Goblin Secrets

Scene I

ROWNIE WOKE WHEN GRABA knocked on the ceiling from the other side. Plaster dust drifted down from the knocking. Graba knocked again. Baskets hung on chains from the rafters, and they shook when she knocked.

Rownie sat up and tried to blink sleep-sand and plaster dust from one eye. The whole floor was covered by a bed made up of straw, stolen clothes sewn into blankets, and sleeping siblings. Two of his brothers crawled up out of the straw, Blotches and Stubble. Blotches had orange hair, orange freckles, and orange teeth. Stubble was the oldest and the tallest, and he liked to say that he had a beard. He didn’t. He had stray hairs on the tip of his chin and on his cheeks near his ears.

Their sister Vass came in from the girls’ room, which was really the same room with a blanket hung across the middle. Vass had been her name before she came to live with Graba. Sometimes Graba’s grandchildren kept the names they had before. Sometimes they made up names for themselves. Blotches and Stubble had made up their own names.

“Hurry,” Vass snapped.

Rownie got to his feet, combed the straw out of his hair with his fingers, and stumbled away from the middle of the room. He stood with Vass and Blotches while Stubble pulled the rope that lowered the stairway down from the ceiling. The musty smell of Graba’s loft came down with it.

Vass went upstairs. The others followed her. Rownie came last.

There were birds everywhere in Graba’s loft. Most were pigeons, gray and mangy. Some were chickens. A few larger, stranger birds perched in dark corners, watchful.

Graba perched on a stool near the iron stove, her legs hidden underneath the bulk of her gray skirts.

“Four grandchildren,” she said. “Today I have four of you. Enough for what I have in mind now.”

The word “grandmother” did not mean “mother’s mother” or “father’s mother” to Rownie, or to the various other children who sometimes lived in Graba’s shack. Neither mothers nor fathers were part of this household, and the word “grandmother” simply meant “Graba.”

The four children lined up in front of the stool, waiting. Two chickens pecked at the floorboards nearby, looking for seeds.

“I’ll need eggs carried to Haggot’s market stall,” said Graba. She pointed to Stubble and Blotches, but she did not say their names. She probably did not know their names. “He’ll be at the Northside market today. Trade the eggs for feed-grain, the best chicken feed you can find. Bring it back to me. Will you do that, now?”

“Yes, Graba.” Stubble picked up a wooden crate filled with straw and eggs. All four siblings turned to go.

“Don’t be going yet,” Graba said. She took a small leather bag from around her neck and held it out to Vass. “Hang this over the chains on the Clock Tower door. Sing the charm I was teaching you last night, and stand back when you do. Take care with this, now. It is a present of welcoming home, and it’s almost ripe.”

Vass took the bag carefully. “What’s in it?” she asked.

“A bird skull, stuffed with other things. Do this well, and I might be teaching you the making of it.”

“Yes, Graba,” said Vass.

“Go,” Graba said. “All of you but the runt, the smallest one. Rownie should wait here with me.”

Rownie waited. He wondered why Graba knew his name. She knew the names of those she kept an eye on, and it was not always a good thing to have Graba’s eye on you.

He listened to Vass, Stubble, and Blotches clamber down the stairs.

“Yes, Graba?” Rownie asked.

“My leg bones have run down,” she told him. “Wind them for me now.” She extended a gearwork leg from under her stool. It was bird-shaped, with three long talon-toes in front and one in back, at the heel. The whole limb had been made out of copper and wood.

Rownie pried the crank out from her shin and wound it up, watching gears turn against chains and springs inside.

Graba always said that Mr. Scrud, the local gearworker, hadn’t enough skill to make legs into human shapes. Vass whispered that Graba needed the chicken legs to hold up her hugeness, that nothing smaller would suffice, and that Graba wouldn’t be able to walk today if she hadn’t lost the ordinary legs she’d been born with.

Stubble said that Graba used to be a sailor, or a boat-witch, and that she’d lost her legs in a pirate attack. He said Graba killed some of the pirates with a look and a laugh and a lock of her hair before they cut off her legs with rusty swords. He always drew out the word “rusty” when he told the story. “Rrrrrrrrusty swords. Ha!” Then he’d hit Rownie behind the knee with a stick to buckle him over.

Stubble told this story often. Rownie had cried the first time, and the rest of Graba’s grandchildren had laughed. On the second telling Rownie had glared up at Stubble from the ground. The third time Stubble told the tale Rownie had fallen backward on purpose, throwing up his hands and imitating Graba’s rusty voice. “Curse you, Pirate King!” (The story had grown by then, and the ordinary river pirates had become a full barge captained by the King of All Pirates.)

Everybody had laughed. Stubble had helped him up, and after that he didn’t hit Rownie so hard while telling the pirate story, because Rownie couldn’t say his line if he was gasping in pain and holding his leg. It still hurt, but not as much.

Now the story was almost a play. This was dangerous. Performances were outlawed in Zombay.

Rownie finished turning the left crank as far as it would go and folded it into the shin. Graba pulled back her left leg and then extended her right. Rownie pried out the crank and turned it once. The joint gave a loud, shrill creaking. Graba waved her hands and scowled.

“Needs oil,” she said. She reached up into the rafters and into one of the nests. She plucked out a small brown egg and popped it into her mouth. It crunched. “I haven’t any gear oil left,” she said around the cracking eggshell. “Get to Scrud’s shop for a small flask, now. I’ve overpaid him for leg repair, and he owes me for it. Don’t let him tell you otherwise.”

“Yes, Graba,” Rownie said. He folded back the crank, dodged around a chicken, and ran down the stairs.

He grabbed his coat, even though it was a little too warm outside for coats, and tried to leave through the door. The door wouldn’t budge. Rownie remembered that it couldn’t budge. Graba moved her house around sometimes. She would send everyone out, lift up the shack, and go somewhere else. Then she would let everyone back in after they found her, if they ever did find her. The last time Graba moved her house, she set the front door against a neighboring wall. “Just use a window,” she had said when Vass complained. “I like my view better this way.”

Rownie climbed through the window and dropped down to the street.

Scene II

THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE CITY was dusty. Rownie tried not to step in any of the dust piles that littered the street. Every morning sweepers swept their houses, and they left large, brown piles outside their doorsteps. Every day the dust came slowly back inside and covered the floors. There was a kind of fish that swam in Southside dust, and a kind of bird that fished with their long beaks in the dust dunes. The lives of sweepers became interesting during dustfish spawning season.

