Equipped with proper elf shoes and clothing, Miranda felt more comfortable, but she was far from contented. The next night, she went bathing with the women in the cold river water, but they didn’t allow her to take a dignified bath. Instead, they played tag, splashed one another, and splashed her, too, and insisted on washing her hair.
Concerned that she had no work to do after the evening meal, she looked for some useful activity to join. But the elves didn’t do anything useful, they just fooled around: dancing, singing, playing with their children, coming and going on walks. She noticed a pair of hunters leaving to bring back a deer for the band’s daily stew, but it was clear that they enjoyed hunting too much to call it work. Only the elf lord, copying spells and practicing them at his writing desk, was performing a task that Miranda could approve of
She sat down near the edge of camp, dejected and annoyed. It didn’t matter that the elvish life was so lovely, she thought. They really should engage in some honest labor. They could be plowing a field right now or cutting down some trees to build a house. Marak had been right about the lazy elves. They needed taking in hand.
Just as she was concluding this arrogant thought to her satisfaction, Hunter and another elf man walked up behind her on their way back into camp. With lightning skill born of long practice, they had half her hair in an untidy braid before she knew what they were doing. When she reached back to smack their hands away, they were already walking past her, talking together in low voices as if she weren’t even there. This was exactly the sort of thing, she fumed, that she should expect from the silly elves. Rummaging in her small store of elvish, she found the right word for them.
“Turturla!” she yelled. Children! The men laughed and turned to look back at her, answering in bursts of graceful elvish as they continued on their way. Nir heard the exchange and smiled to himself. Then he paused in his writing to think about it. It was the human prisoner’s first attempt to speak elvish to an elf. That was very good, he mused: a real step forward. Of course, it had been an insult, but that didn’t really matter. One had to start somewhere.
That does it, decided Miranda in disgust, standing up and brushing herself off. I don’t care if I am important to a bunch of pretty children who have no manners with strangers and nothing to do but play stupid pranks. I don’t see what I’m supposed to add to their world except be made the butt of jokes. I want to know what I’m doing here, and I want to know it now. And if I don’t like it, I’ll find some way off this stretch of ground if I have to dig under the camp border with my teeth.
She marched resolutely off to the elf lord, thinking of all the things she wanted to say. She walked up to his writing desk, ready to do battle, her face looking like a thundercloud. But the elf lord closed his spell book when she appeared beside him and turned to her with a smile. It was the first time he had ever smiled at her, and he won the battle before she could say a word. She forgot that she was angry. She forgot everything. She just stood and stared at that smile.
“Sika,” he said, “I’m bored with writing, and I’m tired of learning spells. Let’s go on a walk.” Then he stood up, stretched to take the writing cramp out of his arms, and reached for her hand. No stars lit up in protest this time. The dumbfounded girl was quite incapable of protest.
They climbed up the side of the nearest hill together, the elf lord’s hand guiding her as she struggled to find her footing. Not far from the top, they came out of the trees and stopped above a short cliff. The whole elf camp lay below them, the bend in the river gleaming in the light from the stars.
The elf lord walked along the cliff edge and then sat down where a broken slab of rock angled up to provide a comfortable backrest. He looked at the small figures of his elves dancing in the meadow below. Miranda sat beside him, listening to the faint music.
“When I was little,” he told her, “I was raised by a human woman who lived with my father and me. She always talked about being in the dark. Elves move camp each season, but we moved all the time, and I got the feeling that we were trying to escape the dark, as if it were a frightening place. But dark is really a shade, isn’t it, like dark red or dark green. Do you humans see everything in dark colors?”
“I can’t see colors at night,” answered Miranda. “Everything’s black, except that the moon and stars are white, and a little light shining on the river is white. The sky is dark, and the ground is even darker. That’s why we call it being in the dark.”
The elf lord looked deeply shocked. “No color at all?” he echoed in dismay. “Do you mean that the whole scene in front of you now looks just like a goblin’s cloak? That’s far worse than I had imagined!”
Miranda considered this, looking around. “What do you see?” she wanted to know.
“I see the leaves of the trees, all different shades of green, tossing in the wind, and the patterns that the elves are making as they turn and dance in circles. The sky is a dark blue-green, going on and on forever, and the stars hang in it like globes of fire—yellow, red, orange, pale green, blue, and white like ice. The big round disk of the moon is dark blue. Only the thin rim is bright.” He paused. “A silver-gold rim, I’d call it. I don’t know your word for that color.” At the astonishment on her face, he grimaced. “But to you, it’s all just black.”
