In The Coils Of The Snake (12 page)

Her bracelet began
to glimmer. Miranda saw a remarkable face looking into hers, a face possessed
of a cold, splendid beauty. His
black eyes
gleamed with anger, and his look was calm and stern. He
seemed very much
like an avenging angel, and she cringed in surprised dismay.

He continued to gaze
at her, implacable. “You couldn’t justify yourself at all,” he said
severely.

“Oh, yes, I
could,” she replied, gathering her confidence, “and
I’ll do it the way you great lords do. My people
think I’m dead; I can
show you my
tombstone. It’s best for my people that I really be dead.
As long as the
people get what’s best,” she concluded bitterly, “it doesn’t matter
what happens to one insignificant woman.”

“Child, I would
have said,” he remarked. “How old are you?”

“I’m seventeen!”
she replied in indignation.

“Then you are a
child,” he concluded. “I was sure of it. That’s justification for
your foolishness, I suppose.”

Offended,
Miranda turned away, and he didn’t speak again. Her
battered feelings, her chaotic thoughts spiraled down
into wretchedness. The force of her anger washed away, leaving her dull and
tired.
Nir studied her profile as her expression
slowly changed to dreary misery, his own face cautious and calculating.

“You still have
half a turn of the sky before the sun rises,” he said. “But this
great lord has to work a spell tonight. Will you do
something for me? Do you see these white flowers?” He pointed at
the
small lilies springing up here and there out of the grass. “I
need twenty-eight of them. Will you gather them for me?”

Miranda shrugged
apathetically. She had always hated waiting
for
things and having nothing to do, so she began picking the lilies,
searching
for them by the faint light of her bracelet. He took them from her as she
brought them and plucked them from the stems, pulling out their golden insides
to leave a small hole at the back of each one. Twenty-eight, he thought to
himself as she handed him a flower.

“I think that’s
the last one,” she said.

“Do
you?” he asked inattentively. “Wait a little, you can help me
count them.” He reached into his tunic and withdrew
a small
leather bag. Opening
the top, he blew a quick breath into it, and the
bag
inflated like a child’s balloon. When he let out the air, he was holding a
leather bag about four times its original size. Miranda stared at it in
surprise. It looked perfectly ordinary.

“Here,”
said the elf lord, and he piled the blossoms up in her
hands. Then he climbed to his feet and plucked the flowers back one
by one, examining them for flaws and dropping them
into the bag. As
he did she began to wander slowly toward the great
trees, not
watching where he was going.
Miranda, walking beside him, counted
the
flowers out loud. She wished he would stop walking. It was hard
to hold
a mass of loose blossoms, walk, and count all at once.

“Twenty-eight,”
she announced as they reached the circle of
trees. The preoccupied elf lord carefully tugged the bag
shut and tied
it to his belt, still wandering.
Miranda walked with him, interested in the thought of the magic.

“What
is the spell for?” she asked, curious, stepping close beside him to
squeeze through the first ring of trees. She didn’t know of any
goblin spells that used flowers unless they were crushed
like herbs.

“Do
you really want to know?” murmured the elf absently, look.
ing
up at the dark crowns of the ancient oaks.

“Yes,” she
said. She had always liked magic. He glanced back down at her then.

“It’s
for you,” he said. And the instant they passed the great
trunks,
his hand closed over her wrist.

Miranda stopped, bewildered. “Let
me go!” she cried, her tired brain
wondering what this
meant. She tried to pull away, but although the
elf held her
with only one hand, her jerks and tugs didn’t even attract
his
notice. He had turned and was staring intently at the trees above
them, his right hand
held up in readiness and his whole body still.

As
the goblin bird came swooping toward them, the elf made a
quick movement, and there was a rustle in the trees
overhead. A net
of
twigs and leaves arched swiftly around the flying bird, trapping it
in
a split second inside a living cage. Nir studied his handiwork.
The bird was completely enmeshed. It would take
hours to peck and
claw apart the
encircling twigs. But if it changed back into a goblin,
the fragile branches would break under its weight
and send it crash
ing to the ground below. The elf lord laughed, well
pleased at the goblin’s humiliating quandary.

Miranda didn’t know
what her captor was looking at, but his
dark
eyes shone, and his whole face lit up with the power of that tri
umphant,
musical laugh. The inhuman beauty that had awed her
before was now a terrifying force, just as incomprehensible and fear
some as the inhuman ugliness of the goblins. Miranda
shrank back,
and a lump rose in her throat. She felt instinctively that
she had stumbled in fatal error across a sight not allowed to humans.

The
elf lord glanced down at her with that laugh still shining in
his
eyes and walked rapidly away from the truce circle, pulling her with him.
Momentarily overcome, Miranda walked beside him,
unresisting. She felt in hurt reproach that Marak shouldn’t have
talked so casually about the pretty elves. Her
impression of them had
been quite different.

“Where are we
going?” she demanded breathlessly.

“I’m
taking you back to my camp so that I can work the spell on
you,”
he answered.

“What will the
spell do to me?” she asked.

“I don’t intend
to tell you,” he said.

