Pansy could have screamed.
Returning to her parents’ burrow in Haverow should have been a relief, a much-needed balm to soothe the sting of her encounter with that awful goblin. There was nothing an hour or two in the kitchen couldn’t fix, unless someone had beaten her there – someone who, to be clear, wasnotsupposed to be there.
“Mum!” Pansy groaned as she set her basket on the counter, the truffle inside rolling lightly across the bottom. “I told you I was going to cook tonight!”
“Oh, honey, it’s fine.” Her mother waved her off with one oven-mitt-clad hand as she stirred the contents of a heavy red saucepan with the other. Judging from the state of her hair, often wilder than even Pansy’s own curls, she had just started: the brown ribbon she always used to hold her hair back while she cooked hadn’t even begun to slip. “You were out all day. You can cook tomorrow instead.”
There it was – the very thing Pansy had been afraid of. She swallowed the sigh that welled up in her throat and said, as kindly as she could manage, “Mum, you know I won’t be here tomorrow.”
Her mother shrugged. “The day after, then.”
“Orthe day after. I’m moving out. We talked about this.”
A beat passed. Her mother said nothing, her gaze fixed on the pot in front of her: filling for a pot pie, Pansy guessed, given the smell – warm and homey and full of butter. But her mother’s thinking had always been plain to see, etched, this time, in the tightness around her mouth.
Finally, a sigh. “Do you really have to leave?” her mother asked plaintively, hazel eyes in the same shade as Pansy’s own flicking over to meet hers. “You’ll be so far away.”
“Not that far,” Pansy corrected, heading over to the basin to wash her hands. Just because her mother had already started on dinner did not mean Pansy couldn’t help. “I already told you I’d come visit. Every ten-day. Like I promised.”
Her mother would not be placated so easily. She shook her head, frowning. “It’s not right. You should be home.Here. With family. Even your grandmother recognized that, in the end, when she moved back to Haverow. Not that it made much of a difference…”
“Mum.” Pansy shot her mother a hard look, her hands stilling on the water jug. “I’m moving into Grandma’s old cottage. Not”– she gestured haphazardly, uncaring of the tiny droplets loosed from her fingertips – “running off to fight in some wizard’s war.”
The notion alone was enough to pull a noise of distress from deep in her mother’s throat. No matter that it had been nearly six decades since the last Great War, and that the Realm was,arguably, at peace – perhaps even the most tranquil it had ever been, with the latest in a long line of dark lords sealed away behind powerful magic, his cruel armies of goblins and orcs decimated by the forces of Good. It mattered even less that Pansy had no interest in following in her grandmother’s footsteps, whether it meant adventuring with some wizard, killing goblins or saving the world. The fact that she wanted to see more – the slightest,ittiestbit more – of what lay beyond the four corners of their cozy little hamlet was enough to mark her as a cause for concern in her mother’s eyes, an echo of an old wound that had never truly healed.
At this point, Pansy’s father, who had doubtless been eavesdropping since the start, poked his head through the doorway and said, “Your mother’s right, Pans. The forest is no place for a halfling. Plus, no one’s lived in that cottage for decades! For all you know, the roof could have been blown clean off by now.”
“Then I’ll fix it,” Pansy declared. Her father’s favorite nickname for her wasn’t going to sway her – not this time. “I know neither of you is happy with my decision, and I’m sorry you feel that way, but my mind is made up.”
“But there could begoblins!” her mother all but wailed, her lower lip trembling as a ruddy haze mottled her usual golden-brown complexion.
Pansy half-wanted to tell her about the goblin she’d encountered earlier, as proof that her mother’s concerns were largely overblown, but that was not what her mother needed right now. Letting out a breath, Pansy wiped her hands on her apron before pulling her mother into the biggest, tightest hug she could muster.
“It’ll be okay, Mum,” she said, resting her chin on her mother’s shoulder like always. “If anything happens, I’ll come rightback.”
A sniffle. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Good.” Pansy’s mother pulled away just enough to lightly dab at her eyes. “I get so worried, knowing that there’ll be goblins living near by. That cottage isrighton the border.”
“Hopefully they’ll stay on their side of it.”
“But what if they don’t? You know, a farmer over in Halfbough found his pasture ransacked just last week. Not a single goat left behind! The work of goblins, no doubt. He swears he heard a whole pack of them cackling outside his bedroom window. Of course, he was too afraid to go outside and check. Smart man. Who knows what they might have done to him if he had? We all remember what happened to Lillishire during the War.” She shuddered.
To be fair, Pansy didn’t exactly “remember” per se; not in the way her parents did. After all, they had been alive during the Great War, while she obviously hadn’t. Yet she knew exactly what her mother was referring to – any halfling would.
Often described as the “darkest moment in halfling history”, the Lillishire Massacre stood as a black albatross over their collective consciousness. Even sixty years later, no one could forget how the dark lord’s goblin armies had swept through nearly two-dozen halfling villages to the east, razing them to the ground while putting everyone who hadn’t managed to escape to the sword. Now, instead of two halfling provinces, the Realm had only one.
Perhaps her mother was being a tad overdramatic, referencing Lillishire like that. From what Pansy could tell, petty theft was more goblins’ speed these days. But, at the same time, could she really blame her? Because while Pansy had learned about allof Lillishire’s horrors in the abstract, her mother had seen them firsthand, in the haggard, terror-soaked faces that had flooded Halvenshire in the ten-days and months that had followed, seeking refuge in the only place they had left. That sort of memory wasn’t something you could just shake.
Pansy gave her mother a reassuring pat on the arm. “I already told you, Mum, I’ll come home. You’re acting like the next time I see you I’m going to be telling you all about my new goblin housemate.”
Thankfully, her mother let out a little, hiccuping laugh at that. “You’re right,” she admitted, now smiling as well.
“I usually am. Now what’s for dinner? It smellsdelicious.”
And like it would go well with some truffle. But as to where that truffle had come from – well, Pansy wasn’t going to think too hard about that one.
