by Aimee Ogden
Hen-of-the-Woods lies under piled-up furs beside his siblings, listening to his parents fight long after he should be asleep. The hut is barely big enough for a half-dozen goblins as it is, and Mama’s voice carries, so Hen can’t even pretend they’re fighting about whether Mama should risk hunting where the skin-panthers roam, or whether Dammu coddles the twins too much, or how many pounds of knuckle-nuts Papa agreed to trade to Sundew for some cheese from the old gob’s goats.
In the Broken Tongues, every question becomes an accusation. Every assertion sounds like an attack. Hen knows no word that means he has caused something that did not also mean he will be blamed for it. He can’t describe the warmness that wells up in him when Papa makes marsh-grain porridge for supper, except to say that he doesn’t hate what’s in his bowl. He has no name for the feeling that squeezes his chest now, the one making him chew on the bedcovers. He can’t name the things of the world that lure him closer: the feeling of crunching a marshmoth between his teeth. The sounds the twins make when he shares a handful of troll-ear mushrooms. Dammu’s meticulous way of picking the nits from his hair.
Even if such words existed, his parents wouldn’t use them now. Rumors ride with each trade caravan of goblin-kin that passes through the village in the wetwood. In the northworld, someone has laid a claim to the Dread Lord’s banner. Who? A frost giant, or a champion from the strongarm clans, or even one of the human-folk who carve their livings from the ice-lands. No one knows, but they do know that an army is muddying the white slopes of the Winter Teeth with its numbers.
Papa says it’s a damn stupid time to raise an army; winter’s hard enough before some lordling crowds hundreds of mouths into one place. “We’ll have to hide what food we can. Armies are hungry things.”
“It’s not just supplies we should worry about, dung-brain.” Dammu stomps around to feed a few more sticks to the fire. It’s their job to keep the hearth warm, even when Mama is far afield hunting and when Papa goes on the longest loop of his scavenging route. “If this army doesn’t fall apart before spring, there’ll be a war tithe.”
All three parents go quiet. Hen bites deeper into the blankets. Papa will be angry when he sees the tooth-marks. Maybe Hen can blame the holes on the twins, even though Browncap and Bluecap only have their baby fangs still.
“Well,” says Mama, “I won’t go, that’s all. It’s been forty years since some fart-knuckle called himself Dread Lord.” She slaps her leg, forgetting about the sleeping children. “We haven’t dropped dead without one!”
But they have had long hungry winters, and two years back, when the twins were scrawny, stringy newborn things, the nearest strongarm clans fought a war that tore out of their own home plains and into the wetwood. And the Smoothfolk, the elves and humanfolk and deerkin and the rest, they live not very far across the valley and down the river. When goblin scavengers range over the invisible line between our trees and your trees, they ride out into the marshes. Last spring, a Smooth One with long tufted rabbit ears walked into the village and cut down Buckthorn and Black-trumpet, and neither of them were even scavengers: Buckthorn made swamp-rice liquor and Black-trumpet was a dammu with five goblings at the hearth. Hen has heard other goblins muttering, saying a Dread Lord could push the Smoothfolk back. Prove the Broken People could still stand against them. And someone had to get those bean-brained strongarms in line, keep them from stampeding over other folks’ lives. Gods know they won’t listen to goblins, and couldn’t even if they would.
Sometimes Papa tells the story of how a sorcerer-circle of Smoothfolk cursed the Broken Peoples, centuries ago, tearing apart the single language that bound them and making a cacophony of what remained. To keep us fighting each other, Papa says, instead of fighting them.
Mama tells a different version, when she’s had a cup or two of swamp-rice wine. We’re cursed, all right, she insists, but we’re cursed from the inside out. It was the first Dread Lord that put a hex on his own people, when he figured out he was going to lose.
“When they come,” barks Dammu, “it’s not you I’m worried about, you old cow.” The fire pops, and they hiss with dismay. “Hen-of-the-Woods is nearly of age. What if they take him, and never mind his broken-backed old ma?”
“What sort of Lord do you reckon it is?” Papa interrupts. “One of those strongarm thanes this time?” But Mama and Dammu are both too angry to speak. Hen falls asleep in the sullen silence.
#
In the morning, Hen wakes before the twins. He shuffles out for a hunk of cold roasted tuber and a swat on the backside from Dammu, who shoos him out to fetch water.
