The North Road wound its way through the great forests of northern Almenor like a pale ribbon cut through an endless sea of green. Towering oaks and pines crowded close to the track, their branches weaving together high overhead until only shafts of golden afternoon sunlight reached the road below. Moss covered the stones beside the path, and a cool breeze carried the smell of damp leaves and pine needles.

It was, Thorn Axehand decided, a very good place for an ambush.

He did not say so aloud. He had read that heroes should keep their fears to themselves and their eyes on the trees, and so he kept his eyes on the trees, and his hand near his axe, and walked at the front with his jaw set at what he hoped was a heroic angle.

Beside him padded Loki, nose close to the ground, investigating every smell the forest had to offer. Every so often he vanished into the undergrowth before trotting happily back to Thorn’s side with something disgusting in his mouth.

Behind them came Derek, steady as a walking barrel with boots, his shield across his back and his warhammer resting on one shoulder. Derek walked at exactly the same speed whatever happened. He had been on a great many roads in his long life, and he had learned that trouble usually came to you, so there was no need to hurry towards it.

Dave followed next, and Dave was a problem, in the way that weather is a problem. He was six foot seven, so that Thorn could always spot his scaled copper head above the ferns, and he was seven years old, so that Thorn could always hear him too.

“Are we nearly there?” said Dave.

“No,” said Thorn.

“How about now?”

“We’ve been walking for three days, Dave. Fallcrest is another two.”

Dave thought about this for a moment. “So we’re nearly there.”

Somewhere under Dave’s cloak, something small stirred: a familiar, resting in the pocket between worlds, Dave said, though he rarely explained further. He kept glancing at the trees, muttering under his breath and wiggling his fingers through the motions of a spell, partly to practise and partly because he liked the noise his claws made.

Nibbles McPicklepants brought up the rear, some distance behind, because ten minutes earlier he had seen something shiny in the mud and was still hoping there might be more.

“You know,” Dave said eventually, “I always thought adventures would have more dragons.”

“We’ve only been travelling three days,” said Thorn.

“I know, but dragons seem like the sort of thing that should happen quite early. Like in the first bit.”

“They’re probably saving themselves,” said Derek.

Before Dave could ask what dragons would be saving themselves for, a triumphant voice drifted from behind.

“I’ve found treasure!”

Nobody stopped walking. Thorn sighed. “What is it this time, Nibbles?”

The dragonborn rogue emerged from the bushes holding something between two claws, turning it to the light like a jeweller. “A button.”

“It’s a button,” agreed Derek.

“It’s a brass button,” said Nibbles. “With a little anchor on it. It might have belonged to somebody important. A sea captain. An admiral. I’d value it at four coppers, possibly five to the right buyer.”

“It might have belonged to somebody with a hole in their shirt,” said Derek.

Nibbles slipped the button into one of his many belt pouches anyway, and made a small note in a small book, which he had begun keeping and called his ledger. “You never know,” he said.

That, Thorn thought, was true enough. The four had known one another only a short time, but each was already wonderfully predictable. Dave asked endless questions. Derek noticed the things everyone else missed. Nibbles could not walk past any object without wondering what it was worth. And Loki assumed that everyone they met would either become a friend or need barking at, and was usually right.

---

The road ahead dipped into a shallow hollow where an old fallen log lay half across the track, moss-covered and slowly being swallowed by the forest. And in the dust beside it, glittering in a shaft of sunlight, lay a small, neat heap of gold coins.

Loki stopped walking. His ears stood upright and the cheerful wagging of his tail disappeared.

Thorn froze and raised a hand for the others to halt. The forest had fallen silent. No birds. No insects. Even the breeze seemed to pause.

“Don’t touch that,” Thorn said quietly.

Nibbles had already taken two careful steps forward. He stopped, sighed, and crouched to study the coins from a safe distance. Then he reached out with the tip of his dagger, flicked one towards him, picked it up, and bent it between his claws as easily as a leaf.

His face fell. Then it hardened. Of all the dangers of the road, Nibbles found this one the most personally offensive.

“It’s not even good fake gold,” he said. “It’s tin. It’s painted tin. It’s thin as cheese. Who would fall for this?”

“So it’s a trap,” whispered Dave.

“Obviously,” murmured Derek.

“It’s not a trap,” said Nibbles, “it’s an insult.”

They spread out and moved forward with more care, weapons ready, eyes on the trees.

It was not enough care.

