In The Coils Of The Snake (28 page)

“I know,”
he replied. “I’m sorry for tricking you. You can see that I don’t trust
you, either.”

• • •

The
next night, Nir left camp to go hunting. He didn’t hunt deer,
but he found exactly
what he was after. As Sable came slipping through the trees, he stepped out to
confront her.

“Stop!” he
called. She yelped in fright, but she stopped. “You’ll tell me what I want
to know,” he said with stern satisfaction, walking up to her. “You’re
an elf, so you don’t have a choice. What did you tell Sika — Miranda — last
night that’s made her so unhappy?”

“I told her
that the goblin King has arranged for her escape,” retorted Sable, turning
away from him and staring at the ground. “I tried to convince her to take
advantage of it.”

“You tried?”
echoed Nir in some surprise. “Why did she need convincing?”

“She loves you,”
muttered Sable reluctantly. “She wants to stay with you.”

“The
human girl
loves
me!” exclaimed the elf lord incredulously,
and
he gave a triumphant laugh. “That’s dealt a nice blow to the goblin King’s
plots for her, hasn’t it? Tell me, how did you try to convince her?”

“I told her
what you elf men are like,” snapped Sable, “that you have no feeling
at all for her, that you’re just waiting until her marriage moon to throw her
out of your tent. I told her how dangerous you are, that you’re insane, that
you even killed your own wife.”

The elf lord’s face
went white with indignation and fury. “How dare you say such things! How
dare you bring harm to your own people!”

“The goblins
are my people, not the elves,” replied Sable. “I’d
never live among people like you who have no
feelings for others.”

“What would you
know about the feelings of elves?” cried Nir. “Fine! You’ll have what
you want. Look at me,” he commanded, putting his hand on her head, and she
looked up at him for the first
time. “And
listen,” he said in a low, firm voice, looking into her eyes.
“I tell you that you are not an elf. You are
a goblin instead. Go back
to your King and say that the elf lord tells
him that his spies won’t
plague me much
longer. I’m giving him fair warning: if I catch him
meddling with Sika
again, I’ll murder any goblin I find. Now get away from here. And don’t let me
see you again.”

Sable shook all
over, seeming to shrink before his eyes. When he
released her, she staggered backward and fell onto the damp ground.
Mindlessly, automatically, she crawled away from
him, but her eyes
never left his face.
Torn between grief and disgust, Nir watched
her go, the elf that wasn’t an elf. Then he turned and walked back
to
camp.

Hunter was waiting
for him by the tents.

“Some
tracker you are!” he scoffed, his blue eyes bright. “I caught
my quarry long ago
and she’s already flayed and carved.”

“So’s
mine,” sighed Nir. “Please gather the others. I have to talk
to
them.”

Miranda was sitting
by Galnar, listening to his violin. Half the
camp
was dancing to the music, but she was too unhappy to dance.
Before Sable’s warning, she would have wandered
the camp bound
ary to watch for Nir to come back from hunting. She wouldn’t
let herself do that anymore, but she was still impatient for his return. She
had only two weeks to spend with him before it was too late.

The
elves all gathered under the shelter of the bluffs and listened to
their lord. Miranda couldn’t understand his rapid elvish,
but she heard
different names
mixed into it, and a thrill of excitement went through
the
crowd. She wandered over to Hunter, who stood to one side.

“What’s
he saying?” she whispered. Hunter turned with a bewil
dered
expression and leaned toward her, cupping his hand around
his ear. “You heard me!” she whispered. “I
know you speak English.”
He
smiled indulgently at her and patted her on the head. She glared
at him.
Elves are so silly, she thought.

Nir
finished speaking, and the assembled elves dispersed, head
ing off on different errands. The lord walked up to his
friend and his
prisoner. “Hunter,
Sika is your responsibility in my absence,” he
said, “but she can stay alone in my tent. Sika, follow his orders
as you
would mine. That is to say, reluctantly,” he added, a smile
lighting his dark eyes.

“In your
absence?” asked Miranda anxiously.

“Yes,
I have to leave tonight,” he said. “There’s a spell I need to
work.
I’ll be back at the full moon.”

“The
full moon!” gasped Miranda. “No! That’s too late! Take
me
with you,” she begged.

“I can’t, but I’ll
be back soon,” he promised. Soon, thought the stricken Miranda. As soon as
I’m a grown woman, and you stop worrying about me. My last two weeks, gone. She
wandered away from the men as they talked, and crept into his empty tent.

Miranda didn’t let
herself cry. She lay facedown on her pallet,
overwhelmed
by misery. She wished she were asleep, unconscious,
dead. She heard Nir crawl into the tent and felt
him sit down next to
her, but she didn’t move.

“Sika, you
asked me last night if you could trust me to do what you want,” he said. “I
don’t know the answer. I have to do what’s best for the elves, but I’ll make
you happy if I can.”

“Catspaw
told me the same thing,” she muttered, “that he would
give me anything to make me happy, anything. But he wouldn’t
give
me the one thing I wanted, and neither will
you.”

“You
can’t be sure of that,” he replied. “Tell me what you want.
I’ll
give you anything that’s in my power to give.”

