The Leaky Sovereign had not hosted a village council meeting in four years.

  The last one had concerned a dispute over grazing rights on the eastern slope, which had begun as a civil discussion between two farmers, escalated into a debate about property law, detoured through a lengthy tangent about the historical migration patterns of goats (contributed by Tommas, who had strong feelings on the subject and no sense of when those feelings had ceased to be relevant), and concluded, approximately three hours later, with Alderman Fitch declaring the matter "tabled indefinitely" and everyone going home to drink.

  The matter remained tabled. The goats remained on the slope. The slope remained indifferent.

  Council meetings were, in Thornwall, treated with the same enthusiasm as dental appointments — acknowledged as occasionally necessary, postponed whenever possible, and attended primarily by people who had run out of excuses.

  This evening, however, the common room of the Leaky Sovereign was full.

  "Full" was, admittedly, a relative term. The Leaky Sovereign's common room could seat approximately sixty people if those people were willing to share benches, breathe in shifts, and accept a level of physical intimacy normally reserved for family members and very crowded lifeboats. Tonight, it held thirty-one, which was enough to fill every table, line the bar three deep, and produce a collective body heat that had raised the room's temperature by several degrees and given the air the thick, humid quality of a greenhouse in which the primary crop was anxiety.

  Marda had responded to the unexpected influx of customers with the grim efficiency of a general mobilising for a siege she had been expecting. Kegs were tapped. Glasses were filled. Bread was sliced — Berta's bread, naturally, which required a knife, a cutting board, and a degree of physical commitment that bordered on carpentry.

  The slices were distributed to the tables, where they sat on plates and radiated density.

  Levin was behind the bar.

  This was his usual position, and he occupied it with the territorial calm of a man who had found the one spot in a crowded room where nobody would bother him and intended to defend it through the ancient and effective strategy of being useful.

  He poured ale.

  He wiped the bar.

  He cleaned clean glass.

  He refilled Marda's tea without being asked, which earned him the customary look — the one that contained gratitude, suspicion, and the faint suggestion that kindness was a form of long-term fraud.

  Ria was in the kitchen, producing soup at a rate that suggested she had anticipated the crowd, or possibly summoned it through the sheer aromatic force of rosemary.

  The soup was good. The soup was, by this point, famous — or as famous as anything could be in a village of two hundred people, which is to say that everyone knew about it and approximately forty percent of the attendees had come for the soup rather than the council meeting, a ratio that said something about Thornwall's priorities and nothing flattering about its civic engagement.

  Alderman Fitch sat at the central table.

  Fitch was a thin man in his sixties with a face that had been designed for worrying and had spent six decades fulfilling its purpose with distinction. His eyebrows lived in a state of permanent elevation, as though they had been startled sometime in his youth and had never fully recovered.

  His hands, when not holding a quill or a ledger, fidgeted — drumming on surfaces, adjusting his collar, straightening objects that were already straight. He wore a waistcoat that had been fashionable during the previous king's reign and a cravat that had been fashionable during the reign before that, and the overall effect was of a man who had been assembled from the spare parts of several different decades and was doing his best to function as a coherent unit.

  His ledger was open before him. His quill was poised. His inkwell sat at his right elbow, positioned with the geometric precision of a man who believed that the placement of stationery was a reflection of administrative competence.

  To his left sat Berta, arms crossed, rolling pin on the table in front of her like a sceptre. To his right sat Dorin, the woodcutter, who had brought his axe and leaned it against the table leg, where it sat with the quiet menace of a prop in a play that hadn't decided yet whether it was a comedy or a tragedy.

  Garren the blacksmith occupied the end of the table — Level 7 Artisan, broad as a doorway, hands like geography. He had come straight from the forge and still wore his leather apron, which smelled of hot iron and honest labour and was, in the confined atmosphere of the common room, competing with thirty other personal aromas in a contest that nobody was winning.

  The remaining seats at the central table were filled by Tommas (goats, turnips, permanent squint), Aldric (grain, sacks, gratitude, lingering nervousness around Levin), Gretta (sheep, turnips, and a grievance about wolves that she had been sharpening for two weeks like a blade on a whetstone), and Old Maren, who was ninety-three years old, deaf in one ear, and present at every public gathering in Thornwall for reasons that nobody questioned because questioning Old Maren about anything produced a response that lasted approximately forty-five minutes and covered topics ranging from the current subject to the weather in 1347 to the dietary habits of her late husband's horse.

