The hens screamed in the middle of the night.
Tam was awake before he knew he'd been asleep. For a moment he lay in the dark of the loft, listening, with his heart going hard. The farm hands snored on. Then it came again from across the yard: a hen shrieking, a crash of wood, and under it, a high, giggling chatter he knew.
Goblins.
He was down the ladder before he'd finished thinking it, with the bronze helmet still on his head and the scimitar at his side. He got as far as the dairy door. Then he stopped, with his hand on the latch.
Tell Seth before every fight, he thought. You promised.
He could hear the hens. He could hear the goblins. Every second he stood there was another hen.
He had promised.
He turned and ran the other way, across the yard to the farmhouse, and hammered on the door with the flat of his fist.
"Seth! SETH!"
A window banged open above him. Seth's head came out of it, in a nightcap, with his beard sticking out sideways.
"What? What is it?"
"I'm going to fight a goblin," said Tam.
Seth stared down at him. "Now?"
"It's in the coop."
There was a short, terrible silence. Then Seth said a word Tam had never heard him say, and the window slammed shut. Tam was already running back across the yard toward the coop. Behind him he heard boots on the stairs and the farmhouse door crashing open.
* * *
There were four of them.
One was in the doorway of the coop, half in and half out, with a hen under its arm. The hen was flapping and shrieking. The goblin was trying to stuff it into a sack and losing. Two more were inside. He could hear them crashing about among the perches, and the hens going mad. The fourth was up on the roof of the coop, where the new boards met the old ones. It was levering at a board with a stick.
Over the top, thought Tam. Again.
The goblin in the doorway saw him coming. It dropped the hen, which fled shrieking into the dark. It snatched up a spear from against the wall and turned to face him. It showed its teeth.
Tam drew the scimitar as he ran. It was still set to slash, for Strength. He had Strength 1. It would have to do.
The goblin jabbed at him with its spear, a sharpened stick with a flint tied on. He saw the jab coming and sidestepped it badly. The flint scraped across his ribs.
Hitpoints: 9/10.
He slashed back. The scimitar caught the goblin across the arm. It squealed and staggered back against the coop door.
+4 Strength.
It wasn't enough. A goblin took five good hits to put down, and he had landed one. He kept at it: slash, step back, slash, while the goblin jabbed and missed, and jabbed again. On the fifth hit, it went down.
Behind him, a lantern came bobbing across the yard. It was Seth, in his nightshirt and boots, with his pitchfork in one hand and the lantern in the other. His face was like thunder. The two goblins inside the coop came boiling out of the doorway at the noise. One of them ran straight into Seth.
Seth didn't stop to ask questions. He set the lantern down, ran the goblin through with the pitchfork, as if it were a bale of hay, and threw it aside.
Tam had no time to watch. The other goblin was coming at him. It was a big one, with a club in its fist. It swung. He ducked. The club hit the coop wall with a bang and a scatter of splinters. He slashed at its middle and missed. It swung again and caught his shoulder.
Hitpoints: 8/10.
It hurt. Not much, but it hurt. He went in under the club, and out, and in again. Slash after slash, one small hurt at a time, until the big goblin made a noise of great surprise. It looked down at itself. Then it sat down in the mud and fell over.
The fourth goblin had come down off the roof. It took one look at Seth with his pitchfork, and at Tam with his scimitar and his helmet, and at its three friends on the ground. It grabbed a hen off the grass by the neck and ran for the hedge.
Tam started after it. Seth caught his arm.
"Let it go."
"It's got a hen..."
"Let it go," said Seth. "You're bleeding, lad. And I'm in my nightshirt."
* * *
They stood in the yard in the lantern light with three dead goblins at their feet and the hens still screaming inside the coop.
Seth lifted the lantern and looked Tam over: the red mark on his shoulder, the helmet, the scimitar, the two goblins he had killed so cleanly. The scrape across his ribs was already closing. Seth frowned at it, and let it go.
He didn't say anything for a long time.
"You came to the house," Seth said at last. "First."
"I promised."
"With goblins in my coop. You came and knocked."
"You made me promise," said Tam. "Before every fight."
