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Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full and fine, Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try: Currants and gooseberries, Bright-fire-like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy. —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, GOBLIN MARKET
“‘Rule one,’” she read. “‘Ask for nothing.’ How funny that is! Although maybe that means I’m not allowed to ask for the way out? I’ve never heard of a rule like that before.” She resumed walking, and shortly came upon a second frame. Again, she stopped. “‘Rule two,’” she read. “‘Names have power.’ What does that even mean?” The walls did not reply. Katherine walked on, faster now, hurrying to find the next sign. Rule three was “always give fair value.” Rule four was “take what is offered and be grateful.” And rule five, most puzzling of all, was, “remember the curfew.”
“What’s the Goblin Market?” “It is a place where dreamers go when they don’t fit in with the dreams their homes think worth dreaming. Doors lead here. Perhaps you found one.”
“There is a curfew, Lundy, and it comes for all of us. It’s not the kind of curfew you may know. It doesn’t mean ‘all good little children come inside at sundown.’ It means we must be sure no one is trapped here against their will. It means we want all those who crave citizenship in our admittedly unusual land to have chosen their way with care. The doors have found you now. They will open for you again and again, and you can take them or you can walk away, until the day you turn eighteen. On that day, arbitrary as it might seem, the doors will close. If you’ve kept fair value in mind, when
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Fair value says we don’t steal what isn’t ours. It also says that what we own, we keep.”
“Promises are their own form of fair value, as long as they’re kept.”
Let us speak, for a moment, on the matter of sisters. They can be enemies to fight or companions to lean upon: they can, at times, be strangers. They are not required to be friends, or to have involvement in one another’s lives, or to be anything more than strangers united by the circumstances of their birth. Still, there is a magic in the word “sister,” a magic which speaks of shared roots and hence shared branches, of a certain ease that is always to be pursued, if not always to be found.
“There will always be a birthday. There will always be a holiday, or a funeral, or a birth. If you delay, you can delay yourself right over the edge of being sure.”
