Goblin Secrets

by William Alexander

  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.

  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.

  Act I, Scene VI

  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.

  Rownie ran from that silence. He pushed himself forward, through the dark of the Southside Rail Station.

  The station was a vast, open space. Rownie could tell by the way sound moved through it. His feet smacked the polished stone floor. The sound went out away from him, echoed, and got lost somewhere in the open space. He tried to move quietly, but his feet still smacked against stone.

  There was a tiny bit of light. The ceiling was glass, and moonlight shone dimly through its smudged surface. It made the ceiling visible, high overhead, but it did not illuminate very much beneath. Dark shapes loomed around Rownie, and he tried to avoid them.

  He moved as quickly as he dared, with both arms groping in front of him. He hoped to find obstacles with his hands before he found them with his face. He found one with his shin instead. It was metal. The pain in his leg made lights flash inside his eyes. He shut them. He also shut his mouth. He didn’t cry out. He wouldn’t cry out.

  Rownie felt with his hands to see what he had run into. It was a bench made out of wrought iron, curved and stylish, for important people to sit on while they waited for the railcar to take them to Northside. He crawled underneath it. It was big enough to hide him, and to keep anyone else from bumping into him in the dark.

  He waited. He couldn’t hear anything except his own heartbeat and his own breathing, and he tried very hard to silence both of those things. He was sure the Grubs would be able to hear his pounding heartbeat from all the way across the station floor.

  The floor was cold. It felt cold under his hands. It smelled cold, and dusty.

  Rownie tried not to think about all of the possible things that might haunt the station around him. He tried not to think about diggers, especially drowned diggers, crawling up from the flooded tunnel. He tried not to think about ghouls. He tried not to think about the gearworkers who used to be sane, who used to make sense when they spoke, before the Lord Mayor of Zombay gathered them all together to make grand and glorious projects like rail stations. Now the gearworkers were all as cracked as Mr. Scrud, and nothing they said ever made sense. Rownie tried not to wonder what it was that cracked them all, and he tried not to imagine that it was still here, somewhere in the station. He tried not to imagine that he could hear it breathing. He was fairly certain that he could hear something breathing, something big, somewhere in the dark.

  Many pairs of bare feet smacked the stone. The sound echoed all around him.

  “Rownie-Runt!” Blotches called. It was Blotches’s voice, but the syllables sounded like Graba.

  “Stop your hiding, now,” called Greasy. He spoke like Graba.

  “I’ll be so much less angry if you come out,” called Stubble, his voice rising and falling the way Graba’s voice rose and fell. “I’ve got things to ask of you.”

  “Come out, you Changeling thing!” Blotches shouted, his voice rusty and furious.

  Rownie stayed where he was, as still as he could manage. He stopped wondering about what else might haunt the station. It was haunted by Grubs, and he didn’t think that there could be anything worse. He focused on breathing silently. He got ready to run, if he needed to run.

  Someone passed near Rownie’s bench. Rownie heard him muttering. It sounded like it might be Greasy. Rownie hoped so. Greasy wasn’t very fast. Whoever it was moved off again.

  Rownie heard pigeon wings overhead. He peered out from underneath the bench to see dark, feathered shapes pass beneath the faint glow of the ceiling. They circled. They searched.

  “Vass, are you here?” Stubble asked loudly, still in Graba’s voice. “Make light for me now.”

  Rownie heard Vass chanting, somewhere in the dark, and then it wasn’t dark anymore. Light bloomed and blinded him.

  Large clocks hung from the ceiling by great lengths of chain, like the pocket watches of giants. Each clock was also a lantern, and now every lantern burned. They swayed slowly back and forth as pigeons landed on them and pushed off again. The light that they cast made long and swaying shadows.

  Rownie watched the Grubs from underneath his iron bench. He watched them search for him in the rows of railcars. The mirrored, brass finish of the cars looked tarnished and old, even though they had never been used.

  He waited until he was sure that no one looked in his direction, and then he crawled away from the bench and into the shadow of a stone pillar. He crept carefully down the length of the shadow, farther into the station.

  The whole place looked like Northside, with its polished stone and precise angles. It was strange to be south of the River, but seem to be in Northside. Rownie tried not to let it bother him, because he had worse things to be bothered about, and quirks of architecture were down among the very least of his concerns—but he still found it distracting and disorienting. There was a logic to moving through Southside, and that logic no longer worked inside the rail station. Rownie had to make a gear shift in his head, and in his movements, to make sense of his surroundings and to find somewhere to hide. He had to pretend he was north of the River.

  Stubble called to him, somewhere very close by. Rownie’s insides jumped at the noise. He couldn’t t
ell where it was coming from. He climbed up inside one of the railcars to get quickly out of sight.

  Rows of chairs filled the inside of the car. The chairs looked soft and comfortable. They were made out of polished wood, and had faded red cushions. Small, round tables stood between some of the chairs, with streaks of green patina across their copper surfaces. A few lanterns burned on the walls to either side, lit by Vass’s chant.

  Rownie knew that Vass had a little talent for curses and charms—or at least he knew that she bragged about it—but he had never seen her do anything so grand before. He had also never seen a sibling look at him with Graba’s look, or speak with the rhythms of Graba’s voice, before Vass did so in the Market Square. She can wear us like masks, Rownie thought, and he wondered if it was something Graba might do to him. He started to panic at the thought. The weight of everything he didn’t know about his own home pressed down on him and squeezed like Graba’s talon-toes. He did not feel like a giant. He felt like the furthest thing from a giant. A bug, maybe. A burnbug or a beetle.

  Graba can’t wear me, he decided. She can’t. She won’t. She wouldn’t have to send everyone else to look for me, if she could.

  He moved carefully down the railcar’s center aisle. He felt trapped inside the car, and he knew that he shouldn’t stay. The others were already searching railcars, one by one. They would find him if he stayed. Rownie didn’t know what would happen then. He didn’t want to know.

  He glanced up at the far entrance. Vass stood there, watching him.

  Act I, Scene VII

  ROWNIE TOOK IN A LONG BREATH, and let it out. He stood up. He did not run. She would catch him if he ran. He showed her that he would not run by the way that he stood there, and he waited to see what would happen next.

  Vass continued to watch him. She smiled her cruel smile, and otherwise she did not move.