A twig snapped. Then another. Half a dozen small green figures burst from the undergrowth, waving rusty swords and crude spears, their armour held together with bits of string. The largest of them scrambled onto the fallen log and spread his arms like a showman.

“No fighting!” he squeaked. “We make bargain!”

Nibbles’ ears pricked up. “What sort of bargain?”

“Nibbles,” said Thorn.

“I’m only asking—”

The goblin grinned, showing a mouthful of unpleasantly sharp teeth, and the archers in the trees let fly. One arrow thudded into the road beside Dave’s foot. Another cracked off Derek’s shield. A third buried itself in the log, an inch from Nibbles’ ear.

“Cheats!” shouted Nibbles, genuinely outraged. “That’s not a bargain! That’s not even a negotiation!”

The goblins howled with laughter. “Fake gold!” one cried. “Stupid travellers!”

Dave squeaked, flung both hands out, and shouted the first spell that came into his head. A potato shot from his fingertips with astonishing speed and struck the goblin on the log squarely between the eyes. The goblin made a small noise like a deflating bagpipe and toppled backwards into the weeds.

Everyone stared. Even the other goblins stared.

Dave looked at his hands. “That worked,” he said. Then, after a moment’s thought: “I meant to do that.”

Thorn did not waste the moment. With a roar he had been practising quietly for three days, he charged, Loki barking furiously at his side. Derek raised his shield and followed at his usual unhurried pace. Nibbles tossed the bent coin over his shoulder, drew his blade, and slipped off through the trees to come at the goblins from the side.

The fight was short, loud and extremely confusing. Thorn drove the goblins back with great sweeping swings. Derek’s shield rang with glancing blows, and Derek did not appear to notice them. Nibbles jabbed one goblin from behind, vanished, and jabbed another from somewhere else entirely.

Dave fired another potato. This one hit a tree. The tree did not seem badly hurt.

“Sorry!” Dave called to the tree.

Soon the goblins’ laughter turned to panic. One threw down its sword and bolted into the forest. Another followed. A third saw Thorn and Loki bearing down on it, made a noise like a boiling kettle, and fled north.

“They’re running!” cried Nibbles.

“After them!” said Thorn, because it was what a hero would say.

“Is that sensible?” asked Derek.

“No,” said Nibbles.

They chased them anyway. Derek sighed and came too, because someone had to.

---

The goblin trail led away from the road, through brambles and up a muddy slope. Loki found a better path than the goblins’ scattered footprints, and Thorn crouched beside a splintered branch to look at the dark spots on the moss.

“Blood,” said Derek quietly.

“Not much,” said Thorn. “But enough.”

Whoever the goblins had dragged this way had not gone quietly. The trail grew clearer as they climbed: a strip of torn cloth on a thorn bush, a dropped arrow, and then, half hidden in the ferns, a battered round shield painted with a soaring falcon above a stone tower.

Derek knew the emblem at once. “Fallcrest,” he said. “This belonged to one of the town guard.”

The cheerful mood drained away. Even Dave was quiet. “Then the goblins have been busy,” said Thorn.

Loki sniffed the shield, then barked towards the top of the slope. Beyond the trees, half hidden by ivy and grey stone, gaped the mouth of a cave, a thin line of smoke drifting from inside.

For a moment they stood at the foot of the slope and listened. From within came faint echoes: scurrying feet, goblin voices, and something that might have been crying.

On a rickety wooden platform above the entrance sat a single goblin guard with a shortbow across its knees. It did not look alert. It did not look fierce. It looked fed up. It was yawning, kicking pebbles down the slope, and glancing more often into the darkness behind it than out into the forest.

An angry voice echoed up from underground. “Oi! Lookout!”

The guard sighed enormously. “What?”

“Are you actually watching?”

“I am watching!”

“You’re useless!”

Another shout came from deeper in the hill. “Ratbag’s nicked my dinner again!”

“Oh, for…” The lookout stood up, slung its bow over its shoulder, and climbed down from the platform without giving the forest so much as a glance. “You lot sort it out yourselves,” it grumbled. “I’m not going near Ratbag again.”

It disappeared into the cave.

The companions stared at the now completely unguarded entrance.

“Who,” said Dave, delighted, “is Ratbag?”

“I don’t want to know,” said Derek.

---

Before anyone set foot inside, Dave murmured two careful words and held out one hand. A small shape unfolded from the air beside his wrist: a pseudodragon no bigger than a house cat, bright-eyed, with coppery scales and her wings folded tight.

