Close Kin Read online

“Something the ugly goblins forgot,” announced Emily in triumph. “I found an elvish book. Look, it has the symbol for goblins on almost every page,” she said, sitting down next to the teacher. “And here, on the first page, is the number four, so it must be a volume of a set.”

  Ruby examined the pages, dumbfounded.

  “Em!” Her voice was a whisper. “You’ve found Mouse’s book! That’s her elvish name, Lim, on the first page.”

  “Mouse? Who’s Mouse? Someone named Four? I’d hate to have a name like that.”

  “She was the fourth baby. It’s so rare for an elf woman to have that many children that those babies are always named Four. But the goblins never called her that. Marak Blackwing nicknamed her Mouse, and that’s what she was for the rest of her life.”

  “I remember something about her,” lied Emily cautiously, but for once Ruby didn’t bother to scold her.

  “Mouse came to the kingdom to try to free her father, who was in prison for killing goblins. The goblin King offered her the choice of marrying him and saving her father’s life, or of going free and causing her father’s execution. Mouse lived in the kingdom for three months before she had to make her decision, and she spent the whole time studying goblins. Her elf fiancé was a scholar, and she wanted to be one, too. That’s when she wrote this book.

  “Marak Blackwing recorded in the chronicles that Mouse never intended to marry him. She always told him that she would go back to her people when the three months were up. The goblin King fell in love with her, and he released her father rather than force her to choose his death. But when he told Mouse that, she decided to marry him after all. He sent her book to the elves with the announcement that she had become the King’s Wife.”

  “Why would she do that?” asked Emily, flipping through the volume. There was a crude sketch of the throne room on one page, and a diagram of a typical palace apartment on another. “Had Mouse fallen in love with Marak Blackwing, too?”

  “Goodness, no,” answered the goblin woman sincerely. “Not for a long time. Mouse was a strong, brave woman, and she realized her elf King was a fool. Mouse knew that her people couldn’t protect themselves, so she stayed to be a friend of the elves in the goblin King’s court. Her plan worked. Marak Blackwing adored her, and he would have given her anything. He never harmed another elf as long as he lived. Their son, Marak Whiteye, actually protected the elves until the death of their last King. Then, of course, there was nothing he could do for them.”

  “Wait a minute!” interrupted Emily. “Do you mean that the son of this amazing elf was the goblin King who ordered the elf harrowing? The goblin King who destroyed this very camp? Some friend of the elves he was!”

  “I said there was nothing he could do,” snapped Ruby. “The elves couldn’t survive without their King. They must have hidden his mother’s book because they knew he wanted it so much. That’s a nice dose of elvish spite for you.”

  “They didn’t hide it at all,” argued Emily. “I practically fell over it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! It must have been hidden by a spell, and the spell wore off over the years.”

  “It was wrapped in this,” explained Emily, standing up and dragging the heavy folds forward. Ruby stood up to take them from her. Then she sat down with a jolt.

  “No,” she gasped. “No! It can’t be!”

  “What is it?” demanded Emily, pulling back the folds to shake them out. They formed a perfectly ordinary cloak, undamaged by time. A black cloak, of the sort that the King’s Guard always wore.

  “A goblin hid it?” she asked slowly, turning it in her hands. “The book that the goblin King wanted? I don’t see how that’s possible!”

  Ruby didn’t explain. She sat without speaking, rocking back and forth, obviously quite distraught.

  Their supper was ready, but Ruby didn’t eat. Emily ate heartily, meanwhile making plans. The old goblin woman didn’t want to tell her what was wrong, but getting things out of people who didn’t want to give them was one of Emily’s specialties.

  “Mouse must have been an outstanding King’s Wife,” she remarked in a casual tone. “Her son must have been a great goblin King.”

  “He should have been.” Ruby’s voice was unsteady. “He had tremendous gifts. He spoke and read elvish like one of their own scholars, and he knew more of their history than their own lords did. He dressed like an elf and hunted like an elf. He even looked like an elf.”

