They didn't go looking for what else was down there.
Arnold had made that clear enough already, standing over the ogre's body with his son's overreach still weighing the air between them. He didn't repeat himself walking back through the main cavern, stepping over goblin corpses and cooling fire pits like they were nothing more than debris underfoot now.
Henry followed a step behind, his empty scabbard slapping his hip where his sword should have been. Howard had recovered it for him without being asked, pressing the hilt back into his hand somewhere between the fork and the goblins' cold fires. Neither of them said anything about it.
Arnold finally broke the silence once they cleared the cavern mouth, back into the ravine's wind.
"You disobeyed a direct order in a live encounter," he said. Not loud. Just flat, and final, the way he said most things. "I don't care how well it turned out. Next time it won't."
"I know," Henry said again, because there wasn't anything else worth saying.
Arnold's jaw worked once, like he was chewing on something more, then let it go. "We're done discussing it."
That was as close to forgiveness as his father dealt in.
They walked in silence after that, boots crunching through snow, the adrenaline bleeding out of Henry's limbs and leaving something colder behind it. His shoulder had started to ache in earnest now, a deep throb that pulsed every time he moved his sword arm.
"If a cave this close to the Outpost is hiding something like that," Arnold said eventually, more to himself than either of them, "I'd wager Winslow's stretch of the range isn't faring any better."
Henry's mind snagged on the name before he could stop it.
Winslow. His fiancée's family.
He hadn't thought about her at all these last few months, not once, and the reminder came with an unwelcome weight behind it. In the life he wasn't supposed to remember, she'd broken the engagement in front of both their families, in a room full of people, with a coldness that had felt less like correcting a mistake and more like making a point of him. He'd deserved plenty from that life. He wasn't sure he'd deserved that particular humiliation.
She hadn't done any of that yet. Wouldn't, maybe, if this life went differently. He pushed the thought down before it could curdle into something he'd have to answer for later.
"You alright?" Howard asked, falling into step beside him. His voice carried none of the strain Henry might have expected after watching their father dismantle something nine feet tall in under two minutes. Howard sounded almost too easy, too composed, his usual polished cheer snapping back into place a half-beat faster than it should have. "You've gone quiet."
"Just thinking," Henry said.
"That seems to be a family trait today." Howard's smile didn't waver.
Henry let it go. Whatever Howard was actually carrying after watching that fight, he wasn't going to hand it over easily.
The walk back to the Final Outpost took less time retracing familiar ground. The ride north to the Garrison passed in the same clipped silence that had carried them south two days before. Nobody suggested stopping to camp.
Garrett was waiting at the gate when they rode in, though his expression shifted the moment he took in Henry's stiff posture and the dried blood along Arnold's jaw.
"Baron," Garrett said, straightening. "I take it the culling didn't go as planned."
"It went further than planned," Arnold said, swinging down from his horse. "Walk with me."
Arnold kept his account short and grim: a goblin warband bigger than any routine patrol should find, led by something with real magic behind it, and something worse waiting past a fork none of them had planned on meeting. He didn't give Garrett numbers. He didn't need to. Garrett's face said he understood the shape of the problem well enough without them.
"That's not scouts anymore," Garrett said quietly.
"No," Arnold agreed. "It isn't."
He didn't waste time deciding what came next. "Start recruiting more knight apprentices. Expedite their initial training, whatever corners can be safely cut, and I want you training up whatever excess we've got sitting idle here at the Garrison. If the mountain's sending us more than strays, we're not going to meet it undermanned."
Garrett's jaw tightened, but he nodded once, already turning the order into a plan. "Understood, Baron."
"Get him to the infirmary," Arnold added, nodding at Henry without looking at him.
"I'm fine," Henry said automatically.
"You were thrown into a wall by something that could have ended you," Arnold said, still not looking at him. "You'll let a medic decide that, not you."
Henry didn't argue further.
The Garrison's infirmary smelled of antiseptic herbs and old stone, its cots mostly empty this early in the season. A medic with grey-streaked hair and quick, impatient hands had Henry stripped to the waist and was prodding at his shoulder within minutes, ignoring his insistence that it barely hurt.
"Barely hurt people don't wince like that," she said, pressing again just to prove her point. Henry didn't hide the flinch that time either.
She checked his range of motion in efficient silence, the bruising already dark across his shoulder blade and down his spine. Nothing broken, she said eventually. Deep bruising, some strained muscle. Nothing that wouldn't heal clean with rest.
She handed him a small vial and a folded paper packet. "Lower health potion, and something for the pain. Two days, no heavy exertion, nothing that puts real weight on that shoulder. After that you're cleared for light duty, cautiously. Push it before then, and you risk turning strained into torn."
Two days.
Arnold, standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, looked faintly surprised by the number. He'd clearly braced for worse.
"Two days," he repeated, like he was testing the words for a catch he might have missed.
"Two days," the medic confirmed, already moving toward her next patient.
Arnold nodded once, some private calculation resolving behind his eyes. "Rest," he told Henry. "We go back out once you're cleared."
Two days passed in a blur of forced stillness, sleep, and a shoulder that ached less with every hour the potion had time to work.
On the morning of the third day, Henry stood at the Garrison's gate beside Howard, gear checked and packed, his shoulder tender but obedient when he tested the weight of his sword arm. Arnold stood a few paces ahead, watching the road north.
A lone rider crested the rise before Henry could ask what they were waiting for.
Lean, dark-haired, moving with an easy grace even from horseback, the rider slowed as he approached the gate, and something in Henry's chest went still.
He knew that face. He'd spent two years in another life trying to move the way this man moved.
"Sir Adar," Arnold said, by way of greeting. "Glad you could make it on short notice."
Adar swung down from his saddle. "Baron. You said you needed someone who could keep up with whatever's out there." A faint, unreadable smile. "I take it that's still the plan."
"It is." Arnold gestured to his sons. "My sons, Howard and Henry. You'll be working alongside them for this one."
Adar's dark eyes moved over Howard first, then settled on Henry a moment longer than the introduction called for, some private assessment passing behind them that Henry couldn't begin to read.
"Sinclairs," Adar said, with a short nod. "Let's see what you've got."
"Let's move," Arnold said.