16. Stubborn Idiotic Asshole,Murderous Angry Goblin
16. STUBBORN IDIOTIC ASSHOLE, OR MURDEROUS ANGRY GOBLIN
ELOWYN
As if I’d drowned before a well-meaning savior dragged me to shore to pump my chest, I gasped, sucking in huge, desperate lungfuls of air. My entire body came awake with me—pulsing, throbbing, hurting like a motherfucker—until my jaw stuck in the open position with a punishing jab that ricocheted along the left side of my face and into the eye socket. Those little dark dots again danced at the edges of my vision. This time, I chased them.
“Oh no ye don’t,” snarled a voice like a saw through a felled tree.
Pain started in my collarbone and radiated everywhere , swift as a well-aimed arrow.
Sucking in a wheeze that was mostly a cry, I finally focused on the irate goblin with wooden-like dragon feet bent over me, prodding at my obviously fucked-up-beyond-repair collarbone without a single shred of remorse across his snarling features .
He glowered, bared his teeth, and growled. And that was before he brandished the stone-hewn blade in his other hand.
“For fuck’s sake,” I gritted out in a desperate wobble around my jaw, still stuck partially open. “What’re you doing?”
Actually, what he was doing was obvious. The goblin was clearly a batshit crazy sadist of the highest degree. He didn’t just want me dead, he wanted me to beg to die before I went.
After he finished an impressive rolling growl I would have believed came from an animal had I not been looking straight at him, I mumbled a barely coherent, “Stop.”
He didn’t.
Unable to keep myself from whimpering, I cried, “Please. Stop. Kill me if you must, but not this.”
He drew back and away. I dared hope my relief would be long-lasting?—
Splash! Water smacked against my face in a spanking sheet. Its temperature was capture-your-attention cold.
Gasping, I gaped at the cretin who was setting down a now empty cup. “Wha—?” I stammered.
Before I could finish blinking the water from my poor swollen eyes, he was back in my face. His stare was wild, savage, more dangerous than the black stone blade he wielded.
“What’ve ye done with my gran’gobbler?”
I blinked and gawped some more. “Your … what? ”
Tentatively, I waggled my jaw, and by sunshine it unlocked! With a deeply relieved sigh, I closed it.
“You heard me,” he snapped, his breath like hot saltwater stinging the many cuts along my neck. “Where is she?”
“Who? But before you answer that, what the dragonfire do you think you’re doing? You’d better back off of me before I … I make you,” I ended weakly, remembering at once the state of myself.
“Don’t play stupid with me.”
“I’m not playing,” I barked like a dysphonic seal. By a dragonling’s whiny nature, was my throat damaged too? Was any part of me working the way it should?
“Forgive me for being a little … out of it here. Fuck .” Even my fuck sounded like a drunken raven’s caw. “You’re not helping anything by hurting me even more, you know.” I glared at him; I didn’t even think he noticed. Sighing in resignation, I said, “If you’re Granddoody , then Pru’s fine.”
I hoped she was fine anyway. But now didn’t seem the time to argue the finer details of her whereabouts.
“I don’t know a ‘Pru,’” the crazy goblin said while he raised his blade as if to strike me straight through the chest with the full force of his weight and misplaced anger. Combined, they were that of a full-grown dragon.
“Prim … rose,” I wheezed, as he leaned his empty hand onto my shoulder and pressed down. All at once, blissful oblivion was winking at me, beckoning me toward it .
“Primrose?” he repeated, but I was too far gone to answer.
My eyes had closed of their own volition. The pains were already beginning to fade as the darkness crowded in again like a soothing compress. I didn’t have to do a thing to make it happen. For once, something was easy. Consciousness was leaving me all on its own?—
Two hands dug into my shoulders and shook me. Oh dear dragons, no. The pain erupted across every inch of my body, and I couldn’t bear it. I held my breath and prayed for it to end.
“Lemme go,” I mumbled, still chasing the darkness that clutched me.
“Not till ye tell me ‘bout my gran’gobbler.”
Then the bastard shook me again .
I forced my eyes open to their widest, causing my puffy eyelids to throb. “ That’s it ,” I seethed, though my vehemence cost me with jolts of hurt pretty much everywhere—shocker. “You shake me or push on me or put a knife to my throat one more time, and I swear to dragons I’ll kill you the very instant I’m well enough to enjoy it. And if I die, I won’t go to the Etherlands until I’ve spent at least a century haunting you so hard you won’t ever sleep again. Do you get me?”
While he blinked in surprise, so did I. My speech was coming more easily. I hadn’t even had to pull a Mauricio .
The goblin seemed to have recovered from whatever had shocked him. Once again, he loomed over me.
But he didn’t touch me .
“I mean it,” I warned, my voice a rough croak. “I’ll butcher you if you keep pushing me. I’m well past my edge, asshole.”