Before leaving, he snatches up his well-patched bag as well as the water bucket. He’s in no hurry to return to the stuffy hut, where the twins will crawl all over him and yank on his ears, where Dammu will think up a dozen more chores. When he’s a big goblin, he’ll scavenge, like his Papa, and he plies this trade now, within the close-by boundaries his parents have marked out for him. No farther west than the creek, no farther north than the cutberry bramble. They don’t like him to go east at all—not trusting him, not trusting the Smoothfolk. Someday he’ll have to go that way, driven by the war-drums, or the hope of a hunger-breaking sheep picked off from the Smoothfolks’ pastured flocks. But not today.
He meanders west, stopping to pick chewy shelf-shrooms, or a last cluster of cones hanging from a club pine. It’s too late in the year, and there are no eggs to be found. Mushrooms are mediocre fare, compared to a ready-to-hatch finch egg. Still, when he reaches the creek, his bag bangs heavily against his side. He fills the bucket, then lets it sit for the sediment to settle, so that he can scoop the worst of the mud out. While he waits, he upends his bag, sorting his findings. The pinecones make up most of his haul—too bad, it’s a lot of work to prise the cones open for the tender meat inside. But he has a pile of ragged mushrooms, too, enough for the whole family tonight.
He hums to himself as he starts to return the mushrooms to the bag, but he quiets when the ground behind him gives a warning squelch. Goblins don’t have such heavy footfalls. Nor would the beasts of these low woods gladly approach—the little tuskadeer avoid goblin hunters, and although a sloth-bear’s claws could easily end a lone goblin’s life, they’re shy beasts, preferring insects to prey that fights back.
Hen touches the little knife on his belt and turns slowly, ready to face any number of petal-skinned Smoothfolk or bannermen of the Dread Lord. But a single strongarm stands behind him, leathery gray-green skin, tusks, arms as long as Hen-of-the-Woods is tall. He can’t get in close to strike with his knife. Not with her superior reach—and this is a her, she’s painted her tusks red, only the female strongarms do that—and not with her halberd a claw’s-breadth from his neck. A wicked spike curves back from the polished blade. He’s heard the stories of his great-grandparents’ war-days, handed down through his parents: how the strongarms would strike at Smoothfolk riders first, and if they missed, they might yet hook the mounts’ legs as they rode past.
Hen wouldn’t make it far before the blade found his back or the spike sliced into his ankle. Goblins don’t fight on the front lines: they’re fast, they’re nimble, they’re clever, they’re sneaky—not strong nor sturdy. It does him little good to be fast, if she already has him pinned down.
But she hasn’t run him through yet—why not? Her hands on the halberd have clawed fingers like his, and they’re even a similar shade of green. But so much bigger, with strength he can’t imagine.
She growls at him, deep in her chest, a thunderous rumbling his squeaky goblin voice could never produce. Her blade brushes the soft spot under his jaw. His skin doesn’t break—even goblins have tougher hides than that, thank the gods below—but he flinches. “I don’t know what you’re saying!” He can’t know—that’s half the curse of the Broken Tongue, the half Hen never expected to trouble him as much as the rest.
The strongarm rumbles again and releases the halberd with one hand, pointing at Hen’s hard-earned spoils. What would a strongarm want with mushrooms? Hen clutches his bag. “It’s mine!”
The halberd lurches, and Hen shrieks. But instead of gutting him like a fish, the strongarm has hooked the bag’s strap. With a twist of her wrists, she wrenches it over his head and out of his reach.
He doesn’t contest the loss. As soon as the halberd is otherwise occupied, Hen takes off. He snatches the bucket, silt and all, and flees toward the village on a zig-zagging path. If the strongarm pursues him, he doesn’t hear her. Maybe she decided he was more trouble than a mouthful of meat was worth.
Back home, Dammu looks Hen-of-the-Woods over and scolds him for the loss of his bag, while adults from the other huts ring the village in a watchful circle. Others investigate the wetwood, creeping silently through the trees. They return hours later, having found a solitary set of strongarm footprints.
“A scout?” Dammu suggests.
Morel snorts and scratches their hairy chin. “Scouts usually travel in threes. If it was a scout, the others hid better than clod-clompers normally manage.” They give Hen’s head a shove, then reach inside their coat and pull out his bag—empty, but no worse for wear. “Must’ve seen this little vermin and figured out no one wants to live on top of gobbo filth!”
“Thank the gods below, small, great, and forgotten,” says Dammu fervently, but Hen doesn’t feel so thankful as that.
#
When the snows fall, Hen-of-the-Woods finds himself with time to scrap and squabble with the other goblings—little good scavenging, and he loathes huddling up in the hut while the twins whine and the parents nag and natter. So he goes outside, packing snowballs, pelting the other goblings as hard as he can, and fleeing before he can be pelted in turn.
