“Do you mean that your chicken has a literal demon in her? Not that she’s just a … a bad chicken?”
The words sounded incredibly foolish as she said them, and the dust-wife’s look indicated that they did not improve upon hearing.
“Girl, have I given you any indication in the last week that I joke about anything?”
“How did you get a demon in your chicken?”
“The usual way. Couldn’t put it in the rooster. That’s how you get basilisks.”
Marra opened her mouth to ask what the usual way was, then stopped because there was an enormous staircase in the ground that had most definitely not been there when they had walked by earlier.
It had broad stone steps, easily wide enough for two horses to pass abreast. Marra could not possibly have missed it. The steps ran straight down into the ground, ignoring the existence of the nearby river that should have turned them into a waterfall. The dust-wife walked down them without pausing, not even ducking her head.
It was dim for the first few steps but green light illuminated the lower stairs. Marra looked around for the source, then wished she hadn’t. In alcoves on each side of the stairs, a firefly the size of a house cat blazed with light.
“Where does this go?” she whispered, hurrying to catch up with the dust-wife. The fireflies ignored her, but their antennae moved slowly in the air. “Who made this?”
“To the goblin market,” said the dust-wife. “But in answer to your second question, I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure it was made, in truth. Some things come into being once it’s inevitable that they will exist.”
Marra was still trying to parse that one when the stairs ended at a landing above a sunken room, and Marra gazed down into the goblin market.
* * *
It looked like a market, but such a market as Marra had never seen. There were jeweled pavilions crowded next to mud huts and hide tents and things that looked like upside-down bird nests. The aisles between were crowded, but the people within them did not move like a crowd. They moved like dancers, some light, some heavy, some in circling, solitary waltzes. They reminded Marra far more of the courtiers in the prince’s palace than of the town on market day.
She had been a little afraid of the courtiers, and now she was more than a little afraid of the people here. The courtiers, for all their cloth and starch and politics, had been human, and some of the crowd here were obviously … not.
And I am here with a dog skeleton at my heels and a woman with a chicken on her staff, so what must they think of me?
“Don’t stare,” murmured the dust-wife, “but don’t look away if someone looks at you. Show as little weakness as you can. Agree to nothing and accept nothing until you know the price.”
With that, she stepped forward into the crowd, and Marra hurried after her.
The majority of the crowd had looked human from a distance, but once she was among them, she had her doubts. Some were human shaped but had green or blue skin. A number had horns rising from their foreheads, short and pointed as antelopes’。 One woman walked by with a rack of antlers that would do any stag proud, and small black birds seated on each tine, wearing silver collars around their necks.
Others were not even human shaped. A trio of boars in starched collars, walking on their hind legs, went grunting past. Six white rats, each nearly three feet tall, carried a palanquin on their shoulders. And who could guess what lay beneath the pale braids that covered that figure from head to toe?
Where did they all come from? Are they from other parts of the world or are they all from here? But how could they be from here?
You heard stories, of course. Stories of the Fair Folk, of little people that lived behind the world. Stories of old gods that had never learned how to die. But Marra had never imagined that there might be so many or that they might be right here, on the other side of a tree root, not far away under the hills.
Even the blistered land had not prepared her for that.
“Hmm,” said the dust-wife. She had stopped at a table that held a little wooden tray divided into squares. In each square lay a moth, apparently dead. “Hmm. That one.” She pointed.
“Shows you what you need,” said the woman behind the table, sounding bored. She was old and wrinkled, with thin gray braids coiled around her head. “You sure you don’t want the one that shows you your heart’s desire? It’s much better.”
“Also a lot more expensive, I suspect.”
The woman grinned. She had no teeth. Instead her tongue was banded with red and black and had a snake’s golden eyes. “Five years of your life. But you get the rest to spend with your heart’s desire, so it’s worth the price.”