Excerpt:

This was it, after all. The next day, I would be returning to the Desolation, wandering from camp to camp until I found one in need of me. This was my last chance to assert my authority over her, to make her pay for all the times she had humiliated me. I was the one who would be leaving to lead the next generation; she was still here, studying. Sure, she’d studied longer and harder than me, but she had had no right to treat me like some back-dusted unrefined—

“Pictash,” she said, sitting next to me, looking up at the stars, “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Do you?” I asked, and she turned her head to look at me, and I twitched.

“You want to kill me,” she said, her voice holding the same curious and aloof tone it always did. I blinked. “You always have,” she continued. “You don’t like me and you don’t like the way I’ve treated you and you think you’re better than me.”

“Well, I am,” I said, wary, wondering if she was trying to distract me before attacking.

“I thought we were friends,” she said. “Like you read about, in stories.”

“Goblins don’t make friends,” I said. “That’s in the stories too.”

“Only because other people write them,” she said. “We could be the first goblin friends, ever.”