Accustomed to the
straightforward goblins, Miranda found this statement astounding. Confident in
their strength and insensitive in
their
feelings, goblins never bothered to conceal anything. “What
do you mean, you don’t intend to tell me?”
she asked. “Why are you
doing this?”

The
elf was silent for some time as they walked, trying to make
sense
of the first question. At length, he gave it up as hopeless and went on to the
second one.

“Why? I don’t
know,” he admitted. “But you won’t come to any real harm.”

“I
never do, with you great lords,” snapped Miranda. “Your
plots are so benevolent, aren’t they? You lords do what’s
best for your
own people. I’m
not one of your people, so you won’t care what hap
pens
to me.”

This argument had
worked beautifully on the guilty Catspaw,
but
the elf lord didn’t look impressed. “There’s truth to that,” he
said coldly. “But I only have to stop short
of killing you to improve
on your own ideas.”

“Let
me go!” said Miranda angrily, trying to pry his hand loose.
“I’m
sick of you great lords practicing your magic on me.”

“You should be
glad it’s this great lord and not the other one,” murmured Nir, watching
for landmarks as they walked. “You were
about
to be enslaved by a monster and locked away under the earth.
I’d think
you’d welcome anything after that.”

“Well,
I don’t!” she retorted. “At least the goblins showed proper
respect. At least
they were polite. None of them is half the monster
you
are!”

The elf stopped and
turned then, handsome face set and eyes gleaming with wrath. “You think I’m
a worse monster than he is,”
he
exclaimed, “just because I won’t leave you alone to kill yourself!
Stars
above! Illogical is the kindest word for your point of view.”

Miranda took
advantage of the halt to wrap her free arm tightly
around a tree. “Let go of that,” he commanded, but the order
had
no effect, and if he jerked her
loose, the bark would tear her skin. He
paused to think for a second,
eyes narrowed. Then he touched her bracelet, putting out the light.

Total
blackness. Before, she had been able to pick out shapes in
the
gloom, but in this dense forest, all detail was gone. Miranda
blinked, but nothing in her field of vision
changed to let her know if
her eyes were open or closed.

In an instant, she
was six years old again, and the panic that
gripped
her was absolute. She was nothing but a helpless child, tor
mented,
trapped in the darkness. She held her breath to fight down the cry that
tightened in her throat and shook her head to stop her mother’s silky laughter.
Let me out of here!
She reached out her fist to pound on the locked
door.

Nir
studied her frightened face and wide, sightless eyes, catching
her other hand in his as she reached out toward him. It
was far from
honorable, he
thought in disgust, for him to use her human weakness
against
her. He thought about how it would be to stand here in the
sunlight, his own eyes blinded by the terrifying
whiteness of the day.

“Walk right
beside me,” he said, “and I won’t let you stumble.” He released
her wrist and held the hand she had given him, tucking
her
arm under his to keep her close. “Not all the nights are as dark as
this
one,” he added sympathetically, “and your eyes will adjust a little.”

Miranda
gave him no answer, occupied completely with the
effort of the frightening journey. She found it
exhausting to step and
step into blackness.
Her body was rigid, irrationally convinced that
the next step would be out into nothing. Time passed, but how long
or short, she couldn’t have said. She lost all her
bearings in time and
place when she lost her ability to see.

The
elf lord slowed and turned, speaking softly into the darkness
beside them, and another man’s voice answered his.
Miranda’s
bracelet flared
to a faint light, and she accepted the gift of sight with
blissful
relief. She looked up to see her captor and another elf man
both studying her as they walked along, talking in
some strange lan
guage. Deeply shaken
by the walk, Miranda was completely cowed
again by the elf lord’s
inhuman appearance. It was hard to imagine in her current state of fatigue that
she had ever had the courage to argue with him.

The
elf who had joined them was not nearly so frightening.
Blond
and blue-eyed, he was remarkably handsome, but he lacked
the air of command that belonged to the elf lord
as if it were a phys
ical trait. He was staring at Miranda with open
curiosity and a kind of humorous mischief.

They
walked along slowly now as the two men talked. The trees
began
to space themselves more widely, their trunks thick and straight. Miranda heard
the murmur of water nearby and realized that she was walking on soft grass. A
wide clearing opened out. Overhead shone a sky full of stars.

“This is my
camp,” said the elf lord, stopping. “Hunter is bringing some things
that I’ll need.” Miranda saw no buildings, tents, torches, or fires. She
would have walked right through the clearing and never noticed anything special
about it.

The blond elf Hunter
walked off on his errand, but Miranda found to her dismay that she was quickly
attracting an audience. Elves were drifting over to join them, their ageless
faces noble and
quite foreign, staring at
her as if she were some new species of ani
mal. Miranda stared back at
them, anxious and uncomfortable, remembering Marak’s stories of the elves’
human slaves.

“Why did they
even have slaves?” asked the girl. “In the fairy-tale books, they’re
beautiful and good. “

“The lazy elves
were just beautiful” he told her cheerfully. “Some were
beautiful and bad! Lots of elf lords didn’t have
slaves, but they had more and
more
toward the end. Whenever there was hard work to do, they made the
humans
do it. —’