“What?” Lacey intervened. “What are you talking about? You would do to the wolves what the wolves did against the goblins?”

“Yes,” the Queen of the Goblins spat back, and the fury in her eyes defied the ice of their color.

“How does it make you any better?” Lacey demanded.

“It doesn’t and I don’t care!” the Queen said without a trace of regret.

“She is bitter,” the White Wolf shook his head in short little bursts. “Unreasonably so, but will you not at least talk peace with us, even with your daughter to stand between?”

“You knew?” Lacey turned on the White Wolf. “That the Goblin Queen was my mother?”

“Of course, he knew, you little fool,” the Queen said, her fists clenched at her side and practically shaking. “You are nothing more than a bargaining chip and a last-ditch desperate effort to stop me.”

“Understandable, considering that you want to exterminate his whole race!” Lacey yelled back at her mother over whatever the White Wolf was going to say. “Now shut up because I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to him.”

“I did know,” the White Wolf admitted softly in silence of the Queen’s fury. He offered no excuse and no apology.

“Am I a bargaining chip?” Lacey asked, ignoring the fuming woman on the other side of the wall.

“Of course you were,” the Queen interrupted despite Lacey’s glare. “He thinks that bringing my daughter here will soften my heart and allow these baby-killers to gain another foothold. Then what? You go back to killing the goblins with the same lack of remorse I dare to show you? You wolves are all the same and you always will be.”

“And you’re no better,” Lacey screamed at her mother loud enough for the woman to jerk back from the words. “You didn’t even want me enough to use me as anything. You threw me away like garbage, so excuse me for wanting to listen to someone other than the person who’d…”

“I left you with your grandmother,” the Queen revved back up. “You wanted her more than me anyway!”

“You blame me for liking a person who laughed instead of yelled?” Lacey rolled her eyes at her mother, knowing she was being sidetracked from the real issue and not caring so much. The pain this woman’s words could still cause was a physical ache in Lacey’s chest.

“She never had the responsibility of making you behave, so of course you liked her better,” the Queen dismissed Lacey like the bargaining chip she claimed the wolf used her for. “I left you where you wanted to be anyway, where you were happy, and that makes me a bad person too? Unbelievable!”

“You expect me to be grateful?” Lacey yelled back.

“Yes!” the Queen blinked furiously. “That would be nice. I did my best and I left when you were in better hands than mine. Nothing I ever did was good enough for you or her!”

“And you think I’m unbelievable!” Lacey fumed, letting the magic build between them. It fairly crackled in the very air they all breathed. “You blame a child’s emotions for your abandonment when you are the most immature person I’ve ever known!”

“You’ve never known me!” the Queen screamed.

“Whose fault is that!?” Lacey threw right back. “Mine again? I didn’t leave!”

The Queen tried to cut Lacey off, but Lacey used the crackling air to slam against the Queen’s shield and interrupt the interruption.

“No!” Lacey threw the magic against the shield again. “You don’t get to blame me for leaving!”

Lacey punctuated her sentences with bashes of magic that had the Queen edging back to hold her own.

“You don’t get to blame me for how horrible you were, and you don’t get to blame the wolves for taking me away!” Lacey stormed, her emotions showing in raw surges of the magic. “You chose to save goblin babies and be the big hero of the goblins rather than be a mother to me!”

“I…” the Queen tried, but Lacey would have none of it. For years, she’d made excuses for what madness had taken her mother from her. She’d tried to keep a soft heart for the greatest pain she’d ever felt. There was nothing that ever compared to the knowledge that her mother hadn’t loved her. There was nothing that could beat back the memory of the woman storming off her grandmother’s porch with a suitcase and an angry string of words. No pain could contend with that, so Lacey had bounced back from the rejection of playground antics as if she was strong. Even boyfriends who cheated on her were almost expected to do so since even her own mother hadn’t wanted her, hadn’t loved her. Only the pain of losing her grandmother had eclipsed the childhood pain that resided in that prominent part of her heart. Even with that pain, Lacey had kept going, kept trying, kept making excuses.

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“Here’s what you missed, though I’m sure you won’t appreciate it any more than you did the child who relied on you,” Lacey’s tone had calmed, but the zipping magic in the air belied her face and voice. “I hate you for not loving me. Gran is dying. The only person who ever loved me is lying in a hospital bed fighting for her last breaths and you, you, you…”

“Lacey,” the White Wolf tried to comfort her, but she shoved his hand away.

“You stand here fighting for goblin babies like some superhero of your own story,” Lacey said, and gentled her rejection of the wolf at her side by taking his hand back in hers. “You threw away your own flesh and blood to champion others so that you could feel better about the monster that truly resides in your ice… cold… heart. And I hate you. I hate you more than I want to breathe my next breath. Your own daughter, born to love and follow you, hates you and everything you stand for.

“That’s the teenager in me struggling to reconcile the child in me that still begs you to find a part of you that isn’t too hard to love your own child,” Lacey ignored the tears that formed and fell as the magic also beaded into salty rain. “And it’s the adult in me that can’t love herself because one woman was too selfish to see to the needs of the child she held in her arms. And it’s the granddaughter that quivers with gratitude that someone took over for you.”

