Arvel put on a kettle of water hanging over the fireplace and pulled a basket of day-old biscuits from the kitchen to place on the table where Rain sat. The marchioness was mostly dried off and was gently toweling her lilac curls with a threadbare cloth that Arvel had found her.

“You’re born under the sign of a star too, aren’t you?” Arvel asked, “You got that kinda feeling around you.”

“I was born beneath the Noble Star,” Rain said.

“Figures,” said Arvel as he sat across from her, pulling a biscuit from the basket to slice open with a knife and begin to slather butter inside; “You’re real graceful-like, and you’re mighty good with your words too. Being a real live noble too, I bet it’s easy for you to just say what you want and get it.”

“Mostly,” she said, looking down at the basket of biscuits, or perhaps through it. She sighed softly and said, “But this isn’t something I can just fix. I can’t command the crops to grow or the demons to not harass caravans of traders. I can’t issue a decree that life in Nathulan just gets better.”

Arvel looked down at the buttered half of a biscuit in his hand, before holding it out to Rain, and said, “Maybe not. But you can order your people to pick up and move.”

Rain stared at the offered biscuit for a moment, before looking at Arvel’s eyes.

“I know it’s not the solution you want,” Arvel said, gazing back at her earnestly, “But if you’re tryin’ to be a good noble and take care of your people, then it might just be the best thing you can do for them. Order them to pack up and get the hells out of here.”

Rain’s shoulders trembled as she bit back her sobs, but the tears rolled silently down her cheeks in spite of herself. She reached out and took the biscuit to nibble from the corner, staring down at the table once more.

“Pa didn’t come out here because the life was easy,” Arvel said, “He came out here and set up this farm because it had clean water and good dirt, and because nobody would bother us. But Nathulan ain’t a place for soft people anymore. It wasn’t good to ma, and if I didn’t toughen up, it wouldn’t have been good for me either.”

“You could live somewhere else too,” said Rain, “There are plenty of places that no one would bother you, that aren’t at the foot of a mountain infested with monsters.”

Arvel paused, seeming to consider her words pensively for a few seconds, before he gave her a grin and said, “Yeah, but I already got a house here.”

Rain fell asleep on the fur rug in front of the fireplace that evening. Arvel had planned to offer up his bed like he heard a gentleman was supposed to, but he had underestimated how much the events of the day exhausted her, and he didn’t want to wake her.

The next morning, the rain was still falling, but Arvel heard a strange noise. Between the pitter-patter of raindrops and the distant roll of thunder, he heard a knocking sound. Arvel emerged from his bedroom, to find Rain still curled up on the fur rug under a blanket he’d draped over her. He tip-toed past her and stepped outside, looking around to appraise the muddy farm, before following the source of the noise.

The audible trail led him toward the chicken coop.

“Stupid human!” a small, strained voice shrieked, in between the thuds.

Arvel rounded the corner of the house to see a goblin standing beside his chicken coop. She was short, about three feet tall, with a messy mop of black hair and a snaggletooth poking out from between her lips. But there was nothing about her that seemed childish; a skirt of hastily-stitched leather scraps hung from around her curvaceous green hips, and her tattered tan shirt barely covered her ample breasts, the curve of them still hanging from beneath the cloth, bouncing and swaying every time she swung her club. And she swung her club frequently, banging on the side of the coop.

“You mind telling me why you’re wailing on my chicken coop?” Arvel asked, scratching the back of his head as he stared at the sight.

The goblin didn’t even look at him as she kept banging on the side of the coop, yelling, “You! Stupid human farmer! You killed my tribe!”

“Well yeah,” he muttered, “They kidnapped someone.”

The goblin paused, and then let out a frustrated scream as a flash of lightning lit up her rain-soaked and tear-streaked features before she swung her club on the coop wall again.

“Hey,” said Arvel, “I know life’s not fair and all but my chicken coop didn’t do anything to you.”

“You!” she shouted as she spun around, her bare feet sliding in the mud. She lifted her club to point at him accusingly and said, “You did it! Because of you, Fidget doesn’t have anyone at home!”

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“Fidget?” Arvel asked, before shaking his head to chase off the questions about how one gets a name like that. He instead directed himself to more pertinent questions, like, “Why is there nobody at home? Some of them ought to have revived. At least one of them ought to have been born under the Warrior Star in a pack that big.”

The goblin stomped her foot as she huffed, and said, “Fidget wasn’t home! And when Fidget came home, everyone moved on... Because of you!”

Arvel heaved a heavy sigh as he watched the little goblin, musing over what he should do.

When Rain awoke, Arvel stood in the doorway, with a dripping goblin beside him. Immediately, Rain shrieked, bolting upright and clinging to her blanket.

“Settle down,” Arvel said, “Ain’t nobody got any business being that loud first thing in the morning...”

Fidget halfway hid behind Arvel, clinging to his pants leg as she peered around his hip at Rain.

