I eyed the iron warily—it may not have hurt me anymore, not like back when I held it in my hand to light up a flame to kill the draugr during the Hunt—but I still had an almost superstitious bad feeling in my gut when I was around it.

I lifted my axe out of its holster and handed it to her. She wasted no time hammering the back of the stake into the earth with the blunt, back side of the axe until it was grounded into the bank of the raging river. The land screamed out noiselessly at the painful intrusion, and a sharp bolt of pain went through my side as if someone had hammered the stake into me instead of the ground. Despite it staying the same on the surface, I could see behind my eyelids, almost like a second scene, the ground writhing and thrashing beneath us, trying to expel the foreign object inside of it. Blood leaked out of the land as it cried out in pain. I offered a silent apology, though I doubted the land cared as we forced poisoned iron into the ground.

When she was done, she tied a rope to the end of the iron stake—something else that came out of her pack—and tied it tightly around the stake, making sure it wouldn’t slip off.

“All right, I’ll be right back.” She rolled up the leathers again, this time with my axe and the rope inside it as well as the stake, and tucked it under one arm. I frowned. Was she going to do what I thought she would? Surely even she wasn’t that bold.

“Wait, Diaval—” Rosamund said in horror as the she-goblin plunged into the icy water. For a moment, she was thrashed by the current, bobbing up and down, being thrown left and right by the torrents of water and ice. She went under as an ice floe hit her, and despite the pain of the running water, all three male goblins and I stepped forward, peering into the churning darkness.

It was quiet for a long, painful moment, and I gripped Soren’s hand, squeezing it as my heart raced for my friend. But as I was starting to truly fear she’d drowned, Diaval burst out of the water on the other side, breathing deep in the cold air. She pulled herself out of the river by her arms, crawling low with her belly until she was all the way onto the opposite bank. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding and relaxed my grip on Soren’s hand. He gazed at the redness, the mark of strength from my grip, in surprise.