In the Coils of the Snake

by Clare B. Dunkle

  Now Miranda watched the new goblin King examine her damaged hand. The skinned knuckles were an outlet for her wounded feelings, a focus for her internal pain. If Marak wasn’t coming back to mend them, she didn’t want them mended at all.

  “I think some wounds shouldn’t be healed,” she proposed.

  Catspaw had a high opinion of her intelligence and was ready to be interested in the idea. “Why shouldn’t we use magic when it’s convenient?” he inquired.

  “I’m not magical,” said Miranda. “Is it good for a nonmagical body to undergo magic for no reason? These will heal on their own.”

  “They might scar,” observed the goblin King calmly.

  She studied the smashed, skinless knuckles. It was true that they weren’t a pretty sight. But she felt again that sense of mastery over pain, and the exhilaration of it carried her along. Certainly the straightforward Catspaw had no insight into her complicated feelings on the subject.

  “Humans are proud of their scars,” she debated. “Scars can be a badge of honor.”

  At that moment, Seylin walked up beside them, on business with the King. The handsome man caught sight of Miranda’s injured knuckles and grimaced in concern. “Miranda, what did you do?” he cried out, genuinely distressed. His reaction was like a splash of cold water. Miranda felt guilty and embarrassed.

  “Here’s a thought, Seylin,” remarked the King with cheerful unconcern. “Should some wounds be left unhealed?”

  “No,” answered his chief adviser sharply, and Miranda didn’t protest when he mended her hand.

  Catspaw excused himself and went off with his adviser, leaving Miranda alone. After her traumatic visit to the crypt and Seylin’s unpleasant reaction to her wounds, she felt nervous and unstrung. She edged cautiously up the stairs, hoping not to meet anything too revolting, but even the picturesque goblins startled her today. She was relieved to reach her own floor and glad to find that the guard posted there was one of the least distasteful goblins in the kingdom.

  Tattoo, Sable’s youngest son, had only recently become a member of the King’s Guard. His black uniform made him inconspicuous against the dark green marble of the hallway. Big and handsome like his father, Tinsel, Tattoo got his name from an unusual feature: many faint black lines crisscrossed his silver face, as if someone had marked it with ink and he hadn’t washed it all off. His straight black hair flopped untidily into his blue eyes and about his shoulders.

  Miranda liked Tattoo, who had his father’s easygoing, friendly manner, and she seized upon his presence as an opportunity. Now, instead of just hiding in her rooms, she could go somewhere more interesting. Facing the deformities in the hallways wasn’t nearly so disturbing if she had company along.

  Where did she want to go? Miranda loitered in the hallway, considering her choices. There were many fascinating and exotic places in the underground realm, she reminded herself, trying to ignore the nagging whisper that she really wanted to go outside. To leave the goblin caves, to stand in the sunlight again… Miranda forced the thought away and held her breath. Sometimes the gloomy shadows here seemed almost to choke her, like layers of dark cobwebs winding themselves around her face and throat.

  She couldn’t leave the caves, so she would do the next best thing. The kingdom contained two places that Miranda thought of as “outdoors.” When she had first come through the goblins’ front door, she had emerged in what seemed to be a narrow valley, it was so vast a cave. This lamplit, subterranean cavern was called the palace gardens because of its ornamental beds full of jeweled replicas of living plants. Near the goblins’ great iron door, a grove of brass and silver trees caught in clever artistry the changing of the seasons. The enormous palace, with its great square windows, overlooked these dark gardens, and a shallow river foamed over rocks at the valley floor.

  Did she want to visit the palace gardens? Miranda hesitated. Of all the wonders in the goblin realm, they were the most eerily exquisite, but for all their beauty, she didn’t really like them. They were so silent, faint and ghostly in that black place. They seemed to be frozen in an eternal midnight.

  She would go look at the other place in the goblin kingdom where one felt that one was out of doors. There, at least, she would find light. “Tattoo, come with me,” she ordered, but the big guard looked uneasy.

