Chapter 8

I spent the day wandering the market with Mirri at my side, figuring my odds of getting swindled were significantly lower with her around. I still had no idea what anything cost, and with only twenty coins left in my pocket, I couldn’t afford to make a stupid purchase.

I picked up two sets of clothes, a pack with a small tent and bedroll, a basic mess kit, a knife, a flint striker, a few days of dried food, and whatever other odds and ends Mirri insisted were “absolutely essential.” I also bought fifty feet of rope, heavy as sin, because what kind of adventurer didn’t carry rope? Mirri didn’t understand the point, but I tied it to the bottom of my pack anyway and felt oddly proud of myself for it.

While we were out, I bought Mirri a fruit pastry and a butterfly-shaped hairpin she kept glancing at but clearly didn’t have coin for. It wasn’t much, but it felt good to be able to give her something back. By the time we were done shopping, I had nine gold coins left and a handful of lesser metals jangling around.

That night, the three of us settled in the cramped little room. Mirri and I sat side by side on one of the beds while Ashlara sharpened her axe on the opposite one, dragging her whetstone across the blade in long, steady strokes.

Mirri and I chatted about nothing in particular, but only half my mind was engaged. The other half was desperately trying to figure out how to phrase a question without sounding like I had the mental capacity of a concussed toddler. Mirri joked about that sometimes, my “possible brain damage”, but I was reasonably sure she was kidding. Mostly sure.

She must’ve noticed my attention drifting, but she didn’t call me out on it, just kept the conversation flowing and gave me space to wrestle with my own awkwardness.

Eventually, I decided it was now or never. Mirri was my friend. She’d survived plenty of dumb questions from me already; one more wasn’t going to break her.

So when our conversation hit a natural slump, I dove in. “Hey, uh… Mirri? Can I ask a stupid question? Like, a really stupid question. One I should absolutely already know the answer to, but don’t?”

“I’m twenty,” she said, smirking.

“I… what?”

“I’m twenty. People always think I’m younger because…” Her expression darkened, just a flicker. “Because I’m so small.” She **** a smile again, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Oh. Good to know. But that’s not, uh… that’s not what I was going to ask.” I tried to smile back, hoping to soothe whatever insecurity I’d accidentally brushed against and also give myself some courage. “So… Ashlara’s an orc, right?”

The scraping of the whetstone halted for a fraction of a second. Then resumed. I couldn’t see her from where I sat, but I could feel her attention like a weight. Heat crept up my neck.

Mirri blinked. After a pause where she became sure I was waiting for an answer, she replied “Yeah…”

“And I’m human.” I said this with a little more confidence, because at least that was one thing I knew for sure. Probably.

“Uh huh…” she said slowly.

“So, uh… what are you?”

She stared. Not blinking. Not moving. Not breathing. Just staring straight through me.

Seconds stretched into eternities. She should’ve blinked at least once. Why wasn’t she blinking? Why wasn’t she saying anything? Oh God, I messed up. I messed up so bad.

Her eyes grew round and glossy. Her shoulders trembled. Her face turned red.

“Mirri… I didn’t mean-”

And then she exploded. One moment she was frozen in horrified silence, and the next she was laughing hard enough to fold in half. She toppled sideways and rolled right off the bed. I lurched after her, unsure if I was supposed to help or just stand there while she died of laughter.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. “You…” she wheezed. “Me…” She curled tighter, shaking uncontrollably. “Fuck! This hurts…” She tried to inhale and choked on her own hysterics. “Holy… Mother… Matron…”

It took a few minutes for her to settle down. Every time she tried to speak, another tremor of laughter shook through her, sending her back into breathless giggles. I waited it out, doing my best not to get dragged along with her contagious cackling.

At last she managed a series of steady breaths and straightened, though her mouth was still fighting an uneven grin.

“I’m a…” She strangled another giggle. “I’m a goblin,” she finally said, breath hiccuping as she **** the laugh back down. “Haven’t ever seen a goblin before?”

“I… ah… no. We don’t have goblins where I’m from,” I said, the words slipping out in a sigh caught somewhere between relief and awkwardness.

“You must be from a long ways away,” she murmured, suddenly pinning me with a sharp, almost unsettlingly focused stare. “What’s it like?”