“It’s a curse,” Miranda said softly, as if she were talking to herself. “My mother did it. She told me I would live my whole life in the dark.” Even though this was a statement, her voice had a question in it, and Nir felt bound to answer it.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “That was a true curse.” This was not what she had hoped to hear. Nir watched her unhappy face, feeling guilty.
“I know what it means to be cursed,” he said quietly. “My magic is like that: a blessing to the elves, but a curse to me. It’s very powerful. It does things on its own that I don’t expect, and it tells me to do things, too, and sometimes they’re very hard for me. I have to do them, and I usually don’t understand their purpose until later. Often I never understand.”
“Then why do you do them at all?” asked Miranda.
“Because they need to be done for the elves so that we can survive. They’re always the right thing to do.”
“How do you know that they’re the right thing,” pursued the girl, “if you don’t know why you should do them?”
Nir shrugged and looked away. “I can’t even tell you that.”
Miranda studied the man, feeling intrigued. He hadn’t revealed much about himself before; their talk had been relatively formal. It occurred to her that he didn’t like to speak about himself. He was reserved, just as she was.
“I still don’t know your name,” she admitted, rather embarrassed about it.
“You do know my name, Sika,” he replied with a smile. “You use it at least once a night. My father gave me his name and his father’s name, Ash, which means ‘lonely’ or ‘alone.’ But my people call me Nir, which is as good a translation as my language has for ‘great elf lord.”’
Miranda felt even more embarrassed and quickly changed the subject. “Did your magic come from your father?” she asked. “Goblin magic is passed down.”
“No,” he replied. “I don’t know where it came from. But then, I know nothing of my relations; perhaps my grandparents were like me. My father was gentle and playful, a perfectly ordinary elf, hardly magical at all. The only extraordinary thing about him was the love that he had for my mother.”
“That’s sweet,” said Miranda with a smile.
“Sweet?” Nir looked at her in surprise. “Well, perhaps it was. In any case, he was baffled by my magic. Even as a child, I knew things that he didn’t know. I was so different from him.”
“Set aside for a special destiny,” said Miranda with perfect under standing. She was enjoying the conversation. She hadn’t ever met a man who was like her: dignified, reticent, troubled by a difficult past. Catspaw and Marak were both confident and talkative, comp Portable with themselves.
“What’s the worst thing that your magic made you do?” she wanted to know. She doubted he would answer the question, but after a second’s hesitation, he did.
“The worst thing,” he reflected. “I’m not sure. Bringing Arianna here to give her to the goblins was a horrible thing to do, but that wasn’t the worst thing that my magic did. It killed my wife, Kara, and I didn’t know in time to stop it.”
“You were married?” exclaimed Miranda in astonishment, her feeling of empathy vanishing abruptly. She certainly had no experience to match this.
“Kara and I were married for years,” he replied. “She was Hunter’s sister. They were the first elves I found. Kara was heartsick that we never had any children. I didn’t mind, but she said that I should have a son to be lord after me, and because she was a commoner, she thought that I shouldn’t have married her.
“When I made trips to gather elves, I usually took my wife, but one time, my magic told me to leave her behind. She was sure that my magic was getting rid of her, and she said that she didn’t mind, that she was glad to go. But she cried and cried. She couldn’t bear to say goodbye, and I couldn’t find any way to reassure her. When I left, she walked beside me, crying, until she was in danger of not making it home to camp before day. Then I stopped and kissed her and ordered her to go back, and I never saw her again. Hunter told me she was dead in our tent that evening. My magic must have killed her somehow, but I never would have left if I had known.”
What a terrible burden to live with, thought Miranda in amazement, even worse than losing Marak and all of his promises. “Was Kara as beautiful as Catspaw’s wife?” she asked, and then regretted the question. Of course she was, you fool, she told herself. All elves are beautiful.
“No,” said Nir. “Arianna was more beautiful, but that didn’t mean I loved her more. An engagement can seem short or long. I only had to wait five months for Kara, but I thought I’d go mad. I had already waited four years for Arianna, and I could have waited another four. I would have been happy not to marry her if I’d known she was happy with another elf. The thing that haunts me,” he said moodily, “is the thought of that monster kissing her lovely face.”