  The room hummed with conversation.

  The conversation had the particular quality of a crowd that had gathered to discuss a problem and was currently in the phase of the discussion where everyone described the problem to everyone else, despite the fact that everyone already knew what the problem was, because describing problems to people who already know about them is one of humanity's most cherished and least productive social rituals.

  "—three sheep," Gretta was saying, for what Levin estimated was the fourth time. She held up three fingers. The fingers were thick, calloused, and communicating their number with the emphatic clarity of a woman who wanted the record to reflect that the quantity was three and that three was too many. "Three. In two weeks. The first one they took from the north pasture. Clean. No blood, no wool, no fight, nothing. Just gone. Like the earth swallowed it."

  "Earth doesn't swallow sheep," Tommas said.

  "I know earth doesn't swallow sheep, Tommas. I'm speaking figuratively."

  "Figuratively doesn't bring the sheep back."

  "Nothing brings the sheep back! That's the point! The second one they took from the pen. The pen, Fitch. Behind the barn. Locked gate. They went over the fence, or through it, or under it — I don't know how, but they got in, and they took the ewe, and they left tracks."

  "Goblin tracks?" Fitch asked, his quill hovering.

  "Green footprints. Small. Dozens of them. All over the mud around the pen. And the smell—" Gretta's face performed a compression that suggested the memory of the smell was attempting to re-enter her nostrils through sheer force of recollection. "You know the smell."

  Everyone knew the smell.

  Goblin smell was, in the taxonomy of unpleasant odours, a category unto itself — distinct from troll smell (which was industrial), distinct from rat smell (which was domestic), and distinct from the general smell of Thornwall on a hot day (which was agricultural). Goblin smell occupied a unique olfactory niche that combined wet fur, rotting vegetation, unwashed skin, and something acidic and faintly sulphurous that defied identification and resisted forgetting.

  "The third sheep," Gretta continued, "they took two nights ago. From the field. Broad moonlight. My son heard the bleating and went out with a lantern, and he saw them — six, maybe eight, running north with the ewe between them. He shouted. They didn't stop. They didn't even look back."

  She paused.

  Her jaw tightened.

  "They used to look back. They used to scatter when you shouted. Now they don't even flinch."

  The room absorbed this.

  Fitch wrote something in his ledger. The quill scratched across the page with the sound of a man documenting a problem he had no solution for.

  "It's the same on the north side," Aldric said. He was sitting two seats down from Gretta, holding his ale with both hands, turning the glass in slow rotations. "My grain stores. The ones the goblins raided before — the ones Levin recovered." He glanced toward the bar. Levin was polishing a glass. "They came back. Different goblins, I think. More of them. They didn't take the grain this time. They took the chickens."

  "How many?" Fitch asked.

  "All of them."

  "All of—"

  "All of them, Fitch. Fourteen chickens. The coop was torn apart. Not opened — torn. The door was ripped off its hinges. The wire was pulled out of the frame. Whatever did that was stronger than the goblins I've seen before, or there were enough of them that strength didn't matter."

  Berta leaned forward. The rolling pin rolled slightly under her crossed arms.

  "It's the same story from Harrow's Bend," she said. "Ria's family — the farm east of the village. Her mother sent word yesterday. Goblin tracks in the turnip fields. Nothing taken yet, but the tracks are fresh, and they're coming from the northeast. From the deep forest."

  "Briarwood?" Fitch asked.

  "Beyond Briarwood. Further north. The old growth. Nobody goes up there."

  "Goblins go up there, apparently."

  "Goblins go everywhere. That's the problem. They're spreading. A few weeks ago, we had a camp of five at the old mill. Five. Levin cleared them." Another glance toward the bar. "Now we're hearing reports of groups — packs, bands, armies, whatever you call a collection of goblins—"

  "A nuisance," Tommas offered.

  "A catastrophe," Gretta corrected.

  "The collective noun," Old Maren said, from the far end of the table, with the sudden and startling clarity of a woman who had been appearing to doze and had, in fact, been listening to every word with the selective attention of someone who only engaged when the conversation reached a topic she had opinions about, "is a 'grievance.' A grievance of goblins. My husband — rest his bones — told me that. He fought goblins in the Border War of '09. Said they came in grievances. Said the word was chosen because that's what you had after they left. A grievance."

