Close Kin (33 page)

Even worse, Til
felt that she was losing her hold on Kate, whom she had always viewed as her
special property. From the day Til had
arrived in the kingdom as a baby, the little girl whom
Kate had
found in the sorcerer's lair had been the
center of Kate's world.
Catspaw's birth
hadn't done much to change this. Kate loved her
son, but she didn't understand his goblin nature that well, and he
was
even-tempered and independent. Til, on the other hand, fought hard to get as
much attention as she could. With Kate, she usually succeeded.

Now Kate had new friends and
interests, and she didn't dote on
the child
anymore. Til's life among the pages took her away from her
foster mother
for days at a time, and Kate no longer pined for her little girl. In fact, as
Til aged and her temper became increasingly
tempestuous, Kate
found herself more and more distressed by her
daughter's
behavior. The reserved woman couldn't identify with
Til's vanity and ambition. When her attempts to
manage the headstrong girl
failed, Kate began to find excuses to spend
less time with her.

In doing this,
the King's Wife was merely behaving like an elf, as
Marak noted to the interested Seylin. "She did the
same thing when M was growing up," he remarked. "She can't fight her
nature. Elves
don't tolerate negative emotion well
at all. If someone's behavior becomes too upsetting, an elf simply stops
speaking to him." This analysis was undoubtedly true, but Kate's reticence
did Til little good, and the girl's conduct grew worse and worse.

There were many
things that Til despised, but as the years
passed, Catspaw came to top them all. It wasn't that the
goblin
prince was particularly
cruel to her; he was usually completely indif
ferent. The stormy closeness of their early childhood
was only a dis
tant memory. Til moved in one circle
of peers, and Catspaw in another. Even in boyhood, he was gaining magical
power, confi
dence, and prestige. Til's
younger sibling, respected by all, was being
groomed to take over his
kingdom. His ambitious foster sister felt that this was completely unfair.

The prince was shaping up to be a
particularly promising ruler.
From Kate,
whose elvish roots almost certainly went back to the elf
King's
lieutenants, Catspaw had inherited a stunning amount of
military magic, and with it came a real enthusiasm for the art of war.
The young prince gathered about himself boys from
the high fami
lies to join him in
goblin games of strategy and battle. Richard,
gifted as well with
military magic, became his favorite opponent.

One day, when
Til was close to fourteen years old, she came up
the stairs to her parents' floor to complain to them
about some imagined offense. But she couldn't even reach their rooms. Catspaw
and
Richard had taken over the broad hallway for
their war games and
had temporarily altered
it past recognition. Instead of polished gold,
the hall floor had
erupted into miniature mountains, hills, valleys, and canyons. Over these, like
ants, marched the phantom troops of the two warriors, who studied their ground
and laid their plans. Behind the last mountain range, and before the doors that
were her goal, the goblin guards watched the sport and made quiet wagers.

"Get this
junk out of the way!" she demanded, walking up
behind
Catspaw. "I have to see Papa."

Her foster
brother was too busy to respond. He was in the middle
of an assault against the vanguard of Richard's army. The minu
scule cavalry at his feet wheeled and charged, uttering
faint war cries.

"Marak isn't at home," one
guard related. "He's out inspecting the harvest, and the King's Wife has
gone for a walk."

The thwarted girl seethed with
irritation. She aimed a kick at a marching column of Catspaw's reinforcements,
causing terrible slaughter. Tiny soldiers dragged their injured comrades out of
danger. A chorus of quiet groans arose, like a regretful sigh.

Catspaw knelt
to resuscitate his fallen forces, irritated in his turn.
"Til,
no one wants you here," he declared. "Go back to the pages'
floor."

Til felt both the truth and the
injustice of this remark and drew herself up to her full height. She might not
be magical royalty, but she was half a head taller than he was.

"I'll do what I like! I'll never
do what you say," she declaimed
dramatically.
She noted with displeasure that the guards exchanged
amused glances, and
Richard looked up and grinned.

"Of course
you will," remarked Catspaw. "When I'm the
King,
you'll have to."

The veracity of
this statement only infuriated the girl more. She
struck out as best she could. "You're going to be a
terrible King," she
announced coldly.
"Everyone knows it. They just don't tell you."

