The archer snorted. “If you think they’re that dumb out here, sure.”

“They’re that dumb everywhere. Go help Goswin round up some customers. You know Paeris is useless for that sort of thing. Dunno why you stick with him, cousin or no.”

“Yeah, fine.”

The archer left the tent.

Az didn’t like the archer being in the tent. He didn’t like being alone with the wizard. He didn’t like any of this.

*****

The first of the townsfolk came into the tent in a huge group, laughing and chattering, shrieking as they saw the first of the caged monsters, pointing and holding each other’s hands and listening to the fighter explain in that warm, booming voice what they were passing and how it had been caught.

As the crowd approached his cage, Az tried to shrink back away from them, but all of a sudden, the archer was crouched behind his cage, clicking her tongue at him.

“Tsk tsk. We knew you’d try that. Get up where they can see you!”

She jabbed an arrow through the bars, and he wasn’t fast enough to avoid it entirely. He wriggled to the front of the cage, the arrowhead digging into his back and leaving a shallow cut.

“Now this one,” the fighter boomed, “This one might not look like much, but he’s so dangerous we have to keep him muzzled. One bite from a goblin and you’re as good as dead. But, of course, we’d never let any of you get the plague.”

The crowd responded immediately, shrinking away from him with gasps that he would have thought were melodramatic if they didn’t seem to mean them.

“Some folks says goblins are almost human, building cities down in those caves and such, but anyone’s ever fought ‘em can tell you different. They run in packs, like dogs, and just when you think you’ve got one handled, another one’s behind you with something sharp, ready to rip your guts out. One goblin alone, though...” he laughed again, “Well, let’s just say even if he did get out, he’s nothing to worry about with us here.”

Az hated the eyes on him. He hated the glares and the gawking, the ones who leaned forward for a better look and the ones who shrunk away and glanced back in terrified little glimpses.

He tried to shrink backward again, only to find the archer’s arrow still behind him.

“Now, now, don’t make me pin you to the ground in there.”

He shivered, no doubt left in him that any of these people would be true to their word when they said such things.

After the first rush of people, a guided group huddled together, the rest of the day was a steady trickle, and people stayed longer at each cage, peering in.

A little boy shouted insults at him, telling him the plague was his fault, and he wondered how quickly word got around in a town like this. He wondered how many people knew he was here. He wondered how many people wanted a look.

His stomach grumbled, but he knew if there hadn’t been breakfast for him already, there wouldn’t be. Just like there hadn’t been dinner last night. His stomach ached and gurgled, and every instinct in his body said to stay curled around it any time the archer stopped prodding him to be more visible.

By midafternoon, the trickle was slow and the group had gotten lazy with the Wizard off at the tavern eating lunch. He heard the fighter send in a group of little boys at a discount ‘for kids’ and squirmed back into the back of his cage, hoping the archer would stay at the front where she’d been chatting with him.

The boys were loud, shouting and clanging into things and shoving each other. Maybe they’d be too distracted to notice him here. Maybe they’d miss him and move on.

They didn’t, immediately gathering at the front of his cage and peering intently into it.

“Whoa, it’s naked!”

“Of course it is, stupid, it’s a monster.”

“Don’t look like a monster.”

“Of course it does! Look at its ears! It’s like an ugly old bat.”

Az tried to hide his face in his arms.

“I wanna see better,” one of the kids declared. “Hey, goblin, I wanna see you!”

He didn’t move, hoping they’d believe he couldn’t understand.

He could hear one of them coming closer, squeezing around the side of his cage toward where he huddled at the back.

“Hey, Sig, don’t! Berto’s mom says goblins are real dangerous! She says the guy in here said they have plague.”

“That’s a buncha hooey. They wouldn’t bring it here if it had plague. I just wanna see.”

Suddenly, he was being prodded with the arrow all over again, and he glanced up, surprised, only to find himself making eye contact with a small boy with russet hair and green eyes. The eyes lit up in a way that reminded him of the archer, and he wriggled back toward the center of the cage, away from the boy.

