Albanus joined them at the campfire that evening. Hogwyn dragged his feet in the going. Not even sitting on the log beside the wizard lifted his spirits. Sansum. Somehow, the knowledge of the dwarf’s name only sharpened his fear. It had been Sansum who had tackled him in the dark near the Pit those few winters ago. It had been Sansum whose breath stank of iron and musk and death and burst from him in loud shuddering rasps like Grampy’s snoring. Hogwyn again saw the pickaxe’s point, how it glittered, how it tormented him in his nightmares: I’m coming for you, Hoggy. Woo-ee, here I come. Oink for me! Squeal for me! The nightmare always ended with Hogwyn’s eye ripping open like the membrane of an egg yolk. Then Hogwyn woke up.

“Answer the wizard, Gwyn,” Granny Lagger snapped.

Hogwyn looked up from his bowl and let the scrap of chicken he’d brought up to his lips fall back with a splat.

“I—”

“He’s always been quite special, our dear Gwyn,” Hagger said to the wizard. She batted her eyes at Hogwyn.

“That’s not true,” Hogwyn said automatically.

“You’re embarrassing me,” Mother said.

Hogwyn barely heard her over the crackle of the campfire but his teeth clacked shut and ground together all the same.

“Have you any letters?” Albanus repeated.

“No,” Hogwyn said.

“Have you ever wanted to learn any?”

Hogwyn’s eyes skipped from his father to his mother to Granny and back again. He swallowed, and said, “Yes.”

The elf grunted. “Good. What about you, dear?”

Hagger crinkled her nose. She was quite proud of it, how it crumpled like autumn leaves, and was putting on quite a show for the wizard. Hogwyn took comfort in its futility. If the elf couldn’t even speak with his ears, he wouldn’t notice his older sister’s blossoming beauty. Hogwyn hadn’t even been able to suss out the elf’s gender until it had been confirmed for him.

“No,” Hagger said. “Never. Granny says—”

“Granny says letters are important,” Granny Lagger said sharply. “More important than you know. But they ent for goblins like us. We’re miners. Good, Orogoros-fearin’ folk of rich soil an old rock. Ent a rune or scratch in creation can rival that.”

Albanus nodded, as if this were very wise, and said, “But you were not always miners, back in the day.”

“Right on,” Grampy said. He swayed ever so slightly on the log beside Snatcher, who held the clay jug full of spud mead. “We were warriors, an before that we were kings.”

He jabbed a hooked finger at Gobbler.

“Your father Biter was a warrior, by Orogoros—”

Grampy seemed to wither under Granny’s gaze. He wrenched the jug out of Snatcher’s hands and swigged it noisily.

Hogwyn’s ears twitched to attention. He’d heard talk of his late grandfather, Biter, only in whispers. Or in random shouts from Grampy’s direction when he was drunk and taking a piss off the cliffside.

“He was a mighty warrior indeed,” Albanus said. His tone was polite and quiet, and for a rare moment, no one in the family spoke.

Hogwyn eyed Snatcher nervously in the silence. His uncle sat hunched and eyed the jug in Grampy’s hands. He was steeped in one of his black moods, but dared not speak against the wizard in front of Granny. Satisfied his uncle would not lash at the wizard again, Hogwyn ached to know what his grandfather Biter had done or achieved, and how the wizard had come to know him. Who was he? What did the wizard know about him? Why did Granny not want him talked about?

“War feet,” Dugg worbled, ramming his fist into his bowl and scooping out a piece of chicken.

Hogwyn’s ears prickled with irritation. Dugg acted most like a gobblekin when they had company, or when he’d done wrong, or when he was desperate for attention. This case seemed the first and perhaps a bit of the third. Mother always reminded Hogwyn he’d been guilty of it himself when he was Dugg’s age. Somehow, that didn’t seem to make a difference in his estimation of Dugg much. Not when Dugg was at it.

“Sir Wizard,” Hogwyn said, ignoring Dugg, who was now hopping on top of his empty bowl, “what mystery did you come to discover?”

“Hogwyn!” Every adult goblin around the campfire frowned at him.

“It is all right,” Albanus said. His shoulders shook and he rumbled with a sound like boulders crashing together. “We Big Folk do not find such curious questions rude, whether posed to guests or to hosts. The mystery, young goblin, is that of this mountain.”

Albanus’s large pink hand gestured at the summit above them. Rags of snow still clung to the lower reaches of the peak and the crest shone bone-white beneath the moon. A sense of pride stirred within Hogwyn. Our mountain, he thought. Gobblehouse.

“This was once the seat of the dwarf kings in the west,” the wizard said. “From here, they tore great seams of gold and other metals precious and useful from the earth and spread their power and wealth across the plains to the south and to the river lands to the east. Some of their old coins still circulate in the markets of Goblin Town to this day.”

