Nine Goblins(7)

“Right. The next thing you should learn is how to take a punch a little better than that, but it’ll have to wait until we stop for the night. Have you had any training at all?”

“We had two weeks…”

“…of boot camp, Sarge.”

The sergeant grunted. “Whacked a lot of straw men with your board, eh?”

Mishkin nodded vigorously. Mushkin nodded rather more gingerly, holding his face.

Up ahead, Weatherby was drifting off to the side. Nessilka could tell he was planning to make a break for it, because he was starting to mutter to himself and tug at his clothes. She sighed, and did what sergeants have done since time immemorial…she delegated.

“Go see Corporal Algol and tell him that you’ve had the basic boot camp and nothing else. And that I said to put something on that eye.”

“Yes, Sarge!”

The twins went to find Algol, and Nessilka went to collar Weatherby.





Sings-to-Trees’ morning began slightly after dawn, when the hen crowed.

She was a black hen with a fine gold eye and a blue sheen to her feathers. She laid quite large brown eggs. She also mounted the other hens occasionally, an exercise in bafflement for everyone involved. And every morning, she crowed.

As far as he could tell, she seemed happy, so he’d resigned himself to getting up at hen’s-crow most mornings. He hadn’t wanted a rooster, anyway. His farm was located on the edge of what were nominally the Elvenlands. A small human settlement lay less than an hour’s walk away, where woods gave way to farmland. The humans viewed him as falling somewhere between the priest and the village idiot, and thus required feeding either way. Depending on the time of year, gifts of flour or cheese or bacon were always turning up, and they dumped excess chicks on him year-round. He had a hard enough time keeping up with donated chickens—had his small flock been producing more on their own, he’d have been hip-deep in fowl. So he was somewhat grateful for the confused hen, after all.

This morning, there was a small, fresh, cheese on the doorstep, accompanied by a small jug of buttermilk. He took both inside. Fleabane was gone, on some coyote-ish errand of his own, or there would have been toothmarks in the cheese.

Elf and raccoon shared a pleasant breakfast. It was a little over a month old—the raccoon, not the breakfast—with big, wide eyes and delicate, dexterous black fingers, and it was shortly going to be tearing his house apart. The destructive capacity of small cute animals was really quite astonishing. Fortunately, after years of this sort of thing, Sings no longer had much that could be torn apart. His furniture was heavy wood, scarred by claws and chewed by tiny (and occasionally not so tiny) teeth, the cushions faded by hundreds of washings, the rugs ragged and warm and mostly colorless.

He owned quite a few rugs. He had to wash them so often that it made sense to keep extras. An elven visitor had once commented (with the air of one desperately trying to find something complimentary to say) about the unusual patterns dyed into the rug. Sings-to-Trees had to explain that it wasn’t dyed, precisely, but marked by numerous Mystery Stains from patients who had not been entirely in control of their bladders. The silence had been awkward.

He suspected the other elf had been expecting something on the order of a hermit monk, communing with nature and binding up the wings of snow-white doves with snow-white bandages, not a bedraggled lunatic daubed with unspeakable substances, surrounded by shrieking birds, and massaging the belly of a tiny lynx kitten to make it defecate. (In Sings-to-Trees’ defense, it had been a particularly insane week, with two lynx kittens, a nestful of orphaned gray jays, an infant false-phoenix that kept exploding into flames when startled, and a pine marten with a broken foot, who would have happily eaten any of the other patients if he could catch them.) The other elf hadn’t been back.

The raccoon trundled away from its food, stood up briefly on its hind legs, wobbled, and tried to steady itself against his mug. The mug went over. The raccoon also went over. He could only catch one, and of course, there was no question.

The raccoon snuggled against his chest and went “Clur-r-r-p!” The mug went “plunk!” The buttermilk went into his lap.

“Bad raccoon.”

“Clurr-up!”

Well, it was his own fault for trying to feed himself and the creatures at the same time. The raccoon cub went back into its hutch by the hearth. He toweled off the worst of the buttermilk, and then the remains of the raccoon’s breakfast. The mug had survived intact.

Had he been inclined to collect blown glass sculptures, he would have lived a life of great frustration, but his tastes had been limited by necessity to things that could take a heavy pounding. The mug, for example, was attractively glazed earthenware—pretty enough, but durable, and easily replaced if, say, a raccoon got into a cupboard, had the door swing shut behind it, and tried to smash its way out.