great power, the same who told him earlier that he was to be granted nobility. The figures seemed displeased with his actions, particularly the wider figure who seemed wider than the widest ocean. Their voices boomed like thunder, rattling him from forehead to heels.
This time they had not promised anything. They had told Toede only to 'live nobly,' not that he would become a nobleman. His mission was to live in as noble a manner as possible, said the other one, who was taller than the tallest mountain.
Then he awoke, the metaphysical door hitting his backside on the way out. Toede wondered if this was what it was like to be a priest, with one's deity always nosing about and making damnable orders.
Also, he wondered how one was to live nobly if one was not a noble already-unless one acted as a do-gooder like the Solamnic Knights and that breed? Toede assumed that people like that were born with silver short swords in their mouths.
Toede opened his eyes. He was back on the banks of the stream, the same stream where he had awakened earlier, beneath the same maple as before. Spring and high summer had passed in his absence, and now the scenery was a brilliant shade of yellow. The first leaves were drifting down in the breeze and settling on his prostrate form.
Toede squinted, looking at the brilliantly garbed tree and wondering if it had been created specifically to bother him. Perhaps next time they would send him back with an axe to take care of such beauteous offenses.
No. He almost forgot. Noble people did not threaten trees just because they did not care for their looks. He reached out and patted the trunk. 'Nice tree,' he said aloud, feeling immediately foolish. For all he knew, noble- acting people felt foolish all the time.
There was an excited chittering overhead, and Toede looked up to see a squirrel, bushy-tailed and red-gray, taunting him from an upper branch. Again, his first thought was to grab a stone and put the little rural rodent out its misery, but he caught himself. 'Hello, Master Squirrel. Sorry to disturb you,' he said, pointing at the squirrel with two fingers, imagining them in his mind to be a crossbow aimed at the creature's heart.
The squirrel chattered for a few more moments, then fled, obviously perplexed. Anyone who might have been able to talk to this squirrel in the next two months would have heard a story about how the squirrel saw a drunken hobgoblin appear out of nowhere and speak sweetly to the trees and flowers. Fortunately for Toede's reputation, no one did query the squirrel in this manner, and after two months the squirrel's memory had returned to more important facts, like remembering where all its nut-caches had been stored.
Toede stood, rocked on his unsteady heels, and stumbled to the shore. He splashed water on his face. Again his stomach rebelled. He knelt over the stream but could manage nothing more than dry heaves. Just as well. There was no way (at least no way that Toede knew of) to vomit in a noble fashion.
Toede sat on the shore for the longest time, trying to determine his next move. He was probably a wanted man in Flotsam by whatever government had replaced Gilden-tongue's bogus faith. And he couldn't stay where he was. There were kender in the hills.
He toyed with the idea of retreating from it all, much like Groag, being nothing more than a servile slave to a beneficent master. Groag seemed to have matured in the process. Adaptive, that's what he had said. On reflection, Toede would have called it imitative. Aping the mannerisms of his superiors. Still, it had proven a sure survival trait.
Toede shook his head. Poor Groag, nothing but smoked hobgoblin on a stick, now.
Toede took stock. Whatever had returned him to life had not thought to send any food, supplies, or weapons along with him. A most inconvenient oversight on their part, particularly with kender stalking the woods.
The thought of kender made Toede uneasy. True, they'd taken in Groag as a slave and tried to rehabilitate him, but Groag didn't smash a kender guard in the face and try to drown Kronin's dippy daughter. They might not be very happy to see Toede, and after all, he was weaponless.
The lack of weapons also mitigated against an immediate return to Flotsam. Without knowing who was running things, it would be a safe bet that the new powers-that-be would be as unwilling to hand the throne to Toede as Gildentongue. Without a small army backing him up, Toede was unlikely to get past the gates.
