Chapter 2

It was a measure of how enormously the night's activities loomed in Daniel's mind that they were back on the road again before he remembered that there might be an ocean of goblins waiting just outside the pickets to descend on them in crashing waves, extinguishing one of the few outposts of humanity left in the world. Even when he did remember, it seemed less terrifying than it had the evening before. If the goblins came, they would fight. He'd meant what he said to Eli. He joined the Outriders to fight goblins. He just hadn't expected quite so many at once. Still, instead of fearing it, he found himself imagining what it would be like to face them, sword singing in his hand with each slash and thrust. He could see himself cleaning foul goblin blood off his blade as Piri Marek and Agnes and Agnes's mother all looked on, bosoms swelling with admiration. It only logically followed that, once he'd finished imagining that, his imagination wandered into what might happen next.

An Outrider was trained to be alert and aware of his surroundings at all times. But even such training had its limits. Daniel only realized Eli had been speaking to him for some time when the older man cleared his throat.

Daniel looked over, startled, and tried to remember what Eli had been talking about, but it was a total blank. He finally had to admit he hadn't heard. "Sorry?"

Eli's hearty laugh echoed off the foothills. "I guess Miss Bruhn made quite an impression on you last night."

Daniel was tempted to tell Eli the whole story. The big, bald man had been training him since he became an apprentice Outrider and Daniel didn't keep very many secrets from him. They weren't exactly friends. The line between apprentice and teacher always hung in the air between them. But Eli was probably closer to him than anyone other than his roommate Arpad.

Still, he did have some secrets from Eli and the one he had with Agnes seemed worth keeping if he he couldn't say why. "She's a lovely young woman."

Eli nodded. "You should have seen Marika when she was younger. That one was sculpted by the gods to tempt a man. I never figured out how she wound up with Otto the fat farmer when she could have chosen a dozen other men if she'd just crooked her finger."

"Who's ... Marika?" Daniel paused as he realized the answer to his own question, but pressed on in case he was wrong.

"Agnes's mother. Magnificent Marika we used to call her." Eli got a faraway look in his eyes, seemingly remembering happy times. Daniel must have made a face because he added, "Don't worry, lad. I'm pretty sure you're mine and I was out of favor when Marika got pregnant, so you two probably aren't brother and sister."

Again, Daniel was a bit slow on the uptake. He hadn't really had time to process what he'd done last night, but a kind of lightheaded happiness that didn't seem to require justification had settled over him and wrapped his brain in cotton."Me and ... Agnes? Gods, I hadn't even thought of that." While there were a few married couples among the upper ranks in Kozar Remeny, most alliances were shorter term and less exclusive than that word implied. and Daniel was far from alone in not knowing exactly who his father was. Somehow, he'd picked up the idea that it was impolitic to even want to know. He was Szubarla - "cave-born" and that made him part of a family with hundreds of members, all of them boys and men around his age. For some reason, the girls born here took their mother's last name, but the boys tended to be named after where they were born. He didn't know why. It wasn't like that in books.

But with Eli's suggestion, a question he'd never really addressed suddenly came to the forefront as crucially important. And he might never get a better chance to ask it than riding along an empty road with nothing in sight but mostly-empty pasture dotted with a few cows. "How sure are you that you're my father?"

Eli didn't answer right away, but the thoughtful look on his face said he'd heard and was formulating an answer. Daniel didn't let his sudden impatience show. The road they were taking back from the pickets was straighter than the one they'd taken out, but even though it would take them all day to return to the kovar, it felt like the chance to get a straight answer disappeared under his horse's hooves every time they touched the ground.

"You're almost certainly mine," Eli said finally. "If your mother was seeing more than three men at the time, she never told me and I never found out. But Janos was out on a long ride and you don't take after Big Ed. Levi and Laszlo are almost certainly his and they turned out to be fucking giants just like their old man."

He didn't look over at Daniel, but kept his eyes scanning the road for threats. Even this deep inside human territory, the road wasn't necessarily safe. "Back before the rains, we used to fool ourselves into thinking we could know for sure which seed grew into which tree, but really only the women ever know for sure."

"It seems like it used to be more of a big deal," offered Daniel. "Big enough that people would decide which side of a war to join based on who their father was."

Eli nodded. "We could have gone that way. When it was just the Company and a few camp followers and it looked like we were never going to see the sky again, it wouldn't have been hard for us to just start murdering each other over what we all wanted, but there wasn't enough to go around. A few tried. But more of us decided it wasn't worth dying over. We agreed that we'd all raise the Szubarla like you were our own sons and not worry too much about who was whose." He gave a faint smirk. "That last part was a lie and anybody who didn't know that when we were telling it to each other figured it out sooner or later, I'm sure. As long as we keep pretending it's not important, we don't stab each other over it much."

