Goblin Secrets

by William Alexander

  It was working. Rownie carried an audience with him.

  Not everyone noticed as he went by with poise and purpose in his mask. Some went about their business and were not at all distracted by a fox face. Their eyes missed him somehow. Their attention slipped around him. He was something strange, something that should not really be there, so passersby who were not his audience passed him by and assumed that he was not there if he was not supposed to be.

  Rownie walked in daylight with a fox face over his own, and some people couldn’t see him at all. He was hiding and proclaiming himself, both at once. He didn’t know how this could possibly work, and he didn’t want to think about it too much in case it stopped working, so he just kept moving. He let the fox mask show him how to move.

  The audience was larger now. He could tell by the noise they made, all packed together into the narrow, winding staircase. Rownie glanced behind him to see just how many there were.

  He saw Grubs. He saw Stubble and Blotches and Greasy, all a part of the crowd that followed him. Stubble smirked.

  The Grubs broke the charm. Before that moment, Rownie had been Rownie, and also a fox, and something that was neither one, and something that was both together. Now he was only one thing. The mask made it difficult to see, and he stumbled on a crooked stair. He tried to hurry without falling down the stairs entirely and rolling all the way to the docks, bloody and bruised.

  The audience behind him thinned, no longer interested in whatever the masked performer might do next, or where he might be headed. The charm was broken. The Grubs had broken it with a look and a smirk, without even trying.

  By the time Rownie reached the Floating Market, only Grubs followed him.

  Act II, Scene V

  A METAL LATTICE COVERED the whole of the docks. Each dome and arch of latticework held small openings for glass windows. The windows kept the rain out and let the sunlight through—unless the glass had fallen out, in which case it let through both sunlight and rain. The whole place smelled of fish, riverweed, and tar. Bustling noise and blunt, heavy smells rose up from the Floating Market and into the streets and alleyways of the ravine wall. Rownie could hear it, and smell it, before he finally turned one last switchbacking corner and saw it in front of him. Then he broke into a run. Grubs followed.

  Narrow piers lashed to floating barrels jutted out from the shore and into the River. Small barges and rafts had been tied along each pier, packed close together, and each one was also a market stall. The Floating Market was a bigger, louder, and messier place than Market Square in Northside. Here mongers shouted, chanted, and sang about what they had to sell.

  “Hammocks, comfortable hammocks woven from the finest braided squidskin!”

  “Sugarcane and sea salt, good for charms and cooking!”

  Rownie pushed into the crowds surrounding the downstream piers. He ran underneath the winch to the Baker’s Cage, which was dunking some poor baker in the River for selling bread loaves that were too small or too large or too stale. Rownie forced his feet to learn how to move across the uneven surface that pitched and rolled with the River. He ducked and dodged between people. No one touched him or blocked his way, even when they failed to notice him otherwise. He hoped to lose the Grubs in the bustle and the noise before circling back and rejoining the goblins.

  The fox mask felt heavy on his face, a brightly painted thing that shouted “Here I am! Here! Right here!”—but he couldn’t remove it without showing off his own unChanged face beneath.

  Fruit and fishmongers announced their wares to either side of him as he ran. The hard accents of upstream folk mixed and mingled with softer downstream syllables.

  “Oceanfish! Riverfish! Dried and salted dustfish!”

  “Rare pears and quinces! Figs and citrons from the shore!”

  A meager fruit stall and a stack of barrels stood at the very end of the downstream pier, beneath an open stretch of iron lattice that had long ago lost its glass. The lone fruitmonger displayed baskets of sad-looking apples on a countertop, and didn’t bother to announce them with a shout or a chant. He glanced at Rownie and then away again, uninterested.

  Rownie turned around. The Grubs still followed him, unhurried. They had no reason to hurry. He had no other direction to run. He could face the Grubs or throw himself into the River—and the currents were very strong. No one ever crossed the whole River by swimming.

  Stubble-Grub sneered as they drew closer. It was an ordinary sneer, just the sort of expression he would usually make. It was not Graba’s look. Rownie didn’t see Graba in his face, peering out through his eyes, wearing him like a mask.

