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The Goblin King looked down from his throne at the weary human woman standing before him. She was leaning on a stout walking stick, looking as battered as the pack slung on her back. But she looked back at him with impassive eyes. No fear there, he noted. No humbleness. Merely determination. It was almost insulting.
She spoke first. “Give me back my child.”
Definitely insulting. “No.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I beg your pardon?”
His narrowed to match. “No. I'm keeping him.”
Each word fell as though chipped from stone. “I have no patience for playing guess-the-magic-phrase. Give me back my child.”
He snorted and leaned back in his throne. “Even if you had found the proper words- have you learned nothing, in all your travels here?- it would still be no. What fun would being king be, if I had to follow the rules all the time?”
To his surprise, she sighed, leaned her stick against the nearest statue, and began to rummage in her pack, bringing out a canteen he'd seen her using as he spied on her progress. “Ah, well, if we're going to talk about rules...” she said, staring at him for a moment before she took a drink. When she continued, it was in a reflective tone of voice. “Have you never noticed, in all your years of stealing babies, it's never the child's mother who ends up standing in front of you? Stepsisters, younger brothers, even wandering heroes. But no one I talked to had ever heard of a mom being here, before now. Do we create you, I wonder, or do you create us? Either way, human fairy tales have the same rules as your world. The authors never send the mother on the quest.”
He smirked at her. “And you think there's a grand reason?”
“Oh, not a grand reason. But a good one.” She took a last drink from her canteen, tucked it back in her pack, then pulled out a sawed-off shotgun. “They know better.”