In The Coils Of The Snake (27 page)

Miranda thought
about what Sable had told her. “Nir, I don’t
want to help you fight goblins,” she told him worriedly. “Why
should
I?” But the elf lord made no answer.

They
came to a perfectly round hill rising out of the woods. The
night
was moonless, and clouds hid the stars, but Miranda could
make out a line of tall, straight ash trees
climbing the hill in a curve.
Nir
led her along a path that lay at their roots, spiraling up the steep
slope.
The whole dark forest spread out below them.

“Now,
do you see the water shining over there, under the stem of
the
Leaf?” he asked.

Miranda shook her
head. “I don’t see any stars,” she told him “The clouds are in
the way.”

“Oh, of course
they are.” He stood in thought for a moment. Then he lifted his hand, and
the night sky went into turmoil. The clouds boiled like froth on a kettle,
churning in wild undulations.
They split
apart and slid rapidly away, revealing the white glitter
of stars.

“Now,
you see the stem of the Leaf,” he continued as if nothing
of importance had happened. “That water beneath it
is the brook
that passes our
camp. I want you to walk back to camp on your own,
following
the brook upstream. Don’t you think you can do that?”

The
shock of Sable’s message, the heavy sleep, and this magical
upheaval in the sky had a strange effect on Miranda. The
elf lord no longer looked friendly and familiar in the weak light of her
bracelet.
He was an inhuman, inexplicable
presence in the dark, and he frightened her.

“Nir,
I don’t want to,” she faltered, drawing back. “I don’t want
to help you do
something evil.”

“They
are the ones who are evil,” declared the tall elf decisively.
“They have no business here in my forest. I want
you to walk back to
camp. That’s all I
ask.”

The girl shivered in
the black torrent of wind that was pouring over the brow of the hill. “Is
it true that you’ve turned me into a weapon that can kill goblins with my bare
hands?” she asked.

The elf touched the
stars at her wrist and looked down at her.

“Yes,”
he said. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not something I’m ask
ing you to do.”

“You could,”
she insisted, and her voice was thin. “You could order me to kill them,
and I would have to!”

“Sika,” he
said, “the goblins mean to destroy us. All I’m trying to do is to keep
that from happening. Why do you listen to them?” His voice was pleading. “Why
can’t you trust me?”

Miranda looked up at
that pale, perfect face and thought about how much she loved him. “Can I
really trust you to do what’s best for me?” she whispered. “What I
need, and what I want?”

He looked at her in
silence for a few seconds. Then he stepped away. “No, you can’t,” he
said sadly. “I want you to walk back to camp now.” And he turned and
disappeared into the night.

Miranda’s
first feeling was panic. She had never been left alone in
the
dark. Even if she couldn’t see very far, she could always hear
voices talking and laughing in the gloom. Usually
some sort of
music was playing as
well. It filled up the darkness and made it safe.

Now
she was all by herself on unfamiliar ground, and she could hear nothing but the
rushing of the wind. It was an alarming sound,
empty
and powerful, with no sympathy for one lonely human.
Miranda looked at the white pinpricks of stars, the black forest
below her, the strange hilltop she stood on, with
its ghostly procession of trees. I don’t belong here at all, she thought
desperately, and
she started down the path toward the distant elf camp,
stumbling, running. Then she stopped abruptly.

Why
does he want me to walk this way alone? she asked herself,
very
troubled. How will my taking a walk on my own help him to
fight goblins? Maybe he knows that the Guard will
come out to greet
me and try to take me back. Maybe he’s waiting nearby,
and he means to kill them.

She
sat down at the foot of one of the ash trees, in a drift of slippery,
crackly dead leaves.
What should I do? she thought miserably. Catspaw didn’t marry me, and I’ve
turned my back on the goblins. I’m important to the elves. I can’t imagine Nir
hurting me, but he admits that I can’t trust him. Maybe his magic is making him
do something cruel.

Marak,
what should I do? she asked the darkness. I thought you
knew everything, but
now you’re lost and empty, like the wind. I
never
wanted to be anywhere but with goblins while you were alive.
Now I can kill goblins with my bare hands, and
they’re supposed to
be the ones who are evil.

“I told Cook I
was learning goblin, ” announced the little girl, “and she said
goblins are evil fairies who steal little
children and boil the meat from their bones. ”

“Did she
really? ‘“asked Marak. He glanced up, an angry gleam in his eyes.
And is this woman still on the staff? “

“Do you have any idea,” Til
demanded furiously in return, “how few really
good servants will come out to this wilderness? That woman is a treasure.
All
my guests are jealous. Mrs. Hempstead actually complimented her
turtle soup.”

Marak considered her dispassionately for a
moment. Then he bent over his
little girl
once more. “Miranda, goblins aren’t fairies, and they’re no more evil
than
anyone else. And they would never boil children. That’s revolting.”

Young Miranda had not
really understood that it was revolting and had harms
bored
secret hopes that the goblins might do something about her brother Richard. “Are
you sure?” she asked in disappointment.

“Yes,”
said Marak. “I am the goblin King, and I rule all the goblins.”

Miranda
stared at her strange guardian, deeply impressed and terribly
excited. “Oh, I
wish I could tell Cook!” she exclaimed.

