Goblin Secrets

by William Alexander

  An elegant lady puppet took the stage. Semele’s voice sang a story behind it.

  Rownie tried to watch the puppet show and Jansin at the same time. It wasn’t easy, and he was distracted by other puppet shows in his head and memory. Rowan used to make shadow puppets against the walls of Graba’s shack—when he still lived in Graba’s shack. He could make shadows of sailing ships and animals, horses and goats and scampering molekeys. He could make silhouettes of people in tall hats or long gowns. Even the loudest and the rudest Grubs would watch and listen. Rownie always held the candle—a dangerous thing to hold over the straw-covered floor, but he was careful. His favorite shadow puppet was the bird, because that was the only one he could manage to make himself, with thumbs hooked together and fingers making feathers. Rowan had promised to teach Rownie how to twist his hands into other puppet shapes, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

  The audience of children laughed at something on the little stage. Rownie shook his head, trying to shake out the shadows, and paid better attention.

  Semele’s voice sang a story about the lady puppet, who lived alone with a witchworked mirror. The mirror on the stage wasn’t actually a mirror. It was just an empty picture frame with another puppet behind it. The Lady looked inside, and the matching puppet behind the frame mirrored her movements perfectly for as long as the Lady was watching—and then waved at the audience whenever the Lady looked away.

  The mirror had been witchworked to show the Lady a young and childish reflection early in the day and an ancient reflection in the evening. The Lady learned how to reach into the mirror in the mornings and yank her own reflection through the frame and onto the floor. She did this several times, morning after morning, until many child puppets bustled around the stage with her.

  Rownie wondered how Semele could possibly move them all at once. She was the only one in the wagon, so she had to be the only puppeteer, but each of the several puppets moved as though directed by a living hand. It was easy to believe that they were alive themselves, even though Rownie could see that each was a thing made of cloth and wood, carved and painted.

  In the story, the Lady kept all of these mirror children as slaves and servants.

  “She had only herself

  For her own company—

  But she kept many selves of herself.

  It was they did the sweeping

  And all the housekeeping

  And dusted the books on their shelf.

  She harvested selves

  In the hours of each morning

  When reflections were not very old.

  She commanded them all,

  Her own selves while yet small,

  And herselves did just what they were told:

  Until the cruel Lady made coal.”

  All the little puppets bustled offstage again. The Lady stood alone and put both wooden hands beneath her wooden chin. She looked harsh—mostly because of the way her sharp eyebrows were painted on. Then she shivered, her small arms wrapped around her puppet frame. The windows of her chamber grew dark and gray. Rain pattered against the back of the small stage. One of the young reflections came in with a broom, and the lady puppet loomed over her.

  The next part of the show was unsettling to see. The Lady reached into the chest of her smaller self and removed something red. The little puppet fell over. There was no stage blood, or any other gruesome special effect, but Rownie still felt uncomfortable. He shifted his weight between one foot and the other. Some of the more squeamish local children squeaked.

  The Lady put the heart into her fireplace, where it gave off a warm glow. She rubbed her hands together, enjoying the warmth. Then she placed a single metal gear inside the girl’s chest. The little puppet stood up again—stiff and straight—and began sweeping the edge of the stage.

  This was monstrous. Everyone knew what coal was and where it came from and what it was for. Everyone knew that automatons couldn’t move without a lump of coal in their metal innards—or, in Horace’s case, several tiny lumps of fish-heart coal. That was bad enough. To heat your house on a rainy day with coal, when any piece of wood would do just as well, was a monstrous thing.

  Rownie noticed that Jansin didn’t squeak or flinch or turn away. Instead he drew himself up to stand more stiffly, and clenched his fist a few times.

  “Now, one slave girl witnessed

  The Lady take hearts,

  And that girl wisely feared for her own.

  She crept up to the mirror,

  The tall, witchworked mirror,

  And then was no longer alone.”

  The little puppet reached through the picture frame and pulled out a twin.

  “The day was still young,

  The reflections as well,

  And each one of them reached for another.

  Their hands passed through glass,

  And they clasped other hands

  Till the girls had a gang of each other.”

  The puppets made more and more of themselves. Then the Lady returned with several slave-selves behind her.

  They all fought. Puppets flew everywhere, tossed back and forth. When the fight was over, only three of them still stood—two rebel girls and the Lady. One of the girls pinned the Lady’s arms behind her. The other girl reached into the lady’s puppet chest and took out her large heart. They tossed the heart into the fireplace, where it burned briefly, and then went out. All the other little stage lights dimmed with it.

  Rownie noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that Essa and Thomas were quietly returning the mule to its wagon hitch. The dead tree had been hauled aside. The road was clear.

  Semele’s song came to an end.

  “Treat well your young selves

  Or they’ll rise up inside you,

  And your heart will be overrun.

  So good night to you all,

  For the curtain must fall

  On this tale, which is over and done.”

  There was silence. Then the little crowd began to cheer. “Blood and guts! Blood and guts!” said the smallest one, jumping up and down and clapping both hands together.

  Jansin did not cheer or clap.

