Not only did Emma have plenty of stew, she and Éogar had a bet about whether I could eat three bowls. Éogar lost, and had to wash the dishes. Don’t tell them, but I could have finished a fourth.
Emma didn’t let me leave in the morning without some coffee and biscuits, and a meat pie for lunch. She was worried that she hadn’t made me anything for dinner, considering that where I was going, the Forsaken Inn, the food isn’t fit to be eaten. I reassured her I’d brought a couple of smoked fish, and only then did she give me permission to leave.
It was a cold clear day, but as the sun mounted, it didn’t warm up much at all. I misjudged how much that would slow us down. Kestrel didn’t seem to mind, nor did the mare, but my own reactions slowed, as did my sense of urgency. The sun was nearly down as we were passing the marsh, and given that I’ve heard about goblins in that area, I thought it would be a bad place to be out by dark, so we did the last couple of miles at a trot.
The stable-keeper was brusque and persnickety, but ultimately he was satisfied with the mare. I was glad to see his care, but I also thought he was acting a bit above his place. The gangliest nag that comes out of Éogar’s farm would still become the best horse in his run-down stable. He also wanted to charge me for stabling Kestrel, even though I was only there in service to him, but after some haggling, we came to an agreement where Kestrel could stay in the stable if I cleaned out his stall and did all his care. Which was actually what I wanted; I didn’t trust this fellow with Kestrel, and wasn’t even happy to be passing the mare to him. I did some extra work to care for other horses there, even though it was late and I was tired, because they seemed to need it. By the time I was done, the stable-keeper was already sleeping in the hayloft, so I found another spot in it to sleep myself. When I woke before dawn, chilled through, he was still asleep, so I left without a word. That stable is a fair bit cleaner than it’s been in some time, I warrant, but it also needs a carpenter to spend some time on the roof. Not as much as does the Inn, though!
Kestrel was as eager to leave that gloomy, uncomfortable stable as was I, so with darkness still around us, we picked our way west along the road. We made better time than we realized, or the marsh comes on sooner than I expected, because the sky was just beginning to purple behind us as the land dropped away to the right into the resounding chorus of neek-breek, breek-neek.
When that chorus suddenly went silent around us, Kestrel froze in place; I could feel his muscles tensing below me. Silently I drew my bow from my back, hooked one end behind my ankle, and began to bend it. The wood creaked and I wondered what was hearing the sound, but nothing rose above the edge of the bluff until after I'd gotten the bow strung and an arrow in hand.
When the first goblin's pointed, jagged ears rose above the lip of the land, Kestrel did not charge, as he had in the hills near Trestlebridge. Perhaps he sensed that the ground, sloping down steeply into swamp, would be poor for a charge. But perhaps he knew better than I did that I was ready. Instead he held so still I wonder if he was also holding his breath.
I waited until the whole head had appeared, by which point, another pair of ears was cresting the ridge. "If this goes bad, run," I whispered, though I knew Kestrel knew that better than I did. My heart was racing but my breathing was even and my hand steady.
Mister Aren would probably insist that the moment you swing the sword is really just the release of all the positioning and preparation you've done before that moment, and that's probably true. But in archery, it's true in a far more literal sense. The moment you fire the bow isn't a moment you do anything; all that marks that moment is the tiniest bit of stopping doing something. All you do is let go.
The first goblin head disappeared; I couldn’t even see where the arrow landed. There was already another in my hand, as the second goblin began to charge, and a third joined it, both of them cackling. More arrows flew. It happened too fast for me to start to become scared. In fact, it all happened between breaths.
I've seen many archers around Bree who would probably think nothing of such marksmanship. The woman who made my bowstring probably wouldn't even account it as archery, and could have done it standing on one foot on Kestrel's back as he galloped by. But for me, the long silence between the last arrow's flight and the return of the neek-breek sound was a strange mix of terror and triumph. I finally remembered to breathe, and then Kestrel was lightly stepping closer to the edge of the rise.
Three goblins felled with three arrows. The middle one was hit a bit off center and probably suffered before it perished, but the other two likely never even knew what had happened. Cutting the ears off was grisly work; not like butchering an animal, because of how ears sit against the skull, and because goblin ears are already notched and scarred, more gristle than anything else. But they'll earn me more coin in Staddle than Éogar paid me for the journey, according to what Miss Adriellyn told me.
More importantly, they earn me a sense that, when we travel east, I may still be depending on others to keep me safe, but I won't be unable to contribute to the effort.
