The Goblin's Heir

Chapter Twenty Seven: Between Fate and Death

"I know everything, Little Queen. Where you are even when you hide. Every word you think before it seeps from your lips. Who you are, were and will be." Athane clacked her beak while she dragged me across her dirty floor by my skull, the curve of her claw biting against the tender walls of the cavern left by my destroyed eye. She threw me down in front of the fireplace and withdrew her claw from me. I clutched my face, pressing the heel of my hand against the ravaged socket while I flailed and screamed at the pain ripping and tearing through me. My one remaining eye was bulging wide, taking in every horrid inch of her. She loomed over me, her wrinkled, circular face grinning too-widely. "The Queen I knew in her fledgling-hood would never have done something so stupid as to burgle my nest." She lifted her still owl-like taloned foot and set it on my stomach. She pressed down with increasing weight, joy washing over her hideous features at the sound of my anguished wailing. She kept her largest talon lifted just enough that the claw only grazed my skin. One slight twitch and she could send it stabbing through my innards. With a slash, they'd be spilled out on the floor. 

I imagined my body split open and laid out like Knut's had been and suddenly my rage overcame my terror and pain. I clenched my teeth and bore them at her. "She and I are no longer the same creature." I lowered my hands from my face and grabbed at her foot, trying with all my strength to shove it off of me. "You know nothing of me." I felt her claw bend back beneath the fierceness of my grip. "Where is my son?!"

She raised one feathery eyebrow her dark eyes gleaming with malicious delight. "Changed you are, but you are still a peculiar beast. Here you are, trapped within my claws and bleeding out and still you snap and snarl as if it is I who is trapped." Her smile was cruel as she bent down low to fill my vision with the spark of evil in her eyes and my nose with the stench of rotting flesh. "How very wrong you are. You of all people should know by now not to believe everything you hear." She laughed and punched her claw through my hands and into my stomach. 

I was wrapped in a cocoon of pain and the warmth of my own blood. It covered me. Seeped out of my screaming mouth and puddled around my prone body. Blissfully, my mind turned off. I didn't fall asleep. I merely ceased.

"What's happening? Why won't the wound heal?!" Floki shouted and whimpered all at once. His voice was the first to break through the void of silence that had engulfed me. Neasa's was the second.

"I don't know. She's not reacting to the magic as she should. At least I got the bleeding to stop." She said with a disappointed sigh. "I'm sorry I'm not very skilled in healing. If Papa and Augustus were here..."

"You're doing well. Thank you, Dovey." Frit's voice was low and soft. I felt a hand take mine and squeeze it. The hand was large, but not meaty like Floki's or boney like Odd's. It was a warm very human hand, Frit's hand. "Hold on, Mama. Stay with us." He pleaded with me and I listened. I squeezed his hand back and let it drag me back to that world of unending pain.

I blinked my one good eye open as my consciousness returned. My vision blurred then slowly focused, at least as much as it was able. My depth perception was annihilated. Frit's face was the first thing my eye focused on. Then Neasa's. She knelt at one side of me while Frit sat on the other. Her hands hovered above each side of my face, radiating brilliant cold light like sunlight on a snowdrift. I'd been stripped down to my tunic and magic poured into me from her small hands. It rolled through me with that cold intensity, numbing the searing pain to an incessant throbbing. 

I lifted my hand shakily touching the place where Athane's claw had pierced my eye. I could feel the jagged lines of a tear that ran from my brow to my cheek and the awful give of my eyelid over my hollowed out socket. When I pulled the fingers away, there was no blood coating them. There was no blood, but the wound burned in spite of the magic being pumped into my veins.