ii

Geoffrey cursed under his breath as another branch whipped by his face.

“Whose gods-damned bright idea was it to enter the woods at night?” he muttered.

Though he spoke the words under his breath, he could see Imogen out of the corner of his left eye, struggling to contain her laughter. He fumed silently for a few seconds before she finally spoke.

“It was your idea, Geoff,” she said softly, a teasing edge to her voice.

He resisted the urge to yell at her as another twig scratched his cheek.

You’re lucky you’re a caster, bitch. He could think of no other reason he would have chosen to put up with the mouthy mage. She had demanded a larger share of the treasure, assuming they found any, and when they had stopped at the outskirts of the forest earlier, she had also claimed the best food.

But no one could say a cross word to her. She could use magic, so they were just lucky she had agreed to come along. Geoffrey had spent longer convincing her to go with them than anyone else. Without a caster, entering goblin territory was too dangerous. Especially in such a small group.

Geoffrey’s party of six was carefully selected. Henry was their best swordsman, Thomas was quick and quiet, Brutus was the dumb muscle, Imogen was the caster, Geoffrey’s girlfriend Cornelia was the healer, and of course, Geoffrey himself was the brains of the operation. This trip had been his scheme.

“I did say we should come in after dark,” Geoffrey agreed. “It was the only sensible thing, too, much as I hate trying to navigate this thick tangle of sticks.”

“We know,” Brutus grunted brusquely from the back. “We already know it all. We’ve had this conversation before.” He obviously wanted Geoffrey to be quiet. The big fellow protecting their rear suffered from bad headaches, and noise aggravated them. The sound of Brutus’s fingers rubbing his temples was audible to Geoffrey now. It was a measure of how close the large man was to snapping—giving in to his berserker heritage.

Geoffrey chose to stop belaboring his point. He was not certain why he felt so compelled to start a fight with Imogen, anyway, except that she was older than him by two years and had always been a bit of a know-it-all. Plus, she had attended the mage academy in Bridgeport on a full scholarship, and after that, she had become even harder to stomach.

Meanwhile, there was no scholarship for the likes of me. Talent with a sword or a spear was cheap compared with magical gifts. No one bothered to test the non-magical for other aptitudes. So he had ended up helping out on his uncle’s farm once he came of age—the same thing he had spent most of his youth doing. Talk about boring!

The resentment was so thick in his throat that he could almost taste it. Geoffrey forced his mind to refocus on the present situation. We’re working to change that fate right now, he reminded himself.

They were approaching the river now, he could tell by the burbling sound that cut through the normal creepy chatter of the woods. Geoffrey led the group away from it. He did not want anyone stumbling into the water when they got up in the night to piss.

They cut through the thicket of twigs and branches with a minimum of hacking and smashing and finally found a small clearing where they could all fit.

“Great, this is perfect, let’s set up camp for the night,” Geoffrey said.

His words set off a chorus of groans and complaints.

“Sounds good,” said Cornelia wearily.

“Fucking finally,” grumbled Thomas.

“I’m going to fall asleep where I’m standing,” muttered Brutus.

“Is this really the place we want to stop for the night?” asked Henry.

“Whatever you say, chief,” Imogen said brightly.

The mocking cheer in her tone felt so weirdly sincere and contrasted so completely with the sullen remarks of the other party members that there was a slow roll of laughter from all around Geoffrey. He felt an instant need to reassert his control of the group.

“And no fires!” he added.

“No fucking fires?” repeated Thomas. “So we won’t know if we’re sleeping on a snake’s nest or—”

“You fucking heard me,” Geoffrey hissed. “No gods-damned fires. Do you want the whole valley to know we’re out here hunting for the King’s gold? You have any idea what Lord Crinus would do if he knew someone was out here trying to steal the King’s tax money?”

That silenced the objections in a heartbeat.

The only sounds that filled the air thereafter were those of the party members shuffling around making their bedding ready as best they could. Fortunately, it was summer, so keeping warm was not a concern.

Geoffrey retreated into his own mind until he sensed subtle motion beside him. He instantly wheeled to confront the potential threat—and just as suddenly relaxed. He found himself facing Cornelia.

“What are you sneaking up on me for?” The words were softer when spoken aloud than they had been in Geoffrey’s mind.

It was partially because the movements he saw from her were more slinking up to him than sneaking toward him. She looked almost as surprised as he had been. It was partially because he could not look at her without feeling a strong affection mingled with lust. They had spent the night together for the first time a few weeks ago. Finally, he had the sense that she had chosen him over the other young men of the village who wanted to court her.

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Then, when a stranger stumbled into her house of healing, bleeding from what turned out to be a fatal wound to the chest, it had been Geoffrey that Cornelia told about it first, her hands still shaking and sticky with blood. Only then did she report the bandit’s death to the local constable, along with most of the story the bandit had relayed.

Cornelia had repeated what the bandit confessed—that he and his cohorts had beset Baron Lucius’s tax collectors as they traversed through the Murmur and robbed them of the gold the Baron was sending to the King. The tax collectors were all killed.

She had left out that the bandit who died in her clinic had said that he and one other equally gravely wounded man were the only survivors of the attack—meaning the gold could not have gone far from wherever the tax collectors died. Cornelia’s story left Lord Crinus’s men thinking that there might be dangerous bandits still at large in the Murmur.