“All right, you can,” promised
Marak with a chuckle. “You tell Cook that you know the goblin King, and he
wanted you to tell her that goblins aren’t evil fairies and that boiling
children is a disgusting idea. And I’ll tell you what,” he
added carelessly, fishing a coin out of his pocket, “give
her this and tell her it’s
present from the goblin
King.”

The next afternoon
Til had company down for the week, and Cook was deep in the middle of preparing
a meal for twenty guests. She and her girls were filling meat pies when an
intruder wandered into the kitchen.

“I know the goblin
King, ” announced Miranda.

“Do you,”
grunted the busy woman, flicking her eyes critically over the
child. Miranda behaved well, but the servants didn’t like
her. She had a poise
that no little girl
should have, and her eyes watched them coolly as if she knew secrets.

“The goblin King wanted me to tell you
that goblins aren’t evil fairies, ”
declared
the young messenger, but her audience did not reply. And the goblin
King
says, ” Miranda continued, “that boiling children is a disgusting
idea. “

“He can have an opinion, I suppose, ”
muttered Cook, reaching for a giant bowl of filling.

`And he wanted me to give you this,”
added Miranda, holding up a coin. Cook stopped and stared at it. Then she wiped
her hands and reached for it. The girls came over to gawk at it, too. It was
solid gold.

“It’s a present
from the goblin King,” said the little girl sincerely, and
Cook’s
face turned irritable again. She tucked it into her apron pocket and went back
to work without a word. Miranda felt distinctly disappointed.

“May I have a
tart?” she asked.

“‘No,” snapped Cook. So the child
turned with a sigh and wandered back out of the kitchen. As the door shut, she
heard an outburst of excited, disapproving chatter. Then she heard a muffled
bang.

Til was quite bitter over it the next time
Marak came to visit. “Quit and
gone in
the middle of an afternoon, and the rest of the kitchen staff, too!” she
shrilled. “Strange creatures leaping out of aprons and popping like
fireworks,
and my hunting party
completely ruined! Mrs. Eliot will tell everyone, and I’ll
never live it
down.”

The goblin King just
laughed until he cried.

Miranda
laughed, too, savoring the memory. Marak’s goblins
weren’t evil. The
elf lord was beautiful, but she would never
help
him hurt a goblin. She wouldn’t go back to his camp. Sable
was right,
and he himself had confirmed it: he didn’t care what
happened to her. He had given her no order, so she was free to do as
she
liked. She would go back to the goblin kingdom.

But
you love him! protested a part of her brain as she studied the
stars to try to find her way. I do, she confirmed,
feeling a painful stab
of grief, but I’m
not going to help him do his killing.

Miranda
set off along the pathway that spiraled down the hill, the
straight sentinel trees making her uneasy. She hurried
toward the forest
that
began at the foot of the slope, and the ragged tangle of woodland
blocked out the stars as she made her way into its
depths. But here was
something new: a
clear path in the underbrush right at her feet.
Miranda welcomed its tidiness in that leafy chaos. A few more feet,
and
an ash tree loomed ahead of her. Starlight shone down on her
again. Another ash tree past that one, and
another, in a gentle curve.
Miranda stopped in confusion. She was
climbing back up the hill.

This
time she walked slowly into the dim forest, turning around
frequently to keep an eye on the hill behind her. The
thick boughs of
trees closed in over
her, and the forest swallowed her up. She crept along, making a direct path for
herself, gauging the angles from trunk to trunk. The next trunk was straight,
with an ash tree’s diamond ridges. Stars broke through the vine-hung gloom. She
was walking up the hillside path once more.

Spirals played in
patterns inside the girl’s dazed and desperate
brain. This spiral could loop around on itself, she decided. Very
well, she would abandon the path and escape its
devious tricks. She went sliding and scrambling right down the face of the
hill. She felt
it level off, saw the
uneven edge of forest ahead of her, and ran under
its branches. The next thing she knew, she had run
right through the black fringe out into starlight again. She was climbing the
steep hill
side before she could even stop.

The
elf lord found his human huddled at the foot of the bottom-
most
ash tree, her face a study of bewilderment and distress. He knelt down by her
side and put his arms around her.

“I’m sorry that
upset you,” he said. “It was wrong to frighten a child like that, but
I didn’t know how else to test this spell.”

Cold
and miserable, Miranda nestled into the warmth of his arms.
“That’s
all I am to you, aren’t I?” she said. “Just a child.”

“Of
course you are,” he said kindly. “I’m not like that fur-handed
monster.”

“But
I’m only a child for two more weeks,” she said with a sigh.
“Then
you won’t have to take care of me anymore.”

Nir was puzzled by
her unhappy expression. “I thought you wanted to be a grown woman,”
he pointed out.

“Not
anymore,” she whispered. “I’m glad I still have two weeks.”

“I
don’t blame you for feeling sad,” he said sympathetically. ‘At
the very end of your tragic childhood, you’ve finally
found someone
to take proper care of you. It’s too
cold for you here. I’ll take you back to camp.”

Miranda let him help
her up and lead her through the endless
shadows.
“I wasn’t going back to camp,” she confessed wretchedly.