“Let’s be the Dread Lord’s Army,” instructs Big Button one day, from a solid perch in a cypress tree that she’s fortified with plenty of ice-cold ammunition. She points down at the other goblings, hiding in the threadbare bushes. “I’m the Dread Lord. You can be the Smoothfolk.”
“Eww! Look at my yellow hair—pale as strangling moss!” shrieks Little Button. (They share an unimaginative dammu with Big Button.) They fall, writhing, on the ground. “It’s strangling me now!”
“Look at my eyes!” Snake-root peels her eyelids wide with her fingers. “They’re so white from all the milk I drink. That’s why I slosh when I walk.” She holds her arms out, waddling back and forth. “Gloop gloop gloop.”
Hen doesn’t want to play this game, even though he has played it before, in the five or six other winters he remembers. He shoves Snake-root, and when she hits the ground, she doesn’t make a gloop sound at all, just an angry squawk. Two other goblings lunge to tackle Hen, but he’s bigger than them, and he careens through the wood until he loses them. When he returns home, he does so on a roundabout tack. Papa putters outside the hut, cutting wood for Dammu’s fire.
Though he can move as quietly as a swamp-mouse, Hen approaches with noisy, stomping steps. Because he doesn’t want to startle Papa while he’s swinging an axe; because he wants to be noticed.
And noticed he is. Papa stops chopping and leans on the haft of the axe to rest. “What’s wrong, you scrawny little gob?”
Hen perches on the stump, pushing the last piece of split firewood aside. “Your dammu’s papa fought for the last Dread Lord.”
In answer, Papa takes draws his own belt knife, a bigger affair than the one Hen carries, and hands it over, hilt-first. It is a long, heavy piece of dark iron, the scarred metal carefully tended over the years.
Hen examines it from hilt to tip without finding the answers he wants. All he finds is more questions. “The last Dread Lord was a human. One of the Smoothfolk.”
“He was.” Papa adjusts Hen’s grip on the hilt. “A third-born prince, exiled from his own kingdom. Seeking his revenge—though he didn’t find as much of it as he would’ve liked. But you’ve heard those tired old stories a hundred times!”
“Why would anyone fight for one of them?”
“Well. Some danced for his pleasure, I think. Because he was the one who beat the drum.” Papa’s well-wrinkled face furrows deeper. “But then, some danced for their own.”
Hen turns the knife left and right, feeling its weight. He imagines his own hand driving it true, into the chest of a human who dared call himself Dread Lord—iron biting through leather and skin and bone. And then he imagines it sinking into the chest of Big Button, her eyes wide with surprise.
He flings the knife to the ground and scratches Papa’s arm, not because he wants to, only because he that is what he does, and hares off into the woods again, far from friends and family alike.
#
Alone, Hen is a spy, a saboteur, a sneak, a thief, just like the hundreds of goblins before him who fought under the Dread Lord’s banners. Not like the lizardfolk, frontline soldiers, small but sharp-toothed and vicious—rending Smoothfolk hands faster than they could bring weapons to bear. Then the strongarms, the backbone of the infantry…until they were trampled in turn under well-trained war horses. And the war-eagles, which Dammu insists are real and Mama swears are only a myth invented to polish bygone glory, who menaced the Smooth Ones from the air—making themselves vulnerable to every arrow.
Hen swings a stick like a sword, brandishing it at a sapling’s bare branches. A pocket-mouse perches there, black eyes round and bright. A pair of frozen berries, stuffed into its cheeks, peek out through its mouth.
He could kill a mouse, couldn’t he? He’s killed birds and moths and flies and even, once, an injured tuskadeer he found dragging itself along on a broken leg. What’s so different about killing a mouse compared with killing a Smooth One?
For one thing, mice don’t fight back.
Hen throws the stick down and stomps on it to break it. The snap echoes strangely—somewhere deeper in the trees—
Someone’s here. Watching.
Hen panics, blundering around for the right way home. He stumbles into a clearing, where he finds himself standing in a pair of strongarm footprints. He doesn’t follow to see where they lead.
#
Winter snows harden into old ice, which thaws and leaves barren, brown ground in its wake. When the ice disappears from the creek’s borders, but the ground remains hard, the trade-wagons come, carrying cloth woven by cave-goblins in the north. They’ve seen the shadow of military might on the march: bristling polearms, banners snapping in the wind. “The tithe is coming,” they promise. “Best be ready, you lazy gobs.”
