The Kingdom - Clare B Dunkle - Hollow Kingdom 01 - The Hollow Kingdom
“Where did the elves come from?” she asked softly.
“From the First Fathers, like the goblins,” Marak replied. “The First Fathers had no bodies and no young, but they wanted to make a race of their own. They probably intended to found one race, but they couldn’t agree. The First Fathers of the elves wanted to take only what was beautiful to make their children, but the First Fathers of the goblins wanted strength. Our Fathers thought that if a creature had a powerful eye or a claw, then it should be used, but the Fathers of the elves couldn’t endure such irregularity. The elves must be beautiful,” he remarked, studying the sleepy face beside him, “even if they can’t defend themselves.”
“What’s that?” Kate murmured. The purple darkness above her had lightened to violet. Now a dark silver circle began to shimmer in the sky. Kate sat up to look at it. It seemed to wobble and shake about, high above her. As she watched, it brightened to a luminous opacity.
“It’s the sunrise from my kingdom,” Marak told her. “My mother liked to watch it, so I thought you might enjoy it, too.”
The violet became cobalt. Gradually, the silver circle faded, and the color changed and became more transparent. It formed a sky she never could have imagined, a sky of the darkest, clearest blue, and everything below it was bathed in a shifting twilight. She looked down at her lap. Under the light, her red skirt was dark purple, and her hands, a bluish gray. They seemed to be detached from her, as if they belonged to someone else.
Kate thought longingly of that sunrise on the shore of the lake, of the pink and gold clouds and the birds singing. The same sun, the same lake, but now she was underneath the water. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest. I promised to do this, she thought, closing her eyes. I live here now. Her head rolled back on the couch as Marak watched her closely.
“When I became King,” he said quietly, “the last known elf had already been dead for fifty years. Now I have several strong elf crosses in my kingdom. I wonder if the elvish race is reviving.”
Kate didn’t hear him. She was fast asleep, her young face still worried and anxious. Marak studied her for a long minute, touching the angry burn on her forehead. Then he picked her up carefully and took her in to bed.
The next evening, Kate went out in public for the first time since the ceremony. Sitting by the King in the banquet hall, she surreptitiously watched all the goblins openly watching her. Their bizarre shapes and sizes took away what little appetite she had. Emily sat beside her, terribly impressed with her sister’s new appearance. Kate was wearing a loose gown of blue silk that pleased her much more than the awful wedding dress, but she felt unhappily that it did no good to try to look nice. Everyone just stared at the coils of golden snake visible above the neckline. All the unwanted scrutiny made Kate nervous.
Marak warned Emily not to make any threatening moves toward her sister. “Otherwise, the snake will paralyze you, and then I’ll have to deliver judgment on whether you live or die,” he teased. Emily thought that she would love to have such a snake. She had hoped for her own, but Marak told her that only Kate got one.
Kate watched the goblin King pile up food on her plate. Some of it was vaguely recognizable, like the flat bread. Some of it looked very unfamiliar, like the skewered chunks of meat.
“Where are the forks?” she asked, looking around.
“Forks are absurd,” he scoffed. “They insult your food. They make it think you’re killing it twice.”
“But I can’t eat without a fork!” Kate exclaimed, distressed.
“Really!” Marak laughed. “I’ll bet that you can. I’d be very surprised if you gave up eating at such a young age.” He ate heartily and surprisingly neatly with his hands, using the bread as an edible utensil. Kate nibbled at the bread and pushed things around experimentally with it. Everything tasted unusual, and most of the food had a rather strong flavor.
“What kind of meat is this?” she asked cautiously. Marak grinned, understanding her concern.
“Goblins eat sheep for the most part,” he told her, “and we never eat a female animal. In part because our own females so often can’t have children, the beast goblins cross out to all kinds of different species. We view any female as a mother, a sacred life.”
“That reminds me,” interrupted Emily. “When are you going to have your baby, Kate? Soon?” Her sister turned bright pink, embarrassed to discuss such a topic in public. Marak raised an amused eyebrow at his young wife’s distress.
“It could be soon,” he answered for her, “but that’s not very likely. It’s not so easy for goblins to have children. Married couples spend a lot of time trying and hoping, and eventually things work out. That’s the way it is for the Kings, too. My parents were married for ten years before I was born, and I’ve read of fifteen or even twenty years of marriage before the Heir is born.”
“Twenty years!” said Emily in horror. “I can’t wait that long.”