“Peggy,” said Dave softly. Everyone called her Peggy. Dave called her Pegs, for reasons he had never explained and nobody had thought to ask about twice. “Go and look, Pegs. Quietly.”

The little familiar slipped into the cave mouth and was gone. Dave’s eyes went distant and glassy, one hand half raised, as though he had gone somewhere else entirely.

“He’s in a trance,” said Derek. “He sees through her eyes.”

“Can he hear us?” said Nibbles.

“No.”

“Dave,” said Nibbles, “owes me six coppers.”

“I heard that,” said Dave, without moving.

For the others it was a long minute of waiting. For Dave it was torchlit stone, dripping water, and the sharp green world of Peggy’s eyes as she glided through the dark. Two goblin warriors arguing over bone dice in a passage to the west. More voices to the east. And, further in still, a smell Peggy did not like at all.

Peggy came back on silent wings and landed on his shoulder. Dave shuddered, gasped, and came back to himself.

“Fighters,” he reported. “Two goblin warriors in the west side, playing dice. More voices to the east. And something that smells like a sock.”

“Ratbag,” said Nibbles darkly.

Dave looked at the cave mouth and swallowed. “I’ll keep watch out here,” he announced. “Caves are dangerous. Someone sensible ought to stay where it’s safe.”

Nobody answered. Loki trotted into the darkness, Thorn close behind, Derek after him, Nibbles slipping in fast, already scanning the walls for hidden doors and stolen coin.

Dave stayed where he was, for about as long as it took to notice how close the trees seemed. A branch creaked somewhere above him.

”…Actually,” he said to no one in particular, “keeping watch is also dangerous when there might be goblins behind you.”

He hurried after the others. “Wait for me!” His voice echoed down the tunnel, which was exactly what everyone had hoped it wouldn’t do.

---

The cave was cooler than the forest. Water dripped from the ceiling, and the floor sloped down through twisting passages lit by smoky torches jammed into cracks in the stone.

The passage soon divided. To the left, a narrow tunnel bent west. To the right, a longer corridor wound east and north, the freshest goblin tracks pressed deep into the dust. And from somewhere further in came the sound of crying, faint but definitely human.

“We stay together,” said Derek firmly. Then he looked at the two tunnels again, and his face fell, because he could already see what was coming.

“We’ll never find whoever they’ve got if we search one tunnel at a time,” said Thorn.

“I know,” said Derek. “I still think it’s a terrible idea.”

“So do I,” Thorn admitted. “But it’s the only one.”

They split up. Thorn, Derek and Loki took the eastern corridor, where the fresh tracks led, because wherever the boss and his prisoner were, that was the way. Dave and Nibbles went west, towards the sound of goblins who were far too interested in dice to be proper guards.

“Treasure never argues this loudly,” whispered Nibbles.

“Neither do sensible people,” Dave whispered back. Then: “Nibbles?”

“What?”

“Am I sensible?”

Nibbles considered this for slightly too long. “Let’s go and find the goblins,” he said.

---

Thorn, Derek and Loki moved carefully along the eastern route until the tunnel opened onto a stretch of floor that looked altogether too smooth. Derek stopped at once and held up a hand.

“Wait.”

Loki froze mid-step. Thorn saw it too: dust lying undisturbed in a perfect rectangle ahead, and the goblin tracks swerving sharply around it. Someone had dug a pit and covered it with branches and earth. Not deep. Just deep enough to break an ankle, or leave someone stuck while goblins laughed from the shadows.

“Trap,” murmured Derek.

He led them the long way round, keeping to solid stone at the very edge. Loki gave the pit a deeply offended look as he passed it. Thorn brought up the rear, axe ready in case a goblin had stayed behind to see who fell in.

The great cavern opened before them not long after: the biggest chamber in the cave, cluttered with stolen goods, broken crates, sacks and barrels. Smoky torches threw jumping light across the walls, and against the far wall stood a rough wooden cage. In it sat a young woman with dirt on her face and a furious expression, the expression of someone who had been angry for several days and had saved some of it for whoever came next.

She looked up as Thorn stepped into the light. “You’re not goblins,” she said.

“No,” said Thorn. “Are you hurt?”

“I’ll live.” She studied him. “I’m Mara. I was carrying a message to Fallcrest when those little monsters ambushed us on the road.”

“Was the message important?”

Before she could answer, a voice shrieked from the shadows.

“Mine! Prisoner mine! Shiny bag mine!”

