CHAPTER ONE
Boy straightened painfully in the sweltering heat and leaned on his hoe, mopping the sweat off his brow, his palm raw with blisters. The salt stung his hand, and he wiped it on his coarse linen pants. Although he’d grown so much this past winter they were more like britches than trousers. Food had been scarce over the winter, though, so he had to use a piece of twine to hold them up around his hollow middle.
He only had one shirt, but it barely stretched across his shoulders any more, so he was shirtless now. Which was just as well. Summer had come early this year, all scorching sun and merciless blue skies with no hint of rain in them. The bean plants stretched away like so many stunted, dust-coated sentinels.
Hoeing this field was ridiculous—as long as the beans were taller than the weeds, they’d produce just fine. But ever since Ma’d passed, Pa had been prone to giving him crazy jobs to do. Best, though, not to argue with Pa when he was into the ale, which was pretty much all the time these days.
His back aching, Boy bent wearily to his hoe once more. But as he did so, a movement caught his eye in the far hedgerow. Low to the ground. Quick. A rabbit maybe, or a squirrel foolish enough to have left the safety of the trees. It had been a while since he’d had meat, and a sharp pang of hunger quickened his gut. He eased his slingshot out of a back pocket, eyeing the ground around him for a likely rock. There. Small enough to fly right and big enough to knock the sense out of a critter. He crouched slowly and picked up that stone and a spare.
He extended his left arm stiffly and pulled back on the stretchy gut. The movement came again. He loosed the stone with the desperate precision of the half-starved.
“Owww!”
The yowl startled him so badly he nearly fell as he started toward his kill. Rabbits might scream like women, but they didn’t yell like schoolboys. Fark. Pa’d kill him if he’d hurt someone and got himself in trouble with the law. Ever since that snooty sun elf, Baron Hector, came to visit last year and put the fear of hanging in everyone, the local steward was real particular about legal stuff and such.
“”Ey there! You be ‘urt?” Boy called out. “Come on outta them bushes.”
A rustle was all the response he got. Must be that Tomikin lad from down the creek. Probably s’posed to be home workin’ and gonna get ‘is hide tanned if’n he got caught playin’ hooky.
“That you, Tomikin? Quit foolin’ around.”
The bushes parted without warning and something green and fast charged him, screaming bloody murder. Holy dragons! That was no human…it couldn’t be…
The creature was shorter than he but twice as wide. Stringy muscles showed under a bright green hide. The face was vaguely humanoid in that it had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. But there the resemblance ended. The creature’s features were sharp and feral, the look in his eyes violent. Goblin.
He’d heard stories of the creatures, but had never heard of one being seen in these parts. They’d been driven south into the Great Forest long ago, when humans and elves and the other civilized races settled these lands. Of course, there’d always been dwarves in Neritia, but they kept mostly to the mountains and their underground cities.
Belatedly, Boy realized he was unarmed except for his slingshot and a rusty hoe, and he was definitely being attacked. He loaded the second stone hastily and loosed it. He swore as it arced wide of the goblin, who was almost on him now looking raving mad.
The creature’s eyes were gold in color, the pupils not quite feline, but not quite human, either. And the smell of him. Gor’, he reeked. Worse than rotted fish. His skin looked closer to grass green than the olive of the local lizardmen, but it was hard to tell under the caked dust and dry, cracked state of it. The goblin looked strong. And fully desperate enough to kill.
Boy swung the hoe in a wide arc that only slightly slowed the goblin’s headlong charge as he ducked under the tool. The goblin barreled into him, wrapping shockingly powerful arms around his ribcage and squeezing until Boy could barely draw breath. Thankfully, he managed to stay on his feet. If he went down, the monster would eat his innards for sure.
That was when real panic hit him. He pummeled the creature’s head with his fists, yanking with all his strength at the tufts of thin hair, scratching and biting and kicking wildly. He didn’t care what he made contact with. He was going to die fighting, by the stars.
The goblin grunted and staggered back as Boy’s fist slammed into the bridge of his nose. Boy swung again, aiming at the same spot. Whereas all the other blows had seemed to have little effect, the goblin’s face was another story.
Boy cocked his arm across his body and then unleashed his elbow as hard as he could at the goblin’s bleeding nose. The creature screamed and his arms fell away from Boy’s ribs. Leaping back, Boy scooped up the hoe and rammed the end of the handle hard into the goblin’s gut. The vile thing doubled over, spewing bile all over his pants. A hard downward chop with the hoe, and the blade buried itself with a sickening thud in the back of the creature’s neck.
