He kicked one, felled another with a punch and then found himself on the ground. The kobolds swarmed over him like lice. Reynevan yelled, kicked out, punched blindly, even bit, ineffectively. Each time he threw one off, two more took its place. The situation was beginning to become perilous. Suddenly, one of the kobolds dug its claws into his hair and ears and another landed on his face, stopping up his nose and mouth with its hairy behind. He began to suffocate and panic seized him. He felt teeth clamping onto his thighs and calves. He kicked out clumsily, but the kobolds clung on tightly to his legs. Reynevan jerked his head out from under the hairy backside smothering him and howled. Desperately and inhumanly.

And just like in a fairy tale—help was at hand. The track suddenly resounded with shouts, neighing and the thudding of iron-shod hooves. Something swept the kobold from his face and the weight on his legs also vanished. Reynevan saw above him a horse’s belly and an iron sabaton in a stirrup, caught sight of the flash of a sword and watched blood gush from the severed doglike head. Right beside him, another waldschrat was thrashing about and squirming, pinned to the ground by a bear spear. Hooves were thudding all around him, spraying wet sand. He heard cursing, laughing, guffawing. As though there was a reason for merriment.

“Get up,” he heard from above. “We’ve driven the devils away.”

He got to his feet. He was surrounded by armoured men on horseback. Among them was the knight who had told him to stand up, wiping the blood from his sword blade. Reynevan saw a moustachioed face shaded by a raised hounskull helmet. It was strangely familiar.

“In one piece? They didn’t bite anything important off?”

The armoured men guffawed when he involuntarily ran his hands over his now ragged trousers. The knight removed his helmet. Reynevan recognised him right away.

“So it was worth it,” said Janko Schaff, Lord of Chojnik Castle, resting a fist on the pommel of his saddle. “It was worth hanging around here for a few days. I felt you’d abscond from Trosky, Reynevan of Bielawa.”

They made a stop close by the track, under a grove of large oaks. Several of the soldiers had set off on a pretty hopeless pursuit of the kobolds. The rest spent some time looking in amazement at the corpses and talking. Finally, the remains of four of the dead waldschrats were hanging by their legs from branches, and the esquires and servants had begun to skin them as trophies and proof of the victory. Reynevan watched gloomily. He wasn’t sure if they wouldn’t start skinning him, too. Jan Schaff’s apparently benign but at the same time mischievously cunning expression didn’t bode well. Reynevan didn’t let the feigned cordiality delude him.