  “I’m not supposed to, King’s Bride,” he said. “I got in trouble last time. I have to stay at the door. That’s my orders.”

  Miranda frowned at him and folded her arms in imitation of her imperious mother. “Which would you rather do?” she demanded. “Upset me or risk a little trouble?”

  “Upset you,” answered Tattoo fervently. “Mother found out that I was written up for leaving my post. I think she’ll kill me if it happens again.”

  This Miranda could understand. The two elf women, Sable and Irina, were her neighbors, and they formed the nucleus of a small clan of oddly attractive elvish-looking goblins. Sable was a stern matriarch with very high expectations. She didn’t put up with much nonsense from her children and could be very blunt about telling them so.

  `All right, you don’t have to come with me,” Miranda generously decided. “But you still have to deliver messages to Catspaw for me, don’t you?” Tattoo nodded. “Then deliver a message to him in the royal rooms, and I’ll come with you. I’ll tell you what it is on the way.”

  Tattoo pondered this for a minute and then walked resignedly to the stairs. Miranda followed him, feeling smug. She wasn’t concerned that a lowly guard might think her behavior strange. Delivering eccentric orders to the servants was a cherished privilege of the upper class, and Miranda had seen a great deal of it during her childhood.

  “What’s the message?” asked Tattoo as they climbed the stairs.

  “Let’s see,” reflected the girl. “Tell the King that I hope his day is going well.”

  “I have to tell Marak that?” Tattoo looked glum.

  “The goblin King will be very pleased,” Miranda stated with breezy self-assurance, and she was quite sure that he would be. Catspaw was making no secret of his fondness for her: his attention was becoming real fascination. There were many things in her new life about which Miranda felt dubious, but the new King’s regard was not one of them.

  Keeping pace with the goblin guard, she climbed steps until she was short of breath. The royal rooms were on one of the highest levels of the palace. That palace fooled the girl into thinking it was a normal building because of its rooms, halls, and stairways, but Miranda already understood that it was much more than it appeared to be when viewed from its ornamental gardens. Many of those hallways burrowed deep into the rock. Its contours could never have been built aboveground; they had had to be mined away.

  The pair arrived at the elaborately decorated royal floor of the palace, and Miranda studied the stately hallway with pleasure. On one side, square windows without glass stretched from ceiling to floor, and across from them stood two uniformed guards watching the set of golden doors that led to the royal rooms. The brilliant mosaics and gemstone encrusted furnishings shamed the Taj Mahal. Not a single human monarch in the entire world lived in such splendor, and Miranda enjoyed thinking of her imminent residency there. The life of a goblin King’s Wife, she decided, did have certain tangible rewards.

  Tattoo conferred with the door guards and then passed her on his way back to the stairs. “Marak isn’t here,” he said bitterly. “He’s in the palace town, inspecting some hybrid grain.” He didn’t add that this meant an hour’s walk to deliver her inconsequential message, but Miranda was fully aware of it.

  “What a lucky thing for you not to be stuck so long in that boring hallway,” she noted. “I’ll see you later then.” The young goblin’s unhappy expression as he walked off indicated that he viewed this last statement as a threat.

  Miranda’s goal was the balcony overlooking the lake valley on the other side of those stately windows. This valley came closest to the world that Miranda had left behind. Hollow Lake,
in which she had splashed and played as a little girl, was a large oval body of water several miles across. Beneath it lived the goblins, in simple villages and farms, raising the crops and animals that fed them and the dwarves. The shores of the lake were like mountains hemming them in, the impassable boundaries of their deep round valley. The waters of the lake were the only sky that most of them ever saw, a trembling firmament of shifting cobalt twilight by day, and a bland and featureless velvet blackness by night.

  Miranda stood with her hand on the cold stone of the window frame, taking in the view across the round valley. Here, birds flew, although they took care not to fly too high, or they would find themselves swimming instead. Here, plants grew, although no trees could survive. And here, if nowhere else in the kingdom, the sun shone—after a fashion.