  “He did? The goblin King?” Emily thought of Seylin and all the teasing he had endured. She supposed a goblin King could be teased, too, but it was hard to imagine.

  “Well, he did have blue skin and white hair,” amended Ruby, “and white eyes like mine. But aside from that, he looked just like an elf. Marak Whiteye put his own Guard to watch the elf King’s borders when he discovered that the Border Spell was gone. And when he heard of the death of the elf King, he realized his destiny. He was to be the first King of the two races.”

  “How did he get from that destiny to butchering them all?” Emily demanded. Ruby turned evasive.

  “It was their fault, really,” she muttered. “The elf lords insulted him. And when he pointed out that his mother had sacrificed her life for those worthless lords, they insulted his mother, too. They said that she had done nothing for the elves: she had produced another goblin. As far as they were concerned, she had wasted her whole life.”

  “So Marak Whiteye took revenge,” said Emily with growing comprehension. “He took goblin revenge for his mother’s sake, and he proved the elf lords right.”

  “He swore to kill as many elf men as he could.” Ruby sighed. “And he wasn’t particular about the women and children who got killed, either. His mother was dead herself by that time. There was no one to talk him out of it. He wanted their books of magic for himself, and he was determined to have this book, too. It held a secret. Mouse had written in it all day before she decided to become the King’s Wife. But she couldn’t remember what she had written, and her husband never would tell her.”

  “This is Whiteye’s cloak, isn’t it?” asked Emily. “He found his mother’s book.”

  The teacher nodded. “Yes, there are leather ties. Whiteye’s cloak was just like an elf cloak, with no metal clasp. He hurt the dwarves’ feelings badly. But this isn’t a real elf cloak. They never wear black cloth.”

  “What did his mother write on that last day?” wondered Emily.

  They looked at the pages together. The handwriting was hurried and sloppy, almost unreadable in places. Lines broke off in the middle, and characters were scratched out.

  “She’s written down everything she loves about being an elf,” whispered Ruby. “Everything that she’s about to lose forever. Her favorite flowers. All the kinds of trees. Dances, friends, foods. The best hills to climb. And here, on the final page, her elvish fiancé’s name. ‘Please understand,’ she writes to him. That’s the last thing in the book.”

  Emily felt a lump in her throat. She imagined the young elf woman saying good-bye to the man she loved, about to condemn herself to a living nightmare.

  “Poor Whiteye,” she murmured. “He must have read those pages and finally understood that he had destroyed everything his mother loved. He couldn’t face the shame of taking the book home. He had to leave it behind.”

  “He stopped the elf harrowing that night,” said Ruby. “The goblins never came back to the elf lands, and Whiteye died bitter and unhappy. Scholars thought that it was grief over the loss of his Guard, but it must have been regret.”

  “And his mother had had such hopes for him, too,” mused Emily. “I wonder what hopes my parents had for me.”

  “I can tell you what I hope,” said the teacher, closing the old book. “You should give up this nonsensical quest and go back to the kingdom to get married.”

  “I want to marry Seylin,” protested Emily. “I can’t just give up what I want. You can’t ask me to do that. It isn’t fair.”

  But her sister had done it. S
he had given up everything she loved to save Emily’s life. Emily paused, struck for the first time by the courage of Kate’s sacrifice. Ruby broke in on her thoughts.

  “I can ask you to do it because I’ve done it myself,” she said crisply. “I never wanted to teach about humans; I wanted to teach about the elves. I studied and studied to become an elf lore-master, but Master Webfoot got that subject instead. The King asked me to be the human lore-master, and I did it even though I didn’t want to.”

  “Well, I don’t think you should have,” declared her former pupil with devastating candor. “You hate the subject, and you make your students hate it, too. Kate gave up what she wanted, but she didn’t hate Marak for it. She knew it wouldn’t be right.”

  “I teach my subject as well as I know how!” exclaimed Ruby, deeply offended. “I work harder than anybody else, and my students learn more.”

