As he stood with his hands up and the point of a goblin spear at his throat, James, the elder of the two, silently cursed the tight-fisted old bastard, the parents who had indentured him to the tight-fisted old bastard, the fates who had assigned him to those parents, and everyone else he could think of who might share some measure of responsibility for his situation. Brigands he could have handled. Not physically, not in this the start of his thirteenth summer, but he could have talked to them, reasoned with them, paid them off. All brigands wanted was gold, after all, and James was far from holding Jenevar's above the value of his own life or Minvi's.

These goblins, though—there was no reasoning with them. For one thing, James didn't know their language, or indeed whether they even had one. For another, their hobgoblin leader had that light in its eyes—the fanatical gleam that said it was just waiting for its half-dozen minions to finish ransacking their captives' belongings before it either let them do murder, or did so for itself. The hobgoblins in these parts belonged to some sort of cult, even more violent and xenophobic than the usual excuse for a culture such creatures possessed. Both James and Minvi knew this well; it was the reason why the south road was not to be traveled lightly, particularly this time of year. Whatever strange cycles the hobgoblins' twisted faith followed, their brutality was especially high in the months when the days were long.

The hobgoblin glanced at him, its eyes narrowing, and James realized to his horror that he'd looked at it for a little too long while having that thought. Snarling, it barked an order, unintelligible but unmistakable, to its lessers. From the way they started scrabbling faster through the handcart's contents, James guessed it had ordered them to hurry up. They might be bold enough in the summer to strike in broad daylight, but it still would want to minimize the possibility of encountering a King's patrol... not that there were many of those to be had nowadays.

James heard Minvi muttering under her breath behind him and suppressed a grim smile. The goblins probably thought she was praying. James knew different, knew what she was about to do, and knew that it was probably going to get them both killed; but he agreed with her that the attempt had to be made. Better to go out attempting an unwise resistance than just let themselves be butchered like hogs. He considered his nearest captor, weighing his chances of wresting the spear away from it before it could skewer him. He guessed they were about fifty-fifty, and beyond that he had no idea what would happen, other than that the odds were very much against them.

"Excuse me," said a low voice from somewhere behind the broad, armored bulk of the hobgoblin. James would probably have found the way the creature stiffened, its red eyes widening in surprise, fairly comical if the situation hadn't been so dire. Hand on the hilt of its sword, it whirled, moving as it did so that James could see past it to the person who had addressed it.

The speaker was a small figure, no bigger than a human child or one of the Small Folk, clad in a slightly ragged set of the simple traveling robes worn by itinerant priests of the region's various religious orders. He(?) had a small pack on his back and a dark wooden walking stick in one hand, and his bowed head was entirely hidden by the large, conical straw hat he wore, but the shape of him made it clear that he was neither smallfolk nor child. Neither would have had those curiously reversed legs, ending in clawed bare feet covered in iridescent black scales, or that restless ridged tail, tapering to a point behind him.

Behind James, Minvi ceased muttering, her soft voice trailing off in surprise; a moment later, she whispered in James's ear, "Is... is that a kobold?"

"A kobold priest?" James wondered in reply.

The priest, if that's what he was, raised his head, and now James and Minvi could clearly see that he was a kobold, his long reptilian face also black-scaled but barred in vivid yellow. Despite the creature's unusual dress, James was momentarily convinced that their situation had just gone from bad to worse... but then the kobold spoke again. His voice sounded like a man's, but a little bit reedy and with a bit of a croak, as if its owner were just getting over a bad cold, and what he said, in a reasonable sort of way, was,

"You're blocking the road. Please leave those people alone and get out of the way."

The hobgoblin rasped out orders, and the four of its followers who had been sacking the apprentices' handcart broke off their task and ran to surround the kobold instead, hemming him in with the points of their spears. Advancing on his group's newest captive, the hobgoblin barked something interrogative-sounding. At this, the kobold winced and backed up as far as he was able without running into the spears of the goblins behind him, crouching and cowering.

James had felt a minor surge of hope at the appearance of this strange interloper, but it faded within him at the sight of this display, and the obvious amusement it provoked in the goblins. They'd make short work of the hapless creature, the apprentice was sure, and then he and Minvi would be back where they started. Worst of all, he would never get to know why there had been a kobold out here dressed as a wandering priest in the first place.

"N-not in the face, superior sir!" the kobold pleaded, his hands raised, as the hobgoblin loomed over him and drew back a mailed fist... and then a very strange thing happened. The hobgoblin threw its punch, all right...

... but Not-in-the-Face wasn't there to receive it. Moving with the speed of a startled bird, the reptilian priest dropped to the ground and scrambled through the gap between the hobgoblin's legs, tumbling across the ground like a ball of dusty rags, as if he'd just fallen off the back of a wagon. Somehow, at the end of this tumble, he contrived to wind up back on his feet, in the process sweeping the feet of the goblin guarding Minvi from under it with his tail—the whole process appearing utterly accidental.

Less plausibly accidental was what he did next, which was to draw the short, straight sword concealed within his walking stick and almost casually, without looking, plunge it into the fallen goblin's chest, all but nailing the unfortunate creature to the road. He did this so swiftly that the hobgoblin and its four guards didn't even see it happen; by the time they had turned to see where their erstwhile captive had gone, the deed was done, and the kobold was withdrawing the point of his blade from the carcass of their fallen comrade.

James, though just as startled as everyone else, recovered his wits quicker. Galvanized, he seized his own guard's spear just behind the head, easily wrenching the weapon from its goggle-eyed holder's slackened grip. He couldn't get it into position to strike its former owner—he was no weapon master—but he could at least use the butt of it to shove the startled goblin away, gaining himself some breathing room as he backed up as tightly to the handcart as he could.

The creature, looking affronted, made to reclaim its weapon, but before it could do so, Minvi released the spell she'd been casting and set it afire. This didn't kill it—even the likes of a goblin could withstand the tiny flame of a novice's cantrip—but being on fire gave it something else to worry about, and it took itself off to the nearby stream to attend to the matter.

"Nice," said Not-in-the-Face with an offhandedly appreciative little nod. "Oh, don't give me that," he replied scornfully in response to the hobgoblin's shouted challenge. Unconcerned at the monsters' advance, he pulled the cork from the clay jug he wore strapped to his left forearm, took a long swig of whatever was inside it, and corked it again, then took a wobbly step forward and said in a faintly slurred tone of dismissal, "I ashked you nishely."

When describing the incident to the Flatwater city guardsmen later, James was a bit at a loss for words. What had happened next? It couldn't possibly have been the case, not really, but it had looked for all the world like the kobold priest had slain the four remaining goblins... well, more or less accidentally, in the course of stumbling around in a drunken panic, avoiding the hobgoblin's increasingly frenzied attempts to kill him. Indeed, strictly speaking, the hobgoblin had slain one of them, striking with its great broad sword at where it thought the kobold ought to be and cleaving one of its own attendants practically in half instead.

It all looked accidental, except that there was no conceivable way it could've been. James wasn't a man-at-arms, he was an apprentice weaver, but even so, he had watched the town guard at their training often enough to know what a well-commanded fight looked like. Although Not-in-the-Face's stumbling dives, painful-looking falls, and reeling dodges all looked like the purest happenstance in isolation, together they made up an almost-perfectly-fought battle; and whatever he did, however he staggered and tumbled and swayed, his sword always ended up precisely where it needed to be, right down to the moment where it found its way under the hobgoblin's breastplate and up into the creature's heart.

With a look mingling frustrated fury and infinite surprise on its ugly face, the hobgoblin toppled backward and crashed flat on its back to the road, making a sound like a mishap in an ironmonger's shop. The kobold priest wobbled on his feet for a moment over the corpse, the bodies of its lesser minions scattered all around him like broken toys, then took one last swig from his clay jug, wiped his sword, and put it away.

"Well," he mused philosophically, "that's all for you, superior sir," and there was no trace of a drunken slur in his voice or a wobble in his gait as he turned and made his way over to the astonished apprentices.

"Heading for Flatwater?" he asked. At James and Minvi's mute nods, he asked, "May this humble pilgrim beg a favor?"