“Hey!” the boy shouted to his friends, “They got his mouth all covered. I bet he’s got wicked teeth behind there.”

Something thudded into the back of his head, and another kid shouted, “Hey, look over here! I wanna see!”

One of the boys in the group hissed, “Don’t!” but the others picked up dirt clods and threw them at him again, even though he was facing them.

“Think he’s got balls?” one of them asked, suddenly daring. “I bet I could hit him in the balls.”

The one behind Az laughed, jabbing at him again with the arrow. “Hey, yeah. Show us your balls.”

Az’s face burned, but the cage was just big enough that the kids’ short arms probably couldn’t reach him if he stayed right in the middle. He just had to stay right in the middle.

He curled up tight again, tucking himself into a ball. The kid with the arrow kept prodding at him, never quite managing a good stab, but a couple of times getting enough purchase to scratch him through his coating of filth. The boys in the aisle continued pelting him with mud. He closed his eyes.

Even when they got bored and stomped off to rattle other cages, he stayed tucked that way.

As they left, he heard them complain that the goblin was no fun and wouldn’t even let them hit it in the balls with a rock. The archer laughed, and his blood ran cold.

He only knew it was getting toward dusk when he heard the fighter’s loud, booming voice outside, telling the townsfolk that the show was only going to be open a few more minutes before they had to get ready for ‘the big show,’ whatever that meant.

The last trickle of customers was hurried, and they seemed to look at everything but him, rushing past his cage. He wanted to feel relieved, but after everything else, it just seemed like another ill omen.

The wizard shouted about the big show as the fighter and archer started moving the other cages and crates out of the tent, carrying them out the back and presumably back to the cart. Az couldn’t hear her words over the grunts and chatter of the two moving the cages, or the noises of the creatures inside, hungry for their dinner even having eaten twice since he was last fed.

It wasn’t until his cage was the absolute last that he was certain of it - he was the show.

As people filed in to stand on the opposite side of the tent, he felt his whole body growing cold with fear. What was this? What could they possibly be planning to do to him that they hadn’t already?

The fighter’s voice rang out, filling the tent. “Now, some of you questioned whether we really caught these beasts. Some of you doubted we could contain them. Some of you even told your friends to carry knives on them in case we had a breakout.”

There was a soft muttering from the crowd, and the fighter laughed. “Now, don’t worry, we’re not angry. We understand! It sounds wild! But that’s why we’ve prepared one last little show for you. We liked this little town of yours, and you seem like good folks, so we thought we’d put those rumors to rest in case we ever come through here again.”

A bright light suddenly appeared directly on top of Az’s head, and he buried his face in his arms to get away from it.

“Behold!” the wizard shouted from behind him, “A real, living goblin!”

The crowd responded immediately, making shocked noises like they hadn’t already seen him earlier in the day.

“Now my friend Dania here is going to open his cage, and you’re going to see exactly why you’re so safe with us in town. The first time we caught him, he had his hands and legs free, and his mouth uncovered and ready to bite.”

That wasn’t true, and the wizard knew it. Az wasn’t sure he had the courage to risk being frozen like that again, trapped in his own body and not only in his chains. He whined in the back of his throat.

The wizard was still talking. “But of course, we’d never put our beloved patrons in danger like that! For tonight’s - entertainment, we’ll be showing you what would happen if his cage door came open - and we think you’ll find you’re quite safe on your side of the tent.”

The archer stepped forward, waving out at the crowd, and the wizard’s voice spoke directly into his head, making him squeak in surprise. “Make this look good or you’ll be riding into the next town with only half your skin. Make it look really good and I’ll let Dania take off the muzzle so you can eat again.”

He couldn’t. He couldn’t. Could he? But then the cage door was open and there was a crackle of sparks behind him, where the audience couldn’t see, and he crawled forward away from the noise as fast as he could, stumbling to his feet outside the cage and shuffling as fast as his shackles would let him toward the open tent flap beside the audience.