Daniel had wanted this conversation, but now that he had it, he needed time to digest what he'd learned. So, he changed the subject. "You never did finish telling me about Big Ed. That big orc kind of walked in right as the story was getting interesting."

Eli laughed. "Ah, Big Ed. There's a man who was a legend even before he died. Big Ed probably killed as many goblins as any three of the rest of us - thousands of the little bastards. I've got a lot of stories about Big Ed. What do you want to know?"

"What happened to him? If I ever met him, I was too young to remember."

Eli gave Daniel a sideways glance and the young man was embarrassed to remember how he'd frozen up the evening before at the idea of how many goblins there were out beyond the pickets. He lowered his head. "Listen, it's all right. I just got some bad memories mixed in with what you were saying last night. I've had time to think about it now. It won't happen again."

Eli considered that, then gave a firm nod of acknowledgement. "Big Ed used to fight with this massive hammer, looked like it was made for an honest-to-Li giant, not just a huge man like Ed. Anyway, when he would swing it in a fight, you'd get three dead goblins as he drew back and three more when he swung. We used to fight almost shoulder to shoulder back in the caves. And there were more times than I care to count when I thought he was dead for sure - where there was just nothing but wall to wall goblins where he should be. But each time, he'd let out this roar and swing that damned hammer and be back in the fight. Saved my ass a few times, too."

Eli paused and gathered his thoughts, then said, "One day, we were fighting deep underground. We'd driven the iron dwarves as far as we could and were hoping to put an end to their ability to come back and fight us again when another wave of goblins showed up in our rear somehow. It was total chaos. Somehow, Ed wandered or got pulled off into a side tunnel where it was him and hundreds of the little bastards. Anyway, I lost track of him and when we found him, he was just buried in bodies - stacked six deep on top of him. And when we pulled him up to bury him, there were hardly more than a few cuts or scratches on him anywhere. He hadn't died from any wound. Most likely, he'd just suffocated under a pile of them. He must have kept killing until he couldn't breathe."

There was a long silence as Daniel got a very clear picture in his head of what must have happened - an ocean of goblins drowning Big Ed. He held that image, considered it, and tucked it away in the back of his mind to remember in case he ever had to make a decision that involved facing hundreds of goblins by himself. He'd have to remember to keep enough room for himself to breathe.

"Somehow," he said slowly. "Hearing that it's as bad as I imagined is actually less disturbing than the imagining was."

By the time Daniel and Eli approached the outer gate of Kovar Remeny, the sun had set hours earlier and there was little moon, but Li's Tears were in a bright part of their cycle, some close enough to look like little moons hanging high overhead.

Daniel, raised in the caves below, had taken a long time to think of the kovar as secure. It was a fortress of sorts, the outer wall two or three times the height of a man, built of massive stone blocks hewn from the mountain it nestled up against the base of. Men and dwarves had built it together, but in a simple, utilitarian style that he remembered the dwarves complaining bitterly about. Under the mountain, where the dwarves had built long ago and to their own specifications, every wall had a carving, every tower and gate an ornament. It had taken hundreds of years to build, but every structure in the city under Kistestvere was a work of art.

Kovar Remeny wasn't a work of art. Kovar Remeny was a tool of war. It had been built in a decade, smooth stone meant to keep an enemy out, not impress them with anyone's skill as a stone carver.

From the road, Daniel could look up and see the old motte and bailey nestled on a high ledge and looking down on the whole fortress. The round, wooden enclosure had been the Company's first foothold above ground after more than a decade of living with the dwarves below. Even today, it looked like a feeble gesture of defiance, but it had held well enough long enough to get the first wall built - even when the goblins had come in force, trying to wipe out every trace that humans had been here.

Daniel remembered very little from before the last great goblin massacre. There had been caves and a sense that the tons of stone above their heads kept them safe. He and his mother and sister had lived in a stone house with three rooms carved into the wall of the Great Eastern Hallway. And there had been endless drills from as soon as he could walk and talk - where to meet in an emergency, how to hide if the iron dwarves from down below raided or the goblins came in from the surface. Over and over, they'd made games of it - Hide Deep, Lead and Chase, and endless games of war with older children pretending to be dwarves or the younger ones pretending to be goblins.

When they'd come out and there was nothing but sky over their heads, Daniel still hadn't gotten over being taken by the goblins. He spent the first year staying indoors whenever he wasn't forced to go outside. He'd always loved reading, but in that year, he'd begun the process of reading every book in the humans' library. "Agda's History of the World" was heavy reading for an eight year old, but they had only ten of the twenty-six volumes that made up the whole set, so it had gone more quickly than it might.

Even now, they were still building the kovar. As Daniel and Eli approached the new gate, they could hear the low, dull boom of work crews using black powder to dig the wide trench that would eventually connect to the river that ran through the whole kovar. There was already a trench filled with water that extended maybe a hundred paces total on both sides of the gatehouse. It even had a proper drawbridge, but Daniel refused to think of it as a moat until it went far enough that an enemy couldn't just walk around it to the other side.

