Nine Goblins Read Free

in the ears of foxes and gave charcoal to colicky
wyverns. No beast was too ugly, too monstrous, too troublesome. He
had once donned smoked glass goggles and shoulder-length cowhide
gloves to sit up with an eggbound cockatrice for three days, giving
it calcium tablets and oiling its cloacal vents every four hours.
Since he’d been nursing a pocketful of baby hummingbirds at the
time, which had to be fed sugar water every fifteen minutes sixteen
hours out of the day, it had been quite an extraordinary three
days. He still had nightmares about it.
    But he’d never really warmed to unicorns.
Possibly it was because they didn’t need him. Regular elves loved
unicorns, as they loved all beautiful creatures, and a unicorn with
so much as a stubbed hoof could turn up at the door of any elf in
the world and be assured of royal treatment. Sings-to-Trees hardly
ever had to deal with them, and he preferred it that way.
    But when somebody needed to actually reach a
hand in there and turn a foal around, suddenly the unicorn lovers
of the world melted away, and it was down to Sings-to-Trees and a
barn and a bucket of soapy water. And the hind end of the unicorn,
of course.
    As if to punctuate this thought, the unicorn
kicked him again. He grunted. He was pretty sure the mare was smart
enough to know that he was helping her. He just didn’t think she
cared.
    He got a grip on something that felt like a
wee little hock, and started the tricky process of hauling,
coaxing, and generally begging the tiny creature to turn around.
Another contraction came along, and he willed his numb fingers to
hold on to the foal’s leg. His fingers laughed at him.
    Give him trolls any day. A thousand pounds of
muscle and bone, froggish goatish creatures the size of grizzly
bears, with enormous curling horns that could smash through a
concrete wall. They were ideal patients. Trolls might not be
any more talkative than unicorns, but they understood every word
you said, and if they had come to you for help, they’d trust you to
the ends of the earth. You could saw off a troll’s leg, and it
would look at you with huge, tearful eyes the size of dinner plates
and hold still while you did it. And if you told them to come back
in a week for a check-up, they’d be there a week later, as soon as
the sun went down, squatting patiently in the vegetable patch,
ready to be poked and prodded all over again. Sings-to-Trees quite
liked trolls.
    And they were grateful, too—not a
month went by when he didn’t wake up to see gigantic cloven
hoofprints around the yard, and half a billy-goat left draped
across a tree stump.
    Not like unicorns. As soon as the foal was
able to walk, the mare would be gone like a shot, and he’d never
see her again.
    Come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t a bad
thing.
    “Okay,” he said to the unicorn, mildly
surprised at the weariness in his own voice, “I think I’ve got it
presenting right. Let’s give this a try…PUSH!”
    The mare pushed. He pulled. There was a brief
horrible moment where nothing happened and Sings-to-Trees saw
another two hours of internal fumbling ahead of him, and then with
almost absurd ease, the foal slid out and hit him in the chest, the
mare grunted in triumph, and he fell over backwards with his arms
full of slimy baby unicorn.
    Its first act was to kick him with its
adorable little hooves. He gazed at the barn rafters while it beat
a tattoo on his ribs. It hurt, but not as much as his knees
did.
    Okay. Not much more to go. He could handle
this.
    He staggered upright, shuffled on his knees
to the end of the unicorn he hadn’t seen much of this evening, and
dumped the foal in front of her.
    She bent down, snuffled at the tiny creature,
tapped it delicately with her foot-long horn as if to test it, and
then began licking at its damp white hide. The bedraggled foal
lifted its muzzle and made a faint squeaky snort of protest.
    Even to someone who didn’t much care for
unicorns, at another time, this scene