by Bryan Huff
Written and Illustrated by
Rory Madge and Bryan Huff
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author makes no claims to, but instead acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the word marks mentioned in this work of fiction.
Copyright © 2020 by Rory Madge and Bryan Huff
THE PRINCE AND THE GOBLIN by Rory Madge and Bryan Huff
All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Month9Books, LLC.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-951710-37-8
ePub ISBN: 978-1-951710-45-3
Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-951710-46-0
Published by Month9Books, Raleigh, NC 27609
Cover and interior art by Rory Madge and Bryan Huff
For my mom, Penny.
And for my dad, Larry, and stepmom, Jill.
Thanks for all your support and encouragement over the years.
- RM
For my wife, and best friend, Bridget.
I am forever grateful for your love and support.
- BH
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
About the Authors
Connect With Us
Prologue
A Road Less Traveled
“goblins!” shouted the guards along the village walls. “goblins!”
Under cover of darkness and heavy rain, the creatures had launched a surprise attack.
The warning cry echoed across town, as two cloaked figures—one short, one tall—hurried through the stormy streets. A goblin raid was least of their worries, though. They were fugitives on the run.
The clatter of hoofbeats on cobblestones chased them on. And suddenly, seven horsemen appeared behind them in the darkness, carrying bright torches and kicking up a spray.
The lead horse was a massive gray charger, ridden by a tall figure cloaked in black. The rest of the horses were white, ridden by soldiers in glinting golden armor and crimson cloaks.
The fugitives ran as fast as they could but had nowhere to go. Half-timber row houses lined both sides of the street, hemming them in. The horsemen bore down upon them.
Then they met the goblins! A dozen of the wild green creatures rushed up the street in the opposite direction, carrying loot sacks and swinging crooked weapons over their crooked heads.
The short fugitive pulled his companion into a sunken doorway at the street side, and the goblins collided with the horsemen right in front of them. crash! Horses reared. Swords rattled. Goblins howled and ran. And the fugitives slipped away.
Moments later, a loose board in one of the village’s timber walls was pried back with an axe. The fugitives slipped out through the crack.
“Never thought there’d come a day when I was glad to see goblins,” said the short fugitive, stowing his axe. His voice was old and gruff, but not without a certain pep. “Why’d you have to go showing off for that tavern girl?”
“Relax,” replied the tall fugitive. His voice betrayed his youth; he could not have been more than fourteen. “We’ve escaped.”
“Not yet, we haven’t!” said the little man, hurrying on.
They scrambled through the storm-swept fields outside of town. But before long, the heavy hoofbeats chased them again. The diversion hadn’t lasted, and the horsemen were back on their trail.
With the storm growing worse all the time, the hoofbeats were soon the only thing in the world the fugitives could still make out.
“We’re lost!” cried the boy, unable to locate even his companion.
“No!” cried the little man. “There’s a road!”
The boy found the little man standing at the beginning of the so-called road. Overgrown and churned to mud by the storm, it was barely a path. It quickly disappeared into a thicket of low trees that grew in a gully between two hills.
“This is our escape,” cheered the little man. “A shortcut. A road less traveled!”
“More like, not traveled at all,” said the boy.
“Better still, if it means their horses can’t take it.”
He had a point. Every second, the hoofbeats grew louder and louder.
“After you then,” said the boy.
Within minutes, the horsemen arrived. Their torches lit up the scene. It turned out the fugitives’ little road actually branched off of a much larger one, which the horsemen had come by.
“Where’d they go, Captain?” asked one of the horsemen.
The rider in black—the Captain—said nothing, but dismounted and stalked about with torch in hand. Its light fell first on the beginning of the little road, complete with fresh footprints in the mud. Then it caught on something else, something the fugitives had missed—an old signpost lost in the thicket of trees.
The Captain raised the torch to reveal three signs. Two pointed along the main road, marking The Way Round and The Village of Brew. The third pointed down the little path, marking …
“The Gobble Downs!” gasped another horseman. “Few ever make it out of those hills alive!”
“They’re braver than I thought,” remarked a third.
“’Zey are fools,” said the Captain. She threw back her hood and turned to her companions.
Her face was stern and proud; her skin desert brown under jet-black hair tied back in a bun. Her dark, piercing eyes gleamed in the torchlight.
“But ’zey have escaped. Even if we could follow on horseback, with all ’ze branching paths in ’zose hills, ’zey would already be lost to us. With any luck, ’zey will continue to be as good at getting out of trouble, as ’zey are at getting into it. And we shall meet ’zem on ’ze other side.”
The next instant, she was swinging back into her saddle and setting her charger to gallop up the main road north, taking The Way Round. Her men followed immediately. And, one by one, they vanished into the storm.
