The Goblin War

by Hilari Bell

  “All the parts he can confirm are true,” Jeriah said. “And the rest can’t be checked on because I traveled so fast. Is Tobin in the next—”

  “Where is Tobin?” the sorceress asked. “I half expected him to be with you. It would be a foolish risk, but no one ever called him the cautious sort.”

  A core of ice formed around Jeriah’s heart.

  “What do you mean, ‘Where’s Tobin?’ He went into the Otherworld with you. I thought . . . You didn’t leave him there!”

  His voice had risen.

  “Shh!” Girl and goblin hissed the word together.

  “He was with me,” she went on, “but he sickened quickly, so I gated him out as soon as those amulets reached us. That was over three weeks ago! No matter where he came out, he should have gotten home by now. Or word from him, if he was too weak to travel.”

  “No word’s reached his family,” said Cogswhallop. “Nor him neither. I keep in touch with those still on his father’s land.”

  The ice began to spread. “I thought he was with you,” said Jeriah. “Cogswhallop told me . . .”

  Fragments of remembered conversation flashed through his brain. If Cogswhallop had never actually said that Tobin was imprisoned with the sorceress, he’d certainly implied it. As far as Jeriah was concerned . . .

  “You lied to me,” he told the goblin coldly.

  He expected the creature to deny it. Technically . . .

  “Aye, I lied,” Cogswhallop admitted. “I needed you to get the gen’ral out, not go haring about looking for your brother. So I—”

  “Wait a minute.” The girl was standing now, her sardonic expression melting into concern. “If Tobin’s not with your family, and he’s not with me, where in the Dark One’s name is he?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jeriah grimly. “But I’m going to find out. Guard!”

  Cogswhallop argued in a fierce whisper right up till the guard’s key clicked in the lock, but Jeriah ignored him. If the goblin had endangered Tobin in his haste to get his cursed general freed, Jeriah would never forgive him.

  He’d thought the goblins were his friends. Hah!

  Jeriah was prepared to leave the girl to rot—or hang! But when the guard led him up the stairs to the hall, he found the judge waiting for him with a woman whose face was vaguely familiar.

  “That’s Jeriah Rovan, sir,” she confirmed. “He traveled all the way to the wood with us, working as Master Lazur’s aide. And he carried messages back and forth on the journey.”

  Jeriah’s boiling fury stilled. If he suddenly abandoned his “mission,” he might still end up in a cell—and that would do Tobin no good, wherever he was. Besides, if he left the girl to hang, his brother would never get over it.

  “I take it my identity has been sufficiently established?” Jeriah asked the judge. It came out with more anger than he’d intended, and the judge smiled placatingly.

  “I had to make certain. Particularly in the absence of written orders. But since your identity has been established, and our local priest was able to confirm that you were appointed as the Hierarch’s squire, I believe I’m justified in releasing the girl into your custody.”

  “Ah,” said Jeriah. “I don’t want you to bend your own rules, sir. If you’d like to keep her here, unharmed, until orders could be sent . . .”

  “No, no,” the judge assured him. “In truth, I’m glad to see her go. Many of those who were driven out of the wood by the goblins came here. And even though a settlement was established after the goblins were gone, their memories are bitter. I’d not have allowed her less than a fair trial. But I’ll admit, young sir, I wasn’t sure how to bring it about! I’m delighted to turn her over to legitimate authority.”

  And if he didn’t continue to act like legitimate authority, Jeriah realized, he would become a suspicious character himself. One who had to be held, pending further instructions.

  “Very well, sir,” said Jeriah. “I’ll take her off your hands. But leave those chains on her, if you please! I’ve no mind to find myself bedeviled by every goblin between here and the City of Steps.”

  They had traveled away from Brackenlee, mostly in silence, when Cogswhallop dropped out of a tree and onto the back of Glory’s saddle. Fortunately she was accustomed to the goblins and only shied a little. Jeriah could remember a time when Cogswhallop would have stayed in the tree, beyond human reach. If this was a sign of trust, it was misplaced.