  “My family takes hearts,” he said. He did not shout, but his voice carried. It silenced the applause around him. “We take hearts from traitors and criminals and people who deserve it. We make them into coal. We should rip out your goblin hearts, but they probably wouldn’t even burn.”

  Jansin took one step forward, and then Rownie kicked him hard in the back of the knee. Nobody deserves to be made into coal, he thought, but didn’t bother saying so aloud.

  The older boy went down. Rownie ran. He pushed other children out of his way and took Essa’s hand as he reached the driving bench. She pulled him up. The puppet stage closed with a snap. Thomas cracked the reins, hard, and the mule launched itself into a gallop.

  Their former audience shouted and threw stones, but the wild and angry noise soon faded behind them. After that Rownie heard nothing but the rattle of the wagon and the thud of Horace’s hooves against the road, and he saw nothing behind them but trees.

  Act II, Scene IX

  SEMELE CLIMBED THROUGH a hatch in the front of the wagon. The whole troupe sat together on the driving bench.

  “Slow down, yes,” she said. “We are well away, and it is becoming dark and dangerous to ride so very fast. I will drive, I am thinking.”

  Thomas handed over the reins, but not without protest. “You can hardly see,” he said. “You aren’t even wearing your spectacles. How is it any less dangerous to let you drive?”

  “This road is a very old road,” Semele said, unconcerned. “I can drive along it well enough from memory.” She slowed the mule down and steered it around a turning. “Please be letting me know if any new and unusual obstacles present themselves.”

  Thomas tugged his hat down over his face. “You should have let me give that insolent prig a warning cut. It would have been shallow.”

  Essa made noises o
f frustration and disgust. “Sure. Perfect. Good idea. Shed a few drops of blood from a rich kid, at a crossroads, at night. Give that rumor legs and let it run around for a bit, and by the time we get back to the city, every single person will think that we ritually murder innocent children at crossroads in order to raise up an army of dead criminals with which to conquer all of Zombay. People already think we’re child-thieves, so we really should try to avoid attacking any children. Even if they deserve it.”

  “We are child-thieves,” said Thomas from underneath his hat.

  “Only for very excellent reasons,” said Semele. “And we are the children that we steal.”

  “Also, I don’t really mind,” said Rownie.

  “While we are sharing recriminations,” Thomas went on, “it was not, perhaps, the brightest notion to further antagonize that hotheaded coalmaker with a personal history about making coal and how very despicable the practice is.”

  “Hush yourself,” said Semele. “The most useful thing for the both of you to be doing would be to make supper. It has been several hours since we ate. Rownie can stay here and keep watch for any more fallen trees in our way.”

  “I lost my hat,” Rownie admitted. “I should probably get inside.”

  “Do not be worrying,” Semele told him. “There is no one else on the road. Also, it is dark, and I think there will be a rising fog tonight. It would take very good eyes to see through all of this, and spot you for someone unChanged who keeps Tamlin company.”

  Essa and Thomas went below, grumbling. Rownie could hear further grumbling inside the wagon, though he couldn’t hear what either one of them said.

  He watched the road, a long and winding stretch of packed dirt surrounded by trees with twisting branches and roots. A fog did rise up, slowly covering the ground until the world itself seemed made out of fog, with only the wagon real and solid in it. Rownie couldn’t see well enough to spot fallen trees, or any other roadblocks, so he just crossed his toes and hoped there were none. Semele still managed to keep the wheels on the road.

  “That was quick thinking and quick doing,” Semele told him. “I could see you in the audience, from spy-holes in the puppet stage.”

  “I just kicked him,” Rownie said. “That’s all.”

  “That is not all,” Semele said. “You put yourself where you needed to be, and you had the foresight to do so. This was very well done.”

  Rownie savored the praise. He didn’t get praise very often, so he was not entirely sure what to do with it. It made his face feel warmer in the foggy air. He didn’t savor that warmth for very long, though. In his memory he saw Patch fall again, and again he felt as though he were also falling. He opened his eyes, and stared at the fog.

  Something itched at the back of his mind.

  “Graba has a lot of birds,” he said. “All over the city, and even outside the city. We were a good ways upriver when her birds attacked us.”

  “Yes,” said Semele. “Not all pigeons are hers, even in Zombay, but she does use very many of them.”

  “She’s looking for Rowan too,” said Rownie. “She was always asking about him, before.”

  “She would be, yes,” said Semele.

  “So why hasn’t Graba found him? She keeps finding us. She keeps sending birds after us. She must be looking for Rowan, and her pigeons are pretty much everywhere, but Rowan’s been gone for months. Why hasn’t she found him?”

  “I do not know,” said Semele. She said it gently.

  “Maybe he isn’t here to be found,” Rownie said. He didn’t like saying that. He felt like he might make it true by saying it out loud. Maybe if he kept quiet, he could keep it from being true—but he couldn’t keep quiet. “Maybe Rowan left the city already, without me. Or maybe he’s dead.”

  “I am thinking that he is not dead,” said Semele. “I wish that I knew where he was, and that I could tell you where. I do not know, but I am thinking he is alive.”

  “How can you tell?” Rownie asked, not yet allowing himself to be comforted.

