In The Coils Of The Snake (36 page)

Nir smiled to think
of this tiny group continuing their elf ways
in
the goblin kingdom. “That’s what Arianna’s magic is for,” he
said. “Her magic that you admired so much
relates to music. Galnar
has her
harp now, but I’ll send it along to her. I didn’t think that you
would
let her play it.”

Marak
Catspaw scowled at this last remark, but then he relented.
“I’d have given a great deal to see Miranda married
to someone else,”
he confessed.

“You’d
have given my life, for example,” observed the elf bitterly.

“Absolutely,”
agreed the goblin. Nir was amazed that he could
be so direct. “I’d have given much more important things than
that.
Miranda’s welfare matters to me.”

“Miranda
— what a name for her!” Nir grimaced. ‘A lie of a
name. I used to hate it because it means ‘in the coils
of the snake,’ but
now I hate it
because it means ‘seeing.”’

“Seeing?”
asked Catspaw in surprise.

“Yes,
in some language that humans speak,” sighed the elf King.
“I can’t think
of a worse name for someone who’s blind at night.”

The goblin King
studied his rival for a long minute. “There’s a spell for that,” he
pointed out.

Nir looked up, his
dark eyes gleaming with excitement. “I have
to have that spell,” he declared emphatically. “That is — please
share
it with me,” he added.

“Certainly,”
promised Catspaw. “I’ll send it over tomorrow
night. Do you know, I’m glad there’s an elf King again.
Life has
been terribly dull:
nothing to plan for, nothing to defend against, the King’s Guard out picking
flowers. It’s a shame we signed that treaty,
isn’t
it, brother? But our sons will have a thrilling time. And they’ll
tell stories about us, too. They’ll begin, ‘In the
reign of Marak
Catspaw and Aganir Ash, the elf King named Alone.”’

• • •

It was early morning
by the time Nir walked back to his camp, and he paused on a rise to study it.
The elves were delirious with joy. Every single one of them was dancing.
Mothers were dancing with their babies in their arms, and Galnar was dancing as
he played. Even the elves assigned to prepare the morning meal were dancing
along with the rest. That meant no bread, and the stew was doubtless stuck to
the pot. Other races held feasts in celebration, mused Nir, but elves always
burned their meals when they were happy.

But
the elf King didn’t join his delighted elves. He spotted a light roving the
boundary line back in the shadow of the trees. He walked
out
of the darkness into the circle of that light, and there stood the worried
Miranda, keeping watch. The anxious look in her eyes
changed to relief as she caught sight of him, and he took her into his
arms
and kissed her.

“You’ve
done more crying than laughing in the goblin caves,” he
observed,
“and it’s your marriage moon, and you’re not dancing by
its light.” He sat down with her right inside
the boundary line.
“We’ll have to dance tomorrow night instead.”

The
elf King studied his young wife. Now that he understood
the
riddle of his own existence, he understood her role as well. He realized why
the plans of the First Fathers had placed this stranger
among his deferential people. She was a captive, but she was freer of
him than any elf ever could be. The patterns of
her mind were
beyond his understanding, and her secrets were hers to
keep. Her human heart would be the only one he would have to earn.

The elf King
realized that his weak forefathers had rejected this challenge. They had found
their one truly free companion to be a burden not worth the bearing. They had
emptied their wives’ minds
and forced their
devotion because they didn’t want to earn their
hearts. But those
pitiful, subjugated women were still free to hate their worthless husbands,
still free to reject a race that could inflict such cruelty. And an unmagical
human, bound mind and body into slavery, had studied this strong, magical race
and accomplished its devastation. She had deliberately destroyed thousands of beautiful,
powerful elves so that some other human
girl, her sister in mind and
heart,
would remain free and not endure the ghastly slavery that she
had known.

Miranda
looked up at him, her brown eyes very grave. “What
did
your magic tell you about me when you met me in the truce circle?” she
asked. “The secret that made you feel so sorry for me?
The one that would bring me no comfort in my life,
except that I
had a special destiny?”

“It told me
that you had to marry me,” he said. “It told me you were the mother
of my son.”

Miranda smiled at
him and shook her head in disbelief. “And
you felt sorry because of that?” she
exclaimed. “I can’t imagine that
there’s a woman alive who wouldn’t want to marry you. You
must never have seen your face in a mirror!”

He could have argued
the point. He could have explained that his father’s good looks hadn’t made his
mother any less lonely and wretched, or their meals any less meager, or their
nights any less hard. But he held his wife close instead.

“As long as you
want to marry me,” he said, “I don’t care about mirrors. Your face is
the one I’d rather see.”

The
next night, the goblin King sent over the spell that he had promi
sed, and with it a blank volume. The following message
fell out of the
book: “It took
me all afternoon to enter last night’s events into the
Kings’ Chronicles, brother, and I send this so that you can start
a Kings’ Chronicles of your own. Your lazy
ancestors fell out of the
habit, but
Kings should record their own reigns. Just remember not to
write down all those nasty grudges you have
against me. This is an
important
record for the Scholars. Particularly for the goblin Scholars,
once your kingdom crumbles and we take away all
your books again.”

