Rakhzan's Draazstone patrol

Four hobgoblins out of Draazstone, armed and armored as soldiers are, who worked the mountain edge and the old goat path under Rakhzan. They minded goats up there and they traded with the trappers they met, and the roads they kept ran north and south and nowhere else. All four prayed to Drozom the Frozen. Two of them have names, and the second is Calvin.

What they carried that the company did not was the country itself. They gave it over on the road without being pressed for it: that the mountain lions up there run larger than the cats of the plains and do not hunt people; that the golden eagles are real and enormous; and that the wyverns hold territory, prefer cattle to men, and will not retreat from a fight once they are in it, but finish it or die.

At a stranger’s cairn in the hills one of them walked up to the woman standing over it, said he was sorry she had lost one and hoped she found the other, and asked leave to pay his respects to a dead man he had never heard of. He prayed over the grave in G’lin. Then he uncorked a waterskin and poured it out across the stones so that the coming freeze would hold the soul in it solid and rigid and strong, winter being close. He offered to burn the corpse of the man who had killed him.

They walked the company three days toward the valley and then stopped for a farewell luncheon and brought out a wineskin they had been saving. Koa counted them the first decent company met since Gwenivere Velmont and Captain Jack. Then they parted and went to track a giant eagle to her nest, which was the work they had been on before the strangers crossed their path.

It cost them the band. One of the four was left on the mountain with talon wounds in him. When Al-Sāmiyah came down on the three who were left, the crossbows came up: one man knocked another’s aside so hard that it fired into his own forearm, and the third would not let go of the last of her eggs until it was taken out of his pack. Rakhzan was tried for the trade when he got home and is imprisoned there still. The other two went north to Draazstone, and where either of them went after that was never written down.