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  The table considered this.

  "A grievance of goblins," Fitch repeated, and wrote it down, because Fitch wrote everything down, including things that were not strictly relevant to the administrative matter at hand, on the principle that information was like firewood — you never knew when you'd need it, and it was better to have too much than too little.

  "The point," Berta said, reclaiming the conversation with the firm hand of a woman who had watched it wander and was steering it back, "is that the goblin problem is getting worse. It's not a camp anymore. It's not five scouts at an old mill. It's dozens. Maybe more. Coming from the deep forest, raiding farms, taking livestock, and getting bolder. And we can't stop them."

  The last sentence landed on the table like one of her bread rolls — dense, heavy, solid, good for close range combat, and impossible to ignore.

  "We could petition the regional garrison," Fitch said. His voice carried the particular tone of a man suggesting something he already knew wouldn't work but felt obligated to suggest because it was in the procedural manual and the procedural manual was, in Fitch's world, a document of near-sacred authority. "Fort Calloway has a standing force. Two hundred soldiers. They're mandated to respond to threats against settlements within their jurisdiction."

  "Fort Calloway is sixty miles east," Dorin said. "And the last time anyone petitioned them was — when? The flood of '14? They sent three soldiers and a clerk. The clerk assessed the damage, filled out a form, hummed a few times, and told us the garrison would 'review the matter at the next quarterly session.' The quarterly session was four months away. By then, the floodwater had receded, the damage was repaired, and the form was presumably filed in a cabinet somewhere between 'Forgotten' and 'Ignored.'"

  "The Adventurers' Guild—" Fitch began.

  "The Adventurers' Guild?" Garren said, and the two words carried the weight of a man who had been a member of that guild for twelve years and had watched it decline from a functional organisation to a social club with dental benefits. "It has fourteen registered members in the Thornwall chapter. Twelve of those members are retired, inactive, or both. The remaining two are the Thornwall Irregulars, who take jobs when the weather is good and their knees cooperate, and whose combined combat effectiveness is, on a generous day, roughly equivalent to a moderately aggressive scarecrow."

  "There's Levin," Berta said.

  The name dropped into the conversation like a stone into a pond.

  Ripples spread.

  Heads turned — not all at once, and not dramatically, but in the gradual, sequential way that heads turn when a room full of people simultaneously remembers that someone relevant is present and redirects their attention accordingly.

  Levin was behind the bar.

  He was holding a glass. He was polishing it. The glass was already clean — he had polished it twice — but the motion gave his hands something to do and his eyes somewhere to look that wasn't at thirty-one faces turning toward him with expressions that ranged from hopeful to sceptical to the particular blankness of people who were waiting to see which way the wind blew before committing to a facial expression.

  He set the glass down then picked up another one.

  "Levin cleared the goblin camp," Berta continued. She was addressing Fitch, but her voice carried across the room with the projection of a woman who had spent decades shouting over bread ovens and saw no reason to modulate her volume for a mere council meeting. "Single-handed. One spell. Four goblins. Recovered the stolen goods. Aldric got his grain back. Tommas got Gretta's turnips back. And he cleared the rats from the guild basement — thirty-one of them, overnight, alone."

  "He's Level 1," someone said, from the back of the room.

  The voice belonged to a man Levin didn't recognise — a farmer from one of the outlying homesteads, probably, someone who came to the village for market days and council meetings and otherwise existed in the comfortable anonymity of rural life.

  The words "Level 1" moved through the room the way they always moved — carrying their payload of doubt, pity, and the reflexive assumption that a number on a status screen was a more reliable indicator of capability than anything a person had actually done.

  "Level 1," the man repeated. "Against a goblin infestation. That's — look, I'm not saying he didn't do well with the camp. Five or four goblins. Fine. Good work. But we're talking about dozens now. Maybe scores. You can't send a Level 1 against a score of goblins. That's not brave. That's arithmetic."

  "Arithmetic," Berta said, "is exactly what it is. And the arithmetic says he killed four goblins with one spell. One. If there are forty goblins, that's ten spells. If there are eighty, that's twenty. The man makes it look like sweeping a floor."

  "Berta—"

  "I was there, Henk. I saw the scorch mark. I saw the glass circle where the bolt hit the ground. I saw Aldric's face when he got his grain back. Don't tell me about no arithmetic."

