Chapter 4: Taxes for Goblins

The first arrow hit the notice board.

It struck dead center through Ethan’s freshly posted labor roster with a hard, wooden thunk, quivering between “ditch-clearing duty” and “latrine inspection rotation.” For one very strange second, in the cool gray light of dawn, he simply stared at it with the weary disbelief of a man whose life had become so aggressively unreasonable that even being shot at felt like an administrative inconvenience.

Then someone screamed.

“Raiders!”

The half-repaired square of the settlement exploded into motion. A chicken burst from beneath a wagon in a storm of feathers. Two laborers dropped a bundle of paving stones on their own feet. Someone overturned a barrel of lime. The sharp mineral sting of it rushed into the air just as another arrow hissed overhead and buried itself in the side of the granary.

Ethan ducked on instinct, hands over his head.

“Well,” he muttered to the muddy ground, “this seems bad.”

“That is because it is bad.”

Mirelle swept past him in a snap of dark skirts and flying braid, clutching a leather satchel to her chest. The young alchemist looked irritatingly composed for someone under attack before breakfast. Her amber eyes flashed toward the tree line beyond the fields. “Those are goblin shafts. Crude fletching, resin-sealed. They’ll have poison if the tribe has a shaman with any ambition.”

“Fantastic.” Ethan rose into a crouch behind a water trough. “Any chance there’s a non-poison option?”

“Yes,” Mirelle said. “Being stabbed instead.”

Across the square, the merchant Garren was attempting to drag three separate crates to safety at once while loudly assuring everyone that trade goods were the foundation of civilization. The crates won. He sprawled face-first in the mud.

At the north palisade gap—the section they had not yet finished replacing—the watch bell finally began to clang. A heartbeat later, Lysa vaulted up onto a stack of cut timber, hand on her sword, silver hair catching the thin dawn like a blade drawn from ice.

“Positions!” she barked. “Spears to the breach! Archers on the roofs! If you run, run behind me, not past me!”

That, Ethan had learned, was the sort of command that frontier people obeyed immediately.

He scrambled upright, pulse hammering. Beyond the churned vegetable plots and stumpy new fence posts, shapes darted between the low scrub and broken stone. Small. Quick. Green-gray. Too many of them.

Goblins came in a streaking wave, low to the ground, shrieking with cracked voices and clattering weapons. Some wore scraps of boiled leather. Others had armor made from mismatched pan lids, bark, and bits of chain. They looked ridiculous right up until one of them leaped a ditch and sank a hooked spear into a man’s shield hard enough to spin him sideways.

The settlement met them with panic and courage in roughly equal measure.

Lysa hit the front first. There was no wasted motion in her, only a terrifying economy. Her sword flashed once, twice, and two goblins fell before their war cries had fully left their throats. She kicked a third in the chest so hard it cartwheeled backward into its fellows. Mud sprayed. A pot helm bounced away with a metallic ring.

“Left flank!” someone shouted.

“There is no left flank,” Mirelle snapped, already kneeling behind the trough beside Ethan. She pulled three tiny stoppered vials from her satchel, bit one open, and flung its contents. The liquid burst in the air into a cloud of yellow sparks. Goblins rushing through it shrieked and clawed at their faces as smoke flooded their eyes. “There. Now there is a left flank.”

Ethan stared. “You made chemical mace?”

“I made an inhalant deterrent,” she said. “Don’t call it by a stupid name.”

Another arrow struck the trough inches from his hand. Ethan flinched so hard his teeth clicked.

He should have been terrified. He was terrified. But layered over it, like a transparent sheet placed over disaster, came the familiar cold geometry of his skill. The settlement unfurled in his awareness as ledgers, districts, obligations, assigned labor, resource flow. Breach points pulsed red. Guard coverage glowed thin and insufficient. Worker morale dipped sharply in the market quarter. Supply value at risk: moderate. Civilian casualties projected if raid remained uncontrolled: unacceptable.

A translucent prompt flickered at the edge of his vision.

Territorial Alert: Unauthorized Hostile Incursion Detected

Settlement Stability threatened.

Emergency Administrative Measures available:

– Issue Temporary Defensive Mandate

– Reassign Civilian Labor to Militia Support

– Invoke Resource Priority Routing

Ethan took a breath through the stink of lime, wet earth, and smoke. Fear still clawed at his ribs. But bureaucracy, unbelievably, was stronger.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, yes, emergency mandate. Sure. Why not. That’s a thing I can do.”

He reached for the glow the way he’d learned to reach for a spreadsheet cell that wanted formatting. The world tightened.

Temporary Defensive Mandate issued.

