Until Simon's armor was taken off, he truly believed that he was just exhausted from his ill-advised bloodsport. Now he could see it for what it really was: blood loss. He wasn't concerned, of course. If anything, he was concerned by just how little he cared. If he died, he would have lost a week at most. Hell, if I'd died, I could just come back faster and kill the goblins before they attack, he told himself. For a moment, he almost even allowed himself to believe it, but that seemed like a dangerous and slippery slope to fall down.

Fortunately, before he could dissect the exact moment that martyrdom became masochism, the healer arrived. She was a pretty redhead nearing thirty, if he had to guess. Something about the way she looked and her soft curves made him think she was a mother. That was confirmed a moment later when she looked at him like she wanted to scold him for what he'd done.

"Haven't we already had enough goblin wounds for one week?" she snapped, as she set down her bag and started taking out herbs as well as needle and thread.

"You must be Mari," he said. "The people I helped yesterday mentioned you were busy helping more desperate cases."

"And you must be the miracle worker," she said, a touch defensively. "I'd rather you stuck to healing instead of fighting, though. You don't seem very good at the latter."

That made Simon laugh enough for it to hurt, earning him a second scolding, but the woman's sharp tongue didn't stop her from getting to work. She quizzed him on some of the more ghastly wounds, but he couldn't really tell her what had gotten him in every case. The teeth marks made the bites obvious enough, but in some places, he wasn't sure if he'd been stabbed by a spear, a claw, or a rusty blade.

"Don't they feel different?" she asked him, "Because if they all start to blend together after a while, maybe that's your cue to stop."

Simon smirked, toasting her with the jug of whisky the headman had brought him. "Truer words were never spoken," he agreed, though for entirely different reasons than what she meant.

Mari did a pretty good job. It wasn't perfect. He might have chosen slightly different herbal compresses for a couple of wounds, but then he didn't know exactly what grew in the area. It didn't matter. He'd be fine, regardless.

The healer spent half the time sewing and half the time bemoaning the bullheaded nature of men, and when she was gone and the sun was rising, the headman helped him to one of his children's beds, and he promptly passed out.

Simon slept dreamlessly until past noon, and when he woke up, he used a word of lesser healing on his worst-looking wound. He didn't want to be a miracle patient, but the way it throbbed told him that the stab wound on his leg was infected, and he didn't want to be miserable, either.

Still, even after that was done, and he was whole, more or less, he wondered what had happened. "Did I use the runes too much and burn them out?" he wondered aloud. He instantly realized he shouldn't have said something like that where people could hear, but he only shrugged. He was no longer being tracked by Magi secret police, so it hardly mattered.

The problem was an interesting one. He would have been tempted to say that the magic hadn't worked as he'd intended or perhaps as well as he'd intended, but it clearly had, or he would have died five times over. All the reflection in the world couldn't beat an actual examination of his weapon, though, as soon as Simon looked at his dagger, he realized what had happened.

I fucked up the runes, he realized as he looked at the scraped upside of the blade. The damage didn't look like it had come from deflecting or parrying anything. It seemed far more likely that it had happened when he'd showered the cavern in sparks. He'd assumed that was just metal on stone, but in retrospect, they'd been too extreme for that. It had been the genie escaping the bottle.

He rubbed the abraded section, noting where the runes had been damaged. It wasn't even that bad, but it was a reminder of his time in the black forges of the white cloaks. Small problems could make magical items fail completely and often catastrophically. Imagine what would have happened if you'd tried to use a greater word instead, he reflected for a moment before deciding that was probably a bad idea.

When Simon finally moved to get dressed, he noticed that his bloodstained clothes had been removed and replaced with simpler garments, like the headman wore. They weren't exactly his size, but he cinched a piece of rope around the waste of his baggy pants and made do. Then, he went out to face the day and was subjected almost immediately to a hero's welcome.

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It started out simple enough, with a hearty breakfast of eggs and ham. Almost as soon as Simon was in the man's kitchen, though, and listening to him alternate between praising Simon for the peace they'd had last night and telling him about the current condition of the town, they started to attract guests.

"So this is our hero?" one woman asked after she'd finished letting the headman know how the flocks were doing. She introduced herself as Kedra, the town baker, and offered to bake him a pie just as soon as he was well enough to get his appetite back.