The resulting imagery of slicing the goblin to bits was enough to make me grimace, because blazes, no , I didn’t want to do that. But on the outside, I merely sneered at him as best I could around what felt like split lips. A split cheek too.
The goblin wavered as he studied me. “What’d ye do to my Primrose?”
“Why would you think I did anything to her? She’s my friend. I wouldn’t hurt?—”
Faster than I could register over the cottony sluggishness inconsiderately stuffing my head, he was back in my face, his weight again pressing down on my shoulders.
The blackness crowding my vision had returned too. This time, I pushed it away. This crazy goblin might actually kill me while I was out, no matter that he’d been the one to apparently nurse me back from the threshold of death.
“Get … the fuck … off me,” I grunted, while I tried to push him away. My arms wouldn’t cooperate, making it obvious how very much at the mercy of this goblin I was.
Though I’d only managed to reveal more of my vulnerability, he pulled back some, though he continued to hover above me, his knobby hands a constant threat of more pressure, more pain .
His eyes were narrowed, his brow low in heavy suspicion. “Ladies aren’t supposed to curse.”
“And I’d bet goblins aren’t supposed to murder innocent ‘ladies’ just because they feel like it.” My jaw ached like I’d been smashed in the face by a few pygmy ogre fists, but by sunshine at least I could actually talk again.
“Besides, I’m not a lady,” I added.
His eyes narrowed again. “Then what are ye?”
“For one, I’m Primrose’s friend—and don’t you dare try to kill me again for saying it. I’d think it’s pretty obvious I’ve been through enough without you trying to hurt me more. And I haven’t earned any of this any more than you earned your ‘punishment.’ Since the queen hurt you too, you’d think you’d be sympathetic to her doing this to me instead of making me almost black out from the pain.”
The remorse I was hoping to find was nowhere on his face.
“Ye can’t be Primrose’s friend.”
“And why not?” I asked.
“‘Cause it ain’t done.”
“Says who?”
“Everyone,” he grumbled, still leaning his face over mine.
“Then ‘everyone’ is wrong. Primrose and I are too friends.” I hesitated, but he was her granddoody, I was sure of it. “We even took a blood oath to protect each other’s secrets.” My jaw throbbed with all this talking, but he was finally listening .
His nostrils flared at the end of his large, wide nose. He scrunched it, accentuating a slash of a scar across its bridge.
“And there’s my proof,” he said, voice another sawing slice through wood. “What’ve ye done to my gran’gobbler? If ye’ve hurt her, I won’t stop till ye?—”
“For fuck’s sake, Granddoody! Can I call you that?”
“Ye can not call me ‘Granddoody.’ That’s?—”
“Great. Granddoody it is till you give me something better to call you. Unless you want me to pick, and at the moment my choices run along the lines of Stubborn Idiotic Asshole—SIA for short—and Murderous Angry Goblin. I’d call you MAG.”
He sucked in an affronted wheeze. As if I were the problem here… “Ye’ll do no such thing!”
“Then what do I call you?”
“Ye’ll call me nothing till ye tell me what ye’ve done with?—”
“Come on, man,” I snapped at him, even though he was no man. “I can’t take this right now. I’m two short seconds from losing whatever I have left of my shit. Like, seriously. You’ve got no idea what I’ve been through lately. None. Give me a break here and stop being such a miserable jerk!”
His fat nose crinkled. “Ye will not loose yer bowels in the bed. Cleaning that up’s not my job.”
I wanted to roll my eyes but couldn’t; the movement would hurt, no doubt about it. “No, Granddoody , I have no plans to. It’s an expression.” Before he could misunderstand me anymore, or assume anything else, “ Is there some way you can”—I paused to swallow around a tender throat, to find the strength to push through the ache in my jaw—“sense the blood oath between her and me? You know, so you stop beating me up? Also, what kind of goblin takes advantage of someone’s incapacity like this?”
“A smart one. My Primrose would never be foolish enough to do something like that with someone like ye.”
“Well, she did,” I snapped, well and truly over this dragonshit. Was it not enough that the queen nearly succeeded in killing me again? That I was hurt in so many places that it was faster to list where I wasn’t hurt than where I was?
Continuing to clutch his blade like he might still use it, he sat back atop the stool at my bedside, staring at me with those big, dark eyes.
“Shit, I thought maybe there’d be some way since you’re related,” I said, feeling oddly defeated at failing to win over the goblin, even when he was threatening me.
Those wide nostrils of his twitched. Then he sniffed the air. His brow scrunched. His eyes widened so that the light from the window on the other side of the room gleamed across them. He stood when I was just starting to enjoy the scant distance he’d put between us to lean over me. Again, he smelled the air.
His brow shot toward his hairline, and then he was sniffing my neck, my shoulder, my arm. Sniff, sniff . The inside of my elbow, where he paused to deeply smell the pulse point. Sniff, sniff, sniff .
