He set her on her feet, his arm still around her waist. She immediately tried to slide to the ground, her feet scrabbling on the loose dirt. Doubled over, kicking and clawing, she felt him drag herforward. “There, you’ve walked in, more or less.” She straightened up to find herself in a broad, dimly lit corridor of polished black stone. “You’re inside now. You don’t see anywhere to run, do you?” She shook her head. “So you’ll stop this scrambling around. You shouldn’t have come looking for us, my dear, if you didn’t want to find us.”

The tall figure released her and unfastened his cloak, stepping back a pace to study her gravely. She stared at him openmouthed, unable to look away. His eyes were beautiful, large and black, like the eyes of Christ on her father’s Greek icon. His face was broad, with high cheekbones, and his smooth skin shimmered in the lamplight with a strange silvery gray color. He had no hair on his head, no beard, not even eyebrows. His mouth was a little too wide, and his ears were long and narrow and rose to sharp points. She was tall for a girl, but he was half a head taller than she, and his broad shoulders and thick arms explained how he had been able to carry her away so effortlessly.

He saw a very young woman of sturdy, athletic build, her lean, pretty face very pale, black hair straggling about it rather wildly. Her green eyes glared desperately at him. No tears were on her cheeks yet, but the trembling lower lip indicated that they weren’t perhaps too far from falling. He gazed at her for a long moment and then gave her a smile.

“You see what a lucky girl you are,” he said in a low voice. “I’m very handsome for a goblin. And you were going to catch a goblin, weren’t you? With your bare hands.” He reached out and laid one of her trembling hands on his muscular silvery gray forearm. “You’ve caught a goblin, my dear, all for your very own.” The hand ended in what looked like well-kept dog claws, and she tried to pull away. He chuckled quietly, and she glanced up to discover that the teeth in that gray face were the color of dark, tarnished silver.