Women shrieked and men yelped, but he’d only made it a few steps before an arrow thudded into the ground just a hair’s breadth in front of his toes and he had to backpedal, ducking to the side and trying to weave to be harder to hit, even as his shackles kept him at constant risk of tripping. A few more arrows missed him narrowly, some coming closer than others.

The fighter moved toward him, taking one big, slow, menacing step toward him at a time so that Az’s heart started leaping uncomfortably in his chest and he had to duck backward defensively again, rerouting for a second time and trying to circle toward the faint sunset light of the exit instead of weaving straight there.

Then the magic touched him. Rosie’s magic. He’d know that particular arcane touch anywhere, now, and probably to the end of his days. He cried out, expecting to be frozen, but instead he found himself - floating?

He yelled out again in panic, trying to get back to the ground and finding that his desperate scrabbling did nothing but send him spinning, flailing as he moved through the air outside of all control.

“Dania!” Rosie shouted.

“Got it!”

Something hit him hard in the side, driving him through the air and toward the audience, and he’d barely had time to register that it had been blunt before a net sprung out of the arrow and wrapped around him.

A moment later, he was slammed suddenly to the ground, Rosie’s magic on him the whole time, thrusting him into the dirt harder than a mere fall would have and driving the breath out of him.

By the time he’d regained enough air to cry out, Goswin was looming over him, a long staff in his huge hand, and it was all Az could do to curl in on himself and pull his chained arms over his head before the staff was thudding heavily into him, hard crushing blows that he could only pray would stop before his ribs cracked.

He couldn’t beg them to stop with the muzzle over his mouth, but he whimpered through it anyway, trying to get enough sound through to the man that he’d know that Az had given up.

Of course he’d given up.

They’d known he would.

They’d known he didn’t have a chance.

His eyes filled with hot, stinging tears, and Goswin kicked him so hard he rolled halfway over and had to curl himself around the other way, his face turned from the crowd and the sunset, back to his cage and Dania’s perch on top of it, that cruel grin back again. Rosie was on a box, looking at the crowd like he wasn’t even here, but Dania’s eyes were fixed on him and he shivered at the sight of them.

He whined through the muzzle again, curling more tightly around himself inside the net, but the only response he got was another hammering blow to his ribs.

He continued to whine and whimper, making every noise he could get through the muzzle in the hopes that something, anything would make them stop, would take away the thousand eyes staring at him, peeling through the grime to burn into his skin.

He could still feel the magic on him, not dropped, just waiting, and Rosie stepped ever so slightly forward on her box, clearing her throat. Fear rippled through him again, cold and violent.

Before she could speak, a loud voice sounded from the entrance to the tent, behind him. It was twice as loud as Goswin was at his loudest, shocking the whole tent into silence.

“Enough.”

He didn’t even realize it was Paeris, the half-elf, until the voice continued, slightly more quietly, “I think you’ve proven your point. Put him back in the cage. There’s rumors at the temple that there’s paying work in the next town for folks like us.”

Az shivered again. He’d never heard Paeris like this. He’d never even imagined it was possible. And from the truly murderous looks on both Dania and Rosie’s faces, he didn’t think they had, either. He shrunk down into the ground, wishing it would rise up and swallow him before their ruined show came out of his own hide.

The magic on him abruptly cut off, and then the edges of the net were lifting. He turned his face, panicked, to see Goswin lifting him into the air, his face as impassive as the first time he’d bound Az and carried him dangling alongside his leg.

Az shivered, waiting for the man’s hand to drop him abruptly back to the ground and drag him, but instead everything seemed to snap back to business, Rosie hopping down off her box to wrap up the show as Goswin tossed him, net and all, back into his cage and Dania swung the door shut with a clang.

“You’d better cooperate later when I get my net back,” she growled at him as she locked it, “Or in the next town those arrows won’t miss. You getting shot is still a pretty good show, as far as I’m concerned.”