All recognized residents within settlement bounds gain:

– +12% coordination while defending registered structures

– +8% endurance during emergency labor

– Reduced panic spread

The effect rippled outward silently.

It was not flashy. No pillars of light, no thunder from heaven. Just a collective straightening, as if a hand had steadied the entire settlement from behind. Men who had looked on the verge of breaking gripped their spears more firmly. A woman hauling children toward the stone storehouse stopped trembling long enough to drag two more with her. Even Garren, still muddy and indignant, somehow found the will to pick up a dropped hammer and start helping barricade a cart.

“You did something,” Mirelle said, voice sharp with recognition.

“I keep doing things,” Ethan said. “No one ever seems happy about it.”

“I’m not happy,” she said. “I’m observant.”

The goblins were not mindless. Ethan saw that almost immediately. They tested the unfinished sections. They loosed arrows in coordinated bursts. A cluster of them rushed the goat pens not because goats were valuable—though apparently they also thought so—but because it would drag defenders off the center. One skinny goblin with white paint smeared over his face shouted orders from atop a boulder.

Chief, Ethan guessed. Or at least middle management.

A larger figure emerged a moment later from the brush behind them, and the rest of the raiders shifted around him with instinctive deference. He was almost as tall as Ethan, broad for a goblin, with one ear torn nearly in half and a necklace of polished animal teeth hanging across a chest crisscrossed by old scars. Unlike the others, his gear was functional: layered hide, a bone-reinforced shield, and a cruel-looking hatchet with a hammered iron edge.

He surveyed the settlement, not with frenzy but with calculation.

“That one,” Ethan said. “That’s the boss.”

Lysa turned, a goblin bloodline splashed across her cheek like red paint. “Then I’ll kill him first.”

“Wait.”

She looked at him as if he had suggested they negotiate with the incoming arrows.

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“Hear me out.” Ethan pointed. “If we kill the chief, don’t they just come back angrier with a new chief? Maybe several chiefs? I don’t know how goblin succession works, but it sounds exhausting. What if we capture him?”

Lysa’s stare went flat with disbelief. “You want me to take a goblin war-chief alive in the middle of a raid.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and then did the only honest thing available. “Because I think I can tax him.”

There was a beat of silence in which even the ongoing battle seemed offended.

Mirelle slowly turned her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you can what?”

“Not him personally. Probably. Unless that’s possible. I mean his tribe. Labor pool, territorial rights, food distribution, anti-bandit agreements—”

A goblin vaulted the trough. Mirelle smashed a vial into its face. It went down shrieking and smoking.

“Your timing,” she said, “is monstrous.”

Lysa wiped her blade on the goblin’s ragged sleeve, eyes narrowing toward the chief. “You’re insane.”

“A little, yes, but I’m often productive about it.” Ethan pointed at the breach. “Can you do it?”

Her grin came fast and feral. “If I couldn’t, I’d be insulted you asked.”

She leaped from the timber stack before he could add any qualifiers like preferably without severing all his limbs.

The chief saw her coming. He barked a command. Three goblins lunged to intercept, and she simply passed through them like a storm through reeds. One blade stroke knocked aside a spear. Her elbow crunched into a throat. She slid under a wild swing and came up inside the chief’s shield line.

He was good. Better than Ethan wanted him to be. He turned with the force of a boar, shield smashing forward. Lysa took it on her shoulder and skidded in mud. The hatchet whistled down. She caught his wrist, twisted, and for a second they locked there amid the chaos—the human knight and the goblin chief, boots grinding, teeth bared.

Then two goblins rushed her blind side.

“Lysa!” Ethan shouted.

Without thinking, he reached into the system again.

Emergency Reassignment available.

Unassigned assets detected: Cart oxen x2, ditch crew x6, lime stockpile, rope reserve.

His eyes snapped to the cart yard. Rope reserve.

“You!” he yelled at the ditch crew huddled behind a wagon. “Grab those coils! Make a drag line! Hook the chief’s legs when she creates an opening!”

Six pairs of startled eyes fixed on him. Men who yesterday had mostly complained about dirt now moved with the strange obedience his mandates seemed to inspire. They lunged for the ropes.

“Garren!” Ethan shouted.

The merchant peered up from behind a barricade. “What?”

“Lose a cart!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Lose one dramatically!”

Garren threw up his hands. “I despise you.” But he kicked a chocked handcart downhill.

The loaded cart rattled wildly across the muddy square, smashed through a puddle, and barreled into the melee at an angle so stupid no sane warrior could have predicted it. Goblins scattered, shrieking. The chief glanced aside for one fatal fraction of a second.

Lysa headbutted him.

