That’s how it stayed as we went farther and farther north. To where the dead skeleton trees were the only foliage to be seen, to where any grass was stained white and gray with death and snow, where the rocks were sharp and covered in ice. It could almost be beautiful, almost, had I been here willingly. But I wasn’t and every single bone in my body ached with that knowledge.
Soren continued to try to engage me, and despite the harshness of the environment, the starkness that made it hard to bear alone, I did my best to ignore him or shut him out. But he managed to whittle out answers from me sometimes when I was doing something rote and mindless like dressing the rare rabbit or squirrel that we came across. Stupid things like my favorite color or if I preferred dawn to dusk. Most of the time, I answered sarcastically which left him confused—I was finding out the whole spiel about goblins not able to understand sarcasm was actually true and very annoying—but sometimes when he caught me off guard, I answered honestly and in return, he gave his own answer. So, I learned that his favorite color was dark green, that he preferred the dawn right as the sky went from gray to pink, and that he abhorred the taste of herring. I learned that he preferred vines to flowers, grass, and even trees, that he let them grow almost wild around his home, that he had no siblings and sometimes he wished for that to change despite knowing it was easier to be an only sibling as a goblin.
I didn’t like how human he was after these sessions and how they slowly got my tense muscles to relax as he talked, almost to himself considering the little I had to say to him, and shared and became a tangible person versus a thing taking me from my home.
The night I fell asleep in front of a roaring blue fire before he did, closer to him due to the warmth that radiated from his body, lulled and comforted by it all instead of repulsed, I knew I’d lost the battle and I would continue to drift farther and farther into this world as we traveled. Drift farther and farther into him.
A voice in my head whispered no, whispered roots, but another voice asked me if it would really be that bad to fall into this place, fall into him, and I woke up in blind terror one night, gasping from the voices and feelings in my head.
There was something I needed to do. Somewhere I needed to go, and I couldn’t keep falling into this world. If I fell asleep, I would never wake up again, not to the world I needed to, somehow I knew. I palmed the knife that I was given so very long ago, the iron smelling unpleasant in the Permafrost, so strong that it woke him up from beside me. He gave me a resigned look, like he’d expected this to happen, and moved to disarm me, but I turned away before he could and began hacking at the exposed roots at the base of the tree I slept near, eyes widening as the roots began to bleed a thick, dark sap. I hacked and hacked, cut and jabbed, and then as the thick sap flowed, I took it in my mouth and drank like some type of creature was possessing me.
All of a sudden the fire fell away, the Permafrost fell away, the trees fell away, the horses fell away, and the goblin man beside me fell away, and all that was left were the roots. So impossibly long and thick.
And I was falling once more.
* * *
MY BACK HIT the roots as they spiraled down and once again the voice of Hel spoke. “You’re a clever girl.” The condescension in her voice was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. “Aren’t you? Or is it luck that keeps you from losing yourself completely in your other selves?” The void called out to me, shimmering like skipping a pebble over water, and I glared at the vast darkness.
“Did you truly have so little faith in me?” I snarled to Hel’s voice, but all I could hear was her laughter—grating and painful to the ears.
Her voice faded away as the other, more ancient voice spoke, By root, by fang, by iron, come back to us. By root, by fang, by iron, seal your fate. Though there was no speaker, the words brushed against my skin as if someone whispered softly against me. The words ran down my body like a gentle caress. Unlike the mocking of Hel, this voice called out encouragement as I closed my eyes once more.
The world exploded back into color. This time grim, the sky right before dawn looming over me with a heavy, almost oppressive feeling to it. Something was familiar about the sky, about the day, but nothing I could really put my finger on as I hefted the axe upon my shoulder and carried a few blocks of firewood beneath my free arm. The cold months were coming soon and my sister’s newborn needed to stay warm if he was going to survive. As my father’s heir, it was my duty to help take care of all of my six sisters and their children, working side by side with my father and some of their husbands, until we had enough to live off during the months of severe cold when the ocean water froze and nothing grew in the hard, dark ground. When the daylight disappeared completely and all we could do was huddle by the fire and each other, pressing our freezing skin against one another to share heat, until the warm months came again.
