“What do you want for the ring?” Carter fought to keep the glare from her eyes, the hatred from her voice.
The goblin merely blinked, his face revealing no more than hers, though they both knew he had stolen the ring from her pack as she had slept. All so he could sell it back to her at the market. The Goblin Market.
“This is a valuable piece of jewelry,” the goblin said, making a show of running his fingers over his chin as if considering. “I won’t sell it cheaply.”
Carter gritted her teeth. “How much?”
“Not for money, girl.” Now the goblin leered at her. “We don’t trade in anything as vulgar as money here.”
Carter hesitated. She had heard as much. “What then?” She swallowed, heart racing as she worried at what he might extract from her. What he might demand.
“A secret.”
She hadn’t expected that. Her firstborn, perhaps, or a year off her life. But a secret? “What kind of secret?”
“One you have never told anyone else. And you must never reveal it to another, for it will become mine to trade.”
“Why would anyone trade for a secret of mine?” Carter scoffed. But she knew exactly which secret the goblin was after. And she dared not give it to him. The prince’s location. The ring the goblin rolled through his thieving fingers belonged to the prince. His token, to be given to the general to prove the message she bore truly came from him.
“And if I give you this secret, you are bound to give me the ring?”
The goblin smirked. It had won. “I am so bound.”
Carter leaned in to whisper into his ear, the foul stench of his breath nearly making her vomit. The secret she gave him was not her own, but her grandmother’s. The secret of a woman long dead, who had entrusted it only to her. “My grandmother’s middle name was Goven, and she hated it.”
The goblin jumped away from Carter, clutching the ring in his fist. “That’s not…”
Carter grinned, holding out her empty palm. “You did not specify which secret, goblin. Now hand over the ring.”
Scowling, the creature threw it at Carter. She snatched it from the air and turned on her heel. “And next time you enter my camp,” she said without a backward glance, “You’ll be met with steel instead of a secret.”
Tales of the cost of buying from the stalls at the Goblin Market abound, appearing in the fantasy stories of many authors. I thought I’d turn this on its head and have my protagonist get the best of a goblin who sought a secret she could not sell for a ring (which he had stolen from her) that she had to have.
Like many of my stories, the first line for this one popped into my head. I didn’t actually know how Carter was going to resolve her dilemma until wrote the words in which she revealed her grandmother’s secret.
Though I don’t think it happens much now, if at all, there used to be a practice of giving the last name of a grandparent (or other relative, I think) on the mother’s side as a middle name to a child. Hence, my mother-in-law’s middle name was Reed and my father-in-law’s was Harwood.
Carter would likely not have had cause to share her grandmother’s middle name prior to this encounter. It was an innocuous secret and one that Carter wouldn’t mind the goblin selling.
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I'm sure we all have a secret in our hearts that is only ours. I'm so happy she had one that saved the day!
Love what she says at the end!