Thank you for your patience in between installments. Almost 20k words but we finally get some breeding!
There are likely some errors in the technical information. I have never taken apart a car before. Everything about goblins when they get creampied is accurate, however.
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The council reconvened an hour later. Unlike the previous meeting, the room was full to bursting with agitated voices. What had once been an item of passing interest, the overall management of their little colony, had turned into a life or death decision-making process. Nell, doing her best to be the leader, struggled to maintain order. Some conversations were losing the pretense of 'intellectual debate' and were sounding more like panic. Jesse felt a little self-conscious about being in the room with frightened Kith himself, given what happened last time. He stood near the back, letting the voices around him speak their piece.
"You saw them," Kalvis said, his bitter voice cutting through the din. "Those were the ones who attacked us. Those...Wolven monsters. They butchered my friends, Nell. We can't trust them!"
The head of the community grimaced. Other conversations died out as heads turned to her. She visibly squared her shoulders, feeling the weight of expectation upon her. "I hear you, Kalvis. I hate them too for what they did to the others. And no, I don't trust them. But we have to be realistic. There's less than a hundred of us. You saw their numbers. Not just the Wolven, but the archers, the armour...Gods above, even if the matter of arms was even, they could overwhelm us with brute strength. Not all of us are as strong or quick as Huntress," she said, motioning to the taciturn woman near the door. Jesse had last seen her traipsing off, presumably to tail the army and see that they weren't lying in ambush. He hadn't heard her enter, but he never heard her do anything, so that wasn't surprising.
"The moment we go on those ships, we're done. We'll be clapped in irons and sold, or worse." Kalvis spat.
"I don't understand why they didn't attack. It's what I would have done. Why give us the time to 'think it over'?" Huntress asked.
"Misplaced magnanimity?" Vee offered.
"I don't think so," Nell said, running her hand through her hair, "Either they don't think we're enough of a threat to warrant wasting resources on, or they have something more pressing that requires their attention."
"Krosen," Huntress supplied, to nods around the table.
Jesse bent over to whisper with the little alchemist who shared his bed. "I've heard you mention them before. Who are they?"
"The original owners of this area," Vee explained, her cadence that of the teacher she'd been most of her life, "Hundreds of years before it collapsed, the Empire subsumed their territory, integrating some and pushed the rest to the edge of the continent. And by integrating I mean...not exactly treating them well."
"Are they a potential ally, then?" he asked.
"Only in so much as they are the enemy to our enemy," Vee continued, "We might be related, distantly, but Kith and Krosen never got along before the Empire fell and those resentments remain. The Folk used us for our brains and hands, rather than our ability to haul materials or fight in their wars. Krosen see us as soft, spoiled, the favoured children of our shared abusive parent. We've made some overtures but they're mostly uninterested in us. There's no telling how they'd react if we asked for their help fighting off an attack or, Gods forbid, were forced to flee into their territory over the Wile River."
Their eyes returned to the table. The conversation had continued without them, with Nell's unwavering voice taking precedence. "Our focus needs to be on the facts, not fear or conjecture. Like it or not, our options are limited. Either we take the Folk at their word...or else we take our chances on splitting up and trying to get us all back to Voxus piecemeal."
"We could defend ourselves," Glora said. The table offered a mixture of groans and scoffing in response. All save the small cadre that had clustered around her, who nodded in silent agreement.
"We're academics, not soldiers!" Vee said.
"In our histories there have been many times our people have been forced to protect ourselves, with violence if necessary. When Voxus originally broke away from the thrall of the Empire, when the Silithin raided our outer villages we chased them off with our superior weapons! Some of you may have forgotten our roots, but I haven't."
More grumbling, with Glora's crew of faithful staring daggers at those that raised objection. Jesse felt a twinge in his gut at the clear signs that factions were forming, and an even worse feeling when he realized that he agreed, at least in principle, with Glora. You didn't win by giving a bully what they wanted.
"It only took half a dozen Wolven to do terrible things to the sailors on the beach," Zixie added, hugging herself in the process, "I don't want to see that happen to anyone else, on either side..."
Kalvis hammered his fist on the table. "We can't let these Folk bastards get away with what they did!"
"This isn't about getting revenge, Kalvis. Do you want us all to die?" Vee asked.
