Close Kin Page 4

  “He did. He said it was most important. Please don’t imagine that I volunteered.”

  “And if I complain, he’ll just tell me to stay home.” Emily gave an exasperated sigh. “Oh, very well. Let’s go. If my luck holds, we’ll be back before nightfall.”

  But Emily’s good luck had vanished. She found no sign of Seylin in the forest outside and couldn’t determine which way he had gone. Day after day, she searched for him while her former teacher scolded and grumbled. The goblin kingdom was a small, tidy place. She had forgotten how big the human world could be. Every road stretched on forever. Finding one young man in that vast expanse began to seem impossible.

  Meanwhile, Marak paused every day to consult two maps that he had fastened to the wall of his workroom. One showed Seylin’s wanderings, and the other showed Emily’s progress. Hanging on two hooks next to the maps were the braided rings made from their hair. Marak smiled as he took down Emily’s ring and held it in his palm.

  “The scholars say that persistence is one of the most basic human traits,” he told it. “We’re going to find out if that’s true.”

  Chapter Three

  Seylin retraced his former trading journey, but no call came to tell him that elves were nearby. Before the death of the last elf King, several thousand elves had lived in eighteen camps scattered through the elf King’s forest. Each camp had contained as many as two hundred and fifty people under the guidance of a camp lord. The nomadic elves had moved from location to location throughout the year, but the camps had retained a precise pattern in relation to each other. They had formed the shape of the Warrior constellation, with the King’s camp in the center.

  Now Seylin spent weeks combing the elf King’s silent forest for the remains of the camps. He found ancient sites that had been used by the elves for thousands of years, but no sign showed that anyone had been near them in perhaps a century.

  Failing to find elves in the forest, he began to spend more time in the little human villages that dotted the edge of the elf King’s old domain. He told himself that this was a prudent decision because the humans might have some information for him, but the fact of the matter was that he was lonely. Goblins were very gregarious. They lived and ate together, worked together, went on patrol together, and visited one another almost constantly.

  Seylin had been alone for several weeks now, and he began to prefer any companionship to that. But because humans were only out during the day, he couldn’t have very much contact with them. In the twilit evenings, he could sit inside the public houses over a beer, or he could change into a cat and watch humans going about their daylight business from the cover of nearby bushes.

  One morning, Seylin decided to stay up for a while and do some people-watching. Before dawn, he came to a little town and found a deserted shed right next to the forest. He hid his pack carefully behind some old junk, changed into a cat, and strolled out into the early morning. He headed down a weedy garden path toward the ramshackle old house that his shed belonged to. Perhaps some people inside were awake over their breakfasts, although he rather doubted it. If the shed and garden were any indication, they weren’t the industrious sort.

  “You’re a cat now!” exclaimed a voice behind him, and Seylin bounded into the air. A thin girl emerged from a bush and pushed back straggly fair hair, her pale cheeks flushed with excitement. “You’re under an enchantment, aren’t you?” she demanded breathlessly.

  Seylin twitched his bottle brush tail as he considered what to do. The child, only about nine or ten, didn’t look dangerous, and she was talking about things he understood. His tail died back to a soft fluff again, and he sat down in the garden weeds.

  “Yes, I am under an enchantment,” he confirmed in his high cat-voice.

  The skinny little wraith before him didn’t even blink at this extraordinary news, and she didn’t look surprised to hear him speak, either. She just clasped her hands together and walked up to him, her face ecstatic.

  “Oh, I just knew it!” she cried. “I’ll help you if you like. You could marry me when I grow up, and then you would have to leave me and be locked away in the farthest castle, and I would wander looking for you for seven years, over mountain and valley, and finally find you about to marry the troll princess, and I would trade my ring to talk to you, but you would be in a magical sleep, and I’d sit by you and cry and say, ‘I’ve sought you for seven years,’ and a tear would fall on your cheek and wake you up, and then the enchantment would be broken.”

