Silent minutes passed; not from the struggle to perceive and acknowledge what the bemusing charlatan Filburn had just expounded, but rather Cezzum pondered how right Filburn had been. The goblin observed the faces of his friends as they sought to comfort him while sparing the occasional look elsewhere, still absorbing the beauty of Cezzum’s, nay, their dell. Cezzum clapped Amyia and Palodar on their backs in a gesture that all was eventually well. They moved towards the hut.
Cezzum opened the door with a creak and invitingly ushered in Palodar and Amyia; Tac’quin pounced onto the hut’s roof.
“What a mess!” cried Amyia with distaste. “No this will not do. Cezzum, in the morrow we are tidying up this place. Look at these blankets all over and… this… just look! Look at all this dust.”
“Perhaps we were better off with the Osi,” suggested Palodar to his goblin brother in fear of what the morrow would bring.
“Well, at the least we have nothing to worry about my dear brother,” informed Cezzum quite forthrightly. “Cleaning is women’s work; we have little to concern ourselves with.”
The jest proved thoroughly efficacious, perhaps too much so. Amyia pouted; her cheeks bulging to great proportions that even the frog in Cezzum’s mere would be jealous of. Her hand cuffed the back of the goblin’s head.
“You wait and see what women’s work is Cezzum! I will have none of that!”
Cezzum smiled and laughed, as did Palodar, and eventually Amyia too surrendered to the happiness of the moment.
“Cezzum,” said Palodar sitting in one of his chairs next to the warm hearth, “I have been meaning to ask: how many wonders did you see after we were parted in the storm?”
The goblin grinned guilefully. “Only two,” replied Cezzum, indeed knowing full well he had seen three.
“Ha!” cried out Palodar in victory. “Four did I see my brother. Now you well know that I am not a dwarf to laud his conquests over another, of course not; even so, you must obviously know this fact, but I will point it out again for reassurances... for posterity, you know. I do believe that places me one wonder ahead of you Cezzum, and we have returned from our quest so the time to see wonders is now done. I am victorious!” Palodar cheered wildly to himself.
Amyia shook her head in her own perplexed wonder at her family and said, “Sometimes you two still confuse me.”
Cezzum laughed at Amyia and his dwarven brother, and gave unto Palodar his sincerest congratulations: “I have been bested!” But the goblin knew he had achieved more than Palodar would ever know.
Tac’quin let out a little puff of smoke as it rested upon the straw and twig roof of the ramshackle hut, curling into a little ball, ever so slowly moulding a dragon-shaped contour into the roof to call its own.
Cezzum, goblin, friend, paladin and brother, closed the door.
He was home at last.
The Good Goblin Page 38