"We don't have to kill them all. We can just...survive. Fight defensively. If they are reluctant to just strike out of the blue, then maybe we can make it too costly for them."
Vee threw up her hands. "And what grand fortification do you think the few of us could erect? None of us are masons. It took us weeks to make the cold storage shed that we're using as a jail, and that was just mud bricks. Even if we had the tools, the sheer labour needed to quarry stone would make us doing anything else, including feeding ourselves, impossible!"
"It doesn't need to be a stone wall."
The goblins turned to Jesse, and at that moment he realized that he'd been the one who'd previously spoke. His throat suddenly felt dry. He hated public speaking.
"It doesn't?" Vee asked. "Wouldn't a wooden wall be easily burned?"
Whelp, he was into it now. He stepped closer to the table and tried to keep his voice steady. "Hypothetically, you could dig a trench around the parts of the village you wanted to protect, then mound the earth on the closer side. Forming both a vantage point from which to see and fire down into while effectively doubling the size of the berm your enemy had to get across."
"What about the Wolven?" Kalvis asked. "They can leap pretty high."
"Stakes, I guess. Roman forts used to have pointed stakes to keep back cavalry. You could place them at angle to make the jump either dangerous or impossible. There're ways to coat them in something inflammable too."
Murmuring between the various members of the informal council. Jesse didn't know if he had overstepped his position as an unofficial member. He retreated behind Vee, who turned around in her seat to face him.
"Hold on. You're not seriously suggesting we fight them, are you?"
"I was just thinking out loud," Jesse admitted. He wasn't going to suggest these people stick around to get themselves killed because of some things he remembered from history class or video games. "I don't have any experience at this kind of thing myself, but my phone has a bunch of overviews of the conflicts my people engaged in. The tactics, the weapons, that kind of thing. It's all very general, but it might help offer paths that this world hasn't gone down yet. Stand on the shoulders of giants." He paused, realized the phrasing and his audience, and added, "Metaphorically."
"But you have no personal experience? Your knowledge is based on the factoids pulled from the ether on that device." Vee's voice again, a little more cutting than he thought it needed to be. But she had a point.
"You're right. I'm just...Listen, I'm not an expert. Fighting is awful, and people are probably going to get hurt, maybe even killed. I'm not gonna say that this is a sure-fire way to stay alive and together. But if you can visibly make yourself a harder target, they might not be as willing to spend resources trying to dig you out. This is just another option. Can't hurt to have a plan C for if A and B don't work out."
The discussion drifted down other avenues after that. First believing the Folk and their offer, then looking for a ship they could charter at the nearby neutral port town of Swifttail. The final scenario, deemed a long shot, would be to either rebuild the Looking Glass or construct an entirely new vessel to sail back to Voxus.
"Keela's raft is one thing," Kalvis explained, his weary tone implying this idea had been brought up a number of times before this, "But an oceangoing vessel, especially something that can get through the dangerous waters we need to go through, is another thing entirely. We had a chance when the Looking Glass was just beached, but I was there when it ripped apart. It sank in pieces, surrounded by the razorreefs that tore it asunder. It's gone. We might be able to dive for some more sundries than the stuff we already pulled off, but making a new ship on our own in two weeks is madness!" He took a breath, folding his hands on the table in front of him. "I'm sorry. I lost friends when it sank the first time, I lost even more when it sank again. I want nothing to do with that damn boat anymore."
Nell nodded. "Then we now have three choices, none of them particularly appetizing: believe the Folk and their suspiciously generous offer, find a way to make the meagre valuables we have worth passage for all our people on a ship someone else owns, or staying here and potentially fighting a well trained and equipped army for the right to stay exiled from our homes." She hesitated before continuing. "I think...I think we'd all benefit from some time to think this over. We'll reconvene tonight after sundown. Go about the rest of your day as normally as you can. We may be leaving this village soon, but there still work that needs doing."
The crowd filed out of the town hall building slowly. Conversations continued all the way out the door. Jesse waited for Vee to collect her notes.
"Jesse," Nell said above the din, "Could you stay behind for a few moments?"
The formerly cacophonous room was deathly silent. Nell's gaze bored into Jesse, who sat across the giant table in the nearly empty meeting hall. He didn't try to meet her eyes.