The goblin collapsed, motionless.
Boy prodded the inert form with his foot. No response. A harder poke with the hoe. Was he dead? Nausea rumbled of a sudden in his gut. He’d killed plenty of rabbits and the like, but they was for food. This was another two-legged humanoid like him. A monster, to be sure, but a sentient being. He’d never killed nothin’ like that. Was he in trouble? Would Pa turn him over to the steward or just beat him to a pulp himself?
Pa.
The goblin had come from the direction of the farmhouse. Boy took off running for all he was worth toward the low, sod-roofed hovel he and Pa lived in.
The garden was torn up, and the door sagged open on its leather hinges. Dread settled on his chest like Jon the Smith’s big anvil. “Pa, you okay?”
Silence.
“Pa!”
He careened around the corner and into the one-room house. And screeched to a halt. He smelled it first. Metallic and coppery. Blood. He spied a huge smear of it on the wall by the fireplace, trailing down to a lump of cloth and blood and gore on the floor.
Ahh, gads. He raced over to his father’s body and fell to his knees beside it. The cursed goblin had taken most of Pa’s innards. Probably already ate ‘em. But the vile beast has also taken Pa’s ears and fingers, and his tongue by the look of it. And maybe a patch of his scalp. Hard to tell with that gaping gash in the top of Pa’s head. The thought of Pa’s parts as trophies lit off a rage way down deep inside him. So deep he barely felt its fire. Yet.
Something hot and painful burned a trail down his face, and he registered an odd, high-pitched keening sound. He realized vaguely that the sound was coming from his own throat. But he couldn’t seem to stop as he rocked back and forth on his knees.
The world had ended. A goblin had come to his home and, in the blink of an eye, obliterated it all. He registered that the hovel had been ransacked. What hadn’t been taken had been smashed. The destruction was complete.
How long he knelt there, he didn’t know. But at long last, it occurred to him to move. To act. Climbing to his feet like an old man, he found a broken shovel with a few feet of wooden handle remaining and trudged out to the garden to dig a hole. A grave. Pa deserved at least that much. He might’ve been a hard man, mean and drunk in his final days, but he was all the family Boy’d had. And he’d been a good man, once. When Ma was alive.
It wasn’t like Pa’s spirit had the strength to come back. Not after Ma died for good. It had taken all the light right out of their home. Aged Pa twenty summers in a season. Naw. Pa’s spirit would go lookin’ for Ma’s in the Great Void. Who knew? Maybe he’d find her and have some peace at last.
When he judged the trench was deep enough, Boy went into the hovel to drag what was left of Pa’s body outside. When he did so, he saw the goblin had, indeed, cut out Pa’s liver and kidneys. The outrage simmering in his gut exploded into full fury.
He rolled the mess that had been Pa into the hole and shoveled dirt over him. It was hard work, burying a man. Took till nearly sunset, and he was tall and strong for his age, if still on the lanky side. Finally, a neat mound took up the middle of the garden. Pa was covered deep enough that the wolves wouldn’t dig ‘im up and finish what the goblin had started.
Boy entered the house one last time. There was no question of him staying here. First Ma, and now Pa, had died in this place. He couldn’t stand it, not one night. Moving slowly in a sort of fog, he laid out a bedroll and stacked upon it the essentials he’d need to survive. A knife, a sharpening stone, flint and steel. The chipped ale mug that had been Pa’s. He moved around the room, kicking through the debris the goblin had left behind, considering each object for its potential usefulness. Funny how hard it was to decide even the smallest thing.
A length of rope. An oiled tarp. His shirt. A small, ivory comb that had been his mother’s most prized possession. And then, feeling like a thief, he pried loose the stone up high on the chimney. He wasn’t supposed to know about Pa’s special hiding spot, but he did. Drunks weren’t very good at keeping secrets.
He fished out the handful of copper and silver coins and carefully tied them into Ma’s best handkerchief. Numb all the way to his soul, he took one last look around.
“That’s it, then.” His voice was hoarse, deeper than he was accustomed to hearing it. Must be all that fussin’ he did earlier.
He stepped outside into the soft gray twilight settling around him like a blanket. “Good-bye house.” He glanced at the raw wound of black dirt in the garden. “Bye, Pa.”
Girding himself with a deep breath, he made himself look over at the sickly willow sapling a little ways away. It nodded over the other grave on the property, its long, thin leaves too yellow for this time of year. His throat hitched and he only managed a whisper. “Bye, Ma.”
Then he turned his back on the only home he’d ever known and headed out.