  “Well done,” Cogswhallop told him. “As neat a jailbreak as ever I’ve seen! There’s a bend up ahead where you can ride into the woods and take off those chains.”

  “What for?” Jeriah asked.

  “Why, because . . .” The goblin’s voice trailed off.

  The glint in the girl’s eyes deepened. “Been training him to bargain, have you?”

  “Daroo.” Cogswhallop sighed. “He was determined to civilize him. I warned the lad it would come to no good, but does he listen to his parents? I must say, hero, I’m surprised to see you bargain over doing what’s right.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? You goblins made me pay every time you helped me. And now you’ve reneged on the payment. You promised, at least by implication, that my brother would be here if I freed your general. Until I get him back, she won’t go free.”

  “I’ve been too busy keeping track of this situation to put much effort into finding him,” Cogswhallop admitted. “Not to mention what that fool Bookerie has been up to! But now she’s safe, I’ll spread the word. Finders have a limited range, but there’s nowhere in the Realm he can be hidden from our folk. Not for long.”

  “Then I suggest you start,” said Jeriah. “Because until I’m standing in his presence, you owe me.”

  “Oh, he’ll be finding Tobin anyway,” said Makenna. “That’s now his first priority, by my order. I mean it, Cogswhallop. No arguing.”

  “And I’ll do it,” said the goblin. “So why not take her chains off now?”

  “Because he’s got something in mind.” The girl spoke before Jeriah could. “I’ve been watching him forming up some scheme ever since we left the town hall. It looked like hard work, for him.”

  Jeriah was finding it very easy to keep Makenna in chains.

  “This situation might do some good,” he told them. “What I said to that judge, about the Hierarch wanting to know everything about Master Lazur’s plans, that wasn’t nonsense. Even if you didn’t have the wit to spy on your enemy, I can still use the fact that you were his enemy. If I present you to the Hierarch as one of Master Lazur’s victims, and he can thwart the man by freeing you, maybe it will . . .”

  Maybe it would lessen the Hierarch’s fear, give him a sufficient sense of power and control that he could listen when Jeriah explained that not everything Master Lazur had done was wrong. Or at least that the reason he’d wronged so many, including the Hierarch, was a good one. Necessary.

  Because if the relocation didn’t go forward, if the Realm didn’t get to a defensible position while it still had a large enough army to man the wall, soon none of this would matter to any of them.

  Two pairs of eyes were staring at him inimically.

  “You mean to turn the gen’ral over to the Hierarch?” Cogswhallop demanded. “As a prisoner? We’ll not permit that, human. Be warned.”

  Jeriah had seen what the goblins could do, and he didn’t take that warning lightly.

  “I’ve got three lengths of charmed chain. If I use one to chain her to myself and a tree, and put one around each horse and their gear, what can you do?”

  “You’ll find out,” the goblin growled. The threat seemed a bit incongruous, since he was riding behind Jeriah, in easy reach of the human’s much stronger arms. But Cogswhallop meant what he said. It might not be war to the death, but it would still be—

  “No.” The note of command in her voice transformed the girl into the general. “It makes no sense for either of us to waste time and strength fighting each other. Cogswhallop, you’ll leave him alone, all of y
ou, till you find Tobin. Then bring him to us, or if he’s still too weak to travel, get word to us so we can go to him.”

  To Jeriah’s amazement, the goblin’s head bent in obedience even as he protested.

  “But Gen’ral, if he turns you over as a prisoner, in those chains . . . What if they find against you? You might be hanging yet!”

  “The Hierarch will never hang one of Master Lazur’s enemies,” Jeriah put in. “No matter what they’ve done. That’s part of the problem. I’m hoping that if the Hierarch can spare one of the priest’s enemies, he’ll be more able to think about the relocation instead of just reacting against it.”

  “I think the kind of fear and hate you’re describing won’t be appeased by a sop,” said the girl. “But I should be safe enough, and we don’t know if Tobin’s safe or not. You’ve got your orders, Cogswhallop.”

