Chapter 9: The Raiding Party

Nobody in the old story ever cooked the wolf his supper. The girl in the red cape was meant to be the main course, or at least the main event, and Angeau had never once asked who did the washing up afterward.

Noëlle owed a wolf a week of suppers, and she had promised him bitter yarrow in every one of them. She had gone deep into the woods to pick it herself. The morning was fine, and she expected nothing worse than a sore back from bending over a plant.

I will say this for the bet: I kept it. Four suppers in, Crispin had thanked me through his teeth for every bowl, and my yarrow was down to stems. He knew a big stand of it past the second ridge, in ground he usually avoided. He said so three times at breakfast. I said that was exactly where the yarrow was, and he came.

The yarrow was my excuse. I wanted a whole day in the deep woods with him when nobody was bleeding and nobody was being chased, and I wanted it badly enough to walk a long way for a weed.

My nose had stayed sharper since the moss. On the walk out I could pick the wet-stone smell of a stream before the stream showed, and I could tell where Crispin was without looking at him. He was ahead and a little to my right, and I knew it the way I know where my own elbow is in a crowded room. I tested it twice by shutting my eyes on a stretch of flat trail, and both times he was where I pointed. The second time he turned around and said, “Please stop that,” with his tail twitching behind him, and I did not stop that.

The stand was on a long slope where the trees opened, with white flat-topped flower heads up to my knees. I had the cloak tied on, because the deep woods stay cool under the canopy. I had brought Crispin’s spare shirt, knotted into a bag, because the basket was full of Nana’s herbs. I knelt among the flowers and cut stems with my little knife, and I stuck the first bundle through my belt to keep my hands free. Crispin stayed at the edge of the trees. He never sits down out there. His ears turned to every sound while I hummed, and I will admit I hummed louder to make one of them turn my way.

The smell reached me before anything else did. It was smoke, sharp, with meat gone rotten inside it, cooked and then left. I had smelled it from a deer track, on the afternoon I found him, and I had been much closer then. The wind was in our faces, and the smell came thick, with the sourness of a lot of bodies under it. There were far more of them than a pair, or even a patrol.

“Goblins,” I said.

“Goblins,” said Crispin, at the same moment, and I’m telling you I said it first. His ears stood straight up and his head was turned east. “Feet,” he said. “A lot of feet... Noëlle, this way. Now.”

He had my wrist before I was off my knees. I grabbed the bag, which was silly, and it banged my leg all the way down the slope.

We ran west, toward the den, which was a long way. The chittering began on our left and then it was ahead of us, passing through the trees faster than anything on two legs should have. Crispin swung us uphill and then back down, and every time we turned, the sound came from where we meant to go, and I gave up on having opinions and went where my wrist went. He let go of my wrist to push through a thorn thicket and the brush closed between us. I lost sight of him entirely.

I didn’t need it. He was ahead and to the right, a few strides off and moving, and I went straight at him through the thorns, scratched to the elbows, and came out beside his shoulder. He looked down at me with his mouth open.

“How did you...”

“Later,” I said. It was the first time all week my nose had done anything I could use, and I was extremely pleased with it.

We came out of the thorns onto a game trail, and they were on it.

They stood in a line across the track with their short knives out. Goblins come up to about my ribs, with scraps of hide tied on and bony hands, and they never stop chittering. Each blade was shorter than my hand. I had cleaned one goblin cut that summer, which was enough to know what a short knife does up close, and I had never seen so many of them in one place. There were more behind us in the ferns. I could smell them.

Crispin stepped in front of me.

I was looking at his back. His ears pinned against his skull and his tail stuck straight out behind him with the fur on end. He made a sound.

I had laughed at his growl in the moss. This came up out of his chest, low and rough, and went into my boots and up my legs. Every hair on my arms rose. The chatter on the trail cut off, and the whole line took one step back. I was holding a bag of yarrow in both hands, and I would like to say I was calm. I thought: that’s him. That’s the one he’s been keeping in.

They came, and I stopped thinking in sentences.

The first goblin lunged and Crispin caught its wrist in the air, turned it, and the knife dropped. He used the goblin as a handle and threw it into two more, and all three went down in a pile. The next one he took by the belt and flung, hard, into a bramble, and it stayed there, yelling. He could have had their throats. He went for hands and knees, which heal, and each time he knocked one over he stepped back between the rest and me. The ferns shook. Hide ripped. A knife went past my ear and stuck in a trunk.

Don’t think I was brave; I was so scared for him that I had no room to be scared for myself.

The goblin smell came from the ferns on his left, behind his shoulder, strong and close, and nothing there had moved yet.

“Behind you!” I yelled. “Left, low, in the ferns!”

He didn’t ask how I knew. He spun, and the goblin who had been crawling up on him took a boot in the chest and went rolling downslope. I breathed in, and the smell came again from the other side, from the top of the bank beside him. I looked up in time to see a goblin crouched there with its knife held in both hands, about to drop on him.

I was closer to it than he was. I dropped the bag and ran up the bank, caught the goblin’s arm as it jumped, and pushed my thumb hard into the inside of its wrist, below the heel of the hand, where the nerve runs. Every healer learns that spot in the first month. The fingers opened by themselves and the knife fell. I kicked it away.

Another goblin had come up the bank behind me. Its knife missed my legs and sliced through the hem of the cloak. A long strip of red wool fell onto the dirt, and my first clear thought of the whole fight was that Nana was going to kill me.

