The Goblin's Crown

Chapter Nine: Death

"Let me go! Please!" I wailed as the prison guards dragged me from my dungeon cell. There were three of them, escorting me down the corridor. Two to carry me by the arms in bruising grips and one to guide the way with a highly held torch. "Please!" I sobbed again, wincing as skin tore away from my toes where they dragged against the floor. The men continued on, ignoring me. Beneath the echo of the men's heavy footsteps, I could hear the scurrying of little feet. Looking down, I saw them there, my goblin guards running beside us, keeping pace.

Before us, loomed a heavy door and the nearer we drew to it, the louder the screams of those poor souls trapped behind it became. And the more I fought against their iron holds. "No! No, please!" I screamed writhing between the two guards that held me. With grunts of effort, they lifted me more off the ground to stop my feet from dragging and to make it more difficult for me to struggle.

Behind that terrible door, was a cavernous room filled with instruments of torture. Above fiery pits, men cooked in iron cages. On racks, others were pulled limb from limb and everywhere criminals of all sorts were receiving their flogging before they were to be executed. I was passed to one of these torturers, a man just as ugly and twisted as a goblin, who wielded a pair of large, rusty scissors.

Just as Knut had warned me would happen, I was stripped and made to kneel on the gore bathed floor of the torture room. Then those scissors set to work on my hair, stripping away my pride with each snip just as easily as they had my clothing. I shivered, watching as strands of gold fluttered to the ground around me. I caught a lock of hair in my hands and held it tightly as I wept. I didn't even notice the man switch the scissors for the whip until it cracked against my back. Again and again, the whip came down, cutting into my skin and muscle with each blow. The gold locks of hair around me soon turned red with my blood.

The goblins sat before me, their eyes bright, shimmering with the firelight from the pits below the cages. "Help me." I mouthed between screams.

Pig-nosed patted my hand as the whip came down again and I twisted against the searing pain. "We can't." It said, sadly. "We're just here to make sure you don't die."

"Pull the thread." The Rat-tailed growled. Its tail thrashed more and more irritably with each blow of the whip. "Pull it and this ends." Knut was still controlling it, somehow, and speaking through that borrowed mouth, that much was clear. "It has to be your choice."

"Please, Miss Bride?" Pig-nosed pleaded. I bared my teeth at them in answer, my anger burning more than the wounds stung.

"I'll do what I can, though it'll only hasten your end." Rat-tailed harrumphed like a grumpy cat and leaped up onto the torturer's shoulder.

The whipping stopped as the man listened to the goblin's whispers. The torturer's arm that held the whip fell to his side. "That's enough for you." He said and hoisted me to my feet. "It's near time they take you to the gallows, anyway." He pulled a plain dingy shift over me to cover my nakedness- more for the execution's audience's modesty than my own- before dragging me out of the dungeon to the outside courtyard where the cart, loaded with the soon to be dead, sat waiting to take me to the gallows.

Pig-nosed clung to the skirt of the shift and Rat-tailed rode on my shoulder as I staggered towards that cart full of screaming and wailing men. They reached through the bars, grasping for the freedom they'd never know again and the world they were about to leave. As badly as this cold world had treated them, they were still terrified to leave it. I knew that feeling well, in every sense. "Do you think I enjoy seeing you hurt, Matilda?" Rat-tailed/Knut whispered in my ear. "I felt every blow of that whip. I'm not letting this happen because I want you to hurt. I'm letting this happen because it is what you are choosing. You cannot go back to your old life. You've been caught. All this world offers you now is death. Please, Matilda, Love, end this. Let me take you home and I'll give you back your pretty hair."