A Rather Unfortunate Victory
Victory leaves Beech with missing neighbours, hungry refugees and five imprisoned goblins. An evening rescue reveals that the raid's real purpose may lie closer to home.
In which a hero discovers that winning creates an alarming amount of work
The first thing Beech learned about victory was that it involved a great deal of washing up.
He had imagined cheering, perhaps a trumpet, and certainly someone pressing a full mug into his hand. Instead, he was scraping cold porridge from a pot while Harl Dobb explained that the refugees needed another four pots cleaned.
"I thought you were in charge of the cooking," Beech said.
"I am. You're in charge of the pots. It's called sharing the burden."
"I don't recall agreeing to that."
"You didn't agree to the goblin invasion either, but you've made a respectable effort with it."
Beech attacked the porridge with his thumb. His mother's pan lay hidden beneath his cloak, safe from communal service. Several people had suggested that a weapon capable of frying eggs ought to earn its keep.
Around the old sheepfold, the refugees settled into uncomfortable order. Nella's dogs patrolled with the air of officials inspecting poor workmanship. Elna, her burned hands bound in linen, directed the stores. Harl wore a borrowed coat over his nightshirt. Darron lay on folded cloaks while Berta changed the dressing on his injured arm.
Above the hollow the sky reddened towards evening. Below it, their village still smoked.
More than twenty people had reached the ridge alive. Others were missing, and their homes had not reappeared merely because the goblins had retreated.
"That's clean," said Harl.
Beech looked at the pot. "There's a bit there."
"It's the bottom of the pot."
"Ah. Yes. I wondered why it wouldn't come off."
Harl took it from him. "Come and eat before Elna puts you to work peeling things."
At the mention of food, Beech felt his spirits rise. They fell again when he saw the supper: a thin stew of onions, oats and whatever vegetables had survived the journey. Each helping was more a suggestion of a meal than the thing itself.
Beech accepted his portion without complaint. This required considerable self-control.
He sat beside Darron, whose left arm was bound from wrist to elbow.
"How is it?" Beech asked.
"Still attached."
"That's encouraging."
"Less so than it sounds. Berta says I'm not to lift anything heavier than a spoon."
"You're holding a spoon."
"I've considered the risk."
Beech managed a smile, but it faded when Darron shifted and caught his breath. The goblin's spear had struck the same arm twice, the second time when Darron stood between a child and the point. Beech could still hear the sound the blacksmith had made.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Darron gave him a steady look. "You made the way out. I chose to stand in it. Don't go collecting blame like firewood. You'll never carry it all."
That sounded like something his father might have said, with fewer references to joinery.
"All the same," he murmured, "I'd rather you hadn't been hurt."
"So would I. Now eat your onions. They're going cold."
The missing were counted after supper.
Nella had a piece of slate and a stub of chalk. Harl knew the names of almost everyone who had sheltered in the Lantern and Ladle. Merrick knew the families around the mill. Between them they reconstructed where people had last been seen, which cottages were standing, and which had burned. Tam watched the ridge with his cracked horn and the whistle he was ordered to use instead.
The names were read aloud carefully. Beech found this harder than the goblin shouting. Missing did not mean dead, Nella reminded them, but some people were unaccounted for.
"Joss," Beech said when the list reached the eastern lanes. "And his daughter."
Harl looked up. "You saw them?"
"At the stable. The goblins wounded his arm. I helped him inside, but he couldn't walk far and there was a bowman watching the lane. I told the girl about the orchard path." He stopped. "I should have checked."
"You had three goblins after you," Nella replied. "You told us where they were. We've had no one spare to reach them."
Beech remembered the girl trusting him when he said the lane would clear. It had not cleared quickly. She might still be waiting behind the stable door because a carpenter had told her to.
"We can't leave them there tonight," he said.
"No," said Nella. "We can't."
Harl laid one large hand upon the slate. "We've got other trouble. Five of the little brutes are still locked in the cattle pound. Merrick's worried they'll work at the hinges. And the last light is going."
"The pound's a good gate," Beech said automatically.
Merrick, sitting beside the fire, snorted. "You built it."
"My father and I built it."
"Then half of it will be splendid."
