The Dragon King and I (15 page)

She was nothing like how I remembered her. Her face was smeared with dirt and her leathery skin looked sticky with juices. Her features were the same but for her eyes, and when she spoke I caught peek-a-boo glimpses of her teeth. They were sharp, like knives, but if my guess was correct, they were also made from stone. She had stone teeth. Teeth that would not only rip through human skin, but cut through bone with similar ease. A carnivore at its best.

She was naked, but for some strange liquid that was smeared across her body. It looked like blood.

“Come buy.” she whimpered, her nails tracing a vein in the back of my hand. I flinched.

“I don’t.” I had to clear my throat because I was so scared I actually wanted to cry. “I don’t have any gold.”

Isn’t that how the poem went?

She tsked and tried to take a step past the trellis, but something invisible held her back. She snarled, and for a moment in time her face wasn’t Flo’s at all. It was a creature who wore human skin like a coat. Its teeth were stone, its eyes burning coals, and upon its head, like a hat or crown, were interwoven hundreds of different types of human hair.

It was just for a moment. But in that moment I
saw
and my knees went weak.

“You have much gold little maiden, pretty maiden, wishes all in a row. It’s hidden in your skin, it’s swimming in your veins, and it’s living in each breath you take. Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy.”

I shivered, and looked back over at Sam.

His jaw tightened at the sight of her, but he nodded, his hold on Conric never loosening as the other man continued to fight.

I looked down at Flo—no—the goblin and put my own trembling hand inside her own. She purred like a kitten and seemed to sink into herself. Then we were off. She jerked me away from the house, little legs moving faster than I could see. I heard a curse behind me but I was concentrating too hard on not falling flat on my face to turn around and check it out. I knew that if I fell, she’d simply drag me, so I ran, full out, and still only barely managed to keep up with her.

Everything around us was a blur of color, and the only sound I heard was the goblin’s tuneless humming and the sound of my feet slapping against the pavement. One of my sandals broke and I cried out as the loss of it tripped me up. I went down, but the goblin just kept moving. Her hand tightening around my own with such force that her claws dug into the back of my hand and I felt my bones grind against one another.

It was sheer luck and a good bit of pure stubbornness that got me back on my feet. I didn’t have the chance to look down and investigate but I could feel blood running down my leg from where I’d been dragged across the cement.

My body wanted to limp. Hell, my body wanted to collapse, but I gritted my teeth and pushed. Faster. Harder. I ran, arms and legs pumping, the hand in my own the only real thing there was, until I was no longer lagging behind, but actually pulling out in front of her.

I felt something soft brush my face, like the strands of a spider’s web, and thought the sensation unimportant until the Goblin pulled us both to a halt.

As soon as my legs stopped moving, I went down. You know the way the muscles in your thighs will shake and go weak after a really good orgasm? Well mine were like that except I didn’t remember having a happy time immediately beforehand. All I knew was that I could no longer hold myself up. My lungs were screaming and my heart was crying, and my vision darkened around the edges as I fought not to throw up. Some part of my mind knew we were underground. Knew that I was now surrounded by a bustle of activity. That Flo now danced around my shaking form, her voice echoing through the air in joyous abandon.

For the first time I heard the lyrics that accompanied the song she’d been humming.

“She comes! To market she comes! Come and greet her. Love her, treat her, she comes to buy your goods from you. Goblin pulp and Goblin dew. To market, to market the maiden’s come, show her the wares and fares you’ve won. Show her the figs carved from the ladle, the moonbeams trapped inside the cradle. Shower her with fruits galore, and when she’s spent and fights no more, we’ll feast to our heart’s desire,”

They converged on me, all yellow eyes and stone teeth and I cringed away as Flo lifted a lock of my hair and ran it along her tongue, her smile serene.

“Oh, how I love the taste of a maiden’s fire.” She leaned into me and hissed against the shell of my ear, her rhythmic whimsy from earlier replaced by cold, hard, hunger, “It is perhaps, the tastiest fruit of them all. Welcome to the Goblin Market little maiden, pretty maiden, wishes all in a row. It feels as if we’ve waited a forever for you.”

Welcome to market indeed.

Suddenly, Sam’s suggestion that I play bait didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.

* * * *

The Market was like a dream within a dream, wrapped tightly in a nightmare. There were creatures made of light and dressed in gossamer trapped in cages beneath the ground, so that the entire world was cast in twilight by the soft, pulsing, glow, radiating from beneath.

They were about an inch or so big, and what I’d thought at first to be grass and stones were really their tiny little fingers wrapped around the bars of a cage that never ended. With every step I took I crushed them, ground their bones into dust, and smeared the bottom of my one bare foot with their blood. Even so, they refused to let go of the bars, because beneath them more Goblins roamed, sticky fingers reaching out hungrily.

Their screams sounded like chirping birds and harp music.

I felt something in my mind shift, and finally I had to turn away. It wasn’t blood I felt, but crushed berries, just like it wasn’t flesh and bone beneath me, but grass. I wasn’t crushing the fingers and breaking the arms of millions of pixies. I was simply walking across grass.

It was just grass.

Just grass.

To admit anything else would be to stop moving, to collapse in a ball of screaming madness, and I couldn’t allow myself to do that. Not with the ever-growing crowd of Goblin merchants surrounding me. When I first met Flo I’d known instinctively that it would be bad to show weakness. I was even more aware of that fact now than I had been before.