His eyebrows met in the middle and he rubbed his chin with a giant hand.

“But of course,” the wizard said, “those were in the days of my youth. I met King Rum in the days when the lights of his hall never dimmed and the fire of his forge never dwindled—”

“It’s still going,” Hogwyn said.

“Oi,” Snatcher barked. “You going to let the gobblekin give away our secrets?”

I’m not a gobblekin, Hogwyn thought furiously, but Granny and Mother had both started gnawing on Snatcher with exclamations like “You ent about to be rude to our guest, I ent raised no hobgoblin,” and “Don’t speak to my son that way. Gobbler!”

Mother could be just as fearsome as Granny when she invoked her husband’s name. Learned it at Granny Lagger’s knee, no doubt, and the harsh sound never failed to make Hogwyn wince.

“It is no secret,” Gobbler said. He set down his bowl and wiped his hands through the grass and then ran them over the fire to cleanse them. “The dwarf forge has never gone out.”

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“In all this time?” Albanus sounded awed. He leaned forward on his knees, eyes bright and glistening.

“Not once,” Gobbler said. He paused. “We have lived here for ten winters. Perhaps more.”

Albanus’s eyebrows were one again, and he appeared to Hogwyn to be struggling with something. Perhaps the desire for more information. Dugg made a similar look when Granny put away the jars of honey roots reserved only for feast days.

“May I ask how you came about living here?” Albanus said at last.

“No, you may not,” Snatcher said, before Granny could shut him up.

“After them summer wars,” Grampy bellowed over the deluge of family voices, “I left the Northern Burrow with the rest of our kin and we made our way south.”

Grampy took a swig and his voice, freshly whetted, settled into the lilting rhythm that had chased Hogwyn to sleep most nights in his young life. But not tonight. No, this night he clung to his grandfather’s every word.

“I’d been lightly injured in the last battle. No big wound, mind, just a clean cut delivered me by one of the Big Folk. I was lucky, see. In those days they hadn’t invented the crossbow. One bolt from a Man-sized bow-onna-stick will kill a cropped goblin warrior. Dead in his tracks. But where was I… oh, yes, the mountain. Well, I’d offered to marry my daughter to Biter’s son—” Grampy gestured with the jug at Gobbler “—well before she’d even been born, and he was eager enough at the time, though the wars had drug us apart after a while. He hauled up his glory from the dwarf mines of Dunne and I ripped mine from the Men warriors of Corwin’s Steading.”

Hogwyn saw Granny roll her eyes.

“So when the battles ended and Biter was kilt,” Grampy said, eyeing Gobbler, “I took in his gobblekin and raised him up and when the time came, they were married, just as me and Old Biter had agreed. But by summer’s end, the Northern Burrow collapsed, the clans crumbled. We were exiles.”

Hogwyn shifted on the log beside the wizard. His grandfather’s eyes were wet, far wetter than they should have been at this time of night, and on the first jug, too. A defensiveness Hogwyn had never heard before crept into Grampy’s voice: “Corwin’s Steading burned, of course, but those little wood cones they call houses were built right back up. And the contraptions the dwarves built for the mines of Dunne were smashed, yes, but there ent no greater sin in this life than noshing off what you don’t understand.”

Hogwyn bristled. He and his family used the Eternal Forge for heat, didn’t they? The heat source and mechanism was a mystery to them. A miracle. Grampy himself had said so. Grampy was being a hypocrite. Parents and grandparents often were, but they never seemed bothered. Perhaps it was part of being older. The world was no longer new, and you just got used to things that didn’t make any sense. Started to like ‘em that way, even.

“And that counts double for Big Folk,” Grampy said pointedly. He seemed to catch Granny’s look and hurried on: “Then, when Gobbler had learned to mine from the hobgoblins in Fogbother we started lookin’ for a claim. Ended up wandering westward and ran into some trouble. Gobbler ended up befriending one of those old war hogs the dwarves had used in the war and he lead him to here, I suppose like those dogs who know where they’re going when they set their hearts to head home. Doesn’t matter where they ended up wandering to, they always know where to go to get back.”

Grampy trailed off. Confusion clouded his face and he raised the jug to his lips again and set it down. Granny Lagger plucked it from the ground and tucked it behind her quick as a whip.

The wizard paused politely and then said, “I see. And that was ten winters past.”

“A bit more,” Gobbler said.

Hogwyn wondered if there was an edge of defensiveness in his father’s voice. Had they done wrong in coming here? The way Grampy had told the story in winters prior, they’d practically been forced to come to the mountain, to live here, far from their Greenfoot cousins. The hog story wasn’t new— it was part of Hogwyn’s namesake, after all, but he couldn’t square the missing details of Grampy’s story.

“And you came upon it abandoned,” Albanus said.

