A. Hartley - Will Power

“Will,” she said, and her voice was soft. “Will, look.”

She pointed me toward the huge black goblin who had almost reached us before stopping dead in his tracks. I looked.

It was Orgos. His armor was grimy and his tunic torn, but it was Orgos. I don’t know how I could have failed to recognize him.

“It’s all right, Will,” said Lisha. “You see? It’s all right.”

She broke from me and wiped her face.

My eyes fell on Orgos. He had dropped his sword, the one with the yellow stone in the pommel. I think he had been running to embrace us, but now his eyes were full of doubt.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought. . I saw the other goblins and I thought. . Sorry.”

The goblin who had pinned my arms released me and Orgos stepped up to me.

“Hello, Will,” he said. And it was him: No goblin. No undead apparition. It was Orgos, my friend. Slowly, a smile as broad as only he could manage spread across his face.

“I missed you,” I said as he flung his great arms about me. Over his shoulder I saw Lisha embrace another large man: Mithos, still bandaged, but walking and well.

“And now you have to tell us how you come to be here,” Orgos said, still grinning, “and we’ll introduce you to our new friends.”

“Friends?” I spluttered.

“Friends,” said Mithos firmly.

The impact of the word put the finishing touch on all my former thoughts about Phasdreille, the rewritten history of the “fair folk,” and all the other suspicions which had been mounting in my head. I watched Orgos casually say something to one of the “goblins” in their own tongue and watched the listener smile with understanding. The goblin features shifted as easily as any human face and I found myself looking not at the spawn of hell, but at a person. The unavoidable conclusion came charging through with the rest of the wild horses that were my thoughts, and I grew instantly cold and struck with horror.

“My God,” I breathed aloud. “What have I done? Lisha. .”

She turned to me and her eyes were full of a sad understanding. She wanted to make me feel better and knew it was futile.

As the full weight of my realization hit me, I felt my eyes well with tears, and, staring at her, I managed to say it.

“Lisha, I’ve been fighting on the wrong side.”

I was still cold, and evening was coming on. One of the goblins, a thin, gray creature with deep-set eyes and high, angular cheekbones, was adjusting a blanket strapped to a small backpack, using his long, bony fingers. The blanket was worn in places, but it looked clean and dry, unlike mine. A matter of hours ago I might have killed him for it, or tried to, but now I didn’t know what to do. I shifted uneasily, hardly daring to meet the creature’s eyes and fearful of what would follow if I did. I coughed. When his gaze fell blankly on me, I looked jealously at the blanket.

“You want this?” he said in perfect Thrusian. “Here. Dry yourself off. The swamp may freeze tonight.”

I gaped at him. It was as if I had sat down to milk a cow and the beast had turned to me at the first squeeze of its udders and said, “Gentler, if you don’t mind.”

There’s something about hearing words come out of someone’s mouth that changes the way you look at them. I guess it’s the casual ease with which the lips and tongue shape sounds so intimate and meaningful to you, putting the two of you on the same level, establishing an equilibrium of sorts. A talking cow, then, would not merely be a curiosity; it would violate your understanding of the universe and your place in it. It would force you, I suspect, to rethink every action you had ever performed. It would change more than your attitude to steak, I’ll tell you that.

This was where I found myself now. The goblin unfastened the buckled straps and tossed me the rolled blanket without another word. I stood there doing my world-famous impersonation of a fence post, waking only when the parcel hit me in the chest and fell into my hastily raised arms. It-or perhaps I should say he -grinned broadly and walked away. I watched him go.

His grin had been genuine and yet somehow alarming. It reminded me that he was a goblin, for his jaw was heavy and his teeth were over-large, but it also seemed so ordinary, so human. Before I could take my eyes off him, Lisha appeared silently beside me.

“Will?” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, my eyes still on the back of the receding goblin. “I. . I’m really not sure.”

“We should talk,” she said.

“Yes, we should,” I echoed distantly.

“Will! Look at me!”

I turned slowly and met her eyes. They pooled at me in the twilight.

“We made a mistake,” she said. “That’s all. We were given false information and, without any reason to doubt it, we believed it.”

We . The extent of her mistake was getting mistaken for one of them. I, however, had. .

Don’t think about it.

I nodded and managed a smile, but it was a thin ruse. She knew as much, knew also that, for once, I didn’t feel like talking after all, and she respected that. She touched my cheek and walked over to where Mithos and Orgos were studying a map.

I sat on a log, dazed with shock. How could I have been so stupid? I had trusted my eyes and ears and, as a result, fallen for the oldest theatrical ploy there is. I was taken in by the desire to believe something preposterously convenient was real. I had forgotten to read between the lines. I had known something was wrong but I just went on standing there like the idiot in the pit who thinks everything on the stage is real because a few paid con men tell him it is. It had all been a show, just storytelling and spectacle, and I had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I had risked my life for the “fair folk” and-and here was the scorpion in my underpants-I had killed for them.

Now morals aren’t my strong suit, and I still had a hard time thinking of the goblins as people exactly, but my glorious ride with the cavalry, my brave defense of the city, and my valiant raid on the Falcon’s Nest fortress were beginning to look a little tarnished, as if my heirloom silver tankard had turned out to be made of oven-baked cow dung. The “fair folk” had said that all the light-against-dark, good-against-evil rubbish that I’d been laughing at my entire life was actually true, and I had believed them. They had told me that every old tale, every fairy story about ogres and goblins, every half-baked morality play aimed at children and the mentally deficient was right, and the world as I had always known it was wrong. Beauty (of the right kind) really is virtue, they had said, and ugliness (someone else’s) is evil. And I had believed them. Cynical Bill, Will the realist, had polished up his sword and gone out goblin slaying, glad to be doing his bit for goodness and light and fluffy bunny rabbits. I should have known Garnet couldn’t be right.

I had known, too. Kind of. A bunch of things had not seemed right. I should have just listened to my hunches and not to those dandified idiots in Phasdreille. Well, from here on it would all be Will Straight-from-the-Gut Hawthorne.

“Feeling better?” said Orgos.

“Yes,” I lied. “The blanket helps. How long did it take you to realize what was going on?”

“Not long,” said Orgos. “But that was because they told us and we believed them. Maybe we would have believed Sorrail if our positions had been reversed.”

“You don’t really think that,” I said.

Orgos shrugged. “Well, we also had the evidence of how they treated us,” he went on. “They were suspicious because we had been caught in the company of one of their greatest enemies, but we had our looks on our sides, which, frankly, helped.”