“What’s what like? Being far from home? Or… home itself?”

“What’s home like?” she clarified and leaned towards me.

“It’s… very different,” I said softly. “I lived in a city. I had a job that - well, it doesn’t matter anymore. And I… was sort of married.”

“Sort of?” she echoed.

“We were in the middle of a divorce. She - well, that doesn’t matter either.”

Her eyes didn’t soften; they sharpened, as if she were trying to read something beneath my skin. “What do I look like to you?”

I frowned. “What?”

“When you look at me, does it look like I have lines carved in me? What about Ashlara? Or this room? Do they have lines carved into them?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No carvings.”

She looked dejected for a few moments. “Hm…”

“Why would you think you have lines?”

“Oh, I don’t,” she said quickly. “It’s something my great Granda used to say. Grams said he was always talking about grooves in things. And I just thought… well, he was a Nomad. And maybe you were a Nomad too?”

That didn’t help. “What’s a Nomad? I mean, other than someone who travels.”

“Oh, my great Granda was human,” she said brightly. “And he came from another world! He was amazing. I mean, I never met him, but everyone says he was amazing. He showed up one day and said he was from a place called Erv. And they had all this great stuff there, like peace and love and everything. Great Grams said he was the best fuck she ever had, so it must be true, right?”

“Wait, your great Grams said-”

“Yeah! And then they had my Grams, and he taught her how to make kites, and sing songs, and play ‘chest,’ and fold paper birds that flew through the air!”

My mind spun. It couldn’t mean what it sounded like. It shouldn’t. But I was here, wasn’t I? And if I was, maybe someone else was too.

“Where’s your great Granda now?” I asked quietly.

“He disappeared one night. Just, poof.” She snapped her fingers. “One second he was sleeping next to Great Grams, and the next he was gone.”

I let out a long breath. Started to say something, stopped, walked a few steps away, then turned back to her. “Are you telling me your great Granda was… a hippie?”

She blinked. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Did he have long hair?”

“Yep!”

“And he liked flowers?”

“Hell yeah!”

“And…” I braced myself. “And he said everything was groovy?”

“FUCK YES!” she roared. “I FUCKIN’ KNEW IT! YOU’RE A FUCKIN’ NOMAD!”

“I… uh… what?”

“IknewitIknewitIknewit!” she shouted, bouncing off of the bed. “People don’t understand me ‘cause I say weird shit. Like ‘what’s the story, mornin’ glory’ and ‘what’s your tale, nightingale’. And I say shit like ‘bummer’ and ‘no sweat’ and ‘nifty’ ‘cause that’s how my Grams talks. ‘CAUSE THAT’S HOW MY GREAT GRANDA TALKED! And you never bat an eye. You never ask what I mean. You just fuckin’ KNOW!”

The room sank into a dense, uncomfortable quiet. At some point Ashlara had stopped working her axe, and without the steady scrape of stone on metal, the stillness felt even heavier - like the air itself had thickened.

A sudden thud slammed against the wall beside Ashlara, followed by someone on the other side barking, “Shut up!” Ashlara’s answering punch hit the same spot with a crack that rattled the frame.

Mirri slapped both hands over her mouth to smother a shriek, her eyes enormous and glittering, her whole body vibrating like she might lift off the floor.

I hunched in on myself. “I… uh… guess I’m a Nomad,” I admitted.

She squealed through her fingers, a high-pitched noise that probably should’ve counted as another disturbance.

“You have to tell me everything,” she hissed in an urgent, breathless whisper.

“Well, uh… how old is your Grams?” I asked.

“Sixty-one! No, sixty-two!” she corrected, bouncing on her toes.

“Makes sense,” I murmured. “That would put him around the same age as my dad.” I sat back down on the mattress, but Mirri didn’t join me. She just hovered there in front of me, practically vibrating out of her skin. “So… the sixties were before I was born, but there was this movement. A counterculture focused on freedom, peace, love, and, uh… recreational substances. It sort of rose up around the Vietnam War, at least partly-”

“Okay, okay, okay,” she interrupted, flapping her hands. “What’s a counterculture? And what’s a Vietnam? Because this already sounds just like Great Granda! Grams said he loved dreamcaps and was usually high as a kite!”

I let out a long, slow breath. “This… is going to be a long night.”

