"But the harvest is huge this year," Carys said to her husband. "We don't have enough hands to do it all ourselves."

"I still don't like the idea," Geraint replied. "Being like those savage creatures."

"Savage creatures who will raid our homes and take our grain anyway if we don't buy them off," reasoned Carys. "And this way, we benefit as well. Just think about it. Most of us in the farmsteads have to have children just to provide extra pairs of hands, just to scrape through. That's not fair on them or us. And it's years before they're old enough to help; until then, all that extra cost of feeding and clothing an extra body…"

"I can't believe you're being so cold about this, Carys," said Geraint.

"Well someone has to be!" the woman shot back. "Someone has to be practical around here!" She clasped her hands on her head and sighed in exasperation.

"Look. Those goblins obviously wouldn't have bothered sending that messenger if they didn't mean what he said," she reasoned. "That's just not their way. They don't bother with tricks. They obviously don't want to risk an attack if they can help it, and they know we don't want that either. So we have two choices. We can either lose all our grain and maybe our lives when they raid the whole region after the harvest, or we can take up their offer. We give them some of our grain, and they give us…"

"I know, I know." Geraint stared at the floor. "But I think it's just plain wrong."

"Is it? Is it really wrong? I'm sure we'd be kinder than the goblins."

"Is just kinder good enough, though?" Geraint challenged. "Just because the goblins are worse, that doesn't mean we can do it ourselves."

Carys paused for a moment. "You're right," she conceded. "Maybe it makes us immoral. But so what? Who has to know, apart from the other farmers who are probably all going to make the same choice anyway?"

"Oh, not the girl herself, I suppose?"

"Well she'll hardly be in a position to do much about it."

"Carys!"

Carys' iron-hard expression faded. "I know," she said softly. "It is wrong. But do we really have a choice? A genuine choice? It would solve everything. Not just buy off the goblins, but give us the extra pair of legs we need as well - and for virtually no extra upkeep…"

"How about we take up the goblins' offer, then release the girl?" Geraint tried. "The best of both worlds, surely."

"You saw the one that goblin messenger was riding," Carys responded. "She was just like a horse. She stood there like she was in a trance, she did everything the horrible little thing told her to. Even if we released her, do you really think she could ever have a normal life after that?"

Geraint looked sceptical. "I don't know."

"If we were to take up the offer," Carys said, "we would have this girl in our possession, she would be our responsibility. We couldn't let her go, she wouldn't know what to do; she wouldn't survive a week in the wild. I'm sure there's nothing we could do to help her. So, we might as well use her ourselves. Where's the harm?"

Geraint couldn't help thinking that his wife seemed a little too keen, but saw that there was sense in what she was saying. He frowned, trying to see things from her point of view.

"We could sell the barn as scrap, too," Carys continued, sensing that her husband might be coming around. "She'd be small enough that we could keep her in the pen with the goats and pigs, and I'm sure she could eat the same food."

There was a long silence. Carys looked at Geraint with wide eyed encouragement. She was biting her lower lip with anticipation.

Geraint was a simple man and knew his wife was clever, much more so than him. It was one of the things he loved about her. The way she always seemed to be able to wrap him around her finger with words was frustrating at times, but in the end, he trusted her wisdom. Very deliberately, he spoke.

"Sell the barn, you think?"

Carys' face lit up, and she threw her arms around her husband.

"I knew you'd see sense, Geraint. Trust me, it's the only way."

"Wait, wait," Geraint said, starting to laugh. "I didn't say…"

He was cut off by Carys' lips as they met his.

The sun had nearly disappeared behind the mountains far in the distance when Geraint finally bolted the pen gate for the night. He watched for a moment as the ponygirl gazed absently at the horizon, feet squelching in the ankle deep mud of the sty, the little tin bell on the collar they had given her clanking. As she slowly paced around trying to avoid the noisy jostling of the pigs and goats around her, Geraint felt a little guilty about keeping her in the pen; but selling pieces of the barn to local tradesmen had eased their purse strings, and after all there was a certain logic to keeping all the animals together.

She looked astonishingly docile. Her arms, tightly bound behind her, were tiny in comparison to the rest of her physique, and despite the sinewy seam of muscle that rippled beneath her naked skin she was quite slight. The goblins had obviously traded away their weakest girls. Geraint had an awful suspicion that perhaps she had been kidnapped from a village or farmstead just like his own, perhaps not even very far away.

He dismissed the feeling. Carys had been right - rather than the naked and vulnerable human teenager she appeared to be, it helped his conscience to imagine the girl simply as another variety of livestock. She certainly acted like it. Her expression seemed eerily devoid of some intangible quality that Geraint couldn't quite place, and even with her arms permanently entwined behind her back she could probably have clambered over the fence of the pen if she had tried - but after two nights she was still here, obviously as broken and tame as any workhorse. And however disagreeable, it was better to have the goblins as trade partners than as enemies - Geraint's father's battered old sword could handle a few of them but a whole tribe riding to the attack would have been certain doom.

As Geraint continued to watch the ponygirl spied a gap at the trough and, sinking to her knees in the mud, shouldered in between two of the pigs and joined them in eating hungrily from the sloppy vegetable mix. She certainly deserved a good feed, Geraint thought; she had been dragging the harvester through the fields all day. Carys was exhausted enough and she had just been following the ponygirl with a stick, though the smile she had been wearing was a testament to how effective the ponygirl had been. Between the mud of the sty and the caked sweat and grime from the day's work, the ponygirl would need washing tomorrow.

Geraint noticed that most of the animals had now headed inside the pen's small shelter, surprisingly early. Suddenly there was a deep, ominous roll of thunder. Geraint looked up and saw that there was a huge front of storm clouds blackening the already faded sky a few miles upwind. He cursed himself for not noticing the warm, blustery wind before, and for continuing to put off enlarging the shelter of the sty; there simply wasn't room for all the animals inside it. But there was nothing he could do about that now. He turned to walk back to the house before the rain started.

Looking back when he reached the door, he saw that one of the smaller goats and the ponygirl had been the unlucky ones. They would have to endure the storm in the open. As the first spattering raindrops fell he saw the ponygirl try one last time to squeeze herself through the low opening of the shelter, muscling against the other animals that packed it out, but there was already barely room to breathe in there. She was pushed away and fell onto her back. Forlornly she wriggled to her feet, now covered in slimy mud, and resumed her vacant pacing, staring at the sky.

Geraint sighed. At least the rain ought to save them the trouble of washing her tomorrow.

There was another crash of thunder and with a deafening roar the heavens opened. Geraint ducked inside the house, but kept the door open for a moment. He squinted through the torrential rain at the miserable-looking ponygirl, already drenched and huddling in a rapidly deepening lake of mud in the corner of the pen.

As the rain pounded down on her, Geraint felt uncomfortable pangs of guilt, still not completely convinced they had done the right thing; but he couldn't help smiling. As strong as a human worker but without requiring any prepared meals or clothing, and a fraction of the cost and trouble of an ox, the ponygirl was the perfect compromise for a small farmstead like this, even without considering that they had bought off a goblin attack. Carys' choice of name for the ponygirl, Lucky, truly had been the right one.