In the end the wisest choice was to put distance between himself and Flotsam and stay away from the kender as well. Move somewhere else, somewhere near Balifor, where one's past could be safely forgotten, or even back to Solace. Surely, no one was left alive there who might remember him. If, in the course of his travels, he happened to encounter a band of hobgoblins of the old-style, whom he could razzle-dazzle and convince to capture a city, well, then, what harm would there be? It would even be a noble thing, almost, bringing his people out of savagery and into a better world.
More cheerfully, Toede started on a trail along the creek, careful to keep his thoughts sufficiently intact to avoid any spills and watching for the beginning of the swamp.
Move far away, that was the right idea, reflected Toede. Perhaps even enter into some holy order or another, like the Solamnic Knights or the Tower of High Sorcery. Learn, relax, gather one's strength, then take over some small town or hamlet in the name of goodness. That would give him a chance to flaunt his nobility, or at least enough nobility to keep his shadowy masters happy.
Perhaps a lordship would come in time, he mused, for humans were always singling out those of their number who acted in a noble or selfless fashion, and providing all manner of rewards to them. Perhaps individuals would come from miles around to listen to Toede's wisdom and to seek his advice, for a noble being would undoubtedly be considered wise.
Lord Toede the Wise. Saint Toede the Protector. Toede, Master of All Noble-Splash!
Toede had found the edge of the swamp again, in his customary fashion. Unmiring himself, he noted that the cattails began in earnest another hundred feet away. To the left, the rising hills led to the kender encampment- not the best group of people to be around at the moment.
So Toede, finding a spot to cross the stream, turned right this time. The land was flatter on the far side of the creek and rose only slightly to a low series of hillocks and ridges, dotted by russet maples and divided by other small streams feeding the swamp. A couple times Toede had to double back as the ground ahead became marshy and impassible.
The journey was harder than Toede had expected, and the exertion began to wear on him. His thighs complained brutally. Add to that the regular complaints his empty stomach now made, and Lord Toede was soon thinking less of a sainted position in the annals of men than of a soft bed and hot gooseflesh suspended over a fire. Indeed, his last rest had been in the cottage before reaching Flotsam, and his last 'meal' that foul-tasting concoction that cured his shattered shoulder.
Reflexively he touched the once-wounded shoulder. While the flesh was still puckered in a small scar where the bolt hadWruck him, he was otherwise uninjured. Indeed, it was the only part of his body that was not complaining of the unjust strain being placed on it.
Toede could scavenge as well as the best of his kind, but the bogs seemed to be notably free of any edible wildlife beyond a few worms and squidge-beetles that scurried away from overturned rocks. He considered them for a few moments, then moved on. He recognized some raspberry bushes, but they had already turned a grayish tan and were festooned with dead leaves. So much for previous experience coming in handy.
Finally, after the third small hillock and the third marsh directly behind it, Toede flung himself on a relatively dry patch of ground and surrendered to exhaustion. The squidge-beetles were starting to look good. He toyed for a moment with the idea of starving himself to death, imagining himself appearing before the two spirits as big as seas and mountains and (rightfully) claiming that he had done no harm to anyone during his last sojourn on Ansa-lon, so what could be more noble than that?
Toede's stomach replied with a low whine. The hobgoblin patted it with a fleshy hand. 'Beetles it is, then,' he muttered.
Then he heard another whine, one that did not come from any part of his own pain-wracked anatomy.
Toede cocked his head. It was there to his right, down the hillock's slope, issuing from a particularly brushy- looking patch of marsh. It was a sharp repetition of high-pitched squeals. Some sort of animal in pain.
Toede's mind immediately leaped to the thought of some giant suckling pig whose entire purpose in life was to wander into this dismal swamp and into some dire predicament. Say, perhaps, into the jaws of a trap laid several months ago by a forgetful kender poacher, a trap baited with pig-attracting turnips. And now, on its last legs, said hog was crying for someone, anyone, to put it out of its misery.
Toede set off in the direction of the whining, ignoring the reflection that if he always expected the best, he
