In Kuroinu

Llusse was halfway through explaining what I was supposed to be looking at when the horn sounded.

She'd set me up at the edge of the training yard facing the tree line, bow in her hands, and told me to call out anything that moved in the brush. We'd been at it for maybe twenty minutes. I'd spotted a rabbit, a bird, and what turned out to be a branch moving in the wind, and she'd called me an idiot for the last one. Normal morning.

The horn was a low, ugly sound, and it came from the eastern road. Llusse went still. Her ears rotated before the rest of her did, and then she was moving, bow coming up, quiver settling against her hip as she turned.

"Goblins," she said. "East side. Close."

Filia came out of the temple at a jog, sword already drawn, her armor half-buckled. She must have been in the middle of putting it on. Her eyes found Llusse first, then me.

"Stay behind Tianne," she said. To me. Then she was past us, and Llusse was behind her, and they were heading toward the eastern road at a pace that left me standing in the yard feeling useless.

Tianne appeared beside me. She had her healing staff in one hand and her other hand was already glowing faintly with readied magic.

"Stay close," she said. Calm voice. Professional. She'd done this before.

I followed.

The goblins were at the edge of the farmland where the goat pen met the road. Five of them, squat and green-skinned, carrying crude weapons. Clubs, one rusty short sword, a length of chain. They were ugly in a way that photographs don't prepare you for. The skin was wrong, waxy and mottled, and they moved in quick jerky lunges. One of them had blood on its mouth from something it had killed on the way here. A chicken, maybe, based on the feathers stuck to its chin.

Filia hit them at a run.

The lead goblin didn't even get its club up before her sword took its arm off at the elbow. The thing screamed, high-pitched and wet, and the two behind it stumbled back. Filia stepped into the gap and cut down the second one with a backhand swing that caught it across the chest.

She was fast. I'd sparred with her yesterday and she'd been holding back so much it was embarrassing. This was her actual speed, and it was frightening. Her sword arm was precise and every strike landed exactly where she wanted it. No wasted movement at all.

Llusse was already on the third and fourth. Two arrows in the time it took me to blink. The first caught one through the throat. The second punched through the other's eye socket and it dropped without making a sound. Her face was blank. Focused. She drew and released with no wasted motion and her breathing never changed.

The fifth goblin ran. Llusse put an arrow through its calf before it made it ten steps and Filia finished it.

I stood behind Tianne and watched the whole thing. My heart was hammering and my hands were shaking and I hadn't done a single useful thing. The fight lasted maybe fifteen seconds. The girls handled it like a chore. A violent, bloody chore that left five bodies on the ground and the smell of copper and opened guts in the air, but a chore.

They smelled worse dead than alive. The green skin was already going grey at the edges and the blood was dark, almost black, pooling in the dirt around the bodies. Flies were already finding them. I breathed through my mouth and tried to look like a person who'd seen this before.

"Clear?" Filia called.

"Clear," Llusse confirmed. She was scanning the tree line, bow still up.

I was scanning too. My eyes had been trained on the brush all morning and the goblins had come from the east, but the tree line curved south and there was a gully there, a depression in the ground that I could see from my position behind Tianne but Llusse couldn't see from hers.

Three more in the gully. Moving low. Circling.

The left flank.

"Llusse! Left, in the ditch, three of them!"

She pivoted. The first arrow was in the air before I finished the sentence. It caught the front goblin in the chest and knocked it backward into the one behind it. The third one broke from cover and charged toward Tianne, screaming, chain swinging. Llusse's second arrow hit it in the neck and it went down face-first in the dirt three steps from where I was standing.

My legs were locked. I couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to. The goblin twitched once and went still, and the arrow shaft stuck out of its neck at an angle, fletching dirty with blood.

Filia killed the last one while it was still tangled with the body of the first.

Quiet. The birds had stopped. The only sound was breathing. Mine was the loudest.

"How did you see that?" Llusse was staring at me. Her bow was still half-drawn and her green eyes were wide, and she wasn't looking at me with contempt. "They were below the sight line. I didn't have the angle."

"I was watching." My voice was steady. My hands were still shaking. I put them in my pockets. "You were covering right. I covered left."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she put the arrow back in her quiver and turned away, and when she spoke her voice was different. Quieter. Less performance in it.