After the wagons embark on the next leg of their wandering loop, Hen dreams of war bands and thrumming drums. He can’t tell whose pleasure, if anyone’s, the throngs of well-armed goblins and lizardfolk and war-eagles are dancing for.
#
Spring makes scavenging a time-worthy effort once more. Hen collects the earliest berries, frozen to their brambles; little caches of sun-bulbs stored up by forgetful nest-rats; clumps of overly ambitious chickweed.
Sometimes he finds a cache that has been raided by much larger hands than his; sometimes he finds heavy footprints in the snowmelt-soft mud. Sometimes he finds a small stockade of sharpening sticks hidden in the branches of a bush, ready to pierce whatever beast comes thrashing carelessly through. Once, he finds a stockade with three broken points, blunted sticks stained brown. Something died there. Not a goblin, or he would’ve heard of someone going missing.
He doesn’t mention these signs to his parents, who are busy laying up supplies against the coming tithe (and hiding what supplies they don’t want to share). They have enough to worry about, and for now, the strongarm seems content to leave him alone.
He moves through the woods more quietly, now. If she changes her mind, he wants to spot her before she sees him.
#
The days are still short when the tithe-taker comes: a yellow-scaled lizard-woman riding a trained boar. Behind her—almost all lizard-folk are female, Mama says; Hen has no idea how that works—a pair of lizard-folk lieutenants drive two hunch-cows pulling an empty wagon. The lizard-woman is bigger than Hen expected; stupid, it’s not as if she should’ve looked like the tree-lizards that hide from goblin scavengers. A raven perches on her left shoulder. When the lizard-woman hisses, the raven opens its beak and a goblin-voice projects from its throat. Through the enchanted bird, the lizard-woman proclaims the Dread Lord’s cunning, the size of the army amassing in his name, how the Broken Peoples will be reforged into a single tool that he alone can wield.
The grown-ups mutter while she speaks: some eagerly, some in fear, some with quiet reservation. No one addresses the lizard-woman or her bird, not until she pauses for breath. Then Hen can’t help but pipe up: “What does the Dread Lord look like? Is he lizard-folk, like you? Is he a man?”
A shove from Mama sends him staggering. “Shut up,” she spits. “Stupid gob! Don’t draw attention to yourself!”
The lizard-woman looks at him with dull disdain. The enchantment on her bird lets her speak to them, not the other way around. She should at least tell them about the Dread Lord, who he really is. Their little wetwood offers no fortifications that the Lord might value; but it does lie close enough to Smoothfolk lands that it risks their retribution. If the coming victory is less victorious than the lizard-woman promises.
The raven-voice instructs them to line up for inspection. Then she sidles along the rows, pointing out the goblins she wants. Beside Hen-of-the-Woods, she pauses. Then she hisses, and jabs a claw at Mama. “You,” the raven announces, and Mama slings her little hunting-bow over her shoulder and stomps off to join the two-dozen other members of the tithe. She doesn’t look back, not even when the twins wail and holler; they don’t stop until Papa pinches their ears.
“Before we march,” adds the lizard-woman, adds the bird, “you’ll fill the wagon with food and clean water. And when you’re done, if I see empty space—I’ll fill it.” She lifts her head, looking down at them with a razor-sharp smile. “With fresh meat.”
In short order, the wagon has been stuffed. When the goblins return to their lines, the lizard-woman nods, accepting their contributions. “Expect a tithe-taker again in the summer,” she says, turning her mount to leave, the tithed soldiers marching behind her. Now Mama looks back, but she doesn’t nod or smile or pump her bow triumphantly in the air. She just looks, and Hen looks back, and then she’s gone. With the rest of them, she’s gone.
The goblins wait until the lizard-woman and her raven and her lieutenants are out of earshot before erupting into squealing complaints. “Another tithe!” Dammu pulls their own ears nearly to their chin. “Gods below, why don’t you protect us from these heavy-footed fools?” They weep openly, while Papa keeps his face stoic and stern.
“I’ll go the next time,” says Hen stubbornly. “You and Papa can stay with the twins. You’ll be fine without me.”
Dammu hisses and twists Hen’s ear. “Watch your foul little mouth,” barks Papa. “Your mama will be back before you know it! If you ungrateful lot even notice she’s gone.” He grabs the twins from Dammu, one hand on each shirt-collar, and hauls the two of them off toward the hut. Dammu trails behind, blowing their nose on their sleeve. Hen stays in the village square, long after the other goblins have trailed away. Too afraid to follow Mama, and too ready to bite to go home.
