In The Coils Of The Snake (13 page)

She
frowned disapprovingly. “I wouldn’t work for an elf. I wouldn’t care
what
they did. “

But now, standing in
the darkness, surrounded by their alien magnificence, she was no longer certain
of this.

Hunter returned with
a folding stool and a small wooden tray. “Sit down,” ordered Nir,
pointing to the stool. Miranda glanced around nervously at the growing crowd of
strangers and sat down
without protest. She
didn’t want to find out, in front of this unsym
pathetic mob, if he
intended to back up his commands with force.

The
elf lord knelt at her feet and arranged on the tray the flowers that she had
gathered, his curling black hair falling around the edges
of his pale face as he worked. Miranda studied that
strange face, his
narrow,
pointed ears, wondering in curious dread what the spell was
for. If he wouldn’t tell her, it must be frightful. Maybe
he and Catspaw
had argued, and he
was doing something terrible in revenge.

Now he had all the
lilies in four lines on the tray. He plucked hairs from his head and threaded
one through each line of flowers. He picked up a string of lilies, and the
blossoms remained evenly
spaced along the
hair, like white carved beads on a bracelet. Then he
straightened up,
still kneeling, and turned to Miranda. “Hold out your hand,” he
ordered.

Frightened, she
clasped her hands firmly in her lap and looked
for some means of escape, but the elves stood packed around her in a
close ring, watching the proceedings with
interest. The elf lord knelt back on his heels and stared at her, too,
considering what to do next.
It would be best to have her cooperation
for this spell. He didn’t want her damaging the lilies.

“You were ready
to throw yourself into a lake,” he remarked, “and now you look
worried about a few flowers. Tell me, are you afraid of the silly elves?”

Miranda’s head came
up at that, and she glared at him, holding
out
her hand so he could tie the blossoms around her wrist. Nir kept
his head bent and his eyes on his work. He didn’t
want her to see his
triumphant
expression. One by one, he tied on the strings of flowers,
first to her
wrists and then to her ankles, taking off Kate’s bracelet and setting it on his
tray without extinguishing its light. Then he caught Miranda’s hands and pulled
her to her feet.

“Look at me,”
he said, and Miranda looked into those beautiful
eyes as he whispered the words of the spell. She felt in sudden panic
that she should look away, but those eyes were
all she could see. They
seemed to pull her whole being into them, to
join and become a patch of the night sky shining with the light of the stars.
She stared
at that sky, felt it arch over
her and around her, felt the stars coming
close to her sides. They were surrounding her in a brilliant net, mak.
ing
her their prisoner.

As
Miranda stood frozen, as the elf lord said his spell, the strings
of flowers began to spin. They spun faster and faster,
glittering like
water shaken under
the starlight. Now the lilies gleamed like silver sparks that whirled and
tumbled at her hands and feet, becoming small bright stars that shone with
their own light. They faded in brightness as they slowed to a stop, a circle of
seven silver eight pointed stars around each wrist and ankle. The elf lord
knelt again and drew a symbol with his finger on the top of her foot. Then he
retrieved Kate’s bracelet for her, watching the puzzled girl turn her arms and
study her shackles of stars by its light.

Nir
felt a pang of guilt as he considered the other spell he still had
to work. This spell would keep her trapped in the
nighttime, unable
to
move about in the day. He knew that the sun, hated and feared by
the elves, was really the humans’ moon, and to take it
away from this
poor child was to
condemn her to a life of near-blindness. An unwelcome memory assailed him:

The
small boy was crying, dazzled and frightened by bright light, standing
in
a ring of campfires belching up smoke and flame.

““What are
you doing? ”’ cried Father’s frantic voice. “You’ll set the entire
forest
on fire!”

A blond-haired woman knelt in the middle of
the circle, her face haggard
and stained with
tears. “I had to.” Her words tumbled over themselves. “I’m
going
blind. I’m going mad! Please, Ash, please. I can’t live like this anymore!”

Nir
winced, feeling the dreadful sadness, seeing the pain in that
tear-stained face. I don’t have a choice, he reminded
himself. I have to
do this for the
elves.

“Stand
still,” he said to Miranda, and cradling her face, he spoke
the
elvish words of the spell: “Welcome, good friend, to the king
dom of the night.” Then he kissed her brown
eyes. Now those eyes
would be locked away from the sun behind their own
eyelids, and
she would sleep through all the
hours of daylight. That was elf
magic, Nir mused with a little sigh. It
was beautiful even when it was cruel.

Miranda was
blissfully unaware of the awful spell he had just
worked, but she couldn’t feel more horrified anyway. When he told
her
to stand still, she did so. Even when he came very close and kissed her, she
didn’t draw back. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t move a muscle. And
the whole time that she struggled to
make
herself move, the stars at her wrists and ankles sparkled with a
pale
light.

Turning
to his elves, Nir spoke in their language, and they broke
up
and drifted away. He absentmindedly took Miranda’s hand and
stood holding it as the elves walked off. Then he
caught sight of her
shocked face and
lifted the hand he held to look at the sparkling stars
on her wrist.