Marak picked up Kate’s right hand and rubbed his thumb over the skip in the knife wound. “Neither can I,” he said thoughtfully.
Marak brought up the subject again when he and Kate were alone. She was sitting on the tall stool in his workroom, watching him make salve. “Humans have the easy life,” he told her, grinding herbs. “Many humans can have a child a year. But goblins and elves don’t reproduce nearly that easily, and the King has the hardest time of all. In order to pass his magic on to his son, he has to find a wife from outside his own race, and it’s not enough just to marry her. He has to become interested in her and look for traits in her to admire. The way the King thinks about his wife affects the way the Heir is formed, so if he has a strong wife and he cares about her, his son will be a better King. It’s the goal of every King to have a son greater than he is. Often the marriages don’t work out that well, but that’s the idea.”
Kate thought about this while he fetched and measured ingredients. It struck her as rather one-sided. “What about the way the wife thinks?” she demanded indignantly. “Don’t I contribute something to all this?”
“Of course,” answered Marak, much to her surprise. “The best Kings are the sons of wives who care about their new people. There are traits about the son that will surprise the father, but they’re things the mother appreciated—about herself, her husband, or goblins in general. And the better the wife settles in, the sooner the Heir is born, so you do have a big part in the process.”
“Did your mother settle in well?” asked Kate.
“Oh, yes.” He laughed. “Not that she wasn’t homesick at first, like you, but soon she was marching all over the kingdom, looking for adventure. She turned the place upside down. She talked the bird goblins into trying to take her up over the valley in baskets and persuaded the tall goblins, the ones who got you lost, to carry her for rides. More goblins were bitten for endangering the King’s Wife in my mother’s first ten years than in the whole previous century. Half the time my father didn’t know where she was. She settled in, but she didn’t settle down.”
Kate felt instinctively that she was unlikely to be this sort of King’s Wife. “If the things I appreciate show up in my son,” she asked, “why would I cry when I see him?”
“Because your husband is a goblin,” explained Marak, stirring the salve, “and your son will be a goblin, too. In spite of the constant crossing out, the King is the most goblin of his entire race. And goblin means asymmetrical—you’d say, deformed—and full of unusual animal traits. The Kings are known by their strong traits: Marak Bearpelt, Marak Batwing, Marak Birdclaw. The beast goblins bring the traits into the goblin race as they cross out to different animal species. Once a trait comes in, it can show up anywhere. That’s how a goblin from the high families, who never marry animals, can have the fangs of a leopard or the wings of a bird. And there are even traits that exist in no species alive, just from all the odd magic at work.
“Because of all the possibilities, there’s no way to predict what the magic will do. After all, it’s not a conscious process. Something you admire may be exactly what causes your son to have what you would call a terrible deformity. My father loved my mother’s eyes, and my mother loved my father’s eyes.” Marak grinned at her, his unmatched eyes sparkling. “So I have one of each.”
Three months passed. Kate struggled to come to terms with her new life. She had agreed to her marriage, but she hadn’t realized just how long life could be. She had dealt bravely with loss before, but the loss of her entire world was beyond anything she had imagined.
The goblin King was very aware of her misery; indeed, he had expected it, and he did what he could to try to help her. When she woke up screaming from horrible nightmares, he took the nightmares away, and when she lay awake, restless and anxious, he sent her to sleep with magic. When she cried, he held her patiently, which was the best thing that a great magician could do for a crying wife. Kate found to her relief that she had been right: being kissed by an ugly goblin was not really so bad; in fact, it was one of the few things about her new life that she began to enjoy. The other was sleeping. She would have slept all the time if she could have. The nights seemed very short, but the days were terribly long.
Kate woke out of a dream about Hallow Hill one morning and couldn’t recall where she was. “Good morning,” said Marak, and her view resolved itself into the stone ceiling of their bedroom. Disappointment overwhelmed her, and she closed her eyes tightly. A lump rose in her throat.
“Or maybe not a good morning.” He reached out for her. She buried her face in his arms, hiding from another long day under the earth. “Come on, time to get up,” said her husband. “I have court this morning.”
Kate shook her head, her arms around his neck as he started to turn away. “You said the King’s Wife is more important,” she whispered.
Marak studied her pale, sad face. “Much more important,” he said, and he bent to kiss her. “All right. We don’t have to get up just yet.”
Later that morning he came into her dressing room, ready for court, and found her still sitting before her mirror in her robe. In her old life, she had never wasted time getting ready. Now there didn’t seem to be any point in hurrying. He took the brush from her and began working on her hair. Kate watched him in the mirror.
