Close Kin (5 page)

"Of course not," said Emily
tartly, and the goblin let the matter
pass.
"Marak, I want to go outside the kingdom, but for some reason
the
iron doors won't let me out."

"I
them not to," he replied. "Why do you need to go out?"

"I want to
spend some time outside the kingdom, and I don't see
why
I shouldn't be allowed to."

"How
long?" asked Marak.

Emily
hesitated. "I don't know. Maybe just a few days. Or
maybe longer. It
depends on how long things take."

"A quest?"

Emily nodded.

"What a remarkable coincidence!
Two quests in one day. What exactly are you going to find?"

"My human nature," replied
Emily solemnly. She had practiced for this moment. She sat in dignified silence
while the goblin King laughed.

"Your human nature?" he
hooted. "You won't have to look very far! Why do you persist in lying to
me when you know I can tell?"

"I'm not
lying," asserted the girl. "Allow me to quote to you from
that
indispensable manual,
The Care and Maintenance of Human Brides."
She
produced the battered old volume from behind her back.

"You've been rifling through my
workroom again," observed Marak, and his voice had a dangerous edge. During
Emily's check
ered career with the pages,
she had sat through many a tense moment with her brother-in-law, and she knew
every dangerous edge his voice
possessed. This one was only annoyance.
She decided to ignore it.

"'The human bride should, if
possible, be left in her natural surroundings
until maturity,"' she intoned. "'This allows the distinctive
nature of her race the full time to develop. If
called into the kingdom
too quickly,
she loses the opportunity to try her human traits in their proper setting. Her
subsequent strength of character may be dimin
ished."' She put down
the book and gazed severely at the goblin. "You didn't do that with
me."

Marak grinned.
"And just look at your weakness of character!
M, this is absurd, and you know it. Give me back my book,
and stay
out of my workroom."

The young woman handed over the book,
struggling to control herself.

"It isn't
absurd!" she insisted. "I've lived down here so long, I
don't remember what it's like outside. I want to go see
it again. I've lost something out there. It's something I want, Marak. Or something
I think I want. I need to find it again. I need to find out."

The goblin King
pushed his hair out of his face and paused for a moment, deep in thought. "What
if you don't find what you're look
ing for?" he
asked.

Emily's
face fell. She hadn't considered defeat. She never did.
"I'll come back
and get married," she said. "To anybody." Her brother-in-law
studied her shrewdly.

"M, there's something you need
to know," he said, choosing his
words
with care. "If you go hunting outside, you'll find what I want
you
to find. And nothing more. Do you understand?"

"Yes," she muttered.
"But I still want to try."

"All right. You
can try. But I'll have to send someone with you.
You don't have a shred of magic to protect you out there."
Emily
brightened a little. "Tinsel could go."

"And Tinsel could fall into line
with any idiotic plan you think
up. Tinsel's
too nice, and he's never been a match for your clever talk.
None of your page friends have been, for that
matter. I'll send some
one else. You may leave tomorrow morning. Come see
me in the
workroom right after breakfast; I
need to work some tracking magic.
Then I'll let you out. I'll have your
escort waiting in the guardroom with an adequate pack."

"But -- what's
wrong with leaving this evening?" demanded
Emily,
mentally calculating how far Seylin might have traveled. "It
won't take that long to get ready, and the
trading carts always leave at
night."

"M, you don't want to live like
a goblin," reproved Marak, his eyes bright. "Up at dawn, that's how
your people live. Remember,
you're seeking
your human nature." His shouts of laughter followed
her as she
stomped off down the hall.

Emily hardly slept that night. It
didn't matter that Marak had laughed at her. The goblin King had fallen for her
arguments, and Seylin was as good as found. He would be upset at first, of
course, but a few well chosen words and he would see that it was all non
sense. Better yet, she could make him see that it
was all his fault, and
he would give up the idea of an elf bride. Once
back in the kingdom, she could stall them both on the marriage issue. Not that
it would be such a bad idea to marry Seylin eventually, but having to talk over
every plan with another person before you did anything sounded awfully boring.
Married people were always so serious.

In the morning,
the goblin King was perfectly cordial. As he cut a
lock
of her hair and pricked her finger, he delivered a few words of
advice on life in the human world. Emily didn't
pay any attention. She
wouldn't be in the human world very long. She
asked him discreet
questions about Seylin's
quest instead, and he was surprisingly coop
erative. He told her about Seylin's odd feeling while he was on his
trading
journey and about the
promises Marak had made not to interfere.

"I told him
I wouldn't order anyone to follow him," he observed.
"I informed the assembly at breakfast about his
search for elves and
forbade
them to contact the elves he may find. You should have been
there.
You would have learned more than you're learning now, and you would have
started your journey with a decent meal."

"I'm not hungry," she
assured him absently. The goblins were ordered not to contact any elves, she
noticed, but that didn't mean they couldn't contact Seylin. Her escort might
protest this course of action, but she would soon talk him around. Goblins were
entirely too docile, she reflected. The King's magic didn't allow them to
disobey.

"Enjoy your quest," he said
as he solicitously healed the pin, prick. "I suppose I should wish you
good luck."