“Come with me,”
he said. “There’s something I should show you.” And he walked across
the clearing toward the trees. Miranda found herself walking beside him, her
hand apparently nestled
trustingly in his.
She tried to stop or make her fingers uncurl, but her
efforts had no
effect.

“This is the
edge of my camp,” said Nir, releasing her hand and watching the stars fade
back to silver. “I’m going to let you try to leave now, but you should
know that you won’t be able to do it.”

Miranda glanced
about and saw no border of any sort. She took two steps away from him. Then she
simply stopped and stood. Nir
saw the stars
begin to sparkle on her wrists and ankles as her hands
balled into
fists, her face becoming more and more appalled as she fought to make her body
do her bidding.

“You’re just
wearing yourself out,” he explained. “You can’t
take the next step. The Seven Stars Spell forces
you to obey reason
able commands and keeps you from causing harm to us or
to yourself. And because of the character I wrote on your foot, it’s also
keeping you in camp. It’s almost dawn,” he
added, looking up at the
sky. “Time for the morning meal.”

He led her away
again and found her a comfortable place to sit.
Miranda didn’t notice where she was, and when he left her, she
didn’t
realize why he left. She could think of nothing but her own
battles
within herself How could she see so clearly what she needed
to do and then just
not do it? When he returned and put a piece of
bread into her hand, she didn’t even glance up. She was reliving the
terrifying
feeling of being unable to direct her own movement.

Nir
wasn’t surprised that the human girl wouldn’t eat. If she had
been raised to be that monster’s wife, he must have fed
her for years,
just as Nir himself
had given food to Arianna. He frowned, upset, thinking of Arianna taking her
food from that unnatural paw.

“You
need to realize that your food will have to come from others
now,”
he pointed out. “He’s not feeding you anymore. He’s feeding his wife.”
But she didn’t acknowledge that he had spoken.

The elf lord
considered what to do while he ate his bread and
bowl of stew. Perhaps, he thought uncomfortably, she felt that it was
humiliating to take food from an enemy, a stranger not from her own
race. Certainly none of his maidens would have
accepted food from
a human man. And explaining matters to her was out of
the question. That would be bad enough when the time came, he was sure.

Nir
finished his stew and set the bowl aside moodily. He couldn’t
think of any satisfactory way out of the dilemma. But he
didn’t
intend to let her
starve. She would have to give up her self-destructive
plans. He touched the stars at her wrist that held her
prisoner. “Eat,”
he commanded.

I won’t do it,
Miranda decided; I couldn’t eat if I tried. But her
hand obediently closed around the bread. She found herself taking a
bite, chewing it carefully, and swallowing. She
couldn’t help it. She
couldn’t stop.
No humiliation she had ever faced from her family, no
cruelty of her
mother’s had been as awful as this: to be ordered around like a cart horse by
magic. She covered her face with her hands and burst into distraught tears.

She’s crying again,
Nir thought angrily, and this time it’s my fault. He thought about the things
he had done that night, deeply
ashamed of
himself. He and the goblin King were squabbling over a
pair of children the way dogs fought over bones.
Neither one of
them, he concluded in
disgust, was interested in the children them
selves, they both just
wanted to use them to gain some advantage. And this human knew it, even if
Arianna hadn’t; she kept talking about the great lords and their plots. Maybe
she had known some
how that a few hours of
freedom would be all she would ever have.
Death would have been her only escape because she couldn’t defend
herself.
Now she was trapped in another lord’s plot, and even death was forbidden.

But
at least this time, he reflected, she wasn’t with the barbaric gob
lins.
The elves knew her for what she was, a child who still needed care. It didn’t
matter what his magic had planned for her in adult
hood; right now he could look after her as a civilized person should.
Nir
felt relieved at the thought. It made him seem less ruthless.

“Don’t
cry,” he coaxed, putting his arms around the poor girl
and
smoothing that glowing red hair. “You wanted someone to do
what was best for you. It’s best that you eat,
and it’s best that you stay
safe in camp. Don’t cry anymore.”

His
mild commands had no effect. Furious over his presumption, Miranda wanted to
jerk away from his grasp, but she couldn’t do it. It
seemed as if crying was the only thing she could control.
Nir, listen
ing to her, struggled with his own
unhappy thoughts. These two things echoed through his life from his earliest
childhood: a human woman crying bitterly and his own voice begging her to stop.

Miranda’s sobs began
to subside. She was too tired to keep on
crying.
The night had been so long and horrible. She felt that it was
years
since it had begun.

The elf lord
continued to stroke her hair, admiring its unusual beauty. “When will you
be eighteen?” he asked.

Miranda heard the
question in a doze. “October ninth,” she
answered
automatically. With some time and effort, Nir calculated that into elvish.

“The first
autumn moon,” he translated, “a month and a half
away.” That was very soon, he thought
gloomily, and he wished his
magic made more sense to him. First
betraying Arianna to the goblins, and now this: it was no wonder that he rarely
had the heart to dance with his elves.

“Time to sleep,”
he said, looking up at the brightening sky, and
Miranda stumbled after him as he guided her through an elf’s prepay
ration for sleep. It was unlike the process in a
house or in the goblin palace, and she found it very awkward. Then he led her
to the tents,
set up under the thickest cover of trees where the least
amount of sunlight could disturb them.