#
The family gets by without Mama, the same way the other families in the village make do without a mama or a papa or a dammu. Papa is no great hunter, but he starts fishing to replace the meat that Mama brought home. And that leaves Hen to pick up the scavenging slack. Spring means eggs again, and he climbs tree after tree until his limbs tremble and his fingers ache. The bag at his side grows fatter, and he moves more carefully to protect the contents. He can tell from handling them which contain only yolk and white and a speck of a bird that will never be, and which bear a ready-to-hatch nestling.
Despite this bounty, he wishes his family had one of the magic birds that are common in the lands of the Smoothfolk, the ones that produce a great fat egg every single day of the year. He wishes many things, but a round brown egg each morning, outside his door—that’s the only wish that feels like it could be real. Even if it requires a stupid magic bird.
Rooting around in a wickleaf’s sprawling branches, Hen notices an odd noise. Repetitive, grating, coming from somewhere below him. At first he supposes it’s a sloth-bear with a case of rot-lung; a summer sickness, usually, but not impossible in a wet spring. But as he huddles against the wickleaf trunk, surveying all around, he spots something bigger than a sloth-bear. The strongarm—surely the same one he’s seen before—has curled up on her side amid a knot of dewberry bushes. One of her hands lies on the ground, outside the low-hanging branches’ shelter. Hen would’ve thought she was dead without the raspy sound issuing from her direction.
Goblins are for sneaking, and that’s what Hen does now. Silent as an owl’s wings, he creeps down the tree and draws his knife. A circuitous route leads him slowly around the bushes, his careful claws soundless on the soil. Past the strongarm’s back where it presses up to the sunberry stems—then, in a flash, he lunges—his blade against her throat before she knows he’s there.
Her yellow eyes flare, but she feels the knife-tip against the pulsing artery in her neck, and stills. She looks different than she did before: the broad lines of her face carved away to reveal the angular skull within. She’s … young? Hen knows little about what the years mean to strongarms. But he remembers what Morel said: strongarm scouts travel in threes. The halberd is an awkward weapon for a hunter on the chase, but with a partner to run down prey, while she and a third laid in wait, that would be another tale altogether.
He can’t back down now. There’s still power in those huge hands—power to hurt him, to break him, to end him. If she moves first, she’ll open her own throat, but he doesn’t expect that, let alone hope for it. “You don’t belong here,” he jeers. His voice sounds puny, pathetic even for a goblin. “This is our place!”
He would earn the fear of other goblins in the Dread Lord’s ranks, if the tithe-taker came and found him already accounted a strongarm-slayer. Not just another gobbo sneak-thief, back-stabber, shadow-creeper. Not just a stupid child. Someone who could be a future Dread Lord. Why not? A goblin-lord, sly and clever. He could decide when to go to war, and why. Surrounded by enemies, Smoothfolk and those among the Broken Peoples who wouldn’t gladly suffer such a ruler. But he would always be ready to disappear, to pivot away from a knife in the back…
The strongarm growls, low in her throat. Maybe a warning, in her fragment of the Broken Tongue; maybe only a wordless threat. Hen holds his knife where it is, but he sticks his free hand into his bag. His fingers close around a wight-bird’s egg.
He brandishes the egg like another weapon. The strongarm stares at him blankly. Before doubt catches a handhold in his thoughts, he cracks the egg on her tusk and pours its slick contents into the curve of her lower lip. Whether or not she trusts this offer, her throat jerks instinctively and she gulps the egg down.
And then her big hand gropes up to find the bottom of Hen’s bag and give it a tug. His knife is still close, but he doesn’t flick it forward—he shoves it back into its sheath and tears at her fingers, cuffing her big face with his little hands. When he rakes her over the eye with his claws, she lets go with a bellow. But she claps her hands over her face, not around Hen’s neck, and he scrambles out of her reach. Because she’s too weak? Because she’s too guilty? He doesn’t know, or care. “My family isn’t going to starve because a stupid strongarm doesn’t know how to feed herself!”
Her face turns against the ground. A different sound, still strange, comes from her, huh-huh-huh, and he realizes that strongarms can cry, and it sounds like this.