  The goblin sighed, and the slight weight on the back of Jeriah’s saddle vanished. When he looked around, the goblin was gone.

  They reached an agreement, Jeriah and the sorceress. She could ride free of chains if she promised not to escape. And to Jeriah’s surprise, she kept her word. Which probably meant she had some reason of her own for traveling south, at least for a while.

  She thought his plan to give the Hierarch some sense of victory over Master Lazur by freeing one of the priest’s enemies was ridiculous. “You’re trying to convince the old man to do just what Lazur wanted. You’re not going to do that by tearing down the priest’s influence.”

  But Jeriah knew the Hierarch better than she did, knew that if he could get the Sunlord past his irrational fear of the priest, he might be able to look at the things Lazur had tried to accomplish more rationally. Or at least it might work that way, and trying risked nothing that mattered—not to Jeriah.

  It wasn’t that he and the sorceress weren’t speaking to each other all the way to the City of Steps, but whenever they spoke, they ended up quarreling. Despite that, she learned a lot about what had happened last spring, and all about Jeriah’s concern for the relocation, and the threat presented by the barbarian army.

  He saw no need to bring Mistress Koryn into the tale. His fight with her was his own business.

  Jeriah learned almost nothing about the sorceress. But he’d come to know her well enough to interpret her expression when they rode over a low rise and the City of Steps came into view.

  It was early summer here in the Midlands, and the city’s hill was a mass of blooming trees, sculpted into flowing layers by the seven great walls. She pulled Fiddle to a stop, staring, and Jeriah stopped Glory beside her.

  “You’ve never seen it?”

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “How can a place where so many humans . . . I expected . . .”

  “It’s beautiful inside too,” Jeriah told her. “In a different way on each tier. The low town, where most people live and work—it doesn’t have so many gardens and fountains, but it brims with life. Tobin always worried because I liked it.”

  A smile flickered in her eyes. They both knew how Tobin worried.

  But the thought of his brother banished any inclination to smile back. Cogswhallop had turned up several times during their journey, both to check on his general and to report, and Tobin hadn’t been found.

  Makenna and the goblin thought he must be in a city somewhere, since fewer goblins lived in cities and towns. But Finders in the towns were searching too, and there was still no sign of his brother.

  Makenna had told him about casting a clumsy gate and thrusting his brother out of the Otherworld. Her description of the wavering spell had horrified Jeriah, but she’d seen Tobin reach the other side intact, near a crowberry bush on a dusty road. So unless there was another world with crowberry bushes, Tobin had to be somewhere.

  The carved wooden gate into the low town wasn’t guarded. The girl seemed subdued by the teeming crowds and flinched at a sudden burst of shouting, but Jeriah ignored both the crowd and her nerves. He did stop at the comb-and-scissors sign that indicated a barber shop, wondering if it might be worth a few copper bits to have someone trim her ragged hair. After looking at her closely, he decided that it made her look more pathetic as it was—and nothing could dim her staggering beauty.

  Jeriah was handsome himself; he knew exactly how to use it, and how little it really mattered. Koryn wasn’t even pretty, though he’d come to see a kind of beauty in her fey angular face, in the thin awkward body that was far too slight to hold a hero’s spirit. He’d see her soon. . . .

  Jeriah shook off the thought. First he had deal to with the girl who rode beside him, this strange, half-wild girl commander who didn’t even seem to know she was beautiful. Perhaps it came from spending most of her life among goblins, but her utter indifference to her looks was more effective than the way most girls tried to flaunt whatever beauty they possessed.

  He didn’t think the Hierarch would harm her, but just in case . . .

  “I’m not going to put your chains back on,” said Jeriah. “But if I’m presenting you as a prisoner, and Master Lazur’s victim, it might be better if I tied your hands.”

  He did so just before they reached the fourth gate, which admitted them to the palace grounds. The look she gave him before she turned her back and extended her wrists for the rope made Jeriah very aware that she was submitting to this of her own free will—he was not in charge.

  It didn’t give him much confidence as he pulled her up the steps to the third-level terrace, which was the lowest level of the palace itself, and asked a clerk where Master Zachiros might be found.