There was no love lost between Lord Crinus and Baron Lucius, so the Lord’s only action had been to forbid all civilians in the villages adjacent to the Murmur from entering it until the matter was resolved.

Cornelia had omitted the truth out of sheer loyalty to Geoffrey, who thought they might be able to recover the gold themselves—and make a new and better life—if no one else braved the woods first. He did not know how he had inspired that sort of devotion, but he clung to it. Even if he was fairly ignorant in the ways of the world, he knew that he had something precious.

“You don’t really think your father would punish us if he knew we went into the woods,” Cornelia said softly.

There it was. Maybe that’s why she decided I’m special. His heart fell a little.

“Make sure you don’t say that out loud,” he said under his breath. “You know I don’t want anyone else to know.”

Though Geoffrey had only met his father a rough dozen times over the course of his life, he was Lord Crinus’s unacknowledged bastard. He had told her in the aftermath of their first night together. She had opened herself completely to him, and he had felt the spontaneous urge to do the same.

“But do you think he would punish us?” Cornelia’s tone betrayed a vulnerability that made Geoffrey want to cover her with his cloak.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I have to assume he would.”

Cornelia sidled up closer to him and put her arm around Geoffrey’s shoulder. Her touch and smell sent electricity running through his body, as it always did.

“For trying to recover the King’s gold,” she whispered in his ear, her voice softly wheedling. “We’re doing something good, as far as anyone knows. Taking on the dangerous bandits. Me and my brave hero…”

Geoffrey felt a swelling in his pants and forced himself to step away from her and take a couple of deep breaths.

“You’re bedding next to me tonight,” he said with a confidence he did not feel.

“Oh?” Cornelia cooed, giving him an innocent look. “What will the others think? Who will keep poor Imogen warm?”

“I don’t give a damn what the others think,” he said. “I want them to know about us. I want everyone to know.” She smiled at that, all artifice seemingly gone from her expression. “And I’m not trying to bed you tonight.” His voice took on a teasing tone. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m just trying to keep my lady warm.”

“Well, in that case, dear sir, I suppose I could not fail to accept your offer,” Cornelia said, feigning a noble manner.

After moving their sleeping gear closer together, the pair laid down beside each other and fell asleep in a chaste embrace. A last peaceful, happy memory before their adventure truly began the following morning.

—

Gwendol gradually became terribly relaxed as she rested her weary bones in the river.

Though her arms continued to hold her up out of the water, they weakened.

She drowsed, then dozed.

Her mind was filled with dreams that felt like old memories. In those quasi-memories, the Murmur was alive with the sound of enemies creeping by through the darkness. Some of them killed family members or friends of Gwendol’s. They were doing their bloody work somewhere just out of sight. She had lost three brothers and sixteen cousins during the war.

Usually, the bodies were unidentifiable. She had to guess who was who based on size, general shape, and the position each person had fallen in.

She remembered surreally the sights she had seen and the words she had said when she was trying to identify the bodies.

“Yes, this blackened husk is probably cousin Alban. He would have died defending the others. Very brave. Cousins Kamber and Trina died holding each other. They were fraternal twins, but they always acted like identical twins.”

The images passing through her head had the decency to dissolve into a haze that made the whole world look as if she were seeing it through a veil of tears.

But when the haze parted, her mind passed on to new and even more disturbing images. A burned out goblin village. The scorched bodies of children, bloated with water they had absorbed after their deaths by fire, floating atop a pond.

Gwendol’s mind grew ever more troubled as she fell deeper into her nap. Images of her own bloody deeds mingled with those of the atrocities against her people, until she could hardly tell human from goblin—and a part of her wondered if she had done wrong in treating those humans who she encountered so brutally.

As she began to feel almost as if what she was seeing and hearing was real—she suddenly began snorting and sputtering. Her eyes sprang open. She took in her situation in an instant.

Her head had submerged in the river. Water had risen up her nostrils, and she had begun to breathe it in. A cold dread surged through her abdomen. Her arms were almost completely numb from holding her up out of the water for so long.

Gwendol tilted her head above the water, coughed, and sucked in a single shallow breath through her nostrils. Then she tried to pull herself up.

One pull, and her body barely budged. Her arms felt like two distant outposts of an empire, incredibly slow to receive their orders from her brain.

A second attempt, and it was somehow worse than the first. She was coughing all through it, and her whole body shook with the combination of effort and the semi-voluntary effort to expel water from her lungs. But she could feel her arms beginning to wake up again.

Gwendol gave it a third try, and with all her strength, she yanked herself out of the river and flopped onto the grass. She hacked and coughed and spit up what felt like an unhealthy share of the river onto the soft riverside plants.

Then she lay there, exhausted by the sudden effort, for a few wet, chilly minutes, before she forced herself to dry off as best she could with the grass and dressed in her clothes again.

At least I’m clean, she thought wryly. I won’t tell the kids I fell asleep in the river and almost drowned. It’s not even a strong current in this part. There’s no reason for them to be afraid of the water. Hopefully they will have fun when I bring them tomorrow.

Gwendol picked herself up and walked through the deepening darkness, out of the woods and up the mountainside. Back to her grandchildren and the warmth of her home.