In the Coils of the Snake Page 8

  Miranda didn’t know what her captor was looking at, but his dark eyes shone, and his whole face lit up with the power of that triumphant, musical laugh. The inhuman beauty that had awed her before was now a terrifying force, just as incomprehensible and fearsome as the inhuman ugliness of the goblins. Miranda shrank back, and a lump rose in her throat. She felt instinctively that she had stumbled in fatal error across a sight not allowed to humans.

  The elf lord glanced down at her with that laugh still shining in his eyes and walked rapidly away from the truce circle, pulling her with him. Momentarily overcome, Miranda walked beside him, unresisting. She felt in hurt reproach that Marak shouldn’t have talked so casually about the pretty elves. Her impression of them had been quite different.

  “Where are we going?” she demanded breathlessly.

  “I’m taking you back to my camp so that I can work the spell on you,” he answered.

  “What will the spell do to me?” she asked.

  “I don’t intend to tell you,” he said.

  Accustomed to the straightforward goblins, Miranda found this statement astounding. Confident in their strength and insensitive in their feelings, goblins never bothered to conceal anything. “What do you mean, you don’t intend to tell me?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?”

  The elf was silent for some time as they walked, trying to make sense of the first question. At length, he gave it up as hopeless and went on to the second one.

  “Why? I don’t know,” he admitted. “But you won’t come to any real harm.”

  “I never do, with you great lords,” snapped Miranda. “Your plots are so benevolent, aren’t they? You lords do what’s best for your own people. I’m not one of your people, so you won’t care what happens to me.”

  This argument had worked beautifully on the guilty Catspaw, but the elf lord didn’t look impressed. “There’s truth to that,” he said coldly. “But I only have to stop short of killing you to improve on your own ideas.”

  “Let me go!” said Miranda angrily, trying to pry his hand loose. “I’m sick of you great lords practicing your magic on me.”

  “You should be glad it’s this great lord and not the other one,” murmured Nir, watching for landmarks as they walked. “You were about to be enslaved by a monster and locked away under the earth. I’d think you’d welcome anything after that.”

  “Well, I don’t!” she retorted. “At least the goblins showed proper respect. At least they were polite. None of them is half the monster you are!”

  The elf stopped and turned then, handsome face set and eyes gleaming with wrath. “You think I’m a worse monster than he is,” he exclaimed, “just because I won’t leave you alone to kill yourself! Stars above! Illogical is the kindest word for your point of view.”

  Miranda took advantage of the halt to wrap her free arm tightly around a tree. “Let go of that,” he commanded, but the order had no effect, and if he jerked her loose, the bark would tear her skin. He paused to think for a second, eyes narrowed. Then he touched her bracelet, putting out the light.

  Total blackness. Before, she had been able to pick out shapes in the gloom, but in this dense forest, all detail was gone. Miranda blinked, but nothing in her field of vision changed to let her know if her eyes were open or closed.

  In an instant, she was six years old again, and the panic that gripped her was absolute. She was nothing but a helpless child, tormented, trapped in the darkness. She held her breath to fight down the cry that tightened in her throat and shook her head to stop her mother’s silky laughter. Let me out of here! She reached out her fist to pound on the locked door.

  Nir studied her frightened face and wide, sightless eyes, catching her other hand in his as she reached out toward him. It was far from honorable, he thought in disgust, for him to use her human weakness against her. He thought about how it would be to stand here in the sunlight, his own eyes blinded by the terrifying whiteness of the day.

  “Walk right beside me,” he said, “and I won’t let you stumble.” He released her wrist and held the hand she had given him, tucking her arm under his to keep her close. “Not all the nights are as dark as this one,” he added sympathetically, “and your eyes will adjust a little.”

  Miranda gave him no answer, occupied completely with the effort of the frightening journey. She found it exhausting to step and step into blackness. Her body was rigid, irrationally convinced that the next step would be out into nothing. Time passed, but how long or short, she couldn’t have said. She lost all her bearings in time and place when she lost her ability to see.