  Seylin stared at the excited little girl with his golden eyes. “That sounds like a lot of trouble,” he said politely. “I think I’ll just stay a cat, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Well, you do make a nice cat,” she went on enthusiastically. “May I pet you?” And she sat down beside him and tickled him under the chin. Seylin started to purr. Usually he tried not to do this because it struck him as undignified, but he couldn’t help himself. After an entire fruitless month of roaming through the woods, it was nice to be tickled under the chin.

  “Who enchanted you?” she asked. “Was it an evil witch disguised as a beautiful red-haired woman, or was it some fairy who hated your family? Are you really a prince? Where’s your kingdom?”

  Seylin puzzled over this. It was obvious to him that they had both studied magic, but from very different books.

  “No, I’m not a prince,” he told her. “I enchanted myself. I can’t change back right now because the light would hurt my eyes.”

  “Oh,” she said, a little disappointed. “Most people under enchantments are handsome princes.” She told him several stories to prove her point. Seylin listened with interest. He supposed that they were possible, but a lot of the magic seemed terribly impractical.

  “How do you know all this?” he asked. “Where did you learn about magic?”

  “My father told me some of them, and I’ve read some of them in books,” she said. “My father knows everything. He used to be almost a prince himself and lived in a richly appointed house filled with servants who obeyed his every command. But then he met my mother, and even though they weren’t supposed to speak to each other, she won his heart with her enchanting beauty. His evil mother tried to separate them, and she cast my mother out of doors to starve, but my wise and handsome father rescued her and took her away to marry. They should have lived happily ever after,” the thin little girl said seriously, “but when I was a baby, my mother wasted away and died, and my father wandered about with me, penniless and in terrible distress. Sometimes he gives lessons to the little boys in the town, but most of the time he’s too sick with a broken heart to get out of bed, so I have to tell them to go away.”

  The two unlikely companions spent a happy morning together. The little girl talked, and Seylin listened. Her name was Jane, and she confessed that she was unhappy about this because she had never read a single story about a beautiful maiden named Jane. Seylin decided that she wasn’t going to be a beautiful maiden anyway. She was a plain little thing, scrawny and a bit dirty, with clothes that were too small for her. It gradually dawned on Seylin that he was enjoying her company because she reminded him of Emily. This depressed him, and he remembered that he hadn’t had any sleep.

  “I need to leave now,” he said. The little girl looked crushed.

  “Don’t leave,” she implored him. “I can’t bear to say good-bye. You haven’t told me anything about your enchantment yet, or what it’s like to be a cat. I still don’t know if you eat mice, and I don’t know how to find your kingdom. I don’t know why you put a curse on yourself, and why your eyes would hurt if you didn’t. You can’t just go!”

  Seylin was tired from walking night after night, and he hadn’t met any other human who seemed to care for magic. Perhaps this little girl could help him, or perhaps her father could. He would rest up for a day or two. He’d probably have to walk for months yet.

  “I really do need to leave,” he said, “but maybe you’ll see me again. Don’t tell anyone about
me, or I won’t be able to come back.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” she promised solemnly. “Just like the lovely golden-haired princess who couldn’t speak, and the witch smeared blood on her face, and her husband the king came and said, ‘Where’s our baby?’ and she couldn’t say a single solitary word.”

  “Something like that,” agreed Seylin. What little he’d learned about the local human kings had sounded rather grim, but he’d had no idea that their lives involved so many strange, magical misadventures.

  That night, Seylin came down to the house in order to look through the windows. He had been taught to shun human magic as evil, but the little girl’s stories didn’t seem evil. Perhaps her father was like the goblin scholars, a man who knew all about the history of human magic without actually practicing it himself. Such a scholar of magic would surely have some idea whether or not elves lived in the area.

