In The Coils Of The Snake (16 page)

“It’s a
perfectly normal human name,” she pointed out reason
ably. “Miranda is in one of Shakespeare’s
plays. It’s a Latin word,
I think.”

“It’s
elvish,” Nir informed her coldly, turning away to roll up his
own
cloak. “It’s the elvish word for the goblin King’s Wife.”

“No, it’s
Latin,” contradicted Miranda. “Or Spanish; I can’t remember which. My
brother’s tutor told me it means ‘seeing.’”

“‘Seeing,’”
echoed Nir unhappily, thinking of those brown eyes
peering blindly about in the nighttime. “I don’t
think Seeing is a
good name for you,
either. In elvish,
mir-an-da
means ‘protected by the coils of the
magical snake.’ In other words, the goblin King’s Wife. I’m not about to let my
elves call you such a horrible name.
You
remind me of a fox with your red hair. I think I’ll call you Fox.”

The one nice thing
about having lost everything she had ever hoped for was that she no longer had
to smile and pretend to be
pleased. That
was good, she decided grimly, because she wasn’t feel
ing the least bit
gracious or charming.

“Fox?
That’s an insult!” she cried. “Foxes are a thieving nuisance, and to
call a girl a female fox is a very bad name.”

“Why?”
asked the elf lord.

Miranda frowned. “I
don’t know. I just know that it is.”

“I don’t know
why it should be,” commented Nir. “Foxes are clever, and they shine
like little fires in the woods. They play and dance just like the elves, and
they have red hair like yours.”

He hung his cloak up
on his side of the tent and retrieved and
tied
the belt of his tunic. Then he crawled to the tent opening,
unrolled the mat, and put his bare feet on it,
crisscrossing the leather straps again around the lower legs of his breeches.
Miranda hung up
her cloak and turned
to look at the simple pallet. It didn’t even have a
pillow. How could
she have slept so soundly without a pillow?

She crawled
awkwardly from the tent to find that she had an audience. Two beautiful little
children stood in front of her, their eyes round and sober as they stared.
Miranda stared back, embar
rassed, her hair
a tangled mess, sweaty and miserable from having had
to sleep in her
clothes. Her damp dress was a mass of wrinkles, but
the elf lord’s simple green tunic and breeches showed no wrinkles at
all.
Lacing his boots, he looked as if he had been awake for hours; his pale face
wasn’t sleepworn, and his black eyes were bright. Miranda found this
irritating. Even if the elf had said that she was
beautiful, she found it trying to live among a people who made being
beautiful
seem so effortless.

The
elf lord looked at the children’s serious expressions as he finished lacing his
boots, and his face lit up with one of his rare smiles.
Indicating Miranda, he made a comment in elvish, and the
little girl
giggled something back. They spoke
for a minute as he climbed to his feet and reached down to help up Miranda. No
stars glittered
about her wrist this time as he held her hand. She was
overcome, as
she
had been before, by the captivating force of his smile.

The
children scampered off, and he knelt again to roll up the mat
at the front of the tent. Miranda looked around uneasily.
All about her
in the
twilight, elves were coming and going, emerging from tents, or
sitting
and talking with their neighbors. They were all dressed in
green; they were all terribly attractive; and
they were speaking a lan
guage that
she couldn’t understand. They also seemed to be entirely at
ease with
one another and pleased with one another’s company.

Miranda had thought
that the elf lord held her hand as a way to
force
her to walk with him, but she realized that holding hands must
just be an elvish habit. A man and a woman or a boy
and a girl
would be holding hands as they walked by, and five young
women went by in a chain, talking happily together as they walked toward
the river. She was startled to see several men
keeping company with girls who couldn’t have been more than fifteen at the
most, brushing their hair for them by the tents or walking along talking to
them. Her
human sensibilities made
her feel embarrassed by all the close con
tact. The scene before her was perfectly charming and graceful in
its artlessness, and she felt instinctively that it
had nothing to do
with her.

Shy
and uncomfortable, she tried to summon her dignity. When
it
came to meeting strangers, she knew only the two extremes: humans had
invariably either mocked her or disliked her, and the goblins had been fawning
and deferential. Unfortunately, she was already quite sure that these elves weren’t
going to fawn over her.
After all she had
suffered, she felt that it was particularly painful to
face a crowd of
people she didn’t know.

Without really
wanting to, she moved closer to the elf lord, and
when he stood up again and walked toward the river, she walked by his
side, trying not to look as lost as she felt.
Who invited you?
she heard
her
mother’s voice say in her mind, but the elf lord didn’t drive her away. He
seemed to expect her to accompany him.

“I’ve
sent Kiba to tell her mother to make you some clothes,” he
said. “But they won’t be ready tonight; she has to
make the cloth for them first. You’ll have to wear those goblin things until
tomorrow.”

Still
able to see distances in the deepening twilight, Miranda stud
ied
her surroundings with interest. They were in a beautiful valley. Tall, straight
trees grew in thick green turf that reminded her of the
truce circle, and small flowers of different shapes and shades nodded
at her feet. A little river, about ten feet wide
and somewhat deep, ran
along nearby. They walked through the wide
clearing, or small
meadow, where he must
have worked the spell on her last night. Here
was a profusion of wildflowers, but she was surprised that the grass
was
so short, forming something like a dense, soft carpet.

