Close Kin (6 page)

Now Seylin
spent weeks combing the elf King's silent forest for
the remains of the camps. He found ancient sites that had
been used
by the elves
for thousands of years, but no sign showed that anyone
had
been near them in perhaps a century.

Failing to find
elves in the forest, he began to spend more time in
the
little human villages that dotted the edge of the elf King's old domain. He
told himself that this was a prudent decision because
the humans might have some information for him, but the fact of the
matter was that he was lonely. Goblins were very
gregarious. They
lived and ate
together, worked together, went on patrol together, and
visited one
another almost constantly.

Seylin had been alone for several
weeks now, and he began to prefer any companionship to that. But because humans
were only out during the day, he couldn't have very much contact with them. In
the twilit evenings, he could sit inside the public houses over a
beer, or he could
change into a cat and watch humans going about their daylight business from the
cover of nearby bushes.

One morning,
Seylin decided to stay up for a while and do some
people, watching. Before dawn, he came to a little town
and found a
deserted shed right next to the
forest. He hid his pack carefully behind some old junk, changed into a cat, and
strolled out into the early morning. He headed down a weedy garden path toward
the
ramshackle old house that his shed
belonged to. Perhaps some people
inside
were awake over their breakfasts, although he rather doubted
it. If the
shed and garden were any indication, they weren't the industrious sort.

"You're a cat now!"
exclaimed a voice behind him, and Seylin bounded into the air. A thin girl
emerged from a bush and pushed back straggly fair hair, her pale cheeks flushed
with excitement. "You're under an enchantment, aren't you?" she
demanded breathlessly.

Seylin twitched
his bottle brush tail as he considered what to do.
The child, only about nine or ten, didn't look dangerous,
and she
was talking about things he understood. His
tail died back to a soft fluff again, and he sat down in the garden weeds.

"Yes, I am
under an enchantment," he confirmed in his high cat,
voice.

The skinny little wraith before him
didn't even blink at this
extraordinary
news, and she didn't look surprised to hear him speak,
either. She just
clasped her hands together and walked up to him, her face ecstatic.

"Oh, I just knew it!" she
cried. "I'll help you if you like. You could marry me when I grow up, and
then you would have to leave me and be locked away in the farthest castle, and
I would wander
looking for you for seven
years, over mountain and valley, and finally
find you about to marry the troll princess, and I would trade my ring
to
talk to you, but you would be in a magical sleep, and I'd sit by you
and cry and say,
"I've sought you for seven years,' and a tear would
fall on your cheek and wake you up, and then the
enchantment would
be broken."

Seylin stared
at the excited little girl with his golden eyes. "That
sounds
like a lot of trouble," he said politely. "I think I'll just stay a
cat, if it's all the same to you."

"Well, you do make a nice
cat," she went on enthusiastically.
"May
I pet you?" "And she sat down beside him and tickled him
under the chin. Seylin started to purr. Usually
he tried not to do this
because it struck him as undignified, but he
couldn't help himself.
After an entire
fruitless month of roaming through the woods, it was
nice to be tickled
under the chin.

"Who enchanted you?" she
asked. "Was it an evil witch disguised as a beautiful red haired woman, or
was it some fairy who
hated your family?
Are you really a prince? Where's your kingdom?"

Seylin puzzled
over this. It was obvious to him that they had
both
studied magic, but from very different books.

"No, I'm not a prince," he
told her. "I enchanted myself I can't change back right now because the
light would hurt my eyes."

"Oh," she said, a little
disappointed. "Most people under
enchantments
are handsome princes." She told him several stories to
prove her point. Seylin listened with interest.
He supposed that they
were possible, but a lot of the magic seemed
terribly impractical.

"How do you know all this?"
he asked. "Where did you learn about magic?"

"My father
told me some of them, and I've read some of them in
books," she said. "My father knows everything.
He used to be almost a prince himself and lived in a richly appointed house
filled with ser
vants
who obeyed his every command. But then he met my mother,
and
even though they weren't supposed to speak to each other, she won his heart
with her enchanting beauty. His evil mother tried to
separate them, and she cast my mother out of doors to starve, but my
wise
and handsome father rescued her and took her away to marry. They should have
lived happily ever after," the thin little girl said
seriously, "but when I was a baby, my mother
wasted away and died,
and my father wandered about with me, penniless
and in terrible
distress. Sometimes he gives
lessons to the little boys in the town, but
most of the time he's too
sick with a broken heart to get out of bed, so I have to tell them to go
away."

∗ ∗ ∗

The two unlikely
companions spent a happy morning together. The little girl talked, and Seylin
listened. Her name was Jane, and she confessed that she was unhappy about this
because she had never read a single story about a beautiful maiden named Jane.
Seylin
decided that she wasn't going to be
a beautiful maiden anyway. She
was a plain little thing, scrawny and a
bit dirty, with clothes that were too small for her. It gradually dawned on
Seylin that he was enjoying her company because she reminded him of Emily. This
depressed him, and he remembered that he hadn't had any sleep.

"I need to leave now," he
said. The little girl looked crushed.

"Don't leave," she implored
him. "I can't bear to say good-bye.
You
haven't told me anything about your enchantment yet, or what it's
like
to be a cat. I still don't know if you eat mice, and I don't know
how to find your kingdom. I don't know why you put
a curse on your,
self, and why your
eyes would hurt if you didn't. You can't just go!"