Chapter One
Hob
In the long ago, far away Kingdom of Yore, under the hills known as the Gobble Downs, there lived a horde of goblins. No doubt you’ve heard of goblins before. They often appear in stories of long ago and far away, and when they do, they are always the same. They are stinky, green thugs and sneaks, who serve evil lords, covet shiny objects, and have absolutely no manners at all.
Well, by and large, the goblins of Yore were no better. In fact, they might’ve even been worse! And the Kingdom was infested with them. They’d been warring with the humans of Yore for longer than anyone could remember, with no end in sight.
Yet, even in times long ago and places far away, things were rarely as simple as they seemed, and this is a story about a goblin who was different.
His name was Hob, short for Hobblestraug, and he was a young g
oblin who lived with that horde beneath the Gobble Downs. He was small in size, standing only about three feet tall, even though some goblins were as big as bears. He had large, curious eyes, pointy, bat-like ears, and a little, upturned nose. And he always wore a floppy leather cap on his head and a rough hide tunic on his body.
One night, Hob was looking for something to read. He loved human books, but had only one tiny shelf of them. It was carved into the rock wall over the dug-out bunk at the back of his underground nook.
In the Gobble Downs, you had to either fight for a nook to live in, or find one nobody else wanted. And Hob’s was the one nobody else wanted. It was a dark, dank hole with barely enough room to sleep or stand.
A torch on the wall illuminated a collection of old boots and dusty bottles cluttering the tight space—Hob’s failed attempts at making the nook feel homier.
There was also a badly faded old tapestry that hung in front of the bookshelf, depicting what might once have been a goat. Hob hung it there to hide his books. You see, while reading wasn’t exactly forbidden in the Gobble Downs, it certainly wasn’t the goblin way, which made books hard to come by. And Hob had come by his books in a manner that he knew could get him into trouble. So he did his best to keep them a secret.
Nevertheless, he stood on his bunk, with the tapestry pulled back, considering his secret library. He’d read every book he owned many times, but that only seemed to make choosing one harder. And he had to get moving. Even without his books to worry about, there was no telling what kind of terrifying ordeal he might get dragged into, if he got caught loafing around in the Gobble Downs.
Hob pulled out a book called Sir Swashbuckle’s Last Stand—before changing his mind and swapping it for The Big Book of Derring-Do. Glancing at the sword embossed on the cover, he smiled. He loved human adventure stories most of all—at least when the humans weren’t fighting evil goblins—and this was his go-to favorite.
He slipped the book into his shoulder satchel, and swung the faded goat tapestry back into place. Then he hopped down from the bunk, lifted the torch from the wall, and ducked out through the sheepskin curtain that covered his nook’s round entrance.
Emerging in the black, oozy tunnel outside, Hob snuck his way up it as quickly and quietly as he could, making for the surface and his secret reading spot.
A tangled web of similar tunnels sprawled between the nooks and caverns of the Gobble Downs. But, due to a lifetime of curiosity and frequent attempts to go unnoticed, Hob knew them better than anyone. He stuck to only the most rarely used tunnels, where the air was musty and cold, but the going was easy.
At one point, he was forced to stop where the little side-tunnel he’d been following intersected a wide torch-lit passage. Smells of smoke and goblin musk hung in the air there, and a terrible racket echoed up the corridor. All were coming from the Great Cave, the horde’s central gathering place. It wasn’t far off, and the area was often busy with comings and goings.
Hob made a break for it. He dashed across the wide passage to where his little tunnel picked up on the other side. Then, thinking the danger mostly behind him, he hurtled up the tunnel and around the next bend.
slam! A giant wooden shield seemed to fill the whole passage, and Hob crashed right into it. He fell hard on his back, causing his torch to fly out of his hand and his head to spin like a wobbly top.
“Wanna fight?” barked an angry voice. “I’ll smash yer face!” Then it paused. “Oh, it’s you.”
Hob’s head stopped spinning at once. And it wasn’t the threat of having his face smashed in that did it. It was the sound of that “you.” Blinking hard to clear his vision, Hob looked up from the tunnel floor.
Towering over him, holding the wooden shield, was Brute: a huge, burly goblin, with arms like a gorilla, a face like a bulldog, and the full-body odor of an unwashed sock.
Brute was the favorite son of the goblin chieftain, and the biggest, meanest young goblin in the whole horde. It was just Hob’s luck that Brute had always had it out for him. Brute especially loved to rough Hob up and stuff him into cracks in the rocks, which were so tight that they often took hours to wiggle back out of.
Hob really didn’t want to get “stuffed” just then. He couldn’t afford any trouble while carrying one of his books with him. So, clutching his satchel, he scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and backed up against the wall of the tunnel.
“Well, looky here, boys,” said Brute. “If it ain’t wittle Hobblestwaug.”