A string of curses breaks out of him—not that he tries hard to hold it in—every goblin obscenity he can summon, every strain of pestilence he can name, every color of moldering root-rot and every odor of spoiled meat. He hates her, and he hates himself, and he hates this ruined language of anger that is all either of them know, useless to make themselves understood. And worst of all, he hates Mama and Papa and Dammu, who haven’t taught him words to explain the thoughts nestled up inside him, because they don’t have those words themselves—because they never invented a better world where a little goblin could say good things, and in the saying, make them true things too.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he says, through a throat gone thick and rubbery. “I’ll bring you something else—something small!—if you stay put.” When she lifts her face to blink at him uncomprehendingly, he grimaces. If only he had an enchanted raven as well as a magic egg-layer! His finger jabs at her, then down at the ground. “Stay here!” He slaps his own chest, then mimes eating with noisy goblin lip-smacking, then points at her again. “I’ll bring more food. But not till tomorrow.”
This last point proves harder to express with his hands, but the strongarm’s brow furrows. She points at the sun shining through the branches, then traces a circle in the dirt. Beside it, she inscribes a crescent, and another circle. Sun, moon, sun.
“Not as stupid as you look,” says Hen, with surprise and some satisfaction. He reaches into his bag and removes three more eggs—a full nest’s prize, though he hadn’t managed to snag the brooding mother before she took flight. He sets them down, stretching his arms to bridge some of the space. She can reach them, after he goes. “Don’t die,” he advises. “Not after I wasted four eggs on you.”
#
She’ll have to have a name, Hen decides, one that he can pronounce, for he’ll never come to make the growly noise she makes when she points at herself. He settles on Egg, which has the convenience of brevity. She accepts the gift of a goblin-name with diffidence, and calls him—Hum-grumble, he would say. He’s been called worse things.
It’s a month before she resembles her old self, gobbling the eggs and mushrooms and moss Hen brings her, learning for herself what’s good to eat and what isn’t. After that, with a strongarm’s stout legs at his disposal, Hen extends his usual scavenging terrain. He carries home more eggs that spring then he did all last year, and the occasional waterfowl—when he sneaks up and scares a raft of ducks or geese, Egg waits nearby to slash them out of the sky.
“It would’ve been easier if you had a longbow,” Hen complains, after an entire flock of geese make a clean escape, too high for Egg’s halberd. He mimes shooting an arrow skyward.
Egg pulls a long face. She makes the arrow-shooting movement too, then jerks a thumb over her shoulder. Something about the past. Her empty hands come up at her sides, and she shakes her head. He wonders where in her travels she left it behind. He knows little about the place she came from—where it was, when she left, whether she traveled with others at first, what drove her away. A missing bow is the smallest detail, but it’s one he can pick at. He repeats the shooting motion, and then lifts his hands to his eyes, as if looking around. Where did your bow go?
She watches him levelly, then moves off into the woods without answering. They score a trove of bilberries, and after Hen has filled his bucket, they eat themselves stupid on the rest. Once they’ve stuffed their bellies (which takes considerably longer in Egg’s case), they flop on the ground.
Egg lifts her hands, not to shoot an imaginary bow this time, but to press both palms flat against her chest. Over her heart. She looks over at Hen, who doesn’t know how to interpret this gesture. Does she think that’s where her stomach is, the big melonhead? Maybe she has indigestion. He slaps his full belly and makes a gagging noise, then belches inquisitively.
Egg huffs a sigh and rolls over. Not indigestion, then. They rest, in stillness, before she stands to carry him homeward.
#
If Papa or Dammu wonder about the extra food that Hen brings home, they don’t say so. “Finally earning his keep,” Dammu says, when Hen brings home a dripping honeycomb. They ruffle Hen’s greasy hair under his cap.
“Just like his mama,” says Papa, and coughs. “Took her long enough to figure out that bow, didn’t it?”
Egg prefers duck over goose, clouds over sun, and days when Hen comes to find her over days when he doesn’t. Once, on an afternoon when he’s too busy running Dammu’s errands to roam about in the wetwood, he spots her near the creek—outside of his scavenging range, and too close to the village. Within the sight of any sharp-eyed goblin who glanced her way!
He sidles over, under the guise of investigating a patch of bark on a sickly tree. “Get out of here, melon-head!” he hisses, and dusts his claws off on his shirt. He doesn’t check to see if she obeys him—if she understands enough to obey—before he trots on to Feathergill’s house for the herbs Dammu wants.
#
The traders come less often—the burden of the tithe falls as heavily on the nomad-goblins as any village—and Hen’s neighbors invent news to fill in the long gaps. A popular tale sees the snowlander Smoothfolk swearing to the Dread Lord’s service, wanting to take a bite out of their own woodland cousins. In another, the Dread Lord was a pirate king before he raised his banners, and a fleet of sea-ships sails even now to loot the richest Smoothfolk ports.