  It turned out that the secretary was attending the Hierarch, who was meeting with several councillors in a closed session on important Realm business.

  “The Hierarch’s meeting with the council?” Jeriah tried not to sound incredulous. The Hierarch he had served had been incapable of meeting with anyone “on business.” The drugs Master Lazur had given him had befuddled his mind so thoroughly that the secret could be kept only by shrouding him in layer after layer of formality. He must have recovered far more swiftly than Chardane had expected.

  “Yes,” said the clerk. “The Hierarch frequently meets with the council now. I think he decided to take more control over secular matters after that priest betrayed him. We’ve had to send most of the personal petitioners back to the lower courts, and the wait for a hearing with the Hierarch himself is backed up for weeks. Are you certain the lower court can’t help you?”

  The Hierarch had recovered! He must have recovered completely, or almost completely, and a great burden lifted from Jeriah’s heart.

  “Let me talk to Master Zachiros,” he said. “He’ll determine whether I should see the Hierarch or not. Can you let him know I’m here when they take their next break?”

  The clerk admitted that they were due for a break soon, and he went off to inform the secretary’s assistant.

  Makenna was watching Jeriah, speculation in her dark eyes. “If he’s meeting in closed session with the landholders, that means his mind has cleared, doesn’t it?”

  “How do you know . . . Oh.”

  “Aye, Cogswhallop told me everything as soon as he’d a moment to spare,” she said. “But he said that your herb-healer priest, Chardane? He said she wasn’t certain if the Hierarch would recover, or how fast.”

  “Yes, but the fact that he’d been drugged for the last seven years is a state secret that . . . that . . . It’s a really big secret!” Jeriah told her. “You mustn’t mention it to anyone, under any circumstances, ever!”

  The girl snorted. Given that she and her goblins had been fighting the Realm for the last five years, she probably didn’t care about their secrets.

  “It would break people’s trust in the Hierarch, in the church itself, to learn that their ruler had been so badly incapacitated, and that we, ah . . .”

  “Faked it,” said Makenna cheerfully. “I must admit, I was impressed by the tale.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Jeriah snapped. “Eve
n in the palace, only a handful of people know the truth.”

  Fortunately the clerk came bustling back and told Jeriah that Master Zachiros would meet with him and his prisoner, in his own office, in five minutes. The clerk also sent a guard with them, even though he knew that Jeriah knew the way.

  The secretary stood in his office doorway, watching for them, and greeted Jeriah with a beaming smile. “Come in, dear boy, come in. How was your stay with your parents? It must have been wonderful, since you were gone so long. We’ve been so busy here, I hardly noticed the time passing—though we could have used you, indeed we could!”

  Looking from the spectacles that slid down his long nose to the floppy slippers on his feet, Makenna’s mouth quirked contemptuously. Jeriah noted the warning directness in the secretary’s bright gaze and answered cautiously.

  “I didn’t spend all that time with my family, sir. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

  “Oh, I can see that,” said Master Zachiros cheerfully. “But perhaps we can discuss it in private. You and your, ah, companion?”

  “I have orders to stay with the prisoner, sir,” the guard put in. “Until the others arrive.”

  “Others?” Jeriah asked.

  “Whose orders?” said Master Zachiros.

  “Wait,” said the girl. “I want to speak to the Hierarch myself. That’s why I came. To talk to him or whoever’s in charge.”

  “Lord Brallorscourt’s orders,” said the guard. “He . . . Here they come now.”

  Jeriah turned. Four more guards marched down the corridor and came to a stop before Master Zachiros.

  “Is this the sorceress of the Goblin Wood?” their leader demanded.

  “Why do you care?” Jeriah asked. This wasn’t going the way he’d planned.

  “Yes,” said Master Zachiros calmly. “And as you can see”—he gestured to the girl’s bound wrists—“she’s my prisoner.”

  A frown creased the guardsman’s brow. “Lord Brallorscourt put out the order that if she ever showed up, we were to take her prisoner. His prisoner.”