“I should put my hair up,” she announced. “That’s what married women do.”
“Put up your hair!” exclaimed Marak. “Why not just cut it off! That hair,” he added pensively, “was the first thing I noticed about you when I saw you walking away from the truce circle.”
Kate stiffened, remembering those horrible nights when she had known someone was watching her. In fact, Marak had often been standing right beside her in the shadows, amused at her pathetic attempts to see in the dark.
“That’s just your elf blood talking,” she said spitefully, “noticing a pretty thing like hair! A goblin King should have been looking for strong traits in a wife.”
“Oh, your hair is very strong,” he laughed. “I think it’s magical. I’m sure when our son is born, he’ll have your hair.” And he began brushing again, perfectly serene. Kate scowled into the mirror.
“How are people supposed to know I’m married if I wear my hair down like a girl?” she asked indignantly.
“By looking at this?” he suggested, pointing at the snake around her neck. Misery flooded Kate as she thought about the snake and all it represented. But I did this for Emily, she reminded herself, and she loves living with the goblin children. Maybe our guardian would have killed her by now.
Emily was a page, one of about a hundred likely children from the high families. They lived on the pages’ floor, had lessons from a variety of masters, and took turns serving at court. In spite of her elf blood, she was proving hopeless at magic. As the two nongoblin children among the pages, she and Seylin were inseparable. Emily admired Seylin tremendously, and he had never before been admired. He still divided his time pretty evenly between being a cat and being a boy, in part because Emily was more impressed by his exploits when he performed them as a cat.
A little later, Kate sat in the banquet hall, ignoring her breakfast. I’m surrounded by monsters, she thought bleakly. Monsters everywhere.
“Kate,” said the goblin King, “do you know why today’s harder than yesterday?”
“What do you mean?” she asked listlessly.
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” he replied, unperturbed. “The last couple of weeks haven’t been so bad. Today’s very bad, and I’m wondering if you know why.”
Kate’s homesickness welled up inside her until it hurt like a physical pain. “Em and I had done chores all day,” she whispered, “lessons, needlepoint, housecleaning. And we were finally finished. We were going up to the tree circle to watch the stars come out. We had just walked to the door, and that’s when I woke up.”
The King drank his tea with a thoughtful expression. “You haven’t had nightmares in a few weeks,” he mused, “but it would probably be a good idea to take away your dreams again. They aren’t helping.”
“No, it’s all right,” said Kate, feeling ashamed of her childishness. “I just got up on the wrong side of the bed.”
Marak laughed. “Sides of bed aren’t your problem, Kate. Poor little elf. It’s sad, really. The very things that make you a perfect King’s Wife make it harder for you to be happy.”
“I’m not an elf,” said Kate softly.
“When you tell me what you miss,” Marak observed, “you always tell me elf things: stars, flowers, walks in the forest. My mother was a human, and the things she missed were human things: her father, her horse, Christmas dinner with the family.”
“Did she tell you that?” asked Kate, interested in something at last. Marak noticed it and put down his teacup.
“No,” he answered. “I read Father’s notes about her after he died.”
“Why would your father write about your mother?” Kate wanted to know.
“All the Kings do. They keep their wives’ histories in the King’s Wife Chronicles. I think it’s forty-seven volumes now.” Kate was intrigued. He studied her thoughtfully. “Would you like to see them?” he proposed, and she nodded. “Then do me a favor. Come with me to court this morning, and I’ll read you some entries this afternoon.”
Kate looked away. She knew he only wanted to distract her. He usually found some excuse for keeping her nearby on very bad days. Part of her was grateful for this, but another part was resentful. She didn’t really want to feel better. But she knew it was the best thing, and besides, she was curious about the chronicles.
“All right,” she said with a shrug.
She went to court with him and sat on his throne, which he never used. The crowd of sumptuously dressed goblins cheered her entrance, as they always did, and that perked her up a little. This morning Marak was working with the dwarves on building plans. Dwarves liked to build constantly in addition to their mining, and one of the hardest tasks of any goblin King was finding new projects for them without wrecking the beauty that previous generations had produced. Marak had them building a series of terraces and balcony gardens up the almost sheer sides of the lake valley in order to increase the goblins’ arable land. This offended the dwarves’ sense of aesthetics. They did it, but they insisted that all the ramps and stairs connecting the balconies be decorated with elaborate traceries of wrought iron.