  But Seylin found his investigations very disappointing. The dilapidated house was a mess inside, and Jane’s father didn’t appear to be either handsome or wise. He sat at a dirty table, unwashed and unshaved, his clothes rumpled and threadbare, drinking one mug of beer after another until his unhappy face took on a dreamy, stupid look. Seylin watched him for a long time, remembering Jane’s odd stories. One thing, at least, was clear to him now: heartache was not the disease keeping this human in bed in the morning.

  The next day, Seylin studied the whole area before coming out of the forest. He saw no one stirring, however, except the little girl herself. She was thrilled to see him again and asked scores of questions. Some Seylin answered, but many others he didn’t. He refused to tell her anything about his kingdom or his King. He did tell her, however, that he was looking for elves. Jane was very interested in this, but, unfortunately, she didn’t know where any might be.

  “Why do you have to look for them?” she asked. “Don’t you know where they live?”

  “Not anymore,” Seylin answered. “I hope I can find some of the ones who moved away during the elf harrowing. That was the last war with the goblins,” he explained.

  “Goblins?” asked Jane eagerly. “Do you know any stories about goblins? Tell me a story about an elf and a goblin.”

  Seylin loved history and knew dozens of stories. He thought for a minute or two.

  “Here’s something that happened during the reign of Marak Redeye and Aganir Immir, the elf King named Storm Wind,” he said. “One night, the young sister of a great elf lord, the lord of the Third Belt Star Camp, went out with her maidens to dance beneath the moon. She loved more than anything in the world to dance, and she wanted to go to a certain hill where she could dance so high above the quiet forest that she felt as if she were in the sky itself. But the goblins had watched this camp, and they knew her habit. When she and her maidens were far from home, they overpowered her guards and surrounded the terrified elf girls. Then the goblin King himself came, and he let every one of her maidens go, and all the guards, too, but the lord’s sister he took underground to be his own bride.”

  “And was he fearfully ugly?” asked Jane in a hushed voice. “Was he scaly and horrible?”

  “Let’s see,” said Seylin, trying to remember. “No, he wasn’t scaly. He had bright red eyes, and he was covered all over with short black fur, like a panther.” Jane shivered deliciously.

  “The poor elf bride was horrified at her new life in the goblin realm. Gradually her fear died away, but it left behind nothing but sorrow. The goblin King brought her gold and jewels, rich clothes and finery, but none of it mattered to his unhappy wife. She begged instead to be allowed one more night of dancing under the moon, but this he couldn’t grant her. She was under a spell never to leave the goblin caves and never to see the night sky again.

  “The goblin King’s Wife began to pine away, and nothing seemed to help. Again and again, she begged to dance just one more night, and again and again, her husband denied her pleas. Finally, she fell very ill, and then the poor elf girl couldn’t have danced even if the King had let her.

  “The goblin King sent a message to the lord of the Third Belt Star Camp: ‘My wife and your sister lies dying in my kingdom. Send an elf musician to play for her so that she can get well.’ When he learned this, the elf lord grieved bitterly, and he called all the musicians in his camp to ask if any was brave enough to go down into the goblin caves. One after another turned pale and refused to go, but a young elf man agreed to make that terrible journey. He went with the guards past the great iron door and into the huge palace, and came at last to the room where the poor girl lay, so ill that she didn’t even know another elf had braved that trip to come help her.

  “Then the goblin King sent his dying wife a beautiful dream of the full moon shining above the hill where he had first found her. The young elf took his pipe and began to play to the sleeping girl. The lovely, haunting elf music flowed into her dream, and she began to dance. So ill that she couldn’t even lift her own hand, locked away from the sky that she loved, still, for that one night and in that one dream, the elf girl danced and danced, far from the goblin King, who sat by her bedside and watched the look of joy on her face. The elf piper never stopped playing, and the elf girl never stopped dancing, till a full night and day had passed, and evening had come again.

