In The Coils Of The Snake (4 page)

He
chuckled. “No. That’s just your fancy. Those Kings — they’re
dead.
They don’t go following people about anymore.”

Of course. How
absurd. Miranda felt her face grow hot as she
blushed.
But the shaken girl had no time to nurse her injured feelings
or her
hand. Marak Catspaw was giving her a tour of the Kings’ trophy rooms that
morning, and her visit to the crypt threatened to make her late. She felt a
little frantic at the idea of keeping a King waiting. Twisting her handkerchief
around the bloody hand, she hurried off.

Catspaw
was already there when she arrived, studying the vari
ous display cases in the first of the long, low rooms,
but the courteous
goblin didn’t seem
annoyed with her. Miranda apologized prettily, aware that the King would
interpret her shaking hands and flushed
cheeks
as anxiety over causing offense. While he led her from case to
case,
explaining obscure points of history, Miranda began to calm down. The
frightening episode receded from her mind as she con
centrated on the task of making witty conversation in order to charm
her
royal fiance.

They
spent several hours in the quiet trophy rooms. To her escort,
the
place clearly represented both a legacy and a challenge. These galleries had
become, over the centuries, the kingdom’s national
museum, and each King selected one or two exhibits to add from his
own reign. Marak had added a display about the
sorcerer and a case
holding the rags that Irina had worn on the night
she arrived. They were a sad testament, he had thought, to the end of the
elves.

“I
wonder what exhibits will date from my time,” mused Catspaw as they
examined a display of elvish weaponry. “I wonder what
stories
they’ll tell. ‘In the reign of Marak Catspaw…’ Stories used to begin with both
goblin and elf King names, but no longer, of
course. That made for a better
beginning, and they certainly made the most thrilling tales. There’s almost
nothing for a goblin King to
do these days,
with the elves gone. Humans don’t make particularly
threatening
adversaries. The times are dreadfully peaceful.”

“Isn’t peace
best?” asked Miranda. Her suitor responded with a noncommittal shrug.

She
was enjoying Catspaw’s company. He made her feel impor
tant, and his conversation was worldly and knowledgeable.
She knit
her brows, preparing to turn his offhand
comments into a debate, something that both of them relished. But the goblin
King interrupted her thoughts.

“What
are you doing to your fingers?” he wanted to know, seiz
ing
her bandaged hand. Fresh blood stained the wrap. Miranda had
been rubbing the skinned knuckles with her thumb,
breaking
through the dried blood and newly forming scabs.

It was an old
habit. She had hoarded her injuries even when she was very small for the
pleasure of watching Marak heal them. If he
didn’t come for several days, she tore open the wounds to
make sure
they couldn’t heal on their own.
Later, she had sneaked the nursemaid’s scissors administer
her own cuts. It made her proud to bear
pain without a murmur: she felt that she had
mastered herself. Some
days, when
the household was particularly harsh to her, it seemed the
only thing
she could control.

Miranda’s
mother had soon guessed what she was doing and had
triumphantly
denounced the girl to Marak. He didn’t seem particu
larly concerned, but the girl had learned caution. Afterward, she
only
indulged in the habit when she was really desperate, when her
mother was more than usually severe and she hadn’t
seen Marak for
days. She couldn’t talk to anyone about him, so she
couldn’t share her private worries over whether he was ever coming back. Then
it
was a relief to give herself a small cut
to fret over. It wasn’t as if she
was misbehaving: no one knew what she’d
done. And the pain was like a friend, sharing her silent vigil until he
returned to heal it.

Now Miranda watched
the new goblin King examine her damaged hand. The skinned knuckles were an
outlet for her wounded
feelings, a focus
for her internal pain. If Marak wasn’t coming back
to mend them, she
didn’t want them mended at all.

“I think some
wounds shouldn’t be healed,” she proposed.

Catspaw
had a high opinion of her intelligence and was ready to
be
interested in the idea. “Why shouldn’t we use magic when it’s convenient?”
he inquired.

“I’m not
magical,” said Miranda. “Is it good for a nonmagical
body to undergo magic for no reason? These will
heal on their own.”

“They might
scar,” observed the goblin King calmly.

She
studied the smashed, skinless knuckles. It was true that they
weren’t
a pretty sight. But she felt again that sense of mastery over pain, and the
exhilaration of it carried her along. Certainly the straightforward Catspaw had
no insight into her complicated feelings on the subject.

“Humans are
proud of their scars,” she debated. “Scars can be a badge of honor.”

At
that moment, Seylin walked up beside them, on business
with the King. The handsome man caught sight of Miranda’s
injured
knuckles and grimaced in concern. “Miranda, what did you
do?” he cried out, genuinely distressed. His
reaction was like a splash
of cold water. Miranda felt guilty and
embarrassed.

“Here’s a
thought, Seylin,” remarked the King with cheerful unconcern. “Should
some wounds be left unhealed?”

“No,”
answered his chief adviser sharply, and Miranda didn’t protest when he mended
her hand.

Catspaw
excused himself and went off with his adviser, leaving
Miranda
alone. After her traumatic visit to the crypt and Seylin’s unpleasant reaction
to her wounds, she felt nervous and unstrung.
She
edged cautiously up the stairs, hoping not to meet anything too
revolting,
but even the picturesque goblins startled her today. She was relieved to reach
her own floor and glad to find that the guard
posted
there was one of the least distasteful goblins in the kingdom.

