“That doesn’t surprise me, either,” said Bindlepod. He cleaned the last of the flesh from the fish’s spine, sucked out its eyes, then tossed the skeleton over his shoulder. It landed in the moat with a tiny splash.

“My parents are not merely pains,” said the princess, warming to her topic. “They’re royal pains.”

“That’s appropriate,” said the goblin, who privately thought of Violet as sweet, but dangerous.

Violet climbed onto the wall and took a seat next to Bindlepod. “What’s it like in Goblinland?” she asked.

Bindlepod shrugged. “Nice enough, if you’re a goblin. It’s a bit darker than here, but that’s mostly because it’s underground. It’s damp, too. We call it Nilbog, by the way, not Goblinland. That’s rude. It would be like calling your kingdom Peopleland.”

“Is Nilbog smelly?”

Bindlepod closed his eyes and seemed to be remembering something. “Yes,” he said at last, with just a hint of a smile. “Very.”

“Let’s go there,” said the princess.

“You,” said the goblin, “are walking trouble, a danger zone with feet.”

“Does that mean no?” asked Violet.

“It means never in a million years!”

Then he hopped down from the wall, whistled for his frog, and rode away.

Every day for the next two years Violet asked Bindlepod to take her to Nilbog, and every day the goblin told her no. This was not because he did not like her. Actually, he had come to find the princess fairly interesting. He had even begun to like her odor, which was not nearly as boring as that of her parents. But much as Bindlepod liked the princess, he liked his own skin even better. More specifically, he liked his skin exactly where it was and preferred to keep it there rather than have it peeled from his bones while he was still living—an event he was fairly sure would occur were he to run off with the king’s daughter.

At the end of the second year, it was time for Bindlepod to return to his own land. As he saddled his frog to leave, the princess once again asked if he would take her along.

“Not for all the jewels in your father’s treasury,” said the goblin. “Nor all the fish in his moat,” he added, hoping to make the point more clearly.

Princess Violet wrinkled her nose at him. “You’re not very nice!”

“I never claimed to be,” replied the goblin. “And you’re something of a stinker yourself, when it comes right down to it.”

Then he went to say good-bye to her parents.

Late in the first morning of the trip back to Nilbog, Bindlepod’s frog stopped in the middle of the road and said, “I am not taking another hop until you get that princess out of the saddlebag.”

“What are you talking about?” cried Bindlepod in alarm.