In The Coils Of The Snake (24 page)

“No,
I haven’t,” he said reassuringly. “Someone lied to you about
what
I was doing. Those are just part of the wedding ceremony.”

Wedding?
Arianna didn’t contradict him, but the statement
seemed
absurd. Her exhausted brain couldn’t begin to apply that term to the disgusting
spells he had worked.

“Every
King’s Wife has those lines,” continued Catspaw. “They
give
an indication of our future. You’ll have a long life.” He traced
the line on her left
palm. ‘And so will I.” He traced the other one.
“You’ve seen several elves here, Arianna. No one has changed them
into
anything else.”

“Those others
don’t have to be married to the goblin King,” she
whispered. “The King of all that’s ugly wants his wife to be as
ugly
as he is.”

“Just
because I look different from you doesn’t mean I want you to look like us,”
said the goblin. “If I did, I would tell you.
Why
should I lie? I haven’t done a single thing to change your appearance since the
King’s Wife Ceremony, and that took place weeks ago.”

Arianna
looked up at him, solemn and reproving, her black eyes
larger
for the purple shadows beneath them in her pinched white face. “You’re
waiting until a better time,” she accused. “I see it in your thoughts.”

The goblin King
mused over this, impressed and interested by her claim to be able to mind-read.
“You see me wanting to deform you?” he asked. “I’m not, so that
can’t be right.”

Arianna hesitated. “I
see you waiting,” she confessed. “Always, when we’re together, you
think, ‘Later, not yet, soon.’ Always! It’s in your mind every time you look at
me!”

As
he took this in, the sophisticated King became perturbed and
indignant, perhaps because his thoughts had been so
woefully misun
derstood, or perhaps because he now
had to explain them. “I’m not thinking about deforming you,” he
retorted in exasperation. “I’m thinking about kissing my wife! When I’ll
be able to hold you, put my arms around you — Might I point out that I’m your
husband?”

The elf girl’s stare
went blank. “You wanted to
kiss
me?” she exclaimed.

“It’s
something married people do, I believe,” he remarked
severely.

Arianna
gazed at him in complete amazement. “Then when you
were thinking — all that time ” She made a sound
between a
breath and a sob. “You just
wanted — you wanted—” But now she was quite overcome. She gasped and
whooped, and her shoulders shook until tears spilled down her cheeks. She
couldn’t manage to
stop for some time. Relief
and something that might be mirth
showed
on her face, but the goblin King felt very anxious about her.
He never
could quite make up his mind whether the exhausted girl was laughing or crying.

“I wish you had
just said so!” she told him finally, rubbing her hand over her streaming
eyes. “Besides, you can’t be thinking that. I’m too young to kiss.”

Poor
little elf, she looks so tired, he thought worriedly, and he put
his
paw around her. “You’re not too young,” he countered. “You’re
too tired, too upset, too sick. And I don’t want to make you any worse.”

Arianna
leaned her aching head against his chest, thinking
about this. Catspaw looked around, marveling at the
destruction she
had wrought. The
bits of floor and walls that he could see through the leafy, exuberant growth
were shattered by invading roots.

“Your
magic isn’t gone forever,” he said. “It will come back in a
week
or so. I know you miss your forest and your plants. I’ll bring
you a small tree, and you can keep it in a pot. It
won’t live very long
down here, but it will survive for a few months.”

“No, don’t,”
said the elf girl softly. “A tree shouldn’t have to die in this terrible
place. I wouldn’t want to watch it.”

“I’ll bring you
a branch, then,” he promised, holding her close.
`A fir branch. They smell nice. I’ll bring you flowers, too, the finest
flowers I can find. I’ll start searching right away.” He reached
out and snapped a rose off a nearby stem. “Here, this is for you.”

Arianna cradled the
rose in her scarred hands with the ghost of a smile on her face. “That
search didn’t take you very long,” she whispered.

A second later, she
was fast asleep.

• • •

Marak
Catspaw spent the day watching over his wife, but his
thoughts were far
from kind. He called his two lieutenants into the wreckage of his bedroom and
held a whispered consultation. Not that he needed to whisper. Arianna was
sleeping so soundly that shouts wouldn’t have waked her.

“The
elf lord sent this poor girl here thinking that she was going
to
be mutilated,” he hissed furiously. “No wonder she kept leav
ing — she never knew when I might decide to
scarify her, or slice off
a couple of
toes! That elf is a sly, scheming menace. He deliberately
tried to
sabotage my marriage.”

“There isn’t an
elf King now because of a failed marriage,”
remarked the white-haired Richard. “If you lost your life, Marak,
the
goblins would be as bad off as the elves.”

“Exactly,”
declared his sovereign. “I think that lord has some plot in mind. Arianna
and Miranda are both part of it.”

“But
how can that be?” objected Seylin. “Arianna didn’t say that
the elf lord told her you would deform her. She could
have learned it
from camp gossip,
and he might have had no idea. He didn’t know that you would choose her to be
your wife, either, and he certainly didn’t know about Miranda.”

“Adviser,
you’re thinking like an elf,” said the King impatiently.
“He
knew perfectly well I would pick Arianna, unless he thought I was simply a
fool: he knew we were interested in an aristocrat and intended to look over the
whole band. She was his own fiancee; he spent half his time with her. Do you
actually suggest that he never talked to her about what would happen?”

“He could well
not have,” replied Seylin. “Elves hate to talk
about unpleasant things. And if I’m the one who
thinks like an elf, I
should know.”

