William Alexander - Goblin Secrets

Graba set the mortar down. She took a handful of the powder in one hand and a pigeon from the rafters in the other. The pigeon held on to one of Graba’s fingers with delicate bird’s feet. She sang to it, a low song, and then sprinkled the powder over it. The bird caught fire in her hand. It shrieked. Its feathers smelled sharp and bitter as they burned.

Graba held the fire between herself and Rownie. She watched Rownie through it. She chanted, and the song in her voice made her words stronger, stickier, and more a part of the world of solid things. “By voice and by fire. By blood and by fire. My home will not know you. My home knows no Changelings. Fire will send you, and Rowan replace you. Too old for the Changing was mask-wearing Rowan.”

She leaned in closer, chanting. “If you came from the grave hearth, return to the grave hearth. If you came from the River, may floodwaters take you. If you came from hill demons, are of the hill demons, go back to the doorways set into their hills. I call banishment on you from every direction!”

“Graba?” Rownie said, and tried to think of something more to say, something that would make her merely annoyed with him.

Graba’s talon caught him and held him up, squirming by the scruff of his coat. She brought him closer to the flames in her hand. She kept her eyes fixed on Rownie’s face as she chanted. Her chanting voice took on a snarl.

“Semele will not Change you. Her charms will run howling, her words lose their making, her songs lose their binding. What she hides will be found, what she shows will be hidden. She will not take from me. Her works will be scalded.” Fire flared up from her palm. Rownie felt it singe away the fine hairs on his face.

He stopped struggling, closed his eyes, and reached for the crank in Graba’s shin. He popped it out of place and sent it spinning the wrong way around. Springs lost their tension inside Graba’s leg, and she dropped Rownie at the windowsill.

The window was open. Rownie jumped. He didn’t have time to look first. His foot caught on the sill, and it twisted him around. He fell backward, and then down.

Graba threw the burning bird down after him. The greasy fireball stood bright against the sky. Rownie watched it while he fell.

ROWNIE LANDED IN A SLOPING PILE of dust, and slid down. A dustfish flopped into his hair, flopped out again, and wriggled away to go about its dusty business. Fire, bad-smelling and bird-shaped, smacked against the pile beside him. It smoldered and sizzled there.

Rownie lay still, gasping. He thought very hard about getting up, getting somewhere safely away from the burning bird and away from Graba’s rage. He thought about it, but he did not actually move. The landing had knocked the breath out of him, and he was not yet sure how to get it back.

He looked up, expecting to see another burning bird, or a live and larger bird come to peck his eyes out of his face—or else Graba’s other talon, still wound-up and able to reach through the window and grasp at him. He saw none of these things, so he lay still and tried to figure out if he had broken anything. His arms and legs and head were all sore from the landing, but nothing was bleeding, and none of his bones seemed to have snapped. Rownie experimented with moving his legs and found out that he still could. He slowly got to his feet.

Stubble climbed through the first-floor window. He stared at Rownie. He had a broken broomstick in his hand. He looked shocked, and still afraid, but he held the stick just like he always did when he played the King of All Pirates. Blotches and Greasy climbed through the window behind him.

Rownie might have been the smallest and the youngest in all of Graba’s household, but he was not the most recent one to join them. He remembered when Greasy first stood before Graba, up in the loft. She had marked his face with ash and spit. She had marked him as belonging to her. Rownie didn’t know where Greasy had come from. Maybe he was just another dustchild of Southside, with nowhere else to be and a liking for the thuggish swagger that came with joining Graba’s household and running Graba’s errands. Maybe Graba had made him out of birds—probably pigeons, in his case. Pigeons were greasy.

The burning pigeon blackened into a greasy smear at Rownie’s feet.

Stubble advanced, and then hefted his broomstick, but Rownie was no longer willing to be smacked with rusty swords on the backs of his knees, or anywhere else. He had changed roles. Stubble was very much taller, but Rownie was a giant. He stood like a giant. He walked directly up to Stubble and took the stick away from him, just as a giant would.

“Thanks,” he said, as though the older boy had been offering it to him rather than threatening him with it.

Stubble looked lost. He looked like he no longer knew what kind of story he was in. But then his expression changed. It took on some of Graba, with one eye squinty and the other eye wide. He watched Rownie with Graba’s look, with a piece of Graba inside his head, and the look she gave was angry.

Greasy and Blotches each took on a little of Graba’s expression.

Others climbed out through the window, Lanks and Bilk and Filtch and Jabber and Mot. They were all of them Grubs, and all of them looked at Rownie with Graba’s stare and squint.

Rownie was no longer a giant. He turned away and ran as fast as he could force his legs to run.

He heard many footsteps smack against the dirt and dusty cobblestones behind him. He dropped the broken broomstick. He couldn’t possibly fend off a whole gaggle of Grubs with a stick, and it got in the way of his running.

Rownie dodged from one cramped and narrow lane into another. He took sudden corners and curving streets. He followed the wild and roundabout logic of Southside, and he navigated by memory almost as much as by moonlight. It would have been easier to see on the wider roads, with their rare lantern lights burning above important intersections, but Rownie was more afraid of being seen than he was of tripping over something he couldn’t see. He needed to disappear. He kept to the small and unlit roads.

Guzzards squawked at him from rubbish piles in the dark. They were ornery things, large and flightless trash-picking birds, and Rownie tried to keep his distance from their squawking.

He couldn’t disappear. The Grubs were too close behind him. They ran in silence. Rownie had never known them to keep quiet, not ever, not even while sleeping.

He stumbled his way through a thick drift of dust, coughed when it peppered the back of his throat, and kept running. It felt as though he had always been running. His legs and his lungs ached. He didn’t remember what it was like to be still.

Footsteps sounded close behind him. He couldn’t outrun them. He needed to hide.

Rownie dodged left, onto a wide open street, and ran for the rusted gate of the Southside Rail Station.

At that moment he was far more afraid of Grubs than of diggers or ghouls or whatever else might be waiting for him in the station—as long as the diggers and ghouls did not look at him with Graba’s look and all of Graba’s anger.

Maybe the others would be afraid of ghouls. Maybe they wouldn’t follow him inside.

He reached the gate and squeezed through the bars. He held the end of his coat with one hand, to keep it from catching on the gate—and to keep Grubs from catching it as it trailed behind him.

For the first time since he started running, Rownie paused.

The others were not small enough to follow him through the bars. They reached the gate, and then began to climb. They did not taunt him. They did not insult him. They did not say anything at all.