The Goblin's Crown

Chapter Sixty: Deals

From my prison within the gilded birdcage, I watched Athane go about her day. For much of the night and early morning, she was gone and I was alone with her hoard of useless and dead things. Alone with my own thoughts, the echoes of her voice repeated, again and again with that truth I wish desperately she could un-speak.

Two days had passed since she'd revealed her last truth and my eyes were nearly swollen shut from my constant sobbing. I could do little else but cry...and watch Athane's every move.

I watched.

I learned.

I plotted.

Athane was a nocturnal beast. She spent her nights soaring through the Autumn Branches, but as the pale moon gave way to the blazing sun, she returned. She again struggled to squeeze herself through the door, changed from owl to crone, with the same amount of effort as removing a cloak, and spent the next few hours cooking her meals and enjoying her collection.

She played with the corpses of my fellow prisoners like they were dolls, dressing them in frilly frocks and brushing the strands of hair that still stuck to their decaying scalps. With a childlike innocence, she made them move and dance and sing. When they sang, she mimicked others' voices, sometimes even using other languages. I heard her bellow a jaunty tune once in a distinctly French tongue as she twirled a gentleman's blue-clad bones along a shelf.

When she was not playing with her pitiful toys, she picked through the piles of things, lifting objects up towards the light to admire them, no matter what it was. She treated a scythe with a broken handle with the same awed interest as a sparkling diamond.

It was the latter that unnerved me most, for it struck me that it was not the value of each thing that she coveted, but simply the very act of possessing a thing. People included.

She scared me at the best of times, but now, knowing what I knew, she terrified me to my soul.

She had said before that remaining her prisoner was not my fate, but the more I learned about her, the less I believed that she would simply let me go.

I was a valuable piece of her collection, after all.

If I was ever going to be free I had to escape.

When she left her nest the night of the second day, I paced my cage. I jumped around, testing the strength of the chain links from which the cage hung from the rafters. I found the damned things too strong to snap beneath my weight. I was far too tiny in my current form, no bigger than a common house mouse. I did find, however, that if I ran very fast from one end to the other, the cage would swing enough that I could get the cage directly above a pile of dusty motheaten clothes. It would make for a soft landing, were I able to jump out of the cage.

How I would get out of the cage and back to the Underground was the real issue. There was no door to the birdcage. The bars were strong and tightly spaced. I tried to squeeze my way through them, but could only manage up to my shoulder before nearly getting stuck.

It soon became painfully clear that the only way I would get out of that cage, was if I had someone outside to help me. I needed a goblin.

"Knut?" I called to him with a small, hoarse voice, both thinking it and speaking aloud. "I...don't know if you can hear me, and I'm sorry for being a bother," I backed up until my back hit the bars on the other side of the cage then slid down to the bottom with a sigh, "but I could really use your help right now. I've found myself in a bit of a pickle." The chuckle that followed belonged to someone either delirious with exhaustion or just plain mad. The sound vanished midway through as I swallowed it down. "Darling, please, if you can muster it, send me a goblin. Just one small goblin is all I'll need. I won't ask you for a thing more I prom-." My voice died as a familiar face peeked at me upside down from the top of the cage.