A few of the villagers laughed. Beech would normally have defended his workmanship at length, but he remembered the main gate banging under goblin weapons and the narrow wicket beyond the feed shed. A strong gate was only useful while it stayed shut.
"We need a watch on the pound," Nella said. "And a watch on the drover's path. If the raiders come back, I want warning before they're among the children."
"We'll also need shelter before the weather turns," added Elna, looking up from her bandaged hands. "That wind has rain in it."
There seemed to be more problems than people to solve them.
Beech had wanted to be a hero. He had not realised heroes were expected to understand logistics.
"I'll go for Joss," he said.
Harl looked him over. "You can barely keep your eyes open."
"I'm not using them very well anyway."
"That is not reassuring."
"Nella knows the orchard track," Beech added. "We could get there without crossing the broken bridge."
Nella considered the darkening sky. "I can take Fern. Gorse stays here to watch the sheepfold. We'll be quiet, and if the stable's surrounded, we come back for help. No running into the middle of six goblins because you happen to recognise one of them."
"I've only done that once."
"Once was enough."
Before they left, Elna called Beech aside, holding the wooden horse he had saved from the burned cottage.
"You made this for my niece," she said.
"I know. I found it outside the house."
"She got out with her mother this afternoon. They're further up the ridge."
Relief loosened something tight inside him. "That's good."
Elna ran one burned fingertip along the horse's carved mane. "She'll want to know whether you can mend it."
"I expect so."
"She says no one else makes horses with ears this large."
Beech regarded the toy. He had thought the ears rather handsome. "She was very particular about hearing things."
"You'll have to tell her that yourself." Elna handed the horse back. "Bring Joss's girl home too."
They went downhill as the evening light thinned among the trees. Nella moved ahead, her crook tucked beneath one arm, while Fern ranged silently between the hedges. Beech followed with his cloak pulled close and the frying pan hanging low at his side. Its familiar weight was comforting; he wished it were less noisy against the knife at his belt.
They passed the drover's track, its fallen gate propped aside. Beech felt an old impulse to stop and mend the rotten hinge. For once he resisted.
Beyond the hedge, Briar Glen looked different in the evening. Fire had blackened the bakehouse roof and left its walls open to the sky. Smoke drifted over the empty lane. A broken shutter knocked softly against its frame. Somewhere in the village a frightened animal lowed, then fell quiet.
"Where are the marked ones?" Beech whispered.
"North, if Tam saw them right. But some ordinary raiders may have stayed to steal what they can. Keep behind me."
The millstream sounded louder than before. Merrick's partly opened sluice had sent water across the low track, which now glistened with mud. The narrow bridge still had a jagged hole in its centre where the captain had fallen. Beech refused even to look at it for long. Instead Nella led him behind the eastern cottages, keeping to the dry ground above the flooded crossing.
They approached the old cattle pound from the mill-yard side.
Inside the stone walls came a scrape of iron against timber, followed by a low argument. The five captured goblins had not become more agreeable during their imprisonment. One demanded to be released. Another accused his companions of stealing his supper, although no supper had been supplied.
Nella stopped beside the rear wicket. Its bolt was still fastened on the yard side. The main gate beyond the wall remained barred; through a gap they could see a spear shaft jammed beneath the lower hinge strap. Every time the goblins pushed, the strap shifted in its mortise.
"They're lifting the hinge," Beech whispered.
"Will it come out?"
"Eventually. We used good oak and decent iron. We didn't imagine five people would spend all evening undoing it from the wrong side."
"Goblins," Nella corrected.
"I'd rather hoped for neither."
He found a length of unused fence rail leaning against the feed shed, where it had waited for years to become a repair. He set it across the outside of the main gate below the lower strap, wedging one end into a stone recess and the other behind a fixed post. It would prevent the gate lifting far enough for the hinge to clear. The rail was dry and cracked, so he added a second brace, working carefully while Nella watched the road.
One goblin peered through the gap. "Oi. Carpenter."
Beech nearly struck his own thumb with the stone he'd been using as a mallet.
"Let us out," the goblin said. Its speech was rough but perfectly comprehensible. "Others gone. No chief here now."