The statement reminded Miranda of the depth of her own miss fortune.
“It haunts me, too,” she said, feeling wretched. “When Catspaw kissed me, I never would have believed that he would kiss anyone else.”
“He kissed you?” asked Nir, thoroughly shocked. “You don’t mean that, surely, not a real kiss. just a kiss on the forehead, perhaps. You’re too young to know the difference.”
Miranda gave him a scornful look. She might not have been married for years, but that didn’t mean she was a complete baby. “Catspaw kissed me many times,” she replied crisply. “And, yes, I do know the difference. Not,” she concluded in a sad undertone, “that they meant anything, in the end.”
The elf lord was beside himself with moral indignation.
“That freak-eyed pervert!” he declared angrily. “Kissing you like that! Taking advantage of his guardianship to ruin your childhood! No wonder you wanted to kill yourself when he didn’t keep his promise of marriage. No wonder you keep insisting you’re not a child!”
The stupefied Miranda just stared at him. “But I liked it when Catspaw kissed me,” she said.
“Of course you did,” he remarked, eyeing her with pity. “It made you feel important to the revolting beast. You can’t possibly understand his abusive assaults.”
“That’s not fair to Catspaw,” insisted Miranda, quite upset. “He was always very thoughtful, and I truly did want to marry him.”
Nir looked at the expression of pain and confusion on the beautiful young face, and his heart went out to the poor girl.
“It’s all right,” he consoled her. “We won’t talk about it anymore. You shouldn’t have to think about it.” He put a comforting arm around her, sighing as the startled Miranda tried to pull away and the stars flashed their warning.
“You see,” he observed, touching the stars, “how badly he damaged your nature. You’re afraid of every touch, even when the women comb your hair. You can’t tell the difference between ordinary kindness and some sort of dangerous, twisted attention. You’re always trying to decide what’s decent. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” said Miranda blankly. The stars winked out.
“If I’d known about this before I put the spell on you, I don’t think I’d have had the heart to do it,” he continued. “That explains why you were so frantic. You must have been terrified! I know you thought that I was a monster, too, but you know I wouldn’t do a thing like that, abusing a defenseless child.”
Miranda looked up at him. His face was only a few inches above hers, looking at her very kindly, his black eyes sad and sincere. She thought that he was undoubtedly the most attractive man on the face of the earth, and what she wanted more than anything in the world, she realized, was that he would kiss a defenseless child. The kiss wouldn’t be a thing like Catspaw’s kisses, she was positive of that. It would be worth an entire lifetime of darkness.
“I’m so sorry for you,” he said earnestly. “You’ve had such a tragic childhood, and now I’ve trapped you in a world that looks like a goblin’s cloak. I just wish there was some way I could make it up to you.”
It was time for the morning meal, so they walked back to camp. Nir thought, not for the first time, that humans made a tremendous racket in the woods. Miranda wasn’t paying attention to anything. She thought she floated.
The bread that went with their everlasting deer-meat stew had berries embedded in it. Nir tried to teach her the word for that, but his quick-witted pupil was rather slow tonight. She was probably still upset, he concluded. Of course she was. That monster!
Miranda decided, watching him, that he looked even more noble when he frowned.
The next evening, the elf lord announced to his band that he had learned why the human girl was so afraid to be touched: the goblin King had tortured her for his own sordid pleasure. She didn’t even understand this, he went on wrathfully. She had been taught that this treatment was normal. They would all have to be particularly patient with her so that she could learn to trust people again.
Miranda didn’t understand what he said, but she knew that it concerned her, and she could tell that the other elves were appalled. Even the children stared at her in horror. But Galnar came to sit beside her. Smiling, he pulled out one of his deer-bone pipes and began to play. And Hunter threw himself gracefully down on the ground before her and produced a pair of shiny sheep’s knucklebones.
He and the boy Tibir spent the next couple of hours teaching her to play the ancient game. They played it elf-fashion, wherein both bones had to land on the wrist or the back of the hand to score. Miranda proved hopeless at it, having none of their dexterity, so Hunter thought up elaborate handicaps to make the play even. This entertained the three of them much more than a regular game of knucklebones would have.
The elf lord was amazed at the change in his human captive. She began trying to speak elvish, she gathered flowers with the women, and she played games with the children in the meadow. He took her on long walks, explaining elf life to her, and she asked endless questions. She smiled readily now, and from his work at the writing desk, he often heard her laughter.
