In the Coils of the Snake

by Clare B. Dunkle

  The First Fathers of the elves, he knew, had endowed all the members of their race with beauty, but there was almost as much difference between the attractive elf commoners and the stunning elf nobles as there was between an average human and an elf Arianna was spectacular even for an elf lord’s daughter, he was sure. Some times her beauty made his head swim.

  What he wouldn’t give, he thought drowsily, to have his arms around her now. Watching her comb the smooth black locks, he felt his worries slipping away. Someday soon, he would take her in his arms and feel that cloud of soft hair around him. What a day that would be, he thought blissfully, closing his eyes with a sigh.

  A second later, he opened them again.

  “That was an excellent sleep spell,” he said coldly. “A subtle and powerful effort. I would have woken up to find you halfway across the lake valley, I suppose. If you don’t stop these nonsensical peregrinations, I’ll lock our bedroom door with a King’s Lock, and you’ll find your magic of very little use to you then.”

  With a cry, Arianna flung down the comb and retreated from the bed. The goblin King propped himself up on his paw to look for her. She had taken refuge behind a brocade-covered bench and was peering at him over its top.

  “Honestly, Arianna!” he exclaimed. “What sort of behavior is this? Sometimes I feel as if I’ve married a bird or a squirrel instead of a woman. I should be luring you to my side with lumps of sugar!”

  No answer. The elf girl laid her arms across the top of the bench and rested her head on them, still watching him.

  “But you can speak,” he pointed out. “You spoke to me in the truce circle. I’ll make you a bargain. If you’ll start speaking to me again, I won’t lock the door.”

  He saw her hesitate and glance longingly toward it. After a moment of thought, she shook her head. The goblin King was pleased. This indication of further resistance was in itself more cooperation than she ordinarily gave him.

  “All right, I’ll make you another bargain,” he said. “Come lie down now so that we can get some sleep, and I won’t lock the door.”

  Arianna emerged from her corner and slipped into bed next to him, pulling the blanket over herself so gracefully and gently that he wouldn’t even have known she was there if he hadn’t been looking at her. She really was like a wild creature, he mused. No wonder he never woke up when she left.

  Propped on his paw, he studied his apprehensive wife. He stroked her black hair, marveling at its softness, and played with the strands around her face. She stared at him anxiously, not moving a muscle, and when he took her hand, she didn’t resist. But when he raised the hand to his lips, she gasped and tried to jerk it away.

  Marak Catspaw gave an irritated sigh. While she might look like a woman to him, it was obvious that he still looked like a monster to her, something that might decide to bite off a finger and chew it up for a snack. The goblin King found himself once again cursing the villainous elf lord.

  `Arianna,” he said with soft bitterness, “I know you won’t be able to believe this, but I had a fiancee. too. She was a human girl, taller than you are, and quite lovely as humans go, with red hair that was even more remarkable than yours. She liked me, and she liked to talk with me; we had read the same books, and we enjoyed discussing them. She used to smile at me, and even kiss me, and as incredible as it sounds to you, my fiancee wanted to marry me. The night that I married you, she shed tears.”

  The elf girl listened to this disclosure with an astounded expression, and Marak Catspaw relented.

  “I won’t lock the door,” he promised. “Even though you can’t leave my kingdom, you aren’t a prisoner here. You’re the King’s Wife, and you can go wherever you like. You don’t need to overpower the guards, either. They’re posted to stay at the doors until you or I give them an order. If you leave, they won’t try to stop you, and they won’t follow you. But you need to sleep now, not go wandering. You’re wearing yourself out, and your health is important.”

  Still holding her hand, he settled himself beside her and began to work on a sleep spell of his own. She detected the magic at once and began to fight it, tensing herself up with the effort. Very well, he thought, that wasn’t going to work. He could force her into unconsciousness by sheer magical power, but she would continue to oppose the spell. She might not move for several hours, but she wouldn’t get much rest, either.

  Catspaw began to send her dream images instead, scenes from the forest outside the goblin caves. He imagined for her the stars from the top of the Hill and the quiet lake far below, its dark surface patterned by the rising moon with a thousand silver wrinkles. As he sent her the whisper of night breezes, the quiet drift of clouds, he felt her start to relax. Her breathing slowed, becoming even and regular. The tired girl shut her eyes.

  Now he sent her the image of a leaf being blown from a tree. He followed it in his mind, tumbling through space, skimming effortlessly along on the river of wind. It dipped and flew, spinning high into the air, until it disappeared into the empty sky. The goblin King’s eyes closed, too.

