Page 63 of Fae Crown

“I’m gonna kill ‘er, you know?” I added, but it was mostly to myself.

“Ye won’t be doing much of anything for a long while still.”

“For now. I’ll heal eventually. Even if it … takes a whole year … I’ll get stronger … and kill ‘er then.”

Silence during which my mother moaned softly.The goblin glanced across my bed at her but didn’t comment.

“I have to,” I uttered, again mostly to myself. “Someonehas to.”

“Standing up to her doesn’t lead to anything good. Ye might wanna take me at my word on that. If not that, then my legs, may the dragons bless ‘em wherever they are now.”

I waited what I guessed was an appropriate amount of time to mourn the loss of his legs, then asked, “How long have I been here? Wait … how did I even get here?”

I gasped, and even that hurt deep in my chest. “Rush!” Left to be the queen’sentertainment. “Saffron.” Probably unsettled and distrusting without me, possibly believing I’d abandoned him. “Pru.” Out in the Sorumbra with all those awful monsters?—

My sudden realization pushed apart my swollen eyelids another tiny bit. “Pru.”

I studied the goblin some more. Beyond being a goblin, he didn’t much resemble her. Plus, I was certain the queen must have hurt many goblins over her reign, not just the one.

Even so, I was inexplicably certain.

“You’re Pru’sgranddoody,” I stated with only the merest of movements from my lips and jaw.

Once more,Granddoodystared at me, blinking at me with those large, dark, depthless eyes.

As fast and ferocious as one of the big cats of the Nightguard Mountains leaping after its prey, the goblinshot to standing, bracing his replacement feet against the stool’s footrest-bar. The cup he’d gripped clattered noisily to the floor. My mother moaned while he leaned over me, pressing most of his weight onto me as if he hadn’t been the one to nurse me back from the edge of death.

His breath was hot along my face though I scarcely noticed for the pain that prickled along my collarbone, chest, ribs, neck—everywhere, dammit.

At first I couldn’t breathe at all for the intensity. After, I could only suck in shallow, ragged gasps.

“Too much,” I eked out as blackness danced at the edges of my partial vision.

He only leaned into me harder, pressing a blade to my throat I hadn’t seen him draw.

While he growled like a vicious, cornered animal, every one of my hard-earned warrior instincts failed me.

I blacked out with a knife a swift slice away from ending it all.

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 radiatedeverywhere, 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,whathe 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.”

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