* * *

I did my best to give Mirri a crash course on the sixties, with a few detours into the seventies and the eighties of my youth. Ashlara eventually stretched out on her bed and did her level best to pretend we didn’t exist. Mirri, meanwhile, couldn’t go thirty seconds without interrupting - sometimes with questions, sometimes with some half-remembered story from her Grams meant to prove her great Granda was exactly the kind of person I was describing.

By the time exhaustion set in, I gave up and lay down on the floor, insisting Mirri take the bed. She tried to argue, but she’d earned the comfort more than I had, so I held my ground. Even after we settled, her head kept popping over the mattress edge every few minutes so she could whisper another question that had been bouncing around her skull. I must’ve fallen asleep mid-answer, because eventually she gave up.

The next morning she was calmer, but not by much. She peppered me with more questions over breakfast, a pie made of meat, eggs, and some kind of grain, before suddenly declaring, “We have to go see my Grams!”

Ashlara lifted her head from her pie and fixed her with a long, unreadable stare, but didn’t say anything.

“She needs to know! I mean, how often does something like this actually happen?” Mirri leaned in, voice dropping. “She’s in Reedwatch. That’s only a couple weeks from here. And besides…” She glanced at Ashlara again. “No one would think to look for us there.”

Ashlara seemed to chew on that, both the idea and her pie, then lowered her gaze again without comment.

An hour later she wandered off on her own, and Mirri dragged me back upstairs so we could continue her history lesson without an audience.

Around noon, the orc returned and told me to grab my sword. I followed her out to a small, hard-packed yard that looked like the guards’ training space. There she walked me through the basics of sword work. It was nothing like a staff - bigger movements, more weight, a rhythm that demanded commitment instead of hesitation. Even parrying felt wildly different. I was clumsy, sloppy, and out of breath within minutes.

We eventually switched back to staff drills, then unarmed practice, which mostly involved Ashlara tossing me in the dirt whenever I hesitated. Training lasted nearly until nightfall. But I didn’t complain and I pushed as hard as my shaking limbs would let me. I wouldn’t waste her instruction or the money I’d paid for it.

After dinner we headed to a bathhouse to scrub off the sweat and grime we’d collected over the day. The longhouse was rough-hewn timber, lined with a dozen oblong barrels that passed for baths, each separated by a flimsy partition of woven twigs—just enough privacy to pretend we had some. A small crew of women kept the water hot, topping each barrel with steaming buckets every few minutes. As I sank into the heat, I remembered how good a bath could feel. How good it felt just to be clean again.

The orc women working the bathhouse, much like the ones I’d seen here and back in Wolfsend, were roughly Ashlara’s height, though not built quite like her. “Not as fit” wasn’t the right way to describe them. They were lean and hard, all sleek lines and tight muscle, with almost no softness to speak of. Their short leather tops did little to hide the ridges of their abs, and their arms and legs were etched with definition.

Ashlara, though… Ashlara was different. Not bulkier - no, never that - but larger in a way that seemed unfair to the rest of them. Her thighs curved into her hips with effortless power. Her chest looked fuller, partly because of the sheer strength supporting it. Her waist drew inward a touch more, framing everything above and below it. Her posture carried a kind of natural grace, the quiet confidence of someone who knew exactly what her body could do. She was a sight to behold.

The goblin women, meanwhile, all shared the same voluptuous figure I’d seen on the waitress at the inn: wide hips, sturdy thighs, impossibly narrow waists, and breasts that seemed too generous for their small frames. They were, in a word, overwhelming.

Mirri wasn’t like them. She was petite, her bust modest, maybe a B cup if I had to guess. Her waist didn’t flare dramatically into curving hips; it flowed into long, smooth legs without any abrupt lines. She had tone without bulk, grace without softness. But whatever she lacked in… shape… she made up for in every other way imaginable. She was quick and bright and beautiful in a way that snuck up on you. Patient. Easygoing, despite her swearing. Fun, warm, relentlessly alive.

Both she and Ashlara were so far out of my league it was laughable. But I was happy with them. Happy in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. I didn’t want to risk spoiling any of it. So I resolved to be the perfect gentleman, help wherever I could, and not expect anything more than what I already had.

Honestly… being friend-zoned by the two of them didn’t feel like losing at all.