Chapter 43
First things first, I needed to steal a weapon. I eyed the assortment of goblins who veered towards us, but most of them weren’t warriors. They wore ordinary clothes, not leathers, and if they carried anything it was a book or a mug of steaming dark liquid. Fuck, I’d kill for a drink right now.
The woman holding the mug flung it out in front of her, and I spun on instinct, shielding Kier from the spray. It hit my back and burned, but it wasn’t hot enough to scald, only to soak my clothes. On second thoughts, a drink was a bad idea right now.
Kier’s chest vibrated as he growled, fixing his glare on the woman who threw the drink, but I wrapped both hands around his bulging bicep and gave the woman a consoling smile.
“Hi. We’re just on our way out, don’t mind us. Ignore the growling, he tends to do that when someone hurts us.” These goblins were the admin side, so maybe I could reason with them?
Drink-throwing Lady backed up a step now she’d exhausted her one and only line of defence. “You’re a human.”
“Yes, but look. Goblin husband.” I wiggled my fingers at Kier. “I know my kind have been raging dicks to you, but one—it’s mutual—and two—I’m more on your side right now than theirs. So can you just let us pass? Kier’s only gonna lose his shit if you threaten me.”
“I can hear you,” Kier mumbled.
I saw the woman hesitate, running a hand over her straight midnight hair. “I—”
“Humans killed my nephew!” an enormously tall man with tusks and horns and a tailored leather suit yelled, launching in our direction.
I sighed. “Valour?”
She’d snuck past them to sit by an open window, grooming her paw, but now she lifted her head and her sharp eyes locked onto the man racing towards us. In a moment, she leapt across the long corridor, her body little more than a smear of light and magic.
She got to us right as the horned, tusked man raised his hand to presumably grab me. That was when Kier unleashed all hell, roaring so loudly we’d surely bring everyone else on the island in our direction.
“Well, my little fantasy of diplomacy went well,” I sighed, sharing a look with the woman, who still held her empty mug. “Might want to move, love. Things are gonna get messy.”
She stumbled backwards, her turquoise eyes wide, until she bumped into the window where Valour had just been.
I curled my hand into a fist and threw it into the gut of the man who raced at my right, his head ducked, curling horns aimed for my chest. “Are you trying to gore me?” I blurted, shocked and affronted. “What have I, personally, ever done to you?”
“Your kind killed my—”
“Ah, but I said me personally. Didn’t you hear?”
Black rage filled his small, beady eyes.
I got a quick impression of a tall, slim man and a smart suit stitched from fog and blue cotton, nothing at all like the warriors we’d met before, but then he rammed his side into me and I decided looks could be deceiving.
I drove my fist into his gut, the impact ricocheting up my arm, throbbing through my knuckles.
A certain thrill went through my blood. I hadn’t missed being attacked per se, but I did enjoy fighting too much to keep the smile off my face. And at least this guy was more on my level than Jyrard or a room full of Bluescale soldiers.
I spun, evading a clawed swipe, and had to flatten myself to the wall behind me when a different guy came at me with—a book. Huh. These really were the admin side of the barracks.
“Not a bad weapon,” I told him, a little jealous. This man didn’t have horns, or any hair at all, but he had sharp teeth he bared in my direction, and my stomach flipped at the hunger in his eyes. “You don’t, by any chance, eat humans, do you?”
“Vile flesh,” he spat.
“Great! We’re on the same page.” I ducked low and whipped under his arm, driving my elbow into his spine, completely missing the spot that would have sent him sprawling on the floor.
Oh, well, I wasn’t perfect. “I’m really not your enemy!
” I sighed when two more goblins came towards me, driven by anger but not possessed of the same skills as the other residents of this castle-island-thing.
A guttural growl made us all jump, and we froze, watching a small, balding goblin in a brown suit fly through the air like a cannonball.
“Kier,” I groaned. “It’s not polite to throw people.”
The balding goblin landed in a heap that made me wince, and my own opponents turned back to face me. All three of them. Great. Three against one wasn’t my favourite odds. Wait, where did the tall guy in the blue suit go? I could have sworn he was—
A bulldozing weight slammed into my middle and rammed me into the wall hard enough that something snapped, and I cried out, tears springing to my eyes. “There you are,” I rasped. “Wondered where—”
I whimpered when he drove his fist into my gut, right over the rib he’d broken, and I wheezed, panted, bit back a scream of pain as tears overflowed my cheeks. I missed my troupe. I missed Rook. I missed Xiona for gods’ sakes.
“You will die, pleading for your life, like my nephew died pleading,” the goblin hissed, and it really said something about how bad the pain was that I barely registered the spittle that landed on my chin. “What are your last words?”
“Perse, this isn’t right.” Oh, it was the woman who threw her hot drink at us. She tentatively crossed the corridor, clutching the empty mug. “I think we should hear her out. She’s with Prince Kier, and—”
“I don’t give a shit,” Perse snarled, teeth bared. Oh, that was a lot of teeth. They were a lot more disturbing in anyone but Kier’s mouths. “This vermin—”
“Wasn’t the one who killed him,” Mug Lady insisted, her voice stronger. She took several decisive strides towards us, her blue face set in determination. “And killing her won’t bring him back.”
“Would if I could,” I slurred. Oh dear, was the pain getting better, or was I losing my grip on reality? “Val—” Nope, I was definitely sliding into unconsciousness. Shit. What if I was slipping into death? What if my broken rib had punctured something vital and now I was bleeding inside and—
“Stop!” a roaring, deafening voice cracked across the corridor like gunfire. “Persen, release the princess immediately. Oken, get down from the prince’s back. Now!”
I didn’t know who spoke, but everyone reacted like he was Gaia herself handing down orders. My hero, I tried to say, but my mouth had decided it didn’t want to speak, and my vocal cords had forgotten how words worked, so when I parted my mouth, a howl of pain emerged instead.
Valour’s snarl clashed with Kier’s murderous roar, and I tried to hold on, I really did, but everything had grown soft and hazy. The guy in the leather suit slid across the floor, like Kier had skimmed him like a stone on a pond.
“Woah, okay,” a woman’s voice said close by my ear. “I’ve got you. Did the commander just say princess? I thought that was a lie…”
“She was present at the fall of Cyana. She may be human, but I witnessed this woman trying to save our people. Bluescale goblins. My wife escaped that day, and was evacuated to a nearby city later claimed by the Haar. But she came here with stories of a human princess who tried to stop the Haar.”
I tried to say yup, that’s me, but Kier’s vicious growl of blood and broken bones and hair ripped out and eyeballs popped out of skulls was much closer, and the promise of gore was so comforting that I passed out.
I didn’t want to go back to the spire. But we were caught. Our escape had failed.