The Goblin's Crown

Chapter Seventy Three: I am Here

"Help me get him down!" Ib grabbed onto the iron shackles, tried to pry them apart with his bare hands. He let out a cry like someone had cracked his bones. He shook his hands and flexed the fingers, trying to rid himself of the pain. The faeries and elves had their power to act as a buffer between them and the iron. Ib had nothing. No protection at all. Here he was, a human that could no longer even touch iron without it hurting him. "Matilda, I need you! You have to help me! I can't do this alone!" He cried, clutching his aching hands against his chest.

His pleads, however, fell on deaf ears. I was lost within myself, in the horror flooding my sight. I could scarcely even breathe. I took off my helm and let it slip from my hand to the stones at my feet. "I'm here," I whispered, my voice cracking horribly as I finally reached my husband.

Ever since we'd parted, I'd dreamed of what I'd do when I saw him again. I'd planned to wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him senseless...sometimes I'd even daydreamed of punching him for making me worry so, but that had been wishful thinking and I hadn't been expecting this.

I didn't expect Knut to be dead.

I had been so confident that I'd reach him in time, comforted by the belief that only our child was the only one that could end his life, but it seemed that belief had been a false one. Maybe he'd been lying to me from the very start.

I had endured nightmares of this, of his loss, and in them, I had screamed and cried and torn the world apart, but as I stood there faced with the sad reality of his mortality, none of that came to pass. I couldn't even conjure a single tear. The pain was too great, my sadness more than any amount of tears or anger could express, greater even than what I'd felt at the gallows when I watched my father hang. For I wasn't just losing a family member. I was losing the one person in the world who loved me not in spite of my many sins, but all the more because of them, the person who made me the happiest I had ever been. I was losing the best part of my life.

Trembling fingers raked back his hair from his bloodied cheek. I studied that ruined side stared at that missing eye I'd traded in order to return to his side. Those same fingers slid across his thin, cold lips, remembering how they'd felt against my own, from the first to last. Surprised and uncertain. Warm and full of promises.

My fingers slipped downward along with my gaze across his still chest to his sunken belly and the slight bulge just above his hips where the seed rested beneath the skin. My fingers came to rest upon the iron knife stuck in his side. I couldn't stand seeing him this way, seeing him left in such a sorry state. I pulled at the handle, drawing the blade out.

There was a cry and a inhale of breath. Knut's chest shuttered, swelling and falling with labored, shallow breaths. "Not exactly how I would have preferred to be woken up, Mouse." Knut coughed. His lips pulled into a teasing, but very much welcomed smirk. "Could you not think of a gentler method? A kiss perhaps? Anything not involving a knife?"

"You're alive!" Ib and I both cried in unison. I dropped the knife to the floor with a clatter and finally threw my arms around his neck just as I had imagined over these many months that we were apart.

"I won't be if you keep choking me." Knut started to laugh then winced in pain at the sting of the wound in his side.

Holding his face between my hands, I wiped my thumbs back and forth across his cheeks as if to remove the layers upon layers of dirt and blood caked there. Never in the year, I'd known him had he looked so beautiful. "You scared me half to death." I sniffled. Tears dripped down my face. "I thought you were dead."

"Nah," He took a deep breath, struggling as he did. "It's not their place to kill me." His smirk fell. He pressed his lips into a thin line as he looked at me thoughtfully. Both eyes were open now, the bloodied one opened up just wide enough that I could see the empty socket behind the lids. "I heard you say something when you came in. What was it? I couldn't make it out."