  Rownie did wear a mask. He stood like a fox, wily and proud. “You will not catch me,” he said, and as he said it he knew that it was true.

  He jumped onto a barrel, and from the barrel to the fishmonger’s barge, where he kicked the rope and set the barge to drifting. Then he ran across the deck and jumped into the open air between the piers. His coat billowed behind him like a sail. He caught the railing of a barge across the way, and hoisted himself aboard.

  The River took hold of the fruitmonger’s barge, and it drifted downstream. The monger cursed and paddled with a single oar, both furiously, but his curses were clumsy and unlikely to stick.

  All three Grubs rushed to the open place where the barge used to be, and glared at the watery distance between them and Rownie.

  Rownie took a bow. Then he slipped off the mask and stuffed it in his shirt. He walked calmly around to the front of the barge he had leaped to. The skipper here seemed to be fully preoccupied with selling fish-meat pastries that steamed and smelled delicious, and paid no notice when Rownie climbed down the barge moorings, just as though he had every right to be climbing down barge moorings. He rejoined the crowd and went looking for the goblin stage.

  Rownie slipped between people. He moved quickly, but he did not run. He didn’t want to look hurried. He didn’t want to look like much of anything.

  This was a fancier part of the Floating Market, a pier with the glass awning still intact above it. Those who gathered here sold more fragile things, like bolts of fabric and delicate gearwork—things that needed to be kept out of the weather. One barge displayed strange animals in gold cages. Soap makers invited passersby to smell their wares. A tall man with pale, deep-set eyes sold trinkets carved out of bone. Another barge-stall showed off small and cunning devices that did useless things beautifully.

  Rownie glanced up at every face he passed, to see if anyone looked like his brother. He paid particular attention to people with beards, in case Rowan had painted or pasted on a fake beard to hide beneath. He looked at the barge crews on each deck, in case Rowan had signed up with a crew in order to escape Zombay and the Captain of the Guard. Rownie wondered if his brother would really set sail without him. He flinched away from the thought.

  On the farthest edge of the upstream pier, just underneath the Fiddleway Bridge, a simple raft had been tethered. The goblin wagon floated there, lashed onto the raft.

  Patch stood in front of the wagon, still wearing his half mask, with his arms folded in front of him. The goblin stared down a thin and scraggly looking man with a fishhook charm around his neck. The man was shouting, and an audience had gathered around the argument. Rownie slipped into their midst.

  “This is my pier!” the man shouted in a scraggly sounding voice. “I put on my show here!”

  Patch raised one eyebrow, high enough to appear on his forehead above the mask he wore (which had its own eyebrows). “Show?”

  “Yes, show!” the man said, pointing at Patch with one finger as though trying to knock him over with it. “A respectable show, with no masks! I can swallow a fish for four pennies, and I’ll swallow any other sort of scuttling creature for five. Can you do that, goblin? Bet you can’t manage that.”

  The man had a bucket with him. Small things scuttled around inside the bucket. Patch reached in, took a handful, and showed the crowd a bite-sized crab, a snail, and a wriggling
bait fish. He tossed the crab in the air, and then the snail, and then the bait fish. He juggled them all. Then he added two juggling knives, and their blades flashed in the sunlight. He caught the crab and the snail and the fish in his mouth and swallowed all three while catching a knife in each hand.

  The crowd cheered. Rownie clapped. The scraggly man took a step forward, furious—but then he eyed the knives Patch casually held. He stepped back, snatched up his bucket, and stormed away.

  Patch took a bow. The wagon wall behind him came smoothly down and became the platform of a stage. He somersaulted backward, landed on the platform, and started up a new juggling act while the other goblins started to arrive. Semele and Essa brought their own collected audience members to the crowd, and then slipped backstage through the wagon door.

  Rownie wondered how best to follow when Thomas arrived and came to stand beside him. The old goblin carried himself in such a way as to be nearly unnoticeable, even while wearing a mask, even underneath his huge black hat.

  “You’ve unmasked yourself,” he said, his voice flat and unimpressed. “You have also neglected to bring an audience with you.”

