The battle resumed in sporadic spurts where the Queen would tug and play a card from her hand and then Lacey would pull back and channel her emotions into yet another volley. The soldiers on both sides fought in the between space of those epic volleys. Casualties were sparse, but when they did happen, Lacey felt guilt stab at her for not being able to end this thing as the White Wolf had been convinced that she could do. They were little things and treated as such on this side of the wall. Poe took an arrow in the arm and was immediately treated by the White Wolf tearing it out of the weasel-man’s flesh and dumping a light blue potion down his throat. On the other side of the wall, goblins fell in droves and then their bodies were used as sandbags on the edge of foxholes where new goblins would hunker down to survive the arrows from this side of the wall.

“How can she keep sending more and more goblins against us?” Lacey panted out during a break in the magical volleys.

“They are mostly summoned creatures,” the White Wolf explained even as his arrow’s release was punctuated by a goblin yelp. “The Queen can summon vast numbers of weak creatures daily. It is the goblin heritage pedestal that allows this. Before the Queen, we could keep them in check as they sent their weakest against us once a moon or so. Those strong enough to survive our wars would grow and become citizens of the Goblin Empire. But when the Queen came, she stopped the practice, claiming it was barbaric.”

“I’m not sure I disagree with that,” Lacey was tired enough to say out loud.

“She hasn’t sent waves of the young against us in a very long time,” Graham pointed out.

“She decided to allow the young goblins to grow up before they entered the war making the army that came against us much stronger than we were used to,” the White Wolf let off another arrow, and then hunkered down long enough to pass a few extra potions down the lines. “That was how Grandfather fell. We had been rejoicing in the fact that the Goblin Queen seemed to have stopped sending goblin war parties to the hills to fight.”

“But the war party came, as it always did,” Poe took on the story, as the White Wolf handed Lacey the last of the fruit from the bowl. Lacey was getting tired of the fruit’s sweetness or lightheaded from the repeated use of the magic. She didn’t know which, but she was glad of the respite. “This time the goblins sent aged warriors that the Queen had trained up and armed with the best that she could have made. They nearly decimated the wolves’ warrior population until the Wolves held them off.”

“Grandfather and father held off the swarm long enough for us to evacuate the town into the cavern,” the White Wolf’s sadness didn’t interfere with his ability to send another arrow into the mass of goblins. “The town was a ruin, but we brought in the other animal-races to help repopulate.”

“We were happy to come,” Graham grunted.

Lacey steadied herself and went to pull on the magic again. She reached, but unlike before, there wasn’t a lot of resistance. “It’s different,” Lacey reported. “Different isn’t good, is it?”

“How?” the White Wolf twisted his shoulder out of the way of a flying arrow that zipped with more magic than usual.

“The magic isn’t resisting me,” Lacey tried to explain. “It’s like she’s not pulling back.”

“Duck and cover!” the White Wolf called out as he threw himself to the ground next to her. “I need you to hit as hard as you can. Please. It’s important.”

Lacey sent her vision inward and pulled it all to her. She didn’t let the shock of it overwhelm her after what felt like hours of this kind of fighting. The White Wolf’s army dipped down behind their wall in a wave as the word went down the line from their position. She just filled herself almost over the brim of her own ability and then sent out a shockwave toward the advancing army. It did what it had been doing all along in that it flowed out over the valley between the hills, but it also did something different. The magic… veered.

“We may be in trouble,” Lacey breathed out. “The magic is sweeping around one spot in the line.”

The White Wolf muttered, but Graham swore like a sailor.

“How far away is it?” the White Wolf demanded.

“Close,” Lacey answered.

“Very close,” came another, more feminine, voice and Lacey froze. The White Wolf swept Lacey behind him and stood to face the owner of the voice, the only one of them to stand. “Relax, Wolf,” the voice purred out. “I come in parlay.”

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“A truce does not seem in our best interest,” the White Wolf growled.

Lacey gulped. The White Wolf’s army rose, bows in hand and pointed in the direction of what was left of the Queen’s army. Lacey knelt behind the White Wolf, feeling like a child again, helpless and confused. Beyond the Queen was a vee of elite goblins armored and armed with shiny equipment that pointed right back at the White Wolf’s army, but Lacey barely saw them. She knew that voice and she rose to her feet despite the liquid nature of her knees. Snarls and growls abounded, but the White Wolf held up one hand to his forces even as the Queen held hers at bay as well. The White Wolf’s arm still sheltered Lacey behind him, but Lacey hardly noticed.

“Tell her truth of all of it,” the Queen interrupted the White Wolf’s next snarling threat and Lacey’s gaping.