  The elf lord slowed and turned, speaking softly into the darkness beside them, and another man’s voice answered his. Miranda’s bracelet flared to a faint light, and she accepted the gift of sight with blissful relief. She looked up to see her captor and another elf man both studying her as they walked along, talking in some strange language. Deeply shaken by the walk, Miranda was completely cowed again by the elf lord’s inhuman appearance. It was hard to imagine in her current state of fatigue that she had ever had the courage to argue with him.

  The elf who had joined them was not nearly so frightening. Blond and blue-eyed, he was remarkably handsome, but he lacked the air of command that belonged to the elf lord as if it were a physical trait. He was staring at Miranda with open curiosity and a kind of humorous mischief.

  They walked along slowly now as the two men talked. The trees began to space themselves more widely, their trunks thick and straight. Miranda heard the murmur of water nearby and realized that she was walking on soft grass. A wide clearing opened out. Overhead shone a sky full of stars.

  “This is my camp,” said the elf lord, stopping. “Hunter is bringing some things that I’ll need.” Miranda saw no buildings, tents, torches, or fires. She would have walked right through the clearing and never noticed anything special about it.

  The blond elf Hunter walked off on his errand, but Miranda found to her dismay that she was quickly attracting an audience. Elves were drifting over to join them, their ageless faces noble and quite foreign, staring at her as if she were some new species of animal. Miranda stared back at them, anxious and uncomfortable, remembering Marak’s stories of the elves’ human slaves.

  “Why did they even have slaves?” asked the girl. “In the fairy-tale books, they’re beautiful and good. “

  “The lazy elves were just beautiful” he told her cheerfully. “Some were beautiful and bad! Lots of elf lords didn’t have slaves, but they had more and more toward the end. Whenever there was hard work to do, they made the humans do it. —’

  She frowned disapprovingly. “I wouldn’t work for an elf. I wouldn’t care what they did. “

  But now, standing in the darkness, surrounded by their alien magnificence, she was no longer certain of this.

  Hunter returned with a folding stool and a small wooden tray. “Sit down,” ordered Nir, pointing to the stool. Miranda glanced around nervously at the growing crowd of strangers and sat down without protest. She didn’t want to find out, in front of this unsympathetic mob, if he intended to back up his commands with force.

  The elf lord knelt at her feet and arranged on the tray the flowers that she had gathered, his curling black hair falling around the edges of his pale face as he worked. Miranda studied that strange face, his narrow, pointed ears, wondering in curious dread what the spell was for. If he wouldn’t tell her, it must be frightful. Maybe he and Catspaw had argued, and he was doing something terrible in revenge.

  Now he had all the lilies in four lines on the tray. He plucked hairs from his head and threaded one through each line of flowers. He picked up a string of lilies, and the blossoms remained evenly spaced along the hair, like white carved beads on a bracelet. Then he straightened up, still kneeling, and turned to Miranda. “Hold out your hand,” he ordered.

  Frightened, she clasped her hands firmly in her lap and looked for some means of escape, but the elves stood packed around her in a close ring, wat
ching the proceedings with interest. The elf lord knelt back on his heels and stared at her, too, considering what to do next. It would be best to have her cooperation for this spell. He didn’t want her damaging the lilies.

  “You were ready to throw yourself into a lake,” he remarked, “and now you look worried about a few flowers. Tell me, are you afraid of the silly elves?”

  Miranda’s head came up at that, and she glared at him, holding out her hand so he could tie the blossoms around her wrist. Nir kept his head bent and his eyes on his work. He didn’t want her to see his triumphant expression. One by one, he tied on the strings of flowers, first to her wrists and then to her ankles, taking off Kate’s bracelet and setting it on his tray without extinguishing its light. Then he caught Miranda’s hands and pulled her to her feet.

