Goblins by Philip Reeve

dreams, Eluned could still hear the goblin’s plaintive, wheedling voice: “ Spare me! Spare me! ”) Her father had brought him inside the castle. He had said, “We’ll patch him up and send him home to Clovenstone to tell his friends of the welcome they had from the men of Porthstrewy.”
    But the goblin’s friends were not at Clovenstone. That was why the raiding party had seemed so small. Most of them were waiting, hidden, among the rocks on the cliff top. As soon as the snivelling one was inside and left alone, he stopped snivelling and opened the castle gates, and let the rest of his band come charging inside.
    In the fight that followed, both Eluned’s father and her mother died, and she found herself shipped south, to the court of her uncle in Lusuenn, where most people were far too civilized and educated to even believe in goblins, let alone sea serpents and mermaids. When she told them how her parents had been killed they shook their heads and said, “Poor child! She is a little touched. It was brigands, not goblins, who attacked Porthstrewy.” The girls of the court made fun of her north country accent and called her “Princess Sneeze of Sneeze Harbour”. And when she turned sixteen her uncle announced that he was marrying her to the king of Choon.
    So she had been in a foul mood on the day when he made her go aboard his ship, and when she dried her eyes and looked out through the windows of the stern cabin to see that huge grey figure climbing down the cliffs of Choon Head and sloshing towards her through the waves she did not think, “Oh no, a giant!” so much as, “Oh good, this will upset the wedding plans. . .”
    How the sailors and the servants and the maids of honour howled when Fraddon plucked the ship out of the water in his huge hands! Some wailed for help, some jumped overboard, and some let off crossbows and catapults, whose shots, if they hit the giant at all, were no more than gnats’ stings to him.
    The king shrieked and tried to hide under the cabin table, but it kept sliding away from him as the giant tilted the ship this way and that to admire its pretty paintwork. “We’ll be eaten alive!” he whimpered, bum in the air, spurs jingling as he quivered with terror. But Eluned, peering out of the cabin at the huge face peering in at her, could see at once that there was no harm in this giant. She had read about giants, and she knew that they are creatures of the woods and the high hills and that while they drink great quantities of water they do not really eat very much at all, and certainly not human beings.
    So she opened the window and called out to him. “I am a princess,” she told him, “and the holds of this boat are full of treasure. Just set down all the mariners and passengers safe ashore, dear giant, and it is yours. But not me. You must take me with you. All the best giants have a royal prisoner.”
    And that was what he had done. Eluned’s uncle and his people were set down in a frightened huddle on the tip of Choon Head, and Eluned had Fraddon scoop up the silly ones who’d thrown themselves into the sea and set them safely ashore too. Then he tucked the ship under his arm and went striding back to Clovenstone, and there she had stayed with him ever since. He was a very peaceable giant, who spent much of his time just daydreaming, standing like a tree in the woods or like an old stone up on Oeth Moor. Eluned helped him to make some clothes to replace the rags and uncured skins he was wearing when they met, and in return he cleared a garden for her, and brought fruit trees uprooted from the orchards of the south to plant in it, and whole cupboards full of books from the libraries of lazy kings who had never bothered reading them. Her ship, set squarely on the topmost tower of Westerly Gate, was a perfect place to read and think, and although she was a little scared at first to know that there were goblins close, and even heard them sometimes, caterwauling inside the