Close Kin (18 page)

Seylin dreamed that morning that he
was back home again. He was sitting with Marak in the library, and he was
telling the goblin
King all about his
travels. He described the five elves and their hor
rible life, their
appalling ignorance, their pitiful clothes, and their struggle to find food.

It felt so good to be back home,
talking over his troubles with a real friend. Mara listened carefully and asked
him endless questions. Particularly about the women. Most particularly about
Sable.

"She doesn't know any magic at
all, you say," the King mused. "But it sounds like none of them knows
very much. A camp lord's
daughter! One of
the high families. Tell me, does she have dark
eyes?"

"No,"
said Seylin. "They're blue like Kate's, but her hair is
black."

"Oh,"
said Marak, disappointed. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe
the
line has lost its strength. Black hair, though. I wonder what her parents
looked like. No father; no mother, either. For any of them, come to think of
it. Doesn't that strike you as strange?"

"The life
must be too hard," said Seylin. "They must not live
very
long."

"Maybe so. And
she's never been married, you're sure about
that.
Why not? What did they say about it?"

Seylin frowned.
"Thorn said she was a coward. He said she wanted to stay a child."

"It takes courage to
marry?" asked the goblin King. "What is
that supposed to mean? What sort of life does a child have that
would be worth keeping? That other girl's still a
child by their stan
dards, and she works as hard as any of them."

"I think it must be some sort of
insanity," said Seylin, "to cause
an
injury like that to her face. I've never seen such massive wounds in
my
life. I'm surprised she survived it."

Marak combed his hand through his
shock of striped hair, remembering his first wife.

"There are
all kinds of insanity, I suppose," he reflected, "but the insanity I
know doesn't match this case. Sable's patient under abuse,
and
she's using a good brain to observe and draw accurate conclu
sions. That goblin comment is remarkable! You're
not fooling her at
all. Truly insane people are not pleasant to be around,
and they're a lot of work to care for. No, Sable's useful to them, that's why
they keep her alive."

"Poor
Sable," sighed the young man, shaking his head. The
goblin
King glanced up in sudden interest.

"Poor
Sable?" he echoed. "Have you taken a fancy to that one?"

Seylin grimaced at
the bluntness of the question. "She's really ugly," he protested.

The King studied
him thoughtfully. This from someone who
had
grown up with goblins. "She probably doesn't have to be," he
suggested calmly, but Seylin didn't look
enthusiastic. "All right,
what about the other one?"

"Irina?"
asked Seylin. He grimaced again.

Marak continued to study his young
subject. Perhaps all elves
were this
squeamish, he considered. No wonder their marriages
were arranged years
in advance.

"Never
mind," he said. "Things are bound to improve. You're just getting to
know them, after all. Maybe they'll grow on you."

The young man lapsed into silence.
The goblin King watched him. "Was there something else, Seylin?" he
prompted. "Anything else you wanted to tell me?"

"Not really," Seylin
replied. "Only, just -- I just wondered ... Marak, how is Em?"

The goblin King grinned
affectionately at that miserable face. Then he broke into an amused chuckle.

When Kate walked
into the water mirror cave a minute later and shook her sleeping husband, he
still had a pleased smile on his face.
He opened his strange eyes and focused on her slowly,
squinting up
from his hard
resting place. He pulled his six-fingered hand from the
surface of the mirror. Water dripped from five fingers,
but the sixth
was completely
dry. He continued to smile absently as he flexed the
fingers. They were so cold. He was so stiff He'd been
there for a
long time.

"Marak," said the
astonished Kate, kneeling beside him, "what on earth are you doing on the
floor?"

Elves, thought the goblin King in
satisfaction, looking at her. Pretty things, elves. Particularly this elf. Life
is good, he thought.

"Kate," he said agreeably,
"some spells are harder than others." He winced as he shifted on the
stone floor. She watched him in concern.

"It's time for my magic
lesson," she reminded him, "but do you want to wait until
later?"

"Yes, I do," he said,
climbing slowly to his feet and leaning on
her
as he limped to his workroom. "I don't have time for lessons right
now.

He pulled Seylin's ring from his
finger and studied it fondly. Then he took Emily's ring from its hook and laid
them together in the palm of his hand. He cupped his other hand over them and
whispered softly for a minute.

"I need to meet with Thaydar
immediately on a military matter,"
he
explained to his wife, hanging the two rings back up on one
hook. "Besides, I can't risk you trying to
kill me today, you mad elf
As tired as I am, you might succeed."

Meanwhile, Sable curled up beneath
the sheltering bows of a
yew tree and
pulled Seylin's cloak over her face. She lay awake, think
ing about that
new elf and Thorn's wish, and winced and shifted on
the bare ground. Taken by goblins. A goblin's bride. Please, nothing
so
horrible as that!

Life is good, she thought fervently,
rubbing her cold hands to
warm them. Please
don't let the goblins come. Please let me stay up
here where there are
stars.

