He bent down to kiss my forehead. “I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you too.”
* * *
I DIDN’T ACTUALLY head back to our rooms. First, I had to have a conversation with a dead goblin, and I wasn’t actually entirely sure how to do that. I had a feeling that the limited commentary in my brain was exactly that—limited. Holding a conversation wasn’t necessarily something I’d managed to do yet—though it wasn’t like I was champing at the bit to do so in the first place. We’d have to create a space where we could see each other physically, and not touch each other. There was only one goblin who could probably get me the results I wanted.
Diaval had a number of haunts around the palace. Normally places that were dangerous, like the chasm I threw Aleksey off of so long ago or hidden passageways that’d been built back thousands of years ago when the palace was made. She’d actually climbed down that chasm to retrieve and burn the remainder of Aleksey’s body, saying we didn’t want someone who tried to betray Soren’s ghost haunting the place. Honestly, I was glad. Aleksey may have been plotting against Soren, but he was also the first goblin I killed. Maybe the first goblin of the total Hunt to be killed. The idea of a proper burial took some weight off my conscience.
Though there was no way I’d climb down a chasm, I still checked most of the known haunts she had, and had nearly given up when I finally found the she-goblin, lying in a small crevice like it was a hammock, reading, of all things.
“Diaval?” I asked.
“Yes?” The she-goblin didn’t look up from her book. I tilted my head to try to catch a glimpse of the title, but all I could make out were runes too old for me to know the meaning of.
“That can’t be comfortable,” I said, frowning.
“Things being comfortable are for the weak,” Diaval said.
“Oh?” I raised my eyebrows.
“Besides, I like the pain. Makes me feel good.”
Well, I wasn’t touching that comment with a six-foot pole, so instead, I counted to five and started over.
“I need your help.”
“I’m busy,” she said.
I narrowed my eyes. “That was kind of an order, not a request.”
She finally looked up, dark eyes twinkling. “There’s that backbone. What is it you need help with exactly?”
I spilled it all out to her. Donnar’s words and what he showed me, the idea that Lydian might somehow know something about my visions, the plan to try to speak with him on some even ground where both of our spirits could hear each other clearly. Throughout the whole time, Diaval’s expression never changed. I wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good or bad thing.
“So,” she said when I finished. “You need my help to get into a liminal space.”
“A … what?”
Diaval rolled her eyes. “Liminal space. The space between what is and what’s coming. There are liminal spaces when you can contact those not truly dead but also not truly alive—like Lydian. And there are liminal beings that control those spaces and work as catalysts to move from what is to what is to come. The stag is a liminal being.”
I blinked. “I feel like I would’ve known if I was a liminal being?”
Diaval shrugged. “For you, it’s mainly unconscious. You still can’t access the stag’s full consciousness and scope of abilities while awake and in control. I mean, that’s what you and I practice. If you can’t do that, then getting yourself into a liminal space would be nearly impossible at your current skill set. If anything, the closest you can get to one is when you’re unconscious.”
I frowned. Another reminder about how bad I was at this entire stag thing. “So, you’re saying it’s impossible, then?”
“Not at all.” Diaval closed her book and heaved herself out of the crevice in the floor she’d been lying in. “You need help. And since I am particularly skilled in this area, I can help. But not now. Later, at midnight, when the others are asleep. I don’t really fancy having to explain to everyone what I’m doing. They won’t get it.”
I nodded in understanding. Magic was not necessarily a thing goblins usually knew how to do. Other than a few of them having extra abilities outside of the scope of normal, they tended to be much more physical and martially focused. They weren’t exactly created to do magic, the stag let me know that much. Other creatures in the Permafrost would and could perform it, but like the inability to create without harm to themselves, the inability to use magic was like a check and balance in the system to keep things fair. Finding Diaval had been like finding a needle in a haystack, and her affinity with magic separated her from the rest of her kind. Like me, she understood sarcasm, nonliteral figures of speech, and was deeply attuned to the world around her. While not necessarily physically gifted, she was psychically strong and wasn’t afraid to show that off. She also “got me” more than most others did. Soren was my lover, and Seppo and Rose were friends, but Diaval was someone who I could talk to and know she understood the way I was feeling and offer comfort rather than ways to fix it. We were both outsiders in the Permafrost in our own ways, and like me, she was someone often underestimated but not afraid to pack a punch.
She was my best friend. Words I’d never thought I’d utter.
Magic came to her as easy as breathing, which tended to make her more impatient when it came to my own struggles with the craft.
“All right. Midnight,” I said. “Where do you want to meet?”
“Courtyard should be empty and horse-free by then,” she said. “Best to do it outside where there’s a better connection. Until then, try to get some rest or something, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. Guess it looked like I was going to take Soren’s advice after all. Maybe for once, I could sleep without dreaming. How long had it been since I’d done that? I missed the blackness and utter oblivion that used to come with sleep. Closing my eyes and fearing what I might see once I drifted off did nothing good for my mental state. Not that my mental state was ever in tip-top shape to begin with.
