Goblins Vs Dwarves Read Free

the tallest of those towers, the Blackspike, there rested an old ship. This was the home of Princess Eluned, “Ned” to her friends, who was the creator of the garden. She had become ruler of Clovenstone after all the biggest and most vicious goblins perished in the fall of the Keep, and after Henwyn, who was the true heir to the place, had decided that he wasn’t cut out to be a Dark Lord.
    Ned was not aboard her ship when Skarper and Henwyn returned to Clovenstone next day. They spent half the morning looking for her, and eventually found her round at the eastern side of the Inner Wall, gazing out across Natterdon Mire, the broad, misty marsh which had swallowed up the ruins there.
    It was a place to which Ned often came. During the great adventures of the year before, she had encountered the boglins: savage, froggish creatures who dwelled among those mires and meres. She’d often wondered since what had become of them. Their king, Poldew, was dead, and his hall lay in ruins, but what of the boglins themselves? Were they still watching secretly from behind the mists and reed beds which screened their perilous pools and secret sinkholes? Or had they slunk away, across the Outer Wall, into the still wider marshes which lay north of Clovenstone? And what of the monster they had woken, the dreadful, wet, dragonish dampdrake? Did it still slumber in the deep, dark mere at Bospoldew, waiting for more gifts of human blood?
    Partly it was fear that kept the boglins in Ned’s thoughts (for no queen likes to have a tribe of hostile savages living within a stone’s throw of her realm). Mostly, though, it was just curiosity. As a girl, she had been taught that there were no such things as giants or goblins or twiglings. Since she came to Clovenstone she had made friends with all of them, and with the silly, flighty cloud maidens as well. Even the grumpy old troll who lurked under the bridge over the River Oeth was civil to her now. So it hurt her that the boglins would not even talk with her. Sometimes she took little gifts down to the margins of their marsh, to show them that she meant no harm to them. A basket of cheese; some windfall apples; a tray of fresh-baked scones. The gifts always vanished, but not while Ned was watching. She never saw a trace of boglins.
    When Skarper and Henwyn found her that day, she was sitting quietly on a ruined wall, watching an apple and blackberry crumble which she had left on a tussock at the edge of the nearest lagoon. The marsh mist wove strange shapes around her, the mossy ruins came and went like ghosts, and when Skarper and Henwyn stepped out of the reeds she jumped up with a scream, thinking for a moment that they were boglins.
    â€œOh!” she said. “I did not expect you to come home from your adventures so soon! Did you find anything interesting among the Bonehills?”
    â€œ Among them, no,” said Henwyn. “But beneath them; ah, that is another story!”
    â€œThen you had best tell it to me,” said Ned, glancing quickly at her crumble to make sure it was still there.
    â€œThe Dark Lady of Clovenstone” they called Eluned, down in the Softlands where news from the north came mixed with lots of rumours. In Coriander and Nantivey and places like that, they imagined her as a cold and terrible queen, presiding over a court of goblins. They would have been astonished to see the real Ned standing there, in her faded old russet dress with her apron still tied round it, a smudge of flour on her nose and her grey hair done up in untidy pigtails, listening to the tale of Henwyn and Skarper’s adventure.
    When they had finished, she sat down on her wall again, frowning thoughtfully. “Dwarves,” she said. “I do not know much about them. I haven’t heard of them for years, although when I was a little girl I remember hearing merchants from my father’s harbour at Porthstrewy talk of how their grandfathers had done