William Alexander - Goblin Secrets

Sometimes they made up stories about where the barges had come from, and where they might be going. Sometimes they imagined how fights against pirate fleets would unfold all around them, upstream and downstream, up and down the pylons of the Fiddleway Bridge, up and down the piers and the switchbacking streets behind them. Sometimes Rowan had enough to buy an extra fish pastry, and they would split the third one. He always gave his younger brother the larger piece.

Three pigeons watched fox-masked Rownie from a rooftop, and then turned away and pecked for seeds in the thatch. Rownie wondered if they were Graba’s pigeons. He wondered if Graba had sent any Grubs on riverside errands today, to bring back fish heads or strange packages, or maybe to keep watch for him—or to keep watch for Rowan.

Rownie looked over his shoulder to see if Grubs were following. He saw others following him instead.

A small crowd of curious people had been pulled into his wake, diverted from wherever else they had intended to go and whatever they had intended to do. Some were old and some young. Some wore more expensive clothes and others less. They followed from a safe distance, watching him, wanting to see where he would go and what he might do.

It was working . Rownie carried an audience with him.

Not everyone noticed as he went by with poise and purpose in his mask. Some went about their business and were not at all distracted by a fox face. Their eyes missed him somehow. Their attention slipped around him. He was something strange, something that should not really be there, so passersby who were not his audience passed him by and assumed that he was not there if he was not supposed to be.

Rownie walked in daylight with a fox face over his own, and some people couldn’t see him at all. He was hiding and proclaiming himself, both at once. He didn’t know how this could possibly work, and he didn’t want to think about it too much in case it stopped working, so he just kept moving. He let the fox mask show him how to move.

The audience was larger now. He could tell by the noise they made, all packed together into the narrow, winding staircase. Rownie glanced behind him to see just how many there were.

He saw Grubs. He saw Stubble and Blotches and Greasy, all a part of the crowd that followed him. Stubble smirked.

The Grubs broke the charm. Before that moment, Rownie had been Rownie, and also a fox, and something that was neither one, and something that was both together. Now he was only one thing. The mask made it difficult to see, and he stumbled on a crooked stair. He tried to hurry without falling down the stairs entirely and rolling all the way to the docks, bloody and bruised.

The audience behind him thinned, no longer interested in whatever the masked performer might do next, or where he might be headed. The charm was broken. The Grubs had broken it with a look and a smirk, without even trying.

By the time Rownie reached the Floating Market, only Grubs followed him.

A METAL LATTICE COVERED the whole of the docks. Each dome and arch of latticework held small openings for glass windows. The windows kept the rain out and let the sunlight through—unless the glass had fallen out, in which case it let through both sunlight and rain. The whole place smelled of fish, riverweed, and tar. Bustling noise and blunt, heavy smells rose up from the Floating Market and into the streets and alleyways of the ravine wall. Rownie could hear it, and smell it, before he finally turned one last switchbacking corner and saw it in front of him. Then he broke into a run. Grubs followed.

Narrow piers lashed to floating barrels jutted out from the shore and into the River. Small barges and rafts had been tied along each pier, packed close together, and each one was also a market stall. The Floating Market was a bigger, louder, and messier place than Market Square in Northside. Here mongers shouted, chanted, and sang about what they had to sell.

“Hammocks, comfortable hammocks woven from the finest braided squidskin!”

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

Rownie pushed into the crowds surrounding the downstream piers. He ran underneath the winch to the Baker’s Cage, which was dunking some poor baker in the River for selling bread loaves that were too small or too large or too stale. Rownie forced his feet to learn how to move across the uneven surface that pitched and rolled with the River. He ducked and dodged between people. No one touched him or blocked his way, even when they failed to notice him otherwise. He hoped to lose the Grubs in the bustle and the noise before circling back and rejoining the goblins.

The fox mask felt heavy on his face, a brightly painted thing that shouted “Here I am! Here! Right here!”—but he couldn’t remove it without showing off his own unChanged face beneath.

Fruit and fishmongers announced their wares to either side of him as he ran. The hard accents of upstream folk mixed and mingled with softer downstream syllables.

“Oceanfish! Riverfish! Dried and salted dustfish!”

“Rare pears and quinces! Figs and citrons from the shore!”

A meager fruit stall and a stack of barrels stood at the very end of the downstream pier, beneath an open stretch of iron lattice that had long ago lost its glass. The lone fruitmonger displayed baskets of sad-looking apples on a countertop, and didn’t bother to announce them with a shout or a chant. He glanced at Rownie and then away again, uninterested.

Rownie turned around. The Grubs still followed him, unhurried. They had no reason to hurry. He had no other direction to run. He could face the Grubs or throw himself into the River—and the currents were very strong. No one ever crossed the whole River by swimming.

Stubble-Grub sneered as they drew closer. It was an ordinary sneer, just the sort of expression he would usually make. It was not Graba’s look. Rownie didn’t see Graba in his face, peering out through his eyes, wearing him like a mask.

Rownie did wear a mask. He stood like a fox, wily and proud. “You will not catch me,” he said, and as he said it he knew that it was true.

He jumped onto a barrel, and from the barrel to the fishmonger’s barge, where he kicked the rope and set the barge to drifting. Then he ran across the deck and jumped into the open air between the piers. His coat billowed behind him like a sail. He caught the railing of a barge across the way, and hoisted himself aboard.

The River took hold of the fruitmonger’s barge, and it drifted downstream. The monger cursed and paddled with a single oar, both furiously, but his curses were clumsy and unlikely to stick.

All three Grubs rushed to the open place where the barge used to be, and glared at the watery distance between them and Rownie.

Rownie took a bow. Then he slipped off the mask and stuffed it in his shirt. He walked calmly around to the front of the barge he had leaped to. The skipper here seemed to be fully preoccupied with selling fish-meat pastries that steamed and smelled delicious, and paid no notice when Rownie climbed down the barge moorings, just as though he had every right to be climbing down barge moorings. He rejoined the crowd and went looking for the goblin stage.

Rownie slipped between people. He moved quickly, but he did not run. He didn’t want to look hurried. He didn’t want to look like much of anything.

This was a fancier part of the Floating Market, a pier with the glass awning still intact above it. Those who gathered here sold more fragile things, like bolts of fabric and delicate gearwork—things that needed to be kept out of the weather. One barge displayed strange animals in gold cages. Soap makers invited passersby to smell their wares. A tall man with pale, deep-set eyes sold trinkets carved out of bone. Another barge-stall showed off small and cunning devices that did useless things beautifully.