  “I brought Grubs with me,” Rownie whispered back. Thomas gave him a very blank look. “Children that Graba collects,” Rownie clarified. “She probably sent them.”

  Thomas made a growling, grumbling noise in the back of his throat. “Excellent,” he said, though he clearly did not think that this was excellent. “Please tell Semele once you make your way backstage, which you must do with a certain amount of stealth. Get behind those crates over there, put your mask back on—you haven’t lost it, have you?—and then sneak underneath the stage. Knock three times on the wagon floor, and Nonny will let you in. You will assist her with backstage business for the rest of the show.”

  This was disappointing. “I don’t get to be part of the play?” Rownie asked.

  “You will certainly be part of the play,” Thomas told him, adjusting his hat. “The part that goes on backstage. It is not as though you’ve had time or opportunity to learn lines, or even learn how to read. Your apprenticeship has only just begun.”

  “I can read,” Rownie said, quietly.

  “Don’t worry,” said Thomas, “I do understand that reading is hardly a common skill—”

  “I can read,” Rownie said again.

  “—and not one we could possibly expect you to already know.”

  “I can read!” Rownie shouted.

  A tall sailor with several braids poked Rownie’s arm. “Shut it and watch the show,” she said. “The goblin’s juggling fire.”

  “Ah,” Thomas whispered, taken aback. “I see. Excellent. One less thing to have to teach you. Now please stop shouting and get under the wagon without being seen.”

  “Did you find out anything about Rowan?” Rownie asked.

  “I have not,” said Thomas, “though I have made many discreet inquiries known to observant people. Now please hurry backstage. The proper play is about to begin.”

  Rownie hurried. He hid behind crates, slipped his mask on, and then snuck underneath the stage. Hopefully, if anyone saw him sneaking, they would mistake him for a goblin. Maybe this was how goblins Changed. Maybe, if enough people already believed that a child was goblinish, then the goblinishness became real and true. Rownie reached under his mask see if his ears had become pointy. They had not. Only the fox ears were pointy.

  He knocked three times on the wagon floor. A hatch opened. He climbed up and through.

  Act II, Scene VI

  BACKSTAGE WAS CHAOS DISTILLED into a very small space. Nonny did several things at once with ropes, levers, and various contraptions. Essa jumped up and down and hummed to herself for no particular reason that Rownie could see. Semele sat quietly in a corner with her eyes closed, but she still looked tensed and filled with potential force, like a coiled spring or a stone perched on top of a hill and preparing to start an avalanche.

  Essa noticed Rownie. “You’re here!” she said. “Good, because we’re about to start. Patch just stopped juggling, and Thomas is out there giving the prologue for The Iron Emperor. I don’t know why we call it that—the Emperor doesn’t even show up until the last act, so it really isn’t a good name for the play. We should call it something else. Try to think of something, okay? But meanwhile you should stay out of sight and pull whatever ropes Nonny tells you to pull. Not that she’ll actually tell you anything. Pull whatever ropes Nonny points to. Okay, good. Break your face.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” Rownie tried to ask her, but she had already slipped through the curtain and begun lamenting the woes of an ancient kingdom.

  Rownie took off the hat and gloves, and set the fox mask aside. He approached Semele. He tried not to let the floorboards creak underneath him, but they creaked anyway.

  “Some of Graba’s grandchildren are here,” he told her in a whisper. “On the docks. A few of them. Might not be in the audience yet, but they’ll probably find it.”

  Semele’s pale mask turned to look at him. “Thank you, Rownie,” she said. “I will make the fourth wall stronger, then. This is certainly a tricky thing to be doing over water, but I will do it, yes.”

  She began to chant to herself. Then Nonny tapped Rownie’s shoulder with her foot (her hands were both busy with a complicated crank and a set of bellows) and pointed her toes at a rope. Rownie pulled the rope.

  The dragon puppet gnashed its teeth behind him.

  Rownie dropped the rope, waved his hands in the air, and then stared down the dragon puppet to prove that he wasn’t afraid of it. The painted dragon eyes looked back at him.

