The Goblin's Crown

Chapter Sixty Five: It's Only a Little Blackmail

"It's what he wants." She said, stilling my heart. "He made Stellan promise that if anything were to happen to him, if your defeat proved imminent, that he would see to your safety." The tone of her voice changed. "Do you honestly think Knut would want his pregnant wife anywhere near Mab, let alone fighting her on a battlefield? No, he would do exactly as I am trying to do. He would hide you and keep you and his heir safe." She had two voices, one for the hunt and another for the hearth. She slipped easily between them. Now she spoke with the voice of the mother Tova, the steel of the hunter stripped away. "That baby in your womb is completely dependant on you and you have a responsibility, as his mother, to protect him, Matilda."

"That's what I'm trying to do," I said. "Don't you get it?" Despite my best efforts, more tears dripped down my face. "Even if I were to run to the ends of the earth, it would not matter. Once she kills Knut and cuts the seed from his belly, the goblins will all disappear. Even if by some miracle I evade her claws, my son will be the only goblin left alive with no birthright, no crown. He'll be the heir of nothing." He'd be the same as I was, a rodent scrounging around in the dirt. I shook my head, willing away the very horrid thought. "That will not happen. I will not allow it. I am going to build an empire, regardless of whose bones it's built upon. No son of mine will ever bow his head to a faerie lord."

"He won't need an empire if he's dead." A bit of steel slipped momentarily back into her voice. She glared at the hunk of metal hanging from my throat. "Just wearing that thing could kill him and removing it around Mab certainly will. Don't hide behind your child. If you were truly thinking of him, you wouldn't be fighting me on this. You'd do whatever you had to do to ensure he was safe and would come into this world healthy." She didn't dare lift her eyes to mine. "Even if it meant leaving Knut."

The bitter taste of ashes and blood filled my mouth just as surely as if I'd sipped it from a goblet again. "We can't all be good mothers," I muttered. Absently, my hand slipped down the front of my gown and stalled over my belly, seeking the slightest sign from the life churning within it though I knew it was still much too early to feel him move.

Tova sighed softly. Her brows furrowed as she watched my hand. "I do not mean to accuse you of not loving your baby. I only want to help. I think you are perhaps one of the worst people alive, but I still care about you just as I would my own sister. The last thing that I want for you is for you to go through a miscarriage or stillbirth. I have seen what that can do to a woman...that kind of pain....it changes them. Sometimes, it even destroys them."

For a moment I stood in another place, another lifetime, back in my childhood home. My mother lay cold in her bed, the sheets drawn over her still stained from the birthing. She stared with glassy eyes towards the ceiling, her mouth stuck open in a silent cry. Her arms, which my father had laid across her belly seemed to claw at her empty womb, desperate to hold the child that her god had already taken. For three days she had lingered, burning with fever and writhing in pain. When she finally shuttered and stilled, it was almost a relief. While my brothers cried and my father burned my younger brother's cradle to wash away their pain at her loss, I'd merely been awed by how empty my mother looked, like an egg that had been cracked open. All that was her was gone and the shell was all that remained.

"I'm well aware of that. It's how my mother went. She gave birth to a corpse, then became one herself. Fever."

She blinked at me. "Matilda, I'm so sorr-"

"I am absolutely terrified that I'm hurting him. If I cause my son even the slightest harm I know I will never forgive myself." A strange scoffing sob burst from my lips. "However, I am not going to stop. I am not going to run away. The only thing that has changed is that I am now on a deadline. I only have a few more weeks at most before my condition becomes bloody obvious. If Mab finds out..."