing?"

  Levin blinked. "Sorry?"

  "You held up four fingers. You said 'a few things.' A few is usually three or five. Four is — four is an uncomfortable number. It's unfinished. Like a table with three legs."

  "A table with three legs has three legs. Four would be—"

  "You know what I mean. Give us a fifth thing. Round it off."

  Levin looked at Dorin.

  Dorin looked back with the steady, uncomplicated gaze of a man who chopped wood for a living and who believed that all things, including pre-battle briefings, should have clean edges.

  "Fifth," Levin said. He held up five fingers. "We'll be home by lunch."

  Dorin nodded. "Good enough."

  "Right. Let's go."

  The march north began on the road and ended on something that could not, by any honest cartographic standard, be called a road.

  For the first mile, the path was familiar — the same packed-earth trail that led to Briarwood, same gradual loss of confidence as the ruts faded and the weeds advanced, and the same transition from "road" to "suggestion" to "vague directional consensus among plants."

  The group walked in a loose column.

  Levin at the front, staff tapping.

  Ria behind him, satchel bouncing, braid swinging.

  The eleven volunteers strung out behind them in a line that stretched and compressed like an accordion, expanding on the flat sections where conversation was possible and contracting on the slopes where breath was needed for climbing and conversation became a luxury that the lungs could not afford.

  They passed the old mill clearing.

  The fused glass circle was still there — darker now and weathered, but visible, a permanent scar on the forest floor that marked the spot where Levin had introduced himself to the local goblin population a few weeks ago.

  The spike trap had been dismantled, or had dismantled itself, which was the more likely outcome given the engineering standards of its creators.

  Ria pointed at the glass circle as they passed. "That's where he did it," she told Berta, who was walking beside her. "One bolt. The ground turned to glass."

  Berta looked at the circle and then looked at Levin's back.

  She adjusted her grip on the rolling pin.

  They continued north.

  Beyond the mill clearing, the trail narrowed. The canopy closed. The undergrowth thickened from "assertive" to "actively hostile," producing thorns and brambles and low-hanging branches that snagged on clothing and hair and the extended handle of Pol's boat hook, which caught on an overhead branch approximately every forty feet and required a backwards tug that produced a shower of leaves and, on one occasion, a very startled squirrel that fell onto Aldric's head and departed via his left shoulder with a chatter of outraged dignity.

  The forest changed character as they moved deeper.

  The birches and elms of Briarwood gave way to older trees — oaks with trunks wider than a man's arm span, beeches with bark like elephant skin, and the occasional ancient yew that stood in the undergrowth with the dark, brooding presence of something that had been alive when the village was a clearing and a campfire and that regarded the passage of humans through its territory with the patient indifference of an organism that operated on a timescale measured in centuries.

  The light dimmed.

  The air cooled.

  The sounds changed — fewer birds and critters, more silence, the kind of silence that is not an absence of sound but a presence of quiet, a deliberate and watchful hush that suggested the forest was paying attention and had opinions about the thirteen creatures walking through it.

  Levin stopped.

  He stopped at a point where the trail — such as it was — crossed a shallow stream. The stream was perhaps four feet wide, ankle-deep, running over a bed of smooth stones that clicked and shifted under the water's flow. On the far bank, the mud was soft, dark, and covered in tracks.

  Goblin tracks.

  Dozens of them.

  The prints were small — three-toed, splayed, pressed deep into the mud by feet that had passed through in numbers sufficient to churn the bank into a textured relief map of goblin traffic. They came from the northeast, crossed the stream, and continued northwest, deeper into the old growth.

  Levin crouched beside the stream. He examined the tracks. The edges were sharp, the mud still damp in the deepest impressions. Fresh. Hours old, perhaps. A day at most.

  "How many?" Ria asked, crouching beside him.

  Levin studied the churned mud.

  Individual prints overlapped, merged, obliterated each other. Counting was impossible. Estimating was possible though, in the way that estimating the number of raindrops in a puddle was possible — you could arrive at a number, and the number would be wrong, but it would be wrong in a useful direction.

  "Forty," he said. "Maybe more. Moving in a group. Northeast to northwest. Heading for—" He looked up, following the line of the tracks into the forest. The trees were denser here, the undergrowth thicker, the canopy lower. The trail of churned earth and broken undergrowth was visible for perhaps fifty feet before the forest swallowed it. "Heading for something specific. They're not foraging. Foraging parties spread out. These tracks are parallel. Tight and disciplined."

  "Disciplined goblins?" Dorin said, from behind them. He said it the way a person says "flying pigs" — acknowledging the words while rejecting the concept.

  "Disciplined is relative," Levin said. "For goblins, 'disciplined' means they're all walking in the same direction at the same time without stopping to argue about boots. It's a low bar. But they're clearing it."

  He stood up and looked at the group.

  Eleven faces looked back.

  The faces had changed since the village square — the morning's mixture of determination and regret had been replaced by something more immediate, present, and more aware. Eyes were wider. Jaws were tighter. Hands gripped weapons with the unconscious pressure of fingers that had received information from the environment and were responding accordingly.

  The smell had arrived.

  Faint, carried on the breeze from the northwest, threading through the forest air like a rumour. The particular, unmistakable, olfactory signature of goblin habitation — wet fur, rot, acid, and the sulphurous undertone that no amount of distance could fully dilute.

  Noses wrinkled along the column.

  Tommas's permanent squint deepened.

  Berta's rolling pin shifted from "carrying" to "ready."

  Ria clutched her satchel tighter.