It all went to show, he thought to himself, what a little kindness could do.
• • •
It would doubtless have pleased Nir to learn that the goblin King had not yet kissed his new bride. Such a perverted assault was out of the question: Arianna was far too distressed. Marak Catspaw tried to treat her with consideration, but he made no progress at all. He held true to his promise not to lock their door, but he had to locate her several times a night. She turned up in all sorts of odd places and became the talk of the kingdom. The sophisticated ruler found his wife’s strange antics embarrassing.
Marak’s scheme to raise a bride for his son now turned into a real liability. Catspaw was the first goblin King in history who had not been properly educated for dealing with a reluctant spouse. He felt upset and annoyed by Arianna’s mysterious behavior. Over and over again, he had to remind himself to be patient.
As the days went by, Arianna began to decline. She was sleeping very little and eating even less. Her beautiful face became worn, and she was no longer lively and graceful. And one morning, when Catspaw found her sleeping in a corner of the tailors’ storeroom behind a block.ade of bolts of cloth, the golden snake around her neck awoke.
“Goblin King,” it hissed, “your wife is losing strength. Soon she will become very ill. Twenty-three King’s Wives have become ill in this manner, and six of them have died. See to this matter at once.”
The irate King called in his chief adviser and informed him of the ominous warning. “What should I do?” he demanded. “Why does she keep running off like this? Where is she trying to go?”
“I asked her that the other day when you were in court,” said Seylin. “I pointed out to her that she couldn’t escape. ‘I know,’ she answered. ‘But at least I’m safe for a little while.”’
“Safe from what?” asked Catspaw.
“That, she wouldn’t tell me,” replied his adviser. “But it’s obvious. She’s safe from you.”
“What does she think I’m going to do?” wondered the King. “Maybe Sable will have some idea. Arianna’s talked to her, I know. Guard, come!” he called, and Tattoo walked in. “That’s another thing, Seylin. She talks to you, Mother, and the elves, but she won’t talk to anyone else. She hasn’t said a single word to a normal goblin.”
“She’s talked to me,” interrupted Tattoo, and then immediately wished he hadn’t. In the surprised silence that followed, he could hear his commanding officer’s voice: A door guard protects the King’s counsel and respects the King’s privacy. Never mention what you hear, and never speak unless you are addressed.
“What did she say to you?” asked Seylin with interest. The King said nothing, but his icy glare spoke volumes.
“Oh, not — not much,” stammered the unfortunate Tattoo. His silver skin couldn’t blush, but the tips of his ears darkened. “Just a couple of words `thank you’ — or maybe one word — I can’t remember, is ‘thank you’ one word in elvish or two?”
“Get out,” ordered Marak Catspaw emphatically, and Tattoo rapidly obeyed. He stood outside the door, listening to his sovereign’s raised voice. “She spoke to him? She spoke to him! And all the time, she watches me like a rabbit!” Meanwhile, the miserable young goblin called himself every name he could think of and wondered how he would break the news to his mother when they kicked him out of the Guard.
“That’s just it,” explained Seylin. “For some reason, she’s terrified of you. It has nothing to do with goblins in general. She doesn’t seem worried about anyone else.”
“Then I’ll confine her to bed,” decided the goblin King, “but I’ll stay away from her so she can rest. And we’ll have the elves sit with her in turns and try to get her to talk. Maybe she’ll tell them what’s wrong.”
The poor worn-out elf girl watched in tears as he worked the magic that kept her from leaving her bed. It wasn’t hard after all to be patient with her, he decided with grudging compassion. He explained as kindly as he knew how that he was only trying to make sure she got some sleep and that he himself wouldn’t disturb her unless there was some good reason. Then he left her alone with his mother and went off to court.
Kate sat in an armchair by the bed with a book of Keats’s poems, keeping a worried eye on their patient. In spite of her mania fest state of fatigue and the silence in the room, Arianna still wasn’t resting. She was shifting nervously from place to place on the bed, trying to find some weakness in her invisible prison. The air hummed and crackled as she tested her limits with magic, trying to batter her way out with spells.
“I understand how you feel,” volunteered Kate, trying to distract her. “When I first came, I hated to be locked up, too. I used all my magic to try to break free.”
Arianna stopped her efforts and looked at Kate, her face white and her black eyes glittering as if she had fever. “Were you really the old goblin King’s Wife?” she asked. Her voice was husky from lack of use.