“Ungrateful…” the woman began to spit through shaking, bitter jowls.

“And every part of me hates you and every part of me still has to love you,” Lacey wondered as the mist of tears wove themselves into the rain. “I not only hate you, I condemn your irresponsible, irrational, heartless selfishness.” Lacey almost laughed at herself as she began to repeat it. What else was there to say? What else could there be that could reach a woman so determined to deny Lacey’s hard-won compassion learned from the one woman who hadn’t done this… to her.

“Self-righteous,” the Queen muttered. “Fine, hate me! Let them tell you about your father and see if you hate them any less!”

“What now?” Lacey rubbed her hands on her face and turned back to the wolf.

“He died dueling my father,” the White Wolf nodded, but he wasn’t as closed as the Goblin Queen. He wasn’t as shrewd. He wasn’t as remorseless.

“And that’s my fault too?” Lacey turned back to the Queen to ask. “Was that really supposed to convince me to turn on the wolves? OOOoooH!” Lacey began low and then escalated to scream it out. “You think heaping more pain on my brow in the middle of a battlefield will make me more sympathetic to you?”

“They killed you father!” the Queen pounced on the betrayal and her magic rose against Lacey’s emotional fatigue.

“You killed me!” Lacey screamed back, drowning out her mother with a peal of thunder. “You see me still grasping at compassion and understanding and you drive another spike into my heart.”

“What are you talking about?” Lacey’s mother ranted back over the noise of the still-rising storm.

“I didn’t even know he was dead!” Lacey bellowed, her hands creeping into her own hair. “You’ve just told me that the man I dreamed of rescuing me from your legacy of pain is a ghost. I’m losing Gran, the only one who loved me. You’ve now told me that my father is never coming to save me or even just love me. And you still expect it to make me come over to your side! I am alone. For the rest of my life to be alone.”

“You are not alone,” the Queen grasped at Lacey’s weakness with a greedy fist. “I am here, and I can love you. I do love you. You’re my daughter. It’s not your fault. It was the wolves. They convinced you to work for them. I don’t blame you for that! We can still be together.”

Lacey shook her head and gulped for breath. Her mother didn’t understand. She didn’t understand any of it.

“Join us here,” her mother continued to cajole Lacey. “The goblins worship me, and they’ll worship you too. They’ll serve you instead of using you like the wolves.”

“We aren’t trying to use you, Lacey,” the White Wolf denied the claims, but his eyes were sad where her mother’s were mad. “If it came out that way, I’m sorry.”

“He’s just apologizing because he wants to continue to use you for his war against us!” the Queen raged, oblivious to Lacey’s pain-filled internal wail. “We are so close! With you, we can win! We can wipe these bloody wolves from the face of this universe and live as Queens together.”

“I have little to offer,” the White Wolf shook his head sadly. Lacey felt his hand and considered her mother’s words as she had to do because it was her mother saying them.

He’d dumped a potion in her mouth, growled at her, and then thrust her into a war of magic against her own mother. He could be as untrustworthy as the woman Lacey was genetically programmed to honor and obey had said he was. His hand was gentle, his words unforced. Lacey looked up into his eyes to search for more, just as she’d hoped for more from her own mother. Golden eyes shone with shame and sorrow, and Lacey looked away, trying to compel a single morsel of understanding for her mother through the pain and rage she’d carried in her back pocket most of her life.

“What is wrong with you?” Lacey asked, and she could have been asking her mother or herself, but she was looking at the White Wolf.

His shoulder slumped and she could see the future of his race dying in his eyes as he looked to her with hope dashed. She could feel the line of the White Wolf’s army stiffen, though how any of them could have heard her whispered question was impossible. The weight of feeling their leader’s bravery deflating didn’t just fall on them, but also on her.

“You have no reason to trust me or us,” he was saying, but she raised a finger to his mouth.

“How can you love me when no one else can?” Lacey asked.

“He doesn’t love you!” the Queen suddenly raged. “If he’s said he loves you, it is a trick!”

“Because I’m so unlovable,” Lacey nodded to her mother.

The wolf opened his mouth and closed it. There were words on the tip of his tongue and feelings in his eyes. Something snugged itself into place in Lacey that couldn’t heal the hurt, but it tempered the rage.

“You are as smart as I am,” the Queen barked up the wrong tree, making Lacey huff in disbelief.

“You are vile!” Lacey looked up into the clouds that swirled with her magic. “Unforgiven and unforgivable and yet I’m trying to forgive you even as you drive me into pain worse than any I ever thought I’d feel!”

“I neither want nor need the forgiveness of a petulant child,” the Queen wrenched on the magic, but Lacey was ready for her and held it firmly.

“What you see in me is what you hate in yourself,” Lacey murmured, using every ounce of her emotions to take back the magic. It was something that Gran had told her about bullies. Lacey doubted that it had been meant to explain this.