  This valley was a dim and murky place, the sunlight reaching it through the filter of deep water. Only when the sun stood straight overhead did the water become more translucent. For just a little while, the aquamarine gloom lightened. The difference wasn’t dramatic, but she had already come to treasure it. More than anything else that she had lost, Miranda missed the sun.

  But today, she found to her dismay that the balcony was occupied. Marak’s widow, Kate, was already there. Miranda felt shy and reserved in the presence of the dignified woman. She knew that Catspaw thought the world of his mother.

  “Hello, Miranda,” said Kate. “I’m glad to see you.” Miranda greeted her politely in return and sat down a little distance away. Now, here was a perfect King’s Wife, she thought, a bit overawed. Kate worked constantly for her people, and everyone adored her. She was graceful and formal without seeming in the least snobbish. Miranda reflected unhappily that Catspaw’s mother probably never gave selfish orders to her door guards.

  “I love to come here,” Kate volunteered. “It’s the only place in the whole kingdom where one can see a real horizon. I hope you won’t mind sharing it with me sometimes. My new balcony faces the gardens.”

  Of course, remembered Miranda: Marak’s widow had just moved out of the royal rooms. She instantly felt worried and guilty about her own impending possession of them. Perhaps this important woman resented that. Miranda murmured something civil, and silence descended once again, but now she felt obliged to break it.

  “I come here to see the sunlight,” she confessed. “I like to see the valley brighten up at this time of day, but it looks as if today must be cloudy.” The remarks were harmless enough, but her longing showed on her face, and now Kate looked as if she were the one feeling guilty.

  “I’m so sorry,” she answered. “I hate it that you can’t go outside. Catspaw says that it’s too dangerous to allow every King’s Wife to go outside the way I do, but maybe he will make an exception now and then. I’ll ask him to let you go outside with us on the next fullmoon night.”

  After her ghastly experience in the blackness of the Kings’ crypt, Miranda could think of few things worse. “Please don’t!” she exclaimed in horror. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” she amended, blushing deeply, “but I wouldn’t like to be outside at night. I’m afraid of the dark.”

  “Oh.” The lovely woman stared at her, quite surprised. “Please excuse me for a moment,” she said and left the balcony.

  Miranda reflected in consternation on how rude she must have sounded. Up until then, she had hidden her phobia quite well. Now her future mother-in-law might use this information to torment her, just as her own mother had. She could hear Til’s voice in her mind, elegant and scornful: Really, darling, what a stupid thing to say.

  Then Kate was back, sitting down close beside her and clasping a bracelet around Miranda’s wrist. ‘A dwarf made this for me,” she explained. “It lights up if you’re ever in the dark. I remember how dark it seemed when I first came here and how glad I was to have it with me. I’d like you to have it now.”

  Miranda studied the triple rope of diamonds, completely won over by the unexpected kindness. “Thank you,” she said. ‘And I’m sorry,” she added sincerely, “that you had to move out of your rooms.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” said Kate lightly. ‘All that gaudy decoration! That sort of display has never been to my taste.” She gazed placidly over the valley while Miranda studied her out of the corner of her eye. Did she feel as betrayed as Miranda did about Marak’s abandonment of them? He hadn’t even spoken a word to her before climbing into his tomb.

  “Doesn’t it make you angry sometimes that he just walked away?” she ventured.

  The beautiful woman turned toward her. Deep in those blue eyes, there was a preoccupied look, as if she weren’t really paying attention. She seemed to be listening for certain footsteps, or the sound of a familiar voice. In a flash, Miranda understood why Marak’s widow was handling her loss so well. Kate undoubtedly knew that her husband was dead — but part of her was still waiting for him.

  “That who walked away, dear?” asked Kate mildly. Miranda didn’t have the heart to answer.