  Yesterday, Emily would have argued this point, but today she was silent. What did her family want for her future? What should she do with her life? She had never thought about it in those terms before. She had always considered only what she wanted and how to win everyone to her plans. She thought of Kate’s frustration and embarrassment over her many escapades. She thought of Marak’s endless patience. What did he hope for her?

  “Why do you think Marak sent us out together?” she asked.

  “Goblin revenge, obviously,” snapped the old teacher. “Though for the life of me I can’t recall what I did to deserve it.”

  “I deserve it,” admitted Emily promptly. “But I don’t think that’s the answer. Marak wants something for us both out here. There are things that he wants us to find.”

  She studied Ruby’s ugly features in the flickering firelight as if she were seeing them for the first time. It had never occurred to her before that the teacher might have problems of her own. “Ruby, have you ever tried to understand the human race? Actually tried to like your subject?”

  “Who could do that?” Ruby muttered, but her voice lacked its usual sting.

  “Humans aren’t the only ones who are ruthless and irrational. This battle”—Emily gestured around them—“is as nasty as anything from my world. Have you ever tried to admire us? Have you ever looked at what we’ve achieved?”

  “I’ve seen Hallow Hill,” said the goblin with a sniff. “The dwarves could have built it in their sleep.”

  “I don’t know what Marak wants for me out here,” reflected Emily, “but I do have an idea what he wants for you. We’ll stop looking for Seylin for a while. I’m going to take you to London. There’s bound to be something in that hodgepodge of a place to impress you.”

  Chapter Six

  Seylin roamed about the countryside throughout the autumn, traveling back and forth across the harvested fields. After the last elf King’s death, goblin scholars had conjectured that the rest of the elves would die off within two or three generations. Then the elf harrowing had taken place. No more vicious war had been waged by the goblins in all the previous millennia. As Seylin went farther and farther without finding a single hopeful clue, he began to believe that the scholars had been right. The elves must all be gone.

  The path of the unhappy young man began to look rather peculiar on the map Marak had hung in his workroom. It was more like a spider’s web than a logical journey. Seylin consulted his own map one night in a fit of depression and found the most isolated spot on it, the spot where the villages were farthest apart and where no roads came. That remote spot became his goal.

  The terrain was rough. Trees didn’t grow here; stones and crags seemed to grow instead. But Seylin attained his lonely goal at last. Almost buried in the cleft of a narrow gorge, a band of tall, thin alder trees stood around a gushing rivulet, and there, in the heart of this tiny patch of sheltered woodland, Seylin found something unexpected and quite wonderful. It wasn’t elves, but it was almost as rare.

  The rivulet arose as a bubbling spring from a fissure in the wall of the gorge and ran down to its little streambed through an ancient channel. Next to this little spring stood the smallest and oldest of chapels. Seylin had passed the lovely ruins of several great abbeys, their graceful arches rising straight from the green turf beneath and their soaring walls roofed by nothing besides the night sky with its countless sparkling stars. He saw, too, the churches in the towns he passed, with their plain glass windows and battered façades altered to suit a reckless nation declaring its rupture from the mother church.

  But this tiny chapel showed no such harsh treatment. The wooden door stood open, nor did it look as if it would easily close again, and only ten people could have worshipped there at once, but Seylin was thrilled to see the old stained-glass windows still intact. He studied the windows in the meager starlight that fell through the bare trees and resolved to come again the next morning, when he could admire their patterns in the daylight.

  As he explored the walled valley, Seylin marveled at his find and wondered how these three little windows had come to survive when so much more impressive glass had not. In fact, this glass had had good guardians: the rugged stone hills and the rugged people who lived upon them.