When real news does come, it isn’t from the traders, but from a lone, ragged goblin. He’s missing his left eye; the scar stands nakedly on his sunburned face. The villagers shout and hustle about—who in the hells is this, I suppose he’ll expect to be fed—and gather close to hear the stranger speak.
He tells of long marches, thundering cannons, the stink of besieged cities. He tells of a river stained red, and bodies bristling with arrows. The other goblins listen, and whisper worriedly. Some call him a liar, and some others, in turn, call those fools. When he runs out of tales to tell, the silence stretches impossibly thin. Bluecap breaks it, finally, tugging on Dammu’s sleeve. “But when is Mama coming back?”
Dammu grabs her arm and yanks her aside, squalling and complaining all the way back to the hut. Browncap trails after, whining for answers. But Hen-of-the-Woods stays, and Papa too, and it turns out, after one last outraged howl from Bluecap, that the stranger does have one more thing to say to them.
“He’s in retreat now, but the banners still fly.” The stranger probes his cheek below the missing eye, then lets his hand fall to his lap. “Nothing’s over yet.” It sounds like a promise. It sounds like a threat.
#
The tithe-taker comes on a summer morning, when the damp air is still cool, not yet sun-boiled into stifling soup. Hen is lagging abed when the summoning-drums sound. He sits and shakes off Browncap, who bites his arm in alarm. Both parents have gone as still as cornered tuskadeer, but Papa, closer to the door, peers out through the crack in the mud-daub. “Can’t hide him,” he says. “Hells! They’re already watching. Don’t dawdle—the tardy goblin draws the eye.” But he’s the one who pauses, and unbuckles his own belt, only to re-fasten it around Hen’s waist. “There,” he says, as Hen feels the heavier weight of Papa’s dammu’s papa’s iron knife at his side. “Don’t cut yourself with the blasted thing.” And he opens the door, and Dammu, cursing and spitting, grabs up the twins to follow, and Hen can only trail wordlessly after.
A war-eagle struts through the village, inspecting the goblins’ meager offerings. A second stands at attention nearby. War-eagles are real, and Hen can’t even be impressed, or tell Dammu, I knew it. Dried sweetmoss, nuts, a bit of under-aged cheese from Sundew’s cellar. The war-eagle is unimpressed, and says so. When they speak, they touch a pendant around their neck. Over their screeching, Hen hears, inside his head, words in his own familiar fragment of the Broken Tongues. It would’ve been funny, if the war-eagle had a smaller bird sitting on one shoulder to translate.
No. It wouldn’t be, really.
The subject turns quickly from the poor quality of the supplies to that of the potential recruits. “Scrawny little runts, aren’t you? Well, we’ll have that one. She’ll learn to hold a sword.” The war-eagle snaps their beak at Big Button, who heaves big shuddering sobs, but shuffles over beside the second war-eagle. He leans away from her, onto his longbow, as she draws closer.
It should’ve been exciting, to guess at their wingspan, to wonder how far they could fly. The war-eagle with the pendant stops beside Hen, looks him up and down. “He’ll do,” they announce, sounding bored. Dammu makes a whining noise but doesn’t object. Not with one twin in each arm. The war-eagle clicks their talons at Hen. “Go on. With the other one.”
Reaching for pride, Hen lifts his chin, and takes a step forward. But the war eagle hasn’t moved on. “You, too,” they say, nodding at Papa. “Not too old yet to serve.”
This proves too much for Dammu, who stomps one foot. “You can’t take them both—”
With a lazy shove, the war-eagle knocks Dammu down, Bluecap and Browncap bouncing to either side. “Can’t,” they echo with derision.
Hen stares at their back. At his side, he finds not his belt knife, but the iron dagger that belonged to his great-grandfather. He draws it, as goblins moan and mutter, and leaps toward the point where wings meet body.
But he’s forgotten the second war-eagle, who trills an alarm. Before the blade lands, his target swings around and rakes Hen’s face from cheek to chin. Hen can’t see, for the pain, for the blood in his eyes. He hits the ground, the dagger falling at his side.
Papa can’t speak for him now, he knows. Dammu mustn’t dare. Only the war-eagle may do that now, and Hen knows exactly what the tithe-taker will say. “This one prefers the traitor’s death to loyal service!” they cry, drawing a blade as long as Hen is tall.
Someone bellows, and it is no kind of sound that could come from a war-eagle’s throat, and certainly not from a goblin’s, either. Hen looks around wildly and finds her: Egg, charging at him, her halberd already swinging to bear.
