In the Coils of the Snake

by Clare B. Dunkle

  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 asking 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 b
locked 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 hillside 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.

  “I know,” he replied. “I’m sorry for tricking you. You can see that I don’t trust you, either.”

  • • •

  The next night, Nir left camp to go hunting. He didn’t hunt deer, but he found exactly what he was after. As Sable came slipping through the trees, he stepped out to confront her.

  “Stop!” he called. She yelped in fright, but she stopped. “You’ll tell me what I want to know,” he said with stern satisfaction, walking up to her. “You’re an elf, so you don’t have a choice. What did you tell Sika — Miranda — last night that’s made her so unhappy?”

  “I told her that the goblin King has arranged for her escape,” retorted Sable, turning away from him and staring at the ground. “I tried to convince her to take advantage of it.”

  “You tried?” echoed Nir in some surprise. “Why did she need convincing?”

  “She loves you,” muttered Sable reluctantly. “She wants to stay with you.”

  “The human girl loves me!” exclaimed the elf lord incredulously, and he gave a triumphant laugh. “That’s dealt a nice blow to the goblin King’s plots for her, hasn’t it? Tell me, how did you try to convince her?”

  “I told her what you elf men are like,” snapped Sable, “that you have no feeling at all for her, that you’re just waiting until her marriage moon to throw her out of your tent. I told her how dangerous you are, that you’re insane, that you even killed your own wife.”

  The elf lord’s face went white with indignation and fury. “How dare you say such things! How dare you bring harm to your own people!”

  “The goblins are my people, not the elves,” replied Sable. “I’d never live among people like you who have no feelings for others.”

  “What would you know about the feelings of elves?” cried Nir. “Fine! You’ll have what you want. Look at me,” he commanded, putting his hand on her head, and she looked up at him for the first time. “And listen,” he said in a low, firm voice, looking into her eyes. “I tell you that you are not an elf. You are a goblin instead. Go back to your King and say that the elf lord tells him that his spies won’t plague me much longer. I’m giving him fair warning: if I catch him meddling with Sika again, I’ll murder any goblin I find. Now get away from here. And don’t let me see you again.”

  Sable shook all over, seeming to shrink before his eyes. When he released her, she staggered backward and fell onto the damp ground. Mindlessly, automatically, she crawled away from him, but her eyes never left his face. Torn between grief and disgust, Nir watched her go, the elf that wasn’t an elf. Then he turned and walked back to camp.

  Hunter was waiting for him by the tents.

  “Some tracker you are!” he scoffed, his blue eyes bright. “I caught my quarry long ago and she’s already flayed and carved.”

  “So’s mine,” sighed Nir. “Please gather the others. I have to talk to them.”

  Miranda was sitting by Galnar, listening to his violin. Half the camp was dancing to the music, but she was too unhappy to dance. Before Sable’s warning, she would have wandered the camp boundary to watch for Nir to come back from hunting. She wouldn’t let herself do that anymore, but she was still impatient for his return. She had only two weeks to spend with him before it was too late.

  The elves all gathered under the shelter of the bluffs and listened to their lord. Miranda couldn’t understand his rapid elvish, but she heard different names mixed into it, and a thrill of excitement went through the crowd. She wandered over to Hunter, who stood to one side.

  “What’s he saying?” she whispered. Hunter turned with a bewildered expression and leaned toward her, cupping his hand around his ear. “You heard me!” she whispered. “I know you speak English.” He smiled indulgently at her and patted her on the head. She glared at him. Elves are so silly, she thought.

  Nir finished speaking, and the assembled elves dispersed, heading off on different errands. The lord walked up to his friend and his prisoner. “Hunter, Sika is your responsibility in my absence,” he said, “but she can stay alone in my tent. Sika, follow his orders as you would mine. That is to say, reluctantly,” he added, a smile lighting his dark eyes.

  “In your absence?” asked Miranda anxiously.

  “Yes, I have to leave tonight,” he said. “There’s a spell I need to work. I’ll be back at the full moon.”

  “The full moon!” gasped Miranda. “No! That’s too late! Take me with you,” she begged.

  “I can’t, but I’ll be back soon,” he promised. Soon, thought the stricken Miranda. As soon as I’m a grown woman, and you stop worrying about me. My last two weeks, gone. She wandered away from the men as they talked, and crept into his empty tent.

  Miranda didn’t let herself cry. She lay facedown on her pallet, overwhelmed by misery. She wished she were asleep, unconscious, dead. She heard Nir crawl into the tent and felt him sit down next to her, but she didn’t move.

  “Sika, you asked me last night if you could trust me to do what you want,” he said. “I don’t know the answer. I have to do what’s best for the elves, but I’ll make you happy if I can.”

  “Catspaw told me the same thing,” she muttered, “that he would give me anything to make me happy, anything. But he wouldn’t give me the one thing I wanted, and neither will you.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” he replied. “Tell me what you want. I’ll give you anything that’s in my power to give.”

  Miranda felt again the despair of Marak’s death and the loss of her tidy future. H
er dignity, her hard work, even her perfect manners — nothing in her life had any meaning.

  “Very well,” she said with bitter fatalism. “If you really want to know, I want you.” A lump rose in her throat at the pitiful hopelessness of it all.

  “You want me?” said the elf lord softly. “That’s good. That’s in my power to give.”

  Miranda was just breaking into tears when she heard him. She sat up slowly, wiping her eyes. “But,” she began. “But — you can’t, you know. Elves don’t marry human women.”

  “This elf does,” replied Nir with a smile.

  “But you don’t want to marry me,” she insisted helplessly.

  The elf lord looked puzzled. “Maybe humans think backwards,” he remarked thoughtfully. “You’re telling me things that you couldn’t possibly know without asking questions about them first. Telling me I can’t marry you. Telling me I don’t want to marry you. How do you know that, Sika? Have you asked?”

  She stared at him. “Do you want to marry me?” she whispered.

  “Of course I do,” said Nir. “Why do you think we’re always together?”

  Miranda’s world had fallen apart a couple of times, and she had tackled the wreckage with vigor. But her world hadn’t gone from horrible to splendid in a second. She didn’t know what to do. Marak had raised her to do her duty for the admiration that it would bring. He had taught her to defend herself against cruelty and disappointment — and not to trust anyone but him.

  “Do you love me?” she breathed.

  “Yes,” he answered. “Not that I understand you very well. You’re re so different from us. The elves all belong to me, but you don’t. I suppose that makes you very appealing.”

  Miranda thought about this in complete amazement. The elf lord was remarkable, inhumanly handsome, unlike anyone she had ever known. It had never occurred to her that she might be unlike anyone he had ever known.

  She wanted to prove to herself that this was really happening, so she reached out and took his hand. She could feel her face beaming with joy, and she didn’t know what to do about it. After a lifetime of hiding her emotions, she felt exposed by her own happiness. She didn’t dare to look at him. He would surely see what she was feeling.