  After a couple of minutes, Arianna blinked and cautiously looked around. Withdrawing her hand carefully from his, she maneuvered out from under the blanket. With a bewildered frown, she studied the goblin, touching the tawny fur on the back of his paw to find out how it felt. Then the elf girl slipped noiselessly from the room.

  Pulling open one of the gold double doors, she surveyed the black draped monstrosities beyond. The two soldiers stared at her, and there was no mistaking their apprehension and unease. The diminutive girl walked past as if she didn’t notice them. These hulks were no match for her; she would try the King at his word before she knocked them to the floor. But the guards stayed where they were, and she could feel their eyes follow her as she walked away. The goblin King hadn’t lied to her after all.

  Arianna was beginning to learn her way through the strange square passages of the palace. In spite of her fatigue, she felt her spire its lift at the stillness around her: even in this dreary underworld, she felt the hush of the falling night. Goblins, like humans, lived their lives in the blaring, blazing hours of the daytime. They huddled in their compartments around her now, their thoughts vague and incoherent in sleep.

  Feeling momentarily safe, free from her sleeping giant, the girl paused to lean out one of the great empty windows high above the valley fields. She didn’t look at the lights below that made her squint with their brilliance, crossing the valley in a gross and clumsy parody of a star-filled sky. Instead, she looked up at the rich, green, incandescent lake water that trapped the lamplight and reflected it downward like a vast but indistinct mirror. No moonlight or starlight shone through that watery mirror-sky, but strange currents of pale green and turquoise wandered across it, barely revealing themselves, like a breath misting on cold glass. The goblin world was quiet now, and she felt the soothing peace of it, herself a child of quiet. After the long day of listening to her husband’s staccato growl and rumble, the silence seemed like an exquisite song.

  Why did he want her to talk? What could she say to him, an enemy, that could possibly please him? He tried in his lumbering way to please her, she could tell, but his words meant nothing. Arianna had that most troublesome and temperamental of magical gifts, the ability to feel a person’s thoughts. And she knew that when this alien King looked at her, he wasn’t speaking about what was on his mind.

  Not yet, he was thinking as he talked to her of plants and flowers. Later. Soon. And then — But here Arianna’s gift failed her, as this gift almost always did. Only a handful of goblins and elves who had ever lived knew precisely what went on in the minds around them.

  While the goblin King roared and rumbled his meaningless phrases, Arianna focused all her magic on his then. What plan had this unnatural beast concocted for his foreign bride, whom he kept ostentatiously by him as he governed his hosts of malformed eyes sores? There had been terrifying whispers in the elf camp about what a goblin King did to produce a bride worth
y of his status, and she was sure she understood his plan. He would continue the magical operations on her that he had commenced on the very first night.

  Arianna shrank within herself as she thought of that ghastly time, when he had transformed her, little by little, before a screaming, chanting mob. Every new spell he had worked had robbed her of some of her beauty, as had plainly been his intent. No doubt he meant her to be a showpiece, an exhibition of his magical skill and vision. She uncurled her hands to study the white lines inscribed in her flesh and rubbed the garish snake around her neck. On her forehead flashed a bright letter for all to see. The goblin King’s Wife, it said — a mark of ownership, like the symbols that humans seared into the sides of their cattle.

  What had saved her that night? What had stopped him from carrying on this transformation until she looked as frightful as he did himself? Undoubtedly she had begun to fare badly, and he had been afraid that the procedure would cost too much. He was sincere, at least, in his worries about her health. Perhaps she wouldn’t have survived.

  And now his shadowy not yet haunted his thoughts and hers as she instigated obstructions and delays. She knew that her attitude baffled him: her strategies were limited, and his plan would triumph in the end. But life was a finite space of time: each moment, she came closer to her escape. And each moment that she stayed herself was one she counted as a victory.

  “Arianna!”

  She turned from her window to find an intruder there. That oddest of all oddities, the goblin who looked like an elf, was a little distance from her in the hallway, his handsome face puzzled and concerned. He had stopped in surprise, doubtless wondering at finding her there. Then he stepped forward, composing his face into cheerful normality, murmuring something calm and reassuring.

  Arianna continued to stare at him, unmoving. Then she put out her hands. At once, a large white owl hung in space where she had been. It hovered for an instant, wavering, beating the air with its soft, silent wings. Then it launched itself through the great empty window and floated off into the night.