  Henk — the farmer from the back — raised both hands in the universal gesture of a man who had made a point and was now retreating from it before the point attracted return fire.

  Fitch's quill scratched.

  Garren shifted in his chair. The chair protested. Garren ignored it.

  "There's something else," Garren said. His voice was low. The voice of a man who forged metal for a living and applied the same deliberate heat-and-pressure approach to conversation. "The south road. Cairn Bridge."

  The room's ambient noise dropped by half.

  "I went down there yesterday," Garren continued. "Needed to check the bridge supports — the council asked me to assess the stonework after the spring floods. The bridge is fine. Mostly. Except for a hole."

  "A hole?" Fitch's quill stopped.

  "In the granite. South side, about two-thirds across. Clean. Circular. Goes straight through the stone. Eight inches wide, maybe. The edges are smooth — not cracked, not chipped. Smooth. Like the stone was melted."

  Fitch's eyebrows, already elevated, achieved a new altitude.

  "And the road," Garren said. "The road on the south approach is cratered. Torn up. There are tree stumps — two birch, one elm — snapped off at chest height. Splinters everywhere. And there's a tooth."

  "A tooth?"

  "Embedded in a tree trunk. About twenty feet from the road. Big tooth. Bigger than my thumb. Yellow. Pointed sideways."

  The room was very quiet.

  "I've seen troll teeth before," Garren said. "In the guild hall. Harwick has one mounted on his office wall — a trophy from his adventuring days. The tooth in the tree is the same. Same size. Same colour. Same... angle."

  He paused.

  "Something killed a troll on the south road, recently. Within the last few days and whatever killed it hit hard enough to punch a hole through granite and crater a road."

  Thirty-one people processed this information simultaneously.

  The processing produced a silence that was dense, layered, and occupied by the collective mental effort of an entire village trying to reconcile "something killed a troll" with "nothing in or near Thornwall is capable of killing a troll" and arriving at a gap in the logic that was exactly the shape of an explanation nobody had.

  Levin polished his glass.

  The glass gleamed.

  He set it on the shelf with a soft clink.

  Marda stared at him.

  Behind him, through the kitchen doorway, he could hear Ria ladling soup into bowls. She was humming — the same bright, slightly off-key melody, the one that filled whatever space it occupied and made the space marginally better for the filling.

  She knew about the troll.

  Marda knew about the troll.

  Nobody else knew about the troll, because Levin had not mentioned the troll, and Ria had not mentioned the troll, and Marda had not mentioned the troll, because Marda did not mention things unless the things directly affected her inventory, her revenue, or the structural integrity of her building, and a dead troll on a bridge three miles south affected none of these.

  "Could be a wandering adventurer," Fitch said, grasping for an explanation the way a drowning man grasps for driftwood. "Someone passing through. High-level. Dealt with the troll and moved on."

  "Could be," Garren said. "Could also be something else. Something local and we don't know about."

  His eyes drifted, briefly and without emphasis, toward the bar.

  Levin's hands continued their work. Glass. Cloth. Circular motion. Clink.

  "The point," Fitch said, pulling the conversation back to its original heading with the administrative determination of a man who had an agenda and intended to reach the end of it before the candles burned down, "is that we have two problems. Goblins, which are immediate and escalating. And an unknown entity on the south road, which is mysterious and possibly related. The goblins are the priority. We need a plan."

  "We need help," Gretta said. "Real help. Fighters. Mages. People with levels above single digits. If the garrison won't come and the Guild can't provide, then we hire mercenaries. There are companies in Greymarch. The Silver Lances. The Ironwood Brotherhood. Professional outfits. They'll clear a goblin infestation for the right price."

  "The right price," Fitch said, "is approximately one hundred and ninety three gold for a company engagement. Minimum. The village treasury contains—" He consulted his ledger. His face performed a sequence of micro-expressions that tracked the journey from hope to arithmetic to despair. "Forty-seven gold, eight silver, and three copper. After the bridge maintenance allocation and the bell-ringer's quarterly stipend."

  "The bell-ringer gets a stipend?" Dorin asked.

  "The bell-ringer gets a stipend. It's in the charter. Section fourteen, paragraph six. 'The appointed keeper of the municipal bell shall receive quarterly compensation commensurate with the duties of the office, said compensation to be determined by the sitting council and disbursed from the general fund.' The current rate is two gold per quarter."

