The Hollow Kingdom Read online

  Kate screamed, twisting in her brackets to try to reach the flattened snake. But no one could hear her. The goblins were screaming themselves, chanting, cheering, and yowling at the top of their lungs. The King’s Wife ceremony was over.

  Chapter Ten

  There was a confusion of intense noise and movement. Kate could hear her own voice screaming and see Marak’s face before hers. Her scream died down to a whimper as she looked around for the torches, the table, the crowd. She was sitting on a couch in a small room, and Marak was by her, clamping her hands in a strong grip. She caught sight of the shining gold coils on her bare arm and began to struggle again, but when she called out for help, all that emerged was a long wail.

  “Drink this,” said Marak, and a cup rim was in her open mouth. She choked, and her wail resolved itself into words.

  “Get it off! Get it off! It’s inside my skin!” she cried. Marak held her wrists with one hand as he put the cup down.

  “Kate, for pity’s sake,” he said matter-of-factly, “it’s not in your skin, and neither of us can possibly get it off. It isn’t even a snake. It’s a powerful magic charm that protects you. Right now it’s in a resting form, and you can only see it. You can’t feel it at all, so don’t rip yourself up trying to scratch it off.”

  Kate craned her neck to see as much of the flat snake as possible, and she stopped trying to struggle. “But I want it off,” she insisted desperately.

  “Well, you’ll just have to put up with it, because it’s there until one of us dies, and I’m not prepared to resort to that option just for a whim. That’s the King’s Wife Charm, the most powerful piece of magic we goblins have. It comes from the days of the First Fathers, from the very first King. You’re better protected by that charm than I am by my magic. If anything were to attack you, it would give a paralyzing bite far faster than a real snake could, and the creature would stay paralyzed until I delivered judgment on whether it should live or die. It safeguards you from accident and keeps you from doing anything dangerous to yourself. If it has to, it will bite you, too, and then come report to the King that you’ve done something foolish.”

  Marak released her hands, watching her closely. Kate rubbed her fingers experimentally over the coils on her arm, but she couldn’t tell that anything was there.

  “I can’t believe that you’ve done this,” she said furiously. “I’ve never been through anything so barbaric in my life. And you people call that farce a wedding!”

  “I told you the ceremony was unpleasant,” said the goblin with a shrug. “Unpleasant, but very, very important. Kate, did you know that you’re an elf?”

  Kate stared blankly at him. “A what?” she demanded.

  “No, you didn’t,” he affirmed. “I thought not. It must have been that adopted girl who played with my mother, since my mother was entirely human, and after that, the family moved away from the elf lands. You’re an elf-human cross, but you’re quite powerfully elf, much more so than your sister. I couldn’t be more pleased. With their innate magic, elves make the best King’s Wives. Our son will be a stronger King because of it. We thought that all the elves were dead, and the scholars suspected that the goblins wouldn’t survive it.”

  Kate felt very offended. “I am not an elf,” she insisted. “I’m an Englishwoman!”

  The goblin King chuckled, surveying her fondly. “Then perhaps you can tell me what in your English heritage taught you to watch out for goblins,” he suggested. “You hadn’t even heard of them, but you knew not to let me touch you, much less put you on a horse. And what about your breaking out of my sleep spells? Do you have any idea how frustrating that was for me? That’s why you ran to the truce circle, too, and why you fought off the Persuasion Spell as well as you did. You even look like an elf, come to think of it. I had enough hints; I should have realized it. All my training told me you were working magic on the ride home.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” Kate said severely. “You’re just guessing.”

  “Of course I’m sure,” he replied. “I tested your blood against mine. That test shows all the races shared by the King and Wife. You remember the red cloud?” She nodded. “Our shared human blood. And the larger silver cloud?” She nodded again. “Our shared elf blood. Much stronger than the human blood, if you remember. I imagine that adopted girl was actually half human, and that’s how she wound up an orphan. The birth would have killed her elf mother, and her human father likely didn’t know what to do with her. We’ll have to be careful with you, too,” he mused. “Childbirth will be quite a problem. Elf women don’t get through it easily.”