The crack of skull on skull rang clear over the clamor. The goblin chief staggered. In that instant the ditch crew’s rope snaked low through the mud, cinched around his shins, and yanked. He went down with a roar. Lysa kicked the hatchet away, dropped a knee into his spine, and twisted one thick arm high behind him.

“Now?” she shouted.

“Now!” Ethan shouted back, as if he had any further useful instructions.

The raiders hesitated. Goblins nearest their fallen chief jittered between attack and retreat, eyes rolling white around black irises. One made a move toward Lysa. Mirelle hurled another vial. It burst against the goblin’s chest in a bloom of slick blue flame that burned cold and luminous over leather without touching flesh. The goblin screamed as if the afterlife had already arrived and bolted.

The rest broke.

They fled in a ragged stream toward the scrub, grabbing what wounded they could and leaving the rest. Within moments the raid had dissolved into echoes: crashing brush, distant shrieks, ragged panting, the whimper of goats.

The square stood stunned in the aftermath.

A man laughed once, shakily, the way people did when they had expected to die and felt slightly embarrassed to still be alive. Another sat down in the mud and refused to get up. Somewhere a child began crying now that the danger was over enough to permit it.

Lysa hauled the bound chief upright by the back of his armor. He twisted and spat in her direction. She looked offended rather than threatened.

“He bit me,” she announced.

“Did he break skin?” Mirelle asked, suddenly alarmed.

“No.” Lysa glanced at Ethan. “What exactly is your plan, my lord?”

The title still hit Ethan like an accidental shoe to the face. He wiped mud from his jaw and approached the prisoner cautiously.

The chief smelled like wet fur, smoke, copper blood, and old leaves. Up close, his eyes were brighter than Ethan expected—yellow-green and sharp with animal intelligence. There was hate in them. Also fear. Also the simmering humiliation of a leader taken in front of his tribe.

That part Ethan understood all too well. Different workplace, same principle.

“Do any of you speak Goblin?” he asked.

“A little,” Mirelle said. “Mostly curses, ingredient names, and terms for internal organs.”

“Useful, weirdly.” Ethan crouched to eye level with the captive chief. “Can he understand Common?”

The goblin bared his teeth. “Kill-speech,” he snarled in heavily accented words. “Know enough.”

Ethan brightened. “Great. That saves time.”

Lysa muttered, “Of all the responses available…”

The settlement gathered in a loose ring around them. Fear and anger rolled off the people in palpable waves. Someone had a bandaged arm. Someone else held a bloodied hoe. More than one pair of eyes fixed on the chief with a simple, primal desire to end the problem permanently.

Ethan could feel that desire. The safer choice was obvious. Execute the raider leader. Send a message. Claim justice. Everybody in every medieval fantasy would probably applaud.

And then the next tribe would come.

Or the same tribe, meaner and hungrier and with a vengeance fetish.

He looked at the fields beyond the square. Cleared ditches. Unfinished roads. Empty labor rosters. Too much land, too few hands. A territory trying to survive while hemmed in by monsters, neglect, and old incompetence. Then he looked back at the goblin chief, all sinew and scars and trapped fury.

Problem, he thought. Resource. Same shape, depending on paperwork.

“Untie his mouth,” he said.

“His mouth isn’t tied,” Mirelle said.

“Right. Sorry. Stress.” Ethan scrubbed a hand down his face. “Let’s try this. Why raid us?”

The chief spat bloody mud. “Because you have food.”

“And before that?”

“Because old fort weak. Humans soft. Easy takings.”

That tracked with everything Ethan had seen of the territory before he started forcing basic civic function onto it.

“How many in your tribe?”

The goblin glared. “Why tell?”

Ethan spread his hands. “Because if I wanted you dead, I would let her do it.” He jerked a thumb toward Lysa, who smiled with immediate and unsettling enthusiasm.

The chief’s torn ear twitched.

“If I don’t want you dead,” Ethan continued, “then numbers matter for negotiation.”

The goblin stared at him for a long moment, suspicious and visibly trying to locate the trap.

“Sixty-three,” he growled at last. “Maybe sixty after winter cough.”

Mirelle made a small surprised sound. “That’s a full burrow clan.”

Ethan’s brain instantly translated it into labor availability, ration demands, and security headaches. “Adults?”

“Forty fight. Others dig, carry, breed, cook.”

Someone in the crowd hissed in disgust. Ethan ignored it.

“How many raids this season?”

The chief shrugged as much as the ropes allowed. “Three on roads. One farm south. Now here.”

Garren, still muddy, sucked in a sharp breath. “Road caravans? You little plague. Do you know what you cost me?”

The chief sneered. “Not enough.”

“I’m going to invoice his corpse,” Garren muttered.