Another boring night
was almost over. Seylin studied his map to pass the time. He wanted to read the
camp chronicle, but he didn't
want Sable to
start talking about goblins again. He needed to find a
time to ask her
about that when no one else was nearby.

Rowan opened the
door, letting an icy draft in with him.

"We got that
doe," he said to Thorn. Irina let out a groan.

Seylin followed
the elves outside into the frost and found his little
doe, dead. Rowan and Willow had already tied her feet up
to the tree
branch, and
Sable was capably gutting her into a tub. Seylin
struggled against his feelings of horror and sadness.
That poor little
mother, carrying her
unborn fawn!

"Good work," said the blond
elf to the two hunters. "We're eat
ing
well this winter. Get over here, Irina," he barked as the petite elf
girl
came slouching up.

"Oh,
Thorn, do I have to?" she whined. "Why is it always me?"
Seylin noticed that it was always Sable, too, but the
scarred woman
knew not to argue.

"I'll
help, Irina," said Seylin. Thorn shot him an irritated glance
as
he walked away.

Seylin didn't
know what to do, so Sable had to tell him, and that
made Irina giggle. She couldn't imagine not knowing how
to
butcher. She'd been doing it her whole life.

"I guess
you weren't ugly where you came from, either," she conc
luded. "I wish you were. Then I wouldn't have to
butcher anymore,
or
haul the kindling, or burn the bones, or empty out the guts tub. We
always
have to do that kind of stuff because we're the ugliest."

Seylin studied
her bright, pretty face, her green eyes and golden,
if
dirty, hair. "Irina, what's wrong with how you look?" he asked.
"What's ugly about you?"

Irina's face
clouded over with the unaccustomed effort of
thought.

"Oh, you know," she said
vaguely, "ugliness. But, anyway, I'm not as ugly as her." She
gestured at Sable, who rolled her eyes and kept cutting. This reminded him that
he needed to talk to her.

"Sable, why did you ask me about
goblins?" he demanded. The black-haired elf paused.

"That's
what happened to the woman you loved," she said
shortly.
"You lost her to a goblin. Your band was doing well, and then the goblins
came. It's the only thing that makes sense."

Seylin was
stunned by the conjecture. He couldn't deny it.
Marak
was right: he certainly wasn't fooling her.

"You need
to leave," begged the scarred woman. "You must have
seen
the goblins, but you don't know what they're like. They'll follow
you and find us. They'll capture Irina and me,
and we'll die
down there with them. They use elf women to make monsters.
They -- they breed them to monsters, to make
more. I'm sorry about
the woman you loved. What a horrible way to
die."

Seylin looked down at the meat he was
cutting, thinking of the
woman he loved.
Emily had endless fun with her monster babies. A
few weeks before he
left, she'd been babysitting Bony's twins. The two boys had ram's horns, and
they kept butting heads. The little boys running at each other had looked so
hilarious that Emily had laughed till she cried. Sable's information about elf
women and
monsters was technically correct,
but it wasn't anything like the goblin
life he knew.

"Seylin,
please leave," she urged, "before it's too late for Irina and
me.
Oh, I know, you think we don't have much of a life, but it's a good life,
really. We're free."

"Sure, it is," grumbled
Irina. "I just love my life." She hacked
savagely at the shoulder, carving out strips. "My dress stinks of
blood,
and my hair's all greasy, and I can't even take a bath."

"Don't be
absurd!" replied Sable. "Think what it would be like
if the goblins came. We still have stars. We can look up
and see
the sky."

"Nice for
you," retorted the blond girl. "I don't have time to look up. I've
got all that cloth to weave because Thorn's in a hurry for his
new
cloak. What's stars got to do with it, anyway?"

"Goblins
live underground," explained Seylin. "They live in
what
you'd call large caves."

"Oh,"
said Irina, absorbing this. She pulled her thin cloak
around
herself, leaving a bloody handprint on it, and glanced longingly at her own
cave. "Are the goblin caves warm?" she asked wistfully.

"Irina,
think!" cried Sable. "Don't you understand? You'd be
bred
to monsters, to die having a monster child!"

Seylin opened his
mouth to protest this, but Irina cut him off

"I would
not," she stated complacently. "I'm not old enough to
be
married."

"Fine," said Sable
sarcastically, "for another six months! Irina, you're so stupid!"

Irina just
smiled. That was what they always said when she won
an
argument.

∗ ∗ ∗

"Em, think!
Consider others for once in your life! Stop being so selfish!"

The two women and
three children had been making their way
steadily
toward home, moving from one wayside inn to the next at a
comfortable
pace. The weather was worsening, and Ruby insisted
that the children should be safe in the kingdom, but Emily doggedly
refused
to give up her quest.

"Take them home if you
want," she declared. "I'm staying outside."

"You know I
can't do that. Marak assigned me to guard you."

The door opened, and a very wet Jack
scampered in, wrapped up in a towel. "We're ready to get out," he
announced, hopping up and down. Ruby caught him in her arms and began drying
his hair.