In The Coils Of The Snake (14 page)

He glanced down at
the hand he held as they walked along together. The stars sparkled and faded,
sparkled and faded, as she tried in her exhaustion to resist. It seemed so
pointless to Nir.

“Why
do you keep fighting the spell?” he wanted to know. “The
things
I’m asking of you aren’t harmful or wrong.”

“You’
re
not asking anything at all,” observed Miranda
sleepily.
“That’s why.” But he didn’t understand her argument.

The
elf lord unrolled a mat at the opening of a tent and sat down
on
it, making room for her to sit beside him. The low tent formed a triangle at
the ends. The two flaps at the front end were rolled back and tied, and the
flaps at the back end were partly open, letting through the early morning
breeze.

Nir
tugged off the slippers that Miranda wore and hung them
up on hooks at the edge of the tent roof. Then he
scooped her feet up,
laid
her ankles across his lower legs, and began briskly rubbing her
feet
with a tingling cream. There was nothing particularly unusual
about this. It was a normal attention for an elf
man to pay to a
woman or a child, and
the little children did it for each other. But the
reserved Miranda had never in her life dreamed
that a stranger might take such an outrageous liberty. She felt thoroughly
embarrassed and
shocked. She glared at his bent head as he worked, and
the silver stars lit up again.

“Don’t
you want your feet cleaned?” Nir asked as he rubbed
them,
perplexed. “Feet are important. They need to stay healthy.
There, you’re finished,” and she could pull
her feet away. “The left-
hand pallet is yours, and the right-hand
one is mine. You can use
Arianna’s cloak;
she left it hanging on her side. She won’t be need
ing it anymore,”
he added unhappily.

Miranda looked into
the tent and saw two pallets lying side by
side.
She realized in deep offense that they were hardly inches apart.
“I’m
supposed to sleep here?” she gasped. “I can’t possibly! There must be
somewhere else I can sleep!”

The
elf glanced at her in some surprise. He was unwrapping the
leather straps that cross-gartered his lower legs and
rolling the straps
into
neat coils. “Where else would you sleep?” he wanted to know.
“You’re
too old for the children’s tents. I brought you into camp
myself; you’re no one else’s responsibility.”
He took off his own soft boots and removed the felt inner boots, hanging both
pairs up under the edge of the roof.

“But
I just can’t,” Miranda protested, overwhelmed at the
thought.
“You can’t expect me to. It’s not decent!”

Decent, mused the
baffled Nir, cleaning his own feet. He had
grown
up speaking English and elvish, but he hadn’t spoken so
much English in years, and sometimes she used
words that genuinely
confused him. But looking at her shocked
expression, he realized
what was wrong. Of
course, he should have expected this since she
came from the repulsive goblins. He remembered his argument with
their
horrible King, and it was his turn to be offended.

“You are a
child,” he told her coldly and emphatically, “and
regardless of what you think, we’re not monsters.
No right-thinking
man could even contemplate kissing you at your age. It’s
not that it wouldn’t be decent,” he continued, looking for the right words.
“It would be sickening, disgusting,” he concluded firmly.

Miranda
went straight from being alarmed to being insulted. She
crawled into the tent and threw herself down on the left-hand
pallet
as far as she could be
from his side of the tent. Facing into the sloping
wall of cloth, she felt him lay over her the cloak that
had belonged to
Catspaw’s
wife. How awful, she thought miserably, that she should
have to be reminded of her. After a minute of rustling,
silence
reigned in the little
tent, but she could still hear the elf’s quiet breathing. She didn’t care what
he said, it wasn’t decent to keep her in here.
It
was sickening and disgusting, too.

After
a few minutes of stormy thought, Miranda noticed that the
tent wall before her wasn’t black. It was very dark green.
She
glanced at the cloak that covered her. It
was green, too, a different shade. She sat up in excitement, studying her hands
and dress, and looked out through the end of the tent at the world outside.
Color was pouring into it as dawn came in earnest. The long night was finally
over.

“The
sun’s coming,” she said eagerly, turning to the elf lord. He
lay
under his own green cloak, its hood pulled over his face. His black eyes,
squinting already in the light, peered out at her from its shade.

“That’s true,”
he agreed, watching her quietly.

“I
want to see the sunrise,” she said. “I haven’t seen it in so long.
Please
let me go watch it. It won’t take a quarter of an hour.”

Nir looked up at her
excited face, his heart sinking. The first thing she asks of me, he thought,
and it has to be the sun. “You’re tired,” he said. “You need to
rest.” His eyes were hurting as he
watched
her against the glare of light from outside. “Lie down for a
little
while and wait for the sun.”

Miranda lay down,
still optimistic. “May I go?” she persisted.
“Mayn’t I just go out for a few minutes? This is such a pretty
patch of
forest, and I want to see it in the daylight.”

To see in the
daylight. Nir mused over this. He pulled his hood
so that it shadowed his eyes again, and he still had trouble seeing her
in the blinding light of the morning.

“Just
wait,” he said sadly. She was looking at him with such
hope.
He couldn’t bear to crush that hope now. In a few more minutes, the sun would
come close enough, and the spell would do its
work.
There was no need to tell the excited girl that she would never
see the
daylight again.

