The Goblin's Heir

Epilogue

Floki remembered his mother lying to him and his siblings often throughout their lives. She lied every time she said she was okay when she clearly wasn't. She lied every time she swore she hadn't been crying. She lied whenever she clapped for them during their training. She was never happy to watch them fight and he and his brothers weren't blind to the despair in her eyes that grew each time they drew a practice sword against each other. The worst lie she ever told, however, came to light on a stormy autumn night a mere six months after Hella took the Underground with a faint knock on his bedroom door. 

Floki and Cerise stirred and blinked at the door as lightning brightened the dim room. Another knock came, a little louder than the last. "It's me." Ib's familiar voice pierced the heavy door. 

"What could it be at this time of night?" Cerise whispered as she sat up, pulling the covers up around her. Worry creased her brow.

"I'll talk to him." Floki kissed her forehead and drew their blanket over her shoulder. "Go back to sleep." Dread filling his belly to the brim, he walked the short distance to the door and wrenched it open.

Ib stood in the middle of the hall. The cloak he wore was soaking wet and his white blond hair was stuck to his forehead and cheeks. His boots were covered in telling wet sand and the briny smell of the sea clung to him. Before Floki could even get a word out, Ib knocked the wind from his lungs. "It's your mother." He said softly, finally lifting his eyes from the marble floor to look at him directly. His face was wet, but it wasn't from the rain, his eyes were red and raw. "She's gone, Floki."

Floki was fairly certain that everyone in the empire heard his scream.

Cerise managed to drag them both inside and sat Ib at the edge of their bed. She wrenched Ib's soaked cloak from him and wrapped him in a blanket to soothe away his shivering. Floki couldn't sit still. He paced back and forth along the line of pillars on the open-air side of the room as lightning filled the sky with light and threw the shadows into bizarre patterns. "What happened? I don't understand." He said, weeping still though the screaming at least had passed. "She seemed in fine health the last I saw her."

"It surprised me too. I only got the message explaining how sick she was this morning."

"And I'm just finding out about it now? After she's..." He couldn't even bring himself to say it. His language dissolved into snarling.

"The message Hughes sent me was a summons with strict instructions. I was to come alone and none of her children were to know of her death until after she was gone."

"We should have been there!" Floki roared at him, vibrating with rage. He wasn't angry at Ib. He was angry at her for not telling them. Angry at himself for not visiting her more often than he had. 

"She didn't want you to see her that way and I'm grateful that you didn't." Ib said, bowing his head into his hands. "It was not a peaceful end. She didn't go in her sleep. She struggled and fought until the last."

"Tell me everything." Floki pleaded. It hurt, the knowing, but he needed it. He needed the truth. No more falsehoods. 

"You don't need to know everything."

"No, I do. Please." Fresh tears rolled down Floki's face and that of his wife's as she wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his chest. "Please, Ib."

Ib released a ragged breath. "When I arrived at the island Hughes was already waiting for me at the door. I asked him the very same questions as you. What was wrong with her? How long had she been sick? Cancer, he said. A sickness that was eating her away from inside. It began in the lungs and spread. So quickly his medicine could do little but keep her somewhat comfortable. It was too advanced for a surgery to help and she refused to let a healer look at her."