He didn’t look back as he started north, and with a twisting in my stomach, I realized all I could do was follow him. If I went back home, I’d risk my family and village getting slaughtered, risk my father dying from breaking the oath that he made, risk this goblin’s wrath. So, I forced myself farther north into the cold region as the trees and shrubs began to become thinner and thinner, sparser, until there were no more green leaves coating them but merely skeletons waving somberly in the wind.

He didn’t lie. We didn’t walk for long before we came upon the horses, somehow perfectly obedient despite not being tied down. His—I figured it was his since it was a giant destrier—was solid black with a black mane to match and shaggy fur around his hooves. The gray mare beside him was slighter and smaller though still bore the distinctive shaggy fur that fell over one of its eyes. I ran a hand through her hair and she pressed her nose into my hand.

“Do you need help getting on?” he asked.

“I can get on a horse,” I bit out, not wanting to talk to this goblin more than I had to, despite the annoyance bubbling on my lips. Of course I could get on a horse! It wasn’t like children in my world weren’t taught to ride from a young age either! It was one of the few things encouraged for both boys and girls. If this was a sign of things to come, I would end up in the grave from sheer exasperation alone.

Something tickled in the back of my mind as the anger faded. A word repeated over and over and over again. Root. Something about a root. A feeling like I didn’t belong and a root. But I could barely make sense of the current situation I was in, much less the hypothetical one that kept brushing my consciousness.

We rode hard that first night and camped out when it got dark. He started a fire that glowed an unnatural blue color—normal fires didn’t light in the Permafrost, he explained, though I hadn’t asked—and was roasting a rabbit carcass on it. He’d nearly dug into it raw before realizing that we had different eating habits, and cooked it instead. He needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t in the mood to eat anything he had to give me even if my stomach cramped from the lack of food.