Rownie pulled on his coat, which was very much too big for him. It was dust colored, or else so covered with dust that the coat couldn’t remember any other color. He wished that Graba had sent him to the market with the others rather than to Mr. Scrud’s gear shop. He was hungry. Graba never fed her household, but she usually sent them on food-errands. The others would buy bread and pastries for themselves, as well as the chicken feed, and eat on their way home. They probably wouldn’t save him any, and Rownie couldn’t sip gear oil on his own way home. This errand wouldn’t feed him.

He kicked over a dust pile beside the rusting gate to the old rail station, and then coughed and wished he hadn’t.

The street Rownie picked his way down did not run in a straight line. He walked underneath houses built on top of each other, with newer rooms and houses added on stilts or jutting out sideways and held in place by thick lengths of chain. Tin roofs, thatched roofs, and wooden shingles leaned over his head, almost touching across the width of the road.

Rownie was not very tall, but others on the street made way for him. People always made way for those who were Graba’s.

He came to the Fiddleway Bridge.

Two fiddlers stood at either side of the entrance. They played dueling tunes at each other. Hats rested on the stones in front of them, and both hats were half full of coins.

Rownie scooped up a pebble from the ground, just like he always did when he crossed the Fiddleway. This one was gray, with an orange line running through the middle of it. He carried it with him through the entranceway, through the crossfire of dueling music, and onto the bridge.

The Fiddleway was wide, and long enough to disappear into the fog of a foggy day. The central avenue had been cobbled together several times out of old stone and new ironworks. Small shops and apartments stood on both sides, separated by alleyways that looked out over the expanse of the Zombay River.

Rownie passed musicians of several sorts, and empty hats reserving spots for musicians who were not yet there. He passed piles of horse dung and cow dung and other kinds of dung that he wasn’t sure about, but the smell wasn’t so bad as on the Southside roads. River winds kept the air clean on the bridge. He made sure his coat didn’t drag in any of the dung piles.

Several members of the Guard came marching toward Rownie, with their Captain in the lead. Rownie could tell that the Guard Captain had decided not to notice him, but he waited longer than he should have before moving aside. He knew they couldn’t detain him here on the Fiddleway. The bridge was a sanctuary. No one ever got arrested while still on the bridge. Rownie figured that most of the houses here had been built by smugglers and other sorts of people who couldn’t set foot in the city, on either side.

The Guard Captain tried to glare at Rownie and ignore him at the same time. He had an impressive glare. Every member of the Guard had gearworked legs, and some of them also had gearworked arms, but only the Captain had eyes made of tiny glass gears with dark stained-glass irises. Each iris was gear-shaped. They rotated slowly within the workings of his eyes.

Boots struck the bridge at perfectly regular intervals as they marched. The Guard always marched. The way their legs were made, they had no other option but to march.

“May your feet fall off,” Rownie whispered to the backs of them, once they had all passed. “May your breath smell like pigeon feathers.” He tried to chant the words, to make them into a proper curse, to make them stick. He wished he knew how to curse better. Graba knew excellent curses, of course, but she only shared their secrets with Vass.

In the very center of the bridge stood the Clock Tower of Zombay. A stained-glass sun climbed up the stained-glass sky of the clock face, high above the etched glass horizon of the cityscape. The face glinted, bright with reflected sunlight. When the real sun set overhead, the glass sun in the clock would set behind the glass horizon. Then, at nightfall, lanterns would light up behind the clock face and the miniature glass moon as it ticked its way across the sky.

The whole of Zombay was very proud of its clock, though the tower was said to be haunted by clockmaker ghosts. The big front doors were latched, locked, and chained shut. No one ever went inside.

Vass stood by the tower doors with her back to the road, chanting over Graba’s charm bag. Rownie did not interrupt her, though he did wonder why Graba would want to tie a gift of welcoming home to the Clock Tower. No one lived in the Clock Tower.

He continued on his way, looking for one particular stretch of low stone wall, and there he found Stubble and Blotches. They had the crate of eggs with them. They were sitting exactly where Rownie always threw pebbles over the wall’s side. Rownie didn’t want them to be there, but there they were.

They saw him. Blotches took an egg from the crate and offered it to him. Rownie reached for it, because he was hungry, even though he knew that Blotches never gave anybody anything.

Blotches snatched the egg back and tossed it into the River.

Rownie cried out.

Stubble smacked Blotches on the top of his head. “Don’t waste food,” he said. “Not ever.” He looked over at Rownie. Rownie hoped that he’d offer another egg, but he didn’t. “Did you wind up her ankle?” Stubble asked. Rownie started to answer, but Blotches talked right over him. Blotches had large ears, round and ruddy, but he never used them for much.

“You missed the goblins,” Blotches said.

“What goblins?” Rownie asked.

“They came by in a tinker’s-wagon,” said Stubble.

“One of them had long, metal teeth, sticking out all over,” said Blotches.

“Did not,” said Stubble.

“Did so. I threw an egg at that one.”

“She caught the egg and threw it back at you. And those weren’t metal teeth. Those were nails. She used one to hang up a sign.”

“Did not.”

“She did. She was just holding the nails in her mouth to keep both hands free.”

“Maybe they use metal teeth for nails,” said Blotches. “Maybe they grow them back as fast as they can pluck them out.”

“You’re a kack,” said Stubble.

“What did the sign say?” Rownie asked, but they ignored him. They probably didn’t know.

“Vass should be done with the door by now,” Stubble said, changing the subject, but Rownie didn’t want to change the subject.

“I didn’t know goblins could come out in daylight,” Rownie said.

“They have to keep moving if they do,” said Blotches. “Goblins never have a home, any of them. That’s why they live in wagons. The sun finds them out and burns up any building they stay in for longer than a day and a night. That’s why they’re never goldsmiths, too, because it’s sun-metal. They’re only tinsmiths. And iron burns them.”

“Liar,” said Stubble. “They don’t work with iron because it’s too hard and heavy. Tin’s easier.”

“And they’re thieves,” said Blotches, as though the other one had just agreed with him.

“Obviously,” said Stubble.

“What do they steal?” Rownie asked.

“Everything,” said Blotches.

“The smallest child in every family,” added Stubble. “That’s why Graba only sends the oldest of us with tin pots for mending. No one ever sends a small child to the wagons unless they don’t mean for them to come back.” He snickered, three quick snorts of laughter forced out of his nose instead of his mouth.

“Liar,” Rownie said.

“It’s true,” said Blotches. “And they eat the children they steal.”

He started singing a song about thieving goblins. Rownie turned away and looked at the pebble in his hand. “Hello,” he said, whispering low so the other two couldn’t hear him, and then he threw it as far as he could. The rock made a small splash when it hit the River, but the waters did not otherwise react.

Stubble stopped singing and smacked the side of Rownie’s head. “Don’t get the River’s attention,” he said. “The floods will come for you.”

