Close Kin (31 page)

The goblin King's Wife. She was the
other elf "I -- yes -- I don't know," stammered Sable. "I can't
open the door."

"I can open it," answered
the voice. "Is that all right? Are you dressed?"

"I think
so," said Sable. She was wearing a long robe. Tinsel had
thrown
her rags away that morning.

The door opened, and a blond woman
stood in the doorway, an elf Sable had never seen. She gave Sable a bright
smile, and Sable managed a little smile back. Then a boy stepped past her, a
goblin boy. She stared at him with wide eyes.

"May we come in?" asked the
elf, and Sable backed up. She
looked past
the boy and gave a gasp. A large, hairy gray dog stood in
the doorway.

"It's all
right," the elf woman reassured her, and she turned to the
big
animal. "Helen, you'd better stay out in the hall." The dog put back
her ears and wagged ingratiatingly.

"No, she can come, too,"
said Sable bravely, backing up farther and looking at the crowd that assembled
in her apartment. The dog
sat down, panting.
The strange boy walked right up to Sable. He
had short hair of two
colors, dark blond and pale beige, the colors mixing in patches and streaks all
over his head. He was watching
her keenly
with one blue eye and one green eye. She found it hard to
look at him,
but then she found it hard to look away.

"This is my son, Catspaw,"
said the elf woman, and Sable realized quite suddenly that the goblin boy did
have a paw.

"I'm going to be the goblin
King," announced the boy, planting himself before her and rocking back and
forth from his heels to his
toes. He waited for Sable to say something
appreciative, but she didn't. "You're scared of me," he went on,
watching her critically. "Why are you scared of me?"

"Catspaw,"
explained the woman, "Sable's only just come here,
and she's been taught to be afraid of goblins. You'll
have to show her
that the goblin
King's son can be a gentleman." The monster boy pondered this instruction
for a few seconds, wearing a thoughtful frown. "And my name is Kate,"
continued the elf, smiling at Sable again. Sable glanced down, startled, as her
hand was clasped. She hadn't been taught to shake hands.

"Is she a
goblin, too?" she inquired timidly, pointing. Kate
turned
and looked. Helen gave a thump of her tail.

"Oh! No, she's
just a dog," said Kate.

"Could be a goblin,
though," declared the young prince supportively. "See?"

There was a
bright shimmer, and a half-grown wolf whelp
stood on four feet where the boy had been. Three of the
puppy's feet
were gray, but
the right front foot was still a golden lion's paw. A seco
nd shimmer, and the boy was back. Kate eyed Sable's
shocked face
with unease.

"Catspaw,
you're not to do transformations unless Father's here,"
she reminded him firmly. "Why don't you have a seat
and play with
your mirror
instead." The boy obediently sat down on the mat
beside
the fish pool, and Kate turned back to Sable.

"Did the
dresses not fit?" she asked.

"Dresses? I don't have
one," Sable replied distractedly. "Tinsel did something with mine,
and I can't find it."

Kate looked at the black haired
woman. She considered all the
horrible
things Marak had told her, and she noted the lost, frightened
look in
those dark blue eyes.

"Come with me," she said
kindly, taking Sable's hand, and she led the elf to the dressing room. Once
there, she began pulling on
knobs. The
astonished Sable saw panels in the wall swing open and
slide out to
reveal all sorts of hidden cubbyholes.

Kate stepped confidently to the basin
and brought warm water gushing into it. Then she taught Sable how to wash her
face with soap and a cloth, how to clean her teeth, and how to trim her nails.
She sat her down before the mirror and brushed out that long hair with a
hairbrush, and she showed her how to pull it back with hair
combs. She went to the drawers and closets and
dressed the bemused
elf woman in one undergarment after another,
stockings, and slip
pers. Over it all went a
long blue dress of some thin, shiny cloth, and
then Kate stepped back to
admire her work.

Sable stared at
her reflection in the long mirror. She hardly recog
nized
the beautiful woman who looked gravely back at her. This woman belonged in the
elves' stories of ladies and queens, not in
Sable's
own life of deprivation and slavery. Only the wary eyes were the same. She
still recognized them from before, and she ran her fin
ger along the
thin, faint lines that remained from her ghastly scars. She met Kate's
approving gaze in the mirror and blushed.

"Two days ago,
I was ugly," she said.

They went back
to the ornamental pool, and Sable gave a squeak
of
fright. The goblin boy was watching a huge ant crawl around on the surface of
his mirror.

"Catspaw, why don't you picture
something nice," suggested Kate hurriedly.

"Ants are nice," protested
the boy, but the ant disappeared. He
caught
sight of Sable in her new clothes and stood up. "You're
pretty," he said, and he put his arms around
her waist and looked up
at her. "When I'm the goblin King, I'm
going to marry an elf like Father did. I'm going to steal an elf bride just
like you."

Kate, glancing at Sable's
apprehensive expression, decided that this wasn't what she needed to hear.

"Well,
you'll have to find one first, dear," she remarked briskly.

"I will," he promised,
towing Sable over to sit by him at the ornamental pool. She watched him play
with his magical mirror. Then she looked at Kate.

