In The Coils Of The Snake (25 page)

“I think that’s
why Nir hasn’t told me anything,” said Miranda gloomily. “I know he
thinks of me as a child. But I like it here.
Everyone’s
so nice to me, they treat me just like an elf There’s only
one
difference that I can think of I’m dressed in brown, and every one else is
dressed in green. Maybe brown is just for humans.”

“Elves wear
brown in the winter, green in the summer,” said Sable matter-of-factly.
She paused to study Miranda. “He had you put in brown because you’d look
terrible in green,” she said cynically. “That kind of thing matters
to an elf.”

• • •

Nir
heard from his people that Sable had been in camp and had spo
ken
goblin to the human girl. He was worried and suspicious about
the intrusion. He
learned what he could of the visit from Miranda, but he knew she didn’t tell
him everything. The Seven Stars didn’t control her speech. She was free to keep
her secrets.

“Sable helped
me understand some things I didn’t know about elves,” volunteered Miranda
as she sat on her pallet that morning.
“She
explained why elf women marry at eighteen and why you were
so angry at
Catspaw.”

Nir,
coiling his belt and stowing it in the corner of the tent,
didn’t glance up at this statement. He privately wondered
why any
thing that obvious would need an
explanation.

“And
she explained why you had Igira make me brown clothes,”
added Miranda sadly. “Because I would have looked
terrible in green.”

“She
said that?” murmured Nir as he settled himself on his pallet.
“You should have asked me. I would have said that
your clothes are brown because you look beautiful in brown. I don’t understand
that
woman.
She’s even more horrible than that poor little goblin girl who looked like an
elf. She’s an elf who acts like a goblin.”

“I don’t think
that’s her fault,” Miranda pointed out. “Sable was horribly
mistreated. She told me she’d never known kindness until she lived with the
goblins. Marak taught her magic himself, and he
made sure she learned to read and write. She didn’t even know elvish
when
she came. It was the goblins who taught it to her.”

“The old goblin
King was very clever,” said Nir with his eyes closed. “He knew that
elf women have more children if they’re happy, so he made sure they were happy,
and he knew the children
would be more
elvish if he developed the character of the women. It
makes the elf
blood last longer down in those caves.”

“Oh, you make
it sound so awful!” cried Miranda in distress. “Why can’t you say
anything good about the goblins? Sable loved Marak like a father, and I don’t
see what’s wrong with that. Marak cared about his elves, he really did.”

“I did say
something good about the goblin King, I said he was clever,” remarked Nir
a little heatedly, propping himself up on an elbow. “If you’d asked him,
Sika, he’d have told you what he cared
about.
He cared about their blood. He cared about it when he took it
out to look at it, and he cared about it when he
strengthened it
through teaching and good breeding. We elves care about
the deer, too; we put spells on the land to keep them healthy and make them
bear more does. But the deer don’t thank us, and
they don’t love us.
We consume them, and that’s just what the goblins do
to us.”

Miranda
stared at him, astonished at the hostility in his voice. He
studied
her shocked expression. “You have to understand something,” he said. “We
have always been the goblins’ prey. I signed a treaty with them, but they won’t
honor it. My magic knows that
already. The
elves are in danger now, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Why would you
be in danger?” demanded the girl. “Catspaw isn’t evil. He wouldn’t
hurt innocent people.”

The
elf lord continued to study her, amazed at how severely they
had
crippled her thinking. She herself had suffered terribly in their schemes, and
she didn’t seem to blame them at all.

“We’re a
temptation to the goblin King,” he replied. “A whole
band of unprotected elves — that’s like putting a
bag of gold before a
human! Whether he’s evil or not, he won’t be able
to resist. He’s either thought of the possibilities we offer, or he’s a fool.”

“The
possibilities of what?” asked Miranda in confusion, and Nir gave up the
attempt.

“Never
mind,” he sighed. “You lived with them too long. I can’t
make
you understand.”

If the elf lord was
worried, he kept his troubles to himself after
that, and Miranda wasn’t worried at all. The man she loved couldn’t be
planning harm and revenge for her. Instead, he spent lots of time
teaching
her things and talking to her. She was positive that he enjoyed her company.

One
night she walked up to the writing desk to ask him to go on a walk. “Look
at this, Sika,” he said excitedly, holding out his hand.

On the ground by her
feet a wide circle of glimmering white
bumps
appeared, rising silently from the dark earth. When they had
burgeoned to a height of four inches, plump
mushroom caps formed,
unfolding like tiny umbrellas.

`A
dancing ring!” exclaimed Miranda, and then she blushed over such a silly
statement. But the handsome lord didn’t laugh at her. He
just
looked a little puzzled.

“They’re not
for dancing, they’re for eating,” he explained seriously, plucking one of
the gleaming white mushrooms. “When I think of all the nights I went
hungry! I would have loved to have known a spell like this.”

He
took her to watch the crescent moon rising over a small lake.
Miranda thought
about food as they walked along.

“We eat bread
all the time,” she pointed out. “I’ve seen sacks of flour in camp,
but I didn’t think the elves farmed.”

“The
elves don’t farm,” answered Nir, smiling at the
thought.
“An elf with too much hard work to do is a very unhappy
elf. The First Fathers arranged our lives so that
we could play and be
beautiful. Beauty and hard work don’t belong
together.”