Rownie rubbed his head with one hand. He didn’t look up. He watched the River. It was vast, and Rownie couldn’t look at it for long. There was too much of it to take in. He watched until he had to look away, and then he looked at the ravine walls to either side of the River, and after that he looked at the stones in front of him.

Rownie had a brother older than any of the siblings who shared Graba’s shack, an actual birth-brother. They looked alike, both of them dark with dark eyes—eyes you couldn’t easily see the bottom of. Everyone called the brothers Rowan and Little Rowan. After a while “Little Rowan” shortened into “Rownie.” Rownie had never had a name of his own. Their mother drowned before she’d had a chance to name him.

He also didn’t know how old he was. Vass kept saying that Rownie was eight years old. She remembered everyone’s birthday, but she didn’t always tell the truth about birthdays, and Rownie suspected that she was lying about his. He was sure he was closer to ten.

Rownie and Rowan used to throw pebbles together, right on this spot on the Fiddleway Bridge. They would listen to the musicians, and Rowan would tell stories about the River and about their mother; how she had skippered a barge and gone down with it just underneath the Fiddleway. Only Rowan was able to swim to shore. He carried Rownie with him.

Vass didn’t believe that story. No one can swim through that part of the River, she would argue. The currents are too strong. You would have drowned too. Rowan only shrugged. We didn’t drown, was all the answer he gave.

Later, he showed Rownie where to toss pebbles down from the bridge. We drop the stones to say hello. It’s like leaving a small pile of stones on a grave. The dead speak in stones. Pebbles are the proper way to tell them hello. So Rownie always said hello when he crossed the bridge, even though he didn’t remember his mother at all, or her barge, or a time before Rowan brought him to stay with Graba because they didn’t have anywhere else to stay.

Rowan had been gone for a couple of months now. Stubble, Blotches, and the rest seemed to have forgotten about him already—but Graba remembered. If you hear from your brother, she’d say, you’ll be sure to tell Graba, now. A charmer, that one. Your Graba misses her grandchildren, all of her grandchildren, and that one she worries for.

Rownie had never known Graba to worry about anyone, and Rowan hadn’t even slept in Graba’s shack for over a year. He was too old—sixteen years old—and he took up too much of the straw floor when he slept there. Still, Rownie nodded and promised to tell Graba if he heard from his brother.

You will do that, now, Graba agreed.

Stubble and Blotches started up a song about floodwaters and falling bridges, which seemed to Rownie a very stupid thing to sing about while actually on a bridge. He left them there and crossed the road, looking for the goblin sign—and looking for some sign of Rowan, just like he always did on the Fiddleway. He found the goblin sign, but only the goblin sign. It had been tacked to the opposite railing with one iron nail. Rownie read it carefully. He was good at reading. Rowan had taught him how. It read:

He read it again. He still didn’t believe it. He read it again.

Goblins were putting on a play. Nobody could put on a play. Nobody was allowed to put on a play, but goblins were going to. Maybe he could see some of the show before they all got arrested.

Rownie ran the rest of the way across the bridge, through music from fiddles and whistles and drums. His coat billowed behind him like a sail.

Scene III

BROKEN GEARS AND STACKS OF WOOD filled the alleyway outside Scrud’s workshop. Rownie heard shouting inside. He waited in the alley and rooted through some of the mess of gears until the shouting faded to a low mutter. Then he went in.

The noise did not actually stop. It never did. Mr. Scrud was always shouting to himself.

“Hello, Mr. Scrud!” Rownie called out from the doorway, hoping to be noticed now rather than later. The workshop smelled like sawdust and oil, with a rotten smell underneath. Scrud made very good mousetraps, but he never remembered to clean up the mice afterward.

Planks of wood, bars of copper, and gears stacked in piles and pyramids covered the floor. Dowels stuck out from the plaster of one wall, with ropes, chains, tools, and more gears hanging from them. Clocks hung on the other wall, so many that the wall looked like it was made out of clocks. They all worked, or most of them did—tocking and ticking in rhythms that clashed with each other. It sounded like an argument of clocks.

Scrud bent over his workbench in the middle of the room.

“Jellyweed and impsense!” he shouted at the bench. His voice was cracked and tired. He dropped one twisted tool and picked up another from the wall without clocks. He didn’t notice Rownie. There was a gearworked horse’s head on the workbench, and this did notice Rownie. The automaton’s eyes followed the boy as he picked his way across the floor and tried not to step on anything important.

Rownie took a deep breath. “Hello, Mr. Scrud!” he shouted again. The gearworker scared him, and always had scared him, but Rownie had been here often enough that the fear didn’t matter. He felt it, bright and burning, but it didn’t stop him from standing in the middle of the floor and shouting Scrud’s name.

The gearworker’s head snapped up. He looked at Rownie. The gearworked horse looked at Rownie. Then both of them looked away, and Mr. Scrud began to mutter in an undertone. He wasn’t shouting. This meant that he was listening.

“Graba paid more than she needed to pay, Mr. Scrud. Last time you fixed her leg, she paid more than she needed to.”

“Impsense!” said Scrud. He stuck a long pin in the horse’s ear and twisted it. The horse shut one eye.

“It’s true, Mr. Scrud,” said Rownie. He could see three bottles of gear oil on the shelf behind the workbench. This was what Graba wanted, and Rownie knew that each bottle cost two copper pennies. Two coppers per audience member, the sign had said. Goblin farce, onstage, for two coppers. Maybe they wear masks. Maybe they juggle fire. Maybe they have metal teeth.

He was very afraid of what he was about to do. He took another deep breath.

“She overpaid, Mr. Scrud,” he said. “She needs two coppers back.”

Rownie met Scrud’s glare when Scrud stared at him. He would not turn around and run. He showed Scrud that he would not turn around and run by the way he stood there.

Scrud reached up onto the shelf behind him, took down a bottle of gear oil, and put it on the bench where Rownie could reach it.

“No,” Rownie said, standing and breathing. “This time she needs the two copper pennies.”

The gearworker muttered to himself. He took back the oil, rummaged in his shirt pocket, and put one copper coin on the table. Then he put another on top of it.

Rownie took the coins. “Thank you, Mr. Scrud,” he said. He left the workshop without running. He left the alleyway without running. Behind him the alley filled up with clanking, metallic noises, and shouts. The metal sounded like Graba’s bird’s legs somewhere behind him. Rownie started running.

Rownie ran halfway to Market Square, passing familiar fountains and monuments. He stumbled once, caught himself, and paused for breath under the bronze statue of the Mayor. The statue wore a suit with a watch chain tucked into the waistcoat pocket and held out both hands in a way that looked either welcoming or surprised. The metal was old and green-stained, except for the head. The statue got a new head every time the city got a new mayor. Graba had hinted that she would be very pleased if someone stole the Mayor’s statue-head and brought it back to her, but so far no one had worked up the courage to try it.

