Seppo followed my gaze and sighed. “Why is everything beautiful so deadly here? Sometimes I wish I could wake up in the Permafrost and like … paint a picture of the landscape without burning my hands.”

“I’ll get you someone to paint you as many pictures as you want, dear,” Rose said from behind us with humor in his voice.

“But it’s not the same. I want to be able to do it,” he fake-whined.

I smiled slightly at the two of them. “I didn’t even know if halflings were inflicted with the curse that causes goblins not to be able to create.”

“It’s a coin toss,” Seppo said. “I landed on the wrong side of it.”

“Besides,” Rose said, “some of us can do it. Some of us can touch iron and not be bothered by running waters. The only problem is that person has the temper of a five-foot-three raging bull and is named Diaval.”

There was a growl from behind us where Diaval lagged, limping ever so slightly. “I could turn you into a frog, you know. Not a very good frog, it would probably still have humanoid teeth and shocks of red hair and maybe an arm coming out of its guts, but I could do it.”

“You’re absolutely terrifying,” Rose said, not a note of sarcasm in his voice. “How did so much chaos get into such a small woman?”

She gave a devilish smile as she went for a comeback only to stop and fall to her knees, groaning. One hand reached out toward the wound she said was a scratch on her thigh. Everyone but Lydian ran over to her, a desperate murmur filling up the air.

“I don’t think that’s a scratch, Diaval,” I said, narrowing my eyes in an attempt to guilt her for her lie. Sometimes it was cool that Diaval didn’t have the limitations normal goblins had due to her ability to use magic; now was not one of those times. Whereas the others would probably be healed by now, Diaval wasn’t.

She hissed in pain as she slowly lowered the fabric to show the top of her thigh. It was red and swollen with a thick deep red gash going from her hip to halfway down her thigh. Inflamed and angry, it oozed redness, and pus was starting to form in little pockets in the wound.

“That’s not from the eagle,” Rose said.

That must have caught Lydian’s attention because he finally turned around and looked at Diaval’s wound. Diaval growled at him as if she were a dog telling him to back off.

“That’s definitely not from Hraesvelg,” he responded.