Kate smiled and held out her hands, revealing the scars. Arianna studied them, glanced down at the scars on her own palms, and then buried her hands in her lap. “Yes, my husband died just a few months ago,” said Kate. “I miss him terribly.”
The elf girl was silent for some time, thinking about this. “I don’t understand why he didn’t treat you like a normal goblin King’s Wife,” she said finally. Her soft voice sounded bitter.
She must know, decided Kate, that I can go outside. She thought about how hard it had been for her in those early days to know that Emily could leave the kingdom. “I was like you at first,” she explained, “but not long after I came here, I saved my husband’s life.”
“I wish you hadn’t!” said the elf girl fervently. “Or I wish I could do something like that, too. Now I just have to wait.” Her feverish gaze swept the room as if she were looking for executioners. “I almost wish it were over,” she confided. “I think it’s almost worse than the change.”
“What change?” asked the puzzled Kate.
But here the patient seemed to feel that she had said too much. She went back to her magical escape attempts and spoke no further. At last she must have concluded that the effort was hopeless. She stopped and bowed her head. Then she crept over to the side of the bed where Kate was sitting.
“Do you have any idea,” she whispered, “or did he ever say… anything… about what I’m going to look like?”
The astonished Kate met her tortured gaze and finally understood. “Oh, good heavens!” she exclaimed. “You can’t think that my son would — would—” But her command of elvish seemed to have vanished. She dropped the book of poems and started to her feet. “This is horrible! I have to tell Catspaw!”
“No!” shrieked the elf girl, making a grab for her. She was stopped at the end of the bed. She lifted her magic hand, whispering words, but Kate, on her way through the door, made a quick gesture of her own. Kate wasn’t aware of the duel, and she was entirely unaware of the danger, but it was a very good thing for her that her magic was military.
Left alone, Arianna was in the grip of her greatest fears. Once the goblin King knew that she understood his ghastly plans, he would realize that it was useless to wait for her to accept them. Then he would doubtless begin the work at once. Half crazed with panic, caught in a trap, she reached out with all the magic she had. She called for help to save herself from him, and everything in the room that belonged to her world responded. All the objects that had once been living plants sprouted and started to grow.
From the linen bedsheets sprang up a tall, thick stand of flax, burying her within its reedy depths. A bowl of fruit on the bedside table exploded into activity, young pear and apple trees jostling each other for room, and the grapes erupted into a snarl of vines that uncurled like a nest of green snakes. From Kate’s book shot up a pine tree, already bearing cones, and a pressed rose between two pages sent out a thorny cane. The crackle and rustle of rapidly forming leaves joined with steady thumps and bumps as ripe apples hit the ground, split open, and rose up as young saplings of their own. A pine cone burst, scattering its seeds with a report as loud as a gun shot.
Deep in her nest among the flax stems, Arianna heard that peculiar metallic sound, and the golden snake once again faced her. “What are you doing, King’s Wife?” it hissed quietly. Its elvish, she noted, was flawless.
“I’m making sure he can’t find me,” she whispered back, too caught up in her battle with the goblin King to see it as an enemy, too. The snake surveyed the dense mat of living plants as well as it could: a mesh of grapevines, weaving itself together above their heads, was rapidly blocking out the light.
“You are the first King’s Wife to practice agriculture in the King’s bedroom for the purposes of defense,” it hissed proudly. “I see no danger here.” And it collapsed into sleep once more.
Marak Catspaw and his mother hurried to the door. He turned the knob, and they both stood and stared. A dense, dark thicket of young trees blocked their way, twined with prickly, rose-covered canes. The impromptu forest rustled and stirred in the continued effort of growth. With a hum, a young grapevine whizzed past the doorway, unrolling large green leaves in its wake.
“Mother, get out of here!” exclaimed Catspaw, and she turned and fled. Then he held up his lion’s paw. “Stop!” he commanded loudly. The noise ceased, except for the occasional thud of a juicy pear. But a very formidable barrier faced him.
The goblin King began to make his way into the dim, green depths. Something solid cannot be turned into nothing at all: Catspaw had to change each plant into something else. One by one, he touched tree trunks, changing the saplings into wisps of fog. He changed rose canes into ice and broke through their shining cylinders with a tinkling crash. He had to work very carefully because Arianna might have masked herself under an illusion. He tested each separate plant before destroying it to make sure that it wasn’t his wife.
