Wendy and I are beside their shield wall and not in front of it, which is good for us and very, very bad for them. They try to turn but Wendy hands me my spear and peels the shield from the guy closest to him, spinning it as she does so, causing its former owner to scream as his wrist breaks. She fits the big round thing onto her arm. It’s way too big for her and she looks ridiculous, but she’s completely covered by it. She slams into their wall while they’re still repositioning and knocks them back.

I throw the pike into an archer's midsection and then I’m among them, using the blade of my weapon to cut bowstrings, tendons, and throats. In the confusion, someone falls on my spear and I let it go. It’s too long for this close-in work anyway. I pull a dagger from a merc’s belt and throw it into the man next to him. I slap a blade away before thrusts into my stomach, spin into the swordsman, and put my heel into the back of his knee. His leg buckles and he falls backward.

A shadow blocks the sun. Someone’s behind me. I turn but the man’s already falling, twin daggers falling from his hands, one of Yenna’s arrows in the back of his skull.

I catch his daggers, turn to ram one into the swordsman’s belly below his breastplate, and parry a pike stabbing in from my right with the other.

The mercenaries have a problem. Wendy and I have made them turn to face us, shields facing our way, exposing them to Yenna’s fire from the side. A quarter of them are down already, with almost half of them wounded. I don’t want to kill them. I want to drive them away. Why won’t they run?

I pull on the pike from the woman who’s just tried to kill me. She holds on until I kick the haft out of her grip. I poke her in the helmet with the blunt end once, twice, three times before I sigh and swing it around so the business end is facing her. She’s got an arming sword on her hip but she doesn’t pull it, instead, her eyes go big and she turns and runs. Some people are slower to clue in than others.  I let her go.

Her flight starts an exodus with the archers and the mercenaries’ rear line. As they pull away, I see their healer. An older man with a long gray beard and glowing red hands sees me notice him. He doesn’t stop his prayer to heal an ugly wound in a dwarf’s neck as he watches me.

“You won’t fight?” I ask him.

He shakes his head.

Good enough for me. I nod once and see what’s happening with Wendy.

She’s pounded her way deep into the shield wall, men and women staggering away from her onslaught, but now they’re regrouping and trying to envelop her.

Which puts their backs to me and Yenna both.

A big pale green blur bursts out of a bush and hits them from behind, blades gleaming. They aren’t kukri knives exactly. They’re longer than that, their wide, wicked blades curving down. Either way, they’re deadly chopping weapons. As I watch, a head goes flying, then a hand, a few fingers and a sword.

I have to run hard to get there and I’ve hurt way too many today so I’m pissed. When I’m close enough, I jam the pike into the ground and pole vault up and over the melee to land on the shoulders of a big guy with a mace.

I turn his helmet enough to blind him. He bellows and tries to knock me off with his mace but I block block his arm and then snatch out of his hand. It’s a bit awkward for me too, seeing as how my Erota-fueled boner is pressed up against the back of his helm, but I put that out of my mind, and lay about me with my shiny new flanged mace.

Yeah, it’s hard to dodge riding piggy-back non-consensually on a big human warrior, but the guy’s doing most of my work for me, staggering around, trying to fix his helmet. I keep slapping his hands away but he must feel his life’s at stake or something, so he tries again and again.

Somebody gets a hand on me from behind. It’s a scowling human woman who’s lost her shield. She’s about to swipe me off her friend with her axe when Wendy drives the rim of her shield into the woman’s knee, fracturing the joint, causing the lady to let go and collapse, screaming.

I decide that broken bones are the order of the day. I break an arm, then a clavicle, then a cheekbone.

The guy I’m riding rears back and pitches forward and I’m thrown, rolling with it. I pop to my feet and run a few steps before turning.

A spear hisses by me.

The man who threw it is running at me, drawing a sword.

I throw the mace at his feet.