  Semele thought for a time before answering. “Your adoptive grandmother, she is very good at finding things. She is also very good at knowing when she should not bother looking. If she is still looking, then he is still somewhere to be found.”

  She steered them around another curve. Rownie stared at the fog ahead with less anxiety, beginning to trust Semele to know the road.

  He thought about Rowan, hiding somewhere in the fog, somewhere even Graba’s many pigeons couldn’t spot.

  Rowan used to disappear for days. Sometimes he would put a new troupe together, and try to rehearse, but this rarely went well. They’re too afraid of masks to put one on, he complained once, while tossing several hellos over the side of the Fiddleway. They’re just willing to do a little play-reading, late at night, with the windows down and the shutters drawn, and someone playing a fiddle in the next room to cover the noise. What are they so afraid of?

  The Guard, Rownie said.

  But what are the Guard so afraid of?

  Rownie wasn’t sure. Pirates? he suggested.

  Rowan laughed. No, I mean, why would a little pretending in front of a crowd . . . Never mind. I just wish the rest of my troupe had more courage.

  I’m not scared, Rownie said. Can I be in the next show?

  Not this one, Rowan told him. There’s no role good enough for you in this one. And I’ll need you to be the one friendly face in the audience—if we ever get to stand in front of an audience.

  Rownie was disappointed, and Rowan noticed.

  Let me hear the speech I gave you, the older brother said. You’ve been practicing?

  I’ve been practicing, said Rownie.

  He tried to remember that speech now, while he sat on the wagon bench with Semele. The first line came back to him—I know my way, and I can guess at yours—but he couldn’t think of the next one.

  Another thought itched at the back of his mind, on the shelf of things not yet understood.

  “Thomas called the puppet show a personal history,” he said. “Whose history?”

  “Only mine,” said Semele. “Our selves are rough and unrehearsed tales we tell the world. Hold on to something, yes, because there is an old tree root in the road ahead. There used to be, at least, and I am thinking it is probably still there.”

  The wagon wheels hit the root. Rownie’s teeth clacked together. Thomas and Essa gave squawks of protest from inside.

  “So what happened to the girls, later?” Rownie asked, trying to ignore the pain in his teeth. “The ones in the story? The ones who survived?”

  “They never did agree on which one was first and which was a reflection of a reflection,” Semele said. “One of them Changed and became Tamlin. The other learned witchwork, and she never, ever forgave the first for her Changing.”

  “Oh,” said Rownie. “Oh.” He had several thousand questions now. He asked the one he had asked Patch. “How did you Change? What happened?”

  Semele hummed to herself. She seemed to be examining her own words before letting them loose.

  “A Change is one big step sideways,” she said, “in exchange for all of the small steps you might otherwise have taken. Yes. In most ways you stop changing, after a Change.”

  This was not much of a clarification. “But how does it happen?” Rownie persisted. “Is it happening to me?”

  “No, Rownie,” Semele told him. “We will not ever work a Change unwilling, on you or anyone. It is not happening to you, and will not happen unless you choose it. And we do need the assistance of someone both masked and unChanged.”

  Rownie didn’t know if he was relieved or disappointed. He was not sure that he wanted his eyes to grow huge, his ears to grow long, and his skin to grow mottled with a thousand green freckles. But he did want to be something else, something other than he had been, and he thought that maybe monsters were safe from each other.

  Essa opened the hatch behind them to offer up plates of vegetable pastries. The pastries s
melled heavily spiced, and good. Suddenly supper became very much more important to Rownie than anything left on the shelf in the back of his mind. They all ate together, driving through the fog down Riverside Road.

  Act III, Scene I

  ZOMBAY EMERGED FROM THE FOG.

  Rownie stared. He had never left the city before. It had always surrounded him. He had never seen it from the outside. He had never arrived in Zombay, until now.

  Lights burned through the fog-filled dark. Constellations of lanterns and candles shone in uncountable windows. Street lamps—rare in Southside but common in Northside—cast warm light across cold paving stones.

  The Clock Tower glowed above all. A glass moon ticked across a stained-glass sky on each face, illuminated from behind with lanterns, serving as a lighthouse to any barges sailing beneath the Fiddleway Bridge at night.

  Semele drove them into Southside, into the medley of buildings built up over each other. Houses jutted out at strange angles, tethered with iron chains or buttressed with driftwood logs hammered into the brick and plaster to keep them from toppling over sideways. The misshapen mess loomed over them.

  Rownie breathed more easily. He took in a lungful of Southside dust. It was comforting. It was home. Still, he kept careful watch for Graba’s shack, knowing that it might be anywhere at all.

  Gearwork hooves smacked the road at regular intervals. A few lonely street lamps lit either side of the lane.

  “Are we near to Borrow Street?” Semele asked. “I am thinking that we are, but I would like to be sure.”

  “We’re crossing it now,” Rownie said.

  Semele jerked the reins to the left, and Horace made a precise left turn. The wagon nearly tipped over. Rownie grabbed the bench to keep from flying off, and almost flew off anyway when the wagon settled back onto all four wheels with a crunching sound. Essa and Thomas made angry noises inside.

  “Thank you,” said Semele, unconcerned. “We have not far to go now, yes.”