  “Look at me,” he said, and Miranda looked into those beautiful eyes as he whispered the words of the spell. She felt in sudden panic that she should look away, but those eyes were all she could see. They seemed to pull her whole being into them, to join and become a patch of the night sky shining with the light of the stars. She stared at that sky, felt it arch over her and around her, felt the stars coming close to her sides. They were surrounding her in a brilliant net, mak.ing her their prisoner.

  As Miranda stood frozen, as the elf lord said his spell, the strings of flowers began to spin. They spun faster and faster, glittering like water shaken under the starlight. Now the lilies gleamed like silver sparks that whirled and tumbled at her hands and feet, becoming small bright stars that shone with their own light. They faded in brightness as they slowed to a stop, a circle of seven silver eight pointed stars around each wrist and ankle. The elf lord knelt again and drew a symbol with his finger on the top of her foot. Then he retrieved Kate’s bracelet for her, watching the puzzled girl turn her arms and study her shackles of stars by its light.

  Nir felt a pang of guilt as he considered the other spell he still had to work. This spell would keep her trapped in the nighttime, unable to move about in the day. He knew that the sun, hated and feared by the elves, was really the humans’ moon, and to take it away from this poor child was to condemn her to a life of near-blindness. An unwelcome memory assailed him:

  The small boy was crying, dazzled and frightened by bright light, standing in a ring of campfires belching up smoke and flame.

  ““What are you doing? ”’ cried Father’s frantic voice. “You’ll set the entire forest on fire!”

  A blond-haired woman knelt in the middle of the circle, her face haggard and stained with tears. “I had to.” Her words tumbled over themselves. “I’m going blind. I’m going mad! Please, Ash, please. I can’t live like this anymore!”

  Nir winced, feeling the dreadful sadness, seeing the pain in that tear-stained face. I don’t have a choice, he reminded himself. I have to do this for the elves.

  “Stand still,” he said to Miranda, and cradling her face, he spoke the elvish words of the spell: “Welcome, good friend, to the kingdom of the night.” Then he kissed her brown eyes. Now those eyes would be locked away from the sun behind their own eyelids, and she would sleep through all the hours of daylight. That was elf magic, Nir mused with a little sigh. It was beautiful even when it was cruel.

  Miranda was blissfully unaware of the awful spell he had just worked, but she couldn’t feel more horrified anyway. When he told her to stand still, she did so. Even when he came very close and kissed her, she didn’t draw back. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t move a muscle. And the whole time that she struggled to make herself move, the stars at her wrists and ankles sparkled with a pale light.

  Turning to his elves, Nir spoke in their language, and they broke up and drifted away. He absentmindedly took Miranda’s hand and stood holding it as the elves walked off. Then he caught sight of her shocked face and lifted the hand he held to look at the sparkling stars on her wrist.

  “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I should show you.” And he walked across the clearing toward the trees. Miranda found herself walking beside him, her hand apparently nestled trustingly in his. She tried to stop or make her fingers uncurl, but her efforts had no effect.

  “This is the edge of my camp,” said Nir, releasing her hand and watching the stars fade back to silver. “I’m going to let you try to leave now, but you should know that you won’t be able to do it.”

  Miranda glanced about and saw no border of any sort. She took two steps away from him. Then she simply stopped and stood. Nir saw the stars begin to sparkle on her wrists and ankles as her hands balled into fists, her face becoming more and more appalled as she fought to make her body do her bidding.

  “You’re just wearing yourself out,” he explained. “You can’t take the next step. The Seven Stars Spell forces you to obey reasonable commands and keeps you from causing harm to us or to yourself. And because of the character I wrote on your foot, it’s also keeping you in camp. It’s almost dawn,” he added, looking up at the sky. “Time for the morning meal.”

  He led her away again and found her a comfortable place to sit. Miranda didn’t notice where she was, and when he left her, she didn’t realize why he left. She could think of nothing but her own battles within herself How could she see so clearly what she needed to do and then just not do it? When he returned and put a piece of bread into her hand, she didn’t even glance up. She was reliving the terrifying feeling of being unable to direct her own movement.

