The Company of Three

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Brand recognition: 0%

Shared trauma: pending

Not all roads out of Neverwinter lead somewhere safe.

But the contract didn’t mention that part, and the contract paid in gold, so here we are.

A dwarf named Gundren Rockseeker had hired three travelers to escort a wagon of mining supplies south to Phandalin — picks, shovels, lanterns, the unglamorous tooling of some venture he was too excited and too cagey to explain. Gundren and his bodyguard, a grizzled warrior named Sildar Hallwinter, rode ahead on horseback. The wagon would follow. Ten gold each, on delivery.

They were three strangers when they signed on, bound together by nothing but a road and a wagon. Sage Kendriar took the contract because she knew this stretch of the high road the way some people know a song, and because Gundren moved in the same circles as the temple contacts she trusted. She vouched for Twiggle Dewsniffer — an old face from the High Forest who needed the work and, though she’d never have said it aloud, needed a reason to keep moving in any direction at all. Ibrin signed on for reasons of his own. His brother Addan had taken a merchant caravan up the Thornhold road months ago and simply hadn’t come back, and word had it that Sildar Hallwinter had ridden that same road recently. Maybe the man had seen something. Ibrin had learned, over the years, not to hope in complete sentences.

Three strangers, one wagon, and a road that was about to become extremely personal.

The last thing Gundren said to Ibrin, before he swung up into the saddle and rode ahead into the grey morning, was this: “We’ll talk tonight in Phandalin. I’ve heard something about the toymaker’s route.” He clapped Ibrin once on the shoulder, the way friends do, and rode off.

He never arrived.

✶ ✶ ✶

The first day went suspiciously well, which in Sage’s experience was a thing days did right before they stopped.

The high road south of Neverwinter was well-kept gravel, and the wagon’s oxen — a placid pair named Lulu and Tara — pulled without complaint and judged everyone within range silently and at considerable length. They had the patient, lidded eyes of animals who had decided long ago that whatever the humans were planning, it was beneath comment but not beneath notice.

On the morning of the second day, Twiggle took the reins. Sage walked ahead on foot, where her instincts had room to stretch, and Ibrin settled onto the bench to keep watch — which, for Ibrin, mostly meant polishing his shield. The platinum dragon of Bahamut was etched into the steel, and he worked at it with a cloth until it caught the thin light, the way a man tends to the one thing he’s sure of.

Twiggle watched him do it for a while. “What are you doing that for, Ibi?”

“The symbol matters,” Ibrin said. “When people see it, they know something about who I am.”

What they would mostly know, Twiggle thought, was that he polished a shield in a moving wagon at dawn. But the sentiment was real, and Twiggle let it go, the way he let almost everything go. Caring out loud was expensive, and he’d been economizing for years.

The road narrowed as it went. The trees leaned in. The birdsong thinned to nothing, and the morning took on that specific, weighted quiet that means the day has finished its warm-up.

✶ ✶ ✶

They found the first of it around mid-morning.

Two horses lay at the edge of the trail — not dead, but down, struggling and disoriented, their saddles still cinched on. The ground around them had been worked over with a thoroughness that wasn’t natural: gear flung into the weeds, a leather map case lying open and gutted of whatever it had held, goblin arrows standing up out of the dirt like grim little flags.

Sage knelt and knew the tack before she knew the horses. “These are Gundren’s.”

Twiggle came up beside her and confirmed it — Gundren’s mount, and the other almost certainly Sildar’s. No riders. Goblin tracks running off in every direction, eager and overlapping, the prints of creatures who had not expected to win and had been delighted to anyway.

Then the embankment moved.

Four goblins stepped out of the brush above the road, and their leader opened negotiations with the kind of line that has never once appeared on a poster meant to inspire.

“Give us all your shit, smelly fucks,” it said, “and we’ll let you be.”

It was, all told, a brief fight, and an embarrassing one for the goblins.

Twiggle moved like someone who had survived worse and had no intention of relitigating the experience. He closed the distance to the nearest goblin before it had finished its threat and removed its head with the unbothered efficiency of a man trimming a hedge he’d never liked. Sage marked a second from the rise of the wagon, and her longbow hummed once, and the goblin stopped being anyone’s problem mid-stride. Ibrin — at the front of it, despite every instinct he owned filing a formal objection — called on Bahamut, and a word of dark force went through a third, and its eyes emptied.

Three down. The fourth dropped its weapon and threw up both hands.

It was small even by goblin standards, and it had the trembling, eager look of an employee who has just understood, all at once, that the company does not value him. It gave its name as Droop. It said, with great feeling, that it just wanted to live.

While the others picked over the bodies, Ibrin — already half done patching a cut on his own arm — crouched beside the goblin and pressed the cloth to one of its wounds instead. He did it without quite deciding to, the way some people pour a second cup of coffee for whoever’s nearest.

Droop stared at him. “Why are you doing that?”

“Because you’re bleeding,” Ibrin said.

It was not, Droop would later reflect, an answer he had been prepared for.

✶ ✶ ✶

They let the goblin talk, and the goblin talked the way only a creature convinced it is about to die can talk — generously, specifically, gratefully, like a man giving a deposition he is certain will save his neck.

His people were Cragmaw goblins. Their boss was a bugbear named Klarg, who ran a cave hideout half a day off the road. And Klarg, in turn, answered to someone Droop called The Spider — a figure he had never seen, did not understand, and referred to in the low, careful tone that people reserve for weather, gods, and upper management.

“The Spider wants the old dwarf,” Droop said. “Clark told us to send him to the castle after we got him. But the man — Sildar — he’s still at the hideout. For now.”

Nobody corrected the Clark. It would have been rude, and besides, it was better this way.

Ibrin filed all of it away, and one piece in particular caught on something private and went quiet there. Addan had taken the Thornhold road. Sildar had ridden the Thornhold road. If anyone had passed a gnome toymaker’s wagon — painted up like a carnival, stopped and silent on the verge with no driver in sight — it would have been Sildar.

So first, they would find Sildar.

They bound Droop loosely, left Lulu and Tara hobbled with their feed and their opinions, and followed the little goblin off the road and into the trees. The three of them had been strangers two days ago. They were not, strictly, friends yet. But they had killed something together now, and bandaged something together, and that is its own kind of introduction.

The Company of Three went into the woods. The trees took them, and the road behind them went quiet again, the way it does.