There was an odd tinge in the air, almost like ash, a metallic type of taste in the wind that brought me discomfort and unease that traveled down my spine. I crouched and pressed a hand to the ground, trying to listen, to feel, the way the earth was speaking to me. The minute the ground spoke my eyes shot open and wide. Hoofbeats, the sound of dozens of horses against the frozen ground, the cries of hunters who had no human blood, their faces flashed in my mind from the connection in the ground, and I dropped the firewood and raced back to where I knew I’d be safe—in the lake under the rushing water of the falls the river made.
I stopped dead in my tracks when I realized what I was doing. I was no coward. I couldn’t run, not when I had a family to defend. So, I turned on my heel and raced back to my small village and into the midst of a slaughter.
Never before had I seen such creatures with so much speed, ferocity, the animalistic way in which they hunted and killed, and the way their faces contorted into monstrous features as they reveled in their kill.
A sword came for me and I blocked it with my axe, twisting until the weapon was locked in the space between the blade and the handle and yanking it out of my attacker’s hands. The effort left my own hands red and smarting, but I followed through until my blade was embedded into my attacker’s side. Wrenching it out, blood splattered onto my body as I took a deep gasp of air and attacked another foe. It didn’t matter if they were human, goblin, some unholy mix. I fought my way step by step to where my family was.
Most of the blows coming at me, I dodged, and most of the blows I threw, I missed. But I was doing better than the other humans surrounding me who were getting mowed down like flies. If I had a moment, I might’ve stopped and wondered why there was almost some supernatural type of quality to how I fought. It wasn’t like I didn’t train hard, but this was different, it was like every single step was made with invisible strings pulling me around. One step to the front, dodged a blow, a step and swing to the side, wounded an enemy, like a dance that my body innately knew, even if my mind didn’t.
Something hard smacked me in my face, and I went down to the ground, gasping for air. The dirt was soaked with blood, and I gripped a handful of it, screaming and throwing it in the face of the goblin who came down upon me. He spat as he swiped away the bloodied dirt that muddied his pale face and got into his emerald eyes. His hair was long and blond and unbound, and even with my distraction, he quickly fell upon me.
I aimed a kick toward his chest only to be kicked roughly in the stomach in turn, and I curled up into a ball as the pain exploded, sharper than knives, bringing blood up to my throat and lips. Eyes shut tight, my stomach curdled as I realized there were no more sounds of battle around me. Only whooping of victorious monsters and the dying, ragged breaths of my fellow man.
The goblin pulled me up by my hair, and I hissed in pain but opened my eyes, resolved to look at them until the very end.
“You smell like the Permafrost,” he muttered before throwing me down once more. “Why do you smell like the Permafrost?”
I got to my hands and knees only for another gut-wrenching kick to force me back into a ball on
the bloody earth. Around me, bodies were cut open, bashed in, bruised and torn apart, bloodied until I no longer knew who they were in life. Bile rose in my throat at the smell of the corpses, but I’d had nothing to eat and so I had nothing to throw up other than the blood dripping from my lips.
“Run,” the goblin who kicked me said.
I stared at him with wide eyes. His brethren were coming behind him into a half-circle, jeering with devious looks on their faces.
“I said run!” he yelled, and I scrambled backward until I was on my feet and sprinting toward the woods.
Raucous laughter came from behind me, and deep inside, I knew it was only a matter of time before they caught up to me and finished the job. This wasn’t mercy, letting me run, this was releasing a hare for the hunt. Despite the pain where he kicked me and the other blows I received, despite the blood dribbling from my lips from some internal wound, I raced through the forest like an injured doe trying to escape her hunters. I’d never thought about how the animal must’ve felt when I hunted it down and killed it, and the irony of the situation tasted bitter on my tongue.