Someone nearby shouted at someone else, and not at Rownie. His insides jumped anyway. He slipped the two coins into the only pocket of his coat, and then he walked and remembered how to breathe as he walked. He wanted to run, but one of the Guard might decide that he was running for Bad Reasons and try to catch him.

Most of Graba’s household hated Northside, and got lost in Northside. The streets here followed different rules. They ran in perfectly straight lines, and met each other at right angles. Rownie knew the landmarks of it, though, and could navigate Northside easily enough.

He passed the Reliquary, and the Northside Rail Station. A member of the Guard stood watch over the station’s iron latticework doors. The Guard wore a bright, showy uniform. He held a spear with tassels on it and stared at the opposite side of the street.

Rownie walked by slowly. He wondered why the man was there, guarding a rusted gate. There was only one of him, and if anything crawled up out of the old rail station to break the gate, then one Guard wouldn’t do very much good. The Southside Rail Station did not have a Guard posted at the entrance. It did not need one. If anything nasty crawled up from the depths and came to Southside, then Graba would deal with it. Probably. If she wanted to.

Rownie passed the station and came to the square, a huge open space of flagstones with a fountain in the middle and market stalls all around. It was already afternoon, and some of the stalls were closing. A farmer with dozens of long braids pulled down a tent pole, letting the canvas roof of his stall billow and dissolve into a puddle of cloth.

Rownie smelled foods, all kinds. The smells blended together. They ganged up on him and made it very difficult to think about anything else. He lingered by a baker’s stall and smiled. It was his best smile.

The baker passed him some bread. “Yesterday’s,” she said. “Spoil soon anyway, and there’s no one buying.”

“Good luck selling tomorrow,” Rownie said, or tried to say around the mouthful of dry bread he was crunching on. She passed him another piece for saying so, and waved him away. Then she pulled at a chain behind her. The stall collapsed, folding back into the wall of the square.

Gearwork in the stall squeaked like Graba’s right leg. Rownie flinched at the sound.

He dodged around tent poles and covered wagons, moving away from all the bustle to the fountain in the center of the square. A stone bear, a stone lion, and a stone naga all roared streams of water into a cracked stone basin. He cupped water in one hand, slurping up as much as he could. He dipped his other piece of bread in the basin to soften it, but the water only made it soggy.

A pigeon flapped onto the rim of the fountain and looked sideways at Rownie. Sideways is the only way pigeons know how to look. Rownie ignored it. He knew it just wanted some of the bread. He didn’t think it was one of Graba’s birds. He didn’t think so.

Someone grabbed Rownie’s arm.

“Give me the bread, Rownie-Runt,” said Vass. She had a sack of grain slung over one shoulder. “I’m hungry.”

“Let me go,” Rownie said. She wouldn’t let him go. He gave her the second piece of bread, and she set down the sack to take it, but she still wouldn’t let him go.

“Help me carry the chicken feed home,” she told him. “The Grubs brought the eggs, but they left me to carry the feed myself. It’s heavy.” Vass called the rest of the children in Graba’s household—the ones without names, the ones who had to make up their own names—“Grubs.” She usually said it in a singsong sort of way. Graba’s Grubs, Graba’s Grubs.

“Can’t,” Rownie said. “I have to do something for Graba.”

“Do what?”

“Deliver a message.”

“What’s the message?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Then I think you’re lying. I think there isn’t really any message, so you should help me carry the chicken feed.” She put the rest of the bread in her mouth and swung the sack at Rownie. He caught one end to keep it from knocking him over. Vass pushed him, and they started walking south. They walked very slowly south, away from the fairgrounds and away from the goblins.

Vass was twice as tall as he was. She could run much faster than he could. She would catch him if he ran.

They reached the south end of the square. The Guard had already left his post at the rusted station doors, market-time duties done for the day.

Rownie jerked one way, pulling Vass with him, and dropped the sack as he bolted the other way, toward the rusted gate. He pushed against the metal latticework and squeezed through, stumbling in. He felt Vass’s hand reach in after him and catch at the edge of his coat. He pulled back.

“Stupid runt!” Vass shouted.

“I have a message from Graba!” Rownie was angry that she wouldn’t let him deliver it, even though there wasn’t really any message to deliver.

“Stupid,” she said. “So stupid. Now the diggers will get you. Can you hear them? Can you hear them behind you?”

Rownie took a step backward, farther in. He didn’t look behind him. “It’s all flooded,” he said. “They dug the tunnel into the River, and now it’s all flooded.” Everyone knew that. The Mayor wanted to build a railcar track between Northside and Southside. He kept trying, but the tunnel kept flooding.

The Mayor also wanted to tear down the ramshackle buildings of Southside and replace them with roads that moved in straight lines. That’s what Graba always said.

“Folks still hear them digging,” Vass told Rownie. “So the diggers are still down there, in the rail tunnel.” She let that thought sink in for a while. It sank. Rownie thought about diggers with skin all gray from soaking in River water. He thought about how they would only remember digging, how they would always move forward and break things in front of them with shovels or pickaxes or just their hands. Diggers were people without hearts, without any will of their own, and they just kept doing whatever task they were set to. Rownie wondered if any of them had struck off downward, disoriented by the flood, and if they might pop out the other side of the world someday. He thought about the tunnels behind him, haunted by digging.

“I’ll protect you,” Vass told him, as sweetly as Vass could say anything. “Come out and carry the sack.”

Rownie stepped backward again. “No,” he said. Now he haunted the tunnels. Now he was something to be afraid of.

Vass spit on the ground. Then she smiled, and it looked like Graba’s smile in miniature. “Where’s my gear oil, runt?” she asked.

Rownie’s heart beat like it wanted to run off without him. “What oil?” Vass had left the house already when Graba gave him the errand. Vass couldn’t have known about it.

“Stop it!” Vass yelled, and Rownie didn’t think she was yelling at him. Her eyes were shut. All the muscles of her face were tightly scrunched. “You can’t! I’m not a Grub. Stop it, stop it!” Vass stumbled away, out of sight. She took the grain sack with her.

Rownie stood absolutely still. He did not understand what had just happened. He carefully put it on a shelf in the back of his mind, with other things he did not understand.

He listened for shovel sounds and shuffling steps behind him. It was quiet, cold, and heavy in the station, just a few feet from the warm open bustle of the market where Vass might still be hiding, waiting for him.

He stood as long as he could, and then he stood for longer. He did not look behind him. He did not hear shovels or steps or any other sign that the diggers were coming. He finally took three steps of his own and squeezed out through the iron doors.