Emily
smiled. "My luck has always been good," she informed him.

Marak smiled
back. Amusement glinted in his odd colored eyes,
but,
then, he was always amused about something.

"Who are
you sending with me?" she wanted to know.
"Someone I can count on," he answered vaguely.
"A good companion
for a quest in the
human world."

Emily should have
been more suspicious.

She left her monkey in the care of a
fellow page and hurried to the guardroom. It was empty except for one short,
heavyset figure wearing a voluminous black cloak, leaning over and rummaging in
a large pack. The figure straightened up and turned around, and Emily let out a
howl of dismay.

"EM!" The voice screeched
like a knife blade scratching slate.
"What
is this nonsense about your trudging around outside on some
ridiculous
hunt? This is one of your sly tricks again, isn't it? Well? Answer me!"

The woman peering accusingly at Emily
had translucent light green skin, and Emily had once told another page that she
was as
wide as she was tall. Her eyes were
so pale that the pupil and a dark
gray ring at the edge of the iris were
their only color. The goblins
called them
white eyes, and their stare was disagreeably mesmerizing
. Her mouth was very broad and lipless, rather
like that of a frog, with large yellow teeth that leaned to and fro at odd
angles. Her hair,
strangely enough, was as beautiful as Kate's: golden,
curling locks that she wore pulled back in a modest bun. The whole effect of
her appearance was dismally unpleasant. She was simply too ugly for words.

"Ruby! I can't believe it!"
exclaimed Emily. She turned to the silent walls. "Marak!" she cried.
"Is this your idea of a joke?"

"I'll thank you to call me Lore-Master
Ruby, you little minx,"
snapped the
woman. "And I don't want to hear any more disrespect
ful complaints
against our King."

Ruby's charming name had nothing to
do with the gemstone; it was very close to the goblin word for
"teacher." Her happy parents
had
given her the name after the midwife had detected a strong talent
for
this profession in their newborn. Ruby was one of many goblin
women with no interest in marriage. She had been
teaching, accord
ing to the pages,
since the Dawn of Time. She devoted herself whole,
heartedly to the
education of young minds, and no teacher ever worked harder, but generations of
wretched pages wished that she hadn't.

To say that she was Emily's least
favorite teacher would be a dreadful understatement. It would be more accurate
to say that she was Emily's most hated teacher. Lore-Master Ruby was an expert
who taught about all things human, and she knew
her subject inside
and out. Her classes were the most thorough and her
tests were the most difficult of any that the pages encountered. But one fact
was abundantly clear, from the very first lesson to the last word on the very
last test: Lore-Master Ruby absolutely loathed the human race.

Emily and Ruby had fought for years.
Their battlefield was the
classroom, and
the other pages were the fascinated spectators. Ruby relished the opportunity
to point out the inferiorities of humans, and
Emily, with her
inattentiveness, her quarrelsome nature, and her shrewd manner, was an ideal
example.

By trial and
error, Emily had found the perfect revenge. Day after
day, she ignored the lessons, reading her own books
during class. She
never
once did the assignments or turned in any homework. But she earned a perfect
score on every one of Ruby's fabulously hard tests.
None
of the other goblins ever managed it. Only Seylin even came close.

Ruby ground her
yellow teeth with rage over those perfect scores,
which
made all her careful teaching seem unnecessary. She knew
how Emily would gloat the next day in class.
"It's so easy," she would say cheerfully to the other pages, showing
off her test. "But I suppose
it's one of those things only a human
can do."

Now Emily faced her foe again in the
empty guardroom. "Did the King actually choose you to accompany me?"
she demanded.

"He did. He
said it was most important. Please don't imagine
that
I volunteered."

'"And if I complain, he'll just
tell me to stay home." Emily gave
an exasperated
sigh. "Oh, very well. Let's go. If my luck holds,
we'll be back
before nightfall."

But Emily's good
luck had vanished. She found no sign of
Seylin
in the forest outside and couldn't determine which way he had gone. Day after
day, she searched for him while her former
teacher
scolded and grumbled. The goblin kingdom was a small,
tidy place. She
had forgotten how big the human world could be.
Every road stretched on forever. Finding one young man in that vast
expanse
began to seem impossible.

Meanwhile, Marak
paused every day to consult two maps that he
had
fastened to the wall of his workroom. One showed Seylin's
wanderings, and the other showed Emily's progress.
Hanging on
two hooks next to the maps were the braided rings made from
their hair. Marak smiled as he took down Emily's ring and held it in his palm.

"The
scholars say that persistence is one of the most basic human
traits,"
he told it. "We're going to find out if that's true."

Seylin retraced his
former trading journey, but no call came to tell
him that elves were nearby. Before the death of the last elf King,
several thousand elves had lived in eighteen camps scattered through the
elf King's forest. Each camp had contained as
many as two hundred
and fifty people under the guidance of a camp lord.
The nomadic elves had moved from location to location throughout the year, but
the camps had retained a precise pattern in relation to each other. They had
formed the shape of the Warrior constellation, with the King's camp in the
center.