My chest tightened as I panted in deep gasps of air, but nothing worked to quench the fire in my throat. Pushing on, I jumped over a pile of dead wood and rotting plants and landed with a cry as my ankle gave out.
Stumbling through the underbrush, I finally crashed and fell down a ravine. My leg hit hard stone, and I nearly shrieked as blinding pain filled my vision. When I tried to move the leg, the blinding pain came again, white and hot. One leg most likely broken; one ankle at least sprained. There was nothing I could do anymore.
My vision fuzzy, I waited until they caught up to me. They would torture me, assault me, then if they were feeling merciful, they would kill me fast. But more likely than not, they would play with me like a cat did with its prey.
Something slithered beside me, the cold, clammy scales making me freeze up as a little albino snake in the dirt slithered past me. It had puncture marks on its tail from another snake, most likely, unless it had bitten its own tail. Even with its muted coloring, my father’s lessons came back to me—it was most certainly venomous.
There was crashing in the trees up above me, and a voice whispering in my head by fang, by fang, by fang. Whatever they had in store for me, whatever they could do, it would be much worse than what I could do for myself now, in this moment.
And so I grabbed the snake, enraging it, until it bit into the soft flesh of my arm and the world turned black.
14
WHAT IS AND WHAT NEVER WILL BE
I BOLTED UPRIGHT in my bed, my breath heaving in my chest. It was so real … so, so real. His voice, his touch, his men. I took a few deep breaths before I realized that I wasn’t where I thought I should be. Not on the muddy banks of Hel but in a house—more specifically, the wooden house I grew up in. The loft with the low ceiling. It’d always been a little cramped in here with six other sisters, but I couldn’t tell where anyone was.
I thought I wasn’t supposed to know I was in a trial? I thought, hoping the voice of Hel would hear me.
Trust me, darling girl, the voice replied, and what it said sent shivers down my side. This is the one trial you will remember and wish to forget.
My eyes darted around wildly as I tried to pull myself up, only to fall back down onto the bed in a fit of dizziness. The bed stands grinded against the wood as I fell over and lay there with hazy vision, trying to figure out what the fuck was happening.
It was there, lying on my side, that I realized something. I was … whole. My injuries from Lydian were gone. There was no aching scar tissue, and I gazed in wonder at the smooth skin of my arms and the lack of calluses on my hands. If anything, both of my breasts were a bit swollen, and when I touched my cheek, there were no markings from goblin nails. What? How?
“Ebba!” A voice that sounded so familiar raced up the ladder to the loft. Whoever it was was keeping low as to avoid bumping their head.
Ebba? Ebba was my middle name. My mother had insisted that if I was to have a boy’s name for a first name, she would give me a female middle name and so she had. But no one ever called me it, no one ever referenced it. What was the point? I wasn’t supposed to be a girl anyway.
I stared open-mouthed at the figure coming to lean by my bedside. It was … Soren, but not Soren. Innately, somewhere in my heart, I could feel that he was the same like Lydian had been the same, like my parents had been the same, except for this time … he was the same, but different.
His skin was the color of alabaster, and despite the summer heat, he wore a light, hooded cloak to cover it. His eyes weren’t the color of lilacs, but instead, a pinkish color almost bordering on red. His hair remained white but without the blue undertones that his goblin-self had. But other than that, he was unmistakably human.
What had he said once? The reason he looked like he had as a goblin was due to a genetic mutation. So, if this was a human form of Soren, if this was the same Soren but in a different life—a life where we were both human—it made sense he had the same mutation.
Like all the other versions of my life the roots had shown me, this world was as real as any other, despite it feeling like a dream. This perfect path with no blood or violence and no goblins or other creatures, but still with Soren, human, deeply in love with me.
He leaned forward and kissed my sweaty brow while I was still too shocked to do anything.
“Ebba,” he whispered as if he were tasting the name, like it was fresh water after not drinking for an entire day. “Ebba, you’re awake.”