“It
doesn’t matter in any case,” said Catspaw. “If he could abandon
her without making sure she understood what her new life
would be
like, then he doesn’t
deserve to be a leader, but I think that Arianna
`knew’
just what he wanted her to know. And he undoubtedly had
learned about Miranda as well. He had obviously done some spying.
Remember,
he knew that I was unmarried before we told him.”

“Tattoo was
clear on that,” noted Richard. “The elf had it all
planned. He walked Miranda to the edge of the
truce circle, nabbed
her the minute
she was out, and trapped the guard within seconds, as
neat as you
please. He’s a cunning one, all right.”

“Cunning
and
vindictive,” added Catspaw. “Don’t forget what
he
did to Mother, right under all our noses. He’s afraid to take on a man in a
fair fight, but he doesn’t mind mistreating women.”

“What
do we know about his plans for Miranda?” asked Richard.

“We have no
idea what he has in mind,” replied Seylin. “The Scholars studied the
problem for days and came up with nothing.”

“This
is a military situation,” declared the King. “Richard, I
want
that camp watched day and night. And I want to find out how Miranda is and what
he may have told her about her purpose there. A goblin can’t enter the camp,
but Sable could do it.”

“If
you’re right about him,” observed Seylin, “then you’re put
ting
Sable in danger. And goblin spies would violate the treaty.”

“He
broke it first,” interposed the military lieutenant. “He attacked
one of the Guard on goblin lands and took the King’s ward
hostage.”

“We’ll make
sure that Sable has an innocent reason to enter
camp,” decided Marak Catspaw, “and we’ll send her when we’re
sure
he isn’t there. Don’t worry, adviser. I swore when I signed the treaty to act
in the best interest of the elves, and I fully intend to. Whiteye proposed to
become King of the two races, and the idea strikes me as sound. They lack a
real leader. I’m the one who can best take care of their needs.”

“The elf lord
would never agree to that,” protested the astonished Seylin.

“No, he wouldn’t,”
mused Catspaw. “I’m seeing more and more reasons why that elf needs to go.”

Miranda was alone,
practicing her constellations. Nir was teaching
them to her the elvish way, having her form them on the ground with
pebbles
and then look for them in the sky. Even elves had to learn
constellations. They knew where every star was by
instinct, but they
had to learn the names and patterns.

“Miranda!”
The soft voice came from the trees nearby. She looked
up
from her pebbles in surprise. Who would use her goblin name?

“Sable!”
Miranda hurried over to the elf woman. “What are you
doing
here?”

“I’m bringing
the elf lord another book,” said Sable, handing a bulky spell book to the
girl. Then she dusted off her hands and pushed back her long black hair.
Miranda found the book surpris
ingly heavy,
so she sat down with it in her lap. Sable sat down beside
her, spreading
the full skirt of her silk gown out to cover her feet.

“Nir
isn’t in camp right now,” Miranda told her. “He’s out hunt
ing,
and I don’t know if he’s finished with the other book.”

“I
know he’s not in camp,” said Sable, looking around carefully.
She
switched into goblin. “The King’s worried about you.”

Miranda felt
insulted by both the language and the comment.
“How kind of him,” she snapped. “I think of him constantly
as
well. I’m not speaking goblin to you.”

“Speak what you
want,” replied Sable in goblin. “But you’re a
prisoner here, and the King wants to know why. You’re his subject;
the
elves have no right to hold you.”

“Nir
took me in after Catspaw threw me out,” declared Miranda.
“I
would have killed myself if Nir hadn’t stopped me, and I’m not a goblin subject
anymore.”

“Don’t lie to
yourself,” said the black-haired elf impatiently. “The King didn’t
throw you out, he released you for a little while under guard because he
thought letting you have your own way
would
calm you down. The elf lord trapped your guard, dragged
you to his camp,
forced you to undergo spells, and imprisoned you here. And the question is:
Why? What do you know about it?”

Miranda considered
this information unhappily. She hadn’t known about the guard, but she knew the
rest was true. She didn’t
like to think
about it. The elf lord she had fallen in love with
didn’t go around
attacking people. He was kind and wonderful.

“I’m
important to the elves,” she said. “Nir’s magic says so, and
he
has to do what his magic says. I don’t know why I’m important, but I can tell
he feels sorry for me. That’s all I know. He isn’t like a
goblin; he doesn’t just blurt everything out. He’s
an elf. He’s refined.”

“Refined.”
Sable’s tone was acidic. “I can tell he’s an elf man who doesn’t drop your
food on the floor. The King thinks he may have real harm in mind for you, some
sort of plot or revenge.”

“I don’t think
that’s true,” replied Miranda. “Nir worries about
me. He thinks Catspaw abused me because he kissed
me before I was
eighteen. I don’t know why he was so angry over a few
kisses.”

“It’s
really just an elf custom, the eighteen rule,” answered Sable
uneasily,
sounding as if she were trying to convince herself. “Elf women have a
terrible time with childbirth. If they went into labor
before they were fully grown, even magic wouldn’t save them. And
the elves live so closely together, sleeping in
little tents, coming and
going through the forest. If their society
weren’t structured by the eighteen rule, there would be complete chaos. As it
is, a woman’s a child one night and married the next: no stolen kisses,
jealousies,
dangerous friendships, or
chaperones. She learns to love her fiance
over years of childhood, without the pressure to grow up too soon. I
have to admit, I’m an elf,” she sighed. “It still makes sense to me.”