Boarsnout Spinesnapper was having a devil of a time getting the twenty little goblins in his third period math class to understand their nine times-tables. Well, seventeen goblins and three humans, he corrected himself. Something he hadn’t gotten used to since the war ended and integration began. He took a deep breath and looked out over the room full of shouting, clawing students, all eager to answer his last question. If the next goblin didn’t get it, Boar swore he’d eat him for lunch.

The yellow-haired human boy, Suhz-Eat (or however it was pronounced—human names were impossible tongue-twisters) raised his hand. Boar supposed it was some human method of wanting to be called upon, but he decided against letting him try. Humans were terrible at math, and his principal had made a point of telling the teachers to treat humans with respect. Boar didn’t want to embarrass the poor boy.

“Pigface?” Boar said, calling on his favorite student, a clever young goblinette with dung-beads dangling from her ear hairs.

“Mr. Spinesnapper, could you repeat the question?”

He approached and grabbed her by the ear, shouting into it. “What is eight times nine?”

“Thanks,” she said, smiling up at him. She had requested that he yell in her ears, and she always liked when he remembered. Boar didn’t mind—anything to make a goblin feel special. That’s why he taught.

“Well, then? Eight times nine.”

“Eighty-nine!” Pigface shouted.

The room erupted into chaos, some students cheering for her, others realizing she was wrong and swatting her forcefully.

“Nope,” Boar said. He was getting upset. Trouble computing eight times three, he’d understand—goblins of this age were notoriously dimwitted with their three-times tables. But nines were easy.

Stab Farpisser in the front row pounded on his desk, shouting, but Boar couldn’t hear him over the noise.

“Yes, Stab? You have to scream it.” Something he should have known by now. A class troublemaker, Stab never followed the rules.

The other kids saw the exchange, though, and quieted down. They liked Stab and wanted to hear what wisecrack he might come out with.

Stab stared at Boar with one bulbous yellow eye, keeping his other two on his classmates to see their reaction.

“When are we ever going to use this stuff, Mr. Spinesnapper?”

“Yeah! Anyway!” another goblin called. Then they all joined in.

“This stuff is fewmets!”

“Can’t we learn torture instead?”

“Yeah, teach us about thumbscrews! Something we’ll actually use!”

Boar was about to praise them for their fine independent thinking when he noticed the human boy’s face. Little Suhz-Eat looked petrified.

“Suhz-Eat, is everything okay?”

Suhz-Eat froze in his seat, his puny hands grasping the edges of his desk. He nodded vigorously.

“And my name is Suzette,” he said in a trembling voice.

“Oh, sorry. I was going by the spelling on my class roster. Do you know the answer?”

Suzette paused and then shook his head. Boar heard a few snickers around the room, and someone shouted “Dumb human.” Unfortunately, Boar didn’t see whom. His principal said something at the last faculty meeting about goblins bullying humans. Boar wasn’t going to tolerate that kind of garbage in his classroom.

“Maybe I need to explain it in a way that you can relate to,” Boar told the class. He had a plan: if he could get Suzette to give the right answer, they’d try harder. If a human could do it, they’d realize that they should be able to, as well.

“Suppose you just won a battle, and you’re taking spoils,” he said, looking especially at Suzette. “What are you going to do?”

Nearly everyone clamored to give the answer; to his disappointment, Suzette wasn’t among them. And it was such an easy question.

“Eat their fingers,” Pigface said. “Especially if they were human.”

Everyone laughed. Boar, like every goblin, loved human fingers. Unfortunately, they’d been hard to get ever since the treaty.

“Yes. But how many fingers will you eat from each human?”

“Nine!” Stab called.

“Why?”

“Because you always leave a middle finger on one hand for good luck,” Pigface chimed in.

“Exactly. So suppose you eat the fingers of eight humans. How many fingers in all would that—“

That’s when the sound started. Boar stopped mid-sentence. Green warty heads turned this way and that, seeking the source.

“Alright,” Boar said, trying not to sound alarmed. “Who’s crying?”

No one answered. Boar’s worry grew, knowing that crying indicated mental disab -- [End of Preview.]