Ruby puts it away inside one of his expandable pouches and then...

"One last thing, if I may? Where, ah, is Rorikstead?"

She marks it on his map: about five days' ride away from Markarth, to the east.

Map of the Trip

He thanks her, then steps out into the city.

...Markarth is gorgeous. It's an extremely vertical city, beautiful stone architecture carved into the side of the mountains, a river cutting and winding through the city. For some reason he was instinctively expecting something austere and, uh, ugly, just like Winterhold, but no.

He climbs down the steps from the temple to a ground level road and starts looking for a guard.

It's not hard to find one. "Hail, citizen," she says when he walks up to her. "How can I help you?"

...huh. Her uniform is—it would not be out of place in the College, just like the priestess's wouldn't. She's not naked but there's a lot more skin showing than nonmages ever do, there.

It's probably the weather? Markarth isn't a tropical city but he doesn't need Wolfskin here.

"Hi! I'm afraid I'm not a citizen of Markarth, I'm visiting. Could you give me a five-minute overview of the main places of interest in the city? Inns and shops and the like."

"—sure."

The verticality of the city works well, here: she can just straightforwardly point to the places she mentions. There's the jarl's keep, there's the market, there's the inn, there's the blacksmith, there's the communal baths.

Ruby thanks her and makes his way to the market. In his drunken stupour he ended up never grabbing the food he was meant to bring with him on this trip so he needs to restock.

(Other people in the city are also dressed in immodest ways, he observes. He wonders if Onmund generalised from his local experience too much, when he said Nords have nudity taboos? He does come from a small farm in northern Skyrim, perhaps that by itself would explain it.)

And then he needs to... think.

The trip was meant to be about three weeks long, tops, but more like two if he had been at all smart about it, which he had in fact wanted to be. Now he's three weeks away from Winterhold if he rides back at a trot and runs into no trouble on the way, and that's not counting trying to figure out whatever the fuck happened with Sam and... a broken staff? He really has no idea what this is all about.

So, what he's going to do is hire a courier to go to Stonehills and inform the customer that the sword's delivery will be delayed (a note of confusion: why does someone in a small mining town want an enchanted sword?) and then to Winterhold to let them know he's run into some trouble and will take longer to get back. Not that they really care, probably, they seemed pretty nonchalant about the Apprentices that actually died to a Daedroth, but it's the principle of the thing.

That decided, then, he asks a guard for the local courier office and hires someone.

And then it's time to ride. He definitely doesn't have enough Scrolls of Conjure Ethereal Horse to last him the whole journey, now, so he'll need to actually learn the spell, but he was planning on doing that anyway. He leaves Markarth, summons his ghostly mount, and sets off.

He follows the main road southeast and rides for most of the day. When the sun is setting he slows down and looks for somewhere to set up camp for the night. He spots a shrine to Dibella, which seems as good a spot as any, so he grabs a tent from his satchel and sets it up. Then he steps into the tent, grabs the Ethereal Horse book, and gets back to studying.

(Man, what the fuck happened, he rode all day and hasn't even gotten to Rorikstead yet, how did he get to Markarth from Winterhold in one night. Something real funky is going on, here, and he bets Sam Guevenne is at the heart of it.)

The following two days are spent on horseback, and when he gets to Rorikstead it's already dark, so rather than investigate he just goes to the inn to spend the night.

Fortunately(?) that, itself, turns out to be the right move investigation-wise.

"You!" exclaims a man as soon as he walks into the inn.

"...me," he agrees, sending a prayer up to whichever gods may hear it and wondering what the hell his drunk self did, here.

"You've got a whole lotta nerve showing your face here, after what you did."

"...I'm afraid I have no idea what it was that I did, but I am for what it's worth truly sorry."

The apology, more than anything, breaks the man's stride. He recovers quickly enough, though. "Sorry won't cut it, not while my Gleda is still out there, alone and afraid. You kidnapped her and sold her to a giant."

"—that sounds awful!" He did what. "I'm sorry, who's Gleda and where's this giant? I'm sure I can fix this."

Stride broken, again. "...well, you'd better fix it! Gleda's a prize-winning goat, she was my pride and joy, and now she's gone because of you."

A goat.

Why the fuck did he steal a goat and sell it to a giant.

......maybe the giant sold, uh, their toe? Some other toe they had lying around? For the goat?

"It's late, but if you give me directions in the morning to this giant I can get your goat back."

That... sufficiently mollifies him. He still looks annoyed but Ruby's reaction was, approximately, the best it could've been. "Fine. My farm's by the southeastern gate, be there at sunup." And that said, he turns back to his table and the people he's drinking with.

He's like 80% sure Sam laid some sort of enchantment on him or something. And also has terrifying time-travelling powers or something.

Regardless, he'll rent a room, study the Ethereal Horse spell some, then try to sleep early so he can be ready to... rescue a goat... at sunup.

The next morning the farmer, a man called Ennis, tells Ruby that he was blabbing incoherently about a staff and how he needed the giant's help with something and the giant wanted a goat.

That accords with Ruby's hypothesis that he got the toe from the giant to fix the staff, but still, stealing a goat.

Anywho, the giant lives an about three hours' ride away from the village to the southeast, and he's lived there for years and never bothered anyone who didn't bother him back. If Ruby reads between the lines of what Ennis is saying, though, it seems like the giant is... known for certain proclivities. To put it bluntly, it seems to Ruby that Ennis thinks the giant probably wanted to fuck the goat.

Can a goat survive being fucked by a giant? Genuine question, Ruby actually has no idea how "giant" a giant is, but he doesn't want to bring the subject up; Ennis seems upset enough without him bringing up the possibility that the giant might've killed Gleda.

Well, nothing to it. He's gonna have to burn an Ethereal Horse on that because there is absolutely no way he is going to walk, especially if he might have to flee with a goat depending on what happens.

It's an uneventful ride, countryside vistas abound and nothing more. His ethereal steed doesn't tire, and can run at a steady trot without stopping to rest so he makes good time, and he can soon find the giant's lair—which turns out to be little more than a camp with a large tent, a permanent campfire, and a pen where he has three goats, a pile of firewood, and some other odds and ends. Gleda is easily recognisable as the goat with a bell around her neck, or so Ruby surmises.

The giant himself is about 11 or 12 feet tall—which isn't that gigantic, really, certainly not the mountainous creature Ruby had been fearing—and otherwise looks like a grey-skinned elf, with decorative scars and markings all over his body, which is visible because he is entirely nude. But there is absolutely no way a goat would survive a hard fuck with that. It's not even that big, relative to the giant's size, it's just that "not that big relative to 12 feet" is still most of Ruby's forearm, and thicker besides.

Ruby would be lying if he said there wasn't a part of him that was morbidly curious. He supposes it's fair to say by now that he has a size kink.