Edits to make:
In the previous chapter, change it so that only Catherine and Alfred are left in the robber caves
In previous chapters, change references to fighting goblins (goblins only fight by swarms)
Chapter 16: In the Goblin Caves
The wolves had made themselves thoroughly at home in the largest cave. They had been used to sleeping out on the cold snowy ground, but the cave offered sufficient protection from the elements. The stone floor was hard, but Catherine had taken some of the thick quilts and blankets from the robbers’ stolen hoard, and spread them out for the wolves to lie down on. Seldom had the wild beasts had such luxury, and they stretched out happily on the blankets and went to sleep.
The robbers slept in the other four caves. But Catherine and Alfred opted to sleep in the same cave as the wolves. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping in the same caves as the robbers?” Balsamer the raven asked. “I thought the whole point was to keep an eye on them.”
“We don’t want to push things too fast just yet,” said Catherine. “Just being in their camp is enough for the first few nights. Once they get used to us, then we can start sleeping in their caves.”
“You don’t need to worry about a thing,” Branoc said to Catherine. “My children and I will keep watch for you all night. If any danger approaches, we’ll wake you up.”
“You have my gratitude,” said Catherine.
“My family is forever in your debt,” Branoc said, spreading out his wings and lowering his head, which is a bird’s way of bowing.
“Okay, for the first night then, let’s try it like this,” Catherine said. “We’ll have the ravens at the entrance of the cave keeping guard. I’ll sleep just behind them with the wolves. That way, if the robbers do decide to break their promise and attack in the middle of the night, the ravens can wake me up, and I can gather the wolves and organize a defense. Alfred, you sleep behind the wolves, towards the back of the cave. It’ll be safer back there.”
“I should be the one sleeping at the front of the cave,” said Alfred. “I’m the man.”
“You’re a boy,” Catherine said. “You’re younger than me.”
The dying light was too dim to see the crimson rush to his cheeks, but Catherine didn't need to. She saw the way his jaw clamped shut and his shoulders went rigid as stone. The barb had hit its mark.
“Besides,” said Catherine, softening her tone just a fraction, “you don’t control the wolves. They won’t listen to you if you tell them to attack.”
“But I can still sleep up at the front with you. I don’t need to hide at the back.”
“It’s not hiding. It’s strategy. If, by some chance, the robbers do manage to rush in and grab me before I have a chance to wake up, then we don’t want them grabbing both of us at once. We want you further back so you have a chance to wake up before they get to you. That way you can rescue me.”
Alfred stared at her, his defensive posture melting just a bit as his pride was stroked. “I guess... when you put it that way, it makes sense,” he admitted. With a muttered goodnight, he turned and trudged into the darker recesses of the cavern.
Settling down among the rise and fall of warm fur, Catherine closed her eyes, listening to the wind howl outside.
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And so it happened that in the middle of the night, while Alfred slept soundly near the back of the cave, they came for him. A sudden weight crashed onto Alfred’s chest, ripping him from a sound sleep. Before a scream could clear his throat, a foul-smelling cloth was shoved into his mouth, choking out the sound. He lashed out, intending to kick, but he found that his legs had already been bound with ropes. He squirmed and wriggled against the crushing pressure of dozens of hands, but it was useless. There were too many of them—a swarming mass of at least fifty creatures. Pinioned and helpless, he was dragged down, down into the suffocating dark of the hidden tunnels far below the cave.
***************************************************************
When Alfred next awoke, the world smelled of damp earth, copper, and old rot.
He bolted upright, gasping as his knuckles scraped against rough, freezing stone. His head throbbed in time with a slow, rhythmic pulse. By all rights, he should have been in pitch blackness, but an eerie, milky luminescence washed over the space. Looking up, he saw veins of pale rock embedded in the tunnel walls, bleeding a cold, ghostly light into the dark.
“Alfred, is that you?”
The voice rasped from the shadows behind him. Alfred spun around, his boots skidding on loose gravel.
A boy stood in the dim light, looking about his own age, though it was hard to tell under the grime. His face was streaked with soot, his hair a matted tangle of brown locks, and his clothes hung from his thin frame in ragged, filthy tatters. He was staring at Alfred with a desperate, wide-eyed intensity. He was staring at Alfred intently.
“Yes,” Alfred breathed, his voice cracking. “My name’s Alfred. But… who are you?”
The boy stepped closer, the pale light catching his features. “Don’t you recognize me?”
Alfred stared, but recognition did not come. In fact, Alfred probably should have recognized the boy at this point. But sometimes it can be hard to recognize even a familiar face when you are not expecting to see it. And Alfred had not expected to see this particular face ever again.
“It’s me,” the boy said softly. “Jack.”
The name struck Alfred like a physical blow. “Jack!” he gasped, scrambling to his feet. “Jack, but how? Everyone back home… we thought you were dead!”
“Did they?” Jack’s voice held a strange, hollow lack of surprise.
“You wandered off into the woods and never came back,” Alfred said, the words tumbling out in a breathless rush. “We searched for days. We assumed the mountain beasts had gotten you.”
Jack stared at the floor, processing the words, before giving a slow, weary nod. “Yes. I suppose that makes sense. I’d probably think the same thing if I were them.”
“But you’re not dead,” Alfred said excitedly. “You’re here. And…” He paused, looking past Jack into the yawning, labyrinthine dark of the corridor. “Where is here, anyway? Where are we?”