Vass was gone, and most of the market was gone. A few open wagons rolled away from the empty square. The sky was a darker blue than it had been. Almost dusk. He ran.

Scene IV

A CLOSED WAGON STOOD IN THE CENTER of the fairgrounds. It had walls and a rooftop, like a small house on wheels. A crowd had gathered beside it. The sky was still blue overhead, but the sun was already gone.

Rownie climbed down the slope from the road to the green. His feet hurt. He heard drums and a flute, though he didn’t see any musicians. He made his way to the very back of the crowd. He had to stand off to one side to get a view of the wagon around the thick press of people. He found a spot with a view, and then waited for something to happen. He tried to keep still. He kept shifting his weight.

The wall of the wagon fell over. It stopped level to the ground and became the platform of a stage. Curtains hung where the wall used to be, hiding the space inside the wagon. More curtains dropped around the edge of the platform, hiding the space underneath. Trumpets snapped up from the wagon’s roof and played a flourish all by themselves.

A goblin stepped onstage.

Rownie stared. He had never seen one of the Changed before. This one was completely bald, and taller than Rownie thought goblins could get. His sharp ear-tips stuck out sideways from his head, and his eyes were large and flecked with silver and brown. His skin was green; the deep green of thick moss and riverweed. His clothes were patched together from fabric of all different colors.

The goblin bowed. He set two lanterns at both corners of the stage, and then stood in the center. He held several thin clubs in one hand. He watched the audience in a cruel and curious way, the way molekeys watch beetles before they pull off their wings and legs.

Rownie felt like he should be hiding behind something. When the goblin moved, finally, throwing the clubs in the air with a snap of both sleeves, Rownie flinched.

The goblin started to juggle. Then he stomped his foot three times against the platform. A dragon puppet peered out through the curtain behind him. It was made of plaster and paper, and it glowed in golden colors. The puppet breathed fire over the stage. The goblin tossed his clubs up through the dragon breath, and each club caught fire at one end. Then the puppet roared and pulled back through the curtain. The goblin juggled fire.

Rownie tried jumping in place to get a better view. He wanted to be at the very front of the crowd, at the edge of the stage. He tried to push between knees and shoulders to get there. He couldn’t manage it. He clenched his hands and strained forward, but he couldn’t force himself to move.

“It will cost you two coppers to be any closer than this,” said a voice.

Rownie looked. A small, round, and wrinkled goblin stood beside him.

This one had white hair tied tightly behind her head, and a pair of thick eyeglasses on a little brass chain. She had flecks of gold and bright green in her eyes, which were magnified by the eyeglasses. She held out her hand politely, not too far outstretched. The skin of her hand was a deep green-brown, and her fingers were longer than Rownie thought fingers should be.

Rownie took Graba’s pennies from his coat pocket and dropped them in the goblin’s hand.

“Thank you,” she said, nodding once. “You have paid your way through the audience wall, which is the fifth wall, so you are free to cross it and believe it is not there and only made up of a song and a circle in the grass.”

The old goblin moved away. Rownie could hear her voice at the edge of the crowd. “Two coppers if you please, yes?”

He pushed forward, dodging around the knees of many tall people and working his way to the very front. It was easy enough to do.

The fire juggling ended. The tall goblin extinguished the burning clubs, bowed, and withdrew. A smaller goblin with a trim gray beard and a huge black hat stepped onstage. His face was wide and round, and as he walked, his chin went first in front of him. He leaned on a polished cane, which clacked against the floorboards. He was small—shorter than Rownie—but he moved like he knew himself superior to everyone else gathered there.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he said. “You have no doubt heard that our profession has been prohibited by his lordship, the Mayor.”

Some booed. Others cheered. “We’re only here to see you arrested!” someone shouted from the back of the crowd.

The old goblin smiled a polite smile. “I am loath to disappoint my audience, sir, but I believe that I myself, and my companions here, are not so inconvenienced by this law. The citizens of this fair city are prohibited from pretending to be other than they are. We, however, are not citizens. We are not legally considered to be persons. This saddens me, because I lived in this city long before any of you were born, but I will have to quibble with that particular injustice another time. You have come for a play. We will give you a play. We are already Changed—the additional change of a mask and a costume will not do you any harm, and it will not break the law.”

Everyone cheered this time—those who wanted to see the show and those who wanted to see goblin actors dragged off by the Guard, who didn’t believe that any sort of legal loopholes or flummery would prevent this from happening.

“We will first offer a brief tale to delight the children among you,” the goblin said. He took off his hat, and then pulled out the mask of a giant. The mask had a protruding, furrowed forehead and rows of thick, square teeth. Rownie was surprised that the giant mask had fit inside the goblin’s hat—though it was a very large hat.

The old goblin closed his eyes. Everyone was quiet in that moment, and respectful of that silence—whether or not they wanted to be.

He put on the mask and shifted his stance to tower above them all, even though he wasn’t very tall.

“I am a giant,” he said in a giant’s voice, and it was true because he said that it was true.

Rownie wanted to try it. He wanted to declare himself a giant. He tried to focus on standing still and not bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.

A slight little goblin came onstage with a whip, a wooden sword, and enormous eyes behind a brave-looking hero mask. The Hero tried to outwit the Giant.

“I’ve heard that you can change yourself into a lion,” said the goblin-hero in a high, crisp voice, “but I don’t believe you can manage it.”

“Fool,” said the goblin-giant in a very deep voice. “I can change into anything I please!” He dropped the giant mask and pulled a lion mask up over his face with one smooth motion. He snarled and crouched.

The audience cheered, but it was a nervous cheer.

“This is not safe,” said an old man who stood beside Rownie. His spine was so gnarled and bent over that he had to turn his head sideways to see the stage. “Don’t believe it is, just because they’re goblins. No masks and no changes, none. Not safe.”

“That was wonderful!” said the goblin-hero. “But a magnificent lion is not such a small step away from a giant. Can you change into a python?”

The lion reached into its own mouth and turned the mask inside out. It was a snake now, and it shook slowly from side to side.

“Astonishing!” said the goblin-hero. “But a python is still such a large creature. You cannot have so much magic as to transform yourself into a small and humble housefly.”

Metal shutters closed over the stage lanterns. In the sudden dark, Rownie could dimly see the goblin take off his snake mask and toss something in the air.

The lanterns snapped open. A housefly puppet made of paper and gears began to buzz in circles over the stage. The goblin-hero cracked his whip. The housefly exploded in sparks.

“One less giant!” the hero shouted. The crowd clapped. Rownie cheered. “But I wonder if there might be any more?” He peered out into the crowd, and then jumped over the side of the stage. “Any giants over here?” he shouted from somewhere in the dark.

