Close Kin (26 page)

As they broke
camp and started off, Tinsel puzzled over this new
development.
He found his bride's suspicious glances and careful answers even stranger than
her open hostility. Yesterday she had treated him as an enemy, and he could
respect and understand that. Tonight he couldn't guess what she thought he was.

"Why don't
you want to go back to your own people?" he asked
as
they walked along.

"Because of Thorn," she
said in a low voice. "He hates me, but he'll marry me anyway."

"Thorn was the rabbit
lover?" asked the silver goblin. "And you were supposed to marry him,
weren't you?"

Sable nodded, unsure how much to tell
him.

"When I cut my face, he didn't
want to feed me anymore," she
answered,
"but Rowan said the band needed me. They agreed that
as long as he
fed me my share it didn't matter how he did it. But he hated to feed me, hated
it every night. The things he did weren't so bad. It was how he looked at
me."

Tinsel thought
about what it would be like to live with someone
who
despised you.

"I couldn't
do that to you," he told her. "I wouldn't ever treat you
like that. And you won't die having a child, either. The
goblin King
can get you through it."

Sable
shivered at the thought of a goblin King playing midwife.
"I'm an elf,
not a goblin," she pointed out. "He doesn't know about elves."

"The goblin King's Wife is an
elf," said Tinsel, "and he helped her through their son's birth. It
couldn't have been too bad because she was at a banquet two days after he was
born."

"Another elf?" asked Sable
in surprise. "An elf I don't know? Have you seen her?"

"I
see her every day," said Tinsel. "Her son's almost six now."

Sable
fell silent, confused. He must be lying. Unwilling to argue
with him, she
listened him make promises and
explanations
with
out comment. The young goblin
kept up the one sided conversation
for a while, but then he, too, fell
silent. He considered his captive
bride,
with her history of neglect and abuse. She was so guarded and
distrustful,
she would never see him as a friend.

"I can't do this," he said.
"The King's going to have to find someone else to marry you."

Sable stopped and stared at him,
taken aback. She thought they were already married.

"I made you
angry," she guessed. "I broke a goblin rule."

"No, I'm not
angry," he replied. "That's not it at all. Sable,
you're beautiful and brave and smart, and I'd like the
chance to make
you
happy. But marriage isn't going to make you happy. How can I
marry
you, knowing how you feel about it?"

"It's not your
fault if I die," she said slowly. "It's just a woman's life."

"That's not true," said Tinsel. "If I marry
you knowing it will
kill you, of course
it's my fault if you die, and if I marry you know
ing you'll be miserable, it's my fault if you're miserable. I know you
won't
die, but I also know you don't believe that. I can't marry you and make you
miserable."

Sable was struck by this argument. It
was what she had told
Thorn all those years
ago. If you loved me, you wouldn't want me to
die, she had said. Now,
why hadn't Thorn understood that?

"But you said I'll just have to
marry someone else," she pointed out unhappily.

"I know," he told her,
"but that's not my decision. Marak has to decide those things; that's why
he's the King."

She thought
about what this would mean for her. She would still
die,
and she wouldn't even have this quiet goblin's kindness any, more. Maybe it
would be one of those others -- loud, twisted, with
strange eyes. Maybe it would be somebody cruel. Maybe she would
live
a life like the one she had had before, only this time she would
have to die anyway. Tinsel looked at her face,
even more distressed
now, and he guessed what she was thinking.

"Marak
will let you marry anyone you choose," he said. "You're
terribly
important. You're almost the only elf bride we have."

Sable thought about this for some
time as they walked along in silence.

"Then I'll tell
him I want to marry you."

The big silver goblin was completely
baffled. "Why would you do that?" he demanded.

She
looked up at him anxiously.

"Will
that make you angry?" she asked.

"No, it
won't make me angry," insisted Tinsel, waving a hand in
the air. "But you've been nothing but unhappy the
whole time you've
been with me. Why on
earth would you want to marry me?"

No one asked
Sable why she might want to do things. Even dur
ing
their happiest days, Thorn hadn't been interested in hearing her point of view,
and during the last several years, no one had asked her anything at all. She
couldn't explain that he had understood her argument to Thorn. She couldn't
really explain about his sympathy
and
consideration, either, that it was the first time a man had wanted
to
hear what she had to say.

"You're
kind," she said.

"We're all
kind, compared to what you're used to," he replied gloomily. "You're
with a better class of people now."

"And you don't want to marry
me," she continued sincerely. "I wouldn't want to marry someone who
wanted to marry me."

Tinsel glanced
down at her serious face, truly and deeply puzzled.
"You
want to marry me because I don't want to marry you," he
echoed. She nodded. He fell to work on that
mystery, and a thought
ful silence descended once more.

"Will he
make you?" she asked after a few minutes, and he shot
her
an inquiring look. "Will the goblin King make you marry me?" she
asked with concern.

"Oh,
probably," mused Tinsel.