The second war-eagle nocks an arrow and shoots before she closes the distance. Egg doesn’t falter when the arrow tears her ear, despite the ribbon of blood flying through the air behind her. A strongarm would be too stupid to know she’s hurt, Hen thinks, and stabs his great-grandfather’s knife into the tithe-taker’s skinny leg before fear catches up to him.
The war-eagle’s attention tears between goblin and strongarm, between immediate pain and oncoming destruction. They get only that moment before Egg slices through them as if they’re no more than an overcooked mushroom, and she squares off immediately with the second war-eagle, who launches a second arrow. It lodges in her left forearm, but it does not stop her, or slow her charge, and she stabs clean through the second eagle’s belly before he can nock again.
The eagles fall: one, then the other, as if they need a moment to grasp the implications of their own mortal injuries. Blood sots the soil around the tithe-taker, and Hen scrambles back, clutching the stolen knife. He looks for the twins, who stare at him with wide acorn-cap eyes. He looks for Papa, whose chest heaves as he puts his hands to his head and curses the gods below, and thanks them, and curses again. He looks for Dammu, and cannot find them. So he turns to Egg, who regards the arrow in her arm with quizzical interest. Her green skin is black from wrist to fingertips, and dark drops rain into the soil.
Hen squeals and rushes toward her—then jumps back when she falls to her knees, to avoid being crushed. “Stupid Egg!” he yells, into her big, blank face. The wounds on his face sting afresh. “What if you die now?”
“Move,” says Dammu, and tweaks Hen’s ear to haul him aside. Their hands are full of stingweed, which they rub over their fingers as they step into Egg’s massive shadow. The fumes hurt Hen’s eyes. “You know this strongarm, Hen.”
It’s not a question, and Hen doesn’t consider lying in response. “I—I call her Egg.”
Dammu sighs heavily and turns Egg’s arm. “She’ll probably break my neck suck the marrow from my bones before I’m done, just you wait.” They produce a bit of wire and probe it into the wound, ignoring the warning growl in Egg’s throat. “Hold still,” they warn sternly, and pull the wire loop back. When it comes out, the arrowhead comes with it.
Egg bellows—a sound that makes the ring of stunned goblins shrink back a few paces. “Oh, shut up,” says Dammu, when Egg falls quiet, and presses another wad of stingweed into her wound. “You’ll mend, you big lout.” They pat the remaining stingweed against the cuts on Hen’s face. Hen knows better than to complain of the smell or the sting.
Papa approaches carefully, one twin keeping pace behind each of his legs. “Look at her. She’ll eat us out of house and home. Or just eat us.” He wipes a smear of black blood off Egg’s chin and tsks. “Big brainless clump of a girl! Gods below, what a mess.”
Egg looks between both parents uncomprehendingly. But Hen knows what Papa and Dammu mean, even if Papa and Dammu can’t say it in the ways he wants. Their Broken Tongue cuts them, too, as much as him, with its sharp edges. And Hen can see the meaning that peeks between the shards.
That doesn’t mean the cuts stop hurting.
Bluecap leans on her tiptoes to bite Egg’s ear with tentative interest. Egg flinches, but doesn’t push the goblin away, letting Dammu peel her off instead. She cradles her wounded arm against her body, and her eyes flick to Hen. In hope of an explanation—but how can he explain? Their languages have been irreparably broken—away from each other, and torn to pieces, the flesh stripped away with only the cold hard bones left behind to hit each other with.
He remembers that day, lying beside the bilberry bushes, bellies stuffed to bursting. The gesture Egg made, and how it hadn’t meant anything to him then. Now, suddenly, it means everything. He presses his palms, stained and shaking, against his chest. Over his heart. His eyes water, not just from the stingweed.
Egg’s worried face softens. She moves to copy him, but Dammu swoops in, squawking, ordering her to leave that arm alone if she ever wants it to heal, calling her a clod-clumping fool whose common sense would rattle in a walnut shell.
Hen’s hands fall away from his chest, as Egg allows herself to be roused from the ground by Dammu’s prodding. Such a small gesture. It doesn’t feel like enough. It doesn’t say everything he wants to say, but something broken has started to mend, even if the scars still show through.
“Let’s go home,” he says, and even though she doesn’t know what he’s saying, Egg moves to follow when he goes.
© Copyright 2024 Aimee Ogden
About the Author
Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella, Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was a Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has also appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons, as well as previously in Clarkesworld. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction.