Speaking of: was this goblin going to fighther?
The goblin was still frozen in a strange half-crouch, their muscles pulled bowstring-taut beneath the gray weight of their cloak. While one hand gripped the curve of an immense tree root, the other extended behind them, palm flat and out, almost as if they were telling someone to wait.
But who? Pansy sucked in a sharp breath, panic squeezing around her throat like a vice. Her gaze swiveled away from the goblin, searching, instead, beyond. There, she found not another goblin as she’d feared, but a familiar thief, pink and potbellied, its head cocked slightly to one side. A goblin’s accomplice.Of course.
Had the goblin stolen the pig? she wondered, only to nearly scoff at herself for having deigned to ask such a silly question. They were a goblin. Surely, that was answer enough.
No sooner had Pansy glimpsed the creature than the goblin left cover and came back into her line of sight.Don’t you dare, blazed the silent accusation, knife-bright behind a tangled veil of moss-dark hair. No words had been spoken. Yet Pansy heard them all the same.
“I’m not going to hurt your pig,” she snapped, the hot swell of her own indignation shattering the uneasy silence between them. “I came out here to gather some ingredients. That’s all.”
A beat. Just long enough for the goblin’s long ears to unpin from their skull. “I didn’t know halflings foraged.” Their voice was surprisingly soft – almost pleasantly so – but oddly devoid of inflection, particularly when compared to the way Pansy’s neighbors in Haverow spoke.
“I’m making a quiche,” Pansy declared, canting up her chin at a defiant angle; anything to eke out a few extra millimeters against a goblin who thought her so low as to hurt a defenseless pig – thief or not. “A very halfling thing to do, mind you.”
The goblin’s eyes flicked down to Pansy’s basket, still clutched to her chest, the narrow slits of their pupils flaring ever so slightly wider. “You know those are poisonous, right?”
“What?”
“Those mushrooms. You can’t eat them. They’ll kill you.”
Heat flooded Pansy’s face, rushing all the way up to the tips of her ears. So, theyhadbeen Bloodletter Shrooms, after all. Just her luck. She’d spent the whole day slogging through these woods, all for the privilege of accidentally poisoning her parents with what was supposed to be the greatest meal they’d ever had. And worst of all, agoblinhad been the one to tell her just how badly she’d mucked it up.
“I-I knew that!” Pansy stammered. “I wasn’t going to eat them.”
An awful lie by any measure. The goblin clearly thought so, given the way their nose wrinkled. Still, they asked, “What were you going to do with them, then?”
“I—” Pansy floundered, her cheeks burning hotter and hotter with every second wasted scrabbling for some halfway-believable excuse. As if there could ever be one! She knew it. The goblin knew it. Perhaps, even the pig knew it. And still the goblin continued to wait for her answer, their expression aninscrutable, unyielding wall.
“Decoration,” she forced out at last, managing to keep a straight face.
“Decoration,” the goblin repeated flatly.
“Yes.” Pansy sniffed. “Decoration. Am I not allowed to decorate my home?”
“Withmushrooms. You decorate with mushrooms.”
She shrugged. “I like the color orange.”
The goblin blinked at her, long and slow, then said, “Take it.”
“What?”
“The truffle.” They gestured towards it, still lying between them. “You need it more than I do.”
Pansy balked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The goblin shrugged, their gaze drifting to one side. “I don’t want a bunch of dead halflings on my conscience, is all.”
At that, Pansy’s waning flush roared back with a vengeance. “I told you they’re not for eating!” Then, just to really drive home the point, she upended her basket, scattering the lingering evidence of her failure across the dirt. “There! Happy? Now you don’t have to worry about us stupid little halflings poisoning ourselves with deadly mushrooms!”
For several beats there was nothing beyond the ragged drag of Pansy’s breathing, her shoulders heaving as she stood at the center of an orange halo of her own creation. The goblin said nothing, did nothing. But then they started towards Pansy, pausing to retrieve the truffle, which they deposited in her otherwise empty basket, now hanging limply at her side.
“You should go home before it gets dark,” they said, close enough that Pansy could see the smattering of barely there freckles dusting the bridge of their nose. “The forest is thick and hard to navigate without light, especially for someonelike you.”
As the goblin stepped away, Pansy considered whether she ought to thank them. Good halfling manners dictated that when someone gave you something, you responded with a show of gratitude in turn. It wasn’t so easy when that someone had been anything but polite themselves. Still, it was the right thing to do.
Steadying herself with a deep breath, Pansy opened her mouth to utter two words she had never expected to say to a goblin. But before she could so much as form the first syllable, the goblin tapped their cheek and, with a whisper of something like a smirk curling at the corner of their mouth, said, “By the way, you have dirt on your face. A lot of it.”
