Simon arrived in Sny on the very day that Gregor and the fop of a merary that had almost gotten him killed the st time were heading into the mine, and he only heard about that because the man was bragging in the inn about all the silvers he was going to get for letting the young boy do all the work.

  “Never get paid to work if you get paid for someone else to do the heavy lifting for you!” he bragged. “That’s what my dad taught me, and it’s worked out pretty great so far.”

  Essentially, he was already too te, and his heart sank. “Maybe you should try smoking 'em out,” Simon suggested helpfully after he introduced himself and bought the man a drink to try to get on his good side.

  “Nah,” Nedden said with a shrug as he dowhe mug in two quick swallows. “Hauling that much firewood is too much trouble for a handful of gobs, you know?”

  “Well, the boy is inexperienced,” Simon tinued, “It might be safer if you—”

  “Bah!” the other merary said, wiping the foam from his mouth with a dirty sleeve. “The boy’s got bloody pte mail - greenskins ain't about to get through that, now, are they?”

  The merary looked around, and the other men who were in there at that time of m gave him grudging support. There were a few nods, but Simon couldn’t help but see some of his worse features in the merary. Not only was he fat enough that he obviously had trouble squeezing into his breastpte, but he was overwhelmingly fident, and it didn’t seem to have any basis.

  Simon dropped the subjeot sure what he should do. Murdering this asshole before he caused any real harm would probably be the best answer, but that would have been wrong, even if Simon was quite sure that no one would miss him. Well, that and some part of him felt sympathy for a man that was obviously more talk than walk.

  After another few moments, he resolved to get the man too drunk to fight. So, he ordered a round for the bar as he regaled all of them with stories about goblin shamans that were so ected to the forces of evil that they could use fire magibsp;

  “I’ve heard that before,” one of the farmers chimed in. “But I don’t know ahat cims to have seen it with their own eyes or nothing.”

  Simon was about t about that when the boy and a couple of his father's men came into the bar, foiling Simon’s pn. While it ainful to see the eyes of someone he knew so well slide off him as if he was nothing but a stranger, it was less painful than realizing that he hadn’t seeher of the young men who were apanying Gregor iimeline where he’d healed his arm.

  Suddenly, the whole story clicked into pce. The uninjured man standing with the noose around his throat, the young mortality injured boy, and two missing guards. The only ohat was going to survive this was the coward, and he wouldn’t survive this for long. Everyone else was walking into a trap with a fraud that they thought was an expert.

  Simed at how closely that description fit his first visit to town. If Simon had goo the silver mih his charge or accepted the Baron’s men, history very well could have pyed out ily the same way, with an adventurer who didn’t know as much as they cimed to leading the boy to his doom.

  There were probably refles to be made there oure of reality and time travel, but Simon didn’t have time for that just now. Instead, he turo the group of men leaving the bar and said, “If you need one more sword, I’m game.”

  “Four is more than suffit, I would think,” Nedden said quickly. He might have acted fident, but Simon could see in his eyes that this was all about the silver, and he didn’t want to cut anyone else in.

  He wao say he’d do it for free, but when Gregor appraised Simon for a moment, he froze up. The boy didn’t know him, but for a moment, it seemed like he did, but then it was regor was barely 16, and Simon had to admit he probably looked like shit at the pace he’d been traveling. So, instead of taking him seriously, he deferred to the man his father had hired, theurned a.

  That only plicated things further. Trying to chase after them would only make Simon look pathetic, which was definitely not how he wao start their retionship. So he didn’t. He sat there, nursing a beer while he tried to figure out what to do while the men around him gossiped about how, they didn’t think this was going to end well.

  “Grown meo goblins all the time,” the barkeep said, “I don’t see why the Baron is letting his son face them.”

  “The boy’s got to grow up sooner or ter,” another man said. “He ’t grow up to be half the man his Grandfather was if Lord Corwin coddles him.”

  As the discussion grew more heated, Simon could almost see where this was going, and a few more things fell into pce. The only way that the Vist would survive or that anyone would know that the warrior who was supposed to guard him had fled was if a few men got riled up enough to go che them. In a couple of hours, there would be a mob of aging farmers and out-of-work miners heading down to hahings, but that would already be too te. They might save his young friend’s life, but everything else…

  Simon smmed his gss down and stormed out of the bar. He started following the group discreetly from a distance. He wasn’t pnning to apany them to the mihough. Instead, he cut into the woods and watched as they got closer.

  Then, ohey were ihe mine, he waited. Simon had been all over these woods in the past few lives. While he might not know every inch, he certainly knew where the ventition shafts were, and he waited at the first one fns of the group’s approabsp;

  There was the sound of battle once, but it was over quickly, and by the time they passed the ventition shaft, they were still in good shape. So Simon followed them slowly toward the sed, a couple of hundred yards further on.

  It was there he heard the sounds of a real fight. Even knowing that charging into battle in an unfamiliar pce was a terrible idea, he still didn’t hesitate. As soon as he heard the first human scream, he leaped down into the darkness.

  Simon lit the torch with a word in midair as he pulled out his dagger with the other. Trying to draw his long sword iight fines of the vertical shaft would have been very ill-advised; it would have been impossible.

  Instead, he did the best with what he had and whispered “Aufvarum Oo,” and used the words of lesser force to slow his fall so that he nded smoothly in the dusty mining tuhat had been built to follow a winding vein 30 feet below ground, and it just so happehat there where three goblins directly under him when he nded.

