Prologue

This is the first of four parts to a novelette I started writing over a year ago. 😭 I'd say that a year is a significant improvement to the 4-5 years I spent on A Girl Made of Time, for those familiar with that back story.

Tonally, The Girl and the Goblin Prince is similar to A Girl Made of Time. It's more straightforward and happier, though (see? I can write happy-ish stories!).

Fun fact: the story emerged after a cruise last year, during which the ship passed by a tiny island with a lighthouse. I asked my son, "What do you think is on that island?"

"Goblins," he said.

"What would they eat? There's nothing there."

"Maybe they live underground and they come out and eat people from ships who stop there."

And so...here we are.

I hope you enjoy!

When Aletta was two months old, her mother walked into the thick mist of the dawn-not-quite-morning without stockings or shoes, and never returned.

She thought of that day now, as she stood on the ship’s deck, where she could hardly see two feet before her. She imagined her mother disappearing into such a fog, imagined her setting her face to the mountains and never turning back to look at the husband and child she was leaving behind.

Aletta shivered and rubbed the goosebumps on her arms. Aunt Jolande would scold for certain if she didn’t return belowdecks before the breakfast bell woke everyone, yet Aletta did not at once turn toward the narrow staircase to descend, but cast her gaze to the distance. She tried to imagine what her mother might have seen when she’d walked away that morn, whether she had felt a tug  pulling her back toward the babe in the house she was leaving, or if the call of the mountains was too strong to resist. Such magic was, after all, well known in their hometown.

These thoughts had not been voiced aloud for many years. Aletta’s father scoffed at the superstitions she had picked up from the villagers.

“Your mother left because she was too selfish to stay with us. It’s as simple as that,” he said to Aletta, early and often.

But in the village, the woman who sold Aletta eggs and snuck green onion crisps into her basket whispered of ancient goblin magic long known in those parts.

“Everyone knows.” she’d say under her breath, “The wise don’t go to the Taipingshan. The spirits there whisk the unsuspecting to other worlds. We’ll never see your mother again, I fear. She dabbled in things she didn’t understand.”

Other whispers were less kind. The same children who laughed at Aletta’s strange green eyes also called her the daughter of a witch. “You’ll get eaten by the mountain spirits, just like your witchy mama,” they laughed, dancing circles around her.

The rumors and her father’s dismissive air did little to dispel Aletta’s imagination, alas. Even at two and twenty years old, she looked at mountains with a kind of reverence her relatives raised their eyebrows at, wondering if she might one day climb the same mountain and find traces of her mother where others failed.

Heavy footsteps interrupted Aletta’s thoughts. She recognized her father’s gait without turning, but kept her gaze on the horizon until he came to stand beside her.

“Come inside, Aletta,” her father said.

She did not answer him at first, but forced her hands to unclench before he could notice. Forced her voice to steady despite the chill.

“The air refreshes me.”

From her peripheral vision, she saw him stiffen in the way she knew well that told her of his displeasure. She wanted him to argue, wanted him to scold her for her folly—anything except the distance he held between them.

She wanted to ask him why he let her mother go.

Aletta’s father said, “As you will,” before the plod of his departing footsteps sounded in her ears.