There was more ruckus downstairs as multiple other people began climbing into the loft. My mother’s voice, loud, demanding, and totally in charge, ordered everyone to give me room as a group of people huddled around my bedside. My father, my mother, the town healer, Soren, and a man that I didn’t know but had the strange feeling I should. He also, like me, took after our father with his dark skin and curly hair, and he might’ve been a few years older. Did I have a brother?
The healer bent down, feeling my forehead with the back of her hand. “You gave us quite the scare, child.”
“I— What— What’s going on?” This was too much. Too much information trying to cram itself into my head and my head wouldn’t let it. It was too different, wrong, yet also so, so familiar and so, so right.
“Do you not remember?” My mother fussed over me. My mother never fussed over me. We had a cordial relationship, but there’d always been distance. Whether it was because I was meant to be a boy or because I was meant to be given to the Permafrost when I reached my majority, I’d never know. Not in this world, at least. I didn’t blame her. Living with the knowledge your child was going to be ripped from your grasp for years probably meant some unintentional emotional boundaries. “You fainted, caught a fever. You’ve been asleep for two weeks.”
Two weeks? Asleep? I blinked again, trying to clear the gunk from my gummy eyes. “I—what?”
The healer held up her hand. “It’s possible her brain needs a chance to recover. The fever was strong and likely affected her memory and thinking capabilities. She’ll be back to normal soon.”
“Magda,” the human Soren said, “what about…?” He trailed off, anxiety written plainly on his face in a way it never would have in the Permafrost.
Magda pressed her hand on my lower belly; there was a small but noticeable bump between my hips. “If the child survived the fever without miscarriage, then it should be fine.”
Child? I was with child? My hand went down to press against the small bump. It was more solid than the rest of me, definitely not distended gas or from eating too much. The moment my hand brushed against it, a fierceness flooded through me, stronger than I’d ever known before. A child. With Soren?
It was something I’d thought about before, but doubted was possible for either of us. I wasn’t in the position to spend nine months pregnant, and who knew how the stag’s power would affect the child. Not to mention the child of the
Erlking would be in incredible danger from those that wished us harm or wanted a bargaining chip. And Soren? He might’ve been less physically vulnerable, but he’d never put me in harm’s way. A child was out of the question.
Until now, that was.
“Thank the gods,” Soren said and rested one of his large hands on top of mine. His hand was warm and callused against my softer ones, and I could only stare in shock, knowing that I was pregnant in this world.
Pregnant. Whereas before, in my other life, I took herbs that stopped my menses from coming, terrifying me that I may never carry a child. Though perhaps I was grateful I’d had my monthly dose soon before Lydian decided to tear apart my village. Pregnancy and childbirth were things I’d thrown out long ago as something I would never experience.
And here I was, pregnant, carrying this human Soren’s child within me, seeing it grow inside of me. Something inside me was warm but broken all the same. By iron, you must leave this life, the voice whispered to me. I’d done it all so far. Left lives by root, by fang, and now I must by iron because others were counting on me. But a sweet dazzling smile from the human Soren made all those thoughts melt away.
“You scared us all, sweetling.” My mother brushed a lock of my hair back from my sweaty face. “It came on so sudden.”
“I fear I don’t remember much,” I said, glancing around at the people in the room. Many of them were strangers to me. Soren was Soren yet he was a stranger, the man who was most likely my brother, a stranger, Magda, a stranger. Was my mother a stranger too? Was I a stranger to even myself? The thought wiggled like a worm in my brain, unsettling me.
Magda nodded with sage wisdom. “A fever will do that to you. You’ll probably regain more of your memory as the days pass on. But for now, rest. Be loved and taken care of. It’s best for you and the babe.”
I found myself nodding when I should’ve been searching for my way out. But oh, to be loved and taken care of without the worry of assassins and monstrous creatures, without the weight of the Permafrost on my shoulders, in a simple life with simple comforts and simple love. Was it so wrong that I wanted to experience that for a few more hours?
Goblin King Page 14
