The Goblin's Heir

Chapter Sixty Four: Family

My family seemed to all easily find a niche to fill. Whilst Frit helped the Unseelie running the city plot out our approach, Cat and Bran taught the human soldiers how best to fight the horde and Odd and Dara prepared the elven scouts for their role in the fight ahead. Cerise and Neasa worked with Hughes and the other healers. Floki, naturally, spent his time in the forge. 

I however, spent most of my time wandering, not really knowing what to do with myself, but to make my rounds between them to ask if they needed help. 

The hot fires of the Unseelie forge lit Floki's skin with gold and reflected in his eyes. He looked a shade more human in the forge's glow, but the fire, the heat, the sound of the hammer coming down onto the anvil, forming the metal to his will, sparked to life the goblin prince's need to create. I never saw him more excited and sure of himself that when he was at a forge with a hammer in his hand.

With a melodic rhythm, he struck down on the sheet of red hot iron curving the piece to fit over the curves and contours of a human chest. At the other end, Hephaestus gave orders to a pair of human assistants as they made sword guards and pommels and Serafini sharpened blades at a grinding stone. 

"How is everything going?" I asked, hoping the light of the fire didn't reveal the dark shadows under my eyes too badly. The she-goblin and her song still haunted my dreams, although she had stopped following me about in my waking hours. At least I no longer caught her.

The contentment on Floki's face was a welcomed and comforting sight. I smiled at him, soaking it in. "Well, we're making progress. The humans we have  have been a huge help, but we could still use more." He said, wiping sweat from his brow with a forearm. He was obviously exhausted. He had to be. He'd been working sing Serafini fetched him from our meeting and on and off through the night. And yet he still seemed happy to work. The hammer remained light in his grip. "You look tired. Everything all right?" He asked as he set the chest piece into some water to cool. The water hissed and steam came up in a plume between us.

"I find it hard to sleep sometimes without your father." I answered truthfully.

"You can share our quarters. We can drag in another mattress."

"Then I wouldn't sleep at all with Odd and Frit squabbling through the night." I chuckled. "I'm okay where I am. I have slept just not all the way through the night. There's too much on my mind."

"I can understand that. My sleep hasn't been the best either." He passed the breast plate off to a human assistant and began work on a sword, taking a rod of heated iron from the fire and setting it on the anvil. Have you...spoken with Cerise much lately?" He asked in a tiny whisper, his voice nearly lost beneath the clang of metal against metal. 

"She's been making herself noticeably scarce." I answered, resting against a long table behind me laden with finished pieces of armor. "Did something happen between you?" I asked, playing ignorant.

Another strand of long golden hair fell free from the leather strip keeping his hair back with a particularly hard clash of the hammer onto the red hot metal. "I did something stupid." He admitted without looking at me.

"What?"

Another hard blow followed with a harsh exhale of breath. "I sort of...kissed her." A look of shame darkened his face. "As if she even remotely thinks of me that way. Why did I choose her for a bride? I knew it was the last thing she'd ever want."

"Because she'd be good at it." I touched his sweaty arm, drawing it to a slow stop at his side. "She's already proven she can protect a brood. She nearly died saving you, right?"