Seth made a noise that might have been a laugh. It came out wrong. He put his free hand on Tam's shoulder, the good one, and left it there for a moment, heavy and warm.
"Your father would have run straight in," he said. "Col never waited for anybody in his life."
Then he took his hand away and went to count the hens.
* * *
There were five missing, counting the one the goblin had run off with. Seth stood in the coop doorway with the lantern and counted them twice. His face went hard and closed.
"Five tonight," he said. "And three before."
Tam went to deal with the bodies. In the game, a dead goblin dropped its bones and its junk on the grass and that was all. Here there were three bodies lying in the mud of the yard, and he didn't want Gillie or Jory finding them in the morning.
He crouched by the first one he'd killed and felt along its belt. Nothing. These goblins had come to steal hens, and carried nothing else. He took it by the wrists and dragged it to the edge of the yard. Then the big one.
Last, he crouched by the third one, the one Seth had killed with the pitchfork.
He reached out and took it by the arm to drag it. His hand went straight through.
Stands Alone is an Ironman. He stands alone.
He knelt there in the mud and looked at the old words, and at the goblin.
Not my kill, he thought. Seth's. At Lozar's house, every goblin had been his. He hadn't had to think about it. In the game, if somebody else did the killing, the loot wasn't yours. You didn't even see it.
So he could only loot a fresh kill, or even move it, if he had made it himself. Old remains were another thing. In the game, bones you found lying about were anybody's to bury, and Lozar had been weeks dead when he found her.
"What's wrong?" said Seth, behind him.
"It's yours," said Tam. "I can't move it. It's... it's like the coins."
Seth frowned at the goblin. Then he sighed and put down his lantern. He took the dead goblin by the ankles and dragged it across the yard to where the other two lay.
* * *
In the morning Tam built a pyre on the stony bank below the cow field, at the place where he'd lit his first fires.
He'd thought about it the day he butchered the goblins from Lozar's house: a fire hot enough to get the bones out without the knife. That had been long, bloody work, and twice he'd had to walk away and breathe.
He cut the wood for it at first light, in the woods past the east fields: oak, which burned long and hot. Things to sell and his kit filled more than half his inventory, which left room for thirteen logs. He cut eleven. He dragged his two goblins down from the yard first, and Seth dragged the third down after him. Then Tam laid the logs on the stones one after another and built them into a long, square pile, working on it the whole time so none of them vanished. He heaved his two on top, and Seth dropped the third on the pile.
"Well," said Seth, wiping his hands on his trousers. "Go on, then."
Tam struck his tinderbox.
The flame caught the bottom log and climbed. A rush of heat came up off the pyre.
+60 Firemaking.
Then, as always after he lit a fire, his feet took one neat step to the west, all by themselves.
Seth looked at his feet. Tam looked straight ahead at the fire, with great dignity, as if he had meant to do that.
"Hm," said Seth, and said nothing else.
* * *
It burned all morning.
Tam stayed with the pyre the whole time. He fed it logs and poked it with a long stick, and kept the bodies in the middle where the heat was fiercest. If he left it, the fire would sink, and the foxes would be down from the woods for what was left.
The smoke rose in a thick grey column that half of Lumbridge could probably see. The smell drifted up the field to the farm. It was not a nice smell.
Around the middle of the morning, Gillie came down the field with her arms folded and her face screwed up.
"Tam," she said. "Why does the whole farm smell like roast goblin?"
"Because I'm roasting goblins."
"Why?"
"For the bones."
Gillie looked at the pyre, and at Tam standing beside it with his long stick, sooty and calm. She opened her mouth to ask what he wanted with goblin bones. Then she seemed to decide she really, truly didn't want to know.
"Dad says you killed two last night," she said instead. "On your own."
"Seth killed one."
"With a pitchfork. In his nightshirt." The corner of her mouth twitched. "He told us at breakfast. Four times." She was quiet for a moment, watching the fire. "He said you came and knocked first."
"I promised."
Gillie gave him one of her careful looks. This time it was almost fond.
"Tam would never have knocked," she said. Then she turned and went back up the field before he could answer.
* * *
By noon the fire had burned down to a bed of red embers, and there was nothing left of the goblins but ash and bones. The bones were blackened and cracked, but whole. First he dug a hole a little way along the bank with his spade. Then he raked the bones out of the embers with his stick, one set at a time, onto the bank beside it. He buried the first set.
