I came to staring at my own lap, slack jawed and dazed. I had been propped up because I seemed to lack any strength in my body. I would have felt like a corpse if not for the burning pain in the back of my head.

  People were talking nearby, but I wasn’t in town. They had me braced with their hands on my back to keep me in place as I drooled blood into my lap. Before I was able to make out anything they said, my eyes found the crumpled body of the goblin. Sprawled out across the road with canopy light swaying across the dirty form, I was struck by how big the creature was. Red caps were vicious little monsters, but they were always just that.

  Little.

  Sitting not three strides from the dead goblin, so close I could see the tattered fletching of the arrow that had struck it down, I realized I had never really seen one before. Not really. And that was bad because I was supposed to be able to defend myself from them. Nina and Tommy and Mary too. Every now and then, the guards would post a few cut-off heads on spikes outside the fence. They had started doing that after a tribe tried to raid the farms a few years back. I had seen the gibbering things rip apart a cow but I had been peering between the gaps in the timber and from a great span. I had also been small myself; not a great judge of size at all.

  But the hunters hadn’t lied to me over the years, talking about red caps. If asked, they would have answered that they stood about waist height and that was true. That was how they chose to stand when they came skulking out of the shadows with pointed death in one claw.

  Because they hunched. They walked so bent over they could chew on their kneecaps if they wanted to. Struck down in death, the red cap was a most unsightly mess of flesh strung across bones too long. It could have been almost as tall as I was, and yet the pool of blood it left was almost pitiful.

  Brown was leashed to a tree nearby, calmly chewing grass. I had just noted she didn’t seem to be hurt when a cloth wrapped around my eyes. I made a noise that was supposed to be a word but the effort made me cough out blood. My mouth hurt and, while I heard the women arguing, I probed with my tongue. I hadn’t bit the tip off, but one of my cheeks was a ragged wound, champed off between my teeth and oozing blood into my mouth.

  Suddenly the bandage was pulled off my eyes again and a woman knelt in front of me. She had her chestnut hair done up with a simple ribbon. I didn’t have time to take in the green of her eyes before she hooked her thumb into my mouth and pried my jaw open. She peered within, her thin eyebrows worrying against each other. “Sera, he’s still bleeding!”

  Someone behind me, their voices were getting clearer, said, “And what do you expect me to do about it? How many times have I told you that my magic only works well on you because I know you!” The one who must have been Sera was rewinding the bandage around my forehead, gingerly tying it off against some kind of numb lump across the back of my head.

  Chestnut hair groaned and pouted. When she flipped open the flap of her bag–by the look of her she was a hunter, or maybe an explorer–I swallowed the blood in my mouth. It might make me sick to my stomach later, but it let me get some words out, “Who are you?”

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  “Good, you can talk. As much as I’d like to keep you talking though,” she said before stuffing another bandage into my cheek. It scraped against my wound and I flinched back, but then she had it stuffed against the cut and an open waterskin in my hand. “My name’s Linia. Are you from around here?”

  I answered, but with the linen in my mouth, I was almost unintelligible. “Hree sown end.”

  Linia frowned and looked over my shoulder then back to me. “Three Stone Bend? That’s just ahead, isn’t it?” I nodded. “Do you have a priest there?” I nodded again. “We’ll get you to him, okay?”

  A bush rustled across the road and I saw a third member of the troupe emerge. She was an elf, a tall and muscled one at that. I could tell that despite the leather armor buckled across her body. Her cloak was the color of mud, mottled with green, but she still had it hiked up near her waist for riding. It made it easier for her to carry her weapon: a cocked crossbow. The wooden stock was carefully smoothed, almost polished from the oils of her skin. It matched the black-enameled spring steel that kept a feathered bolt ready to fly. The very same kind of bolt that was buried in the goblin, which I had mistaken for an arrow. “No other tracks,” she said as she planted the nose of her crossbow on the ground. After taking the bolt out, she hooked her boot into the steel loop and unlatched the string as if it were just a bit of twine. The weapon was fascinating, but her strength was remarkable.

  Linia put her hand on my cheek as her comrade stood up from behind me. “Do you think you can ride? Or walk? You lost a lot of blood.”

  Her hand was warm, or maybe I was cold. Only then did I remember she had given me a waterskin which I sucked on. It was warmer than I would have liked, but it washed the iron from my tongue. “I think I can,” I said, managing the slur better. She helped me to my feet, but the first step almost sent me back to the ground.

  Before I knew it, the two of us were riding double, me propped up almost entirely by Linia’s arms around me as the two of us rode Brown back to Three Stone Bend. She had her own horse, but it was a dainty pony that ended up leashed to Sera’s pony as the four of us rode back to town.

  And there was nothing much I could do to help myself. The ladies had the decency to say it was an accident when a goblin attacked me. They didn’t say I was an idiot who couldn’t ride a horse properly. When Harold, the man who styled himself as the town guard, pressed them, Linia simply explained that Claire was a very good shot. The goblin was dead, nothing to worry about.

  I couldn’t have asked for more, but still, three women had saved my fool hide. Even if they were older than me and clearly experienced travelers, it didn’t change the fact that I had been saved by a trio of women.

  While Father Hackworth undid their first aid for proper stitches, I kept thinking to myself about how pathetic I had been. One scare and I had nearly died. Saved by strangers. Maybe it would have been better if a bunch of men had saved me, but maybe that would have been worse. That would have been emasculating in its own way. I just couldn’t stand it, but I didn’t say anything because I was afraid it would be nothing more than the bloodloss talking.

  I was more afraid of being heard a fool than I was of some smelly goblin, or maybe it wasn’t fear at all. Shame? Indignation? It was some kind of emotion I couldn’t name.

  That frustrated me too. It made me feel like a country bum, as ignorant as I was powerless. I could only sit, propped upon a bed in the back of the temple, and brood about it. Father Hackworth had put me in what passed for the town infirmary. The sheets were mottled with blood spots despite the attempts at bleaching, though the small mercy was that the room smelled more like dust than disease. Three Stone Bend was a gentle kind of town in that regard.

  If not for the blood loss, I think I would have brooded all night. As it was, my eyelids shut some time after I filled my stomach which limited my brooding to a few hours. Still, that was enough for me to know that I wished to kill a goblin.