“We are underground, in the goblin tunnels,” said Jack sadly. “I see the goblins have captured you too.”
“I guess so,” said Alfred. “It was too dark for me to see them. But something dragged me off. Somethings, I mean.”
“There were a lot of them, then?” Jack asked.
“Yes. They had hands and feet just like a human, but they were small, like a little child.”
“Yes, those were the goblins,” Jack said.
“So how did they catch you?” asked Alfred.
Jack let out a long, heavy sigh, his shoulders slumping.
“Well, as you know, I decided to take a walk by myself. I was feeling a little bit sick of the group. Lucas was being obnoxious, as usual, and Molly was talking a lot of nonsense, as usual, and I thought I’d just take a walk by myself to clear my head. I knew that I shouldn’t go off by myself, but I told myself that it would only be for a little bit, and besides it was still the middle of the day, so I thought it was safe.” He rubbed a grime-streaked hand across his forehead. “But as I was walking, I saw a little goblin sitting on a tree. I remember he was sitting there just looking at me. There was only one of them, so I didn’t think too much of it. I mean, the goblins are so small that I didn’t think it was frightening when I just saw one of them. So I kept walking. But that was my mistake. I should have ran back the moment I saw him. The thing about goblins is that there’s never just one of them. If you see one goblin looking at you, it means that there are fifty more goblins that you can’t see, hiding behind the trees or under the rocks. And sure enough, as I kept walking, I saw another goblin standing on the ground in front of me, and then a bit further down I saw two more, and by the time I realized I was surrounded, it was too late. You see, the goblins fight by swarming.”
“Swarming?”
“Yes, you see, if there was just one goblin, you’d be able to fight it pretty easily. I mean, you’d have to be a little bit careful. They do have sharp pointy teeth, so they can do some damage if they bite you. And they have little sharp swords that they carry, so you don’t want to let them stab you. But generally speaking, assuming the goblin doesn’t sneak up on you from behind or something, if you have a human with a sword fighting against a goblin, the human has a very good chance. But the problem is they never attack you one on one. If there’s only one of them, they’ll just run away. They only attack when there’s about fifty of them together. And then at that point, you don’t stand a chance. They just swarm you, and either stab you to death with their short swords, or, in our case, they drag you down into their mines.”
Alfred felt a cold sweat break out on the back of his neck. “Is that what this is? A mine?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I’ve been down here for two years. At least, I think it’s been two years. It’s hard to tell time without a sun.”
“And why have they captured us? What do they want with us?”
“They want to make us dig, of course.”
“Dig for what?”
“For whatever we can find. Gold, silver, diamonds, jewels. There’s loads of gold in these mountains. Did you know that? I never knew that before.”
“I didn’t know that either,” Alfred replied.
A bitter, humorless smile touched Jack’s lips. “It’s funny when you think about it. All those trips the forest robbers make up here to raid wagons and steal scraps, and the whole time, a fortune is sitting right underneath their boots.” The smile vanished as quickly as it came. “But someone has to hack it out of the rock. That’s what we’re for.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you think the goblins captured us? It’s because they need children to work in their mines. We do the hard work of digging.”
“Who is we?”
“All of us. All of the children.”
Alfred looked down the tunnel, half-expecting to see a crowd emerging from the gloom.
“They’re not standing just in this spot now,” Jack explained. “But there are several more children in these caves. Maybe about twenty of us altogether.”
“Twenty? But where do they come from? There haven’t been twenty children who have gone missing. You were the only one who disappeared.”
“Anna is here as well,” Jack said. “Do you remember Anna? I had practically forgotten about her myself until I met her down here.”
“Anna,” Alfred said slowly, trying to remember.
“She disappeared when we were five years old. At the time, people said the wolves must have gotten her.”
A sudden spark of recognition flashed in Alfred’s mind. “The wolves… yes. I remember the adults talking about it. She’s alive?”
“She’s here,” Jack nodded. “But the rest aren't from our village. They’re from the forest people down below.”
“What are the forest people doing up here in the mountains?”
“The tunnels go everywhere,” Jack explained, pointing deeper into the dark. “They run under the mountains, under the foothills, straight beneath the forest floor. The goblins can snatch a child from the woods down below just as easily as they took us from the peaks.”
Alfred fell silent, listening intently. The cave was suffocatingly quiet, save for the distant, rhythmic drip-drip of water. “It’s pretty quiet here,” he said. “And so far, just the two of us. Where are the other children? Where are all the goblins? And why is it light inside these tunnels?”
“The light comes from the moonstones,” said Jack, answering the last question first.
“Moonstones?”
“Yes,” said Jack, pointing to one of the stones that was glowing. “If you put these stones outside under the sky in the light of a full moon, they’ll absorb the moon’s light, and bleed it out for a full month down here. Goblins can see perfectly in the dark, so they don’t need them. But we do. And the goblins know that it’s no good sending us into the mines to search for gold or diamonds if we can’t see what we’re looking for. So they keep everything lit up with the moonstones.”
“I see.”
“As for the other children, they’re still eating their breakfast.”
“The goblins feed you?”
“It’s not great food,” Jack admitted. “It’s tasteless gruel, but it does give us energy to work in the mines.”
“And why aren’t you eating with them?” Alfred asked.
Jack didn't look away, but his expression hardened into something detached and numb.
“The goblins sent me,” Jack said simply. “They told me they left a new boy lying in the upper tunnel. They told me to go fetch you, and bring you down to work.”
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