Chapter 7: The Princess\’ Choice
by
The knife gleamed dully in the torchlight, its blade nicked and stained with old blood.
The goblin princess, Rou-Ya, stared at it with her golden eyes, her face carefully blank, and tried to summon even the faintest spark of interest as was expected of her. Her pale green skin carried an almost luminescent quality that flashed in the lightning strikes of the storm that fit her mood, smooth and unmarred. She failed to find any value in the weapon. It was crude and poorly balanced, and the carved bone handle was already cracking. Worthless, in other words. But tradition demanded she accept it with grace.
“Thirty,” the suitor said. He was ugly even for a goblin; his skin was a mottled brown-green, and he looked at her with undisguised hunger.
She took the knife with both hands, the intricate tribal markings on her arms flowing across her shoulders in deliberate patterns as she moved. The traditional symbols emphasised her status, accentuating her natural frame in ways her suitors clearly appreciated. She forced her lips into something approximating a smile.
“Thank you. It’s a… very nice gift.”
Her black hair, braided back in a practical style, contrasted sharply against her skin as she turned to set the knife aside. As was the way of such matters, the tribal markings along her hips were designed specifically to draw attention to her shape. While the hunters of the area had marks on their skin showing their greatest kills, and the sages had protective markings of magical power, as a tribal princess she just had a visual declaration of her value as the designated bearer of the next generation.
The crowd murmured. Whispers rippled through the assembled goblins, most of them assessing and calculating. The suitor puffed up his chest and strutted back to the crowd, clearly pleased with himself.
The princess set the knife aside with the growing pile of offerings and tried not to think about what the number meant. Thirty children. Thirty pregnancies. Thirty screaming infants that she would be expected to bear and raise while he went off hunting or raiding or doing whatever it was that made him think he deserved to be chieftain.
Rou-ya was certain that she was going to be sick. She hated this.
Three days ago, she’d tried to run.
She’d packed a small bag, taken some food from the communal stores, and waited until the middle of the night. The forest beyond the village seemed vast, dark, and full of possibilities as she carefully made her way out, making a wide circle around the lingering mushroom circles in the woods. In her desperation, she even stopped and wished for the little ones who lived there in those mushrooms, according to old legend.
— That was superstitious nonsense in this day and age, but she was desperate.
It was her only shot at freedom. She had the opportunity to become something more than just a prize.
The hunters had caught her before she’d made it half a mile.
They’d dragged her back, laughing that she had gone off to the wilds as she was always wont to do, and her mother, the deceased chieftain’s wife, had locked her in the ceremonial hut until the contest began. After that it was said that there would be no more delays. Tradition was tradition, and the tribe needed a new leader now that the old chieftain had died.
The clans were called together, and now, here she was.
The next suitor approached the platform, and the crowd’s murmuring grew louder.
He was massive, easily the largest goblin in the tribe, his shoulders broad and his arms corded with muscle. Scars crisscrossed his chest and face, each one a story of survival. He was the strongest hunter of the mountain tribe, and everyone knew it.
He held something out to her. He held out a skull dripping with rainwater, its fangs still intact. Wolf, probably. Freshly killed and cleaned.
She would have almost been flattered, actually, that he would put in such effort for her hand. But instead of looking at her as he offered his very respectable gift, he instead turned to face the crowd.
“One hundred,” he proclaimed.
The murmurs became shouts. One hundred. The number was obscene, almost unthinkable. It was a boast of virility, strength, and absolute confidence. And if he failed to deliver, if he didn’t sire one hundred children through her, tradition demanded he be put to death in the most horrible way the tribe could devise. Goblins reproduced in litters, but even with that, a hundred is an astronomical number.
It was meant to show courage. This was done to demonstrate his leadership qualities.
Rou-ya felt bile rise in her throat at the thought of being stuck with a boaster like that. For the brief flash of an instant as he approached, she entertained the fantasy of riding away with a brave hunter toward the horizon. But that fantasy shattered immediately because of the pressure of the rising vomit in her guts. She never wanted to be the princess, let alone have the obligations of one. But here she was, stuck where the stars put her. It wouldn’t be as bad if she actually liked any of them, but she’s never really found other goblins… suitable. In Rou-ya’s eyes, it wasn’t that she herself was arrogant; it’s just that they were all disgusting, stupid, and ugly, and she was better than they were. She was the princess of a kingdom of filth.
Rou-ya forced herself to speak. “Oh… thank you.”
Her voice came out flat, dead. She took the skull and set it aside, along with the knife, the necklaces, and the other useless trinkets. The hunter grinned at her, showing all his teeth, then stepped back to join the crowd.
