"Quiet!"

  The white matron's call preceded four deep thumps of her wooden sceptre against the cave floor. The end of Stump's testimony and the jeering crowd that followed had forced her to lurch out of her chair and lean against her staff, yellow eyes peering through wispy hair.

  "No retribution will be taken until judgment has been passed," she seethed. "You will now witness the decree of the matrons." She turned and shuffled back to her seat, her hunched goblin frame protesting every move.

  She must be pushing nineteen, thought Stump.

  The cheers of "death" might've died down, but his ears still winced at the whispered curses at his back and the threats to his life should judgment not fall the way the rest of the tribe wanted. His eyes fell to an underripe turnip that only moments ago cracked against his shoulder.

  It was a miracle they hadn't killed him on the spot.

  "What say you, matron of yellow, lady of seasons and keeper of the gifts of the ground?" asked the white matron. She turned deliberately in her seat, and all eyes followed her gaze to the throne on the far left.

  Stump lifted his head long enough to meet the glare of the yellow matron. Mouldy carrots and dried tomatoes nearly as old as the matrons themselves dangled from the arms of her chair. Tufts of dead leaves sprouted from her gown, and various roots and mushrooms petitioned for territory along the base of her throne.

  "Mercy," she said, grinding her wrinkled gums. "Mercy, I say."

  Already the crowd began to rise again as one, a simmering bloodlust coming to boil. It would have, if it wasn't for the rapping of the white matron's staff and a second call for silence. Only one of them had passed her judgment, and nothing but the intervention of Grumul himself would stop the seasoned old crones from stating their decrees.

  Stump allowed a brief sigh at her decision. He wanted so badly to turn and spot Yeza in the crowd, to anchor himself to a friendly face, but he refused to show the tribe any weakness. He had to be strong. Brave. He had to be a goblin.

  "Death," said the red matron, on the far right. Youngest of the six, her pronouncement was laced with hatred. She watched him with scathing orange eyes, a departure from the normally yellow hue of goblins. Animal parts buzzing with flies were cobbled to her chair with hardened shit.

  Stump's ears fell at her word, but he couldn't say he was surprised. The matron of red, lady of feast and the hunt and keeper of dung was meant to be as harsh and unyielding as the carcasses that crowned her seat.

  Two judgments had been passed, one in favour of his life and one against. All he needed to avoid execution was three votes of mercy. There was no getting away entirely without punishment, however. "Mercy" was simply the goblin way of saying "not death."

  "Mercy," said the green matron, matter-of-factly. Her nose was turned up, eyes cold and unreadable. Her gown was woven with leaves and sticks and plastered with honey and crawling with beetles. A nest of wasps grew like mould from the side of her throne.

  She wore the bone crown better than the rest, but Stump would never say so out loud.

  The old goblins gave themselves no time to weigh the points of interest in his story. They simply heard it and cast their vote, often in defiance of the matron they liked the least. It was all about rivalry. Instinct. A goblin who gave their answer without forethought was seen as deeply wisened. To hesitate was to be slow, and to be slow was to be weak.

  "Death," said the blue matron, whose decision had never been in doubt. She was the oldest of the bunch, perhaps the wisest, and definitely the meanest. Her body had shrivelled so much that the bone crown was threatening to become a bone necklace.

  It was said her lust for blood could not be quenched. In a vote several years past, before Stump had any understanding of the world, she had cast her vote as death in response to whether or not the back wall of the cave should be redecorated.

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  "Death," she repeated, one hand gripping a colony of moss on the arm of her seat. "Death."

  Her vote, thankfully, was only counted once.

  Stump turned to the white matron, his head held low in sight of her eminence. Though he couldn't see it, he imagined the rest of the tribe bowed their heads too.

  She grunted and pressed all her weight into her staff and forced herself to her feet, moving in the slow manner in which the sun glides across the sky. She didn't have to—none of the other matrons stood to make their call—but she was the white matron, mother of the tribe itself, queen of glory and keeper of plunder, and she could do as she pleased.

  She had been kind to Stump. Not once did she interrupt the telling of his tale, and she defended his right to speak when others did. He wished he could thank her for that, and resolved to do so in private later, once she declared the final vote of mercy.