  Chapter Ten

  Equipped with proper elf shoes and clothing, Miranda felt more comfortable, but she was far from contented. The next night, she went bathing with the women in the cold river water, but they didn’t allow her to take a dignified bath. Instead, they played tag, splashed one another, and splashed her, too, and insisted on washing her hair.

  Concerned that she had no work to do after the evening meal, she looked for some useful activity to join. But the elves didn’t do anything useful, they just fooled around: dancing, singing, playing with their children, coming and going on walks. She noticed a pair of hunters leaving to bring back a deer for the band’s daily stew, but it was clear that they enjoyed hunting too much to call it work. Only the elf lord, copying spells and practicing them at his writing desk, was performing a task that Miranda could approve of

  She sat down near the edge of camp, dejected and annoyed. It didn’t matter that the elvish life was so lovely, she thought. They really should engage in some honest labor. They could be plowing a field right now or cutting down some trees to build a house. Marak had been right about the lazy elves. They needed taking in hand.

  Just as she was concluding this arrogant thought to her satisfaction, Hunter and another elf man walked up behind her on their way back into camp. With lightning skill born of long practice, they had half her hair in an untidy braid before she knew what they were doing. When she reached back to smack their hands away, they were already walking past her, talking together in low voices as if she weren’t even there. This was exactly the sort of thing, she fumed, that she should expect from the silly elves. Rummaging in her small store of elvish, she found the right word for them.

  “Turturla!” she yelled. Children! The men laughed and turned to look back at her, answering in bursts of graceful elvish as they continued on their way. Nir heard the exchange and smiled to himself. Then he paused in his writing to think about it. It was the human prisoner’s first attempt to speak elvish to an elf. That was very good, he mused: a real step forward. Of course, it had been an insult, but that didn’t really matter. One had to start somewhere.

  That does it, decided Miranda in disgust, standing up and brushing herself off. I don’t care if I am important to a bunch of pretty children who have no manners with strangers and nothing to do but play stupid pranks. I don’t see what I’m supposed to add to their world except be made the butt of jokes. I want to know what I’m doing here, and I want to know it now. And if I don’t like it, I’ll find some way off this stretch of ground if I have to dig under the camp border with my teeth.

  She marched resolutely off to the elf lord, thinking of all the things she wanted to say. She walked up to his writing desk, ready to do battle, her face looking like a thundercloud. But the elf lord closed his spell book when she appeared beside him and turned to her with a smile. It was the first time he had ever smiled at her, and he won the battle before she could say a word. She forgot that she was angry. She forgot everything. She just stood and stared at that smile.

  “Sika,” he said, “I’m bored with writing, and I’m tired of learning spells. Let’s go on a walk.” Then he stood up, stretched to take the writing cramp out of his arms, and reached for her hand. No stars lit up in protest this time. The dumbfounded girl was quite incapable of protest.

  They climbed up the side of the nearest hill together, the elf lord’s hand guiding her as she struggled to find her footing. Not far from the top, they came out of the trees and stopped above a short cliff. The whole elf camp lay below them, the bend in the river gleaming in the light from the stars.

  The elf lord walked along the cliff edge and then sat down where a broken slab of rock angled up to provide a comfortable backrest. He looked at the small figures of his elves dancing in the meadow below. Miranda sat beside him, listening to the faint music.

  “When I was little,” he told her, “I was raised by a human woman who lived with my father and me. She always talked about being in the dark. Elves move camp each season, but we moved all the time, and I got the feeling that we were trying to escape the dark, as if it were a frightening place. But dark is really a shade, isn’t it, like dark red or dark green. Do you humans see everything in dark colors?”

  “I can’t see colors at night,” answered Miranda. “Everything’s black, except that the moon and stars are white, and a little light shining on the river is white. The sky is dark, and the ground is even darker. That’s why we call it being in the dark.”

  The elf lord looked deeply shocked. “No color at all?” he echoed in dismay. “Do you mean that the whole scene in front of you now looks just like a goblin’s cloak? That’s far worse than I had imagined!”

  Miranda considered this, looking around. “What do you see?” she wanted to know.

  “I see the leaves of the trees, all different shades of green, tossing in the wind, and the patterns that the elves are making as they turn and dance in circles. The sky is a dark blue-green, going on and on forever, and the stars hang in it like globes of fire—yellow, red, orange, pale green, blue, and white like ice. The big round disk of the moon is dark blue. Only the thin rim is bright.” He paused. “A silver-gold rim, I’d call it. I don’t know your word for that color.” At the astonishment on her face, he grimaced. “But to you, it’s all just black.”

  “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 powerful. 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. “Goblin 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.