The Girl and the Goblin Prince

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!

Once, there was a young goblin prince who lived under the earth on a long-forgotten island. Forgotten by the rest of the world, I mean, but not by its inhabitants. After all, the young goblin was surrounded by his sixteen brothers and sisters—some as ancient as the bushes outside, others younger than he—mere toddlers.

They lived quiet lives—when they weren’t bickering over choice earth creatures to eat (now dwindling since The Great Fight of ’45 when the older siblings finished off all the sheep on the island, somehow forgetting that man-helmed ships had not passed their way for many a year by then. Where would they get new food supply without those ships?

The young goblin—I suppose it’s time to tell you his name is Grubhurst—didn’t remember what happened to his parents beyond some vague images that pressed against his memory. The tunnels beneath the island held echoes of their voices, reverberating against stone walls worn smooth by countless goblin hands. Not even his favorite sister, Prismilla could, or would, tell him, if she remembered. No one spoke of them anymore, or explained why since they disappeared, time had frozen on their island, such that the youngest gobs still looked as if they’d been born mere years ago.

Grubhurst felt certain it had to be at least a century since he last saw His and Her Majesty Goblin (okay, so he wasn’t actually so young, but he was young when time seemed to freeze over at the moment of his parents’ disappearance).

No matter; he took care of the island while his brothers squabbled over moles, and the island took care of him—so far.

And he wasn’t lonely—not really.

Everything changed the day the ship came.

The day had dawned like any other. Grubhurst woke with one of his siblings’ toes in the corner of his mouth (at least he hadn’t been chewing it in his sleep this time—that had been awkward). The air in their sleeping chamber tasted of damp earth and the particular musk of too many goblins in one burrow. She kicked him awake when his drool dribbled down the side of her foot, and this set off the usual chain reaction that sent everyone scrambling for the surface in search of the first meal.

“Foggy, this,” Prismilla said, when they had settled on a couple squirrels for their breakfast at their usual spot. They liked to hunt on their own (less sharing that way) and eat in a small clearing among the ruins of an old lighthouse. The stones smelled of salt and time, and lichen crept across them in patterns like ancient script. No one knew who’d built it—certainly not the goblins, who never built anything above ground. It had to have been humans from long before their time, but who knew? Goblins had no head for history and kept no books.

Grubhurst looked up and grunted in response. It was still early enough that the sun hadn’t quite peeked over the tallest hill on their island yet, and the fog gave the land an eerie glow he couldn’t name—something like an in-between feeling like stepping through a waterfall and finding the world on the other side wasn’t the same as the one behind.

A fleeting image flashed across his mind; dark brown robes disappearing through a misty veil, hurried whispers promising a swift return. Goosebumps rose on his moss-green skin. The last time he had this feeling, time had stopped for a hundred years.

Prismilla had finished off the last squirrel tail when a little brother, Bubhurst, charged through the ferns into their hiding spot.

“People! A Ship! Come see!”

“That’s not possible,” Grubhurst said, shaking his head.

“Not possible,” Prismilla echoed.

But they sprang to their feet and scrambled after Bubhurst to the cliffs, where their fourteen other siblings stood near the edge, craning their necks as far as they could go. Grubhurst heard the hubbub long before he saw a single goblin.

“Where is it?” Hubszilla yelled.

“I don’t see it,” Brimsilla said.

“Man pies, man pies!” shrieked littlest Rimlurst.

The oldest of them all, Tribthurst, roared for attention, and the lot of them quieted. “Now, now,” he said in his gravelly voice, “we don’t know how many humans are on that ship, and I may as well tell you now that it’s been marooned on the rocks in the shallows, but we know we want this meal to last between all of us, so let’s not be too hasty.”

At once, protests drowned out Tribthurst’s next words, so he had to roar once more.

Grubhurst didn’t hear what his eldest brother said next, though. He was sneaking away.

Goblins aren’t known for their stealth, but those on this island have had to learn a bit, thanks to the dwindling food supply. Grubhurst prided himself on being the quietest among his siblings—his steps almost as undetectable as Hobbits—but he didn’t need such skill in the midst of the clamour. And it wouldn’t help him out on the open beach when he approached the ship.

The sight of it out on the shoals surprised him. It was smaller than he expected, and seemed devoid of life. The wood creaked and groaned against the rocks, a slow death song accompanied by the hiss of waves withdrawing over barnacled stone. The stillness of the morning could have deceived him into thinking it was one like any other, except for the foreign sight of the vessel near the island’s shore. He wondered if any of his siblings were looking toward the sea, or if they were still squabbling about how best to ambush the unsuspecting humans. He hoped it was the latter, as he steeled himself to spring out from the shelter of the trees.

Just before he had made up his mind to head toward the ship, however, he saw a small figure fighting against the current and swimming toward the beach.

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.

