In The Coils Of The Snake (23 page)

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 coun
sel 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 gob
lin 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 terri
fied 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 pecu
liar
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: Cats
paw 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 pathw
ay 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 magi
cal
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, dis
persed 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.