  "Two gold? For ringing a bell?"

  "For ringing a bell on time. The charter specifies punctuality. The current bell-ringer has, admittedly, a flexible interpretation of 'on time,' but the stipend is contractual and cannot be revoked without a formal review process that requires—" Fitch flipped a page. "—a quorum of five council members, a written complaint, a thirty-day notice period, and a hearing at which the bell-ringer may present a defence. The last time someone attempted to revoke a municipal stipend was in 1342, and the hearing lasted six hours and ended with the council voting to increase the stipend out of sheer exhaustion."

  "We're getting off topic," Berta said.

  "We are spectacularly off topic," Fitch agreed, and closed the ledger page with the careful finality of a man sealing a tomb.

  "Forty-seven gold won't hire a mercenary company," Gretta said. "It won't hire half a mercenary company. It might hire one mercenary, if the mercenary was desperate and willing to accept payment in turnips."

  "Nobody accepts payment in turnips," Tommas said, with the wounded dignity of a man whose primary crop had just been used as a metaphor for worthlessness.

  "That's rather the point, Tommas."

  The conversation circled the way conversations circle when a group of people have identified a problem, exhausted the obvious solutions, and are now orbiting the problem at a safe distance, occasionally poking it with a suggestion and then retreating when the suggestion fails to produce results.

  Garrison: too far, too slow, too bureaucratic.

  Guild: too small, too old, too retired.

  Mercenaries: too expensive.

  Militia: Thornwall did not have a militia. Thornwall had farmers with pitchforks and a baker with a rolling pin, and while these had proven adequate for the occasional bar fight and the annual goat-escape crisis, they were not, by any honest assessment, equipped to engage a goblin infestation of unknown size in the deep forest.

  "If not stopped," Old Maren said, cutting through the circular conversation with the precision of someone who had been waiting for the right moment and had identified it with the timing of a woman who had attended more meetings than anyone else in the room and knew exactly when a silence needed filling, "all the farms will burn. That's what happened in '08. The goblins came from the north. Small groups first. Scouts. Then raiding parties. Then a horde. They burned three farms before the garrison arrived, and the garrison arrived too late for the Hendricks place. The Hendricks family lost everything. Barn. House. Livestock. Old Hendricks himself lost two fingers to a goblin blade, and he never held a plough straight again."

  She paused.

  The room held its breath.

  Old Maren's pauses were legendary. They lasted exactly long enough for the listener to absorb the weight of what had been said and begin to dread what was coming next.

  "We waited too long in '08," she said. "We waited for the garrison. We waited for the Guild. We waited for someone else to solve our problem, and while we waited, the goblins grew, and the farms burned, and the Hendricks family ate charity bread for a winter." Her eyes, pale and sharp beneath lids that had seen ninety-three years of Thornwall's modest history, swept the room. "I will not eat charity bread again. I am too old and my teeth are too few."

  The silence that followed was the silence of a room full of people who had just been reminded, by a ninety-three-year-old woman with insufficient teeth, that waiting was a strategy with consequences.

  Fitch's quill was still. Gretta's three fingers were raised. Berta's rolling pin sat on the table like a gavel that had already delivered its verdict.

  Levin set down the glass he was polishing.

  He set it down with the careful finality that had become, over seven weeks, his signature gesture — the full stop, the period, the small and deliberate motion that said: the thing I was doing is done, and the thing I am about to do is different.

  "I'll handle the goblin problem," he said.

  His voice was not loud. It did not need to be. The room was quiet enough that a whisper would have carried, and Levin's voice, while not a whisper, occupied the same general territory — calm and delivered at a volume that assumed the listener was paying attention and did not require shouting to maintain that attention.

  The words crossed the common room and arrived at the central table with the unhurried precision of a stone skipping across still water.

  Thirty-one faces turned.

  The turning was, this time, simultaneous.

  Fitch's quill dripped a single drop of ink onto the ledger page, forming a dark circle that spread slowly outward like a pupil dilating.

  Gretta's three fingers lowered.

  Garren's hand, which had been resting on the table near his ale, went still.

  Berta's face did something that was almost a smile but stopped short, holding itself in reserve, the way a person holds an umbrella half-open when the sky is uncertain.

  A certain broom went left and landed on the ground.

  Levin picked it up.