He yanked the covers off to run his nose along my forearm, to my wrist. He flipped over my hand without warning or caution, causing me to yelp at the jolt that raced up my arm.
“Dragonfire! Be careful, dammit. Can’t you see I’m…”
He wasn’t listening. And he already knew how hurt I was, must enjoy my pain.
His nose pressed into the palm of my hand, scenting until surely there could be nothing left to scent. It was the hand I’d sliced, the one Pru had pressed her own cut hand to.
It was the point where our blood had mingled—red and green.
His fingers clamped around mine, pulling them flat against the bed while he sniffed and sniffed and fucking sniffed. Even holding my fingers straight hurt. By blazing fire, how would I recover from this level of damage?
My eyes had lost focus when he finally dropped my hand and studied me as he claimed his seat on the stool. He went on gaping until eventually he said, “I smell her on ye. My gran’gobbler.”
I waited for more.
“Her blood … ‘tis mixed in with yers.”
“Yep.” I barely held back my I told you so . “Like I told you .” Never mind.
“But…” He shook his big head. Sheathed his big knife. “How? Why?”
“Because we’re friends . Again, like I told you . ”
“But … goblins and ladies are never friends. It’s not allowed.”
“And are you telling me you always abide by the rules?” For however little I knew of the goblin, it was easy enough to guess he was about as fond of following rules as I was. Especially when said rules were largely pointless and decided by someone patently unworthy of deciding anything that governed anyone.
He frowned. “But how?”
“Pru,” I started, “Primrose, I mean, of course. I call her Pru, so don’t threaten to kill me just ‘cause I’ve got a nickname for her.”
“A nickname.”
“Yes. I was at the court, at the palace. She was the goblin assigned to attend to me.”
Granddoody sneered. “A noble, then.”
“Nope, no noble.” I grimaced but it hurt. “Okay. Yes, I guess I am a noble, as it turns out. But I had no idea. I wasn’t raised that way. I was raised with the dragons.”
He snorted. “The dragons. Whaddye take me for?”
“I assume you don’t actually want an answer to that question, though I am tempted to give it…”
He snorted again. “All the dragons are dead.”
“And there’s no way your grandgobbler would’ve done a blood oath with me either.”
He harrumphed.
“Exactly,” I said. “The queen has a whole bunch of dragons locked up beneath the palace dungeons. She’s been experimenting on them. Taking their magic for herself too, I think.”
His eyes sharpened. “That does sound like her.”
“Edsel,” I exclaimed as the memory of the queen asking Pru about his “well-being” clicked into place. “That’s your name.”
“‘Tis. How d’ye know it?”
“Same way I know ‘granddoody.’ Pru.” Duh . “She told me about you.”
“What’d she say?”
“Not enough. She certainly didn’t warn me you’d try to kill me without so much as giving me a chance to explain first.”
“I thought you were a threat to my gran’gobbler.”
“And I told you I wasn’t,” I snapped, at once recalling all the additional agony I experienced thanks to him and his hard-headedness.
“I didn’t believe ye.”
“Clearly,” I grunted. I was holding a grudge when Zako always warned me against them. Resenting someone hurts you, not the other person. When you forgive, it is a kindness, not to the person who wronged you, but to yourself.
Yeah, well, I’d bet Zako had never been shredded to within an inch of his death by monsters, then assaulted by a practically feral granddoody.
“She said you’d be furious at her for agreeing to a blood oath with me,” I admitted.
“She was wrong,” he said. Several seconds later, he added, “I could never be furious with her. ”
“And here I was thinking you were starting to see I’m worthy of a goblin’s friendship.”
He crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “That remains to be seen.”
I had no idea why that stung when I had so many greater concerns than being liked by this goblin. But it did.
“You could apologize to me, you know,” I said with a clench of my sore jaw.
He scoffed. “For what?”
I gaped at him. “ For what? Uh, I don’t know. Maybe for hurting me when I didn’t do anything to you? For hurting me when I’m already so hurt I was half-hoping I’d die and be done with it already? For not listening to me when I was begging you to stop?”
He uncrossed his arms and tipped ever so slightly toward me, but then only glowered some more.
“You’re being paid to help me heal.”
“Not enough,” he grumbled. But his posture softened, and he slid off the stool to fill the cup, the contents of which he’d flung at my face. Water dampened my hair and pillow.
“When will Dashiell be back?” I asked.
“Don’t know. He can’t get away often.”
With a gentleness I wouldn’t have believed had I not been experiencing it, Edsel pressed the rim of the wooden cup to my lips. I sipped before he added, “It’s too dangerous. He only happened to be here when ye arrived.”
I shook my head when he offered more water. The pang that stabbed up my nape reminded me that while I might be more alert, my body wanted nothing more than a month-long nap to recover.