This
didn’t come as a surprise to Miranda, but she was more for
giving
of the idea than she once had been. After all, she thought appreciatively,
there was something to be said for beauty.

“We buy our
bread,” said the elf lord. “I think we always have. We buy the flour
from whoever mills it nearby.”

They came to the
lake and sat down on an outcrop to rest. The
stars
shone out above them and below them as well, reflected in the
calm
water.

“Where would
elves earn money?” Miranda wanted to know.

“We enchant a
few springs and pools on the perimeter of our
land,
putting spells on them for health and beauty. Humans come to
drink the water, or the women wash their faces in
it to improve their
looks. Human men don’t seem to care how awful they
look,” he mused. “I don’t think they ever wash in the water. But in
gratitude for the help, the humans throw in a little money.”

Miranda
thought about this, gazing at the mirrored skies of stars.
There
was a pool near the Hall that the servant girls washed their
faces in on Midsummer morning. She knew that they
always threw in
a penny. “I
thought that was just superstition,” she said with a frown.

“It is if there
aren’t elves nearby,” answered Nir. “Those enchantments don’t last
forever. I renewed them on a pool the other
night
when I was out hunting. The water probably hadn’t been any
thing but
plain water for at least a hundred years, but I found lots of
money in it anyway. You’d think the poor humans would
have
noticed. It seems so sad,” he
sighed. “To be so ugly or sick that you’ll
keep desperately throwing money away even when it obviously isn’t
helping.”

“I
wouldn’t worry,” said Miranda reassuringly. “The ones I knew
who threw money into a pool didn’t take it too
seriously. It was just
an old custom.”

“Then
it’s stupidity,” countered Nir with a shrug. “That’s one
way we earn our bread. And Galnar’s taken his violin to
village
fairs. He doesn’t do it
to earn money, of course; he does it because it’s
fun, but he comes away with lots of money, and he has to
be careful
not to take too
much. Humans will pay an elf musician every penny
they have. As long as he plays, they won’t stop dancing,
and when he
stops, they want more.”

“There’s
a nursery rhyme about that,” laughed Miranda. “We
say
it to the children when they’re small.”

Nir
smiled to see her laugh. He wondered if she had ever laughed
for the goblins. “I’m not surprised,” he
commented. “It would be an experience never to be forgotten for a human to
dance to elf music, and certainly something to tell the children. Why haven’t I
seen you
dancing? You’ve probably hurt Galnar’s
feelings.”

“Oh, I don’t know
how to dance,” said Miranda carelessly.

The elf lord stared
at her, speechless from shock, but Miranda
didn’t
even notice. Telling an elf that she didn’t dance was like telling
a dwarf that she thought precious stones were
ugly. Nir could hardly
believe it. To be almost a woman, and never to
have danced! He blamed the goblins, of course. They’d raised her so carefully
to be that monster’s wife, but they’d never given her the chance to laugh or
dance.

The
next night, Miranda was lying on her stomach, making
grass
whistles with little Bar, when the elf lord appeared beside her.

“Come along,
Sika,” he said, reaching down a hand. Miranda climbed to her feet and
dusted off her dress.

“Are we going
for a walk?” she wanted to know. “I’d like to go back to the lake
again; it was so pretty to see the stars twice.”

“No,” said
the elf, “we’re not going for a walk. Tonight we’re going to dance.”

Miranda was alarmed
at the thought, and the stars flashed out
their
light for the first time in weeks. Nir eyed the stars critically as they walked
along together. Sometimes, he decided, the spell was a
good thing.

“But…
I don’t know how to dance,” faltered Miranda in distress.

“I don’t know
what you mean,” replied the elf lord. “No one
knows how to dance any more than they know how to breathe. You
just
breathe, and you just dance.”

They reached the
meadow and joined the dancers, and the astounded girl learned that this was
perfectly true. She danced
immediately — she
danced the whole night — without knowing how.
Perhaps it was because of the Seven Stars, or perhaps it was because of
some charm in the music. Perhaps it was simply because she was
out with the elves, the changeling girl lured
into their play. Miranda’s
feet
flew. She held hands, broke, whirled, and grasped hands again.
All around her were faces alight, eyes shining
with joy, and her face
was a mirror of theirs.

Miranda
forgot the darkness, her dignity, and her uncertain
future.
She forgot who she was, where, and when. She could have been a dancer in any
age of the world, on any grassy field in any land. She faded away from herself
and took her place in something
greater, a
beautiful, harmonious plan. She was a part in a pattern
still whole and unbroken, before it had broken
apart. It should have
stayed whole. The pieces should have stayed in
their dance. They didn’t even have to know how to stay. They had had to be
taught how to break.

As the two of them
walked back to the forest for the morning meal, Nir wondered what she was
thinking.
That was fun
or
I liked it?
Or, a little better,
I
didn’t want to stop?
He knew she could never be an elf, but how much of her
could feel like an elf? How much of her could belong to that world that wasn’t
really her own?

Miranda
looked up, her brown eyes very thoughtful, to meet his
attentive
gaze. “I never knew dancing was so important,” she said. And while
she watched, startled, the elf lord laughed, completely happy — happy for the
first time in months.