In the Coils of the Snake

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “It does make sense,” snapped Catspaw. “That elf is being vindictive. You saw what he did to Mother just because she’d been the goblin King’s Wife. I still mean to honor my part of the treaty, regardless of his behavior. We’re sending him the first spell book tonight, but make sure it contains no military magic. Deliver it yourself and insist on Miranda’s return. I want her back in the kingdom as soon as possible.”

  “Certainly,” responded Seylin. “Goblin King, I think you’re scaring your wife.”

  Catspaw turned to study the girl who sat beside him on the stair. Arianna was looking from one to the other of them with anxious eyes. Of course, he thought. He had been speaking in goblin. She couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” he said to her. “I know I sound angry, but I’m not angry at you. We were consulting about a kingdom matter.” The elf’s expression didn’t change. He might as well not have spoken. She had the fixed, desperate look of a wild animal caught in a trap.

  Marak Catspaw irately considered how pleasant his life had been just one week ago and how much of a mess it was in now: a guard attacked, his ward stolen, and brides switched on his wedding night. He had been lamenting not long before how boring his reign would be because the goblin King lacked any real opposition. Now he was beginning to have the uncomfortable feeling that he had found a real opponent at last.

  Chapter Eight

  Miranda woke up confused, unable to place where she was. She opened her eyes to find herself in a little tent and a man sitting beside her, watching her with interest. Alarmed, she lay quite still and glanced around anxiously. She wished that he weren’t so handsome. He made it hard for her to think. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Good evening,” he said. “You slept well.”

  “Evening!” echoed Miranda. “I want to see the sunrise.” That was what was wrong: it was already darker than it had been seemingly just a minute before.

  She closed her eyes as one awful memory after another besieged her. Today should be her first day as a King’s Wife, but she would never have the prestige and acclaim she had worked for. Her future was dead, just as dead as her guardian, as dead as she ought to be.

  “You don’t look a thing like an elf,” commented Nir. “No elf has brown eyes like a deer’s, and you’re not small like our women are, but you’re beautiful anyway. I didn’t know that was possible. I thought the only beautiful humans were humans who looked like the elves.”

  “Blame it on Marak,” she muttered. “He was always working spells on me when I was young.”

  The elf lord considered this information. “Did the goblin King give you your red hair?” he wanted to know. “No elf has red hair. I’ve never seen hair like yours.”

  “I don’t have red hair!” exclaimed Miranda, dislodged for the moment from her sorrow. She opened her eyes to find the elf studying her in surprise.

  “Of course it’s red,” he replied. “Why argue about such a thing?” Miranda closed her eyes again, depressed beyond words. It was already growing dark. The elf lord continued to look at her, in no hurry to leave the tent. It was still too bright out to suit him. “What’s your name.” he asked.

  “Miranda,” she replied.

  “Miranda!” he exclaimed in horror. “That’s ghastly! Nothing but a goblin’s trick!”

  This unexpected outburst goaded her out of depression again. She had never been one to dwell on misfortune, and it was apparent that she wouldn’t get the chance now. She sat up and began folding the green cloak that had served as her blanket, determined to make herself behave sensibly. She didn’t want this stranger to discover how hopeless and forlorn she felt.

  “It’s a perfectly normal human name,” she pointed out reasonably. “Miranda is in one of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s a Latin word, I think.”

  “It’s elvish,” Nir informed her coldly, turning away to roll up his own cloak. “It’s the elvish word for the goblin King’s Wife.”

  “No, it’s Latin,” contradicted Miranda. “Or Spanish; I can’t remember which. My brother’s tutor told me it means ‘seeing.’”

  “‘Seeing,’” echoed Nir unhappily, thinking of those brown eyes peering blindly about in the nighttime. “I don’t think Seeing is a good name for you, either. In elvish, mir-an-da means ‘protected by the coils of the magical snake.’ In other words, the goblin King’s Wife. I’m not about to let my elves call you such a horrible name. You remind me of a fox with your red hair. I think I’ll call you Fox.”