Seylin was tired from walking night
after night, and he hadn't met any other human who seemed to care for magic.
Perhaps this
little girl could help him, or
perhaps her father could. He would rest
up for a day or two. He'd
probably have to walk for months yet.

"I really
do need to leave," he said, "but maybe you'll see me
again. Don't tell anyone about me, or I won't be able to
come back."

"Oh, I won't," she promised
solemnly. "Just like the lovely golden-haired princess who couldn't speak,
and the witch smeared
blood on her face, and
her husband the king came and said, 'Where's
our baby?' and she couldn't
say a single solitary word."

"Something like that,"
agreed Seylin. What little he'd learned
about
the local human kings had sounded rather grim, but he'd had no
idea that their lives involved so many strange,
magical misadventures.

That night, Seylin came down to the
house in order to look through the windows. He had been taught to shun human
magic as
evil, but the little girl's stories
didn't seem evil. Perhaps her father was
like the goblin scholars, a man
who knew all about the history of human magic without actually practicing it
himself Such a scholar
of magic would
surely have some idea whether or not elves lived in
the area.

But Seylin found his investigations
very disappointing. The dilapidated house was a mess inside, and Jane's father
didn't appear
to be either handsome or
wise. He sat at a dirty table, unwashed and
unshaved, his clothes
rumpled and threadbare, drinking one mug of beer after another until his
unhappy face took on a dreamy, stupid look. Seylin watched him for a long time,
remembering Jane's odd
stories. One thing,
at least, was clear to him now: heartache was not
the disease keeping
this human in bed in the morning.

The
next day, Seylin studied the whole area before coming out of
the
forest. He saw no one stirring, however, except the little girl herself
She
was thrilled to see him again and asked scores of questions. Some Seylin
answered, but many others he didn't. He refused to tell her any,
thing
about his kingdom or his King. He did tell her, however, that he
was
looking for elves. Jane was very interested in this, but, unfortu
nately, she didn't
know where any might be.

"Why do you have to look for
them?" she asked. "Don't you know where they live?"

"Not
anymore," Seylin answered. "I hope I can find some of the
ones
who moved away during the elf harrowing. That was the last war with the
goblins," he explained.

"Goblins?"
asked Jane eagerly. "Do you know any stories about
goblins?
Tell me a story about an elf and a goblin."

Seylin loved
history and knew dozens of stories. He thought for
a
minute or two.

"Here's something that happened
during the reign of Marak
Redeye and Aganir
Immir, the elf King named Storm Wind," he
said. "One night,
the young sister of a great elf lord, the lord of the Third Belt Star Camp, went
out with her maidens to dance beneath the moon. She loved more than anything in
the world to dance, and she wanted to go to a certain hill where she could
dance so high
above the quiet forest that
she felt as if she were in the sky itself. But
the goblins had watched
this camp, and they knew her habit. When she and her maidens were far from
home, they overpowered her guards and surrounded the terrified elf girls. Then
the goblin King himself came, and he let every one of her maidens go, and all
the guards, too, but the lord's sister he took underground to be his own
bride."

"And was
he fearfully ugly?" asked Jane in a hushed voice. "Was
he
scaly and horrible?"

"Let's
see," said Seylin, trying to remember. "No, he wasn't
scaly. He had bright red eyes, and he was covered all
over with short
black fur, like a
panther." Jane shivered deliciously.

"The poor elf
bride was horrified at her new life in the goblin realm. Gradually her fear
died away, but it left behind nothing but sorrow. The goblin King brought her
gold and jewels, rich clothes and finery, but none of it mattered to his
unhappy wife. She begged
instead to be allowed one
more night of dancing under the moon,
but
this he couldn't grant her. She was under a spell never to leave the
goblin
caves and never to see the night sky again.

"The goblin
King's Wife began to pine away, and nothing
seemed to help. Again and again, she begged to dance just
one more
night, and again and again, her husband
denied her pleas. Finally,
she fell very ill,
and then the poor elf girl couldn't have danced even
If the King had let
her.

"The goblin King sent a message
to the lord of the Third Belt
Star Camp:
'My wife and your sister lies dying in my kingdom. Send
an elf musician
to play for her so that she can get well.' When he
learned this, the elf lord grieved bitterly, and he called all the musicians
in his camp to ask if any was brave enough to go
down into the
goblin caves. One after another turned pale and refused to
go, but a
young elf man agreed to make that
terrible journey. He went with the
guards
past the great iron door and into the huge palace, and came at
last to
the room where the poor girl lay, so ill that she didn't even know another elf
had braved that trip to come help her.

"Then the goblin King sent his dying
wife a beautiful dream of
the full moon
shining above the hill where he had first found her. The
young elf took
his pipe and began to play to the sleeping girl. The lovely, haunting elf music
flowed into her dream, and she began to dance. So ill that she couldn't even
lift her own hand, locked away from the sky that she loved, still, for that one
night and in that one
dream, the elf girl
danced and danced, far from the goblin King,
who sat by her bedside and watched
the look of joy on her face. The elf piper never stopped playing, and the elf
girl never stopped dancing,
till a
full night and day had passed, and evening had come again.