The village wasn’t far away to the north up by the shore of the Inland Sea. Boy trudged along, observing dully how the white dust coated his bare feet until he could hardly tell them from the road. The moon lit his way plenty well, and he was accustomed to working by its wan light in the summer. Most dirt farmers worked from a few hours after dark until a few hours after dawn and then slept through the heat of the day. He and Pa did it, too, when Pa wasn’t having one of his crazy spells and making him hoe the beans at high noon.
Grief slashed through him till it nearly cut him in half. Maybe thinking wasn’t such a good idea just now. Concentrating on putting one foot in front of the next, he made his way to the fishing village hugging the coast that marked the northern edge of the Kingdom of Neritia.
He walked until he glimpsed flickering lights on the horizon. Even from this distance he could make out dark shapes moving in the village. Too many for this time of night. Fark. Goblins weren’t attacking there, too, were they?
Common sense said to turn and run for his life. But a compulsion to see it for himself overrode any sense he might normally have. He slowed, moving forward cautiously, cursing this barren land for its complete lack of tree cover. Whose lousy idea was it to settle this place, anyway? Although the way he heard it, the dwarves had been here since before time, and the elves who ruled this place hadn’t been here much less than that.
Huh. It looked to be townspeople moving around. The flickering came from the torches they carried. But sure as he was standing here, something was up, because they was all buzzin’ around like a swarm a’ ticked off bees.
His eyes darting every which way, he walked into the village, about jumping out of his skin when a gruff man voice called out, “’Ey! That you, Boy?”
He turned and spied the tavern keeper standing in the door of Pa’s favorite pub.
“You’re out awful late. Your old man run out of that rotgut of his’n?”
“No, sir. We was attacked by a goblin.”
The fellow made a hocking noise and spit a wad of yellow sputum practically on Boy’s boot. “They hit here, too. Fought ‘em off, though. Sorry rabble they was. No organization. Just a’screamin’ and a’runnin’ around makin’ a grab for anything edible. Where’s your Pa, then? Straightenin’ out at home?”
Boy winced. “He’s dead.”
“Ahh, no. I’m sorry. Come on in, Boy. The Steward’ll be along shortly and you can tell ‘im what happened.”
Boy slid onto a bench at the pub’s long table. “Not much to tell. I was hoein’ beans and one of ‘em jumped me. I killed ‘im and headed for the house. Found Pa dead.” Odd how the day’s events seemed so far away, somehow. Like they was wrapped in mist.
The tavern keeper set a mug of ale down in front of Boy. He stared at it, bug-eyed. Pa never let him drink ale. Said he was too young and stupid to handle the stuff. Although it weren’t like Pa’d handled it all too great ‘imself. Boy took a cautious sip. Gads, it was foul! ‘Twas yellow like piss and tasted like piss. The foam tickled his nose and he sneezed, sending white spray across the table and making the tavern keeper laugh uproariously.
Steward Kay came inside a few minutes later, wearing a quartered black and white tabard—them was the colors of Neritia—with the red hawk of Baron Hector sewn onto it. The tavern keep relayed Boy’s news to the steward.
Kay’s voice was surprisingly kind when he said, “My condolences on your loss, Boy. Did you see how many goblins attacked your Pa?”
“No, sir. He was in his cups pretty hard. Wouldn’t’a taken much to best ‘im. I think ’twas just the one.”
The steward shook his head. “In my experience, when one goblin shows up, more will be along soon. Best spread the word to prepare for a large-scale goblin attack, gentlemen.”
“Beyond the one we already had?” the innkeeper squawked in dismay.
“Aye. Goblins tend to come in hordes. Tonight’s crew was no more than a raiding party looking for food.”
The innkeeper swore while the patrons within earshot nodded grimly and hastened to finish their ales.
Kay turned back to Boy. “I told your father his drinking was going to kill him someday. I just didn’t expect it would happen like this. Do you think he’ll resurrect?”
Boy considered. “I doubt it, sir. He never was the same after we lost Ma. Can’t see as how he’d have any fire in his gut to make it back past the Veil.”
“I’m sorry to say I agree with you. It takes a certain kind of person to come back from the Void. Nearest Heartstone’s in Bradenfall. It would take your father several days to walk back from there. We’ll wait a week or so before we declare him permanently dead.”
The tavern keep interjected, “I hear it’s a fight. You know, to come back from the dead. Gotta have a really good reason to resurrect. Never done it mesself.”
“I have,” the steward said with a hint of pride. “Twice. Easier the second time. Knew what to expect, I suppose.”