Tattoo,
Sable’s youngest son, had only recently become a member
of
the King’s Guard. His black uniform made him inconspicuous
against the dark green marble of the hallway. Big
and handsome like
his father,
Tinsel, Tattoo got his name from an unusual feature: many
faint black lines crisscrossed his silver face,
as if someone had marked
it with ink and he hadn’t washed it all off.
His straight black hair flopped untidily into his blue eyes and about his
shoulders.

Miranda liked Tattoo,
who had his father’s easygoing, friendly manner, and she seized upon his
presence as an opportunity. Now, instead of just hiding in her rooms, she could
go somewhere more in
teresting. Facing the
deformities in the hallways wasn’t nearly so
disturbing if she had
company along.

Where
did she want to go? Miranda loitered in the hallway, considering her choices.
There were many fascinating and exotic places
in the underground realm, she reminded herself, trying
to ignore the
nagging whisper that she really
wanted to go outside. To leave the
goblin
caves, to stand in the sunlight again… Miranda forced
the thought away and held her breath. Sometimes
the gloomy shad
ows here seemed almost to choke her, like layers of dark
cobwebs winding themselves around her face and throat.

She
couldn’t leave the caves, so she would do the next best thing.
The kingdom
contained two places that Miranda thought of as
“outdoors.” When she had first come through the goblins’ front
door, she had emerged in what seemed to be a
narrow valley, it was
so vast a cave. This
lamplit, subterranean cavern was called the
palace
gardens because of its ornamental beds full of jeweled repli
cas of living plants. Near the goblins’ great iron
door, a grove of
brass and silver trees caught in clever artistry the
changing of the
seasons. The enormous
palace, with its great square windows, overlooked these dark gardens, and a
shallow river foamed over rocks at
the valley floor.

Did she want to
visit the palace gardens? Miranda hesitated. Of
all the wonders in the goblin realm, they were the most eerily exquisite,
but for all their beauty, she didn’t really like them. They were so
silent,
faint and ghostly in that black place.
They seemed to be frozen in an
eternal midnight.

She would go look at
the other place in the goblin kingdom where one felt that one was out of doors.
There, at least, she would find light. “Tattoo, come with me,” she
ordered, but the big guard looked uneasy.

“I’m
not supposed to, King’s Bride,” he said. “I got in trouble
last
time. I have to stay at the door. That’s my orders.”

Miranda frowned at
him and folded her arms in imitation of her imperious mother. “Which would
you rather do?” she demanded. “Upset me or risk a little trouble?”

“Upset
you,” answered Tattoo fervently. “Mother found out that
I was written up for leaving my post. I think she’ll kill
me if it hap
pens again.”

This Miranda could
understand. The two elf women, Sable and Irina, were her neighbors, and they
formed the nucleus of a small clan of oddly attractive elvish-looking goblins.
Sable was a stern
matriarch with very high
expectations. She didn’t put up with
much nonsense from her children and
could be very blunt about telling them so.

`All
right, you don’t have to come with me,” Miranda generously
decided. “But you still have to deliver messages to
Catspaw for me,
don’t you?”
Tattoo nodded. “Then deliver a message to him in the
royal rooms, and I’ll come with you. I’ll tell you
what it is on the way.”

Tattoo
pondered this for a minute and then walked resignedly to
the stairs. Miranda followed him, feeling smug. She wasn’t
concerned
that a lowly guard might think her
behavior strange. Delivering
eccentric
orders to the servants was a cherished privilege of the upper
class, and Miranda had seen a great deal of it
during her childhood.

“What’s the
message?” asked Tattoo as they climbed the stairs.

“Let’s
see,” reflected the girl. “Tell the King that I hope his day is
going well.”

“I have to tell
Marak that?” Tattoo looked glum.

“The goblin
King will be very pleased,” Miranda stated with breezy self-assurance, and
she was quite sure that he would be.
Catspaw
was making no secret of his fondness for her: his attention
was becoming
real fascination. There were many things in her new life about which Miranda
felt dubious, but the new King’s regard was not one of them.

Keeping
pace with the goblin guard, she climbed steps until she
was
short of breath. The royal rooms were on one of the highest
levels of the palace. That palace fooled the girl
into thinking it was a
normal building because of its rooms, halls, and
stairways, but
Miranda already understood
that it was much more than it appeared
to
be when viewed from its ornamental gardens. Many of those hall
ways
burrowed deep into the rock. Its contours could never have been built
aboveground; they had had to be mined away.

The pair arrived at
the elaborately decorated royal floor of the palace, and Miranda studied the
stately hallway with pleasure. On one side, square windows without glass
stretched from ceiling to floor, and across from them stood two uniformed
guards watching the set of golden doors that led to the royal rooms. The
brilliant
mosaics and gemstone encrusted furnishings shamed the Taj
Mahal. Not a single human monarch in the entire world lived in such splendor,
and Miranda enjoyed thinking of her imminent residency there. The life of a
goblin King’s Wife, she decided, did have certain tang
ible rewards.

Tattoo
conferred with the door guards and then passed her on his
way
back to the stairs. “Marak isn’t here,” he said bitterly. “He’s
in the palace town, inspecting some hybrid grain.” He didn’t add that this
meant an hour’s walk to deliver her inconsequential message, but Miranda was
fully aware of it.