The next night the
elf King sent over Arianna’s harp, and with it this message: “Thank you
for the book, brother. I have put it to
prompt
use. I am sure I was as flattering to you as you were to me.
You’ll have to be patient for those books since
you can’t barge around
my land
anymore. If you feel like hunting in your little scrap of for
est, let me know so that we can chase a few deer
your way. It’s the
least I can do to show my respect for my brother
King.”

A
few nights later, Hunter and Tattoo met beside the truce circle.

“Oh, hello,”
said Hunter. “It’s good to see you again. I’m on
border patrol tonight, walking the edge between our lands and keep
ing
an eye out for goblins.”

“I’m
assigned to border patrol, too,” said the goblin, “keeping an
eye out for elves.”

“Great!”
declared Hunter. “We can walk together. We won’t take
our eyes off each
other even if we bump into a tree.”

“Actually,
I was hoping to run into you,” said Tattoo as they
started
off. “I still have to give you back your pipe.”

“No, keep it,”
answered Hunter. “I’ll make another one.” He
thought for a minute, and his expression softened. “I’ll tell you
what,
give it to the goblin King’s Wife for me, and tell her Hunter misses her.”

• • •

The
process of changing Miranda’s eyes took months. The darkness
slowly
rolled back, and colors emerged for which she had no name. The stars steadily
increased in brilliance and magnificence until she
realized
that they were something more than pretty, and one moon
less night she stood
with the elf King on a high hill and saw everything that he saw.

When that night
came, Nir removed the Daylight Spell, but
Miranda
didn’t go to the meadow to watch her first sunrise in over a
year. Instead, she lay in the tent with Nir’s
cloak pulled over her eyes
to protect them from the blinding glare of
the day.

“Are you sorry
to lose the sun?” he asked her as she squinted against the dazzling
whiteness.

“No,”
she said. “The moon is more beautiful.” And the elf King
was
happy.

Marak Catspaw and
Seylin agreed that an untaught ruler was
more
dangerous and unpredictable than a properly educated one, so
Seylin embarked on the astonishing career of
tutoring a second
King. He spent
weeks at a time in the elf camp teaching Nir history,
strategy, and
magic, as well as the scintillatingly beautiful elvish mathematics that had struck
Marak as so absurd.

Both Kings marveled
at the friendship that continued between Miranda’s old guards. Hunter taught
Tattoo to stalk deer, and Tat
too taught Hunter to
ride a horse. Their friends became cordial with
one another, organizing gatherings and
competitions, and the military commanders even encouraged mixed patrols.

Hunter
came into camp one night with a letter for the elf King’s
Wife. “Tattoo and Celia had their baby,” he
told her. “Do you know
what? They named him
after me!”

“Sumur told me,”
answered Miranda. “He heard it from Mon
grel
when they were on duty together. Have you seen the baby yet?
Sumur said
it has a rhinoceros horn.”

“Hunter is a
remarkably handsome child,” stated the elf firmly, and his blue eyes dared
her to comment. She managed to keep a straight face, but she took her letter
from Kate and hurried off.

“I was
interested in your idea about comparing King’s Wife tales,” Kate had
written, “so I started to write the story of my early
life with Marak. I let Arianna read it, but I was
rather shocked. She
laughed so much
that her sides hurt. I assured her that it was a fright
ening and tragic
story, but she kept right on laughing anyway. She said that she had no idea a
goblin could love jokes and pranks as
much
as the elves. Honestly, Miranda! I know Marak liked to tease,
but I
never thought he was that funny.”

Miranda
smiled over the letter and tucked it away in her cloak. She
looked
up to find herself surrounded by children. “You promised!”
they clamored, and she had, so she let those
little hands drag her away.

The elf King was
debating the future of the two races and dis
agreeing
forcefully with his opponent. This was perhaps not surpris
ing since his
opponent was a goblin.

“A lasting
peace is impossible, despite the friendships that are building now,”
stated Nir. “Eventually, the goblins will want elf brides, and we will
never give them up without bloodshed. That
happened
only one time, and it will not happen again. The elves will
not buy peace
with the misery of our children.”

“Misery!”
exclaimed Seylin. “Elf brides don’t have to be
miserable.”

“Elf brides
lose their whole way of life,” declared Nir. “Many
may recover from it, but not all do, and none of
them should have to.”

Seylin looked at his
royal pupil’s determined face. “You can’t possibly be objective,” he
said. “You aren’t just the ruler of the elf way of life, you embody it
magically. Marak Catspaw is the same. He embodies the goblin way of life. You
can study each other, but
you will never
understand each other, and you will never really like
each other,
either. You are the living argument between the two Greatest of the First
Fathers, and that argument will last as long as the races exist.”

“The First
Fathers quarreled over whether their race should be
beautiful or strong,” said the elf King. “The goblins seek
for strength
in the elves, and the
elves look for beauty in the goblins. With such
different viewpoints and such different ways of life, how could they
possibly
sustain peace?”

“Within
the hearts of both races lies the same code of conduct,”
answered
Seylin. “With minor differences, the same laws apply to each. These laws
come down from a source higher than the First
Fathers,
and they unite the two sides of the argument. Kindness and
cruelty, honesty and treachery these have the
same meaning to a gob
lin or an elf.
After all,” he remarked, glancing away significantly, “you
can’t condemn the goblins for behavior that the
elves also practice.”