  “Then the goblin King said to the piper, ‘You have worked very hard playing your pipe for me, but now you won’t have to work any longer. I give you the gift of playing the wind itself.’ And for the rest of his life, whenever the wind blew, it played all the notes that the piper wished to hear, and he became the most famous musician in the elf kingdom. The goblin King’s Wife slept for days and days, tired from all her dancing, and when she finally woke up again, she was sound and well. And there was peace between the elves and goblins for the rest of that King’s life.”

  Jane sat for a minute after Seylin had finished speaking, her thin face puzzled and anxious.

  “But, Seylin,” she prompted, “that can’t be the end of the story.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said the black cat doubtfully. “There never really is an end, is there? I suppose I could say that the elf girl came to love the goblin King very much and that their son, Marak Horsetooth, was one of the greatest of the Kings.”

  “No, no, no!” said Jane emphatically. “Seylin, that can’t be how it ends. She can’t love a goblin. Stories just don’t turn out like that. Maybe the piper had a magic box with servants in it, and they popped out and killed the goblin King, and then he kissed the elf girl, and she woke up, and they escaped together from the caves, and as a reward for his bravery, the elf lord married her to the piper, and they lived happily ever after.”

  “That’s not possible,” protested Seylin. “No elf could kill the goblin King, whether he had servants in a box or not.”

  “But I want the goblin dead and the poor girl rescued from him!” insisted Jane. “No creature that horrible should live through a story. Change the ending.”

  “Jane!” cried the cat, his fur bristling. “I told you the truth! Marak Redeye was a good goblin King; he took care of his people, and he loved his wife. It’s not the goblins who are dead at all, it’s the elves. There’s a goblin King alive right this minute, but I don’t know if any elves are left.”

  “That’s terrible!” said Jane, folding her arms and refusing to look at him. “The goblins shouldn’t be alive and the elves dead. How could you tell me a story like that?”

  Seylin thought about all of Jane’s stories, in which brave, handsome princes battled witches and trolls, and beautiful maidens lived happily ever after.

  “Your stories aren’t true, are they?” he observed. “Someone just made them up.”

  Jane jumped to her feet and faced him indignantly.

  “They are, too, true!” she shouted. “They’re more true than yours. People really do defeat evil goblins, and they really do live happily ever after!” And she started to cry. Before the surprised Seylin could even speak, she ran into the house and slammed the door. br />
  Seylin spent that night searching the nearby woods for evidence of elves, depressed about his conversation with Jane. He hadn’t thought of goblins as such an awful thing, but maybe they really were. Maybe it was wrong that Marak Redeye had saved his wife from dying. Maybe he should have let her die. He remembered his own King telling him, “You are who you are, and I am who I am because elf brides came to harm.”

  The next morning, he went back to the neglected house to see if Jane would speak to him again. He found her crying in the shed, her messy hair covered with cobwebs.

  “You were right, Seylin,” she sobbed. “I asked my father, and he told me that the stories weren’t true. He says there’s no such thing as goblins or elves or happy endings, and that magic doesn’t really happen at all.”

  Seylin curled up next to the white-faced little girl.

  “Jane, that’s not right, either,” he said. “Magic does happen. You’re talking to a cat. There are goblins, too, whether your father believes that or not. And there’s still one elf left as long as I’m alive.”

  “But no happy endings!” Jane said. “I just can’t bear it.” She rubbed her hand across her eyes. They were dull, and her whole manner was different. Seylin felt that it was his fault.

  “I hope there are happy endings,” he mused. “I’m not sure, but I think I’ve seen one.” He hesitated. “Would you like to see me work some magic? You mustn’t ever tell, you know.”

  Her dirty face lit up.

  “I’d love to,” she breathed. “When? Now?”

  “No,” he said. “Elves can’t see in the daytime. I’ll come back tonight in my normal shape, the way you first saw me. Wait in the woods behind the shed, and I’ll take you to see real magic.”

  That night, the air turned chilly. The cautious young man watched the area for an hour before he came out to greet her. Jane was shivering, and her teeth were chattering, but her eyes were bright with excitement.