Maybe it’s like magic maybe he’s just taking a ghost tooth maybe it will be okay—
The Toothdancer took a pennywhistle from his coat pocket and began to play a spritely tune on it, using the human lips that Marra had seen before. She wondered if the beak opened at all, and then she stopped wondering because her teeth had begun to dance.
They twitched in her jaw like living things. She shrieked, not in pain but in horror, her mouth suddenly full of wiggling bone, as if she were in one of those nightmares where all her teeth fell out at once. It was like chewing and squirming and wiggling a loose tooth, wrapped all together, in time to the pennywhistle’s tune.
She tried to bite down hard, hoping to still the awful dance, but it was worse, much worse, all the teeth rattling against each other, her skull filling up with the sounds of chattering. Oh god oh god no no no no NO!
If most of her teeth were dancing, the one bad molar was kicking. It felt as if it were battering against her cheek and the rest of her teeth, like a bird at a window, slam, slam, slam.
The Toothdancer leaned in closer and played more quickly. Marra wanted to scream a denial, but if she opened her mouth, all her teeth would dance out. Oh god this was worse than anything worse than the blistered land, that had been outside, and this was inside her skin inside her face—
With a popping sensation, the bad tooth pulled itself free of her jaw. It landed on her tongue, bouncing like an insect, and began to batter against the backs of her lips. Marra yelped at the sensation of hard, crawling life loose inside her mouth. She tried frantically to spit.
The Toothdancer dropped the pennywhistle, leaned in, and plucked the tooth neatly from the surface of her tongue with his beak. He turned and dropped the tooth, wet and glistening, into the tooth seller’s palm.
Then he bowed very politely to Marra, patted her arm, and walked away.
Marra wrapped her arms around her ribs and sank to her knees, gasping. It hadn’t hurt. She would have preferred that it hurt. She would prefer that she had never felt the sensation of all her teeth leaping and bounding in their sockets. She touched her tongue to the gap, hesitantly, and tasted blood.
“Oh god,” she said hoarsely.
She thought she might start crying, but that would be to show weakness in front of the goblin market. For all she knew, there was a creature who would pull the tears out of her skull like teeth and sell them. She squeezed her eyes closed and thought fixedly about the pit of bones, the wires in her hands, silver looped over silver, building Bonedog, building calm.
An arm went around her, warm and solid. The dust-wife? No, surely not. Who, then?
For a wild instant she thought it was the Toothdancer, who had a kind voice, and the sudden horror of the thought made Marra open her eyes.
The white moth was just visible on his opposite shoulder. He knelt beside her, arm around her shoulders, the muscles in his jaw tense under the line of blue-gray stubble. “Enough,” he said to the tooth seller or the dust-wife or both. “Stop this. I’m not worth it.”
“Done is done,” said the stall owner, licking Marra’s tooth. “No taking it back now.”
Bonedog had realized that something was wrong and was trying to get to her. The man she had sold a tooth for half turned, throwing his body between them. No, no, it’s all right; he doesn’t know … Bonedog must have looked like a monster to him, in this place already full of monsters. “It’s all right,” she said against the man’s shoulder. “The dog is mine. My friend.”
She didn’t know if she spoke loudly enough, but he must have heard. He moved, one arm still around her, and Bonedog jumped in to wash her face with a nonexistent tongue. Bone and wire claws on her knee pricked through her clothes and she took a deep breath and said, “It’s fine, boy. I’m fine.”
“Here,” said the dust-wife, handing her a tiny square of fabric. “Felted cobweb tobacco. Put that in the hole. It’ll keep it from going bad.”
She pushed the fabric into the gap in her teeth and nodded.
“Better?” asked the large man holding her. He spoke quietly, almost under his breath. Perhaps he, too, had learned not to show weakness.
“Better,” she said.
He got to his feet and helped her up. The corded, effortless strength of his arm might have been alarming under other circumstances, but in the goblin market, she was glad of it.
“You want the collar?” asked the yellow-eyed man.
The dust-wife sniffed haughtily. “Take it off.”
“As you wish.” He reached toward the man’s neck, and Marra watched the man very obviously not flinch away and wondered what not flinching cost him. The yellow-eyed man flicked the collar three times with his thumbnail, and it fell apart into cobwebs and dust.