The goblin boss burst from behind a pile of crates with two warriors scrambling after him. He was taller than the others, and wore a ragged red cloak that had very clearly once been a curtain: it still had the rings along the top. In one hand he waved a rusty sword. And padding at his side, with its nose twitching, came his pet: a giant rat the size of a large dog, with patchy grey fur and a tail like a wet rope.

“My cave!” shrieked the boss. “My prisoner! My Ratbag!”

Ratbag squealed.

The two goblin warriors fanned out to guard the cage, spears raised.

---

Elsewhere in the cave, Dave and Nibbles had found the dice game. Two goblin warriors crouched in a side passage with a pair of bone dice between them, shouting at each other with real feeling.

“You cheated!”

“I did not cheat! You just can’t count!”

“Five plus three is seven in your stupid head, maybe!”

Nibbles listened to this with professional disgust. “It’s eight,” he said, before he could stop himself.

The goblins looked up. For a heartbeat all four of them simply stared at each other.

“I don’t think we need to be quiet any more,” said Nibbles.

The warriors snatched up their blades and charged. It was not an elegant fight. Dave hurled potatoes with far more enthusiasm than accuracy while Nibbles darted in, stabbing at knees and elbows. One goblin tripped over its own dice bag. The other took a potato to the chin and sat down hard, looking betrayed.

When it was over, both goblins lay groaning on the floor, and Nibbles had a shallow cut along one arm.

The western tunnel — where an argument over bone dice became considerably less important.

“Are you all right?” asked Dave.

“I’ve had worse from a bread knife,” said Nibbles, although he did not sound entirely convinced. He scooped up the dice, weighed them in his palm, and frowned. “These are loaded,” he said. “No wonder they were arguing.” He pocketed them anyway. They could hear the boss shrieking somewhere to the east. That seemed more urgent than bandages.

---

Back in the great cavern, the boss saw Loki at almost exactly the same moment that Loki saw Ratbag.

“No,” said the boss.

Loki barked.

Ratbag panicked. He wheeled round with a shriek and fled across the chamber, surprisingly fast for something so large, and Loki went after him without a moment’s hesitation.

“Not Ratbag!” howled the goblin boss.

The chamber erupted. Thorn charged the boss, axe raised, while Derek threw himself at the two goblins guarding the cage. The boss ducked Thorn’s first swing, slashed wildly with his rusty sword, and screamed for his warriors to help him. For a few frantic moments Thorn had all he could do to keep the boss away from Mara. The goblin fought with the fury of someone who has just watched a dog chase his favourite pet across his own living room. Thorn gave ground once, twice, then planted his boots and caught the next blow on the haft of his axe.

Derek fought the way Derek did everything: steadily, patiently, without any sign of hurry. One goblin’s spear rang off his shield. The other was knocked flat before it could complain. The first tried again, met the hammer, and decided that its loyalty to the boss had limits. From the cage Mara shouted encouragement, which helped more than anyone expected.

Meanwhile Ratbag had tried to squeeze under a broken table, and got stuck halfway. Loki seized his chance. There was a furious scuffle, one enormous squeal, one triumphant bark, and the goblin boss turned just in time to see his beloved pet meet a heroic but unfortunate end.

The great cavern — Thorn, Derek, Mara, Loki, and a goblin chief who had just lost an argument with a dog.

“Ratbag!” wailed the boss.

It was the last mistake he made. Thorn knocked the sword from his hand and put him on his knees with the flat of the axe. Derek smashed the cage lock with one blow of his hammer, and Mara stumbled free. The last two goblins took one look at Thorn, one look at Loki, and fled shrieking into the tunnels.

Loki trotted back and sat at Thorn’s feet, tail thumping once against the stone. Thorn rested a hand on the dog’s head. He did not say anything. He did not need to.

This dignified moment was interrupted by a crash from the entrance passage, followed by Dave’s voice shouting, “I can’t see anything!” and Nibbles replying, “Stop standing on me!”

Derek closed his eyes. “Tell me you did not.”

“We were hurrying,” said Dave, from somewhere below floor level.

Thorn walked over to a second hidden pit, dug just inside the cavern’s entrance to catch anyone rushing in to help. Dave and Nibbles looked up from the bottom of it, covered in dust and dignity in roughly equal measure.

“You missed the signs,” said Derek, pointing at the goblin tracks, which went politely round the suspicious patch of earth instead of across it.

“We were in a hurry,” said Nibbles.

“So was the pit,” said Derek.