  "From here," Levin said, "we follow the tracks. Single file. Quiet. Ria leads the perimeter group. I go ahead. Thirty-foot gap. Minimum."

  "Thirty feet," Ria confirmed. She turned to the volunteers. "You heard him. Single file. Behind me. Quiet means quiet — no talking, no clanking, no swinging boat hooks into trees."

  "That was once," Pol said.

  "It was four times, Pol. I counted."

  "The trees were in the way."

  "The trees live here. You're the visitor. Adjust."

  They crossed the stream. The water was cold — sharp and clean, a brief shock against the ankles that woke the body and reminded it that the morning was real and the forest was real and the tracks in the mud on the far bank were real and led somewhere that was going to be considerably less pleasant than the stream.

  Levin moved ahead.

  He followed the goblin trail through the old growth, his staff tapping softly on the forest floor, his eyes tracking the signs. Broken branches at goblin-head height — three and a half feet, consistent, metronomic. Footprints in every patch of soft earth. Scraps of leather caught on thorns. A gnawed bone, dropped and forgotten. The detritus of a group that had passed through with the subtlety of a parade and the hygiene standards of a landfill.

  The trail led northwest for approximately half a mile, then turned north, climbing a gentle slope through a stand of ancient oaks whose roots had broken the surface of the earth in thick, gnarled ridges that made the footing treacherous and the going slow.

  At the top of the slope, the forest opened.

  The opening was not natural. Trees had been cut — hacked, really, with the crude efficiency of creatures who understood the concept of "remove tree" but had no interest in the finer points of forestry. Stumps jutted from the ground at irregular heights, their surfaces ragged, the cuts made by blades that were neither sharp nor wielded with any particular skill. The cleared area was roughly circular, perhaps eighty feet across, and at its centre, the ground fell away.

  A cave mouth.

  The entrance was wide — fifteen feet across, eight feet high, a dark oval in the hillside framed by exposed rock and the roots of trees that had been growing above the cave and were now hanging over its entrance like a curtain of wooden fingers. The rock around the entrance was limestone, pale grey, stained with streaks of green and brown that were either mineral deposits or evidence of things being dragged in and out over an extended period.

  The smell was no longer faint.

  The smell was, at this distance, a physical presence.

  It occupied the clearing with the territorial confidence of something that had been there first and intended to stay.

  It pushed against the nostrils. It coated the back of the throat. It produced, in the eleven volunteers who had followed Levin up the slope and were now standing at the edge of the cleared area, a synchronised series of facial contractions that communicated, across eleven different faces and with eleven slightly different configurations of disgust, the universal human response to an odour that exceeded the olfactory system's design specifications.

  Aldric gagged.

  He covered his mouth with his hand and breathed through his fingers, which helped approximately as much as holding a tissue over your face during a hurricane.

  Berta's eyes watered.

  She blinked rapidly, her jaw set, her rolling pin gripped in both hands.

  Tommas's squint became so pronounced that his eyes were essentially closed, which was, from a certain perspective, an advantage, because it meant he couldn't see the cave entrance and the cave entrance couldn't see him, and in Tommas's current emotional state, this mutual blindness was a comfort.

  Pol held the boat hook at arm's length in front of him, as though the additional eighteen inches of distance between himself and the smell would make a meaningful difference.

  It did not.

  Levin breathed through his mouth.

  The cave exhaled.

  A slow, warm current of air drifted from the entrance — the breath of an underground space that had been sealed and occupied and heated by the collective body warmth of dozens of creatures living in close quarters, and that carried with it the concentrated essence of everything those creatures had eaten, excreted, shed, and forgotten to clean up over a period that was, based on the intensity of the smell, measured in weeks rather than days.

  From inside the cave came sounds.

  The sounds were familiar. High-pitched. Scratchy. Argumentative. The default soundtrack of goblin existence, amplified by the cave's acoustics into a reverberating chatter that echoed from the entrance like the output of a very small and very angry amphitheatre.

  Levin raised his hand.

  The column stopped.

  He turned to Ria. "Here," he said. "Perimeter. Semicircle around the cave entrance. Thirty-foot radius. Nobody goes closer. Nobody goes inside."

  Ria nodded. She turned to the volunteers and began positioning them — directing each one to a spot along the tree line with the efficient authority of someone who had been managing goats and spiders and soup production for the past week and who applied the same organisational framework to all three.

  Dorin went left, axe ready.

  Aldric went right, pitchfork forward.

  Berta took the centre, directly behind Levin's position, rolling pin in one hand and the canvas sack of bread rolls at her feet.

  Tommas, Pol, and the others filled the gaps, forming a loose arc of villagers and improvised weapons that would, in a military manual, have been classified as "a line" and that in practice more closely resembled a group of people standing near each other and hoping for the best.

  The rake man took his position at the far left of the arc. He held the rake with both hands, tines forward regardless of the fact that his primary weapon was designed for gathering leaves.

  Levin walked toward the cave entrance.

  He walked alone.

  His staff tapped the cleared ground — softer here, the earth churned by hundreds of goblin feet into a surface that was part mud, part refuse, and part things he chose not to identify. The blue-white glow along his forearms was visible in the shade of the overhanging roots — faint, steady, a lattice of luminous lines that pulsed in time with the reservoir behind his sternum.

  The hum was present.

  The secondary harmonic pulsed beneath it. The five combat skill notifications sat in their queue, faded to background, patient, waiting for his attention.

  He reached the cave mouth and stopped.

  He looked inside.