I trudged back to the more livable part of the Erlking’s palace. When we’d first moved in, Soren had constantly complained about the décor—something I really should have seen coming considering his original statement about the palace the last time we were there—until Seppo had taken it upon himself to change how things looked. It was starker now, austere, despite the white-and-gold-veined marble, the jutting ice and rock helping complete the image. I still hadn’t explored the entire thing, mainly because I was sure there were a number of death traps I didn’t need to stumble into, but I was pretty sure both Diaval and Rosamund had the entire place memorized like the back of their hands.
There used to be more thralls too, I noted as I passed through empty halls. Humans that had been taken during raids and enslaved by goblins to do the skills they couldn’t, like I’d been.
But Soren had very little need for thralls in the first place, and the dozen he had originally to complete tasks that he himself wasn’t physically able to do, like create clothing and plant food, all things to do with creation, had come with him here. It still made my stomach upset, seeing them, even if Soren wasn’t going to mistreat them or allow them to be mistreated. Thralldom was still thralldom. It existed even in the human world. When different clans would raid one another, they would often take thralls, and my clan was no different. That changed when I came across humans in thralldom to nonhumans; it made me uncomfortable how much I had accepted thralldom as a way of life.
Still, Soren released all the thralls who originally worked for the Erlking that he didn’t have any need for.
Some of them stayed. They were too old or too well adapted or had been in the Permafrost too long to ever truly acclimatize to the world of men again. They continued to work, but now it was on their own time and by their own choice. Some became changelings and I’d witnessed some of the ceremonies I thought originally were going to happen to me when Soren first revealed the reason he took me on the Hunt. Seeing human fe
atures gradually change into goblin as the days passed was slightly unnerving.
Those who did leave, which were most, were guided safely back to the human world. Sometimes I thought about them. If they’d found family. Had reunions. Were they tearful? Joyful? Were they accepted once more? I could only hope so. Even with Soren being able to erase those bonds, we were still considered so affected by its magic that barely any people considered us human. Monstrous, animals. I’d grown up listening to my father talk about such things, and in the end, I’d even killed a few of those men.
But this line of thought wasn’t going to help me relax.
When I got to our shared quarters and more specifically to our bedroom, I sighed as I took the heavy antler bone torq off my neck and placed it carefully on the table. Doing so gave me a bit of peace. While the torq wasn’t in any way a source of my power, it did help amplify my connection to the land. The little whispers in my head and pulls of feeling as creatures completed their natural cycles, loved, lived, died, were louder, and while I could still feel it without the torq, at least I could ignore it a bit easier.
I collapsed on the sleeping platform, suddenly exhausted. Maybe Soren was right. Rest would be good for me.
But it didn’t come. Despite my comfort, I tossed and turned in the furs; my mind raced through any attempts to calm it. I was still awake when, hours later, Soren came in. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.
“Can’t sleep,” I confirmed. “Guess I better get used to it.”
He unhooked his sword belt and hung it over one of the chairs before coming to sit next to my head. “You need sleep. Even your eye bags have eye bags.”
“Gee, thanks. As if I wasn’t self-conscious enough with my appearance,” I muttered.
Soren rolled his eyes. “You could have three eyes, a horn, and webbed feet, and I’d still think you were the most beautiful person in the world. You are.”
I gave him the ghost of a smile. Maybe I wasn’t traditionally beautiful as much as I wished, but hey, neither was Satu, and she seemed to be doing fine for herself. I had Soren. Soren loved me no matter what. That mattered.
“You’re beautiful too,” I said.
“We’d make absolutely stunning children,” he replied, smirking. The mischievous twinkle was back in his eye.
“Everyone and babies!” I exclaimed. “Is Satu rubbing off on you?”
“It’s an unfortunate trait she shares with her son.”
“Can we even have babies? Like, logistically? As Erlking and the stag?” The thought popped into my head before I could chase it away for the ridiculous thing it was.
Soren frowned, thinking. “I’m … not sure. I don’t believe the original stag ever was in the position to have offspring with the Erlking. Because, I mean, it was a deer. A magical deer. But still a deer.”
I smiled. “Yes, it was, in fact, a deer.” At least physically. I could attest to how not a deer it was in other ways. Deer didn’t help regulate the entire universe, for the most part.
Soren had that soft look in his eyes that was always reserved for me. “Do you want to hear a story?”
“A story?” I asked.
“To help you sleep.”
“I didn’t know you told stories,” I said.
He blushed, pink spreading across the gray-blue skin of his cheeks. “I mean, I don’t really. Only one. It’s true, so I don’t know if that even counts. Tanya told me it when I was little.”
I raised my eyebrows. I could not for the life of me picture Tanya, red-headed, scowling, snapping Tanya, sitting down and telling a young Soren a story. “Really?”
“Well.” Soren rubbed the back of his neck. “My mother and she were very close apparently. I don’t know, maybe it was because they were half sisters, so there was less competition between the two. When my mother was attacked by the draugr, Tanya could only save her or me. My mother told her to save me and look after me. So, Tanya delivered me and my mother died.”
There was a shine of grief in Soren’s eyes, for the mother he never got to know. I felt for him. At least I knew my family before they died. I knew I was loved. Different, yes, but loved.
