The goblin man sat at the end of the kitchen table, a third teacup in front of him. His cloak hung next to the door; without it, he was dressed in simply cut stonespun robes, scarlet as the sunset and edged in polished amethysts. Aliya studied him, the warmth of her own teacup soaking into her hands.
“What are you called?” asked Mama, when the goblin man seemed uninclined to break the silence.
“Dov,” he said, in that same soft baritone.
Mama nodded. “Call me Esther,” she said. “What brings you to our home, Dov?”
Dov sighed and took a long sip of tea before setting the cup delicately down in its saucer once more. “I am… going into exile,” he said carefully. “I cannot stay in the City Below for the coming year, and I obviously can’t stay in the City Above either.” He gestured to himself as he said those words, then quieted again, seeming unsure of what to say next.
“Where are you going instead?” asked Aliya.
“Out into the wasteland,” Dov said. “The Goblin Queen cannot stop my exile, but she has offered her assistance to me in other ways—and it was she who said you might be able to help.”
Aliya’s brow furrowed. “I can’t make my grandmother rescind a verdict,” she pointed out. “Or overrule one she didn’t give, if she isn’t already inclined to do so.”
“No, that’s not—” Dov stopped, staring into the middle distance with unfocused eyes, glittering dark blue irises and catlike slitted pupils. His fingers drummed on the table, pale granite skin clicking against its surface.
She watched him curiously as he thought. He had unusual facial features for a goblin from Tauaveya; his nose arched prominently forwards, rather than sitting close to the plane of his face, and the stone of his cheeks was cut like sharp human cheekbones rather than the softer, rounded shape that goblin faces tended to have.
Maybe he wasn’t from Tauaveya. Aliya had only met a handful of goblins who came from elsewhere in the world, not nearly enough to start generalizing.
“I am not entirely free to speak as I wish,” he said eventually, picking carefully over his words. “I cannot explain to you the context for this, or my reasons. But what I can say is this: I came here to request that you join me in my little fortress in the wasteland and live with me there for a year and a day.”
Aliya stared at him. “What?” she said blankly, taken completely off guard. A moment later, the rest of her brain caught up to what he was asking of her, and she held up a hand before he could make his request again. “I heard,” she said. “Can you elaborate? Tell me how you’re planning on this to go? I don’t know if I’ll go, but—I’ll hear you out, at least.”
“Thank you,” said Dov, lips curling up at the corners to reveal a flash of blocky pyrite teeth, and then he began to explain.
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From the edge of the Hanging Gardens on Sinaveya’s thirty-first level, Aliya watched the sun rise. Below and above her, the city was slowly waking, but there in the Hanging Gardens everything was quiet. Above the city and in the west, the sky was still the violet of night; to the east the hazy horizon was ablaze with red-gold light.
She rarely came up here—it wasn’t one of the levels she could visit freely, and she’d had to use one of her visitor’s passes to access it—but it was calm and peaceful, and after last night’s conversation, she needed what peace she could get, if only to settle her mind.
In her hand, she held one of her grandmother’s golden tokens, a sign of her patronage and her regard. It wasn’t Aliya’s; Dov had brought it with him the night before.
Aliya sighed and leaned down, resting her arms against the delicate wrought-iron fence. She didn’t know what to do. After Dov had asked her to go with him out into the wasteland and explained what exactly it would entail, she’d told him that she still wasn’t sure, that she needed to think it over more. They’d all gone to bed after that, Dov taking the tiny workshop as a guest bedroom.
This morning, Aliya had slipped out before anyone else woke. She’d left a note for Mama, saying she still needed to gather her thoughts; that was true, but now—having taken some time—she was pretty sure that she needed more than just time. This situation called for getting some actual advice, and she didn’t think she’d be able to find it up here in Sinaveya.
Mama had told her the choice was her own; Avidan would say the same if she asked him, she was sure. And that would have been all well and good, if she’d known she could trust Dov. Mama seemed convinced enough by the token to leave it up to Aliya, who thought—she didn’t know. She didn’t know what to think, didn’t know who to trust.
Her wanderlust told her that she should go, and damn the consequences. Her logical mind told her that she should not trust strange goblin men who showed up at her door and asked her to go away with them to a mysterious fortress, sight unseen.
She needed external insight. She needed more substantive advice than that it was up to her. She needed a tiebreaker for her own indecision.
Mind made up, Aliya turned her back to the sunrise and walked deeper into the Hanging Gardens.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
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There were, in reality, two reasons Aliya had had for coming here. One was that it was beautiful and peaceful, and she’d wanted to have her thoughts to herself.
The other was that it was one of the few places in Sinaveya where magic flowed freely enough to allow for relative ease in making an impromptu bridge to Tauaveya. There were tunnels down on the desert level, of course, that led deep into the earth and eventually brought a person down to the City Below, but Aliya didn’t like going that way; in any case, the desert level would not have made for as tranquil a place for reflections.
The Hanging Gardens were called such because their land was fractured and multilayered. Baskets full of green vines and bright blooming flowers hung from silk-thin threads, and great trees grew seemingly planted in nothing, their roots swaying below the overgrown platforms on which the tree’s trunk sat. Magic hung thickly in the air, filling Aliya’s lungs with each breath she took.
