Page 5 of The Goblin and The Dancer
Grik suddenly realized, with a horrible, sinking feeling, that he was standing in front of the same food booth that he had gone to every night for the last year. That he was doing exactly the same thing, just like everyone around him.
“I changed my mind,” Grik sighed. “I’m not hungry.”
“You’ve got to eat something, brother,” Beck urged, possibly because he was more distressed at seeing a sale walk away than by the emptiness of Grik’s stomach.
Grik thought of that soldier again, and his last hunger pang disappeared. “No, thank you,” he mumbled, shuffling away.
He shuffled down the cobblestone street so like the streets above them, except these were grey stone, not rosy brick. Most things here were grey, including him. He was tired of grey. He had once worn a blue necktie, for novelty. He thought it was nice to have a bit of sky wrapped around his neck, but when he got odd looks he had put it away.
He was at his apartment door. He had once thought of offering to swap with someone else on his street—all goblin houses looked more or less the same inside, but at least he could change location. But he hadn’t the nerve to ask.
He opened the door with his key and then turned for a moment on the threshold, watching his neighbors and fellow goblins rush about their evening’s work.
He liked them, he really did. But they made him feel sad, because they didn’t understand him. There wasn’t a single person here in which he could confide his heartache. He had a few friends who would be sympathetic and kind if he told them his heart was broken, but he couldn’t tell them who had broken it. They wouldn’t understand. And he didn’t want a piece of partial sympathy, he wanted someone to understand.
He was different. Were there other goblins who felt the way he did, and they hadn’t admitted it? Other goblins worked up top. Maybe they felt like Grik. Why else would they get jobs in an elvish city? Maybe they were there for the better pay, but it was possible they were there because they liked it. Maybe there were dozens of goblins who felt as Grik did. But none of them were brave enough to admit it. None of them had yet dared to be different.
Grik writhed at his own cowardice, at the cowardice he imagined all of the up-top goblins hiding, and at the expectations of those down belong that kept them from speaking out.
He shut the door. Grik looked around the familiar living room. A tiny kitchen and a sturdy table with a chair. A nice stone shelf that served as a bed—good and hard, with a rough, wool blanket for warmth.
It was a perfectly nice house. It was neat and comfortable and traditional. There was nothing wrong with it.
He just didn’t like it anymore. He wanted a change. Another thing goblins didn’t usually yearn after.
Once, he had tried to redecorate, even though it wasn’t usually done. When he visited other goblin homes, they never had elvish decorations on their walls. He told himself to be brave and start a new fashion and hung up a very small painting he had bought in a secondhand shop in La Caen.
He thought they looked rather nice side by side—the delicacy of elvish art and the sturdiness of goblin décor made a nice contrast to his mind. But then a distant cousin had come for some sludge tea and commented, “That looks funny.”
Grik had been hurt as well as mortified. “I thought it looked nice,” he had muttered.
His cousin had shaken his head as if he had seen something very strange. “Goblins and elves don’t mix.”
“Yes, we do, every day,” Grik mumbled, sounding rather sulky.
“Hmm, yes, well, some goblins might try to fit in up there,” his cousin said tartly. “But normal goblins don’t. Our lives, our tastes, they look ridiculous when we try to put them together. It’s not done.”
Grik shrank inside his tunic. After sitting through a tea he couldn’t enjoy, he took the painting down and hid it beneath his bed. He gave up on the rest of his idea—bringing a little goblin décor into the elvish theater—and threw out the pretty rocks he had been going to give out to the stagehands when he remembered that in all the elvish buildings he had been in, he had never seen any goblin works of art.
Maybe everyone else was right—the two races didn’t mix.
He kicked at a table, then jumped up and down, clutching at his toes and groaning. The table had been stone—like everything else in the house. He really was getting used to the world above if he had forgotten his table wasn’t made out of wood.
He took a deep breath and then closed his eyes. Beyond the shuttered windows, he could hear the hustle of the streets.
Stone Town was always rather loud, full of talking and traffic and, beyond that, the sound of the mines. They didn’t have a theater, and their music was the working songs that the miners perpetually sang with no instruments but the click of their chisels and the thud of their hammers. It was a familiar and comforting beat that he clung to now. But, all the same, he wished for new things, for shining, otherworldly strings to be melded with the hearty, dark rhythms of his home.
He wished for the impossible.
He pulled the scratchy goblin blanket over his head and dreamed of an elf.
Chapter Three
At some point in the night, while tossing on his small pallet, Grik’s grief was overcome by his rising anger. Fury was a far easier thing to feel than pain. The feeling bubbled inside of him with the same fervor as the cup of sludge he had heated that morning.
He kept thinking of Rosanna, of how enchanting she had been and what joy she brought with her dancing . . . and how that joy had been crushed when that stupid soldier had claimed her enchantment for his own. The thought of some arrogant dandy sweeping in to steal his love out from under his nose was more than Grik could bear.
Paul didn’t love Rosanna; he couldn’t—he merely claimed her as he probably did everything else in life. His flirtatious attentions couldn’t hold a candle to Grik’s faithful affections.
