The Child Thief

PETER’S LUNGS BURNED. He’d been running most of the day and still
he dared not stop. He glanced back, eyes wide with terror. He could hear
them, their dogs, and the hard clumps of the horses’ hooves. They were
closing in.
Peter spotted Goll’s hill far ahead through a break in the trees, and the
horrible realization that there was no safety there, that there was no safety
anywhere, hit him. Goll couldn’t stop these huge men with their terrible
swords and axes. The men would kill Goll. Peter cut down a new path,
headed toward the cliffs, leading the men away from Goll’s hill, hoping the
horses at least wouldn’t be able to follow him up the steep ledges.
Peter made the cliffs and stopped, listening for the men as he tried to
catch his breath. He didn’t hear them. A touch of hope lifted Peter’s spirits.
Maybe they’d given up. Maybe he wouldn’t die today after all. Then he saw
the smoke and his chest tightened. “Goll,” he whispered.
Peter ran, ignoring the stabbing pain in his side, the throbbing in his
head as he sprinted as fast as he could back to Goll’s hill. He topped the rise
and froze.
Smoke billowed out from Goll’s burrow and there, dangling from the
great oak, hung Goll. The rope was strapped about his chest, pinning his
arms to his side, his feet twitched only inches above the ground. The huge
men surrounded him, some on horses, some on foot, all with swords and
axes in hand.

---

The moss man was charred and smoke drifted from his red, raw skin.
He had no less than a dozen arrows in him, and yet still he kicked and spat.
The dogs bit at him, tearing open the flesh on his legs as the men brayed
with laughter.
Peter’s knees gave way and he stumbled against a fallen tree, his fingers
digging into the rotting bark as he slid to the ground. He wanted to stop
them, do anything to stop them, but couldn’t move, couldn’t do more than
stare on in utter horror.
A huge fellow with a thick black beard and long knife walked up to
Goll.
Goll stared at the blade with wide, terrified eyes.
The bearded man grabbed Goll by the hair and jerked his head back. He
first cut off Goll’s left ear, then the right. As the moss man struggled, the
men laughed and the dogs ran around in tight circles, howling.
The man jabbed the blade into the moss man’s stomach. Goll screamed
and twitched spastically as the man sawed his gullet open. The man slid the
blade into a loop of intestine and pulled it partially out of the wound, then
whistled to the dogs. The dogs snatched the loop and pulled Goll’s
intestines out onto the dirt in wet, rolling coils, tugging and fighting over
them as the moss man wailed.
Peter watched, stone-faced, unable to move or cry, to hardly even blink.
He watched. He missed nothing.
After too long, much too long, Goll stopped wailing, his head sagged
forward, and he was still.