The Goblin's Throne

Chapter Fifty One: Ashes to Ashes

"I had a nightmare." Knut's frown deepened as I pulled away from him. I sank down onto the edge of the bed and held Magni's box in both hands on my knees. Knut followed suit. He sat beside me and laid his hand over my arm. His thumb brushed back and forth against my skin. He couldn't not touch me. To be apart from me had become nearly impossible for him, it seemed. My poor husband. How much pain was he hiding from me even now? How much had he suffered when I wasn't here to soothe it all away? I had felt so crushingly lonely in the palace, even when around people I didn't completely despise, because he hadn't been there. Knut, I realized now had felt just the same. We needed each other, loved each other, more than we'd ever really understood before.

"There will be many of those." He said. "I wish I could say that they go away over time, but they won't. They may grow less frequent. Months, even years may pass between one and the next, but they won't go away." 

"Do you still have them?" I asked.

He was quiet for a moment, then he answered in a low tone, "I have them more often when I sleep alone. As you can imagine, last night was the best sleep I've had in a year. What was your nightmare about?"

I swallowed down the bile that wanted to rise up at the thought of my nightmare. Having Lysander so close again, holding me down while he snarled and threatened. Looking into my babies' boiled out eyes, Knut's cracked open rib cage showing nothing inside. "I dreamed Lysander was here in this room. He was on top of me and I couldn't move, couldn't get away. You and the children were all dead and burned beside me." I let out a shuttering breath. "All I could do was scream." 

"It was just a dream," Knut assured me. 

"He promised me that he'd find a way to get to them. What if that wasn't just a threat? What if he comes here and kills them just like in my dream?" My voice cracked horribly as a feeling of panic started to rise up and overwhelm every other emotion warring with each other in my mind. 

"He won't." A sharp edge seeped into his voice so that he sounded more gobliny than usual. "They took you from me once, I won't let it happen again. Never. I'll die before I let him or anyone else lay a finger on my family." Those words spoke volumes. He spoke, not only as a father and husband that had had something so precious to him taken away, he spoke as one of those precious things, one stolen by another enemy ages ago. He meant every syllable. I knew that he'd die for me and our family. I knew it because he'd already done it once.

I sniffled as I moved my fingers over the engravings inlaid over the metal box. The design was nearly identical to what I'd seen on the armors hanging in Sarafini's shop. I wondered if he'd made it too. I focused on the box in an effort to keep from remembering Lysander's snarling face or the smell of surfer burning my nose while I screamed. "I keep thinking about the day Magni died, wondering how Lysander could've killed him. How he could've had the opportunity. The only faeries that touched him were the healers that delivered him." I lifted my head and looked Knut dead in the eye. "I swear to you I never let Lysander or anyone else near him. I held him until I passed him to Ib. I held him the whole time."

Knut looked down at the ground, his eye wide open and staring. "Where was Lysander while Magni was alive?" He asked after a moment.

Though I didn't want to, I made myself think back on that day, to remember exactly every movement Lysander had made. "He brought me to the healers and stayed until I had to deliver."

"Where did he go after they made him leave?"

"He waited outside the door." I swallowed. I remembered hearing Lysander and his mother arguing outside the door. He was still there when Tova came, both when she came in and when she left. Right there at the door. "He never left. He stayed right outside the door until Magni was dead." I felt a sharp pain go straight through me. So blindingly painful it made me gasp. "Are you saying he could've killed Magni from that far away without having to touch him?"