Meanwhile, the old goblin had withdrawn. A gruesome head peered out through the stage curtains, exactly where the dragon puppet had been before. The giant puppet winked at the crowd, one paper eyelid closing over a painted wooden eye.

The puppet spoke. “We must have a volunteer to play our next giant! The mask will fit a child best.”

The audience responded with a stunned silence. No one knew if this was a joke. No one knew if it was funny. Everyone knew that even goblinish legal loopholes could never allow an unChanged child to wear a mask.

Rownie expected to hear some sort of official person make an official refusal. He waited for members of the Guard to come forward and forbid any such thing. But there were no members of the Guard nearby. No one said anything at all.

“The child will be perfectly safe!” said the giant puppet. “You there! The tasty-looking one with a hat. Would you like to perform?” It licked its lips with a long puppet tongue, and the crowd finally laughed a nervous laugh. Someone—a father, uncle, or older brother—pulled the child with the hat away from the stage.

The giant puppet searched with its wooden eyes. “You!” it called out. “The one wearing a flower necklace. Play a giant for our story here, and I promise that you will absolutely not spend the next thousand years enslaved in underground caverns. We would never do any such thing.”

“No!” the girl shouted back.

“Very well, delectable child.” The puppet’s eyes moved. “Is there any one among you brave and foolish enough to stand on this stage and impersonate a person of my own great stature?”

Rownie waved his hand in the air. “I’ll do it!” He wasn’t afraid. He felt like he would be even less afraid if he could stand high up above everyone else. He wanted to command attention, like the old goblin had just done.

The crowd cheered him on, but cruelly, convinced that something awful would certainly happen to him onstage and that they would get to watch it happen. The goblins would take him, and then the Guard would come and take away the goblins. It would be an excellent spectacle to see.

The old man with the bent spine tried to hold Rownie back with one gnarly knuckled hand. “Stupid boy,” he said. “Stupid, stupid boy.” Other dissenting voices cried out from people unwilling to let a child take such a risk.

Rownie pulled away and tried to climb onto the stage, but he couldn’t quite manage it. The stage resisted.

“I offer a compromise!” said the giant puppet. “He may hold the end of an iron chain. The front row of the audience will hold the other end. You can yank him away to safety if the performers here look likely to bite him or curse him or possibly steal him away. Are we agreed? Is this protection enough?”

Some still shouted no, but the rest were louder:

“Let him try it!”

“He’ll be fine if he holds iron.”

“Stupid kack has it coming if he doesn’t!”

Rownie ignored them all. He focused on the giant puppet. The puppet looked down at him. He could see that its eyes were only wood, carved and painted, but he still kept eye contact with it.

“We are agreed,” the Giant said, and withdrew behind the curtain.

The goblin with the trim gray beard and the floppy black hat returned to the stage. He took off his hat and drew a length of chain from it. He spread the chain across the front of the stage and nodded to Rownie.

Guess they can touch iron, Rownie thought. Blotches is such a liar. He took one end of the chain. Other hands took the opposite end.

He pushed forward. He still couldn’t climb onto the stage. It wasn’t very high, but the air would not move aside for him.

The old goblin reached down. “Give me your other hand,” he said in a smaller version of the Giant’s booming voice.

Rownie reached up, took the goblin’s hand, and scrambled onto the stage. He stood, let go of the hand with the long, green fingers, and held the chain. He faced the curtain, away from the audience. Suddenly he didn’t want to turn around and see the crowd looking back at him. He didn’t feel set above everyone else, like he’d expected to. He felt at their mercy. He tried to swallow, but his throat was dry.

The old goblin watched him with gold-flecked eyes half closed, considering. “Tell me your name, brave and foolish boy.”

“Rownie,” said Rownie.

The goblin’s already wide eyes widened. “Rownie? A diminutive of Rowan, I believe. How very interesting.” He tipped his hat. “A pleasure. My own name is Thomas, and I have been the first actor of this troupe and of this city since before the walls and towers fell.” He picked up the discarded giant mask, setting it on Rownie’s shoulders. It was heavy. The paint on it smelled funny.

“Stand there,” the goblin whispered, pointing. “I will give you your lines from backstage.” He passed through the curtains. Rownie was alone in the center of the platform. He stood where he was supposed to stand, and turned around.

Faces watched him from the dark. Rownie could hear them murmuring and mumbling. He knew from the sound that some were worried, and others delighted, and all of them were sure that something awful was about to happen.

Rownie drew up his shoulders, pushed out his chest, and tried to be very tall. He was a giant. He was something awful. He was going to happen to somebody else.

The curtain whispered behind him. “What noise was that within my father’s house?”

Rownie roared. “What noise was that within my father’s house?”

“I smell trespassing blood,” the curtain went on. “Now show yourself.”

“I smell trespassing blood. Now show yourself!”

The goblin-hero jumped back onto the stage. “Hello!” he said. “I have heard boasting that giants can transform themselves into anything they please. I’ve come to see if that proud boast is true.”

“This truth will be the last you ever learn!” Rownie said, echoing the curtain behind him.

The goblin-hero laughed, but it was a frightened laugh. “It would be worth it. Can someone so tall transform into a small and unChanged boy?”

No lines or instructions came from behind the curtain.

Rownie took off the mask with one hand. He set it on the stage beside him, and then held out his arms as if to say Look at me! The chain clinked in his other hand.

“Well done!” the goblin-hero said. “You are small, now, though you still look fierce—”

Rownie grinned. He still felt fierce.

“—but I bet you cannot change into a bird.”

The lantern shutters snapped shut. The goblin tossed a paper bird in the air. At that same moment the front row of the crowd, spooked by the sudden darkness, pulled the iron chain and yanked Rownie forward. He tumbled off the edge of the stage.

He felt hands trying to catch him, but he fell through them, hit the ground, and rolled onto his back. He could see the glowing paper bird fly above the dark silhouettes of people standing around him. The bird exploded in sparks, and a cloud of paper feathers drifted down.

“One less giant!” said the goblin-hero from the stage.

Rownie got to his feet. Those around him poked and pinched his arms to make sure he was still there and still real. Then the giant puppet returned, and then roared. It captured their attention. It almost captured Rownie’s attention, but he looked away. He didn’t want to be reminded that he was outside the story now. He wanted to savor how it had felt to be in the midst of it.

A hand emerged from the red cloth that skirted the bottom of the platform. It waved him closer.

Rownie looked around. No one else had noticed, not even the old man with his neck craned sideways.

The hand waved again. Rownie felt like he was about to jump over the side of the Fiddleway.

He ducked underneath the stage.