  Kate didn’t have any idea how to answer him, but she wasn’t swayed in her opinion. It was bad enough marrying a mythological beast. She wasn’t about to become one herself. “I am not an elf,” she stated again.

  Marak laughed. “You don’t really believe in elves, do you? And you don’t believe in my nice magic, either. You think I did all that complicated work out there just to show you how barbaric I am. That reminds me,” he added, “I wanted to take another look at your palms.” He lifted her hands in the dim light, studying the silvery lines.

  Kate was overcome with righteous indignation. “How could you do such a thing!” she demanded with a shudder.

  “It isn’t easy, two knives at once,” the goblin King admitted absently. “But fortunately, the magic guides the blades.” She glared at him, but he remained oblivious, probably because he wanted to. He turned her palms to and fro, looking closely at them. “You see, mine has a skip in it,” he murmured. He glanced up to meet another blank look.

  “The lines,” he explained patiently, “indicate something of the future lives of King and Wife. Here’s yours,” he said, showing her the left hand. “A nice long life. And here’s mine,” he added, holding up her right hand. “Another nice long line, but right here toward the top, there’s a skip. I wonder what it means,” he mused, frowning at it. “I think it must mean some long illness or absence. That’s unusual. Goblins don’t generally fall ill, and I’m not likely to leave.”

  “Maybe the knife just slipped,” Kate suggested, and received an indignant glare in her turn. Embarrassed, she studied her maimed hands. “I thought you said you wouldn’t hurt me,” she remembered resentfully. “You cut me open, you stabbed me, you burned me—”

  “I didn’t burn you,” he contradicted in surprise.

  “You did! That paint,” she declared, and she pointed to her forehead. “It still hurts.”

  Puzzled, Marak took her face between his hands and studied the golden symbol. He pulled one of the wispy pieces from her skirt, dipped it into a goblet of water, and wiped the paint off.

  “Ouch!” cried Kate. “You’re hurting me!”

  “No, you’re hurting yourself,” he murmured. “A bright red burn in the shape of the King’s Wife symbol. You’re fighting the Door Spell. This is the spell that tells my iron doors not to let you out. It’s unbreakable,” he added sympathetically, laying his six-fingered hand on the letter, his fingers icy against the burning pain. “You might as well come to terms with it, Kate. You’re locked in.”

  Kate closed her eyes under the soothing magical touch and struggled to hold back her tears. She couldn’t be locked in here where the moon and stars never shone and where monsters took knives to perfectly civilized young women. “I’m not fighting anything,” she muttered. “Humans can’t work magic.”

  “They can’t, but you are,” answered Marak, studying the letter again. “You’re devoting a lot of magic to this fight, probably all the magic you have. To think that I laughed when you said you wouldn’t come to my kingdom. It’s no joke to an elf to go underground. You were tired and upset enough to begin with, and now you’re caught up in a useless battle against an unbreakable spell. You need rest, Kate. I promised that you could sleep for days after the ceremony, and you probably should. Would you like to sleep here or in our bedroom? The King’s Wife usually spends her first night in this room.”


  Kate looked around the little room, shivering. Her first night locked away from the stars. Her first night with a goblin for a husband. The idea of a first night, with many nights to follow it, sounded so horribly permanent. She pressed her hand to her forehead as the burning letter darkened again. “I’m not sleepy,” she said firmly, standing up and roaming the small space unhappily.

  Marak watched her in exasperated amusement. “I should have given you the Stamp of Truth,” he pointed out. “Are you just going to wander my palace like a ghost until you fall down unconscious?” The anxious look in her eyes as she turned his way answered his question. “All right then,” he sighed. “Come with me. Since you’re not sleepy, I’ll take you to see something my mother always liked to see.”

  This time they walked up staircase after staircase. Kate was desperately tired. I promised to do this, she reminded herself sternly; I’m married, and I live here now. But she just couldn’t bring herself to face the thought.