Slowly and laboriously, the goblin King made a tunnel-like pathway to the bed. Then he vaporized the heavy knots of grapevines. He parted the flax plants, and there was the elf girl, curled up like a field mouse in hay.
Before she could make a move to escape him, Marak Catspaw seized her right hand and held it to his paw, draining away her magical strength. Arianna cried out and struck at him: the spell hurt, and the more resistance it met, the more painful it became. It was a shame, he thought grimly, to fulfill her worst ideas of him like that. But he couldn’t risk her killing anyone who might come to the door, and in her current state, she almost certainly would.
Her magic gone, Arianna rocked back and forth in pain, cradling her throbbing arm. Catspaw altered some flax reeds, dispersed their foggy ghosts, and sat down beside her on his ruined bed.
“You have to tell me what you’re afraid I’m going to do,” he said urgently. “You think I’m going to change you. Into what?”
Interpreting the injury to her arm as a threat of further retribution, the elf girl was finally frightened into speaking. “The goblin King is angry that he can’t marry another goblin,” she burst out. “He’s angry that he has to marry an elf. So he cuts her and burns her and bends her bones until she looks worse than the ugliest goblin.”
“That’s not true at all,” said Catspaw, very surprised. “I wouldn’t do a thing like that except for revenge, and I would never practice revenge on my wife.”
“They told me you would do it,” cried the terrified girl, “and look, you’ve already started!” She uncurled her palms to reveal the scars and held them up as evidence.
The goblin King gathered both shaking hands into his human one. Her magic hand was very cold, and he began rubbing it to bring the blood back.
“No, I haven’t,” he said reassuringly. “Someone lied to you about what I was doing. Those are just part of the wedding ceremony.”
Wedding? Arianna didn’t contradict him, but the statement seemed absurd. Her exhausted brain couldn’t begin to apply that term to the disgusting spells he had worked.
“Every King’s Wife has those lines,” continued Catspaw. “They give an indication of our future. You’ll have a long life.” He traced the line on her left palm. ‘And so will I.” He traced the other one. “You’ve seen several elves here, Arianna. No one has changed them into anything else.”
“Those others don’t have to be married to the goblin King,” she whispered. “The King of all that’s ugly wants his wife to be as ugly as he is.”
“Just because I look different from you doesn’t mean I want you to look like us,” said the goblin. “If I did, I would tell you. Why should I lie? I haven’t done a single thing to change your appearance since the King’s Wife Ceremony, and that took place weeks ago.”
Arianna looked up at him, solemn and reproving, her black eyes larger for the purple shadows beneath them in her pinched white face. “You’re waiting until a better time,” she accused. “I see it in your thoughts.”
The goblin King mused over this, impressed and interested by her claim to be able to mind-read. “You see me wanting to deform you?” he asked. “I’m not, so that can’t be right.”
Arianna hesitated. “I see you waiting,” she confessed. “Always, when we’re together, you think, ‘Later, not yet, soon.’ Always! It’s in your mind every time you look at me!”
As he took this in, the sophisticated King became perturbed and indignant, perhaps because his thoughts had been so woefully misunderstood, or perhaps because he now had to explain them. “I’m not thinking about deforming you,” he retorted in exasperation. “I’m thinking about kissing my wife! When I’ll be able to hold you, put my arms around you — Might I point out that I’m your husband?”
The elf girl’s stare went blank. “You wanted to kiss me?” she exclaimed.
“It’s something married people do, I believe,” he remarked severely.
Arianna gazed at him in complete amazement. “Then when you were thinking — all that time ” She made a sound between a breath and a sob. “You just wanted — you wanted—” But now she was quite overcome. She gasped and whooped, and her shoulders shook until tears spilled down her cheeks. She couldn’t manage to stop for some time. Relief and something that might be mirth showed on her face, but the goblin King felt very anxious about her. He never could quite make up his mind whether the exhausted girl was laughing or crying.
“I wish you had just said so!” she told him finally, rubbing her hand over her streaming eyes. “Besides, you can’t be thinking that. I’m too young to kiss.”
Poor little elf, she looks so tired, he thought worriedly, and he put his paw around her. “You’re not too young,” he countered. “You’re too tired, too upset, too sick. And I don’t want to make you any worse.”