"Good call," she said.

Filia was checking the bodies. She moved through them efficiently, confirming each kill, checking for anything that might indicate where they'd come from or whether more were following. She wiped her blade on one of them and sheathed it. Yesterday she'd spent an hour patiently correcting my grip. Today she'd killed three goblins in ten seconds and her breathing hadn't changed.

"Scout party," she said. "Small. Probably separated from a larger group." She looked at the road east. "We should report this to the village. And we need to talk to the innkeeper about whether anyone else has seen activity in the area."

I looked down and realized there was blood on my forearm. The goblin that had gone down near me had caught me with the chain on its way to the ground. A shallow cut, already welling red, and I hadn't felt it until now.

"You're bleeding," Tianne said.

"Oh." I looked at it. "I didn't notice."

She took my arm. Her fingers wrapped around my wrist and she turned it so the cut faced up. Her other hand hovered over the wound and the same warm pulse from the summoning day moved through my skin, gentle, and the cut sealed shut in about two seconds.

But she didn't let go.

Her face was close to mine. The small scar above her left eyebrow that I hadn't noticed before, her lashes casting shadows on her cheeks when she looked down. She smelled like she always did, herbs and lavender and the greener thing underneath that I still couldn't name. Her breath was warm on my arm where the cut had been, and her thumb was making a slow circle on the inside of my wrist, right over the vein.

"All better," she said. Her voice was quiet and her eyes came up and met mine and her pupils were wide and dark in the afternoon light.

"Thank you, Tianne."

She let go. Stepped back. Tucked hair behind her ear and turned to face the road like it had suddenly become very interesting.

The inn was a low-ceilinged building at the edge of the village with a sign that might have had a picture of a horse on it once, before the weather got to the paint. We went in because Filia wanted to warn the innkeeper about the goblins and because I needed to sit down somewhere that didn't smell like dead things.

She came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of bread and stew before we'd even sat down.

Dog ears. Brown, soft-furred, standing upright on top of her head. A tail behind her that was already wagging before she'd fully cleared the kitchen door. Round face, bright eyes, an expression that was so openly happy to see customers that it made me feel guilty for not being hungrier.

Mila Micola.

I knew her immediately. Beastkin handmaid from the source material. Loyal to a fault, warm in a way that was impossible to fake, and the glue that held the party together in ways the combat trio never acknowledged until she wasn't there. She was shorter than Tianne and rounder in the face, and her ears were expressive enough that you could read her mood from across a room. Right now her mood was delighted.

She put the tray down on our table and her tail was going so fast it bumped the chair behind her.

"Welcome! You're the hero's party, yes? Everyone's been talking about you since the summoning." She beamed at Filia. "I'm so glad you came in. The stew is fresh, I just made it. Please sit, please, I'll get more bread-"

"Thank you, Mila," I said.

Her ears perked straight up. Her tail froze mid-wag.

"You... know my name?"

The table went quiet. Llusse's eyes flicked to me. Filia's spoon paused halfway to the stew.

"The innkeeper mentioned you when we passed through yesterday," I said. "Said you were the one who keeps this place running."

Mila's ears twitched and her tail resumed at double speed. "He said that? Really? That's- oh, that's so nice of him. He never says things like that to my face." She laughed. It was a bright, short sound and her ears bounced with it. "Well, please eat! And let me know if you need anything. Anything at all!"

She bustled back to the kitchen. I picked up my spoon.

The stew was good. Root vegetables and chunks of meat in a thick broth that was probably the best thing I'd eaten since arriving in this world, which wasn't saying much because I'd mostly been eating travel bread and whatever Tianne had scraped together from the temple supplies. Filia ate fast and focused, refueling. Llusse tore bread apart with her fingers and didn't look up.

Llusse was still looking at me when I reached for the butter dish. It had a crack running through the glaze.

"What?" I said.

"The innkeeper didn't mention her."

"Sure he did."

"We didn't go inside the inn yesterday."

I ate a spoonful of stew and took my time chewing.

"He mentioned her when Filia was talking to the smith," I said. "You were watching the goats."

Llusse held my eyes for a long second. Then she picked up her bread and tore off a piece.

"You notice a lot of things," she said, "for someone who's been here two days."

I didn't answer. From the kitchen, Mila was humming.