The kovar was never quiet. Although most of the residences were asleep, there was a small company of young apprentice Guardians drilling in the outermost courtyard as they passed. Glowstones lined the main road frequently enough that their moonlight-soft circles of light nearly touched. Other parts of the fortress were darker, but here along the river, the road was always lit.

Daniel and Eli didn't speak as they rode deeper into Kovar Remeny. It was a pattern Daniel had learned as a young apprentice. If you had something to discuss with another Outrider, you waited until you were inside the keep or outside the walls. Here, there were too many people too close together and too many of them were civilians who didn't need to know everything right away. Civilians could panic over the littlest things.

When they brought their horses into the stable at the foot of the waterfall stair, Robert Szubarla was there waiting for them and was quietly overseeing two young stable boys as they cared for another pair of horses that must have been ridden in less than an hour before.

Daniel recognized one of the horses and, by extension, the other. "Arpad and Klara are back already?"

Robert nodded. "They came in a little while ago and headed right up to the old man's office. I didn't expect them back for a week." He looked up at Daniel. "I didn't expect any of you back."

Daniel looked away instinctively. Robert had been an apprentice along with him and Arpad once. Then, one day, he wasn't an apprentice. He was the new assistant to the stablemaster. He wasn't ever going to be an Outrider. Daniel never found out why.

If he had stayed an apprentice, Robert would have had his first ride-out this week. He'd know what the Outrider's secret weapon was. And Daniel would be able to freely give him the gossip he was so obviously asking for.

It was Eli who tilted his head towards the two young grooms as if to suggest they were the reason he wasn't sharing with Robert. "Found something that needed reporting in. I suspect everybody will know more in a day or two."

To Daniel, it sounded perilously close to telling secrets outside of the Company, but as he and Eli ascended the waterfall stair, the pounding of Three Kings' River off to his right, he decided it must be diplomacy. Eli hadn't told Robert anything he couldn't figure out for himself, but it would be easy for the assistant stablemaster to think he'd been let into their confidence.

Diplomacy was part of being an Outrider too - and part Daniel knew he had very little natural skill at. He filed away Eli's technique as another tool.

Arpad and his partner Klara were just coming out of the Captain's inner office and someone else stepping in and closing the door when Daniel and Eli stepped into the antechamber. Eli and Klara exchanged a look that seemed laden with information unreadable to Daniel. The lean, wiry, white-haired woman was the only female Outrider and highly respected by the Captain for her skill. Because of their scarcity, very few women served in the defense of the community, but at some point early on, Klara had decided she was going to be an Outrider and, if anyone had tried to tell her no, they hadn't succeeded.

Everybody said Klara was part elf, which was probably true since she'd ridden in with the Thousand Swords twenty-two years ago and, aside from the white hair, didn't look that much older than her partner. Plus, she had an almost alien serenity that managed to suggest at all times that she both had a secret and that you would never find out what it was unless she wanted you to know it.

Compared to her, Arpad had the eagerness of a puppy that couldn't wait to show you the new stick it had brought back from the woods. He probably thought he was radiating an Outrider's stoicism, but Daniel could see right through that. Of course, Arpad could probably read him just as well. He allowed himself a small smile at the thought. "See you back at the room?"

Arpad glanced at Klara, who gave him a faint nod. "Yeah. I'll be there."

After they'd left, Daniel stood at ease, hands clasped behind his back and practiced observing the room. There wasn't much to it. It was an inner chamber with a single doorway. The walls, like all the inner walls in the keep, were gray, white, and yellowish ashlar blocks, sturdy enough that a man couldn't break through them without magic. They were decorative only in their irregularity. Some had come up from the caves, others from the river. A solid oak door led into the office proper. A day candle and an ordinary white candle burned on a table, but it was the glowstone over the door that lit the room and its only ornamentation - a map to the right of the door showing their whole settlement with the kovar to the upper right and the pickets on the bottom left.

Once he'd reassured himself that nothing in the antechamber had changed since his last visit, Daniel stood and watched the day candle burn. The Captain made it a point of pride to keep all of his debriefings under five minutes, particularly if they were important. Five minutes was one lesser tick mark on a day candle.

Tonight, the candle burned down and Daniel waited. It was sometimes hard to tell how much of a lesser tick had already passed when you first started watching, but as Daniel watched the second tick mark melt away, he started to get nervous. The Company thrived on routine and whatever was going on tonight was anything but.

At his side, Eli stood, his pose seemingly relaxed. He really did have the unreadability all Outriders strove for. But Daniel knew he couldn't be unaware of how long they'd been waiting.

To break the tension, Daniel asked, "Do you know what Klara and Arpad's ride out covers?"