  The one nice thing about having lost everything she had ever hoped for was that she no longer had to smile and pretend to be pleased. That was good, she decided grimly, because she wasn’t feeling the least bit gracious or charming.

  “Fox? That’s an insult!” she cried. “Foxes are a thieving nuisance, and to call a girl a female fox is a very bad name.”

  “Why?” asked the elf lord.

  Miranda frowned. “I don’t know. I just know that it is.”

  “I don’t know why it should be,” commented Nir. “Foxes are clever, and they shine like little fires in the woods. They play and dance just like the elves, and they have red hair like yours.”

  He hung his cloak up on his side of the tent and retrieved and tied the belt of his tunic. Then he crawled to the tent opening, unrolled the mat, and put his bare feet on it, crisscrossing the leather straps again around the lower legs of his breeches. Miranda hung up her cloak and turned to look at the simple pallet. It didn’t even have a pillow. How could she have slept so soundly without a pillow?

  She crawled awkwardly from the tent to find that she had an audience. Two beautiful little children stood in front of her, their eyes round and sober as they stared. Miranda stared back, embarrassed, her hair a tangled mess, sweaty and miserable from having had to sleep in her clothes. Her damp dress was a mass of wrinkles, but the elf lord’s simple green tunic and breeches showed no wrinkles at all. Lacing his boots, he looked as if he had been awake for hours; his pale face wasn’t sleepworn, and his black eyes were bright. Miranda found this irritating. Even if the elf had said that she was beautiful, she found it trying to live among a people who made being beautiful seem so effortless.

  The elf lord looked at the children’s serious expressions as he finished lacing his boots, and his face lit up with one of his rare smiles. Indicating Miranda, he made a comment in elvish, and the little girl giggled something back. They spoke for a minute as he climbed to his feet and reached down to help up Miranda. No stars glittered about her wrist this time as he held her hand. She was overcome, as she had been before, by the captivating force of his smile.

  The children scampered off, and he knelt again to roll up the mat at the front of the tent. Miranda looked around uneasily. All about her in the twilight, elves were coming and going, emerging from tents, or sitting and talking with their neighbors. They were all dressed in green; they were all terribly attractive; and they were speaking a language that she couldn’t understand. They also seemed to be entirely at ease with one another and pleased with one another’s company.

  Miranda had thought that the elf lord held her hand as a way to force her to walk with him, but she realized that holding hands must just be an elvish habit. A man and a woman or a boy and a girl would be holding hands as they walked by, and five young women went by in a chain, talking happily together as they walked toward the river. She was startled to see several men keeping company with girls who couldn’t have been more than fifteen at the most, brushing their hair for them by the tents or walking along talking to them. Her human sensibilities made her feel embarrassed by all the close contact. The scene before her was perfectly charming and graceful in its artlessness, and she felt instinctively that it had nothing to do with her.

  Shy and uncomfortable, she tried to summon her dignity. When it came to meeting strangers, she knew only the two extremes: humans had invariably either mocked her or disliked her, and the goblins had been fawning
and deferential. Unfortunately, she was already quite sure that these elves weren’t going to fawn over her. After all she had suffered, she felt that it was particularly painful to face a crowd of people she didn’t know.

  Without really wanting to, she moved closer to the elf lord, and when he stood up again and walked toward the river, she walked by his side, trying not to look as lost as she felt. Who invited you? she heard her mother’s voice say in her mind, but the elf lord didn’t drive her away. He seemed to expect her to accompany him.

  “I’ve sent Kiba to tell her mother to make you some clothes,” he said. “But they won’t be ready tonight; she has to make the cloth for them first. You’ll have to wear those goblin things until tomorrow.”

