'Grow out of what?' said Carrot.
'Growing. But now your mother thinks, that is, we both think, it's time you went out among your own kind. I mean, it's not fair, keeping you cooped up here without company of your own height.' His father twiddled a loose rivet on his helmet, a sure sign that he was worried. 'Er,' he added.
'But you're my kind!' said Carrot desperately.
'In a manner of speaking, yes,' said his father. 'In another manner of speaking, which is a rather more precise and accurate manner of speaking, no. It's all this genetics business, you see. So it might be a very good idea if you were to go out and see something of the world.''
'What, for good?'
'Oh, no! No. Of course not. Come back and visit whenever you like. But, well, a lad your age, stuck down here . . . It's not right. You know. I mean. Not a child any more. Having to shuffle around on your knees most of the time, and everything. It's not right.'
' 'What is my own kind, then?'' said Carrot, bewildered.
The old dwarf took a deep breath. 'You're human,' he said.
' 'What, like Mr Varneshi?'' Mr Varneshi drove an ox-cart up the mountain trails once a week, to trade things for gold. 'One of the Big People?'
'You're six foot six, lad. He's only five foot.' The dwarf twiddled the loose rivet again. 'You see how it is.'
'Yes, but — but maybe I'm just tall for my height,' said Carrot desperately. 'After all, if you can have short humans, can't you have tall dwarfs?'
His father patted him companionably on the back of the knees.
'You've got to face facts, boy. You'd be much more at home up on the surface. It's in your blood. The roof isn't so low, either.' You can't keep knocking yourself out on the sky, he told himself.
'Hold on,' said Carrot, his honest brow wrinkling with the effort of calculation. 'You're a dwarf, right? And mam's a dwarf. So I should be a dwarf, too. Fact of life.'
The dwarf sighed. He'd hoped to creep up on this, over a period of months maybe, sort of break it to him gently, but there wasn't any time any more.
'Sit down, lad,' he said. Carrot sat.
'The thing is,' he said wretchedly, when the boy's big honest face was a little nearer his own, 'we found you in the woods one day. Toddling about near one of the tracks . . . um.' The loose rivet squeaked. The king plunged on.
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