  They came up a wide staircase, the steps gleaming like gigantic gold bricks. They struck Kate as rather gaudy. The wide hallway that opened out at the top had a gold floor to match them, and the walls were composed of small, precise geometrical inlays of stone that repeated continually up their surfaces. They, too, were rather gaudy, like something in the palace of an Oriental despot. Great square windows lined one side of the hallway, but only one broad set of doors faced them. Kate could see from her vantage at the top of the stairs that guards stood on either side of the doors.

  “This is our floor,” said the goblin King, “the royal rooms. Would you like to see them?” he asked, evaluating her thoughtfully. Kate hastily shook her head, thinking with a homesick rush of her little wooden-floored room at the Lodge, her shoes still in a row under the bed. “No, I didn’t think you would,” he laughed, “since you’re not sleepy.” At the word, Kate felt such a wave of exhaustion come over her that she thought she would drop onto the floor. “I brought you up here to see something else, anyway,” he added more kindly. “Through here.”

  Marak turned toward the window to their right and led her out onto a shallow balcony. Kate felt dizzy at the view. They were high above the broad, bowl-shaped valley. Tiny lights twinkled across it, seemingly for miles. Above the valley was a velvety blackness. No, not a blackness, a dark purple. Kate had a sense of lofty space as she stared up into the purple heights.

  Marak waved her to a couch between two of the windows. Then he stepped away for a moment, and the light from the windows went out. Kate leaned back against the couch, and Marak sat down beside her.

  “How can a cave this big fit under the Hill?” she asked curiously, turning toward him. She couldn’t really see him in the gloom.

  “It doesn’t,” he answered, looking down at the white face and heavy-lidded blue eyes, which he could see perfectly. “You’re looking up through the lake. I told you the first time we met that it was hollow.”

  Kate stared up at it, aghast. Then she looked down at the twinkling lights in the valley. They looked so pleasant and cozy, blinking away under vast tons of suspended water.

  “But what holds the water up?” she gasped.

  “Magic, of course. Do you know anything else that could do it? This isn’t our first home, but it’s an ancient one. The elves came to this region millennia ago, and we goblins followed the elves. My palace looks like a building, but it’s more of a subtracting. Originally it was a solid wall of rock between the two parts of my kingdom. Above and behind us, the wall continues, becoming the shore of the lake at the foot of the Hill. Farther up in that wall is the window that forms my water mirror. The same force that keeps the water from pouring into that cavern keeps all the rest of the water from pouring down onto the valley.”

  Kate gazed up at the water sky. It seemed to her that it was not so dark a purple as before. She thought sleepily about the strange world she belonged to now. Palaces, hollow lakes, elves and goblins. The twinkling lights spun and blurred in her drowsy vision. Marak folded his arms and patiently waited for her to fall asleep. He could have enchanted her in an instant, but he scorned the thought of inflicting unnecessary magic on her now that she was his wife.

  “Where did the elves come from?” she asked softly.

  “From the First Fathers, like the goblins,” Marak replied. “The First Fathers had no bodies and no young, but they wanted to make a race of their own. They probably intended to found one race, but they couldn’t agree. The First Fathers of the elves wanted to take only what was beautiful to make their children, but the First Fathers of the goblins wanted strength. Our Fathers thought that if a creature had a powerful eye or a claw, then it should be used, but the Fathers of the elves couldn’t endure such irregularity. The elves must be beautiful,” he remarked, studying the sleepy face beside him, “even if they can’t defend themselves.”

  “What’s that?” Kate murmured. The purple darkness above her had lightened to violet. Now a dark silver circle began to shimmer in the sky. Kate sat up to look at it. It seemed to wobble and shake about, high above her. As she watched, it brightened to a luminous opacity.

  “It’s the sunrise from my kingdom,” Marak told her. “My mother liked to watch it, so I thought you might enjoy it, too.”

  The violet became cobalt. Gradually, the silver circle faded, and the color changed and became more transparent. It formed a sky she never could have imagined, a sky of the darkest, clearest blue, and everything below it was bathed in a shifting twilight. She looked down at her lap. Under the light, her red skirt was dark purple, and her hands, a bluish gray. They seemed to be detached from her, as if they belonged to someone else.

