T. Kingfisher - Nine Goblins

The troll’s eyes riveted on the bottle. Its mouth sagged in a parody of despair. “Grawh.”

“Come on, you’re a big troll,” said Sings-to-Trees. This was something of an understatement—Frogsnoggler was probably close to two tons and stood nearly eight feet tall. “And I know you’re brave. You stood there while that fox bit you and never a peep.”

“Gr aww …”

The elf put his hands on his hips. Frogsnoggler cowered away, one arm over its eyes. Trembling, the troll held out its injured arm. Tears welled in dinner-plate sized eyes.

This was the standard trollish response to all medical treatment, and Sings-to-Trees knew full well Frogsnoggler would have done the same thing for removing a splinter or splinting a bone, but he was still torn between wry amusement and feeling a bit like an ogre.

In truth, it was probably nothing—trolls sustained worse every time they went after a billy goat—but still, foxes weren’t known for their clean mouths. He brandished the iodine bottle and a clean rag.

The troll sniffled through the whole operation. Finally, Sings-to-Trees set the rag aside. “All done!”

Frogsnoggler inched its hand down from its eyes and gazed at him worriedly.

“Really, all done,” said the elf, and patted the troll’s shoulder. “And you were very brave. I’m proud of you.”

A smile cracked the immense face. Frogsnoggler leapt up and cut an elephantine caper around Sings-to-Trees. “Grah! Grahgrahgrah!”

“Now, if that gets infected—if it turns red, or it starts to smell bad—I want you to come back here, okay?”

“Grah!”

“Then go on home before the sun fries you.”

The troll nodded, reached out a hand, and patted Sings-to-Trees rather heavily on the shoulder.

“Oh—” The elf patted the troll’s knuckles in return, which had wiry black hair growing from them. “I’ll probably release the fox in two or three days, if you want to come back and see him.”

“Graah!” Frogsnoggler said happily, and turned and scampered—insomuch as something the size of a team of oxen can scamper—into the woods.

Sings-to-Trees chuckled to himself. He did love trolls. They were so immensely good-hearted. He didn’t know how they managed to be voracious predators—every time they saw a wounded animal, they brought it to him instead of eating it. This wasn’t the first patient that had come to him in the arms of a troll.

(Once it had been a half-grown moose. The moose had been a fairly straightforward job—barbed wire wrapped around one leg—but treating the addled troll, who’d been kicked half senseless, had taken most of the night.)

He went back in and checked on the fox. It was resting now, still breathing more shallowly than he’d like, but sleeping all the same. There were herbs he needed, but his supply was running low. He really needed to go out to the bog-meadow and pick some, before the season turned completely and everything dried out.

And there, of course, went the rest of the afternoon.

He laughed a bit to himself as he picked up a basket. He should have known, of course—there was never any free time that wasn’t filled immediately with a crisis—but he felt good anyway. Between the sleeping fox and the capering troll, his earlier glum mood had broken up. Maybe he would be doing this when he was old. Someone had to.

And if he needed a seeing-eye troll to help him around the farm, he suspected he only had to ask.

Stepping out onto the porch again, he glanced around for the trap. It wouldn’t do to step on it, but he hadn’t seen where Frogsnoggler had dropped it.

He got down the front steps and saw it. The troll, casually and without fanfare, had reduced the trap to fragments of twisted metal. Sings-to-Trees could not have duplicated the destruction without a hammer and possibly a forge.

The elf made a faint, thoughtful sound to himself, and went off to gather herbs.

The farmhouse was very quiet.

It was too quiet.

Generally when people say it’s “too quiet,” it’s a prelude to a monster with a lot of teeth jumping out of the grass. In this case, however, since the only thing that could qualify as monsters with a lot of teeth were the goblins themselves, it was just plain too quiet.

The farmhouse was a small sod building—and that was odd, too, since there was a whole forest right there, and who builds out of sod when they have wood?—and the fences were the low dry-stone affairs that look cute and quirky and charming until you realize they’re made of all the rocks that some poor farmer had to haul out of a field by hand.

There was wood, but not much. The timbers were in place only where nothing else would do. A few scattered tree stumps around the farm showed where they had probably come from.

It was a neatly kept yard, with a thatch roof and a small henhouse and a pigpen. Around back, a low stable held three empty stalls.

It was very, very quiet.

“Perhaps they went into town. The horses aren’t here.”

“And took the pigs and chickens with them?” asked Murray skeptically.

A rising, rattling hum startled them all, until they realized that one of the trees dotting the property had cicadas in it. The insects buzzed their way up the register, and then fell silent.

It was still too quiet.

“Maybe it was market day? They took the pigs and chickens in to sell?”

“Every single one, Sarge?”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

Algol cleared his throat. “They must have looked pretty odd carrying all those chickens and walking. The wagon’s still here.”

They all looked at the wagon. It was distinctly wagon-like. The cicadas buzzed again.

“Check the hen-house.”

They made their way around the farmhouse. Coming out of the woods, they had been moving like goblins on a raid—low to the ground, skulking, hiding behind things. It was beginning to seem silly in this deep, abandoned silence, but Nessilka hadn’t lived this long by going into enemy territory and sauntering around in the open.

Besides, it was so quiet that it was almost comforting to crouch behind water barrels and old haystacks. It made you feel like you could hide from that terrible silence.

The last stretch to the hen-house had no cover for anyone over six inches tall. Crouched behind the compost bin, the three goblins eyed the distance. Nessilka gritted her teeth, squared her shoulders, and said “Wait here.”

She didn’t run. Goblins know all about monsters—they’re related, after all—and they know all about the rules. Like small children, they know the rules in their bones. If there was something out there, something cloaking itself in the silence, if she ran, it could run, too.

She walked , therefore, to the door of the henhouse, over earth packed hard and littered with old chicken droppings and bits of straw, while the skin on the back of her neck crept and crawled and cringed. Algol and Murray crouched together, shoulder to shoulder, biting their lips. The sergeant reached out, caught the wire door, and flung it open.

Sunlight lanced down through cracks in the ceiling, and made pale spots on the straw. Old dust, old straw, old feathers. There were reasonably fresh droppings near the door, but no clucking greeted her, and there was no movement of nervous chickens along the walls.

She considered looking behind the door. She decided not to tempt fate.

She closed the door instead, and walked back across the courtyard with a deliberately steady tread.

“Empty,” she said in a low voice. “For a few days, probably.”

Algol, without saying anything, crab-walked over to the pig pen and looked over the fence. The other two followed him.