Standing below the mass of roots of the biggest tree in all of the Gardens—a giant red cedar, stabbing up into the sky—Aliya took a deep breath and started calling the roots lower, weaving them into a ring. She didn’t do it with her hands; she was nowhere near strong enough for that, and the roots would have fractured anyway if she’d tried to directly bend them with physical force. Instead she moved her hands as a conductor would, calling the roots to move to the soundless music underpinning the world around them, and brought them dancing into an intricate oval.
Most humans needed an external conduit to cast their magic. Human bodies—flesh and bone—did not work particularly well, when it came to the channeling of magic.
Aliya was the (adopted) granddaughter of the Goblin Queen, and there was crystal marrow in her bones. She had no need of tools that weren’t already buried under her skin—not for something like this, at least.
Once the ring of roots was completed, Aliya sought into herself, and found her memories; she connected the ring of roots to the wooden border of the mirror in Titi’s receiving room, and the air within warped and twisted for a moment before settling into an image of an underground stone chamber with a black floor polished to a mirror shine, and a chandelier overhead made of a hundred different gemstones.
She stepped through the portal and out of the mirror into the Goblin Queen’s palace at the heart of Tauaveya, the City Below. Behind her, she closed the portal; freed from her magic, the roots would slowly revert to their original placement, and she didn’t want anyone following her through uninvited.
It was just now daybreak, so Titi would be retiring soon; all her queen’s business should be finished for the time being, at least.
Aliya went in search of her grandmother.
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“Queen Tamar,” said Aliya, giving a shallow, formal bow at the threshold to the spacious royal chambers. The floor was covered in a thick layer of soft moss, and the walls were covered in a rainbow’s worth of colors, tiny glittering jewels forming a single abstract mosaic.
Her grandmother laughed, melodious and fluid. The sound seemed incongruous, coming from her mouth—she was squat and broad, with long delicate fingers and lichen hair arranged in elaborate braids around a shimmering glass crown. Her skin was half-covered in moss, and the exposed surface was composed of a mix of rough, uncut gemstones. If she had stood very still, one could have been forgiven for taking her as a very lifelike statue.
“None of that now,” she chided. “Come in, come in—my, but you’ve grown since I last saw you down here! How is my sister-city these days?”
Aliya shrugged and toed off her shoes before stepping into the room, letting her feet relax into the familiar feel of the moss. “Same as ever,” she said. “Still keeping the magic locked down, still keeping the storms out.”
Titi shook her head. “One day Hila will come to rue that,” she murmured. Hila was the given name of the queen who ruled Sinaveya, the Queen of Light, and Aliya knew no one but Titi who would casually refer to her as such.
“I received a visitor last night,” said Aliya. “He gave me your token—I think it’s legitimate, but I wanted to confirm that before I lit off into the desert with him.” She pulled the token from her pocket and passed it to Titi, who tapped a sapphire fingernail on it and nodded sharply.
“This is real,” she said at once. “I’m surprised Dov got up to you so quickly. Did he say how he slipped by the Lightkeepers?”
“No,” said Aliya slowly, “but he’s absolutely dripping in magic. I figured he used spellwork, or something like that.”
“Perhaps,” Titi said cryptically. “Do you think you’ll go?”
“Maybe,” Aliya said, rocking back on her heels. “I’m not sure. It’s very sudden, I guess—but then again you’ve vouched for him, so I suppose that’s one of my worries put to rest.”
Titi scrutinized her. “Tell me,” she said abruptly, “how do you like things now, with the magic-running?”
“It’s all right,” said Aliya slowly. “Sometimes it feels like I’m not really doing anything, though—at least, not anything worthwhile. Smuggling conduits isn’t something that could change the world, or even the city—not really.”
“Hmm.” Her grandmother turned away from her suddenly, moving deeper into the room. “Come here.”
Aliya approached. Titi had picked up two small black stone pendants, densely etched with glyphs, each one held between the wings of a silver messenger falcon. On one the glyphs were filled with golden pigment; the other, scarlet.
She recognized what they were, of course. They were message stones, which allowed two-way speech so long as both parties had the right keys. The red one was one of Titi’s and would enable anyone in possession of it to communicate with her grandmother; Aliya didn’t have one of her own because the storm-wards on Sinaveya created too much interference for them to work properly there. She didn’t know who the gold one would go to, though—she’d never seen a message stone coded with that color.
“You’ll be out of the city, so the message stone should work for you most of the time,” said Titi briskly, unceremoniously grabbing Aliya’s wrist to drop the red message stone into her hand. “And this one”—she held up the golden stone, then added it to Aliya’s palm as well—“belongs to a young woman I happen to be familiar with. I think the two of you would get along well. If you do end up contacting her, tell her Tamar gave it to you.” She gently curled Aliya’s fingers around the two message stones.
“I never said I was actually going to go,” Aliya protested mildly.
“You haven’t, no,” Titi agreed, an amused smile crossing her face. “You will, though.”
It wasn’t a command. Aliya knew how her grandmother sounded when she was giving orders as the Goblin Queen; this wasn’t that. This was just Titi’s general savviness, and the fact that she knew Aliya far too well on top of that. It wasn’t terribly surprising—she’d raised her, after all—but still.
Aliya tucked the message stones into her pocket along with Titi’s token and sighed. She had come down here for guidance, hadn’t she?
“I will,” she said, half-reluctant and half-eager.
Titi laughed brightly, and the mosaics on the walls shimmered eagerly in response.