He trips on it, falls forward, and I bring my foot around to meet him, my heel driving into his temple. The remainder of his trip to the ground is boneless. Either I’ve knocked him cold or he’s dead.

Two more men charge at me, swords leveled behind shields.

I turn and run six feet up a tree, bending my legs further with each step, and when my upward momentum bleeds out, I shove off hard, flipping over the two men.

One of them is wearing a cloak and I grab it by its hood on the way down. I hear him choke when my weight hits the fabric, and, when my feet hit the ground, I really pull.

Mr. Cloak comes off his feet to fall backward, intercepting his friend’s sword thrust meant for me.

The other man drops his sword in horror after watching it plunge six inches into his companion.

I pluck it out and give it right back, thrusting the blade for half its length through his biceps.

I’m at the edge of the fight and when I turn, I see Wendy with a man held up over her head, kicking. I can tell she’s eager to toss him at somebody else but all I see are the backs of mercenaries running away. Wendy snorts and tosses the man contemptuously aside.

Their healer is the only one left still in position on the slope. He stands, showing us his empty hands, and moves on to another clump of his groaning associates.

Wendy doesn’t pause. She rushes right back down toward the kobolds and Caedi.

Yenna goes to retrieve her bow, but I’m right behind my wife.

If they’ve hurt Caedi I plan to kill every mercenary down there.

Charging up the rise was the right move. They’d been able to fire over the heads of their own men into the kobolds’ rear. Now the support for the mercenaries’ front line is in full retreat and all the kobolds and Caedi have to worry about are the warriors in front of them.

Of course, the mercenaries are pretty confident their rear is covered by their men on the slope and aren't expecting an attack from that direction.

Their line starts collapsing from the far edges as Yenna picks them off, delaying any awareness on the mercenaries’ part that anything’s amiss.

I can see Caedi, kneeling behind the kobold's shield wall, pulling at a struggling kobold who is thrashing on the ground, trying to get him out from under the stamping feet and stabbing swords, pikes, and spears above him. Her robes are spattered with blood and her hands are aglow.

Wendy gets there before I do. She plows into the center of their line and strikes with both hands into the small of a big man’s back. He's the closest one to Caedi and I approve.

I hear his spine snap over the din.

I leap and grab the back of a woman’s breastplate by the neck and armholes and use that to leverage a kick into the man’s jaw beside her, spinning him half around.

The woman staggers, off balance from my sudden weight, and a kobold stabs up with his sword into her neck.

The man whose jaw I just broke catches a pike through his eye.

I leap clear.

Wendy slams a fist into a man’s leg above his knee, knocking him off his feet. She takes a firm hold of his hair as he falls, then slides over his chest, his head tucked under her arm like a football. She twists and pulls and snaps his neck.

With four dead in their center and their flanks chewed away by Yenna’s arrows, the mercenary line is cut in two and it’s the kobold’s turn to surround their enemy. Six attackers left standing in two groups drop their weapons and shields, breathing hard.

“You’re hurt!”

I look up to see Caedi rushing at me, hands alight.

I’m hurt?

I look down at myself. Yeah, I’m bloody but none of that’s my own. I think. Come to think of it, I’ve got an itch or something behind my shoulder.

Caedi slaps her hands down on me and there’s a bright burst of pain before a coolness starts to spread on my back. Something falls behind me. It’s an arrow.

“Not mine,” says Yenna.

I wobble a little on my feet.

“You didn’t know?” says Caedi.

“I was busy,” I say and stifle a giggle. I’m a little light headed now that I’ve let go of my Erota.

Caedi lurches suddenly and I worry that one of the mercs is trying something or maybe even one of the kobolds, but it’s Wendy, hugging our healer’s thigh.

Caedi smiles and smooths my wife’s hair. “I’m fine,” she says. “They never touched me.”

 

 

The kobolds are very thorough. All the bodies, living and dead, are searched before the mercenaries are allowed to leave, disarmed, all their weapons gathered into a pile. On one corpse they find a copy of a contract for the utter destruction of the kobold’s den. It’s signed by two men, one of them I’ve never heard of, presumably it’s the dead man. The other name is Heckwin Gorminiel’s.