  Nonny glared. Wrong rope, the glare said. She pointed more forcefully with the tip of her toe. Rownie pulled the next rope and felt the wagon shift under his feet. Flat, painted walls and towers unfolded to either side of the stage. The platform became a city.

  “The moon is full,” Essa said onstage, looking up. It was night onstage, even though the sun was shining above them. Essa said it, so it became true, and everyone believed it.

  The Iron Emperor was a ghost story. Rownie caught glimpses of the play around the curtain edge, between pulling whatever ropes and levers Nonny directed him to pull.

  Essa played both the Princess and the Rightful Heir. Patch played the Wrongful Heir—unless both the Princess and the Rightful Heir needed to be onstage at the same time, in which case Patch and Essa swapped masks.

  Semele was the ghost of the old Queen, and she made her entrances in bursts of blue smoke and blue fire. This was always impressive, even backstage, even when Rownie could see Semele crouched out of sight beforehand.

  Nonny set off the smoke and fire herself. She clearly didn’t trust Rownie with any of the combustible effects. This was fine with Rownie. He worked the bellows on the music box instead. It played mournful, keening notes for Semele’s ghostly entrances, after the bursts of blue fire and smoke.

  Rownie heard gasps of fear and surprise, as though it really were midnight and not the middle of the day with sunlight bright and cheerful, as though Semele really were a spirit of the dead with hair moving in the wind between worlds and not just wearing a mask with egg whites making the hair stick out in all directions. Semele’s high, commanding voice combined with music and smoke, and all of them together changed the shape of things.

  Then everything went wrong.

  First the music box broke. It broke loudly. It was supposed to give a long, mournful note, and instead it squawked like a peacock falling off a wall. This did not sound ghostly or mysterious. It did not sound like the wind between the worlds.

  Nonny glared at Rownie. Rownie shrugged. He hadn’t done anything wrong. At least he didn’t think that he’d done anything wrong. Nonny pushed the unhappy music box aside, and the play went on.

  They changed the scenery from city towers to the open sea. The sea was a blanket, gray and gauzy, and the two of them held opposite ends and flapped it up and down to make waves.

  Then the waves
caught fire.

  One of the blue firecrackers went off, suddenly and all by itself. The sparks landed on the gauzy blanket, and the blanket burst into flames. Rownie and Nonny both dropped it.

  Essa grabbed the sword of the Wrongful Heir away from Patch, poked it through the burning blanket, and flung it away from the stage and out over the River.

  Then the pigeons came.

  Birds swooped down from all sides, snatched up the burning blanket, and kept it airborne. The fire spread and changed color from pale blue to an angry orange. It spread to the birds themselves. Pigeon feathers burned with greasy flame, and still they flapped their wings and flew above the audience with the burning sea-blanket between them.

  The birds screamed and died and fell. The blanket broke into pieces, and fell. Fire came down on the audience. It came down on the nearby barge-stalls of the Floating Market. People screamed and pushed each other. Some fell splashing off the pier in their haste to get away from burning things. The awning of a barge-stall caught fire.

  One pigeon smacked onto the stage and smoldered there. Essa flicked it away with the sword. The dead bird hissed and steamed where it struck the River.

  Thomas took off his mask and looked sadly at their former audience. “The show is done, I think,” he said to the rest of the troupe. “We had better hoist anchor before the crowd gets organized enough to have us lynched and drowned.”

  Semele came backstage. “Take us upstream, Nonny.”

  Patch and Essa untied the moorings that held the wagon-raft to the pier. Nonny cobbled together some wire and springs, stuck four oars through it, and tied the whole contraption to the back of the raft. The oars spun around and pushed the wagon-raft upstream, away from the pier. They passed beneath the Fiddleway and over the spot where Rownie always dropped pebbles, where Rowan had taught him to drop pebbles for their mother. He felt for the pebble in his only coat pocket, the one Semele had given him in the litchfield, the one that was Rowan’s hello. He thought about dropping it over the side to say hello to the mother he did not remember. Instead he kept the pebble in his pocket.