“Why would I?” Deglan made a show of looking at his hands, then put them to his face, feeling his features. “Oh! Well, that is what I get for sleeping. Gone and formed a gnome. So similar to you goblins! Both despicable, stunted. It is a disgrace to wear your skins, a humiliation!”

Canker tried to glimpse the trees without moving his head and Deglan saw his weight shift.

“Do not try and run. I would be upon you before you could make a pair of steps. We gruagach are very fast, Canker.”

Canker did not run. His legs gave out and he hit his knobby knees, his hands raised in appeal. “No! Don’ drowned me! Don’ I beg, don’…don’ drowned me!”

“I’ll not,” Deglan said and hope flitted across the goblin’s face. “If you answer my questions.”

“Yes! I will. Ask anything, I’ll speak it true by my bones. I’ll speak it true and if I says a’right you’ll not drowned me?”

“No, Canker. I will not drown you. Now into the house so we may talk.”

Canker went within all too eagerly. Deglan asked his questions and Canker answered them. He had to keep his face a mask as the goblin spoke, but his guts turned to sickening liquid with every response. Deglan got his answers and kept his promise. He did not drown Canker. He slit his throat to the bone with his cleaver.

Night was coming, but Deglan remained in the hut, his thoughts spreading as darkly as Canker’s blood. Lingering was likely to prove fatal if the main group came back in search of these two, but he could not bring himself to stand. It felt as if he had been on the run forever, as if the intervening years of peace between the last war and now had never transpired. It had felt good killing Nape; a tiny measure of revenge against all the sorrow goblinkind had heaped upon him. But by the time he opened Canker’s throat, vengeance offered no more succor. All the blood in the world would not be enough to weigh against what had been and what would be if Canker’s final confessions could be believed.

And Deglan believed.

He shook his head roughly. “Enough of this wallowing! Miles to go and sitting here will not remedy that.”

Deglan pushed himself to his feet and went out the door.