In The Coils Of The Snake (22 page)

“It’s
a curse,” Miranda said softly, as if she were talking to herself.
“My
mother did it. She told me I would live my whole life in the
dark.” Even though this was a statement, her
voice had a question in
it, and Nir felt bound to answer it.

“I’m
sorry,” he murmured. “That was a true curse.” This was
not
what she had hoped to hear. Nir watched her unhappy face, feeling
guilty.

“I
know what it means to be cursed,” he said quietly. “My magic
is like that: a blessing to the elves, but a curse to
me. It’s very power
ful.
It does things on its own that I don’t expect, and it tells me to do
things, too, and sometimes they’re very hard for me. I
have to do them,
and
I usually don’t understand their purpose until later. Often I
never
understand.”

“Then why do
you do them at all?” asked Miranda.

“Because
they need to be done for the elves so that we can survive.
They’re
always the right thing to do.”

“How
do you know that they’re the right thing,” pursued the
girl,
“if you don’t know why you should do them?”

Nir shrugged and
looked away. “I can’t even tell you that.”

Miranda studied the
man, feeling intrigued. He hadn’t revealed much about himself before; their
talk had been relatively formal. It occurred to her that he didn’t like to
speak about himself. He was reserved, just as she was.

“I
still don’t know your name,” she admitted, rather embarrassed
about
it.

“You do know my
name, Sika,” he replied with a smile. “You
use it at least once a night. My father gave me his name and his father’s
name,
Ash,
which means ‘lonely’
or ‘alone.’ But my people call me Nir,
which
is as good a translation as my language has for ‘great elf lord.”’

Miranda felt even
more embarrassed and quickly changed the
subject.
“Did your magic come from your father?” she asked. “Gob
lin
magic is passed down.”

“No,” he
replied. “I don’t know where it came from. But then, I know nothing of my
relations; perhaps my grandparents were like
me.
My father was gentle and playful, a perfectly ordinary elf, hardly
magical at all. The only extraordinary thing
about him was the love
that he had for my mother.”

“That’s sweet,”
said Miranda with a smile.

“Sweet?”
Nir looked at her in surprise. “Well, perhaps it was. In
any case, he was baffled by my magic. Even as a child, I
knew things
that he didn’t know. I was so
different from him.”

“Set
aside for a special destiny,” said Miranda with perfect under
standing. She was enjoying the conversation. She hadn’t
ever met a
man who was like
her: dignified, reticent, troubled by a difficult
past.
Catspaw and Marak were both confident and talkative, comp Portable with
themselves.

“What’s the
worst thing that your magic made you do?” she wanted to know. She doubted
he would answer the question, but after a second’s hesitation, he did.

“The
worst thing,” he reflected. “I’m not sure. Bringing Arianna
here to give her to the goblins was a horrible thing to do, but that wasn’t the
worst thing that my magic did. It killed my wife, Kara, and I didn’t know in
time to stop it.”

“You were
married?” exclaimed Miranda in astonishment, her
feeling of empathy vanishing abruptly. She certainly had no experi
ence
to match this.

“Kara
and I were married for years,” he replied. “She was
Hunter’s sister. They were the first elves I found. Kara
was heartsick
that we never had any children. I
didn’t mind, but she said that I should have a son to be lord after me, and
because she was a commoner, she thought that I shouldn’t have married her.

“When I made
trips to gather elves, I usually took my wife, but one time, my magic told me
to leave her behind. She was sure that
my magic was getting rid of her, and
she said that she didn’t mind,
that she was
glad to go. But she cried and cried. She couldn’t bear to
say goodbye,
and I couldn’t find any way to reassure her. When I left, she walked beside me,
crying, until she was in danger of not making it home to camp before day. Then
I stopped and kissed her and ordered her to go back, and I never saw her again.
Hunter told
me she was dead in our tent that
evening. My magic must have killed
her somehow, but I never would have
left if I had known.”

What a terrible
burden to live with, thought Miranda in amazement, even worse than losing Marak
and all of his promises. “Was
Kara as
beautiful as Catspaw’s wife?” she asked, and then regretted
the question. Of course she was, you fool, she
told herself. All elves
are beautiful.

“No,”
said Nir. “Arianna was more beautiful, but that didn’t
mean
I loved her more. An engagement can seem short or long. I
only had to wait five months for Kara, but I
thought I’d go mad.
I had already
waited four years for Arianna, and I could have waited another four. I would
have been happy not to marry her if I’d known
she was happy with another
elf. The thing that haunts me,” he said moodily, “is the thought of
that monster kissing her lovely face.”

The statement
reminded Miranda of the depth of her own miss fortune.

“It
haunts me, too,” she said, feeling wretched. “When Catspaw
kissed me, I never would have believed that he would kiss
anyone else.”

“He kissed you?”
asked Nir, thoroughly shocked. “You don’t
mean that, surely, not a real kiss. just a kiss on the forehead,
perhaps.
You’re too young to know the difference.”