“That’s right,” Granny Lagger said. “Empty as a tomb. Nothing moving but the flames in the forge.”

Hogwyn’s ears shook. He felt the wizard’s glance on him and froze up, gripping his knees.

“The mystery of Rumbaktum,” Albanus said. “It has troubled me since I first heard the mines were emptied, the halls of the dwarf kings abandoned. Many fanciful theories were posed to me. Some said the mines harbored something evil. A dark thing which devoured the dwarves without touching their artifice or pillars or walls. Some said the dwarves’ greed had driven them to madness, that they had built up new halls deep beneath the earth, never to be seen again, but danced about their deepest forges bedecked in the charms of their priceless hoard. Others were less imaginative.”

Hogwyn’s eyes were drawn to the wizard’s hands as he filled his pipe. His large thumb was narrow enough for the task of tamping down the weed and did so deftly. Though he looked as old as Grampy, he had none of Grampy’s frailty of movement. The elf looked less and less haggard by the minute. Could it be magic? Hogwyn felt a gobblekin peal of excitement rise in his throat. He remembered his cropped ears and was silent.

“But the mystery remains,” the elf said. He chomped down on the wooden pipe with a click of his teeth and passed his hand over it.

Hogwyn gasped and forgot his embarrassment as soon as it registered. From his downward angle he’d spotted the spark leap from the wizard’s palm and burst into the tangle of pipe weed. It had happened so fast the next moment he wasn’t sure of what he’d seen. Had it been real? Perhaps he’d plucked an ember from the fire with his large hands thick with calluses. But no, Hogwyn would have seen him stoop down to reach the fire.

Hogwyn stared at the wizard’s hands and noticed the elf looking back at him. He met Albanus’s gaze.

“Have you any interest in learning magic, my good goblin?” Albanus said. He tapped the bulge in his cloak that hid the scroll. It rustled.

“Hogwyn wants to be a miner, just like his father,” Granny Lagger said. “Ent that right, Gwyn?”

Hogwyn swallowed. If he said he did want to become an Inventor, the wizard might dismiss him entirely. But if he said he was interested in magic, Granny Lagger would never let him hear the end of it. He’s a braggart wizzpot, Hetty, she’d tell his mother. I told you so when that wizard come a-knockin’. I said he’d better not go off and learn his letters now. No goblin lass worth the soil her tuber root is planted in is willing to put up with a parchment sniffer. Grampy would stop telling him war stories. And, worst of all, Hagger would join in: Most Special Hog, always with his nose in a barbarian book sloughed off a dead animal. What’s wrong with tuber parchment?

“Well, go on, answer him,” Grampy said. His voice had gone surly. He’d not had a sip in overlong and doubtless started sprouting a headache.

“I suppose,” Hogwyn said. He kept his eyes on the fire before him. He was aware of the pall it flung onto every one of his family’s green faces and how it tossed the backs of the trees surrounding the camp into shadow. Most of all, he knew, his father stared into the fire opposite him, studious in his avoidance of the others’ seeking looks.

“He is most curious and open,” Albanus said. “It is, I dare say, a good thing.”

He clapped a hand on his knee and said, “Now, my dear goblins, your hospitality has been most overwhelming in its abundance. And do forgive me if those are not the correct words of politeness, it has been so very long.”

With that, Gobbler rose from the log and together with Mother and Granny and Hagger cleared up the bowls and brought them up to the Front End of the Burrow. Without a word, Snatcher shuffled off toward the ridge, leaving Hogwyn alone but for Grampy and the wizard and Dugg, who had fallen asleep facing the stars.

“What did the big-beard say?” Grampy said suddenly. “What lies has he spun?”

Albanus blew a column of smoke skyward. Hogwyn watched with interest as it formed a five-fingered hand and billowed to a fist and vanished among the twinkling stars.

“The dwarf Sansum claims that a goblin horde killed his kin and took up residence in the mountain,” Albanus said.

Grampy’s hiss sent shivers up the backs of Hogwyn’s ears. The last time he’d heard a cropped goblin hiss like that there had been a bear clawing at the wood door of the Front End.

“You’ve seen the lot of us,” Grampy said. “You know that ent true.”

“Oh, yes,” Albanus said simply. “I know it to be true. But Sansum has not gone to the dwarf mines in the east to plead his case. No, not since he left them has he returned, if the rumors that have reached my ears prove true. He plies his story of woe to more sympathetic ears, and younger ones. The ears of those who were not yet born when the dwarf kings ruled jewel and stone below Rumbaktum.”

Albanus plucked his pipe from his mouth and pointed the mouthpiece toward the lake. Small points of orange and red glowered along the pitch of the water.

“He has gone to plead his case to Men.”

Grampy clacked his teeth down over his pipe and blew a ring.

“Then we are as fucked as trolls,” he said.