  Still able to see distances in the deepening twilight, Miranda studied her surroundings with interest. They were in a beautiful valley. Tall, straight trees grew in thick green turf that reminded her of the truce circle, and small flowers of different shapes and shades nodded at her feet. A little river, about ten feet wide and somewhat deep, ran along nearby. They walked through the wide clearing, or small meadow, where he must have worked the spell on her last night. Here was a profusion of wildflowers, but she was surprised that the grass was so short, forming something like a dense, soft carpet.

  She looked up eagerly, her eyes taking in as much of the waning light as they could. The cloudless sky was a clear indigo and the first stars were already out. She could see that the river, glimmering in the fading light, made a loop around the edge of the meadow. Near the middle of the loop, it became wide and shallow. Trees resumed on the opposite side, and a band of tall, forested hills cut off the remaining colors of the sunset to her right. To the left, the forest sloped up gradually into a more distant line of wooded hills.

  No other elves were nearby. They were in the shadowy forest. Nir had brought her there as a kindness, knowing that her human eyes would enjoy the bright light. His own eyes found it rather uncomfortable still.

  “Now is the time of day when we elves go bathing,” he said. The river had carved out a flat stone bank, and he knelt down on the stone to wash his face. Miranda wondered at the remark. She hadn’t seen any way to heat water, and the tents were too small to bathe in.

  “Bathe where?” she wanted to know. And then, when he looked around in amazement at the question, she said, “You mean they bathe right in the river?” She thought about this, rather shocked, while the elf considered, not for the first time, how little sense humans seemed to have. “But you can’t mean that they bathe out in the open where everyone can see them,” she insisted. “That wouldn’t be decent!”

  Decent again. At least this time Nir understood what the word meant. “It’s decent,” he assured her patiently, dipping a wooden comb in the water and pulling it through his hair. “The women usually bathe together and the men bathe together, or they go off by ones and twos, married couples, for instance. But no one bothers anyone else, and they’re still wearing their underclothes anyway, that way they’re always just as clean as the elf is.”

  Miranda was astonished that a man would mention such things to her, but she kept her face expressionless. If elves discussed them, she would, too, so as not to be thought naive. “Ugh,” she remarked with distaste. “It’s a wonder they don’t die of pneumonia, walking around half the night with wet things on.”

  “But they’re not wet,” said Nir. “Elf clothes have the Drying Spell on them. As soon as they come out of the water, they’re dry. See?” He splashed some water on his tunic, and the dark stain quickly faded out.

  “Do you want to go bathing?” he persisted, walking back up to her, his washing finished. “I can show you where the women bathe.”

  Miranda found this a bad idea on many different levels. “No,” she said quickly. “I don’t want to get into that cold water.”

  “Cold?” echoed Nir. “In the summertime?” He was surprised into a musical laugh, and once again, Miranda found herself afraid of him. The elf lord was quite beyond human at such times, like one of those pagan gods who walked the earth disguised as a man. She understood now why Daphne had run from Apollo. She ran away herself, hurrying past him to the riverbank and kneeling to wash her face.

  Nir handed her the comb as she came up the bank, and they walked back to the forest together. She jerked the comb as rapidly as she could through her hair, grimacing at the many tangles, while the elf lord reflected that humans made the most graceful tasks seem ungraceful. He didn’t realize that she was hurrying because he was watching her. Miranda thought his attention impolite.

  He left her to collect their evening meal. Two elves had laid piles of food out on a sheet, and they appeared to be cooking the flat, circular bread on some sort of rock. It was the men who went up to take the food and then brought it back to share with a woman or a girl. Only the little children went up on their own. Miranda found this sort of servile role odd for a man, especially for the elf lord. She certainly couldn’t imagine the goblin King waiting on anyone.

  “Thank you,” she said stiffly as the elf lord came to sit by her side, handing over her breakfast wrapped up in a cloth. She unwrapped it to find half a piece of bread, a strip of dried meat, a carrot, and five radishes. Not quite breakfast in the goblin kingdom, where she would have had whatever she ordered, no matter how elaborate. Lately, she had been favoring apple tarts.