Arianna leaned her aching head against his chest, thinking about this. Catspaw looked around, marveling at the destruction she had wrought. The bits of floor and walls that he could see through the leafy, exuberant growth were shattered by invading roots.
“Your magic isn’t gone forever,” he said. “It will come back in a week or so. I know you miss your forest and your plants. I’ll bring you a small tree, and you can keep it in a pot. It won’t live very long down here, but it will survive for a few months.”
“No, don’t,” said the elf girl softly. “A tree shouldn’t have to die in this terrible place. I wouldn’t want to watch it.”
“I’ll bring you a branch, then,” he promised, holding her close. `A fir branch. They smell nice. I’ll bring you flowers, too, the finest flowers I can find. I’ll start searching right away.” He reached out and snapped a rose off a nearby stem. “Here, this is for you.”
Arianna cradled the rose in her scarred hands with the ghost of a smile on her face. “That search didn’t take you very long,” she whispered.
A second later, she was fast asleep.
• • •
Marak Catspaw spent the day watching over his wife, but his thoughts were far from kind. He called his two lieutenants into the wreckage of his bedroom and held a whispered consultation. Not that he needed to whisper. Arianna was sleeping so soundly that shouts wouldn’t have waked her.
“The elf lord sent this poor girl here thinking that she was going to be mutilated,” he hissed furiously. “No wonder she kept leaving — she never knew when I might decide to scarify her, or slice off a couple of toes! That elf is a sly, scheming menace. He deliberately tried to sabotage my marriage.”
“There isn’t an elf King now because of a failed marriage,” remarked the white-haired Richard. “If you lost your life, Marak, the goblins would be as bad off as the elves.”
“Exactly,” declared his sovereign. “I think that lord has some plot in mind. Arianna and Miranda are both part of it.”
“But how can that be?” objected Seylin. “Arianna didn’t say that the elf lord told her you would deform her. She could have learned it from camp gossip, and he might have had no idea. He didn’t know that you would choose her to be your wife, either, and he certainly didn’t know about Miranda.”
“Adviser, you’re thinking like an elf,” said the King impatiently. “He knew perfectly well I would pick Arianna, unless he thought I was simply a fool: he knew we were interested in an aristocrat and intended to look over the whole band. She was his own fiancee; he spent half his time with her. Do you actually suggest that he never talked to her about what would happen?”
“He could well not have,” replied Seylin. “Elves hate to talk about unpleasant things. And if I’m the one who thinks like an elf, I should know.”
“It doesn’t matter in any case,” said Catspaw. “If he could abandon her without making sure she understood what her new life would be like, then he doesn’t deserve to be a leader, but I think that Arianna `knew’ just what he wanted her to know. And he undoubtedly had learned about Miranda as well. He had obviously done some spying. Remember, he knew that I was unmarried before we told him.”
“Tattoo was clear on that,” noted Richard. “The elf had it all planned. He walked Miranda to the edge of the truce circle, nabbed her the minute she was out, and trapped the guard within seconds, as neat as you please. He’s a cunning one, all right.”
“Cunning and vindictive,” added Catspaw. “Don’t forget what he did to Mother, right under all our noses. He’s afraid to take on a man in a fair fight, but he doesn’t mind mistreating women.”
“What do we know about his plans for Miranda?” asked Richard.
“We have no idea what he has in mind,” replied Seylin. “The Scholars studied the problem for days and came up with nothing.”
“This is a military situation,” declared the King. “Richard, I want that camp watched day and night. And I want to find out how Miranda is and what he may have told her about her purpose there. A goblin can’t enter the camp, but Sable could do it.”
“If you’re right about him,” observed Seylin, “then you’re putting Sable in danger. And goblin spies would violate the treaty.”
“He broke it first,” interposed the military lieutenant. “He attacked one of the Guard on goblin lands and took the King’s ward hostage.”
“We’ll make sure that Sable has an innocent reason to enter camp,” decided Marak Catspaw, “and we’ll send her when we’re sure he isn’t there. Don’t worry, adviser. I swore when I signed the treaty to act in the best interest of the elves, and I fully intend to. Whiteye proposed to become King of the two races, and the idea strikes me as sound. They lack a real leader. I’m the one who can best take care of their needs.”
“The elf lord would never agree to that,” protested the astonished Seylin.
“No, he wouldn’t,” mused Catspaw. “I’m seeing more and more reasons why that elf needs to go.”