"And he's
really your son," she said hesitantly. "I mean, he was your own
baby."

"Oh, yes,"
laughed Kate. "He was my own baby."

Sable
looked from one to the other of them. "I'm sorry," she said
a
little timidly. "I've never seen a mother and her baby before."
The smile left
Kate's face.

"I
know," she said. "Marak told me. It sounded so horrible."
And
her eyes filled with tears. Catspaw glanced up and saw them, and in another
second he was in her lap.

"Mother,
Mother, look," he said anxiously, holding up his mir
ror. "Look,
Mother, I've made you a rose."

∗ ∗ ∗

Irina and Sable began to find their place in the goblin
kingdom, and
if their
comrades looked rather odd, at least their life was much more
comfortable.
Their new duties were more interesting, too because
they had lessons in magic, elvish, and goblin, though the classes did
give
Irina quite a few difficult moments. Kate and Sable quickly formed a strong
friendship, in spite of the fact that the two women
came from such different worlds. They also had very different inter
ests,
as Kate was astonished to discover.

"What's this?" she asked
one day, picking up some papers that Sable had brought to their elvish class.
Sable glanced over and blushed.

"Tinsel's
been showing me how math works," she admitted
shyly. "I like to try problems when I have a few
minutes alone. Num
bers are so
beautiful."

"Are
they?" asked Kate in surprise, looking at the long division
problems. The goblins had never developed their
own mathematics;
instead because of their regular commerce with humans,
they stud
ied human mathematics. "I had
to learn this, too," declared the blond
woman, "but I thought
language was much more beautiful."

"Oh, no," insisted Sable.
"Numbers have such regular features.
Languages
are all lopsided and irregular, like goblins. If I know the word for 'dog,' I
don't know the word for 'horse,' but if I know three and four, I know thirty,
forty, three hundred, four hundred. And if I
know three multiplied by
three, I know three multiplied by thirty, and then division, which is
multiplication in reverse. All the patt
erns
are so beautiful, and they always come true. Numbers are some,
thing you
can depend on."

Kate pondered this. It had never
occurred to her that someone might like numbers more than words. She told Marak
about it, and he found it equally interesting. Before their next magic lesson,
he handed Sable a piece of paper.

"What's this?" she asked
cautiously, looking at the complicated
figures
drawn on it. She still found the proximity of the goblin King
unnerving.

"It's a new class just for
you," he answered. "I'm going to teach you elvish mathematics."

Sable brightened, attracted by the
thought of the math. "But I can't read this," she pointed out.

"No, you can't," he agreed.
"The elves didn't use human numbers for their math. They developed their
own."

"What did they
use their math for?" asked Sable.

"Use?" Marak chuckled.
"They didn't use it at all. They played with it, just like they did with
everything. Elves liked to study geo
metric
figures, but not like the ones you may have learned from Tin
sel. Their geometry is in motion: a planet
forming different figures as
it
crosses a constellation, or a dance of two circles, one going one way
and
one going the other, with dancers weaving in and out between
them. The elves
developed their math to describe all those moving figures, as if anyone would
ever want to do that."

Sable
was fascinated at the thought of those complex patterns.
"How do you
know all this?" she asked.

"I wasted
three years of my life studying elvish mathematics," he said. "My son
will, too, and the pages learn a smattering of it as well.
It exercises the mind, and that's about all. It's not
anything I've used
once I learned it.
Sometimes, when I'm falling asleep, the beautiful figures from elvish math will
drift around in my head. Poor elves, that's all they gave the world, a few
pretty dreams."

If elvish math was useless and
beautiful, it also turned out to be
very
hard. One problem could take all afternoon. Marak was
impressed by
Sable's rapid progress and pleased with her powerful interest in it. "So
elvish math has a use after all," he commented to Kate.

Marak taught the
three elf women magic twice a week. Kate and
Sable
were strong rivals in class, but Irina was perfectly content to stay in last
place.

One day, he put
an odd handful of ingredients in front of each of
them.
Kate studied her handful. It looked like a combination of uncarded wool, plant
stems, seeds, and crumbled leaves.

"Starting
today, you're going to learn how elf clothing is made,"
announced
the King. "Most of these ingredients are common forest plants. The elves
took their wool from their own flocks of sheep,
which ran loose in the elf King's forest. Once a year, the elves called
in
the sheep and worked the Shearing Spell, peeling the wool right
off. The protection spells on the sheep were
renewed, and the sheep
were free once more. You can see," he added
dryly, "that the elves' life didn't involve much hard work."

"Mine did," sighed Irina,
and Marak patted her on the shoulder as he walked to his own pile of
ingredients.

"What
you see before you is the raw material of elf yarn," he told
them.
"The spell for making yarn centers on the Harp constella
tion."
He pointed to it on the star chart. "The First Fathers of the
elves noticed how
much a loom looks like a harp, so the spells for
clothing are full of musical ideas. To make yarn, you cup your hand
loosely over the ingredients before you, find the Harp in your mind,
and
recite the following phrase,
'gutesha-si shir,'
which means 'voices
blending in a single melody."' Marak looked at his ingredients, frowning
in concentration. "And then," he said, cupping his hand over the
pile, "with your other hand -- "