It took several minutes, a rope made from stolen sacking, and a great deal of muttering before everyone stood on solid ground again. By then the cave had fallen quiet except for Mara’s breathing and the drip of water. Derek checked everyone’s injuries with the calm efficiency of a cleric who had learned long ago not to ask too many questions, and checked them all a second time, because that was what Derek did.

---

“Thank you,” said Mara, when he had finished with her. “All of you.”

She pulled a leather satchel out from beneath a pile of stolen cloaks and held it tight against her chest. Near the cage lay another piece of equipment: a round shield, painted with the same falcon and tower, scorched and dented, but with a faint hum in the wood that Thorn could feel the moment his fingers brushed the rim.

“That belonged to my escort,” said Mara quietly. “He didn’t make it.”

She looked at Thorn for a long moment, then held the shield out to him. “You’re the one they couldn’t knock down. Take it. I think he’d want it used by someone who needs it.”

Thorn took it carefully. It was heavier than his own, but the old magic woven into it settled into his grip as though it had been waiting for him. Once each day, Mara explained, the ward in the wood could be woken, and for a whole fight it would turn aside blows that should have landed.

Thorn held it up, and for the first time in his life looked exactly like the hero he had always meant to be.

“What were they after?” he asked, nodding at the satchel.

“I don’t think they knew what it was,” said Mara. “But someone did.”

She opened it just far enough for them to glimpse old parchment inside, covered in strange marks: lines, symbols and shapes far older than any ordinary map.

“I was taking this to Fallcrest,” she said. “To the wizard Nimozaran.”

Derek’s eyebrows rose. “The wizard?”

“Or at least to his apprentice. It has to reach him.”

“Then we’ll get you there,” said Thorn.

Mara studied him for a moment, then smiled. “I believe you.”

---

Thorn searched the boss’s belongings while Nibbles prowled the rest of the chamber with the air of a man certain that every goblin in the world had personally stolen from him. The goblin chief had collected a few worthwhile prizes. On his belt was a silver dagger, faintly warm to the touch, its edge sharper than ordinary steel. In a locked box, which gave up its secrets to Nibbles in under a minute, was a heap of real coins. And in a crate of stolen gear Derek found a stoppered glass vial: a potion of healing, clear and faintly glowing.

Nibbles bit a coin, then another. His whole face changed. “Real gold,” he breathed. “Not buttons. Not tin. Actual money.”

“And actual magic,” said Dave, peering at the dagger over Thorn’s shoulder. “That is definitely not a normal dagger.”

“Then it’s worth at least forty gold,” said Nibbles quickly, “and I’ll take it in place of my share of the coins, minus the six coppers Dave owes me—”

“I don’t owe you six coppers.”

“You do now. I wrote it down.”

They divided the coins, and let Derek keep the potion. The silver dagger went to Nibbles, who spent the next five minutes admiring it and the five after that telling everyone else how much it was worth.

Leaving the cave took longer than entering it, mostly because Nibbles insisted on checking every remaining box and crack. Most of what he found was useless: turnips, socks, and one sack containing something that moved, which he wisely decided to leave where it was.

“What do you think’s in it?” whispered Dave.

“Something that isn’t worth anything,” said Nibbles firmly, and walked away quite quickly.

---

At last they came out into daylight. The forest seemed brighter than before, and the danger, for now, had passed. Mara walked at Thorn’s side with purpose despite her tiredness. Dave rubbed the elbow he had landed on in the pit and explained to everybody that caves were statistically more dangerous than forests, which Nibbles said was only true if you didn’t count treasure. Loki walked with his head held high, enormously pleased with himself. Derek carried his hammer as though nothing remarkable had happened at all, which was how Derek preferred things.

“When we reach town,” said Mara, “come to the Blue Moon Alehouse. I owe you a proper reward. Food, drink, coin if I can arrange it.”

“Food?” said Dave.

“Drink?” said Derek.

“Coin?” said Nibbles. “How much coin, roughly? Ballpark?”

“Loki likes sausages,” said Thorn.

Mara laughed for the first time since they had found her. “I’ll see what I can do.”

So the companions returned to the North Road: Thorn Axehand with a new shield on his back, Derek the cleric, Dave the potato wizard, Nibbles McPicklepants with a brass button, a magic dagger and a pair of loaded dice, and Loki, slayer of Ratbag.

They had left that road as strangers. They came back to it as heroes of the North Road.

And far away, though none of them knew it yet, old magic stirred beneath ancient stone.