Crispin came up the bank, pulled the goblin I was holding off me by the back of its hide, and threw it down onto the trail. He was looking past me, at the rest, and his lip was up off his teeth, and I had never seen that face on him.

He made that sound again, louder, and one of the goblins let out a high shriek. The line broke in every direction. They tore through the brush, chittering in different keys, and the ferns sprang back behind them. My thumb was still pressing down on nothing.

The one he had thrown did not get away. Crispin was down the bank and bent over it before the others were out of sight, with his hand on its chest. It was shaking and its eyes rolled up at him. His other arm was raised, back and cocked, with the fist closed.

I said his name in my ordinary voice, the one I use on frightened people.

He didn’t move. His shoulders went up and came down with the arm trembling in the air, and the sound kept coming out of him, lower and lower. He opened his fist.

He took his hand off the goblin and stepped back, and the goblin scrambled up and bolted without its knife. Crispin stood there with his hand out and open and looked at it. His tail came down, slowly, the fur still standing along it.

He didn’t let us stop. He took my wrist again and we ran, and he did not slow until the bramble bank showed through the trunks. He lifted the long cane for me with a hand that was shaking. I ducked through the gap sideways and down the worn steps, and he came after and pulled the canes back into place above us. The sound of the woods stopped.

We stood at the foot of the steps and breathed. I had my hands on my knees. He was against the wall with his head back and his ears still low, and the room smelled of woodsmoke and him.

“They didn’t follow,” he said eventually. “I don’t think. I’d have... heard.”

“I’m sure you would.” I straightened up. The first bundle of yarrow was still in my belt, crushed flat, and most of its smell was on my hip. “I lost your shirt, and all the yarrow in it.”

“I’ll go back for it.”

“You will not. Sit.”

“I’m fine...”

“You’re dripping on the floor you swept.” He looked down. There was a cut along his forearm and a smaller one on his ribs, through a torn gray shirt, and he stared at them with polite surprise. “Sit down, Crispin.”

He sat on the edge of the nest with his tail in a tight loop around one ankle. I knelt in front of him. The fire was banked, so I stirred it up until there was light enough to see by. I pulled the crushed yarrow out of my belt and chewed a leaf to bruise it.

“That’s disgusting,” he said.

“It’s bitter and it stops bleeding. You’re welcome.” I pressed the leaf into the cut on his forearm and held it there. Goblin knives are filthy, and I told myself I would clean it properly with hot water in a minute. His arm was hot under my palm and hard as a branch, and it jumped when I touched it. “Does this hurt?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“A little,” said Crispin.

I took my hand off the arm and lifted the torn edge of his shirt. The scrape on his ribs was shallow, right beside the old cut, which was a pale line under my thumb. His ribs were going in and out under my fingers, fast, and I went along them one at a time, to see if he flinched. Nothing was broken. I had known that from the start. I checked the rest anyway, in a slow line from his side up to his shoulder.

He had stopped breathing at some point. I looked up.

He was watching me. His ears had come forward and his face was red and very close, because I was kneeling between his knees with my hand flat on his chest. His heart was working under my palm. My own was working about as hard, and I remember thinking that I should say something, and not being able to find anything in me except the shameless want to leave my hand exactly where it was.

His hand came up and closed around my wrist, gently, with no plan of letting go.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“That you had to see that. Me. Like that.” His ears went back. “I know what it looked like. If you want to... go home, or not come in here, or... I’d understand. I’d rather you said now.”

He was braced for it, the whole length of him, down to his fingers.

“Crispin,” I said. “You threw a goblin into a bush. Into a bush.”

One ear came up. He tried to stop it.

I turned my wrist in his hand and took hold of his, so we were holding each other. “I wasn’t afraid of you. Not once. I was afraid for you the whole time, every second I could see you. Every second I couldn’t, I could still tell where you were, and that was worse, because it kept telling me you were in the middle of them.” My voice cracked. I let it. “And when it was over you stopped. You had him, and you stopped, and I watched you do it.”

His tail came unlooped from his ankle. It lay on the fur beside us and moved once, and he failed to stop it.

“I almost didn’t,” he said, to my hand.

“You did stop.”

“I don’t know that I could have stopped, if you hadn’t... said my name.”

“Then I’ll keep saying it.”

I meant it as a joke and it didn’t come out as one. The fire popped. His thumb went back and forth across the inside of my wrist, right where I had pushed the goblin’s. I thought about the moon, for a second, the way you think about a pot you’ve left on, and I put it back where it had been.

He looked at my mouth and then he looked at the fire. I looked at his, and I did not look at the fire.

“Crispin.”

“Mm.”

“That cut still needs hot water.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to let go in a minute.”

“Okay,” said Crispin, and neither of us did.

He spoke first, finally, with his eyes on the wall. “They don’t come this way,” he said. “Not that many. Not... all at once, and not with every one of them armed. A pair, sometimes. I’ve never seen a party like that, not in my life.” His ears tipped back.

“What are they after?”

“I don’t know.” He said it carefully. “I’d tell you if I did.”

I believed him. Nana was out there on her own, and I reminded myself that in all my summers no goblin had ever come near her door. I had no idea what else I could do with it, so I let go of his hand and went to fill the pot with water.

“Thank you,” he said behind me, in a small voice.

“That’s for supper,” I said. “You can’t use it up early.”

“It wasn’t for supper.”

I stood with the pot in my hands and my back to him, and my ears got hot all the way to the tips. When I turned around he was standing a step behind me, looking at the floor, and his tail had wrapped itself around my ankle.