Part 2 of the Homegrown Help series

Rendle had offered options, which UG hadn’t expected to matter as much as it apparently did to the dredger standing there waiting on his answer.

There were brighter shades on offer — a couple of the muck vials fizzed with something close to violet, one a green loud enough to see from across the pool — and UG had assumed, without much thought behind the assumption, that brighter would simply be better. The little dredger disagreed, in its own roundabout way, angling itself toward the darker end of the row every time UG’s hand drifted the other direction, until UG finally noticed what was happening and asked outright what it actually wanted.

Dark, it turned out. Blue-green, gone toward black in the shadows, the sort of colour a thing chooses when it has spent its whole existence hoping not to be looked at directly. UG picked that one. Rendle worked it into the mud without comment, the way a man mixes paint he’s mixed a hundred times before, and something in the dredger’s stance settled once it was actually wearing the colour it had angled for rather than one UG might have chosen for it.

It asked for one other thing, once it found the nerve to ask at all. Not much — dredgers weren’t born anywhere, it explained, hesitant about even that much information, made straight out of the muck pool with no den or burrow to speak of first, so the idea of having somewhere of its own afterward, rather than nowhere at all, seemed to matter to it out of proportion to how small a thing it was.

UG thought of the niche the goblins had left empty on the new stairwell, the one built for something that had never arrived. It hadn’t occurred to him until just then that he’d been keeping it empty on purpose.

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More in the Homegrown Help series

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