"You've still got spears," Beech replied.
The goblin glanced behind it, where one of its companions was using a spear to prize up the hinge. "They're not very good spears."
"Good enough to point at children."
"Water, then?" the goblin asked.
Beech hesitated. The goblins had hurt people he knew. Darron was lying on the ridge because of them. But the pound was shut, and the night would be cold. Nella fetched a wooden bucket from the mill yard, filled it at the upper water channel and set it by the small drainage slot beneath the main gate, where the prisoners could draw it through using the end of a spear.
"That's water, not freedom," she warned.
The goblin nodded, too quickly to be trusted. Behind it, the scraping of the hinge stopped.
"We leave someone watching from the mill side when we return," Nella told Beech. "And tomorrow they'll have to surrender their weapons before any decision's made."
The repair might buy them a night. Sometimes that was enough.
They moved on towards the stable.
Joss had bolted the rear door as well as the front. Beech discovered this when he reached the little yard and pulled at the latch. The door refused to move. He tried the frame gently, remembering the damage the rolling grain wagon had done to the front lane.
"Joss? It's Beech."
Nothing.
"The carpenter. With the pan."
From within came a small voice. "How do I know it's you?"
Beech was impressed. The girl was doing considerably better than he had when a goblin had asked him to open his front door that morning.
"I nearly ran your father over with his own wagon," he whispered.
A pause. Then the bar lifted.
"That's him," the girl said.
She was a thin child with a plait coming loose from its ribbon. Her name, she told them as she ushered them inside, was Tilly. He had seen her carrying buckets around the stable for years without learning her name.
Joss lay on a heap of folded horse blankets in an empty stall. His injured arm was bound tight against his body with a strip of harness leather. He looked as grey as the wall behind him, though his voice retained enough strength to be unpleasant.
"Come back to finish the job with the wagon, have you?"
"Not intentionally."
"A comforting distinction."
Nella knelt to examine the bandage. The bleeding had slowed, but Joss was hot with fever and could scarcely sit without help. The stable smelled of smoke, damp straw and frightened horses. Its rear passage into the orchard was blocked by a collapsed section of lean-to roof; Tilly had tried to clear it and failed. The front lane was watched by goblins until shortly before sunset.
"I thought you'd gone," Beech told her quietly.
"I tried," Tilly said. "Dad fell when we reached the yard. I couldn't lift him. I heard them outside again, so I brought him back."
Beech wanted to apologise, but an apology would not move Joss up the hill.
"You did the sensible thing," he said. "Now help me find a cart."
Tilly's eyes brightened. "The little fodder cart. Two wheels. It has a bad axle pin."
"Of course it does," Beech murmured.
"You were meant to mend it," said Joss from the blankets.
"This village has a remarkable memory for my commitments."
The cart stood beneath the loft, loaded with empty feed sacks. It was low enough for Joss to sit with his legs stretched out and narrow enough to pass between the orchard hedges once they cleared the fallen timber. One wheel was loose on its hub. Beech inspected the iron linchpin: not broken, merely bent and half-withdrawn, a problem that could be put right with a straight peg and a little patience.
He shaved an oak offcut with his kitchen knife and fitted it through the hub after Nella straightened the keeper against a stone. It was untidy, but the wheel turned true.
"That should hold," he said.
Joss opened one eye. "That's what you said about my grain wagon last winter."
"I was right about the wheel. It was the brake rope that needed replacing."
"Which you didn't do."
Beech decided there was no profit in discussing the matter further.
While Nella prepared Joss for the move, Beech and Tilly pried the fallen lean-to boards apart. The door beneath had not been destroyed; a roof beam lay across it, the weight bearing chiefly on one end. Beech showed the girl where to wedge a crowbar beneath the timber and which board to remove first. Together they shifted the load just far enough to draw the cart through.
"See?" he said as the beam settled harmlessly against the remaining posts. "A little leverage."
Tilly looked at him with solemn interest. "If you'd fixed it when Dad asked, would it have fallen?"
Beech considered this.
"Not necessarily," he admitted.
"That's what I thought."
She had, he decided, an excellent future in village life.