  "Death," she wheezed. "It will be… death. And may Grumul's burning afterworld greet you kindly despite your failure." She fell breathlessly back into her chair, letting the staff clatter at her feet.

  Death? Stump opened his mouth to protest, but fear strangled the words in his throat. The cave erupted in cheer.

  When he turned to the black matron he found her gaze already on him, and a mischievous smile curling the corners of her lips. With one hand she twirled a coin shimmering with golden light. The other brushed teasingly against a mace recently added to her throne.

  The matron of death, of trickery, of the culling of the old to bring up the new. Her throne sparkled with the trinkets of past tribesmen—a tooth here, an armband there. She watched him with predatory eyes, as if appraising him for the best piece to add to her necrotic collection.

  She held up the coin for all to see, revealing the sun marked onto one side. "Your fate," she said.

  It was her call. Her word. He would live or die by a single sound uttered from the mouth of the only matron in the tribe whose glory grew with the passing of its members.

  With a flick the coin was in the air. All eyes traced its flight. It was up there forever, it felt like. It twirled and twirled, rotating between sun and moon. Stump's fate, his life, was spinning. And then it was coming down.

  It never had time to land.

  "Wait!"

  All heads turned to follow the voice at the mouth of the cave.

  Standing there in the slant of orange light, with the foreboding dark of the Shadowlands beyond, was a goblin, one side of his body licked with burns. Under one arm he clutched a book. The stone on its cover thrummed with a soft red glow.

  Thrung's chest heaved as his one remaining eye fixed on Stump. "Wait…"

  The silence that followed was broken only by the sharp crackle of firelight.

  No, not firelight, Stump realized. It was Thrung himself. The left side of his body was blackened and snapping with smoking fissures, while the other half of his frame was remarkably untouched.

  How had he lived?

  Thrung shuffled forward and the crowd parted—an unusual gesture normally reserved for the matrons. They watched in silent awe as he hobbled next to Stump, lowered his head to the old crones, and croaked his next words out of a partially melted throat.

  "He lies."

  Stump winced at the shrieks rising from the tribe. He stumbled back as a rock grazed his elbow. "No, I haven't," he pleaded. "I haven't lied!" His words landed like a pebble in a storm of javelins.

  "Silence, you dungheaps!" The white matron leapt off her chair, hunched and scowling. "The next one who dares interrupt these proceedings will have their heads feasted on by fire beetles!"

  When the shouts died she regarded Thrung with a softer look. "You…" she began, her words choked with reverence. "You who have tasted the ashes of the burning afterworld, yet walk our soil… what is your story?"

  Stump's stomach dropped. Before Thrung uttered a single word of his testimony he had snared the respect of the matrons.

  Coward, coward, coward. The word roiled at the back of Stump’s mind. Thrung was the better choice, they had all said. The better goblin.

  "Hogsbreath—may his spirit raid endless plunder in the afterworld—scouted the tall men," Thrung began. Steam hissed from his neck when he spoke. "Four tall men and two horses is what he'd seen, but that's not what we saw. There were six of them. We should have retreated, I told Gorm. But Stump signalled the attack!"

  "Th—that's not true!" The words stumbled off Stump's tongue. His lips had gone dry. "I didn't—I wanted—"

  "Stump… no, Ergul," Thrung spat, his crusted skin chafing as he turned to invoke Stump's true name, a crime normally punishable by the removal of a finger. "He hid behind his rock like a coward while the rest of us charged into certain death. I knew it was a mistake, but I was not cowardly enough to disobey an order!"

  Screams. Shouts. Airborne vegetables. Coward, coward, coward.

  The white matron was on her feet again, vigorously rapping her cane against the cave floor, but there was no quelling the storm.

  Thrung spun to face the tribe and raised his voice. "I am Thrung, son of Dung-Spitter, and I am here only through the fury of Grumul! The rest of our brethren are not, because of Ergul!" He uncurled a barbecued finger at Stump, and the ire of the crowd followed.

  It was a story fuelled by rage and decisiveness, the hallmarks of a well-adjusted goblin. None of it was true, but that didn't matter. The tribe responded to it the way Stump knew they would.

  Several feet away the coin glimmered from where it had landed, the image of the sun facing upwards—mercy.

  But no one bothered to check, and the final decree had come.

  "Death."