Miranda lay
restlessly waiting, thinking about the day breaking
outside. She couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t let her go. He seemed
odd,
but not really unkind. She looked into those eyes shining out from the shadow
of his hood and tried to think of an argument that would make him relent. Then
her eyes closed of their own accord,
and her
restless movements ceased. The eager expression faded out of
her face
and left it peaceful in sleep.

Marak Catspaw quitted the anteroom littered with
bracelets and
rings and retraced his steps,
walking down flight after flight of stairs.
The King’s Wife Ceremony
rooms were deep underground, where no frantic enemy could effect a rescue. He
came to the low tunnel
and unlocked the
King’s Lock that he had placed on the short, iron
bound door.

The
bare room beyond was a dismal welcome to his kingdom, he
thought with regret. The stone walls of the primitive
chamber were
unpolished and
undecorated, and no furniture provided a distraction.
It
was such a small space that even he found it confining. To an elf
bride, it must be suffocating. Arianna had crawled
into a corner and
sat curled up in a
defensive ball. His mother was kneeling by her side.

Kate stood up. “How
is Miranda?” she asked worriedly. She
looked
terrible, her face drawn and white and her eyes red from cry
ing. Catspaw
cursed the elf lord from his heart.

“She’ll
be fine,” he said. “Mother, tell the women not to fuss over
Arianna. just have them do the tests, change her clothes,
and put her
hair up in some simple way. And when
she leaves the chamber, lie down on the couch. I’ll send you to sleep as soon
as I see her.”

Kate’s
anxious expression eased somewhat. She had hardly been able to bear the thought
of witnessing the hideous wedding. “Thank you, Catspaw,” she said
gratefully, and left the room, going into the
chamber
where the goblin women were waiting for Arianna.

The
King knelt down by his pitiful bride. The petite girl had her back to the
corner and her arms around her knees, and she was star
ing
straight ahead into space. She hadn’t been crying, although her
dark eyes were glassy. Perhaps she was too far
into shock. She didn’t
look at him, but when he drew close, her breath
came quicker, in shallow gasps.

“Arianna,”
he said, and he put a bouquet of purple flowers into
her hands. The elf girl gave a little cry and clutched the flowers like
a
drowning man clinging to a rope. He watched her run her trembling
fingers over the large, waxy trumpets.

“Arianna,
these flowers live down here in my kingdom, and you
can,
too,” he said. “Tomorrow, I’ll take you to see a whole field of them.
It isn’t as bad here as you think.”

The young woman didn’t
respond. Her terror was almost tan
gible.
Catspaw considered the futility of trying to reassure her. What
could he
say?
Don’t be frightened?
Why shouldn’t she be? Everything that she had
probably never wanted to happen was happening all
around her.
I won’t hurt you?
That would be a lie. Before
another hour
was up, he would slash open both of her hands.

In
the end, he didn’t say anything. He just put the golden shackles on her, gave
her the magical drink, and sent her in to the women.
The
King’s Wife Ceremony would doubtless be the most horrible
event of her life. The best thing he could do was
to get her through it
as quickly as possible.

• • •

Overall, Catspaw
thought the ceremony went very well. He was preoccupied, concentrating on all
the difficult magic, but he was
impressed by
his bride’s courage. Arianna didn’t make a single
sound the entire time, not when she walked across
the shifting letters that proclaimed her freedom from any other marriages and
not when
he painted on her forehead the symbol that would seal her under
ground. She didn’t gasp when he cut her hands open
to mix her
blood with his own and form the prognosticating scars, and
Charm
could have told him that she was one of
only thirty-two King’s
Wives who hadn’t screamed when the golden snake
coiled itself around their necks to begin its guardianship of a new King’s
Wife. But then again, Arianna never opened her eyes, either. Seylin and Richard
had to hold her elbows to guide her from place to place.

After
it was over, Catspaw brought her to the small King’s Wife
Room
to recover. She huddled on the couch where he had put her
and cried bitterly, holding her scarred hands to
her breast. The wor
ried Catspaw
gently uncurled the hands, one after the other, to study
her palms. A
straight, silvery slash now crossed each one, but they had healed beautifully
during the ceremony. There was nothing wrong with them that he could see.

“Show
me you can use them,” he told her again and again, until
some
part of her overwrought mind became aware of the request. She bent the hands
and closed the fingers, and the goblin King felt relieved. Some elvish King’s
Wives persisted in a hysterical belief that their hands were permanently
crippled, and because the problem was only a mental illusion, it couldn’t be
cured.

But the poor girl
didn’t stop crying, and nothing he said seemed
to help. She wept as if she had lost everything at one blow. Eventu
ally, he carried her over to the bed in the
corner of the room and cov
ered her up
with a blanket. Then, very carefully, so that she wouldn’t
notice the magic
and fight it, he sent his wretched wife to sleep.

Marak
Catspaw sat beside her for a long time, me, thinking about
how
much he had looked forward to his wedding. Miranda would have been so pleased
that the ceremony was over, so happy to be a King’s Wife at last. He wondered
where she was and who she would wind up marrying and how he would feel when he
performed the Binding Spell that married her to somebody else.