“I’m sorry,” I said, placing a hand on his bicep.
“It’s fine, it’s why Tanya took so much of an interest in me. She always would tell me stories about how my parents met. I thought it was quite romantic.”
“You, a romantic?” I giggled.
He smirked. “Marriages tend to be arranged and betrothals are common. Breaking betrothals, too, which I really should have taken into consideration when I decided to join my ex-betrothed’s team on a hunt for a magic deer and take along the girl I’d been pining after for half a century.”
“Yeah, you kinda fucked that one up, Soren,” I said, but couldn’t help but laugh. Not at the memory of almost being murdered, but the way Soren described the events as if it were another regular evening.
“My mom was notorious for harshly refusing anyone that came at her. But her father was adamant she marry and carry on the bloodline. There were tons of suitors, I was told, but none managed to ever win her heart.”
I could picture it. A woman who looked vaguely like Soren, laughing in the face of any goblin brute at her feet, scorning the idea that they would ever be good enough for her.
“She challenged any suitor she had to a competition of her choosing, and she beat them all, one by one. It started to get to be quite the spectacle because goblins from all over the Permafrost were going north to where she lived. That included my father and Lydian and their father.”
A montage of the vague woman continuing to succeed and succeed without stopping, hundreds filling a home suited more for dozens, and the crackling of flames filled my senses. The mantle of the stag was letting me taste the past.
“My father was the younger son, so the idea was for Lydian to court her. Despite Lydian still being … Lydian, at the time. He continued to compete over and over, trying to find her weakness. Because her challenge didn’t limit the amount of times you could go head-to-head with her. But while she was fighting suitors by daylight, by moonlight she was meeting my father. Tanya says they were absolutely infatuated with each other from the first moment they laid eyes on each other.”
A couple meeting in secret. Soft kisses in the rain. The giggle of a woman’s voice and the throaty laughter of a goblin brute. Clothes soaked from walking through the snow and underbrush at night, explained away with any excuse they could find. Two hearts beating as one.
I ached to share this experience with Soren, what I was feeling now, but I wasn’t sure how.
“They got caught eventually, and her father put down his foot. He proclaimed my mother would travel away from her home and that night, any suitor who wished could ride out and try to catch her. A hunt, if you will.” A slow smile spread across Soren’s face. “So that’s what they did. A dozen goblins clambering after another one, trying to get through the thick fog and ice of the tundra of the High North, unable to see even an inch past their faces. All except one.”
I was leaning forward now, my heart beating with anticipation at Soren’s story. Something about it struck me as familiar, personal, though I’d never experienced anything like that. But her desire, her will, to make her own choices was something I’d always possessed.
“The night before, she’d snuck into my father’s rooms and told him that to find her, he only needed to look for the light in the sky. At first, that confused him. He thought she meant stars, but the stars were hard to see through the thick fog. He figured it out, though, when he saw a flaming arrow shoot up in the air. They left a trail for him that he followed while everyone else was still lost in the fog, looking for tracks in the ice.”
“She sounds incredible,” I said. “I wish you could’ve met her.”
“I do too. Something … changed in my father when she died. He wasn’t outright hateful toward me. No more than any father-son relationship between goblins. According to Tanya, we looked very similar except
for she was less…” He struggled for the right word, holding out an arm and glaring at his skin tone. “… blue.”
“I always wondered where you got your coloring from,” I said. I knew at least part of it was some genetic mutation that changed the pigment in his skin, making it not pale but an odd, semitranslucent blue-gray color, coloring his eyes lilac, and leaving his lips a soft powder blue. It was beautiful, to me, even if it was strange.
“Thank you for telling me this, Soren,” I said. “Really, it means a lot.” While Soren didn’t have nearly as many shields up as I did, I knew firsthand about sharing trauma and how painful that could be on its own. There was something comforting knowing Soren was okay sharing this with me.
“A bit much for a story, eh?” he said, the sadness wiped off his face.
“I’ll forgive it this time.”
Though certain thoughts and a certain voice lingered in the back of my head, asking me why I wasn’t doing the same. Soon, though. Soon. As soon as I figured out what was going on, I’d tell him. I’d apologize for keeping it a secret. I’d let him know that I’d been scared. Hopefully, he would forgive me.
Despite the stress and anticipation for the night ahead, Soren’s steady, calm voice did help manage to relax me as I lay there. He pulled up a chair beside me and brushed a runaway curl of my hair back behind my ears. My eyelids became heavier, and I closed them as he sang to me in a deep voice, so low I could barely hear.
He continued even after I closed my eyes.
4
THE KILLING SIGHT
FOR ONCE, MY sleep was blissful and dreamless—that was until the flat of someone’s hands nailed me in the ribs in the middle of the night. I woke, a scream on my lips, only for my mouth to be covered.
“It’s me,” Diaval hissed. “You weren’t showing, so I came to get you. Careful, you’ll wake Soren.”
She nodded over to the chair that Soren was sitting on. His head rested against his shoulders, body relaxed, almost like he was about to slump out of the chair completely. I shook my head fondly, realizing he hadn’t wanted to climb over me in order to get to bed, lest it disrupt my sleep.
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