Glaring sunlight beat down over the top of Rasp. It reflected off of the fresh snow and rendered the surrounding landscape obnoxiously bright. Shielding his eyes, Rasp stood and squinted at the approaching rider. Squinting didn’t help any, but it did give Rasp’s mind the chance to play a quick game of catch-up. Everything about the goblin was uncannily familiar: his accent; the way his scratchy voice made the back of Rasp’s throat itch with sympathy pains; the brazen, unabashed use of malaphors. It practically screamed ‘Snag’ and yet, Rasp knew it wasn’t. An impressive counterfeit, undeniably. But definitely not the real deal.

  A distraught Faris was attempting to stumble his way through introductions and was getting nowhere. Hop came to his rescue. “Hello, sir,” he greeted the approaching goblin, managing to keep the nervousness in his voice to a mild flutter. “Thank you for coming out to meet us.”

  “Sir, eh?” the goblin repeated, amused. He hollered back over his shoulder to the goblins hunkered down along the tree line. “Hear that, ya tundra dogs? I’ve moved up in the world. I’m a sir now!”

  “Still look like a shriveled lizard to us,” a disembodied voice replied.

  “Grizzled old turkey gizzard,” someone else contributed, spurring additional comments from the rest of the horde.

  Rasp tracked the chorus of voices, concluding that there were at least a dozen other goblins in a loose circle formation, with the traveling party at its center. Running, unfortunately, was no longer an option.

  “Oi! No one asked any of you,” the goblin rider snapped back. “Now shut your mangy gobs and watch how it’s done. You scrawny lot could learn a thing or two about respect from this here nice goat-man, yeah?”

  All this did was spur more enthusiastic insults from the goblin’s brethren.

  Angered, the lead goblin spurred his horse around and shouted back at them in his native tongue. Rasp recognized the language as Laftak, the mother tongue of those who claimed refuge among the flatlands. And while he normally would have been able to pick out a phrase or two, it was spoken so quickly and angrily, the only thing he walked away with was the fact that the lead goblin was having trouble controlling the unruly horde.

  What in the realm were flatlanders doing this far south? What was even stranger was the fact that there was more than one clan assembled. Each goblin den had its own unique dialect and, judging from the shouting, Rasp could pick out at least three separate factions. Whatever was going on had to be serious. The quarrelsome goblin clans rarely united under a single banner. Something strange was afoot.

  The heated back and forth continued around them, keeping the lead goblin’s attention elsewhere. Hop moved backwards, strategically positioning himself between Faris and Rasp. The large faun placed a comforting hand on Faris’s quaking shoulder and secured a not-so-comforting hand around Rasp’s arm. He kept his voice low. “We are heavily outnumbered,” he said. “Now is not the time to do anything rash, agreed?”

  “It’s not like we can do anything anyway,” Faris said miserably. “Maybe if we’re lucky, they’ll tell me what they did to my family before they slit my throat.”

  “These are Flatlanders, Dingle,” Rasp whispered under his breath. “You said it was the realm that’d taken over your village. Flatties don’t associate with the realm. I suspect they’re here for some other reason.”

  Faris sighed heavily. “Does it matter?”

  “Don’t lose hope, Faris. We don’t yet know anything.” Finished with his sad attempt at a pep talk, Hop leaned closer to Rasp, whispering. “What are Flatlanders doing this far south? Do you suppose it’s a land grab?”

  “Highly unlikely. This area is smack dab in the middle of realm territory. A land grab would have been done closer to the border. This ain’t that.” Rasp suspected he knew the true reason—the one cause capable of uniting the volatile goblin clans as a single force. “This is war.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My ears. Listen to the different dialects. We’ve got goblins from every burrow here. The gobbies are usually too busy fighting with each other to be a realistic threat, but something’s changed. The den leaders have put their petty squabbling aside and united under a single banner, so to speak.”

  “War. Great. And here I was worried about a meager land grab,” Hop moaned with a sad shake of his horns. “Anything else I should know before I try to talk our way out of this?”

  “You?” Rasp said. Goblins, fortunately, were more quarrelsome than Stoneclaws when they put their minds to it. The lead goblin was still arguing with his companions, allowing for Rasp to do the same. “Who appointed you spokesperson?”

  “I did.”

  Rasp couldn’t help but notice that Hop’s grip was getting increasingly tighter around his arm. Wincing, he tried to shrug the faun off but succeeded only in making matters worse. The faun’s grip wasn’t necessarily painful. Just strong enough to assure Rasp that Hop could squeeze much harder if needed.

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  Reluctantly, Rasp ceased his futile struggle and resorted to using his big boy words instead. “Why you? You’re the least qualified.”

  “Whisper fled, your sister is in bear-form, and Faris is in no state to be dealing with this. Believe me, I would have let your father do the talking had he not flown off, too,” Hop said. “Regrettably, as of this moment, I am the only one qualified for the job.”

  Rasp couldn’t help but notice that he’d been left out of the list of potential candidates. “What about—”

  “No.” Hop’s response included not only words, whispered harshly beneath his breath, but another ungentle squeeze. “The last time you were allowed to negotiate, you roped us into battling a giant centipede. And the time before that, you nearly got Whisper killed trying to go head-to-head with the resistance.”

  Rasp rolled his eyes. “I’ll agree that the centipede was my bad, but you can’t blame me for the actions of a magical psychopath.”