They had just settled Joss into the cart when Fern stiffened at the yard entrance. The sheepdog made no sound, but Nella stopped immediately. Beyond the broken lean-to came the scrape of boots on gravel.
A goblin voice spoke from the lane. "Someone's been in here."
Another answered, "Stable's empty. We looked."
"Door moved. Look again."
Beech felt the blood drain from his face. The voice belonged to the bowman from the flour-covered lane. It had been the only goblin there who had waited, aimed and fired while the others shouted. Beech remembered the arrow pinning his sleeve to the barrel.
Nella raised a finger for silence. Joss clenched his jaw against a cough. Tilly crouched beside her father's leg, one hand pressed to the cart's wooden rail.
Two shadows crossed the gap in the lean-to. Beech could see that the bowman had company: a broad-shouldered goblin with a hook-bladed knife. Neither wore the broken-ring mark. They were stragglers, but not harmless ones.
The bowman stepped inside and saw the cart.
"There."
Its bow came up.
Beech shoved the loose stable door between them as the arrow struck the timber. The point drove through the board a hand's breadth above the place where Tilly had been crouching.
Nella snapped a command. Fern lunged from the shadows, not at the armed bowman but at the second goblin's ankles. The creature stumbled into a manger, giving Nella room to pull Tilly behind the cart. The archer was already drawing again.
Beech saw the gap beneath the stall's half-door. He dropped onto his knees, caught the latch from underneath with his kitchen knife and lifted it. The heavy partition swung outwards, between the goblin and Joss's cart.
A second arrow struck the partition.
The bowman circled for a clear shot while Nella drove the other raider back with her crook.
"Move the cart!" she called.
Beech seized the handles. The new axle peg held as he dragged the cart towards the orchard door. Tilly pushed at one wheel. Joss tried to help and nearly collapsed with the effort. The cart caught on a stone and stopped dead.
The bowman came around the partition.
"Drop it," it ordered, aiming at Beech.
Beech stopped. His arms ached. The pan hung uselessly at his side, and there was no room to swing it without striking the cart. He could think of nothing clever to say, nothing loose he could pull or prop he could kick. The arrowhead was steady, and Tilly was directly behind him.
Then Joss, who had spent most of his working life pretending to be indifferent to the affairs of others, reached beneath his blanket with his good hand and brought out the long leather carriage whip he had hidden there. He snapped it against the hanging lantern chain above the archer. The lamp fell with a crash between them, shattering its glass against the stone floor. The flame flared in a little pool of oil.
The goblin recoiled long enough for Nella to hook its bow with her crook and wrench the string aside. The arrow struck the roof. Beech pulled the cart over the threshold while Tilly guided its wheels across the loosened boards.
They were through, but the flame was catching the scattered straw.
Beech looked back. The stable roof had been damaged already. If the fire took hold, it might spread to the adjoining houses. He could not drag Joss uphill and return to put it out. Nella could not fight two armed goblins and carry water. For a terrible instant he stood holding the cart handles, unwilling to abandon a building he knew every timber of.
"Beech," Nella said sharply. "The people."
He looked at Tilly, both hands braced against the wheel; at Joss, fighting to remain conscious; and at the glow climbing the stall partition.
Then he moved.
They left the stable behind.
The orchard path was rougher than Beech remembered. In full daylight it had seemed a perfectly good route for a man on foot. Pushing a cart with an injured man aboard revealed its many shortcomings in a most educational manner.
A wheel struck a root. Joss groaned. Beech apologised. Ten paces later the other wheel sank into a rut. Tilly found a stone to pack beneath it, and they lifted together while Nella watched the way behind.
Smoke rose from the stable. Beech could see it through the leaves whenever the wind parted them. He heard goblins shouting, then the unmistakable crash of something falling inside the building.
He did not look back a third time.
At the fallen gate on the drover's track, the cart would not fit between the posts. The rotten hinge that had once helped their escape now threatened to undo it. Beech examined the gate in the last grey light. To free the opening, he would have to lift the whole thing clear, but the upper strap was still nailed to the post and the timber was heavier than it looked.
"The cart wheels come off," Tilly said.
"Yes. I'd rather they stayed on."