She was a large woman, and as she thanked him, she hugged him hard enough for it to hurt, but she was far from the first. After her came a veritable parade of grateful men and women.

Ordanvale was a town of somewhat less than two thousand people. Still, somehow, like a magnet today, half of them seemed drawn to him, and though Simon appreciated their gratitude, he was eventually overwhelmed by it. While he'd saved plenty of people before, this was the first time in a long time they'd felt the need to thank him individually for it.

On its own, that wasn't so surprising. Simon was staying at the home of one of the most important people in town, in a community that had just undergone a terrible emergency. However, the fact that Simon was there for them to thank and fawn over gave them a reason to linger, and soon, it was halfway to a party before the headman finally dispersed everyone.

"Out, you vultures, out!" the headman said with humor more than anger. "There will be plenty of time to thank this man for all he's done after he's recovered."

Simon thought that sentiment would buy him a couple days of peace, but that celebration turned out to be the following evening. In that time, Simon recuperated and considered when he might start traveling again. Mari checked on him twice more before pronouncing him "Fit enough to get into more trouble."

Of course, by then, Simon was fine. The bigger problem was his shredded armor. It was beyond his skill to repair it. While he didn't really need it, he was long past the point where he thought it was a good idea to fight without some protection, and if he was going to travel hundreds of miles across open roads without leather or a shield, he would use a lot of magic.

That was a depressing thought. He needed to wait nearly two decades to fight the lava titan, and he'd already blown almost three years of his life in the first week. He was definitely going to have to inscribe his sword with words of power to drain life. However, after his brush with death, he was suddenly possessed of the urge to do the work the old-fashioned way.

While he didn't have tools, when the village chief handed him a purse of silver, that solved his most expensive material problem. He could make everything else himself if he had to.

"Don't you go thinking we're trying to get rid of you now," the man cautioned him as he gave Simon the money with a firm handshake. "This is just recognition for the good turn you did us. Nothing more. You're welcome to stay as long as you like."

Simon definitely got the feeling that people wanted him to stay. He could see it in their fearful expressions. No matter how many times he told them the goblins had been handled, he could see that they expected the monsters to come screaming out of the forest any time now, and there were few men with any fighting experience.

Still, despite all of that, he was hesitant to put down roots. The longer he stayed somewhere, the more painful it was to leave when the time came. Even that trepidation wouldn't stand in the way of a good party. While Simon wasn't feeling well enough to help people rebuild the buildings that had burned, he was more than happy to help them celebrate a new beginning.

His celebration tended to revolve more around beer than dancing because he still had a few tender spots, but the people of Ordanvale were good-natured, and truthfully, Simon thought that showing weakness rather than strength after what he'd been through was a good choice. He still had a swirling gray to his aura, but he showed no signs that might tempt anyone to call him a warlock.

Well, except for the two fortuitous cave-ins of the other sections of the goblin lair, but those he lied about and explained that he set fires in the mouths of those caves, causing the collapse. As an explanation, it was convenient and believable, and no one doubted it. Some asked why he didn't do the same to all three, and Simon answered, "If I cut off everywhere they might escape from, they could have found some fourth or fifth tunnel. I wanted to control one exit and herd them to me for the slaughter."

Over the course of the night, he met almost anyone who was anyone in the small town. Fortunately, when the townspeople were using his goblin purge as an excuse to get drunk, he was introduced to a local leather worker. The man had hands stained by his trade and would have been easy enough to pick out. He offered to help Simon make a new set.

"I'd like that. I've worked with lots of wood, and some metal, but never leather," he confessed.

"Working the leather is the easy part," the man laughed. "It's the convincin' the animals to give it up that's somewhat harder."

Simon laughed at that and toasted tankards with the man. After that, he met with the smith too, and asked if he might help him at his forge. The man agreed but was very upfront with the fact that he couldn't pay Simon much for his time, which made Simon laugh. He'd been prepared to offer the man money to borrow his tools, not get paid for the privilege.

The night had started out as a somber affair, which was more than understandable given that perhaps one resident in ten had died in the small town in the raids over the last month, but now that they could see hope, it was becoming more like a wake. It was a celebration of life in death, and he could probably do a better job of learning that particular skill himself, so he threw himself into the night wholeheartedly, determined to enjoy himself.

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