She
looked up eagerly, her eyes taking in as much of the waning
light as they could. The cloudless sky was a clear indigo
and the first stars were already out. She could see that the river, glimmering
in the
fading light, made a loop around the edge of
the meadow. Near the middle of the loop, it became wide and shallow. Trees
resumed on
the opposite side, and a band of
tall, forested hills cut off the remain
ing
colors of the sunset to her right. To the left, the forest sloped up
gradually
into a more distant line of wooded hills.

No other elves were
nearby. They were in the shadowy forest. Nir had brought her there as a
kindness, knowing that her human eyes would enjoy the bright light. His own
eyes found it rather uncomfortable still.

“Now
is the time of day when we elves go bathing,” he said. The
river had carved out a flat stone bank, and he knelt down
on the
stone to wash his
face. Miranda wondered at the remark. She hadn’t
seen any way to heat water, and the tents were too small
to bathe in.

“Bathe
where?” she wanted to know. And then, when he looked
around in amazement at the question, she said, “You
mean they bathe
right
in the river?” She thought about this, rather shocked, while the elf
considered, not for the first time, how little sense
humans seemed to
have.
“But you can’t mean that they bathe out in the open where every
one
can see them,” she insisted. “That wouldn’t be decent!”

Decent again. At
least this time Nir understood what the word meant. “It’s decent,” he
assured her patiently, dipping a wooden
comb
in the water and pulling it through his hair. “The women usu
ally bathe together and the men bathe together, or
they go off by ones
and twos,
married couples, for instance. But no one bothers anyone
else, and they’re
still wearing their underclothes anyway, that way they’re always just as clean
as the elf is.”

Miranda was
astonished that a man would mention such things
to her, but she kept her face expressionless. If elves discussed them,
she
would, too, so as not to be thought naive. “Ugh,” she remarked with
distaste. “It’s a wonder they don’t die of pneumonia, walking around half
the night with wet things on.”

“But
they’re not wet,” said Nir. “Elf clothes have the Drying
Spell
on them. As soon as they come out of the water, they’re dry.
See?” He splashed some water on his tunic,
and the dark stain
quickly faded out.

“Do you want to
go bathing?” he persisted, walking back up to
her, his washing finished. “I can show you where the women bathe.”

Miranda found this a
bad idea on many different levels. “No,” she said quickly. “I
don’t want to get into that cold water.”

“Cold?”
echoed Nir. “In the summertime?” He was surprised
into
a musical laugh, and once again, Miranda found herself afraid
of him. The elf lord was quite beyond human at
such times, like one
of those pagan gods who walked the earth disguised
as a man. She understood now why Daphne had run from Apollo. She ran away
herself, hurrying past him to the riverbank and
kneeling to wash
her face.

Nir handed her the
comb as she came up the bank, and they
walked
back to the forest together. She jerked the comb as rapidly as
she could through her hair, grimacing at the many
tangles, while the
elf lord reflected that humans made the most graceful
tasks seem ungraceful. He didn’t realize that she was hurrying because he was
watching her. Miranda thought his attention impolite.

He
left her to collect their evening meal. Two elves had laid piles
of food out on a sheet, and they appeared to be cooking
the flat, cir
cular bread on
some sort of rock. It was the men who went up to take
the
food and then brought it back to share with a woman or a girl. Only the little
children went up on their own. Miranda found this
sort of servile role odd for a man, especially for the elf lord. She cer
tainly
couldn’t imagine the goblin King waiting on anyone.

“Thank
you,” she said stiffly as the elf lord came to sit by her side,
handing over her breakfast wrapped up in a cloth. She
unwrapped it
to find half a piece of bread, a
strip of dried meat, a carrot, and five
radishes.
Not quite breakfast in the goblin kingdom, where she would
have had whatever she ordered, no matter how
elaborate. Lately, she
had been favoring apple tarts.

Kate’s
bracelet lit itself with a faint gleam as the evening became
night.
It wouldn’t light with its usual brightness anymore, and it reminded her
abruptly that she was in the dark. Miranda shuddered at the thought.

“I slept the
whole time the sun was up,” she said. “It was an enchantment, wasn’t
it?”

Nir looked away. “Yes,
it was the Daylight Spell,” he replied, “the one I worked when I
kissed your eyes.”

“But
why?” she demanded. “I already can’t leave your camp, and
I have to do what you say. What harm would it have done
to let me
see the sun?”

“If
you could see it, you’d think of nothing else but the next time
you
could see it again,” he answered. “You’d stay awake in the day
while we were asleep
and sleep in the night while we were awake.
The
elvish world doesn’t have the sun any more than the goblin caves
have
the moon. You have to learn how to live in our world now.”

Miranda
abandoned her awful breakfast, rolling it back up in
the cloth. His pretense of her being some sort of guest
was pointless,
so she didn’t have
to act the part. She was only a slave here, she
reminded herself, and there was nothing she could do about it. Very
well:
she didn’t intend to waste her time and self-respect in absurd struggles. Marak
had taught her not to put off unpleasant things.