"Not the wheels. The handles. The wooden bar between them. Two pegs. Take it out and turn the cart sideways."
Beech stared at the handles, then at the gap.
She was right.
He had built dozens of carts, yet the simpler solution had escaped him. Tilly watched with the patience of a girl used to slow adults.
"Good thinking," he said.
They removed the crossbar. Nella steadied Joss, and they tipped the cart just enough to work the wheels through the opening, one at a time. Beech refitted the bar on the far side with hands that shook from exhaustion.
A short whistle sounded from the ridge. Tam had seen them. Moments later two farmhands came down the upper path with a lantern shuttered on three sides, and between them they took the weight of the cart for the last climb.
They reached the sheepfold just as rain began to fall.
Harl met them at the entrance, now wearing trousers under his borrowed coat. He took one look at Joss and sent for Berta and Elna, who were already preparing fresh water and bedding. Tilly followed her father inside and refused to be separated from him until Berta promised she could sit by his head while the bandage was changed.
Beech stood outside the wall with his hands on his knees, drinking the cool rain as though his lungs had forgotten how to work.
Nella came to stand beside him.
"You got them out," she said.
"Tilly got us through the gate. Joss saved us from the bowman. You brought Fern."
"And you fixed the cart."
"I should have fixed it months ago."
Nella watched him for a moment. "You can't mend yesterday, Beech. You can mend what you've got in front of you."
He looked down the valley. Through the rain, a dull orange glow rose above the stable roofs.
"Not all of it," he said.
She did not contradict him.
By the time the rain settled into a steady patter, the sheepfold had acquired a remarkable collection of people, animals and opinions. The nearby shepherd's store—a low stone building with a sound roof but only enough space for the injured—had become a sickroom. The rest sheltered beneath canvas pulled between the surviving walls and the ash trees. Every corner contained somebody arguing about knots.
Joss was awake, with Tilly beside him. His arm needed a healer, but the bleeding had stopped. Tam reported that the rain was damping the stable fire before it could spread to neighbouring cottages.
"That's something," Beech said.
"It is," Tam replied. "Not everything."
The words would have sounded unkind if Tam had not looked so tired.
A new voice sounded from the entrance. "OUT OF MY WAY!"
Widow Fenner marched into the sheepfold dragging a reluctant pig by a length of rope. Duchess was muddy to her ears, her sides flecked with scraps of straw, and she carried a stolen cabbage leaf in her mouth. The widow's dress was torn at the hem, but her rolling pin remained firmly in one hand.
Behind her came a small boy carrying a sack of turnips almost as large as himself.
Beech straightened. "Mrs Fenner!"
"Don't you 'Mrs Fenner' me. Someone's been leaving gates open all through the village, and I will be having words with whoever's responsible." Her eyes settled on Beech. "Beginning with you."
Duchess gave an agreeable grunt and attempted to investigate the supper pot.
Harl stepped between the animal and the food with a courage he had not displayed against the goblin captain. "Keep that beast away from my cooking."
"She's eaten better," said Widow Fenner.
"Not tonight, she hasn't."
While the two argued, Beech helped the boy put down the turnips. The widow had found him hiding under an overturned cart near her garden. She had brought him out along the western hedges, slower than she liked because Duchess had insisted on inspecting every patch of disturbed earth on the way.
There was laughter as the pig nosed Harl's borrowed trousers. It was not the laughter of people who believed everything would be well. It was the laughter of people grateful to have one ordinary thing to complain about.
When supper was served again, Widow Fenner's turnips thickened the stew considerably. Beech thought this a genuine improvement. He wisely refrained from saying so in front of Elna.
Much later, Beech found himself sitting beneath the canvas with a bowl balanced on his knee, while several villagers discussed the day's events as though they had all attended a single meeting and come away with different accounts.
According to one account he had defeated twenty goblins; according to another he had trained Duchess for battle, an insult the sow would have deeply resented.
"It was five goblins in the pound," Beech protested. "And I didn't wrestle anyone. The bridge broke."
"Because you knew the plank was rotten," said a farmhand.
"Because I was supposed to replace it."
"See?" said the farmhand triumphantly, as though the matter were settled.