“That’s a goblin!” Rain shouted, pointing at Fidget accusingly.

“Sure is,” Arvel replied.

“Goblins just murdered you yesterday!” Rain said, “And they kidnapped me! How can you just let one in the house?”

Arvel reached down to pet Fidget’s wet hair, and said, “Well that’s kinda the rub. This little goblin’s all alone now because I went and rescued you from up on the mountain. So, she asked me to take responsibility.”

“What?” Rain asked, her eyes widening.

“Take responsibility!” Fidget echoed with a firm nod.

Rain shucked the blanket off onto the floor as she stood up, and marched toward Arvel. She grabbed his wrist and began dragging him away from Fidget, toward the bedroom door. Though Fidget clung to Arvel, he was pulled out of her grasp, and she desperately clawed after him.

“Just a second!” Arvel said, waving to Fidget to stay back, much to her dismay. Arvel watched Rain in disbelief as she pulled him into the bedroom and shut the door behind them. Arvel looked down at her hand grasping his wrist and said, “I don’t want to go getting the wrong ideas, so I’ll just say it real plain, but if you’re lookin’ to thank me for rescuing you, you kinda picked a weird time.”

Arvel’s statement gave Rain pause, blanking her mind of the purpose for which she had actually pulled him into the room. Instead, her thoughts quickly turned toward whatever manner of gratitude he might be inferring. Rain’s eyes glanced rapidly toward Arvel’s unmade bed, his pillow still dented from where he’d laid his head. She had seen his bed last night when she was changing out of her wet clothes, but seeing the signs of him laying there, the scent of his skin still on the sheets, was a different matter entirely.

‘It’s half the size of my bed,’ she thought to herself, ‘and hardly big enough to hold two people.’

The fantasy broke like shattered glass. The realization of reality came rushing back, and Rain quickly let go of Arvel’s wrist, her face blushing a deep red as she folded her arms and said, “I am not that sort of woman! Are you dim?”

Arvel considered her question briefly but seriously, before grinning and saying, “Well my pa always said I wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

“You can’t just agree to things like that!” Rain said, swinging an arm wildly to point toward the door, or rather, to gesture toward what was on the other side of it; “When a woman demands that you take responsibility for her situation, she’s asking for a commitment! By telling her you’d take responsibility, you’ve practically agreed to be her husband.”

“Well that’s just silly,” Arvel replied, laughing heartily, “Nobody means it like that.”

“Are you sure she doesn’t mean it like that?” Rain asked suspiciously.

“Pretty sure,” he replied with a grin, “Now you wouldn’t be jealous, are you?”

Rain gasped, a hand coming to her chest as if reaching for a non-existent string of pearls to clutch. Rather than argue with him, she shoved past Arvel, opening the bedroom door to step back outside. Once she was in the living room, she spun around to look at Arvel and said, “For heavens’ sake, put a shirt on before you leave your room!”

Once she had said her piece, Rain slammed the door with enough force to rattle the rafters, a small cloud of dust falling from up on high. Arvel looked down at his bare arms, sculpted with the strength of his victory, and muttered, “I don’t know if I got none that’ll fit.”

When Arvel finally found a shirt that fit, it had long since lost its sleeves and half of its buttons, easy enough to wear half-open across the newly grown breadth of his chest. He emerged from his room around the time that the rain had finally stopped, and the sun was beginning to peek from between the clouds, shining through the farmhouse windows in brilliant rays that danced across the dusty wood planks.

Rain sat at the table, in one of only two chairs, still wearing his father’s shirt, with her long, fair, bare legs dangling from underneath, her bare toes idly dragging faint lines across the floor. She was clearly agitated, unable to sit still, faintly drumming her fingertips on the table as she watched Fidget move around the room.

Fidget had pushed the other chair against the kitchen counter and used it to climb up on the wooden surface, so she could rifle through the cabinets. She shoved jars aside with noisy clanks and pulled out cloth-wrapped bundles to sniff before tossing them aside. She reached into the back of the cabinet and pulled out a long, rigid dried sausage, swinging it like a club as she turned around and gestured toward Arvel.

“Not enough!” Fidget yelled, “Farmer doesn’t have enough meat! Going to get weak and skinny like this!”

“I don’t think that’s a real big concern,” Arvel said, looking down at one of his muscular arms, before looking back at Fidget.

The goblin took a leap off of the countertop, landing solidly on the floor in front of Arvel and gesturing aggressively at him with the sausage before shouting, “NO! Be serious! If Farmer is taking responsibility for Fidget then Farmer has to be strong and manly! Fidget is going to go hunting. Make sure Farmer eats right.”

Arvel leaned back to dodge the club-like sausage being waved at him, his brow knitted in consternation. He glanced past Fidget toward Rain sitting at the table, and just saw her shrug, offering him no assistance at all.

Rain motioned toward Fidget and asked, “You see what I meant?”