Catspaw's
magic detected the lie at once. It didn't bother the boy
that there were witnesses to the insult. He lived his
entire life out in
public. Schooled by
Kate to be a gentleman, he glanced over his shoulder and gave Til a
condescending smile.

"I wouldn't
dream of contradicting you," he said and turned
back
to his battlefield.

Til went on the attack again, but
this time with more cunning. Combat of a social sort was her own special forte;
she gained her
greatest satisfaction from
the embarrassment and discomfort of oth
ers. She knew the prince's
abilities, and she was also aware of his limitations. She worked out a battle
plan of her own.

"Mama cried
when she first saw you," she remarked.

"I know she
did," responded Catspaw casually. "Seylin says
that's
normal when an elf bride sees her baby."

"She didn't cry because she was
seeing any old goblin," continued Til carefully. "She cried because
of you. I heard her talking to Sable one day. She said she knows that you'll
never be a man like your father."

The prince's
magic found no lie in these statements because each
one
was perfectly true. Together, they formed a lie, but his magic couldn't discern
this. It didn't occur to Catspaw that Kate might be pleased to have raised a
son different in many ways from her hus
band.
The prince had two serious weaknesses: his loving regard for
his mother and his unspoken awe of his father. The
goblin King cast
a very long shadow over the boy, a shadow from which he
might never be great enough to emerge. If Til had spent years trying to think
up ways to hurt him, she couldn't have found a better plan.

The goblin
prince turned to face his foster sister. Dead pale, eyes
blazing, he held out his lion's paw. A gust of wind
swept across the
landing and caught
up the triumphant Til. She spun around in it,
coming
to rest against the wall, where she flattened out like a sheet of
paper.
In an instant, she was trapped in two inflexible dimensions.

A full-length mirror
hung on the wall now, with the struggling girl pinned inside.

"I can't
move! I can't breathe!" cried the desperate Til. She tried
to turn her head, to move her arms, but there was
nowhere to go. She
had nothing but
height, width, and a voice that was growing more frantic by the second.

"`To hold, as 'twere, the mirror
up to nature,"' declared the boy
from
the depths of his fury. "That's you -- all surface. Nothing
behind
the show." The mirror fell forward and hit the floor with a splintering
crash. "Too bad, Til," he added remorselessly. "Seven years of
bad luck."

Seylin heard the
sonorous explosion and ensuing shrieks and ran
up the stairs two at a time. He found Til sitting by the
wall, her face
and hands
criss-crossed by a net of red lines. He knelt down beside
the hysterical girl and discovered that they were
shallow cuts oozing
blood.

"What
happened?" he asked Catspaw. His pupil's expression
was
distant.

"She shattered," the boy
calmly replied. "It's only an illusion." A second later, the bleeding
lines were gone, but Til still sobbed
with
fear and rage. Seylin tried to put a comforting arm around her,
but she
shoved him away.

"I'm surprised at you,
Catspaw!" said the tutor, and his face
showed
his dismay. "You're too old and far too powerful to be giving
way to your temper! A king has to use his
abilities to help and protect
the weak. Apologize to Til at once."

Catspaw turned to
the weeping girl.

"I'm very sorry, Til, that
you're so weak and I'm so strong," he told her in a steady voice. "I
wish we could fight as equals. If you
have
any sense, you'll stay away from me. I'm not an enemy you can
handle."

Til gathered
herself up with a glare at them all and went off
down
the stairs. Nonplussed, Seylin stared after her. He stood up and turned to
confront his pupil, but what he saw astonished him
further. There was a look of decision, of authority, on the boy's face
that
he had never seen there before.

"I will protect the weak,"
declared the prince coldly. "But that doesn't include my enemies. I'll
deal with them as I decide, and it's going to be too bad for them if they're
weak."

Seylin understood what was happening.
The prince's childhood
was ending. Before,
Catspaw had always obeyed him simply because
it was expected. He would doubtless continue to do so, but it would
never again be automatic. It would be a magnanimous gesture from
now on,
a generous gift from a superior to his underling. And the day would come when
his royal pupil wouldn't obey him at all. Instead, Seylin noted with rueful
unease, he himself would be the one who would obey.

Catspaw
was becoming a real goblin King.