Miranda
gave him a scornful look. She might not have been mar
ried for years, but that didn’t mean she was a complete
baby. “Catspaw
kissed
me many times,” she replied crisply. “And, yes, I
do
know the
dif
ference. Not,”
she concluded in a sad undertone, “that they meant any
thing,
in the end.”

The elf lord was
beside himself with moral indignation.

“That
freak-eyed pervert!” he declared angrily. “Kissing you like
that! Taking advantage of his guardianship to ruin your
childhood!
No wonder you
wanted to kill yourself when he didn’t keep his prom
ise of marriage. No wonder you keep insisting you’re not
a child!”

The stupefied
Miranda just stared at him. “But I liked it when Catspaw kissed me,”
she said.

“Of
course you did,” he remarked, eyeing her with pity. “It
made
you feel important to the revolting beast. You can’t possibly understand his
abusive assaults.”

“That’s not
fair to Catspaw,” insisted Miranda, quite upset.
“He was always very thoughtful, and I truly did want to marry him.”

Nir
looked at the expression of pain and confusion on the beaut
iful
young face, and his heart went out to the poor girl.

“It’s
all right,” he consoled her. “We won’t talk about it any
more.
You shouldn’t have to think about it.” He put a comforting arm around her,
sighing as the startled Miranda tried to pull away and the stars flashed their
warning.

“You
see,” he observed, touching the stars, “how badly he dam
aged your nature. You’re afraid of every touch, even when
the women comb your hair. You can’t tell the difference between ordinary kind
ness and some sort of dangerous, twisted attention. You’re
always try
ing to decide what’s decent. It’s the
saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m not afraid
of anything,” said Miranda blankly. The stars winked out.

“If I’d known
about this before I put the spell on you, I don’t think I’d have had the heart
to do it,” he continued. “That explains
why you were so frantic. You must have been terrified! I know you
thought that I was a monster, too, but you know I
wouldn’t do a
thing like that, abusing a defenseless child.”

Miranda
looked up at him. His face was only a few inches above
hers, looking at her very kindly, his black eyes sad and
sincere. She
thought that he was undoubtedly the most attractive man
on the face
of
the earth, and what she wanted more than anything in the world, she realized,
was that he would kiss a defenseless child. The kiss
wouldn’t be a thing like Catspaw’s kisses, she was positive of that. It
would
be worth an entire lifetime of darkness.

“I’m so sorry
for you,” he said earnestly. “You’ve had such a
tragic childhood, and now I’ve trapped you in a
world that looks
like a goblin’s
cloak. I just wish there was some way I could make it
up to you.”

It
was time for the morning meal, so they walked back to camp.
Nir
thought, not for the first time, that humans made a tremendous racket in the
woods. Miranda wasn’t paying attention to anything. She thought she floated.

The
bread that went with their everlasting deer-meat stew had
berries
embedded in it. Nir tried to teach her the word for that, but his quick-witted
pupil was rather slow tonight. She was probably still upset, he concluded. Of
course she was. That monster!

Miranda
decided, watching him, that he looked even more noble
when
he frowned.

The
next evening, the elf lord announced to his band that he had
learned
why the human girl was so afraid to be touched: the goblin King had tortured
her for his own sordid pleasure. She didn’t even
understand this, he went on wrathfully. She had been taught that
this
treatment was normal. They would all have to be particularly patient with her
so that she could learn to trust people again.

Miranda
didn’t understand what he said, but she knew that it con
cerned her, and she could tell that the other elves were
appalled. Even
the
children stared at her in horror. But Galnar came to sit beside her.
Smiling, he pulled out one of his deer-bone pipes and
began to play.
And
Hunter threw himself gracefully down on the ground before her
and
produced a pair of shiny sheep’s knucklebones.

He
and the boy Tibir spent the next couple of hours teaching her
to
play the ancient game. They played it elf-fashion, wherein both bones had to
land on the wrist or the back of the hand to score. Miranda proved hopeless at
it, having none of their dexterity, so
Hunter
thought up elaborate handicaps to make the play even. This
entertained the
three of them much more than a regular game of knucklebones would have.

The
elf lord was amazed at the change in his human captive. She
began trying to speak elvish, she gathered flowers with
the women,
and she played
games with the children in the meadow. He took her on long walks, explaining
elf life to her, and she asked endless ques
tions. She smiled readily now, and from his work at the
writing desk,
he often heard her laughter.

It
all went to show, he thought to himself, what a little kindness
could
do.

• • •

It would doubtless
have pleased Nir to learn that the goblin King
had not yet kissed his new bride. Such a perverted assault was out of
the
question: Arianna was far too distressed. Marak Catspaw tried to treat her with
consideration, but he made no progress at all. He held true to his promise not
to lock their door, but he had to locate
her
several times a night. She turned up in all sorts of odd places and
became
the talk of the kingdom. The sophisticated ruler found his
wife’s
strange antics embarrassing.