Dying.
Something about dying.
What was it about dying? I have to remember. It was important.
Puck is shouting something at me, and I blink at him, wondering at his words. He is urging me to remember, saying something about Rhogin being elsewhere trying to intercept the reinforcements, about breaking them out from his father's control. Something about freedom.
His father's control. What control?
Gurdach is speaking again, not at all agitated; almost pitying.
"Queen of Faerie, go home. My war is not with you. You are human, and I have no use for humans. I do, however, want your King. A small matter of politics, you understand. Turn around and go - return to your children and your family."
Such grace. Such undeserved mercy. I am so thankful. So relieved.
"Yes," I agree. "Thank you for sparing me."
I stumble to my feet, stretching out my hand to touch him, the benevolent saint that he is.
He recoils from my reach, hissing for a split second before schooling his features into its death mask again.
I retreat in shame.
Of course he doesn't want contact with me. He is a deity in whose presence I am not worthy to grovel.
Children. What was he saying about family and children?
But Puck is my family. I want him to come home with me.
"Please let him go," I hear my mouth beg.
Gurdach snarls, and my mind boils. Something nags me: a stray thought about children, and mothers, and kindness and mercy.
And dying. It's important, I think.
But it's hard to think - my mind is so foggy. All I know is that I want to be with the mighty, glorious Goblin King forever.
Something about mothers.
I concentrate.
It dances on the edge of my consciousness, a mote of a memory, tantalizingly out of reach.
I strain through the fog in my mind.
Rhogin and his mother.
She was hurt, and he was begging for her life. He loved her. He wanted to protect her. Rhogin cared for his mother.
I stare at the wondrous Goblin King, willing my mind to make the connection. Puck is still shouting behind me, calling my name.
What was it?
Suddenly, it clicks.
Gurdach killed her, Puck had said.
I hadn't seen it, but I had seen Rhogin's face as he'd begged Puck not to hurt his mother, had seen his anger and contempt when his father had used her and cast her aside without remorse.
I remember Puck's and Mustardseed's own tender relationship with Titania, and how Granny had said you could always tell the goodness of a man by the way he treated the women in his life.
The Prince cared for his mother.
The King . . .
. . . did not.
Rhogin is not the monster; Gurdach is.
And with that conclusion, I feel the power of the Goblin King's suggestions dissolve, leaving my mind throbbing but clear.
I see him as he is.
I remember the battle, why we are here.
I remember why I am here.
But I can still change my mind.
All around us, the Goblin King's brainwashed soldiers fight to defend him, every one from the goblins of his own realm, to the military commanders he has stolen from the other Everafter nations and turned to his kind and to his will.
Along with the uncountable ranks under them who have pledged their loyalty and blindly follow their orders, even while they remain in their own skin, so powerful is their monarch's hold over them.
They will die to protect him, Rhogin had said.
He is untouchable, invincible.
No, there is no other way.
So I must continue to pretend just a little longer.
I lunge toward him, seemingly drunken, a devotee unwilling to be parted from her lord, and stumble once more at his feet.
Above me, he jeers, cruel and triumphant. "Look at her! She's offering herself! Well, then, I shall accept. Watch me take her from you, son of Oberon!"
I hear Puck yell and run forward, but the Goblin King is faster. And I let him touch me, let him clamp my head between his filthy hands, let his consciousness violate mine.
Vision after vision after vision of madness and violence and despair and horror flood my mind as I pray for strength, for this to work. I feel my body shudder as the weight of his dark ambition crushes me. And I feel my own magic - the parasite that is my brand of insanity - rising up within me, fighting to protect me, swelling to push back the tide of his unnatural, heinous evil.
Not yet. Just a little longer.
I make my hands come up and grab his head.
His face twists and he bares his canines, writhing in my grip, but I do not let go.
I must not let go.
I must not let myself throw him as I'd done before.
Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.
It's not going to work.
He will kill me and it will all be in vain.
Where are you? Hurry. Hurry.
And all this while, I can hear everything: the sounds of battle, of creatures dying, of Red wailing, "No, no, no no", of Puck - my beloved Puck, who has ransomed his kingdom for me - screaming, screaming.
Hurry. It is time. Please hurry.
And then, they come.
In a swarm of light, I am lifted, airborne, locked together with the tyrant as we rise on hundreds of glittering wings.
I catch a glimpse of Puck's face staring, horrified, at the minions who have always done his bidding, as he pats his pockets and discovers his pan pipe missing, as he realizes what I am doing.
"I'm sorry," I mouth at him, my head exploding. "I love you."
And then I am twenty feet, fifty feet, a hundred feet in the air, even as a second swarm of pixies surrounds Puck and holds him down. No one assails us, not even the ground archers from either army, or the winged fairies - none dare, for fear of missing one of us and harming the other.
Higher we rise. I can no longer see Puck's face.
Faster, higher.
But I can still hear him screaming.
Faster. Higher. Don't look down. Hold on tight. Don't black out. Not yet.
The noise of the battle below dies away to a soft, dull sound as it is quickly eclipsed by the shrieking of the Goblin King realizing he is thousands of feet in the air. He releases me, and the pain in my head abruptly ceases. But I keep my hold on him, even though it is no longer necessary; we are high enough now that there is nowhere else to go. All around us, the pixies support our weight, a cloud of tiny collaborators against gravity and the cries of our loved ones.
And then we stop.
The pixies twitter, their voices strange in the thin air, so high up where the wind whips them away.
"Do it!" I gasp.
And they drop us.
I expect a million thoughts to run through my head as I fall - my life flashing in front of my eyes - but my mind is completely blank.
No, not completely.
As I look into Gurdach's eyes, watering as the rushing air steals his tears - I continue to see his life, as clearly as if it were my own, running backward like he is regressing through time. Back and back and back - memories, impressions, a spectrum of emotions. And as he un-ages, I feel his madness relaxing its grip on him, lightening; his descent into darkness in reverse, until I am looking at the world through the eyes of a terrified goblin child, cornered in the shadows by Everafter playmates in foreign palaces, taunted and mocked for his face, his simian gait, the way he speaks through fanged jaws. His smiling parents are too occupied establishing diplomatic relations to notice his humiliation, his bruises, his trembling, his painful shyness in the presence of the beautiful children of the kings and queens who had come to visit. Nor do they see how he locks it all inside himself so as not to embarrass them, jeopardize their political agendas, bring shame on the family.
Anger sits on hurt.
This is why he has unleashed damnation on the Everafter world.
This is why he has taken captives from every species and made them in the image of his own kind.
It is not blind ambition or greed; it is revenge.
Oddly, I feel nothing as I hold his secret, literally, in my hands. It is unfortunate timing, this split second between split seconds, suspended between life and death, in which to steward a revelation that I will - just as literally - take with me to my grave.
Most unfortunate timing.
I release him and his life is wiped from my mind.
He shrieks again, limbs flailing, clutching my clothes, my hair, scrabbling at air as he plummets alone. Strangely detached, I watch him falling, barely aware that I myself also am.
I vaguely register barreling through the pixies, who remain airborne to ensure that our descent is unimpeded.
"Oh, dear," I think.
And that is all, as the ground rushes up to meet me in sudden, expanding color.
And everything is still.