Theo shrugged. "Not by choice. Actually, almost none of it was by choice."
"Even so, the grapevine says you met the Big Guy himself."
"Big Guy… ?" For a moment he thought of Button, small slender Button handing him that card at the bus stop, and had to swallow hard. "Sorry, who would that be?"
Mistress Twinge took a moment to reply, applying a flame from her fingertip to an ugly turd-colored cigar. "The Big Guy!" she said through a cloud of foul smoke. "Robin Goodfellow, of course. He's pretty much the hero of my folk. The king's right-hand man, he used to be. Most famous pooka that ever lived. What was he like?"
Theo tried to remember, but much had happened since those moments on the black boat. "Sad. Wise, I guess, as far as I could tell. Kind of funny, too. He didn't like Hellebore much."
Mistress Twinge nodded happily. "A man of the people. I wonder where he is."
"Nobody knows?"
The pooka didn't seem much worried. "Now that Hellebore and the rest are gone, the binding-spells are gone too. He's probably sailing around with the king or queen somewhere. Getting a little well-earned rest."
"You think they're all still alive?"
The pooka leaned forward again, bringing a fog of tobacco fumes with her that would make a hyena squint. "Of course they are. You don't kill off any of those folks. They're like the stars, the moon. Like taxes." She stood up and gave Theo a hearty slap on the back that nearly dislocated his scapula. "We gotta get going now. Come on, Streedy, let's go make some of the new arrivals nervous. Theo, sorry to hear you're leaving, fella — I was going to teach you how to play Beetlebout for money, which would be a comfort to your declining years."
Coathook sat silently until Mistress Twinge had vanished whistling down the muddy street between the rows of tents, Streedy Nettle tagging along after her like a stork following a bulldog pup it had misidentified as its mother. The goblin blinked, then looked at Theo almost shyly. "You saw him last night. What was he like?"
It took a few seconds for Theo to understand, and understanding brought back pain. "I'm not sure I want to talk about it right now."
Coathook's clawed fingers closed on his arm — gently, but with enough force to tell Theo he didn't want the goblin ever to grab him for real. "Please."
He thought of this small fellow writhing on the floor of Elysium House, having taken real poison to facilitate Button's desperate plan. A desperate plan that actually worked, Theo reminded himself, marveling. "He was… well. Very well, considering… considering what was coming. We talked about what happened. He asked me to tell him stories about my world."
Coathook was looking down again. "I would like to hear those stories someday."
But I won't be here to tell them, Theo thought. Out loud, he said, "I hope I get the chance to do it. Did you know him?"
"Not well. Only from a distance. But he was important to me, in a way. He was my father."
Theo could not reply immediately. "You… you don't mean he was, like, your spiritual father, do you?" he said at last.
Coathook slowly shook his head. The swing of his long nose as he did so should have been grotesque, even comical, but it only reminded Theo of the strange world in which he found himself, where there was so much he still did not understand. "He fathered me. On my mother. In the usual way."
"My God, and you only knew him from a distance? Didn't you talk to him? Did he know?"
"I do not think he knew, although once or twice he looked at me as though something about me troubled him. But I was only a child of one of his early matings and so he did not recognize my name — he had never known it. My mother met him at the goblin academy. She was driven from her nest in shame when I was born fatherless, and took refuge in the countryside." He gave an uncomfortable shrug. "It does not matter now. He is dead. He is a hero. I am Coathook. I am not more or less because of him."
Theo thought of his own parents, of his lifelong struggle to make sense of himself by making sense of them, to justify himself by making them responsible for all they had done wrong to him, or failed to do for him at all. "That's all? Don't you care?"
"Of course I care. That is why I wished to hear from you of his last hours. I am on my way to the funeral ceremony, as are all the others of my people who are here, and I wish to think of him in wholeness, but that is all. I am one of them, one of the living, and he is not. Of course I care, but I have always lived my life without him."
"May outsiders go to the funeral?"
"It is not for you, only goblins. That is why he said his good-bye to you on the bridge, last night."
An honor, Cumber had called it, when Theo did not understand what he meant. Now he did. "Did you love him?"
Coathook threw up his hand, touched his forehead in a gesture Theo did not recognize, but which had the look of ritual. "As a son or as another goblin, proud of what he did?"
"Either, I guess."
"Then, yes." Coathook stood. "But today the sun came up again, as it always does. Thank you for your time, Theo. I must leave now. I have to go and eat my father."
Theo sat and watched him walk away, the small, dark-furred figure growing smaller and smaller. Even after Coathook had disappeared Theo still sat in the doorway, watching clouds and listening to the noises all around.
The three of them looked back at him, Poppy with a look of poorly concealed worry, Cumber curious but reserved, Applecore hiding whatever she was feeling behind one of the world's smallest but most concentrated looks of disdain.
"I suppose you're wondering why I've called you all here," Theo said. "Sorry, that's a joke, and it's not a very good one because I actually did call you all here. I'm kind of nervous." He looked down at his hands, clutched together as if both sets of fingers were afraid the other set might sneak off. "I have a question I need to ask you, Cumber. About gateways and going back and forth."
Cumber Sedge nodded. "I had a feeling you might be wondering, Theo. The answer is, no, there's still no way to come back after you've been here and gone. Undoing the Clover Effect has been set back years. There was your uncle's way of returning, but nobody else will ever try anything that horrible and dangerous and the conditions probably won't arise anyway. So, again, no. If you leave, you are almost certainly leaving for good."
Theo smiled despite himself. "That wasn't the question I was going to ask, but thanks. What I was wondering is, can people from the other side — from my old world, the mortal world — still come over here? And can they leave again afterward?"
Cumber looked surprised. It took him a moment to respond. "You mean, are things still the same that way, too? Yes, I suppose so. We haven't had any visitors from there since… since everything happened, and you'd still have to get someone with an available trip to go fetch them. But yes, I think so."
"How about you, Cumber? You've always wanted to visit the mortal world. Applecore's used up her exemption but you haven't. Maybe you could take a trip. A short one, since I'm sure you wouldn't want to be away from Core very long,"— he gave the sprite a mocking look as he emphasized the nickname, then turned back to Cumber — "but enough to see a few things first hand that you've only ever read about. It wouldn't have to be right away."
Cumber looked at Applecore, then at Theo. "But why?"
"Because I have a friend back there named Johnny, just about the only real friend I had, who deserves to see this place — he would get a kick out of it like you wouldn't believe. He'd love goblin drumming, too. And if I can have that one friend come for an extended visit — he might even want to stay, who knows? Maybe we could fix him up with Dolly the ogre — then I think I won't really miss my old world all that much."