The gates swallowed them up and closed behind them with a booming sound. Then there were faces all around her, sharp-featured and hungry looking, fringed in coarse hair and dominated by flat noses and pointed ears. Goblins, she realized, though she had never seen one. They had been banished into the Forbidding in the time of Faerie, she had read in the Druid Histories. Some of them grinned unpleasantly, revealing sharp, pointed teeth and black gums. They reached through the bars to touch her. The wolves snarled and snapped angrily at them, as if protecting a meal they would soon enjoy. The drivers she couldn’t see flicked their whips and croaked. The air was filled with raucous sounds and fetid smells and, even inside the walls of the keep, clouds of dust.

The caravan rolled to a halt at a central tower, one ringed with walls that were spiked and barbed atop their parapets and through which the mouths of spear launchers protruded like serpent tongues. A flurry of activity announced their arrival as dozens more of the Goblins surrounded the wagons, some bearing lengths of rope and chain attached to slip-nooses and clamps and some bearing weapons. Grianne could no longer hear the snarls of the wolves; presumably the huge beasts had been locked outside the last wall they had passed through, their task as herders complete.

The creature with the topknot reappeared, coming out of the Goblin throng to unlock and open the door to her cage. She stood quietly as her keeper entered, thinking that if it got close enough, she might break its neck. But it kept its distance once inside, staying just out of her reach, working instead on the chains that held her fast, releasing them one at a time from the cage walls and passing the ends over to groups of Goblins waiting to receive them. It all seemed well rehearsed and smoothly accomplished, and she was given no opportunity to resist.

So she remained calm and let them do what they chose. She could wait. Her gag was left in place and her irons kept locked as she was led down out of the wagon. She was aware that her jailers held the chains taut so that she could be yanked over quickly if she tried to make a sudden move. It seemed clear to her that any effort at reaching for the gag in her mouth would trigger such a response. She couldn’t know if they were aware of the wishsong’s power and so were keeping her gagged because of it or if they were simply warding against the possibility of her employing any combination of utterances and gestures that might trigger an onslaught of magic.