“What’s it like on the other side?” Boy asked eagerly.
“I couldn’t say. I only remember seeing that sword go into my gut and then waking up all cold and naked and shaking from head to foot with a Heart healer muttering over me.”
Boy was impressed. He’d never met anyone who’d successfully resurrected. He eyed the steward with new respect.
“What are you planning to do next, Boy?” Kay asked.
“Don’ rightly know, sir.” Next? ‘Twas hard to fathom anything coming after today. When Ma died, he’d lived in a daze for a long time, just doing whatever Pa told him to and not thinking at all beyond that. But this time, he was on his own to push through his loss. He’d have to eat. Find a roof and hearth come winter. Although in this relentless summer heat ‘twas hard to imagine freezing to death.
“Have you got any skills?” the steward pressed.
“I can dirt farm. Know how to grow beans and taters and crop hay. Ma taught me my letters and numbers.”
“Hmm. Knowing how to read will help, but it’s not much to build on. The militia wouldn’t normally take you on account of your young age. But I’ll have a word with Sergeant Willis. Report to him in the morning.”
That sounded an awful lot like an order. Like the steward had decided his fate for him and he had no choice in the matter. Willis was in charge of King Gregor’s local militia. The sergeant was a decent enough fellow, but the way Boy heard it, new recruits were treated hardly better than slaves. He made a reluctant face.
“You could always indenture yourself to someone,” the steward offered. His voice lowered to a bare murmur, “But I can’t recommend that. ‘Tis a hard life, and once trapped in it, nearly impossible to escape. Stay clear of it if you know what’s good for you, Boy. You hear me?”
Boy blinked, startled. “Yes, sir.”
“Yes. The Army’s just the place for you.” And with that pronouncement, the steward drained the last few drops of his ale, slapped down a few coppers on the table and left the inn.
A voice, gruff with drink, muttered at Boy’s elbow. “Army. Bah. Come to work for me. I could use a strong lad.”
Boy lurched in surprise. Jumpy, he was, after today. A strong, sour scent of garlic-flavored sweat assaulted him. He risked a glance at his uninvited companion and was alarmed to see the colorful rags of a gypsy. Known to be mostly tramps and thieves, Boy’s hand strayed to his pocket to secure his kerchief of coins.
The gypsy grinned at the gesture. “Not gonna rob ye, tonight, I ain’t. Least not whilst ye still breathe.” He ran a menacing thumbnail across his bearded neck and his voice fell to a whisper. “Ye slit their throats first. Then ye rob ‘em.”
Boy recoiled in horrror as the gypsy burst out laughing.
“What say ye? Come away wit’ me. Ride my wagon and see the big, wide world. I’ll show ye things ye’ve never imagined, I will. Teach ye a thing or two if’n you’ve a head for learnin’. Don’ go in that there Army. Once they’ve got they hooks in thee, them never let go.”
Gypsies were the dregs of the society, barely better than criminals, known to be cutpurses, child stealers, and worse. An offer of employment from one wasn’t much more appealing than the militia. He could hear his mother now, berating him for throwing himself in the path of trouble by associating with such a shady character.
Having never met a real, live shady character before, though, he had to admit to a certain fascination. The gypsy’s clothes clashed flamboyantly, and his bushy gray beard was braided with beads and decorative shinies in the dwarven fashion.
Equal parts intrigued and appalled, Boy watched as the gypsy slid even closer to Boy’s side. When the fellow spoke under his breath, much of the thick gypsy accent was gone. “I can’t pay you much beyond bed and board, but I won’t make you sign your life away. I’ll work you hard, but no harder than I work myself. I can show you the kingdom and teach you the merchant trade if you’re clever. Otherwise, I’ll just use you to do the heavy lifting and attract the ladies.”
Boy blushed hard and hot. For the past few summers, the local girls had teased him so mercilessly that he frankly feared most all females these days.
The gypsy grinned knowingly. “Aye, an’ I’ll teach you ’bout women, too, if’n ye want. Cursed tricky creatures, they be.”
Riding in a gypsy caravan with a merchant? Traveling the open road to new places far away? Learning the merchant trade while he was at it—and maybe a few tricks that would appeal to the heart of a boy intent on a little excitement? The specter of endless military service and indenture retreated from his mind even as the caution of his upbringing remained. Ma and Pa were both dead, anyway. ‘Twasn’t like he needed their approval no more. And he did kill that goblin all by himself, after all. Who knew? Maybe he had a knack for the adventurer’s life.
“I’ll do it,” Boy declared.
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