“You know I appreciate it, Scypha, but you don’t have to spend the entire night helping me,” Pyren said, rapidly moving to and from the scratched-up wooden bar. He quickly delivered another couple of horn mugs of ale to a table of goblins seated in the inn’s dining area. “With all the work you’ve been doing, I already feel like I should be paying you.”

“It’s no bother,” Scypha said, shaking her head and delivering a handful of filled-up, frothy mugs herself. She was slowly getting comfortable with holding six of them at once, three in each hand. She needed every one of her wet, sticky fingers to do it.

“I’m just saying,” Pyren said, “If you’d like to take a break, I won’t hold it against you.”

“Sure you will. We are barely keeping up as it is. Besides … watch out!”

The innkeeper instantly froze behind the bar, then looked at Scypha questioningly.

She nodded towards the line of mugs she’d already filled and carried over just behind his elbow.

“You almost spilled that,” she said. “Anyway … I feel like I want to take my mind off things. This is helping.”

Pyren shrugged and smiled. “Alright. I can understand that, with everything that’s been going on lately. I certainly won’t complain about the help. Thanks.”

Scypha nodded.

“Table Five needs some more refills,” Pyren said. “The greens there seem nice enough. Can I count on you?”

Scypha nodded again, grabbing a metal pitcher full of ale from the counter behind her, along with four empty horn mugs. “Goblins sure do drink a lot,” she said. “More than must humans. I wouldn’t have thought, given that they’re … smaller. You call them ‘greens’?”

The innkeeper smiled. “Goblins’, then. Same thing—they call us ‘pinks’.”

“Right,” Scypha said, walking towards the door with the pitcher and mugs. She remembered Niss and her brother really had called her that … a ‘pink-skin’. It was certainly better than the apparent other options, ‘pigs’ and ‘pukes’.

Table Five was located outside the inn, deliberately positioned at the same part of the wall where the fireplace was inside. Scypha wondered if any of the warmth really made it through the stone. As soon as she rounded the corner left of the door and the wind blew in her face, she got goosebumps.

Ignore that, she thought, while a feeling of unease slipped into her mind. You’re fine. The knight will come back. He won't be long. He will save you.

Despite her wishes, a vision appeared before her. The whole world went completely white, brighter than snow glistening in sunlight … but in the middle, a small, pitch-black stain sat in the middle of it, causing flakes of the white to fall upwards and away.

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Grimacing, knowing it was a bad time to hallucinate, she reached out with her hand … and realized she could feel the white and the black. She tried to scratch away the blackness with her fingernails, to peel it off the white … but instead, she peeled away the white itself, causing the stain to get bigger.

She blinked, and the vision suddenly vanished. She stood facing the wind on the wooden patio outside the inn, just beside its stone wall. The pitcher she had been holding tumbled to the ground, splashing ale onto her legs and feet. More goosebumps. Goblins were staring at her from tables in every direction.

She shook her head, bowed to them apologetically, and picked the pitcher back up. She went back into the inn to fill it.

“Anything you could spare would be welcome,” she found herself later saying to Blan, one of the goblins sitting at table Six. “But if you’ve nothing to give, that’s fine as well. Pyren, the innkeeper, says that drinks are free for you tonight.”

“What?” Blan asked, his voice low and hoarse. “But where does he get the money, then, to buy us drinks? Are you trying to trick us? We’re not falling for it—free is free. We’re not agreeing to become slaves again for a couple of drinks and bedrolls.”

Scypha shook her head. “It’s not a trick. I’m staying here for free as well. I … don’t know the answers to your questions.”

“So the innkeeper just lets people drink and stay here for free?” another goblin said. His name was Tren, if Scypha remembered correctly.

“It seems like it,” she said. “He’s very kind.”

“Suspiciously kind,” Blan said, grimacing.

Scypha shrugged, unsure of what to say. With a word of thanks, she took the empty pitcher from a goblin sitting to his right and nodded that she would bring them some water next, but was then stopped again. Blan complained, and she found herself growing restless—her knees started to shake first, then her fingers. Her vision clouded slightly, her thoughts muddling up together and becoming incoherent. She tried to alleviate the discomfort by tapping her foot—

“You listening?” Blan asked.

“I’m sorry?” Scypha replied. Instantly, she snapped back outside of herself. “Sorry, I wasn’t—”

“Listening, yeah. You’re not all there, are you?”

“Hey, shut up, Blan,” Tren said. “She’s been bringing us free drinks. Thank you for everything, girl. You can sit down with us if you want. Take a break—you look like you need it.”

“Do I?” Scypha asked, flinching.

“Yeah, you do. Come on—make some room, guys. I’ll go and get the water.”

As Tren climbed off the wooden bench by the table, the pair of goblins that sat beside him shifted and made some room for her. She noticed they had little knives tied to their belts. With a nervous smile, she accepted the offered seat.

Her vision began vibrating.

Knight, are you there? she thought. Am I really losing it again? I think I feel … mostly fine. But am I wrong? Am I deluding myself? Where did you have to run off to, again? Please come back!

“So we invite the crazy to our table,” Blan said, sitting across from her.

Scypha gazed over at him. She noticed he had a cut on his forehead, one that had healed recently. It was discolored, a darker shade of green than the rest of him.

“Is your blood red?” she asked. Her voice wobbled in her ears as if she’d heard it from underwater. It really is happening.

Blan grimaced. “What do you think?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Sorry. I don’t know why I asked that.”

Shortly thereafter, Tren came walking back to the table. He wasn’t even twice as tall as it, Scypha noticed. He was definitely shorter than she was, with big, yellowish eyes and pointy ears. He brought a pitcher and a metal cup. He placed the cup on the table right in front of her and poured water into it as she yawned.

Why do I feel so fuzzy? she thought. She couldn’t say anything. She just knew that she needed the knight to hurry and come back. She thanked Tren, took the cup, and quickly drank it all. The water was freezing cold.

She focused all of her attention on that feeling. On the cold. And she tried not to lose herself.