William Alexander - Ghoulish Song

She kept her thoughts focused on practical things. Her thoughts and memories flinched whenever they strayed away from practical and ordinary things, and touched on the reasons why she had just woken up in the hayloft.

Kaile started to climb down. Then she paused. “Do you eat?”

I don’t know, said Shade. I used to eat the shadows of whatever you ate. Maybe I still can.

“Easy enough,” said Kaile. “Anything I find for breakfast should have a shadow of its own.”

Kaile dropped to the bottom of the ladder and sneaked across the yard. She found the kitchen door closed and latched. A threshold charm made faint music behind it.

The kitchen door was never locked. Kaile hadn’t even known that it could be locked.

She could still go around the whole building to the front door. That one would be open at this time of the morning—customers needed to get inside somehow. But Kaile didn’t move. The latch was a message: Don’t come back. Don’t come haunting. You don’t live here. You aren’t alive. Please understand that you aren’t alive.

She almost kicked the door before she noticed the other message.

Someone had set a bundle of cloth on the doorstep, wrapped and tied into a satchel. Kaile picked it up and peered inside. She smelled the pastries before she could see them. They were fresh, and steaming, with just the right amount of redseed spice sprinkled over the glaze. She took one out and took a bite.

It tasted like a perfect morning.

A pair of neighborhood boys from rock-moving families passed through the alleyway. Kaile flinched, and looked for a place to hide, but they didn’t notice her—or at least they pretended not to.

“Shouldn’t feed the dead,” one of them muttered before they turned the corner. “Shouldn’t offer them a threshold meal. They’ll keep coming back if you do.”

Kaile almost shouted after them. She almost threatened to haunt them both. Instead she crept back to the hayloft with the pastries.

Shade sat in the largest shaft of sunlight with her arms and legs curled up tight against her. Sunlight passed through the shadow, but it made her darker and more solid-seeming, rather than diminishing her. Did you bring lamp oil?

“No,” said Kaile. “I couldn’t get inside. But I did bring breakfast.”

She ate one full pastry and chewed it slowly, trying to savor the best of the early-morning batch. Shade reached over, hesitant, and took the pastry’s shadow for her own meal.

Kaile wrapped up the rest of the food and tucked it into the satchel, along with her empty lantern and the bone-carved flute.

“We should go,” she said. “Someone will be out here soon, to feed the guzzards and clean the stall. Probably Father. We shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here.”

He’ll probably just ignore you, when he comes.

Kaile shook her head. “We should keep out of the way. And I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to watch Father ignore me.” She felt embarrassed then. She felt like she had said too much. “Come on.”

She slung the satchel over one shoulder and climbed down from the loft. Her shadow followed her around the alleyway and into the street—though she followed at a greater distance than she ever had before.

Other people were out and about, conducting the ordinary business of the day. No one looked at Kaile. They pretended not to see her. They walked wide around her. And they didn’t seem to notice Shade at all. Kaile wondered why. The shadow seemed almost solid and embodied in direct sunlight.

You still have ashes on your forehead, Shade pointed out.

Kaile rubbed the back of her hand on her face. It only smeared the ashes around. The smear still marked her as the lead role in a recent funeral.

She started to panic, and rubbed harder at the ash stain. Then she forced herself to think practical thoughts. “Okay,” she said. “First thing we need to do is find water I can wash my face with. Then we’ll see about some lantern oil. Then we can ...”

She stopped to watch a goblin walk down the street. He wore a mask with a crown, and he walked in an imperial and commanding kind of way. It made him look tall, even though he was in no way tall compared with the crowd of people who followed behind him. He also walked with a cane.

“That’s the goblin who gave me the flute,” said Kaile. “That was him. I’m sure that was him.” She set off after the masked goblin. “His gift cut us apart, and I’d like to know why.”

Shade walked alongside, keeping pace.

Watch where you step, the shadow whispered, reproachful. Watch who you step on.

Kaile tried not to step on other people’s shadows as she walked. She really did try. But she kept forgetting to look at the ground. She didn’t want to lose sight of the goblin.

The girl and her separate shadow followed the crowd that followed the goblin. They passed through Broken Wall and came to the edge of the River’s ravine.

The masked goblin led them all down a steep, switch-backing road, down to the docks and the Floating Market—a set of narrow piers jutting out from the shore and over the River.

Kaile came here sometimes with her father to buy fish for the fish pies, and fruit for the fruit pastries, and spices to mix in with the dough or sprinkle over the glaze. Sometimes Father would offer Brunip a few free ales to push a wheelbarrow down to the docks and up again, if they meant to bring home more than they could carry by themselves.

She looked for her father in the market crowd. She didn’t know what she would do if she saw him, or how she would feel. But she didn’t have to find out, because she didn’t notice anyone she knew—or at least no one she knew by name. A few familiar-looking faces passed through the crowd, but nobody here had attended her funeral.

They followed the goblin through the Floating Market. Every barge tied up along the piers doubled as a market stall. The barge captains shouted, chanted, and sang about what they had to sell.

“Sugarcane and sea salt, good for charms and cooking!”

“Oceanfish! Riverfish! Dried and salted dustfish!”

An awning of glass and metal covered the market. Morning sunlight broke apart in the glass, and made strange shadows below.

It’s too crowded here, Shade protested. Everyone is getting mixed and mingled and stomped on. She did a little hop-dance across the docks, stepping in sunlight.

“Oh, come on!” said Kaile. She wanted to be sympathetic. But she also felt much the same way she did whenever the Snotfish thought it was absolutely tragic that he didn’t get to eat off his special plate with the blotch in the glaze that looked like a bird skull. Just shut it and eat your dinner, she always wanted to say to the Snotfish. Just shut it and hurry, she wanted to say to Shade. This place is full of people, and I can’t help where their shadows fall.

“We have a goblin to catch,” was all she said out loud. “Hurry.”

She couldn’t actually see the goblin, but she could still follow the press of people who followed him.

Kaile pushed through the market and down the length of the upstream pier.

Shade whispered unhappily at the thickness of the crowd as Kaile pressed through it.

Upstream mongers sold fine and fragile things, and the air smelled nice around their soap stalls. There was less singing and shouting at this end of the market, less bustle and noise. A few people glanced suspiciously at the determined girl in the simple work dress who had ashes on her forehead and straw in her hair.

The goblin’s wagon floated on a raft at the end of the pier. One side of the wagon had been lowered to make a stage platform. The tallish juggler stood on the platform and tossed several silk scarves in the air, making a tree that burst into bright spring blossoms. People who had followed the old goblin down from Broken Wall now focused their attention on the juggler, and Kaile was able to make her way through. It was difficult to see. She found the goblin only by stumbling into him.