+4.5 Prayer.
Burnt bones, he thought. Same as any bones.
It had saved him the knife and the bloody work, and he hadn't had to walk away once.
He buried the second set. The third set was from Seth's goblin. When he reached for it, the bones went straight through his fingers. The old message came up in the air. Seth's kill, Seth's bones. He called up the field, and Seth came down and buried them himself, muttering.
Two goblins, two sets of bones, Tam thought. And a smell the whole valley will remember.
Seth stayed after he'd stamped the earth down, leaning on his spade, looking at the embers.
"Seth," said Tam. "I want two days. Tomorrow and the day after. Unpaid."
Seth turned his head. "What for?"
"My own work. The swamp mine, and the anvil in town. And some other things." Tam took a breath. "And I want to tell you something, so you hear it from me first."
Seth waited.
"I'm going to go to Varrock," said Tam. "Not now. At the end of the summer. I always meant to. I still mean to."
Seth said nothing. He looked at the embers. A log settled in them with a soft sound, and sparks went up.
"Your father wanted more than the farm too, you know," he said at last. "When he was your age."
"I didn't know."
"No. You wouldn't." Seth rubbed his beard. Then his face went practical.
"After haymaking," said Seth. "Not before. I'll not do the hay with the brothers and the old man and a girl."
"After haymaking."
"There's the hiring in the square at midsummer. I'll take a man on there. A grown one, mind, not a boy." He nodded slowly, to himself. "You'll show him the cows. Daisy won't let down for a stranger, so he'll need showing. And the coop. And where the gate sticks."
He went on like that for a while, half to Tam and half to the embers, working out how the farm would run without him. He didn't argue. He just kept planning.
Tam would have taken shouting. Shouting would have been easier.
"Two days," said Seth finally. "Unpaid. And you're back for the evening delivery."
"I will be."
"You'd better." Seth picked up his spade and went back up the field. He didn't look back.
* * *
Hobart came by in the afternoon.
Tam was mucking out the cow shed when he heard the voice at the gate. He knew it before he saw the man: a thin, sour voice, like a hinge that needed oil. He leaned on his spade and looked out.
Hobart leaned on the gate with his long neck stuck out of a coat too big for him. Seth was standing on the other side of the gate with his arms folded.
"A lamb," Hobart was saying. "Another lamb, Seth. That's two. And the hens. I've barely a hen left on the place." He jerked his chin at the thread of smoke still rising from the bank. "I see you had them too."
"Last night," said Seth. "The lad got two. I got one. One got away with a hen."
"One got away." Hobart said it as if it proved something. "They always get away. And they always come back, and there's always more of them. You can kill a hundred, and there's a hundred more over the hill." He lowered his voice. "That fellow at the Sheared Ram. The one from the castle. He says there's people in this town who'd see an end to it. A proper end. Not a pitchfork in the night."
Seth said nothing.
"There's a meeting," said Hobart. "Next rest day. Just a few of us. Farmers who've lost stock. No harm in listening."
Tam's hand had gone tight on the handle of his spade.
He thought about the chest in the spinning room, and the magenta robes inside. He thought about Sigmund's pale, patient eyes: one wonders how long good people are expected to bear it. In the game, the people who wore those robes tried to start a war.
Last time, Seth said no, Tam thought. Last time, he'd only lost three hens.
"Who's doing the talking?" said Seth.
"A friend. The castle man I told you about. He knows what it's like for us."
Seth looked across the yard at the coop, where Tam had nailed the boards back on the other week and the goblins had come in over the top anyway. Then he looked at the smoke.
"Eight hens, Hobart," he said quietly. "Eight in a fortnight."
He didn't say yes. But he didn't say no, either.
Hobart nodded and went off up the road with his big coat flapping around him.
Seth stood at the gate after he'd gone. Then he turned and saw Tam watching him from the cow shed door, and his face closed up again.
"Get on with that mucking out," said Seth, and went into the house.
Tam got on with it. But all afternoon he kept looking up at the road, and thinking about the cave under the ruin on the road to Draynor.