Close Kin (25 page)

"You see," said Thaydar
grandly to his bride, "that's the kind of
magic we can do." Irina was terribly impressed. All Thorn could
do
was make rabbits.

"Then does that mean I won't
die?" she asked in a small voice. She looked at her goblin hopefully. He
always had an answer.

"My
wife," growled Thaydar with conviction, "is
not
going to
die
in childbirth."

Irina thought about this for a
minute. It wasn't hard to make up her mind.

"Then I want to be your
wife," she announced, "because I don't
want to die like that. When Laurel did, it really sounded like it
hurt."

"You
clever girl!" cried Thaydar admiringly, and that sweet face
beamed up at him.
Behind him, Emily grinned at Seylin and rolled her eyes.

They stopped a
short time later to make camp in a little thicket. Tin
sel
took Sable off to one side and sat down, wrapping her in his cloak.

"No, I can't leave her," he
said when hailed by the other busy goblins. "The last time I relied on the
Leashing Spell, she tried to run off and nearly hurt herself"

Emily and Irina sat in the middle of
camp while their bride,
grooms set up
tents. Thaydar had given Irina a necklace, and Emily
watched her happily
studying it in a small round mirror one of the goblin men had brought with him.

"I left my own mirror back
home," she told Emily. "I wasn't awake when we left. Thaydar says
when we get married I'll have a
mirror so
big I can see myself in it from head to toe, but I don't know
how I'll
be able to lift it. Do you think my present's pretty?"

"Yes,"
admitted Emily, noting that Thaydar had even made sure
to match his fiancee's eyes. He would have been given a
description
of her, of course, but he wouldn't
have had much time to prepare.
Now, that
was clever planning. No wonder he was Marak's top mil
itary man.

"Do you think I'm pretty?"
continued Irina, studying her face in the glass. She looked the same as
yesterday, but yesterday she had
been ugly,
and today she was pretty. She looked anxiously at Emily.
Or maybe not?

"You're
pretty," said Emily dryly. "But you're no genius."

"What's a genius?" asked
Irina curiously. "Oh, wait. Thaydar'll
know."
Emily hadn't foreseen this development, and she didn't think
Thaydar
would be very pleasant about her remark.

"I just
meant," she hurried to add, "that you're not terribly
bright."
She smiled a friendly, apologetic smile, and Irina smiled warmly back.

"Oh, I know that." She
giggled. "Everybody tells me that. But I don't see what the fuss is all
about."

Marak had
stressed to the potential bridegrooms that they be the
only ones to give their captives food. "Elf women
take food from the
hands
of their husbands," he had warned. "If you let anyone else
give their meals to them, it'll cause confusion."
Irina didn't know the
first
thing about this, but she was only too happy to eat what Thay
dar gave her. She gulped it down with relish under the
loving gaze of
her fiance.

Sable understood exactly what it meant
when Tinsel gave her
food, and there was no
way the silver goblin could induce her to eat
it. Taking it would mean
agreeing that he had the right to give it to her. It would mean agreeing to
marriage. She wouldn't take it -- she
mustn't
-- but to turn down food freely given was a special torture for
the
starving woman. Her eyes wandered to it every now and then. She could even
smell it a little.

"That's
all right," he said kindly, laying the piece of bread in her
lap. "You don't have to eat it if you don't want
to, but I really think you
ought to keep your
strength up." And he began on his own dinner.

Keep her strength
up. Of course! If Sable had the chance to
escape,
she would need the strength this bread would give her. Dilemma solved, she snatched
the bread and began rapidly devouring it.

"Sable!"
exclaimed Tinsel in alarm, plucking the bread out of
her
hands. "Sable, that's no way to eat!"

She stared in
shattered disappointment. He'd taken the food away from her. It was true that
Thorn did this whenever she was
incautious
enough to let him, but she hadn't realized that this goblin
would do it. Such a huge piece, too. Her eyes
stung with unshed tears.

"You could make yourself really
ill by bolting your food like that," observed Tinsel. "Here, eat this
slowly." He tore off a bite-sized piece and handed it to her. She gazed at
it dully. So tiny. The tiny piece vanished in a twinkling.

"You didn't chew that at
all!" accused the goblin in dismay.
"Chew
this slowly," he said, holding out another piece, "and I
promise
I'll give you more."

Sable took the
piece and gave it a couple of hasty chews to com
ply
with his demand. He sighed and gave her more.

"Take your time," he said
persuasively. "There's no need to hurry." But Sable thought there
was. What if he changed his mind?
She ate
the next piece as rapidly as she thought he would allow, her
eyes on the
large amount that still remained. She had forgotten that she was supposed to
refuse his food.

The party was distributed in three
tents, with three people to a
tent, and
Sable and Tinsel were in a tent with the stripe-faced Katoo.
She was glad at first that he was on the other
side of her own goblin
because his gruesome appearance still frightened
her a little, but when Tinsel settled down beside her and spread his cloak over
the
two of them, Sable became very upset.
Sharing food, sharing a tent,
and sharing a cloak were all the signs of
marriage in her simple world. She never should have taken his bread. Now this goblin
thought that she was his wife. Tinsel sat
up to rummage in his pack,
and Sable shoved away the cloak.

