Close Kin (11 page)

"He should have been."
Ruby's voice was unsteady. "He had
tremendous
gifts. He spoke and read elvish like one of their own schol
ars, 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 bor
ders 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," whis
pered 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 fiance'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 goodbye 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. She 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 any, thing 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.

Seylin
roamed about the countryside throughout the autumn, travel
ing
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 harrow
ing
had taken place. No more vicious war had been waged by the
goblins in all the previous millennia. As Seylin
went farther and far.,
then 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 pecu
liar
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 facades 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 inhabi
tants 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 cent
uries 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
worldviews 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
lifestyle
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 proba
bly
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."