I got out of bed and went out of the room, closing the door on my way out. Before leaving the room, I got a full view of the cold and calculating woman, my gran, spread on the mattress, fully naked, already in deep sleep.
I went to my auntie's room and just slept with her.
*
The next day, it was uneventful. Gran never showed me her face for the next couple of days, and Eskar kept coming to me, but this time, he had less to talk about. He didn't invite me on missions for a while. I also didn't do anything, but I couldn't help myself as I took pleasure in fucking the woman he wanted and making him think he would get her one day.
*
A couple of days later.
Out of nowhere, Eskar had come to meet Jake and offered him a mission, and as Jake didn't have much silver, he decided to go. It was a simple mission, and Eskar already had a team of experts.
The forest southeast of the city had a name that locals used with the casual familiarity of people who had stopped being afraid of a thing and started simply working around it — the Greyswood. Not haunted or cursed.
Just old and dense and home to the particular brand of nuisance that made life difficult for farmsteads and trade roads in a five-mile radius.
Goblins.
Not the storybook variety — not small and bumbling and easily laughed off.
Greyswood goblins were lean and mean and organized in the particular way that pack hunters were organized, where no individual was especially dangerous, but the collective had a nasty, instinctive intelligence that compensated for what each one lacked.
They raided and, scouted. They retreated when they needed to and pressed when they sensed weakness, and they had been bleeding the eastern farmsteads dry for the better part of a season.
*
Eskar moved through the undergrowth like a man who had been doing this for fifteen years, because he had been doing this for fifteen years.
His group spread in a loose wedge through the treeline — himself at the point, Brenn and Ossian flanking wide on either side, two additional blades named Cort and Wyla on the outer edges, and Jake Altoras trailing at the rear in the position that Eskar kept assigning him because it was the safest and because Chelsea would never forgive him if he got her nephew killed on a goblin hunt.
The nest was exactly where the scouting report had placed it — a rocky depression in the ground, half-hidden by root systems and decades of accumulated deadfall, with the particular stench of a large number of small creatures living in close quarters.
Eskar counted the movement inside from the tree line: fifteen.
Maybe eighteen.
Manageable.
He gave the signal.
*
The fight, in the way of professionally executed ambushes, was brief and ugly.
Eskar's group hit from three angles simultaneously — Brenn and Ossian driving from the left flank, Cort and Wyla pinching from the right, and Eskar himself pushing straight through the center with the methodical, heavy efficiency of a Class Four Warrior who had done this enough times that it had stopped feeling like danger and started feeling like work. His blade swung in short, controlled arcs. He wasn't fighting heroically. He was working.
Goblins scattered. Goblins screamed. The ones smart enough to run were the ones that survived the first thirty seconds, and the ones that survived the first thirty seconds found Brenn and Ossian waiting.
Jake fought on the right edge, holding the flank with the mechanical competence of someone who had trained enough to be functional without yet having the experience to be fluid. His swordwork was clean — decent footwork, good measure of distance, nothing wasted — but it was classroom clean, textbook clean, the kind of clean that held up perfectly fine against goblins in a controlled engagement and would need to be stress-tested before anyone could say what it held up against in worse circumstances.
Cort took a slash across the forearm — not deep, not serious. He swore loudly, switched hands, and kept moving.
Twelve minutes.
The nest was mostly cleared. Bodies on the ground. Three goblins were fleeing into the deep brush that Ossian was already moving to intercept.
Eskar lowered his blade and rolled his shoulder and was beginning the internal calculation of kill count versus bounty rate when the ground on the far side of the depression shifted.
Not dramatically. Not with theater, just shifted. The way ground shifts when something large underneath it decides to move.
The hegoblin came up out of the secondary burrow like something being unwrapped.
It was big.
That was the first and most relevant fact, and it crowded out most of the others for a solid three seconds. Not big in the way that large men were big — big in the way that things that had been eating steadily for a very long time in a very dark place were big.
It stood nearly eight feet at the shoulder line, built broad and asymmetrical, one arm visibly longer than the other and corded with the kind of muscle that came from digging through packed earth. Its head was too large for its neck, jaw hanging with the loose, wet weight of something that didn't bother closing its mouth all the way. The eyes were milky at the edges and completely focused at the center, catching the filtered forest light with a flat, patient intelligence that was worse than the size.
Goblin nests sometimes grew them, but rarely.
When a nest went undisturbed long enough and was fed well enough and the oldest one in the colony kept surviving—kept eating, kept growing, kept accumulating the particular dark energy that old killing things accumulated—sometimes they became something else.
Not a goblin anymore.
Something the local farmers called a king, in the way that people name things they're afraid of.