Scene V

IT WAS DARK BENEATH THE STAGE platform. Rownie had to hunch forward like the old man with the bent spine. He turned his head to look around. It didn’t help.

A lantern shutter clicked open, but only slightly. Rownie saw gold-flecked eyes staring at him from behind a pair of eyeglasses. “Well done,” the goblin, the one to whom he had given two copper coins, whispered. “Yes, it was well done. Do you need something to drink? I find lemon tea soothing after speaking to a crowd.”

“Okay,” said Rownie. His neck started to hurt. He sat on the ground, so he wouldn’t have to hold his head at odd angles anymore. The goblin handed him a wooden mug, lacquer-smooth and filled with hot tea. He smelled it and took a sip. He tasted lemon and honey.

“Tell me your name, yes?” the goblin said.

Rownie glanced at her over the edge of the steaming mug. She was smiling, but he couldn’t tell what kind of smile it was. This was strange to him. He always knew exactly how the rest of Graba’s household felt, because none of them knew how to hide it. Graba herself never bothered to conceal her moods and wishes—her face was as easily readable as words spelled out in burning oil in the middle of the street. Rownie was used to that. The goblin, however, wrote her smile in a language that Rownie didn’t know and couldn’t read.

“Rownie,” he said.

“Hello, Rownie,” she said. “I thought that this might be your name. Mine is Semele. Yes, it is. And I am wondering whether you have heard news of your brother.”

Rownie stared at her. He knew what she had asked him, but he didn’t understand why she had asked. “My brother Rowan?”

“Yes, Rowan,” said Semele. “A decent young actor, that one, and he has been missing for some time. Have you heard from him?”

“No,” Rownie said, suspicious. If he had heard from his brother, he probably wouldn’t tell anyone about it—not Graba, and certainly not goblins.

“Well,” the goblin said, “please tell him hello if you see him. In the meanwhile, I wonder if you might be interested in remaining with us. We have many performances to make—we play at the Broken Wall tomorrow and down by the docks on the day after that—and we very certainly could use another voice, another pair of hands. Is this something you would like?”

Rownie blinked. Yes, he would like to stand onstage again. Yes, definitely yes. “It might,” he said aloud, still suspicious. Living in Graba’s household had taught him to be suspicious whenever anyone offered him exactly what he wanted. “Can I watch the rest of the play first?”

“Of course,” said Semele.

Rownie finished his tea and set the mug on the ground. Semele pointed to the back of the wagon. Rownie half walked and half crawled underneath the stage. He emerged between the cloth’s edge and a wagon wheel.

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.

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 tell 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.

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.

“Do you see him, now?” asked Stubble from outside the car. “Have you found him?”

Vass looked directly at Rownie. “No, Graba,” she said. “He isn’t here.”

“Be sure about it,” said Stubble. “And bring me back a mirror if you can find an unbroken one, and also a new cushion for my chair.”

“Yes, Graba,” said Vass. “I think the runt might have ducked into the tunnel. It’s not as flooded down there as it should be.”

“Seven curses on the several chins of the Lord Mayor,” said Stubble. “He’s pumping the water out of it again. I can hear the breathing and the clanking of his siphons, making it dry. I will go looking there.”

“Yes, Graba,” said Vass.

She went to sit at one of the copper tables, crossed her legs, and folded her hands in front of her. She wasn’t so much taller than Rownie while sitting.

Rownie sat in the chair across from her. “Thank you,” he whispered, and he meant it—but he also meant it as a question. He couldn’t remember a single time that Vass had helped him with anything, and this seemed like an unlikely moment for her to start. It was no small thing to lie to Graba.

Vass waved his thanks away with one hand. “She treated me like a Grub today. She can’t do that. I won’t let her do that, not to me. She wears them. She uses them to go places. She’s always moving, always, even when she’s still at home and upstairs. But I won’t let her wear me. I’m not a Grub.”

“Me neither,” said Rownie, and he hoped it was true. “I’ve got a name.”

Vass smiled her cruel smile. “No, you don’t,” she said. “You just have Rowan’s name, made small. But Graba can’t wear you.”

Rownie very much hoped that she wasn’t lying. “Why not?”

“Because you’ve got a little talent for wearing masks,” Vass said. “Why do you think she keeps you around?” She took a cushion from the chair beside her, looked it over, and knocked some of the dust out by whacking it against the table.

Rownie tried to blink the dust cloud out of his eyes. “Why would masks matter to Graba?”

“Forget it,” said Vass. “What matters to Graba shouldn’t much matter to you, not anymore. I’m going to douse the lights. We’ll leave then. We’ll stop looking for you, once it’s dark.”

“Thanks for helping me hide,” Rownie said.

Vass shook her head, forcefully, like there was something stuck to her nose and she wanted it off. “Don’t thank me,” she said. “I’m not helping you. I’m not doing this for you.” She stood up, still holding the cushion. “Wherever you go after tonight,” she said, “wherever you end up, just make sure to keep away from the riverbank. The River’s angry. The floods are coming.”

The floods are coming. The floods were always coming, but Rownie couldn’t remember a time when they actually came. It was just something people said—though there was a difference to the way Vass said it, as though the floods were coming soon.

Rownie wanted to ask what she meant, but Vass was no longer paying attention to him. Her eyes lost their focus and looked somewhere else.

“My charm is now ended,” she chanted softly. “The knots are untied.” Rownie felt the air change around them. He felt the world change shape to her words.

The lights went out. Rownie heard Vass leave the railcar in the dark.

Various Grubs shouted their protests outside. They spoke like Grubs now, and not like Graba.

“You’re a kack at the witchwork,” said Blotches. “Shouldn’t get to keep your name.”

“I’m still learning,” Vass answered him, sullen. “And I can’t keep anything lit for long without oil to burn. Maybe we should stick a wick in Greasy and use him for a lantern.”

“Shut it,” said Greasy.

“The runt probably doubled back and left already,” Vass said, “or else he went down the tunnel, and the diggers got him.”

“There aren’t really any diggers in the tunnel,” said Greasy. “Are there?”

“Oh yes,” said Vass. “Of course there are. Want to see? Should we toss you down there?”

“Shut it!” said Greasy.

The noise of their voices faded as they found their way out of the Southside Rail Station.

Rownie was left alone.

Scene VIII

ROWNIE TRIED TO SUMMON up the feeling that he was haunting the Southside Rail Station, and that other sorts of haunting things should be afraid of him—but he couldn’t quite convince himself that this was true. He felt sure and certain that there were diggers in the tunnel. He felt unsure and uncertain about what Vass had told him.

Graba can’t wear you—you’ve got a little talent for wearing masks.

Rowan had been very good with masks. He had been wearing one the last time Rownie had seen him, the last time anyone had seen him. That had been months ago, in a Southside alehouse.