  Hop wasn’t finished. “Oh, and who could forget how you cooked two soldiers alive in their armor? Certainly not me. To this day, the smell still haunts my dreams.”

  “Fine. I won’t do the talking.”

  “Nor will you do any reacting to the talking,” Hop added stiffly. “Right?”

  Rasp grumbled his agreement.

  “Faris?” Hop’s voice changed. It was both sympathetic and somehow endearingly hopeful. “I’m sorry about your village. But we cannot jump to conclusions. We need to approach this logically. Find out what happened first and then decide our next course of action.”

  “And if that involves hunting down those responsible?” Faris said.

  “Then you will not have to go it alone.”

  June’s throaty rumble warned that the flatlander horde had finally quieted down. The lead goblin’s shaggy horse huffed and snorted as it plodded unhurriedly up the hill in their direction.

  “Alright, now listen up, normally I’d give you some big spiel about how my kin have got you surrounded and what we do to those who don’t listen, but I think you already get the gist of how badly you all are screwed if things go south, yeah?” The rider slowed his steed to a stop several paces short of them. “The name’s Fangle Bogfoot and I’m the indisputable leader of this here outfit.”

  A thoughtful pause followed. Rasp felt the goblin’s steely gaze settle over him, briefly, before moving on to inspect the others.

  “I was told to keep an eye out for curious-looking travelers,” Fangle continued. “Given that we saw your lady friend turn into a bear and how the fifth member of your party vanished in a cloud of smoke, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you’re the sorry sods I’ve been waiting for.”

  Rasp raised his other hand over his head and asked, “Told? By whom? Also, if you’re taking orders from someone else, does that still make you the indisputable leader? Or are you the indisputable leader’s helper?”

  “For the gods’ sakes!” Hop tried to dispel the insolence from Rasp with a rough shake. “Why must you be this way? What is it you have against living?”

  “Hop, please, you’re being hysterical. I’m only helping.” Rasp feigned innocence. “There’s no sense in wasting your breath trying to appease the help when it’s the boss we should be talking to.”

  Fangle loudly sucked his teeth, silencing Hop’s argument before it even started. Instead of taking Rasp’s bait, the goblin cunningly offered his own. “I was told, specifically, to keep my eyes peeled for a baby-man witch. Silver hair, looks like a drowned rat.”

  Baby-man witch? Rasp’s face burned as his skin turned beet red. His plan to stir a reaction out of the goblin backfired. Not only was Fangle familiar with the concept of ‘goad you into telling me what I want to know’, but was, alas, quite versed at the art of insults himself.

  “By process of elimination, I suppose that would be you, wouldn’t it?” Fangle said to Rasp. “Unless he was the maggot who puffed away in a cloud of smoke. Snaggy didn’t mention anything ‘bout smoke, though.”

  “Snaggy?” Rasp wasn’t sure what sort of emotion stirred to life inside of him. It wasn’t so much hope as it was relief that maybe, just maybe, they weren’t as fucked as he’d thought. “Hold up. Are you saying Snag is here?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Fangle replied.

  Rasp’s mind raced with possibilities. If Snag was in Lonebrook, then that meant Oralia had to be nearby, too. And wherever there was Oralia, there was trouble. Could it be? Had the mad orc used her political ties to call in the Flatlander army?

  “Snaglebrag Flint,” Rasp spoke Snag’s full name correctly for what might have been the first time ever. Figures, Snag was nowhere near to appreciate it. “Where is he? Bring us to him at once.”

  Fangle’s blurry form sat straighter in the saddle. “Excuse me? I’ll be the one making the demands around here, not you.”

  Another arm squeeze from Hop reminded Rasp not to get ahead of himself. Reluctantly, Rasp swallowed the insult curled on his tongue and allowed cooler heads to prevail.

  “Please, sir,” Hop said. “Any friend of Snag’s is a friend of ours. We mean you and your kin no harm. I don’t know what happened to the village just over the hill, but I get the sense it’s far from over. We may be able to help, but that hinges on being given the whole picture. We must speak with Snag.”

  The off-tune trill of a pipe squealed in the distance.

  Fangle ignored it, muttering, “Snag, Snag, Snag, Snag. That’s all anyone cares about these days. Was it Snag who assembled the clans? Snuck an army across the border without being seen? And then, once arriving upon a witch-infested village, convinced the other den leaders not to turn back around again? Convinced them that somehow going head-to-head with the realm ain’t suicide? Of course not! And yet, that scrawny little bugger gets all the credit anyway.”

  Hop turned on the charm. “Whoever did all of that must be a very capable leader indeed.”

  “Damn straight!” Fangle agreed. “You don’t have to be a famous outlaw to be good at stuff. People are quick to forget that ol’ Fangle is the den leader. Me. Not Snaglebrag.”

  “Indisputably,” Hop readily agreed. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir, what is the meaning of that noise?”

  The noise in question, of course, was the obnoxious trill of a pipe. It was closer than before, being blasted from horseback, likely, given the rate at which it was traveling. The nearer it got, the worse Fangle’s temper soured.

  “Nothin’. Don’t worry about it.” The goblin spat at the ground with a snarl, muttering under his breath. “If he blasts that damn thing one more time I’m gonna shove it down his scrawny throat.”