  Simon crushed oh his boots, narrowly dodging the upright spear that had almost impaled him. Then, without hesitating, he drove his dagger deep into the skull on his right, jabbed his tor the face of the goblin on his left, and then, stepping back, drew his sword and looked for his oppo.

  There were oblins here. Loads of them, but there were her the people he was looking for nor their corpses, which meant that the Vist’s party hadn’t made it this far.

  Simon gri that. If there was no one around to see, then he could still use magid even though the goblins licked their lips as they saw the easy target they’d found, he unleashed his first spell.

  “Gervuul Vrazig!” he barked, sending a streak of blue lighting through the majority of the enemies he faced with a greater word.

  Everywhere his magic struck, the goblins flopped over or sank bonelessly to the floor, but even as those that were still living looked around in arm, he was charging them with his sword in hand. Just like that, what should have been a sure thing for the greenskins became a plete rout.

  Simon was stabbed a couple of times, but the little bastards didn’t hit anything serious, and soon enough, the cavern was empty save for the corpses of his oppos. Only then, when he’d broken their spirit and stopped the trickle that would have no doubt bee a flood, did he turn to look for’s party.

  He found them 50 yards back toward the exit, where Gregor and one of his father’s men faced off against four remaining goblins. The other soldier y on the ground along with the corpses of a dozen green skins, though Simon couldn’t determine if the man was living or dead, and there was no trace of the Nedden, who had almost certainly fled as soon as his cakewalk turned into a rout.

  Simon dispatched two of the ugly buggers before they even knew he was there. The remaining two quickly found themselves outnumbered and uo flee, and had messy deaths that were quicker than they deserved.

  Once all that was done, Simon began to order the two of them around. “You there, watch my back while I see what we do for your friend!” he ordered the soldier, “And you, Vist—”

  “Wha- why are you here?” Gregor asked. “We left you at the tavern because Nedden said we didn’t need you. Why did you e anyway?”

  “Later,” Simon said. “I o see what be done for this man, so you make sure nothing is ing from the other side.”

  He was ed there might be moblin attacks, of course, but that wasn’t the reason he poihe two remaining men in opposite dires. It was so that her of them would be looking at him as he probed the wounds.

  The guard had been stabbed in several pces and was covered in blood, but his pulse was still strong. So Simon muttered a few words of lesser healing to partially close the man’s wounds and a word of cure to reduce the ce that iion would take him out, and then they made a crude litter from a cloak and goblin spears and dragged the unsan to safety.

  They were halfway to town before they met the mob that Simon had predicted that m. Holy, he thought they would e earlier, he thought to himself, but he said nothing. Instead, he let Gregor do the talking.

  As it turned out, they had started marshaling together as soon as the stable boy caught rying to skip town. That mental image was enough to make Simon ugh, but he held back, trying not to undermihe seriousness of the situation.

  When all of them returo Sny, And things were expio Baron Corwin, the man embraced Simon publicly and told him, “You saved my son. You have any reward you choose. You have but to .”

  “Dinner sounds good,” Simon said, causing a gale of disbelieving ughter. “I’m just gd we could save everyohis time.”

  “I’m not sure that everyone is going to live,” the Baron said, shaking his head. “There’s no reason I think of to spare that cowardly merary’s life.”

  “No?” Simon asked. “Not even to celebrate your son’s safe return? I would think that the greatest punishment of all we could offer a man like that would be letting him live with the knowledge of what he’s done.”

  That wasn’t the real reason that Simon wao spare him, though. It was because it was very easy for him to look at Nedden ahe man he’d once been, and he wasn’t particurly ined to be too harsh on himself from two dozen lives ago.

  Baron Corwin was initially unvinced, but eventually, after he calmed down, he agreed that branding the man a coward and exiling him from Corwin nds would be punishment. After that, Simon’s time on this level pyed out much as it did before for the few weeks. Simo a great deal of time with young Gregor, and though his father quickly banished Nedden from his nds, the Lord kept Simon around to do odd jobs for Baron Corwin.

  He mostly kept to himself, though, fog on studying what little he knew of the words of power and his experiments. He was mostly just biding his time to see how the impending civil war would py out, but surprisingly, it never did. Simon waited for the other shoe to drop, first for weeks and then for months, but the rumors that came to town were more about gossip and sdal than wars on the horizon. The King’s renewed health dispelled them pletely.

  After six months, Simon started to think that he should move on, but by then, he’d started a flirtation with Trinna, the baker. She was a cute, motherly woman who’d lost her husband years before when they were both young. There was just something about her sad beauty that struck him just right, long after the charm of her wonderful bread had faded into the background.

  It was the st thing he’d meant to happen, but somehow, it felt right. He still loved Freya, of course, but it had been many years and several deaths since he’d seen his beloved st, and something about reliving the same life over and over had started to dull those sharp edges.

  So, instead, he stayed. He bought a plot of nd, i on being a part of Sny’s little unity, and the about building himself a house and a livelihood. They werely an item or anything. Not yet. Dating wasn’t quite a thing here, but despite the cloud that still hovered over him, he thought he might propose to her anyway.

  The other levels would always be there, of course. He could do those any day, but he was fairly sure this would be the st time he’d get to watch Gregrow up, thanks to all of his hard work.

  Sadly, that wasn’t how it worked out. Though, the war never came, and Simon stayed. He experimented with magic, he practiced swordpy with his friends, and he learned lots of things he’d never known before, like how to split fence rails, tie knots, and of course bake bread. Unfortunately, all of that was cut short when he died two years ter while he was hauling logs from the forest when a skittish mule he hadn’t been paying enough attention to kicked him hard in the side of his head, instantly ending his well-earned break.