Sable
gave a little sigh of relief.

"Then
I'll tell him I won't marry anyone else."

Tinsel shook
his head. "I don't see how forcing me to marry you
solves
any of your problems," he observed. "You're still miserable
because you don't want to be married in the first
place, and now I'm
miserable because
I don't want to be married to someone miser
able."

Sable
thought about this and felt uncertain once again.

"But I'll try to be a good
wife," she told him. She wasn't quite
sure
what that entailed. Apparently, she wasn't supposed to cook for
him or
sew his clothes, and she didn't know how to hunt.

"That's not really the
problem," explained Tinsel. "You'd still
think I was trying to kill you, and you couldn't help hating me for it.
Remember that look in the elf man's eyes that you
didn't want to
see?" She nodded. "Well, I don't want to see
it, either."

A light dawned in Sable's mind. She
had been afraid that he
would get angry and
hate her, and it turned out that he was afraid
she would hate
him.
She didn't just need his kindness, he needed
her
kindness, too. Sable was
staggered at the thought. She had never had
that
kind of power before. Thorn had never given her the least indi
cation that he cared
about what she thought of him.

"But what
if you don't see it?" she asked him. "If I don't get
angry
at you? If I try to be kind, too?"

Tinsel
stopped walking. He studied her for a long minute.

"If
that's what you want, Sable," he said, and he smiled.

Sable didn't know
what to do. Maybe it was all a trick. Maybe,
when
they got to the caves, this goblin would hand her over to be tort
ured.
But he didn't look as if he would, and he had been a good
husband so far. He had fed her and kept her warm
and talked to her,
and he had cared about how she felt.

She rubbed her
healed hands together, thinking about this. Then
she
looked up and managed a smile in return.

"We'll have a
happy year," she whispered. "I promise."

Camp that morning
was surprisingly uneventful. They had made good time during the long winter
night and would be home before midnight the next day. Richard cheerfully ran
errands for anyone
who asked, and the goblin
men made a fuss over him. He had
assisted in unloading Dinner, who had
been a packhorse for the night, and now he was bringing a pot of water to
Brindle.

"Light that fire for me,"
directed the man, and a roaring flame shot up. "Wait! Not so much force
next time!"

Richard sat
down by the fire to tend it, and Brindle began sorting
through
their supplies.

"You have a
good bit of magic," he observed to Richard. "If you're Mandrake's
boy, and Marak thinks you are, you come by it
naturally.
Mandrake was the best illusionist among the Guard in his
day. You'd walk right by him and think he was a
rock or a tree. Then
he'd trip you
and get a good laugh at the stupid look on your face."

"I have a
dad?" asked Richard in amazement.

"Doesn't
everybody?" noted Brindle. "Had a dad, is more like it.
Mandrake died a
couple of years ago, and that's lucky for him. Marak was so angry when he found
out about you that I thought he'd kill us all. I'm not even old enough to be
your dad, and I still shook in my boots."

Richard's face fell.
"The King didn't like it, eh?"

"Didn't
like it?! He set a door on fire just by touching it, he was in
such
a temper! He called in every man who had been outside the kingdom, and he said
that if anything like that ever happened again we'd every one of us be
sorry."

"I've
never been the kind who could please a king," said the boy
with
a sigh.

"Don't worry," said
Brindle. "It's not your problem. Look here, now. Watch me make these beans
jump into the pot."

"Lumme!" exclaimed Richard,
and Brindle laughed at his expression.

"It's better with bacon, but we
didn't bring any. Here, I'll teach you the spell."

Sable fell
asleep fairly easily, but she woke up screaming again.
She
was very apprehensive about leaving the world she knew and
going down into the goblin caves. As the evening
wore on and they
drew closer to the kingdom, she became quieter and
quieter.

"Are you sure the goblin King
will let me marry you, Tinsel?" she asked anxiously.

"I'm
positive," said Tinsel. "He wants you to be happy."

"I don't
know why he would want that," said Sable suspiciously.
"Not
if he's the goblin King."

The goblin King
figured very prominently in the elves' scary stori
es.
Human slaves had modified many of these from the ghost stor
ies they knew in order to entertain the little
elf children. The goblin
King acted in some like a ghost, in some like
an ogre, and in some like the devil himself. What he almost never acted like
was an authentic goblin King, but Sable didn't know that.

Tinsel knew
perfectly well why the goblin King would want her
to be happy. Marak had reminded the whole party about it
before they had left. The First Fathers of the two races were tremendously
intellig
ent, but they were something like amateur
experimenters. Neither
elves nor goblins
reproduced with the careless ease of the human race.
Elf women didn't have the problem of sterility
that goblins often had,
but they were terribly sensitive to their
surroundings. Unhappy elf
women bore only
one child, whereas happy ones bore three or four.
Marak needed as many children as he could get
from these last remain
ing elves to
shore up his magical high families, and he had made very
sure that his
goblins understood this.