  Kate thought longingly of that sunrise on the shore of the lake, of the pink and gold clouds and the birds singing. The same sun, the same lake, but now she was underneath the water. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest. I promised to do this, she thought, closing her eyes. I live here now. Her head rolled back on the couch as Marak watched her closely.

  “When I became King,” he said quietly, “the last known elf had already been dead for fifty years. Now I have several strong elf crosses in my kingdom. I wonder if the elvish race is reviving.”

  Kate didn’t hear him. She was fast asleep, her young face still worried and anxious. Marak studied her for a long minute, touching the angry burn on her forehead. Then he picked her up carefully and took her in to bed.

  The next evening, Kate went out in public for the first time since the ceremony. Sitting by the King in the banquet hall, she surreptitiously watched all the goblins openly watching her. Their bizarre shapes and sizes took away what little appetite she had. Emily sat beside her, terribly impressed with her sister’s new appearance. Kate was wearing a loose gown of blue silk that pleased her much more than the awful wedding dress, but she felt unhappily that it did no good to try to look nice. Everyone just stared at the coils of golden snake visible above the neckline. All the unwanted scrutiny made Kate nervous.

  Marak warned Emily not to make any threatening moves toward her sister. “Otherwise, the snake will paralyze you, and then I’ll have to deliver judgment on whether you live or die,” he teased. Emily thought that she would love to have such a snake. She had hoped for her own, but Marak told her that only Kate got one.

  Kate watched the goblin King pile up food on her plate. Some of it was vaguely recognizable, like the flat bread. Some of it looked very unfamiliar, like the skewered chunks of meat.

  “Where are the forks?” she asked, looking around.

  “Forks are absurd,” he scoffed. “They insult your food. They make it think you’re killing it twice.”

  “But I can’t eat without a fork!” Kate exclaimed, distressed.

  “Really!” Marak laughed. “I’ll bet that you can. I’d be very surprised if you gave up eating at such a young age.” He ate heartily and surprisingly neatly with his hands, using the bread as an edible utensil. Kate nibbled at the bread and pushed things around experimentally with it. Everything tasted un
usual, and most of the food had a rather strong flavor.

  “What kind of meat is this?” she asked cautiously. Marak grinned, understanding her concern.

  “Goblins eat sheep for the most part,” he told her, “and we never eat a female animal. In part because our own females so often can’t have children, the beast goblins cross out to all kinds of different species. We view any female as a mother, a sacred life.”

  “That reminds me,” interrupted Emily. “When are you going to have your baby, Kate? Soon?” Her sister turned bright pink, embarrassed to discuss such a topic in public. Marak raised an amused eyebrow at his young wife’s distress.

  “It could be soon,” he answered for her, “but that’s not very likely. It’s not so easy for goblins to have children. Married couples spend a lot of time trying and hoping, and eventually things work out. That’s the way it is for the Kings, too. My parents were married for ten years before I was born, and I’ve read of fifteen or even twenty years of marriage before the Heir is born.”

  “Twenty years!” said Emily in horror. “I can’t wait that long.”

  Marak picked up Kate’s right hand and rubbed his thumb over the skip in the knife wound. “Neither can I,” he said thoughtfully.

  Marak brought up the subject again when he and Kate were alone. She was sitting on the tall stool in his workroom, watching him make salve. “Humans have the easy life,” he told her, grinding herbs. “Many humans can have a child a year. But goblins and elves don’t reproduce nearly that easily, and the King has the hardest time of all. In order to pass his magic on to his son, he has to find a wife from outside his own race, and it’s not enough just to marry her. He has to become interested in her and look for traits in her to admire. The way the King thinks about his wife affects the way the Heir is formed, so if he has a strong wife and he cares about her, his son will be a better King. It’s the goal of every King to have a son greater than he is. Often the marriages don’t work out that well, but that’s the idea.”