Remmer watches the mercenaries slink away, many of them on stretchers, most of them limping. Seventeen of them will never leave this place. Only ten kobolds have died though many more took grievous wounds that Caedi was able to staunch, stabilize, and heal to one degree or another.

“Yesterday I would have been forced to slay them all and you for discovering us here,” says the kobold leader. “But now….” He shrugs.

“I’m sure we can make a deal,” I say. “You come to town and tell the sheriff what you told me. That Manver Teeg coerced you into banditry and—.”

“He will not be believed,” says Yenna.

Of course he wouldn’t.

We all stand there watching the kobold survivors stack the dead mercenaries together with their own dead upon a thick stack of kindling.

“I don’t suppose you have any documents? A contract?” I ask.

Remmer shakes his head.

Some of the other kobolds have stripped naked and are bathing in the brook.

“Then we have no proof,” says Wendy. “We know damned well he’s behind it all but can’t prove a thing.”

“He’s not going to get away with it?” Caedi asks, horrified.

I shake my head. “We’ll get him somehow.” I turn to Remmer. “And I’ll make sure that you learn how to farm and store food,” I tell him. “Even if I have to learn how to do it myself. But no more raiding or there’s nothing I can do. Are we agreed?”

“We have enough food for now,” says Remmer. “I can give you three weeks before we’ll have no choice.”

Wendy says, “What if we could find you work? Would you be willing?”

“What kind of work?” asks Remmer.

“Well, I hear that the caravan routes through these parts are fraught with bandits,” she says with a grin.

 

 

By the time we work out the particulars of a deal we can take to Sheriff Cronk and the mayor, it’s getting late. The kobolds agree to put us up for the night so we don’t have to camp out on the road and sleep in shifts.

We’re allowed into their den with a minimal guard, necessary because outsiders are understandably seen as a threat and it’ll help the population inside feel safer. I don’t know what I was expecting but what I find are mud brick dwellings built into the cavern walls like the Puebloans built into cliffs in the ancient American west. They’re simple but have a certain style to them, a culture.

There are no campfires but great ovens instead, with glowing coals to cook their food. Right. Ventilation would be an issue and the smoke from these is minimal, their placement careful. We’re shown where the latrines are and a well for drinking water. Our guides take us to a small building at the near edge of their settlement where we're going to sleep. We’re promised food and told that Remmer will come to us first thing in the morning. We’re also encouraged to go and bathe in the brook outside when we get the chance. Repeatedly.

All of us are exhausted but Wendy is downright pensive and troubled. I don’t say anything. I know damned well why and it's not just all the fighting we just had to do.

Caedi, however does not. “Is she okay?”

Her hair is still wet from the creek, her white robes sticking to her body in interesting ways. Yenna isn’t back yet because, well, getting herself clean after all that neglect is just going to take longer. Wendy and Caedi have been arguing over what to do about the half-orc’s hair. Wendy thinks that it’s a lost cause and they should just shave it all off but Caedi’s convinced they’ll be able to get a comb through it. With much patience and a stubborn hatred for entropy. As the only dude, I was ordered to wash first but only allowed ten minutes.

Fair.

Maybe.

Meh.

“No, she’s not,” I say. 

Caedi frowns at me. She’s got a hairbrush in her hand and some scissors in the other. She must've had them in her pack.

I sigh. “You remember how Hypa explained that we aren’t from this world? That we died in another before making our home here?”

She nods.

“Well, we’re going to be allowed to see our parents this evening who still live there and she’s nervous. It’ll be the first time we’ve seen them since.”

“Oh.”

She leaves it at that, pausing to watching Wendy arrange her bed roll on the floor before she goes out to Yenna.

Caedi doesn't know what to say. Who would? I sure don't.

I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night.