  Kate’s bracelet lit itself with a faint gleam as the evening became night. It wouldn’t light with its usual brightness anymore, and it reminded her abruptly that she was in the dark. Miranda shuddered at the thought.

  “I slept the whole time the sun was up,” she said. “It was an enchantment, wasn’t it?”

  Nir looked away. “Yes, it was the Daylight Spell,” he replied, “the one I worked when I kissed your eyes.”

  “But why?” she demanded. “I already can’t leave your camp, and I have to do what you say. What harm would it have done to let me see the sun?”

  “If you could see it, you’d think of nothing else but the next time you could see it again,” he answered. “You’d stay awake in the day while we were asleep and sleep in the night while we were awake. The elvish world doesn’t have the sun any more than the goblin caves have the moon. You have to learn how to live in our world now.”

  Miranda abandoned her awful breakfast, rolling it back up in the cloth. His pretense of her being some sort of guest was pointless, so she didn’t have to act the part. She was only a slave here, she reminded herself, and there was nothing she could do about it. Very well: she didn’t intend to waste her time and self-respect in absurd struggles. Marak had taught her not to put off unpleasant things.

  “What are my duties?” she demanded.

  “Duties?” asked the puzzled Nir.

  “My work,” continued the girl firmly. “What did you bring me here to do?”

  The elf lord felt a stab of guilt and dodged the question. “Among members of a civilized race,” he answered, “children do no work. I would never order you to drudge and toil at your age.”

  “I am not a child,” asserted Miranda with some heat, and Nir felt quite taken aback.

  “Of course you are,” he said. “The fact is obvious. I don’t understand why you keep challenging it.”

  “I am a grown woman,” declared his human captive with dignity. “I don’t care to be treated like a child. I don’t need anyone looking after me, either. I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

  The elf lord looked at her, expressionless. He said, “That’s why you would be dead by now, I suppose.”

  “Thank you for breakfast,” replied the furious Miranda. “Please excuse me. A great elf lord must have much to do.” She stood up and walked away, and she was very relieved to find that he didn’t order her to come back.

  She went on a walk and surveyed the dim stretch of forest, bumping into the invisible camp border several times. The dark didn’t make her so nervous tonight because she could hear the lyrical conversation of elves
coming from all directions. Her faint bracelet provided only a short ring of light around her, and trees and people emerged from the blackness with eerie suddenness. Unable to form a complete picture of her surroundings, she was struck by odd details instead: the lacy patterns of twigs and branches, the shadows that fanned away from her into the dark. She found herself reaching out to touch tree trunks and bushes as she passed, stroking the rough bark, feeling the cool, pliant leaves. Nearby, an exquisite voice began to sing, and Miranda paused to listen, enthralled.

  When she looked around again, she discovered that she had acquired an entourage. The elf children stood in a little crowd at her heels, as charming and disconcerting as lovely ghosts. She stared at them in dismay, realizing what a spectacle she must seem, and they stared at her curiously and a little anxiously, as if she might charge at them, or possibly start shouting. Then a golden-haired girl smiled bravely at her, and Miranda smiled back, completely conquered. There was just no way that she could resist an elvish smile.

  The children crowded around close to her then, talking all at once. She couldn’t speak elvish, and they couldn’t speak English, but it didn’t really matter. She sat down on the ground so that she would be eye to eye with most of them, and then she pointed at them one at a time.

  They told her their names, with their friends or older siblings helping out to such a degree that she found it hard to understand a word. Kiba’s name she already knew, and her little brother turned out to be Min. Tibir was the oldest boy, possibly about ten. The littlest boy, Bar, could on no account be induced to speak, but so many children spoke for him that it was some time before she could learn his name.

  Then she tried to tell them hers, Miranda. They went into fits of laughter, delighted to find an adult who didn’t know her own name.

  Sika, they told her, and when she looked puzzled, they touched her hair, and Tibir pantomimed sharp ears and a bushy tail. So that was it, thought Miranda, more than a little annoyed: Sika was the elvish word for “fox.”