The rain hammered down harder, turning the ground to mud and making the torches sputter. The awning overhead kept the worst of it off the platform, but water still dripped through gaps in the woven thatch.
The next suitor climbed onto the stage.
He was grey and unremarkable, the kind of goblin who usually faded into the background. But there was something different about him tonight from the other times Rou-Ya had seen him on the periphery. His eyes were bright with triumph, and he held something clutched tight to his chest.
A coin.
He held it up for her to see, and the princess stared at it, unimpressed.
“One coin?” she asked. She didn’t even bother to hide the disdain in her voice this time. This was just insulting, even if she didn’t want to be here. A single coin. Others had brought entire chests full of coins, stolen from human caravans. What was one piece of gold supposed to prove?
“Not just a coin,” he said quickly. He turned to the crowd, holding it higher. “A coin taken from the howling cave.”
The crowd went silent.
Then the whispers exploded. The howling cave. The cursed place on the mountain where bones appeared regularly, where something dangerous had taken up residence these past few darknesses. The tribe had learnt to avoid it, to stay far away, because those who ventured too close never came back in the past.
“I went into the dragon’s den,” he continued, his voice growing stronger. “I took this from the beast’s hoard. For her.”
He pointed at Rou-ya.
The crowd erupted. Shouts and cheers and gasps of disbelief. A dragon. A real dragon. And he’d stolen from it and lived.
Stolen story; please report.
“One hundred and one,” he said, looking directly at the princess now.
The crowd went wild.
The princess just thought he was stupid.
Suicidally, catastrophically stupid. If there really was a dragon in that cave, stealing from it was the worst possible idea. Dragons didn’t forgive theft. Everyone knew that. The stories they were told by their elders about the vengeful beasts that used to own the world were just as fresh now as they were in the past, when they still existed in numbers. And now he’d brought the proof here, to the village, probably leading the creature straight to them.
Idiot.
Since nobody was mentioning it, not even the village sages, Rou-Ya opened her mouth to say something about the matter, anything, when a roar split the night. That was most certainly not thunder.
Every goblin in the village froze.
The sound shook the ground beneath their feet.
Then fire exploded against the outer walls.
Screams filled the air. The wooden palisade caught fire despite the rain, flames roaring upward and casting everything in hellish orange light. Bodies flew through the air, goblins flung aside by something massive and unstoppable.
A silhouette stampeded through the village directly through the soldiers at the gate, black and terrible, smashing through every hunter and guard that tried to stop it. Weapons shattered against dark scales and claws of the same obsidian hue. Black fangs raked through flesh. A long and powerful tail whipped through the air, sending goblins flying in droves.
“MONSTER!” someone screamed as the ceremony devolved into panic.
A flung goblin guard crashed into the staging area, his body crumpling against the platform supports. He collided with the last suitor, who stumbled backward with a yelp as the two of them flew away in a heap. The stolen coin flew from his hands, spinning through the air.
Rou-ya watched it arc toward her in slow motion.
She tried to dodge.
But the coin hit her open mouth and she swallowed reflexively, choking as it lodged in her throat. She swallowed it, gasping for breath. Anarchy devolved around her, as everyone was too concerned with the threat to see her suffocating.
Chaos. Goblins ran in every direction, screaming, trampling each other. The fires spread. The rain hissed against burning wood. And through it all, the black shadow cut a path of destruction, moving with terrifying purpose straight toward the platform.
“A dragon!” an elder shrieked. “The curse is real!”
The creature burst into the torchlight, and the princess got her first clear look at it.
A partial dragon, smaller than the giants conveyed in stories, covered in obsidian scales that gleamed wetly in the rain. But it had the shape of a person, at least in part. Her ruby eyes were wild and raging, and her pupils contracted to slits so tight that they could cut a throat. The dragon’s massive tail lashed behind her, tearing through the soil, and her claws were slick with fresh blood. She was panting, rabid, every muscle in her body coiled with barely contained violence.
She vaulted onto the platform in a single leap.
The remaining goblins scattered as the shape flew over them and Rou-Ya saw her life flashing before her eyes. It landed with a crash. The dragon girl’s gaze locked onto the princess. Her clawed hand closed around the princess’s throat, yanking her forward.
Rou-ya choked, her eyes watering, the coin still lodged somewhere in her oesophagus.
The dragon girl leaned in, her nose pressed against Rou-ya, inhaling deeply. Her eyes blazed with draconic greed, and when she spoke, her voice was low and dangerous.
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