William Alexander - Goblin Secrets

“Well done!” the goblin-hero said. “You are small, now, though you still look fierce—”

Rownie grinned. He still felt fierce.

“—but I bet you cannot change into a bird.”

The lantern shutters snapped shut. The goblin tossed a paper bird in the air. At that same moment the front row of the crowd, spooked by the sudden darkness, pulled the iron chain and yanked Rownie forward. He tumbled off the edge of the stage.

He felt hands trying to catch him, but he fell through them, hit the ground, and rolled onto his back. He could see the glowing paper bird fly above the dark silhouettes of people standing around him. The bird exploded in sparks, and a cloud of paper feathers drifted down.

“One less giant!” said the goblin-hero from the stage.

Rownie got to his feet. Those around him poked and pinched his arms to make sure he was still there and still real. Then the giant puppet returned, and then roared. It captured their attention. It almost captured Rownie’s attention, but he looked away. He didn’t want to be reminded that he was outside the story now. He wanted to savor how it had felt to be in the midst of it.

A hand emerged from the red cloth that skirted the bottom of the platform. It waved him closer.

Rownie looked around. No one else had noticed, not even the old man with his neck craned sideways.

The hand waved again. Rownie felt like he was about to jump over the side of the Fiddleway.

He ducked underneath the stage.

IT WAS DARK BENEATH THE STAGE platform. Rownie had to hunch forward like the old man with the bent spine. He turned his head to look around. It didn’t help.

A lantern shutter clicked open, but only slightly. Rownie saw gold-flecked eyes staring at him from behind a pair of eyeglasses. “Well done,” the goblin, the one to whom he had given two copper coins, whispered. “Yes, it was well done. Do you need something to drink? I find lemon tea soothing after speaking to a crowd.”

“Okay,” said Rownie. His neck started to hurt. He sat on the ground, so he wouldn’t have to hold his head at odd angles anymore. The goblin handed him a wooden mug, lacquer-smooth and filled with hot tea. He smelled it and took a sip. He tasted lemon and honey.

“Tell me your name, yes?” the goblin said.

Rownie glanced at her over the edge of the steaming mug. She was smiling, but he couldn’t tell what kind of smile it was. This was strange to him. He always knew exactly how the rest of Graba’s household felt, because none of them knew how to hide it. Graba herself never bothered to conceal her moods and wishes—her face was as easily readable as words spelled out in burning oil in the middle of the street. Rownie was used to that. The goblin, however, wrote her smile in a language that Rownie didn’t know and couldn’t read.

“Rownie,” he said.

“Hello, Rownie,” she said. “I thought that this might be your name. Mine is Semele. Yes, it is. And I am wondering whether you have heard news of your brother.”

Rownie stared at her. He knew what she had asked him, but he didn’t understand why she had asked. “My brother Rowan?”

“Yes, Rowan,” said Semele. “A decent young actor, that one, and he has been missing for some time. Have you heard from him?”

“No,” Rownie said, suspicious. If he had heard from his brother, he probably wouldn’t tell anyone about it—not Graba, and certainly not goblins.

“Well,” the goblin said, “please tell him hello if you see him. In the meanwhile, I wonder if you might be interested in remaining with us. We have many performances to make—we play at the Broken Wall tomorrow and down by the docks on the day after that—and we very certainly could use another voice, another pair of hands. Is this something you would like?”

Rownie blinked. Yes, he would like to stand onstage again. Yes, definitely yes. “It might,” he said aloud, still suspicious. Living in Graba’s household had taught him to be suspicious whenever anyone offered him exactly what he wanted. “Can I watch the rest of the play first?”

“Of course,” said Semele.

Rownie finished his tea and set the mug on the ground. Semele pointed to the back of the wagon. Rownie half walked and half crawled underneath the stage. He emerged between the cloth’s edge and a wagon wheel.

He could hear a fiddle and a flute from the wagon’s roof, and then singing, beautiful singing. He paused to listen, and he wondered what to do.

He did not actually get to decide. Metal shrieked against metal. Wood and brass talons closed around him from behind.

“Where is my gear oil, runt?” Graba hissed in Rownie’s ear.

She lifted him up with a bird’s leg as though he weighed less than dust or a name or a crumpled scrap of paper. Then she wrapped her arm around his waist and set off with long strides.

Rownie squirmed. Graba held him close and sniffed.

“You smell wrong,” Graba said. “You smell like thieving and tin. You smell unsettled. Did Semele brew you Change potions?”

“No, Graba,” he tried to say, but he couldn’t actually say it. She held him tight, and his breath came out in short gasps.

Graba strode across the green and onto the roadway, moving fast. Rownie thought furiously about different ways he might escape or explain himself. He thought and thought and came up with nothing and more nothing.

They passed beneath the statue of the Lord Mayor. Graba spat at his feet. They crossed the Fiddleway and passed beneath the Clock Tower. Graba spat at the foot of the tower.

Graba strode into Southside. They passed through an open lot of hard-packed dirt and broken plaster walls. It was a place where old buildings had fallen over, and new ones had not yet come and might never come. Night birds pecked in the dirt. Two peacocks slept on the top of a brick chimney that stood alone, without walls.

“This was home, a long while ago,” Graba said as they went through. “This was mine. Every place I put down my shack is mine, though none of them ever own me.”

Rownie said nothing. Breathing was all he could do.

Graba stopped, finally, outside her own shack. Vass and Stubble peeked out through the window that served as their only door. Rownie expected his older siblings to look smug. He expected them to gloat. Someone was in trouble, and it wasn’t either one of them.

They didn’t look smug. They didn’t gloat. They looked afraid.

Until this moment Rownie had been startled, surprised, and scared of what might happen next. Now he felt fear, bone-deep inside him. Now he knew that Graba was upset over worse than the loss of two pennies.

Graba would never fit through the small window-door. She climbed up the sides of the alleyway instead, one long leg stretched out to either wall. She hoisted them both onto the roof, and then lifted half of the shingled rooftop like a box’s lid. She climbed inside and tossed Rownie into the far corner of her loft. The rooftop fell shut above them. Birds shrieked and flapped their wings. Graba settled onto her stool. She watched Rownie with pale eyes. “Did you eat what she gave you?” she whispered. “Did you drink what she offered?”

Rownie stared back at her and said nothing. He needed to know what kind of trouble he was in, and he didn’t know.

“I can burn you,” Graba said. It was almost kind, the way she said it. “I can burn goblin gifts out of you, now. I should do that, before you start to Change into one of them, just as she did. I should burn away whatever she gave you.” She lit the iron stove, took a mortar and pestle down from a high shelf, and began to pound dried leaves into a fine powder. She chanted softly to herself. She never took her eyes away from Rownie, and Rownie never took his eyes away from her. The only light in the room came from the door of the stove.