Lacey searched her face. She was older than she remembered, but she was also smaller. There were lines along her eyes and between her brows, but they were lines of sadness and worry. While Gran had always had the lines at the edge of her eyes that came from laughter, this woman had a very different countenance. This was the woman who had shouted at her when she’d done something wrong which had been a lot of the time.

“Tell her yourself,” the White Wolf challenged Lacey’s mother.

“Fine,” the Goblin Queen snapped at the Wolf. “Perhaps we could be civilized about it? You could at least offer me tea.”

The Goblin Queen wasn’t green, nor did she have a mouthful of sharpened teeth. She was an older and grouchier version of Lacey’s own blonde curls and icy eyes. Unlike Lacey’s weary eyes, the Queen had eyes of silvery ice, cutting and judgy. She wore a gown of red and white velvet and sported a jeweled crown worthy of the nose she stuck up in the air. Around the Queen shimmered a protective shield of magic that bowed out to include her retinue of large and intimidating goblin soldiers that made the White Wolf’s army look ragtag.

“Tea?” Lacey goggled at her mother, the absurdity of it gripping a heart that had frozen over from the hope it had held about her mother and what had happened to her. “You want tea?!”

“Don’t be exhausting,” her mother frowned at her. “You were always so dramatic.”

“Like you would know from my five-year-old self, the last version of me you ever knew,” Lacey gritted out, wishing she had the teeth to fight back harder than simple words. A child’s heart beat within her, strapped into a love for a mother despite whatever she had done or not done, and the resentment of that was enough to choke Lacey. Years of excuses for why her mother had left her evaporated under the snarl on this woman’s lips. Loneliness gripped her at the stark contrast between this woman and the true parent her grandmother had been to her, a woman who was dying in a hospital bed while Lacey was out here fighting a war.

“Fine, make me the bad guy,” the Queen retorted, her voice hitched, but her face immovably awful. “If you’re not interested in the truth, then we should end this here.”

Magic bristled and Lacey reached for her side of it, if only to keep it out of the Queen’s hands. The fury at her mother let Lacey grab far more than she ever had, making the Queen pale a little. Hardening her own heart, Lacey grounded the magic in a way that made the earth shake in warning. Lacey’s mother glared at her and pulled back on the magic, but Lacey held firm in the righteous indignation of a child betrayed by someone who had been meant to love her always.

“I’ll tell the truth,” the White Wolf intervened, probably not understanding that Lacey was winning the little magical argument between the two. “The wolves owned this area of the valley, and we were thriving and growing into goblin territory.”

“What a whitewash,” the Queen complained, eyes suspiciously damp. “What you mean is that the wolves were overrunning their little frontier town here. There were so many wolves that they fought among themselves like savages and when there wasn’t enough room for a new and strong leader, they sent that leader out against the goblins to push them back so that the new leader could take over and expand the Wolven Clan.”

“We pushed the goblins out of their territory and used the remnants of their smallest villages to build up a new frontier,” the White Wolf admitted that much. “My father had just set up in one of those villages when your mother stumbled through a portal meant to bring your grandmother back to my grandfather.”

“Don’t turn this into a romance,” the Queen stomped a foot and Lacey’s hold on the magic trembled. “Your father thought he’d seduce me as assuredly as your grandfather got to my mother. I just wasn’t as impressionable. I wasn’t a sap, like my mother. And when I found out that they’d used goblin magic to open these portals and what it cost the goblins? I didn’t take your father’s side. I didn’t take the side of the baby-killer! I took the side of the babies he was murdering to try to reconnect with…”

“They were soulmates!” the White Wolf growled, his teeth bared in the face of her fury.

“And that’s an excuse to sacrifice a goblin’s heritage pedestal?” she pressed, pointing a finger at him that only barely pushed against the shield the Queen still managed to hold steady against Lacey. “The stone that allows for the summoning of the next generation of goblins.”

“Goblins don’t give birth like the animal races,” the White Wolf lowered his voice and his eyes. “They aren’t born. They are summoned.”

“Unnaturally!” the Queen spat angrily. “That’s what your grandfather and father proclaimed when I protested and told them to stop their expansion into goblin territory.”

“That not what I’ve said or what I meant,” the White Wolf answered, but it was clear that he bore the shame.

“You slaughter them like they’re cattle fodder,” the Queen argued, waving her hand at the bodies that littered the mounds around her.

“You send them in waves against us to destroy the only town we have left!” he tried to fight back. “The wolves claimed all the hills you can see from this rise and now we are forced to bring in the other animal races to even make a stand on the last of our domains. What would you have us do?”

“Die,” the Queen replied without sympathy.