My head feeling leaden atop the pillow, I asked in a thready croak, “Does the king ever come here?”
Curiosity unfurled across his craggy face. “Just once. After … she was discovered here, all alone.”
“‘She’ being…” I steadied myself with a deep inhale. “Odelia Catalina Corisande?”
He didn’t answer, so I added, “The rightful queen of Embermere?”
Wistful, he whispered, “Of the entire Mirror World.” He glanced down beneath the bed, at where his real feet should have been, I guessed. “She woulda never done this to me.”
When he appeared to lose himself to the melancholy of his past, I gently asked, “Why did … well, why did the queen, Talisa that is, take your legs? What was her reason for it?”
He continued to stare at his substitute legs.
“I do believe no reason could possibly justify what she did,” I added.
Eventually, he looked at me. His eyes were blank, free of the emotion that had brimmed so freely in them when he’d defended Pru.
I was opening my mouth to offer a “never mind,” that I didn’t need to know, when he said, in a steady voice that was also carefully blank: “Long before Erasmus became king, I was appointed to attend to him. When he was naught but a boy. ”
My breath hitched in my tender throat as I anticipated more.
“As you surely know, his brother Lohan was in line to inherit the throne.”
“Assume I know nothing. I was raised far from here.”
His brow bunched, but all he said was, “Right. Once Lohan disappeared and was presumed dead, and Erasmus ascended to rule, he grew dark. I was worried, though there seemed naught I could do. I was discussing the matter with fellow goblins, and Talisa somehow overheard. She decided I was to be punished and banished from the court. The latter was no problem for me. I didn’t want to be there anymore anyway. But the punishment…”
He pursed his lips.
“Please,” I nudged gently. “Go on.”
“She had my legs hacked off, the skin flayed from my back, and then some of the scales from my legs sewn onto my back.”
I felt my mouth gape before asking, “Why?”
“I don’t know. But the scales stuck to my back wherever they were sewn on. By the time I was able to try to remove them, it was too late.”
“You would have had to flay yourself again to get them off,” I whispered in perfect understanding. Hearing him talk like this made it easier to forget that just minutes ago he’d been hurting me.
“Aye. I decided being flayed once was enough.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“To this day, I still don’t know how Talisa ever found out. The goblins I told, I trust them. They didn’t tell her.”
“She has spies.”
He shook his head. “We were careful. We kept watch. We always did. There were no spies.”
“She’s got spies others can’t see. They float around everywhere, listening and watching. They report back to her, I’m sure.”
He pursed his lips until they paled. “I figured it was something like that. She was just a girl then.”
I doubted Talisa Zafira Tatiana of Embermere had been just a girl for long, if she’d ever been one at all.
“She’s the one keeping my mother here?” I asked.
“Your mother?” he asked with a sharp jerk of his head.
“Yes. Odelia.” It was the oddest experience, not just to know but to acknowledge her as my mother . How long I’d searched for any information about her. And now … here she was, ten feet from me.
“Dashiell didn’t tell me,” he muttered.
“I’m not surprised. No one bothered to tell me either until very recently. How is she?”
He stared at me for several long seconds. “Not well. Weak. She sleeps.”
“But she’s not dead, right?” I recognized the desperation in my voice.
With a sad smile, he shifted on his stool. “She isn’t dead … but she’s not all the way alive either. ”
“What does that mean?” I asked too quickly, too panicked.
“It means that her body is here but the rest of her isn’t. She’s been here alone and drained for too long.”
“But I heard Dashiell say you can perform miracles.”
“I don’t perform miracles. I’m very old. I’ve taught myself how to help fae heal themselves. Odelia is beyond my help. All I can do is offer her comfort until…”
I still had so many questions. The need for so many more answers.
But all I could feel then was my hope strangling itself as it died. It was more painful than the sum of my many injuries combined.
My mother was so near—and yet she’d never been farther away, or more unreachable.
I needed to understand where exactly I was, how I’d gotten here, and where I’d next go. How long until the queen discovered where I was. How I could get back to Rush and Saffron, find Xeno, Pru, and the others. How I could heal and survive to fight the queen and her shadows, how I could fulfill the destiny the sapphire dragon told me I had, and that I wouldn’t deny.
Assuming I was willing to pursue it at all anymore.
“Do you know where my gran’gobbler is?” Edsel asked.
“What have you been giving me to put me to sleep? ”
“Olvidian. But?—”
“I want some now.”
He opened his mouth, obviously to protest.
“Please,” I said. “I’ve had all I can take for now.”
When I next woke, I would figure out how to reassemble my life from its current shards.
Right then, I needed only to forget.
Edsel seemed to discern the many things I didn’t say. When he pressed the cloth to my nose and mouth with its now familiar cloying sweet smell, his eyes were big, dark, and understanding.
The queen also tried to break him , I thought as darkness swept me away. He doesn’t look so broken .