  Nir wasn’t surprised that the human girl wouldn’t eat. If she had been raised to be that monster’s wife, he must have fed her for years, just as Nir himself had given food to Arianna. He frowned, upset, thinking of Arianna taking her food from that unnatural paw.

  “You need to realize that your food will have to come from others now,” he pointed out. “He’s not feeding you anymore. He’s feeding his wife.” But she didn’t acknowledge that he had spoken.

  The elf lord considered what to do while he ate his bread and bowl of stew. Perhaps, he thought uncomfortably, she felt that it was humiliating to take food from an enemy, a stranger not from her own race. Certainly none of his maidens would have accepted food from a human man. And explaining matters to her was out of the question. That would be bad enough when the time came, he was sure.

  Nir finished his stew and set the bowl aside moodily. He couldn’t think of any satisfactory way out of the dilemma. But he didn’t intend to let her starve. She would have to give up her self-destructive plans. He touched the stars at her wrist that held her prisoner. “Eat,” he commanded.

  I won’t do it, Miranda decided; I couldn’t eat if I tried. But her hand obediently closed around the bread. She found herself taking a bite, chewing it carefully, and swallowing. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t stop. No humiliation she had ever faced from her family, no cruelty of her mother’s had been as awful as this: to be ordered around like a cart horse by magic. She covered her face with her hands and burst into distraught tears.

  She’s crying again, Nir thought angrily, and this time it’s my fault. He thought about the things he had done that night, deeply ashamed of himself. He and the goblin King were squabbling over a pair of children the way dogs fought over bones. Neither one of them, he concluded in disgust, was interested in the children themselves, they both just wanted to use them to gain some advantage. And this human knew it, even if Arianna hadn’t; she kept talking about the great lords and their plots. Maybe she had known somehow that a few hours of freedom would be all she would ever have. Death would have been her only escape because she couldn’t defend herself. Now she was trapped in another lord’s plot, and even death was forbidden.

  But at least this time, he reflected, she wasn’t with the barbaric goblins. The elves knew her for what she was, a child who still needed care. It didn’t matter what his magic had planned for her in adulthood; right now he could look after her as a civilized person should. Nir felt relieved at the thought. It made him seem less ruthless.

  “Don’t
cry,” he coaxed, putting his arms around the poor girl and smoothing that glowing red hair. “You wanted someone to do what was best for you. It’s best that you eat, and it’s best that you stay safe in camp. Don’t cry anymore.”

  His mild commands had no effect. Furious over his presumption, Miranda wanted to jerk away from his grasp, but she couldn’t do it. It seemed as if crying was the only thing she could control. Nir, listening to her, struggled with his own unhappy thoughts. These two things echoed through his life from his earliest childhood: a human woman crying bitterly and his own voice begging her to stop.

  Miranda’s sobs began to subside. She was too tired to keep on crying. The night had been so long and horrible. She felt that it was years since it had begun.

  The elf lord continued to stroke her hair, admiring its unusual beauty. “When will you be eighteen?” he asked.

  Miranda heard the question in a doze. “October ninth,” she answered automatically. With some time and effort, Nir calculated that into elvish.

  “The first autumn moon,” he translated, “a month and a half away.” That was very soon, he thought gloomily, and he wished his magic made more sense to him. First betraying Arianna to the goblins, and now this: it was no wonder that he rarely had the heart to dance with his elves.

  “Time to sleep,” he said, looking up at the brightening sky, and Miranda stumbled after him as he guided her through an elf’s prepay ration for sleep. It was unlike the process in a house or in the goblin palace, and she found it very awkward. Then he led her to the tents, set up under the thickest cover of trees where the least amount of sunlight could disturb them.

  He glanced down at the hand he held as they walked along together. The stars sparkled and faded, sparkled and faded, as she tried in her exhaustion to resist. It seemed so pointless to Nir.