It seemed as if we walked inside of a giant birdcage. I could see the bars, overly large, and made of tree trunks that soared over head and out of sight. There was a single pathway through the market and each merchant had their stalls set up along either side of it. They were so close to one another that they jostled for space and it was impossible to tell which merchant belonged where.

I had no idea where Flo had gone. She’d disappeared into the throng after throwing me to the wolves. I wasn’t at a loss for company however, everywhere I looked a merchant tried to hawk his wares. They were aggressive, almost animalistic, and I had to fight not to flinch with every hissed repetition of ‘Come buy, come buy’.

I found that unlike Flo, most goblins looked like a strange mixture between a number of different animals. Some had rat-like faces and tails like foxes; others were built like bears but boasted peacock feathers. It was like a bunch of forest creatures got tossed into a blender, after which they were glued back together by some coked out two-year-old. The only constant was their stone teeth and clawed hands.

Every merchant’s stall was decked out with fruit. I couldn’t really see a difference in the things they sold. It simply looked like continuous, dripping mess, overflowing around the humble wooden stalls that had been built to contain them all; pomegranates, figs, apples, oranges, cherries, and strawberries, ripe cantaloupe, sliced watermelon, blueberries, plums, and kiwi, every piece of fruit I could name and a few of them that I couldn’t, was all laid out and offered to me on platters straining beneath their weight. But they weren’t like regular fruit. They sort of…breathed. They had a life and potency to them that I’d never seen in a grocery store. I felt as if I let my teeth sink through the pliable skin of any those colorful temptations then they would go down my throat screaming as piteously as the pixies beneath my feet.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that resembled a mirror, magic or otherwise, and I felt terror began to rise.

“Come buy, pretty maiden.” they twittered. Their voices were a strange combination of animal calls. Chattering and chirping, barking and growling, they spoke more with magic than through any intelligible language. And the deeper I traveled into the Market, the longer I went without ‘buying’ a single thing, or tasting the fruit they so generously offered, the angrier they became.

They’d been offering me the ripest of their selections in stubby, dirty, hands, dark skin and fur glistening in the weak light with the wasted juices. As their patience thinned however they began pushing the fruit at me, rubbing it against my skin and clothes, pressing it against what they could reach of my face and laughing hysterically when the delicate fruit broke apart to rain down my clothes.

“I don’t want your fruit.” I told them desperately, and screamed when one of them lashed out, claws raking across my face in a slap that left my cheek numb. Someone else kicked me, cloven feet gouging into my ankle and I flinched away. Something behind me pulled on my ponytail like a leash, while another goblin punched me in the ribs. I bent over with the pain, gasping for air and finding none when yet another goblin smeared a pomegranate, as red as blood, across my face from hairline to chin.

I tried to keep moving through them, but they’d worked themselves into a frenzy. I felt mouths on me. Lapping eagerly at the blood on my thigh from my fall during the run. Something kissed my lips and began sucking the juices off my tongue, more hands grabbed for my hair, and I felt the world darkening as they swarmed over me and brought me down like a colony of ants going in for the kill.

My screaming was lost beneath their roars and howls of triumph, and I lashed out violently, blindly, even as they forced me onto my back and the pixies beneath the ground took over. They began fisting tiny broken hands into my skin, clothes, and hair. There were millions of them beneath me, and they all held on for dear life, much stronger than they’d seemed when I’d first glimpsed them. Their voices were a rising cacophony, music in its purest, stealing all my senses and making me doubt there had ever been anything but this. That I had ever been anywhere but right there, trapped between nightmares and dreams with flavored nirvana drowning me from above while I lay in a bed of pixie blood and broken bones.

I worked one hand free of the mob, stretched, fingers desperately seeking I don’t know what, and howled, my voice hoarse with desperation and the first, rising, tide of madness. One of the Goblins parted the others enough to upend his platter of goods over my head and I vowed, solemnly, and viciously, to never drink another cup of fruit juice in my life.

The goblin pulled away cackling, and that hand I’d gotten free lashed out and wrapped around his ankle, tripping him up. He tried to scramble away as the goblins resurged around me, but something wild gripped me and I snarled, clawing my way up his body, ignoring the discordant notes of dying birds as pixie arms ripped away from delicate pixie bodies. We struggled for all of two seconds before I managed to rip the platter he’d used to carry the fruit out of his hands, gripped it with both of my own, and struck him across the face with it with every ounce of strength I had.

I heard something crack as his head whipped to one side and his neck broke, and some of the savagery drained out of me as I straddled him and tried to learn how to breathe again without snarling with every exhale. It didn’t take long before I noticed it. The silence. Every note, every hidden scream, and slyly spoken invitation, was conspicuously absent. I looked over my shoulder to see the goblins crouched on all fours, yellow eyes blazing like sickly stars. I rose slowly from my victim, my hands clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, around the heavy platter as I met each of their eyes in turn.

I savored the silence, sucked it down like oxygen, and smiled. Not because I was happy, but because it seemed the only logical response to give in this broken world. Then, one of their ears twitched and that was all the warning I got before they came for me.

* * * *

I’d never fought for my life before, and I had no delusions about becoming a warrior woman now. If I stayed, I’d probably die, and if I ran, they’d catch me and I’d die anyway. So I ran. Whichever choice created the most work for them seemed like my best bet. The problem, however, was that my myriad of adventures had taken their toll. I was hobbling rather than running, both legs having taken their share of abuse from angry merchants. I was also lightheaded from loss of blood, not to mention that there was no space on my skin that didn’t throb with a deep, silent, agony.