  The tiny shrine had stood there since time immemorial, the site of the hermit’s hut belonging to an ancient Celtic saint. When armed troops began to rove across the land, enforcing the enthusiasm of their newborn faith upon any monument they met, the quiet inhabitants of these hills decided that they did not wish to lose their shrine. It belonged to them just as the great rocks did, as the wide sky and the gentle sheep did. And, rather than lose the graceful statues or the vibrant stained-glass windows, they chipped away the rocky path that led to the gorge instead. As time went on, the people kept their secret even from themselves, the father from his son and the mother from her daughter, until the children aged and gained a certain moderation, and it seemed prudent to tell them the old story. So, after centuries of destruction and realignment, this tiny chapel still stood while many enormous churches lay in ruins.

  The next morning, Seylin came padding back in cat form and entered the little chapel, his gaze fixed on the vivid round window above the stone altar. If his gaze had been fixed on anything lower, he might have noticed the newly swept floor, and then he wouldn’t have been taken by surprise.

  “Begone, Satan!” declared a firm voice behind him.

  Seylin whirled, his fur on end, to find something else as rare as elves in that day and time. A robust, wrinkled, white-haired priest stood right inside the door, his gray eyes flashing a stern warning. The black cat found it terribly unfair to have to share this beautiful spot with a human, and, even more, with a human who had caught him completely off guard.

  “I am not Satan!” he piped indignantly in his shrill cat’s voice.

  The priest didn’t flinch when he spoke, any more than little Jane had done. Both of these unusual humans held world-views more generous than the normal, in which talking cats were not at all impossible.

  “Then, whichever of the devilish imps you are, begone anyway,” ordered the priest. He was quite as sturdy in his own way as the little chapel, having traveled widely in his youth. He lived there now in a life-style very similar to that of the Celtic saint who had been there before him.

  “But I’m not a devilish imp,” insisted Seylin. The shy cat probably wouldn’t have lingered so long, but the priest who intended to expel him was in fact blocking his path to the door. “I just wanted to enjoy the glass windows. They look so pretty with the light coming through them.”

  For answer, the priest reached into his pocket for his rosary beads and brandished the crucifix at the bewildered cat. Seylin stepped a little nearer to study the tiny figure, hoping to appear polite.

  “It’s very nice,” he said respectfully, unsure how one should compliment a crucifix. “Not as detailed as the one up there, though,” and he waved a paw toward the altar. “I rather like that one better, don’t you?”

  The priest sat down on the last short bench and viewed the large cat disgust
edly.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he declared. “You know you have no business in a church.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Seylin, somewhat abashed, “but I didn’t think anyone would mind. I’m not keeping a big crowd of humans out of this one.”

  “Well, that’s a good point,” sighed the old priest. “I shouldn’t complain. At least someone wants to be here.”

  He fell into his own thoughts, fingering his beads, while Seylin studied his windows in peace. They depicted the life of the hermit and the spring, along with several miracles belonging to both. The lonely cat plucked up courage to ask the human what the scenes depicted, and the lonely priest actually told the devil cat what he knew. Each enjoyed the other’s company, although both reserved men were ashamed about it. As a rule, Seylin didn’t approve of humans, and the priest certainly didn’t approve of demonic beasts.

  “It seems very sad,” piped the black cat at the end of the old priest’s lecture. “It isn’t fair that humans are God’s favorites. They don’t seem to care one way or the other. I’m sure we would care if all of that magic was done for us.”

  The priest’s gray eyes flashed again.

  “You devils had your chance,” he said sternly.

  “I am not a devil!” shrilled Seylin. “We know about the devils, but we don’t have anything to do with them.”

  “That’s likely!” remarked the priest severely. “And what are you if you don’t have anything to do with devils?”

  “I’m an elf,” replied Seylin, rather boldly and incautiously. The priest merely laughed a dry, contemptuous laugh.

  “Now, that’s a lie, you goblin cat,” he declared. Seylin felt deeply hurt. “I know what an elf looks like, and it doesn’t look like you.”

  “You’ve seen an elf?” mewed Seylin in excitement.

  “Yes, I have,” asserted the priest with a grave nod. “I’ve seen two elves,” he added grandly.

  “But—where? And when?” stammered the flustered cat. The priest’s face took on a faraway look.