Miranda felt again
the despair of Marak’s death and the loss of her tidy future. Her dignity, her
hard work, even her perfect manners — nothing in her life had any meaning.

“Very
well,” she said with bitter fatalism. “If you really want to
know,
I want you.” A lump rose in her throat at the pitiful hopelessness of it
all.

“You want me?”
said the elf lord softly. “That’s good. That’s in my power to give.”

Miranda was just
breaking into tears when she heard him. She sat up slowly, wiping her eyes. “But,”
she began. “But — you can’t, you know. Elves don’t marry human women.”

“This elf does,”
replied Nir with a smile.

“But you don’t
want to marry me,” she insisted helplessly.

The
elf lord looked puzzled. “Maybe humans think backwards,”
he remarked thoughtfully. “You’re telling me things
that you couldn’t
possibly
know without asking questions about them first. Telling me
I
can’t marry you. Telling me I don’t want to marry you. How do
you know that, Sika?
Have you asked?”

She
stared at him. “Do you want to marry me?” she whispered.

“Of course I
do,” said Nir. “Why do you think we’re always together?”

Miranda’s world had
fallen apart a couple of times, and she had tackled the wreckage with vigor.
But her world hadn’t gone from
horrible to
splendid in a second. She didn’t know what to do. Marak
had raised her to do her duty for the admiration
that it would bring.
He had taught her to defend herself against cruelty
and disappointment — and not to trust anyone but him.

“Do you love
me?” she breathed.

“Yes,”
he answered. “Not that I understand you very well.
You’re re so different from us. The elves all belong to
me, but you don’t.
I suppose that makes
you very appealing.”

Miranda
thought about this in complete amazement. The elf
lord
was remarkable, inhumanly handsome, unlike anyone she had ever known. It had
never occurred to her that she might be unlike anyone he had ever known.

She
wanted to prove to herself that this was really happening, so
she reached out and took his hand. She could feel her face
beaming with joy, and she didn’t know what to do about it. After a lifetime of
hiding
her emotions, she felt exposed by her own happiness. She
didn’t dare to look at him. He would surely see
what she was feeling.

Nir
leaned his head against hers and looked at her hand holding
his, wondering what she was thinking. “This
engagement has seemed
very
long,” he reflected. “I’m glad it will be over soon. I’ll finish my
magic, and we’ll dance on the night of your marriage moon. We can
survive
until then, don’t you think?”

Miranda looked up,
and he smiled at her. She smiled back and
felt
a lightness sweep over her, as if her heart were a little flake of ash
that
had just flown up the chimney. But a second later, she came back down to earth
with a thump. She remembered that he was leaving.

“I
want to come with you,” she said. “You took Kara on your trips.”

`And
so I would you, if I could,” said Nir, “but this is a difficult trip:
constant walking, constant magic, too cold and hard for a deli
cate
human who can’t see in the nighttime woods.”

Miranda thought
about Kara and remembered what Sable had said about elf men and human women. “Maybe
your magic is getting rid of me,” she exclaimed in distress.

“No, it’s not,”
said the elf lord reassuringly.

“But I — I
probably — well, maybe certainly — can’t have children, either.”

Baffled,
Nir studied her anxious expression. “Sometimes I don’t
understand you at all,” he remarked. “Please
worry about something
that
makes sense to me, like whether or not it’s going to rain tomor
row.
Don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to have a child years from now.
That seems very strange.” He put his arms around her and held her close. “I
have to go.”

She
walked with him to the boundary. “Can’t you kiss me good
bye?”
she begged.

“No,” he
said, smiling, “but I’ll kiss you hello.” And then he
walked away. She stood at the edge of camp and
watched him disappear into the blackness, the stars at her wrists and ankles
sparkling as
she struggled to follow
him. How pointless, she thought bleakly. How
completely irrational. Her
new guardian came to stand beside her.

“Hunter, he’s
gone!” she exclaimed in despair.

Hunter thought up
several witty replies to this but looked at her face and decided against them. “You’re
right,” he concluded. “But you’ll be glad he’s gone. I’ll feed you
better.”

“How’s that?”
Miranda asked absently. “You’re not a lord.”

“That’s just
it,” the blond elf assured her. “No special privileges
for Nir. He says that’s what ruined the elves in
the first place, excess
and caprice
at the top. But I always eat better than everyone else. A
little excess
and caprice at the bottom never hurt the elves.”

“Elf food is
terrible anyway,” said Miranda. “I don’t see what difference it’ll
make.”

“Not
elf food!” insisted Hunter. “Just Nir’s food. No, you take it
from me, all dried deer meat is not the same. It may
look the same, it
may smell the same—”

“It may taste
the same—” said Miranda, smiling.

Hunter drew himself
up indignantly. “Oh, go ahead, mock a serious subject!” he declared. “That’s
all you humans think about anyway, making silly jokes.” Miranda laughed,
which had been Hunter’s goal all along. He was very pleased with himself He was
sure the elf lord could still hear her.

• • •

Miranda went to the
tent alone that morning, happy that the spell
would
shortly force her into sleep. She awoke with a start, knowing
even
before her eyes opened that something was wrong. Then she heard the shouting.