Harl raised his mug. It contained warm water, which he regarded with the solemn distaste of a man enduring an unfamiliar punishment.
"To Beech," he said. "Without his ridiculous plan, half of us would still be in my cellar."
Several people echoed the toast. Someone patted Beech on the shoulder. Tam began to suggest a song and was firmly discouraged by Merrick, who claimed the village had already suffered enough.
Beech looked around at the faces turned towards him. The praise was warm, and quite undeserved in several particulars, but there was something else beneath it. People were watching him as if he knew what to do next.
He felt suddenly colder than the rain warranted.
"I don't actually know how to fight a war," he said.
Harl lowered his mug. "Neither do I."
"Nor me," said Berta.
"I know how to close a gate," said Nella, "and how to get people up a hill before dark."
"I know how to feed them," said Elna.
Merrick lifted his bad leg onto a dry bundle of straw. "I know the mill. Tam knows the paths. Darron knows iron, even if he'll have to tell someone else what to do with it for a while."
"And Joss knows where the wagons are," Tilly added from beside the sickroom doorway. "Or did, before somebody rolled one through a trough."
Beech could not dispute it.
"You don't have to know everything," Nella said. "You have to stop trying to do everything by yourself."
Later, after the watch changed, Beech settled by his bedroll with the pan and knife close and his walking boots beneath his cloak. He was hoping for sleep when Joss called from the stone store.
The carter was propped against a folded blanket. Tilly slept beside him, one small hand closed around a leather rein.
"There's something I ought to have told you," Joss said. "When I was lying outside the stable this morning, before you came along with your wagon trick."
Beech sat on an overturned feed bucket. "I thought we'd agreed not to discuss the wagon trick."
"I saw the marked ones pass up the main road. Not the scruffy little thieves. The others. They weren't searching the houses. They went straight past the baker's and the mill carts, straight towards the meeting hall."
"We know they took a chest from there," Beech said.
"Aye. But one of them had a board in his hand, marked with lines. He stopped outside the lane to compare it with the houses. He pointed at the narrow yard behind the hall, the one that's been locked since old Councillor Brant died. They knew there was a way in from that side."
Beech's skin prickled. The yard was not visible from the northern road. It could only be found by someone who knew the village well, or by someone carrying a drawing made by a person who did.
"Could it have been a map of the village?" he asked.
"Might've been. I couldn't read it from the ground. But I heard him say, plain as day, 'No need for the front. Use the old entrance.' Then the one beside him told him to be quiet."
Beech looked at Joss for a long moment. He remembered the strange urgency of the marked goblins, the signal that had sent even the furious captain north, the chest carried between poles while other raiders were left behind. A raid planned so carefully that its soldiers knew about a yard most villagers barely remembered.
"Who knew that entrance was there?" he asked.
Joss gave a bleak little smile. "Everyone who used to mend the place. You, for one."
Beech remembered complaining that the council kept old rooms locked while asking him to mend the surrounding walls. He had once made a charcoal sketch on a stiff scrap of parchment for the hall keeper, marking the hinges a workman needed to replace. It was the sort of thing that could survive years in a drawer, especially if nobody thought to throw it away.
He had made that drawing years ago. Perhaps it was still in the hall. Perhaps it had been copied. There was no reason, yet, to think it had anything to do with the raid.
But somebody had known precisely where to go.
"You should tell Nella," Joss said.
"I will. First thing."
"Now, Beech. Not first thing."
Beech rose. He looked towards the canvas where his neighbours slept, towards the night watch on the eastern ridge and the darkness beyond Briar Glen. He longed for the morning when his greatest trouble had been a missing boot and a headache.
He went to find Nella.
Outside, the rain fell steadily upon the sheepfold walls. Tam stood watching the northern road. Far away, beyond the last dark roofs of Briar Glen, a single horn sounded—two long notes and one short, too distant to be sure of its meaning.
Beech listened until it died away.
Their first victory had brought villagers to safety, filled the cattle pound with prisoners, and left the goblins' true prize travelling north. It had also made one thing perfectly clear.
The trouble was not finished with Briar Glen.
And, rather to Beech's dismay, Briar Glen was not finished with him.
End of Chapter Five
The story continues.
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