Peeking out from behind Brute was a rabble of goblins big and small, all armed to the teeth. Seeing their dented helmets and crooked blades, Hob understood why they were there. Although it went mostly unused, that particular tunnel doubled as a back passage to the horde’s armory—the cave where the goblins kept their weapons and bits of armor when they weren’t using them, or just playing with them.
“Hi, guys,” said Hob, trying to sound casual, but really sounding like he was about to throw up.
“Hi, Hob!” came an earnest voice from the back of the pack.
There, waving at him, was Hob’s brother, Grunt, a large, husky goblin, with a friendly face that bore a slight resemblance to Hob’s own.
Now, technically, all young goblins in the horde shared the same mother, the Queen Goblin, which made them all brothers of a sort. But it sure didn’t feel that way.
Hob and Grunt really did see each other as brothers, though. They’d been born in the same litter, reared in the same nursery, and that meant something to them. If Hob had a family, Grunt was it.
Grunt’s enthusiastic greeting was not matched by the rest of the pack. They glared at him until he shrank back, looking sheepish.
Brute took no notice. “Watch where yer goin’, Hobby!” he growled, advancing on Hob and shaking a fist. “Unless ya want a beatin’!”
“Sorry, Brute!” said Hob, trying to save himself. “I didn’t mean to run into you. I was just in a hurry, and there was this corner here, and your shield was kinda large and hard to miss.”
“Yer head’s kinda large and hard to miss!” said Brute, giving Hob’s head a shove, so the back of it banged against the wall.
With the exception of Grunt, the goblins all laughed.
“Yeah, watch where yer goin’, big head!” chirped a tiny, weasel-like goblin named Snivel, suddenly emerging at Brute’s side. He was Brute’s chief lackey and hanger-on, and the only goblin who may have hated Hob as much as Brute did.
“Where ya hurryin’ to, anyway?” asked Brute, peering around the tunnel with a scrunched-up face that suggested he was trying to think.
“Yeah, where?” echoed Snivel.
Hob was silent, trying to come up with an answer. The truth certainly wouldn’t do.
Brute fixed him with a suspicious look. “You was sneakin’ off again, wasn’t ya?”
“Me? No, of course not …” Hob lied.
“Then whadda ya doin’ here, Hobby?” Brute pressed.
“Yeah, what?” echoed Snivel.
Finally, it came to Hob—the right answer. “The same as you!” he said.
This was always the right answer with goblins. Though, it could backfire, if, like Hob, you didn’t know what you were signing up for.
“Yer comin’ on the ambush?” said Brute. “But ya wasn’t even picked this time.”
“Yeah, Hobby never goes on ambushes unless ya make him!” said Snivel, mashing his fist into his palm.
It had backfired. Now, Hob needed an explanation for his explanation.
“Grunt invited me!” he said.
Everyone glared at Grunt again.
“I did?” Grunt asked.
“Uh-huh. Just before,” said Hob.
“Oh … right,” said Grunt, clearly not remembering. “And ya said, ‘yes?’ Even I was startin’ to think ya didn’t like ambushes.”
“Hah! Good old Grunt,” Hob chortled. “I love ambushes. The theft! The unsuspecting victims! Let’s go ruin someone�
�s day!”
From the looks he got, Hob thought he might have been laying it on a bit thick, so he added, “Grunt told me to meet him in the armory, but I ran a bit late.”
“Well, keep up!” Brute snapped. “You’ve slowed us down enough already. The scouts spotted two humans up there, and I’m not lettin’ either of ’em get away!” He turned to the rest of the goblins. “Let him through. He’s Grunt’s problem, not mine.”
Not daring to go against Brute’s orders, the others made way for Hob to shuffle to the back of the pack. As Hob fell in beside Grunt, Grunt looked over at him beaming. Then the rabble resumed its march down the tunnel.
Chapter Two
Ambushes and Interlopers
Hob didn’t like ambushes. But he’d never had the heart to tell Grunt the truth about that. The goblins of Yore got almost everything they had from either raiding human villages, or, ambushing any humans unfortunate enough to wander into goblin lands. And although Hob felt this was no way to live, it was the goblin way. So he just had to go along with it.
He was certainly going along this time. The pack marched on and on toward the site of the impending ambush, through tunnel after twisty tunnel, around gardens of moss and mushrooms, up dizzying ladders, and over rickety rope bridges that crossed deep chasms and underground streams.
The tunnels grew fewer and farther between as they reached the edge of the horde’s domain, but they never stopped entirely. Hob knew of a few that carried on right out of the Gobble Downs. A vast network of these nearly endless tunnels connected all the goblin hordes in the great valley of Yore, so the goblins could travel between them without ever venturing above ground. This was important because all goblins shared a natural aversion to sunlight. It made them weak and dizzy, forcing them underground during the day. And, at one time, it had even been used by human magicians to keep them underground at night.