"Here, let me see your
hand," he said, but Sable ignored him. When she didn't respond, he pulled
her hand out of the folds of her
dress and
rubbed cream on it. In a few seconds, the needle pricks, the
knife
scratches, the cooking burns, and the other scrapes and scars
simply melted away.
Sable stared in fascination as the skin became soft and smooth.

"How about the other hand?"
he asked, and this time she held it out to him, watching as he worked in the
cream. She turned her healed hands and rubbed them against each other. They had
never felt like that in her memory.

Tinsel put the salve back into his
pack and tucked the cloak around them once more. "Sleep well," he
told her, closing his eyes,
but Sable
couldn't sleep. She had known the rules of her world even
when she broke them, and she had known what would
happen if
the goblins ever came. Now
they were dragging her away, but nothing was what she expected. Perhaps their
confusing her like this was all just a part of the torture, but it didn't
really matter. In the end, life
held only two choices for her. She would
either find some way to
escape before she
came to the goblin caves, or she would die having
the monster child of
her new goblin husband.

How could she
escape? Now would be the best time, when they
all were sleeping. If she had a knife, she could cut the
side of the tent
next to her and slip
off into the whiteness of the day. She wasn't
afraid
of the daylight, she had been thrown out into it so often. One
could go surprisingly far on feel alone. If they
had more snow during
the day, her tracks would be gone by nightfall, and
they wouldn't even know which way to search.

She lay for ages listening to the
goblins' steady breathing and
watching the
light brighten through the weave of the tent. Even
under the thick canvas, the daylight made her
squint. Over and over,
she ran her hand along the wall of the tent
beside her, pushing the
seam with her
fingers. If only I had a knife, she thought. If only my
hand were a
knife.

Suddenly the cloth parted under her
fingers, and a bright beam of light stabbed in. Sable shut her eyes tightly and
held her breath.

Slowly she ran
her fingers along the tent wall close to the floor, and
the thick, heavy cloth ripped beneath them. Very, very
carefully, she made a hole that was wide enough to slip through. Then she
stopped
to listen. Not a sound
but the goblins' breathing. Sable slid out from
under
the warm cloak and crawled into the daylight.

She paused outside the tent, trying
to remember her surroundings. Tears streamed from her closed eyes because of
the painful
brightness. Crawling away
between the tents, she moved as quietly as
an elf knew how.

Then her hand
stuck fast. It wouldn't move forward in the snow.
She
couldn't imagine what was wrong, and she couldn't open her
eyes to see. Frantically, she slid it around,
trying to find and feel the
obstacle,
but nothing was there to stop it. Just when she was about to give up, it freed
itself as mysteriously as it had been caught, and she
could move ahead
once more.

Terribly excited, Sable crawled
downhill, feeling for the thin trunks of the young trees. She didn't know how far
the thicket extended, but she would search for a small cave or a patch of fir
woods to hide in. She inched along over the
uneven ground for a few
minutes, and then her hand stuck fast again.

"We need to go back," said
a quiet voice. It was her goblin husband.

Sable sat down and bowed her head,
crushed with disappointment. "You followed me," she said.

"I had to," he answered,
coming to her side. "We're leashed
together
with magic. You can't go more than ten feet away. The spell
is like a
rope that ties our hands together."

Sable rubbed her hand, remembering
the pull on it. Now she understood.

"How
did you cut the tent?" he asked curiously, but she wouldn't
answer him. Tinsel
put his arms around her, but she was stiff and
unresponsive.
He felt terrible for her. The poor elf woman hated him, and he couldn't do
anything to make her stop.

"I'm sorry." He sighed.
"I'm sorry we came and caught you. I'd let you escape, but I don't have
the powder that breaks the spell. They probably knew not to give it to me. I
can't steal it for you because that would be working against the King, but if
there were any way I could do it, I would. I know how much you hate this. I
know you want to be with your own people."

With her own people! Sable sat up with
a jolt. That was what
would happen if she
escaped! Thorn would hunt for her, and he
would find her, too. Now that
the scars were gone, he would marry her, and she would die bringing his child
into the world. Sable imagined for the briefest space of time what that would
mean after all the insults, all the cruelty, and all the hatred that had passed
between them. No torture and no goblin
spells could ever be as hor
rible as having to be Thorn's wife.

"No!"
she gasped, huddled in the goblin's arms. "I don't want
my
own people."

"You
don't?" he echoed, surprised. He could feel that something
had
changed. "Sable, if you'll come with me, you won't be sorry,"
he promised. "I know you don't like us, but
I'll be a good husband
to you. Come back and get some sleep."

"All right," she answered.
But there was nothing else she could say. Life held only one choice for her
after all.

∗ ∗ ∗

Sable
woke up screaming from one of her nightmares. She felt arms
around her and heard
kind words in her ear. For a few seconds, she thought that she was back with
Thorn and all the intervening years had been the nightmare. That evening, she
ate her husband's food
without protest and
responded when he spoke to her, but she didn't
have much to say. She watched the monster warily, trying to see what
things
made him angry so that she would know what to avoid. If Thorn had taught her
one thing, it was to stay out of a man's way. Life with a goblin husband would
be hard enough, but it would be unbearable if he started yelling.