“This is just a little alehouse show,” Rowan said. “We’ll stand on tables in the back. Maybe the crowd will listen to us while they eat their supper. Maybe they won’t.”

“Bet the Guard’ll come,” said Greasy. “They’ve been taking actors away. They make ’em into diggers.”

Rowan smiled, and shook his head. “We’re in Southside,” he said. “Since when does Southside pay much attention to the sillier edicts of our good Lord Mayor? Don’t worry about it.”

“Just don’t wear a mask of Graba,” said Vass. “She hates the thought that anyone might ever take her place.”

“You imitate Graba’s voice all the time,” Rowan reminded her. He switched into a Graba-voice of his own. “Run some errands for me, child. Go fetch me the sun and the moon and the stars by suppertime. Do that for me, now.”

Rownie laughed, and Rowan laughed. It felt like the same laugh.

Vass didn’t laugh. Her forehead creased. “Masks are different,” she said.

“Do you get to wear any big, scowly pirate masks?” Rownie asked his older brother.

“Looks like you’re wearing one already,” Rowan told him. He reached down and poked Rownie’s real nose with the tip of one finger. “Nice mask, there.”

“Yours is even scowlier,” Rownie said, and then the two of them tried to top each other for the best scowly face until it was time for the show to start.

“Here,” said Rowan. “Hold my coat until the play is done.” He gave Rownie his dust-colored overcoat, and then ducked behind a curtain made of two sheets and a broomstick.

The characters in the play didn’t have proper names. The hero was called Youth, and he went on adventures and kept trying to do heroic things. Rowan, behind a bearded, grinning mask, played Youth’s best friend, Vice. He carried a broken sword, pulled pennies out of other actors’ ears with a quick sleight of hand, and used the pennies to buy wine. He kept trying to get Youth to drink his wine.

Once, Rowan looked out into the audience, caught Rownie’s eye, and winked behind the Vice mask.

“He’ll get arrested,” said Greasy. “They’ll take him away and torture him, and then they’ll make him into a digger.”

“Shut it,” said Vass. “I’m trying to listen.”

“They will not. They will not.” Rownie whispered twice. But it was right at that moment that the Guard marched through the door.

The alehouse became very quiet. Everyone put down their mugs and their plates.

The captain of the Guard stepped onto a stool, and then onto a table. The patrons whose table it was quickly moved their food out of his way. The Captain unrolled a parchment, cleared his throat, and read from it.

“It is not lawful to wear masks in Zombay. A barge sailor has learned his skill and craft, but an actor may wear a mask and mimic his manner without any such skills. If the actor tried to steer a barge, he would run it aground.”

The actors laughed. “Probably,” one of them said.

“A Guard has earned the right to wear a sword,” the Captain continued, “through service and sacrifice. An actor cheapens that right by wearing a mask and swinging swords for show.”

No one laughed. One of the actors was playing a Guard. Wide wooden gears protruded from the actor’s mask where the eyes should be. The small glass gears of the Captain’s eyes rotated in short, ticking increments as he read.

“It is a great honor to be an alderman. An actor can siphon away this honor by wearing masks and robes to mimic the outward show of their office. Therefore, by order of the Lord Mayor of all Zombay, the business of plays will cease. Players are liars. Citizens may not be players and must not pretend to be other than they are.”

The rest of the Guard arrested each actor and led them away from the makeshift stage. Rowan still wore his mask, and the mask was grinning. Rownie couldn’t see what his brother’s face was doing underneath.

They marched Rowan to the door beneath the ticking glare of the Guard Captain, who still stood on the table. Rowan’s mask grinned up at the Captain. Then Rowan kicked one of the table legs. It broke. The Guard Captain fell forward with a clang and a crash.

Rowan jumped aside, dodged around flailing arms, and disappeared into the back rooms, where the kitchens were. Rownie could hear broken plates and angry yells after two of the Guard followed Rowan. The Captain got to his feet and shouted in his very loud voice. One of his copper boots was dented, and the foot stuck out at an odd angle.

“We’d better go,” said Greasy.

“Obviously,” said Vass.

Rownie stared at the kitchen doorway. He wanted to follow his brother. He wanted to know for sure and certain that Rowan had gotten safely away. But too much had happened, too quickly, and now the commotion was already over. He held Rowan’s coat tightly to him while he followed Vass and Greasy. They all slunk out and away from the alehouse.

Rownie had hoped that his brother would be waiting for them at Graba’s shack, even though he was too old and too tall to still sleep there. He couldn’t bunk with the rest of his troupe, not now that everyone had been arrested, and the shack would be a very good place to hide him from the Guard. The Guard always kept clear of Graba. But Rowan didn’t show up to hide in the shack. Days and weeks went by without any word.

He’s still hiding, Rownie told himself, over and again. Maybe he sailed away downstream to get clear of the Guard. But he’ll come back, and then we’ll sail away together and fight pirates, or else we’ll be pirates. He’ll come back.

Rownie wondered how his brother would find him now that he had run away from Graba’s household and was curled up in an abandoned railcar and listening for diggers in the tunnel.

He tried to remember the giant mask on his shoulders. He tried to imagine himself as a giant, towering and untouchable. He also tried to imagine himself Rowan-like, moving easily through the world and laughing along with everything in it. He wrapped Rowan’s coat more tightly around himself and curled up on the cushioned railcar seat. He felt very small.

Sleep was impossible. Then the rushing excitement of running and hiding drained away from him and left exhaustion behind. Somehow he slept.

He dreamed that Rowan still wore the vice mask he had been wearing at the alehouse. The mask grinned. That was what it did best.

Dream Rowan reached up and turned the mask inside out. It became a mask of Graba, with one eye squinting and the other eye wide. Then it was Graba who stood there, and no longer Rowan. She perched on the edge of the goblin stage. She reached behind her with one bird’s foot, a real bird’s foot covered with black and purple scales, like a guzzard’s. She pulled back the curtain. Behind the curtain was the River. It flooded through and covered the stage and covered the city.

Rownie woke up. He felt the cushioned chair underneath him, expecting to find the straw floor of Graba’s shack. He didn’t, and he didn’t know why—not until he gathered up all the pieces of yesterday and put them back together in his head. Then he remembered how alone he was.

Sunlight peered down through the tarnished glass of the arched ceiling, outside the railcar. It was morning. Pigeons roosted on the tops of the hanging clocks. They seemed to be ignoring him. He didn’t think they were Graba’s birds. He didn’t think so.

He crept out of the station and slipped through the bars of the rusted gate. A few scattered people were going about their morning business. He picked a direction and started walking.

Zombay was a different place to him now, and for the first time in his life Rownie felt lost in it.