Two and twenty years later, Aletta didn’t know what she was thinking when she lowered herself by a rope into the ocean—only that it had to be better than staying on board with her histrionic second aunt, Jolande, who was still sleeping off her last hysterical night of weeping and wailing about their plight, and her equally frantic youngest aunt, Jantine, and Uncle Lars. Below deck, the air had grown thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, stale biscuit, and the sour tang of fear-sweat. At the very least, they couldn’t stay stranded on their ship forever. Her father’s stoic reaction to the ship wandering off course and venturing into this unknown shouldn’t have surprised her. But she’d always mistaken it for equanimity, not indifference, as it now seemed. Odd, how a crisis revealed people for who they were.

For example: Aletta wasn’t a risk-taker. Not really.

Or rather, she didn’t know if she was one. She’d never had the chance to test it. She knew only that she had to get out from under her aunt’s smothering protectiveness for once in her life.

And so, here she was, rowing a boat she barely knew how to row and had no business taking, toward a landmass she was sure could only feature all her aunt’s worst fears: deadly creatures, savages, and the like.

After seven months at sea, however, Aletta could not quite allow herself to fear the unknown more than the suffocating known. Yet.

It didn’t take long for her to realise her rowing skills were nonexistent. Before she had time to think of all the reasons she shouldn’t, she dropped the oars into the boat and flung herself into the sea toward land. The shock of cold water drove the breath from her lungs. Salt stung her eyes and filled her mouth with the metallic taste of the deep. Her aunt’s overprotectiveness had at least given her a strong stroke with which she now utilised to its fullest extent. Of course, that same overprotective voice was now screaming all kinds of obscenities in Aletta’s mind. Common sense chided her, too: one should not swim in unfamiliar waters. But rather than shrinking into herself as she would have if faced with her mother in the flesh, Aletta smiled as the briny water washed over her, blurring her vision and filling her mouth with salt. Nothing was before her. Nothing was behind. It was just her. And the sea. The water held her with cold hands, buoyant and indifferent. Though she kept her eyes trained on beach so she wouldn’t stray from her path, she relished the feel of the ocean all around her; the power of her limbs propelling her forward after so many months of inertia filled her chest with an expanse that she felt could contain a universe.

When Aletta’s feet touched sand, she startled. Her head burst through the water’s surface, and she gulped lungfuls of fresh air, the scent of sea still clinging to her every fiber. The sand beneath her toes felt coarse and cool, each grain distinct against waterlogged skin. Only belatedly did she realise she had brought no change of clothes.

Wringing out her hair, she slopped her way onto the shore, her eyes scanning the foggy land. The fog moved like something alive, curling around her ankles with fingers of mist that left her skin damp and prickling. Except for the crash of waves on the boulders to her left and the faraway cliff on her right, birdsong, and the chirping of crickets yet to sleep, she heard nothing else.

And then. Just above the murmur of nature sounds, so dim she might have mistaken it for one of them—a hiss, low and urgent. She froze. The hiss came again, and with attuned ears, Aletta heard words in it: “Get out of the open; come into the trees. Quickly, quickly. Run. Run!”

Sparing but a single thought that this could be the death of her at last, Aletta’s tight muscles clenched to action once more. Her wet clothes clung to her legs, the fabric heavy as chains. She stumbled and tripped over sand and rocks—her limbs a wobbly tangle after the swim—toward the thicket, where the siren or friendly warning seemed to come from. Perhaps it was a mere imagination, but she felt eyes as if from above peering down and fixing on her—not the solicitous sort, but a sharp yet wary sort of gaze. The feeling sparked fresh strength into her legs; she sprang forward. The earthy scent of pine and coconut of gorse filled her nostrils as she crashed in among the trees. Branches caught at her hair and dress, leaving scratches that stung with sap. She had no time to think of where to hide before a hand pulled her down behind a large moss-covered boulder, and another—knobbly, weathered like an old tree branch—covered her mouth.

Aletta struggled against her attacker with flailing limbs, not helped by the scant offerings on board the ship. Her muscles trembled from cold and exhaustion. She freed her mouth and bit the hand, drawing a sharp yelp from its owner. The taste was like biting into bark—woody, bitter, with an undertone of mushroom.

“Stop. Stop! If you don’t want to be a goblin’s dinner, stop!”

Aletta did not stop. After all, she had not survived corsets, and familial scoldings, and rigid rules made for boxing in wayward girls by obeying commands she deemed nonsensical. She instead spat to expel the revolting earthen taste of the hand from her mouth, saying as she did so, “And who are you? A troll also waiting to eat me—are goblins your relatives? A wight, dragging me into the earth?” Aletta said such things with irony, not truly believing the speaker’s words about goblins and other eldritch creatures. Yet as she wearied and looked down, she saw dark green skin as gnarled as it felt.

“Heaven on earth!” she exclaimed, followed by a number of choice expletives picked up from her “good-for-nothing” uncle (second-aunt’s words, not Aletta’s), and she suddenly jumped up to kick the thing square in the chest.