Free Goblin Secrets by William Alexander Page A

together. Semele poured tea. Thomas brought out the bread basket.
    “Let us see what sort of supper we can make from the materials at hand,” he said. “We have dried things andpickled things—preserved for emergencies against our starvation—and we have bread that young Kaile offered us at the Broken Wall, which was very kind of her. However, the whole of our provisions will make an unbecoming meal for artists of our stature and accomplishment.”
    “Ate wild rat last winter,” said Patch.
    “That was unbecoming also,” said Thomas.
    “I kind of liked rat,” said Essa.
    Thomas made a harrumphing noise. He took the basket around to each member of the troupe. The gentleman’s cane he carried stuck into the muddy ground a little as he walked, and he had to pull it free with every step.
    “The bread also comes with a complimentary review of our performance,” Thomas said. “The girl especially enjoyed The Seven Dancers .”
    “Oh good,” Essa said, “though we really should change that name. There’s only one of me.”
    “You imply the others well enough,” Thomas said.
    The basket came to Rownie, and Rownie cautiously reached in. He took a bread roll. His hand brushed against the bird mask that was still there.
    He was, of course, hungry. The unpoisoned apple from the morning seemed like days and weeks ago. But he wondered what the dried and pickled things were. Maybe goblins ate moths and flowers. Maybe they ate children’s toes.
    Did you eat what they gave you? Graba had asked him. Did you drink what they offered? He wondered what would happen to him if he did.
    They passed around pieces of salted riverfish instead of children’s toes, and a few dried fruits instead of dried insects, and they sipped Semele’s tea from wooden mugs while Thomas strummed a song on a battered bandore. The bread was still warm from the Broken Wall bakery, and it was tasty enough to make him want to crawl inside a bed-sized loaf and fall asleep. The riverfish was salty and chewy and excellent. The tea was lemony and sweet.
    Rownie was impressed that the goblins shared food more freely than anyone in Graba’s household ever did, and he resisted the urge to sneak some dried fruit into his only pocket. He could feel himself relax. His legs no longer prepared themselves to start running at any given moment. He stopped looking around for ghouls or the Guard. He let his toes warm up by the fire.
    Then Thomas leaned toward Rownie. The old goblin did not pause in his playing, but he no longer seemed to be paying much attention to the song either.
    “Tell me, young sir: Where in all the vastness of Zombay would your brother hide?”
    Rownie coughed on a mouthful of tea, and spit most of it out again. Lemony droplets sizzled in the cook fire.
    “Pardon the abrupt rudeness of my question,” Thomas said, “but we have been looking for Rowan with some concern. We had taught him the language of masks, and he spoke it very well—better than anyone else in that amateur and unChanged troupe of his. Then we left Zombay for an important piece of business, far downstream. We returned to find his troupe arrested and undone, and Rowan himself escaped but missing. The Broken Wall is the very last place he was known to perform. Do you have any notion where he might be hiding now?”
    The circle of goblins all stared at Rownie with their large, bright-flecked eyes. Rownie tried not to cough again. The world had just changed shape, and he didn’t recognize the new shape it was in.
    “You know my brother?” he asked.
    “Yes, indeed,” said Thomas. “A fine fellow, and a respectful student, though he also had a sense of mischief appropriate to our profession.”
    Rownie had as much trouble swallowing this as he had just had swallowing tea. He knew that his brother’s life and world were larger than Graba’s shack, but he didn’t enjoy the thought that he knew so very little about it, or that these goblins might know Rowan better than he