  • • •

  A few days later, the girl sat with Catspaw in his library. While the busy goblin King recorded the day’s decisions, writing left-handed because of his awkward paw, she ran her eyes over the closely packed shelves, scanning the long sets of matched volumes. She was bored with her inactivity and annoyed at her own boredom, and she wasn’t feeling particularly gracious. But that didn’t matter; she would have the right smile ready for her royal fiance when he looked up at her.

  With a slight frown, the goblin King took her hand and exam fined the jewelry she wore. Among his own gifts, he spied Kate’s bracelet and touched it with a finger.

  “Mother tells me you’re afraid of the dark,” he said. “I hadn’t known.”

  Miranda was taken aback by the revelation and felt anxious about what it might mean.

  “Did something here cause it?” he asked.

  “No, it started when I was young,” she answered reluctantly. Then she realized he had noticed her hesitation.

  “How?” he demanded, and she decided that she had better tell him the truth.

  “One day Mother was scolding me, and I told her I was glad that I was going away when I grew up. There were lots of things we couldn’t say because of the magic, but there were still things that we could say.

  “Mother always hated to hear that sort of thing — I don’t know why; as much as she disliked me, you’d think she would have been glad, too. This time, she glared at me and said, ‘You’ll go away, all right. You’ll be locked up forever in the dark. Let’s try it out and see how you like it.’

  “She dragged me downstairs to the cellar and shut me into a room. Not one ray of light came in. Then she stood outside and talked to me while I screamed and pounded on the door. ‘There are things in the dark that can’t come out in the day,’ she told me. ‘You’re cursed. You’ll never escape.’”

  “She could say that because it was a lie,” growled Catspaw. “The magic only blocked her from speaking the truth about the kingdom. It’s unfortunate that Til is part of my family; I can’t take goblin revenge. All the same, I don’t see why her life should be going so well. I’ll have to give the matter some thought.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t keep me there very long,” Miranda told him, oddly uncomfortable over the calm threat. “Papa let me out. He was yelling at Mother, just as upset as I was. He was probably afraid of what Marak would do. But Mother was very cool about it. I remember she laughed at him. She said, ‘Maybe now she’ll want to stay with me.’

  “She was right, too. I was afraid to see the sun go down, terrified all night, and the nurse wouldn’t let me keep a candle. I crept out of bed and huddled in a patch of moonlight, thinking about how Marak always visited after dark. The next time he came, I didn’t run to greet him, and I cried when he walked into the room. It sounds silly, time different but it was the first time I noticed how different he was from everyone else.”

  “What did he do?” asked Catspaw with interest. “Did he work any spell
s?”

  “I don’t think so,” she answered. “He was just himself. He held me on his lap, and he talked to me.” Her voice wavered because of the lump that had formed in her throat. She stopped abruptly and studied the diamond bracelet. Sometimes it still hurt terribly to think of him.

  Catspaw leaned toward her as she glanced up and held her gaze with his own. “My spells keep the lamps lit, Miranda,” he said quietly. “I won’t ever leave you in the dark.”

  Miranda was touched by his consideration. She hadn’t imagined the goblin King like this. She saw her royal suitor as someone to charm and impress, but she hadn’t realized that she would have to trust him. Maybe he wouldn’t always seem like such a stranger, she thought with relief. She remembered Marak’s last talk with her: Catspaw will be all that to you.

  “That night when I was frightened, Marak told me about my future,” she recalled. “It was the first time that he said I would be a King’s Wife.”

  “Then I remember that night as well,” said Marak Catspaw. “It’s one of the only times I saw Father worried. I was up late, studying political economy or some such thing, when he came into my room. ‘You’ve got to marry that girl,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I just promised her that you would.”’

  Miranda felt startled. “I thought he knew my future,” she protested. “He sounded so sure of it. I thought he could see it in my face.”

  Catspaw smiled. “He was just being a King,” he said. “Kings are never supposed to seem uncertain. I don’t see anything about your future in your face. I only see the character from the Door Spell.”