Goblin Secrets (12 page)

“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.

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.

The screams and shouting of the Floating Market faded behind them. Rownie saw Stubble-Grub stand apart from the crowd. Vass stood with him.

“This was for me,” he said. “The show was cursed, because of me.”

Semele stood beside him. “This was for the both of us,” she said in a voice that she probably meant to be comforting. “These curses were fashioned for you and me both.”

THE WAGON-RAFT SPUTTERED UPSTREAM.
Rownie sat on the edge of the roof, dangled his feet over the side, and watched the River go by. The city was out of sight already. The Fiddleway Bridge disappeared behind a bend. Rownie could not remember any place other than Zombay, and now he could no longer see it.

Nonny stood in the back and steered the raft by poking her paddle contraption with a pole.

Patch and Essa sat beside Rownie and dangled fishing lines in the water. They hadn’t caught anything. Nonny’s paddles scared all the fish away.

Semele sat up front, in the driving bench. Thomas sat with her, invisible beneath a big, black hat pulled low. Rownie didn’t think the old goblin could see anything other than the inside of his hat, but then he pointed forward with his cane and shouted directions.

“There are rocks ahead! Nonny, kindly steer us to
starboard. Otherwise we are going to crash and sink and return the River’s own face to the watery floor of its home. Then nothing could possibly prevent floodwaters from tearing down all of Zombay—which would suit my mood just fine, actually, so go ahead and steer for those rocks if it pleases you to do so.”

Nonny steered around the rocks.

“What’s he talking about?” Rownie whispered.

“The floods are coming,” said Essa. “I mean, the floods are always coming, but they happen to be coming in a soon-and-immediate kind of way. Listen. I bet you can hear it.”

Rownie listened to the River. He had heard it every day of his life, underneath and around all other noise. He knew its voice—and the timbre of its voice had changed. It spoke low and angry as the water flowed.

“There,” said Essa. “You noticed.”

“Maybe this is what it usually sounds like so far upstream,” said Rownie.

“Nope,” said Essa. “This is what it usually sounds like before a flood comes howling down the canyon. We should probably have warned more people on the docks. We didn’t have very much time, I suppose, before our performance exploded, but I meant to tell a few skippers that they should maybe send their crew and cargo ashore, and up into the hills. Even a little bit of flooding will make things messy at
the docks, and we’re in for more than a little bit.”

“I have already told such barge captains as will listen to Tamlin warnings,” said Semele from the front bench. “They will spread the news. But we may yet be able to speak for the city, and thereby save Zombay from drowning.”

“I am not presently inclined to bet on our success,” said Thomas from under his hat. “There are more rocks ahead, Nonny. You may hit them if you’d like. Otherwise, steer to port.”