Chapter Twelve

The elves moved to their autumn camp, a thick patch of pine forest nestled against steep bluffs that blocked the biting wind. A brook came springing down the nearly vertical slopes, jumping the rocks in waterfalls and rapids. At a level with the tents, it became calm water and gurgled along its way again.

The elves were still wearing their sleeveless green clothes, but now they wore their green cloaks as well. Igira had made Miranda a new outfit in preparation for winter. The dress had long sleeves and a longer skirt, but her legs were still bare. In the winter snows, the women wore brown leggings, but it wasn’t time for them yet.

Miranda wasn’t used to being outside in cold, wet weather. She had enjoyed walking in the summer rains, but the autumn rains were another matter. She wore her winter clothes while the elves wore their summer clothes, and she still found the lengthening nights uncomfortable.

Soon after they had settled into their new home, Nir went hunting, and Sable hurried into camp.

“Miranda, you’re in danger,” she said. “We’ve learned that the elf lord is insane, that he killed his own wife. He controls you completely with those stars, and there’s no telling what he means to do.”

“That’s not true!” protested Miranda. “Nir didn’t kill Kara, his magic did. He was terribly upset about it.”

“What difference does it make if he or his magic killed her?” inquired the elf. “He thinks that he’s kind and good, but the people around him suffer. The Guard is watching the camp, and they’ve noticed that you can go outside the boundary with the women. The next time you go, the Guard will help you escape.”

“Nir always orders me to stay near one of the others,” observed the girl.

“Then point her out, and the Guard will capture her. You can follow her back to the kingdom.”

Miranda shook her head. “I won’t do it, Sable. I know you’re not lying, but I don’t believe that Nir would hurt me.” She hesitated. “I might as well tell you the truth. I love him, and I want to stay here.”

“You love an elf man?” exclaimed Sable. “Miranda, you’re nothing but a slave! You don’t mean a thing to that lord!”

“That’s not true,” replied Miranda steadily. “He feeds me and hunts for me; he shares his tent with me. He spends more time with me than he does with anyone else.”

“Charming,” said Sable coldly. “But that will stop in another two weeks, when the full moon comes back. You don’t understand. To the elves, you’re a child right now, so you have to live with someone. You don’t have a fiancé to live with, so the elf lord is keeping you with him. But as soon as you’re eighteen, you’ll be a woman: you’ll live like a widow and have a tent of your own. Then the elf lord won’t have to worry about you anymore.”

Miranda felt stunned. Nir couldn’t just cast her aside. After all, she mattered to him. No, she reminded herself, heart sinking, he had said that she was important to the elves. She just wanted to think that she was important to him.

“Why can’t I stay in his tent?” she asked in dismay.

“You’ll be ready for marriage at the full moon,” said Sable. “If you stayed in the elf lord’s tent, that would mean you two were married, and he’s not about to marry you. Elf men never marry human women. They can’t even have children together.”

Miranda thought about that, and her world became a bitter, cheerless place once more. It wasn’t that she expected Nir to marry her. She had just thought that he would always spend time with her. But of course—he was just looking after her, taking care of a homeless child. It was like him to be that considerate.

“I understand,” she sighed. “I know I’m a slave. But I don’t believe he’s insane, and I love him. I want to stay here.”

“Did you know that he’s turned you into a weapon to kill goblins?” demanded the elf. “If you held a goblin’s hand long enough, you’d burn right through the bones. You need to give up this pretty dream, Miranda, before his ‘magic’ kills you, too. Try to find a reason to leave camp.”

Nir returned from the hunt to find the human girl in tears. “That goblin elf was here again! What did she say to you?” he demanded.

“Nothing that matters,” Miranda assured him. She tried to smile, but her eyes were miserable, the way they had been when she had talked about being cursed. Nir was too upset to stay and look at them.

He stalked out to the south guard post. Hunter stood there, whistling quietly, having just relieved Sumur. Nir felt his skin crawl and mentally located the unnatural rat crouching in the bushes nearby. How he hated goblins!

“We need to hunt again tomorrow night,” he said. “I won’t be able to take my next turn. Tell Sumur that he and Willow can hunt for us at the three-quarter moon.” He felt the rat sit up in its hiding place at this news, its whiskers quivering with excitement. “I can’t stand it!” he exclaimed passionately. “It makes me positively ill. Don’t tell me you can’t feel that!”

“Feel what?” inquired Hunter, looking around.

“That!”

A great, twisted shape erupted from the bushes directly in front of the blond elf. Hunter had a confused impression of round eyes and long floppy ears before the creature loped away through the trees.

“Oh, that!” he gasped once his heart restarted. “Of course I noticed that.”

“This forest is full of goblins now, night after night,” said Nir grimly. “The treaty means nothing at all. They’ve talked to Sika again, and now she’s crying. The goblin King must have realized why she’s here, and he means to turn her against me. If we give that monster another month, the elves will be finished. I have to find out what to do!”

“Just out of curiosity,” said Hunter, “why is the human girl here?”

But the elf lord wasn’t listening. He stood motionless, eyes closed, rapt in the deepest concentration. After a minute, his right hand grew incandescent, brightly skeletal. The bones shone as if they were made of light, the skin that covered them glowing dusky pink.

Nir opened his eyes with a joyful laugh. “I can stop them!” he cried. He reached out to clasp Hunter in an ecstatic embrace, but the blond elf stepped back nervously.

“Good—good for you,” he stammered, eyeing the luminous hand.

“We’ll be rid of these monsters once and for all,” Nir continued in excitement. “I tell you, Hunter,” he added, shaking a finger at the elf, “they’ll see who they’re dealing with!”

Hunter shied sideways and then turned to see the boulder that he had been leaning against transform itself into a spiky mass of deep blue delphiniums. “I say,” he said anxiously, “do you mind terribly not waving that hand at me?”

“Did you want something?” asked Nir with absentminded good humor. “I’m sorry. It’ll have to wait.” And he disappeared between the trees in the direction of the retreating goblin guard.

The night was cold and blustery. Depressed, Miranda retreated to the elf lord’s vacant tent and curled up on her pallet, reading his spell book by the light of her diamond bracelet. She didn’t know all of the words, but the goblin that she had learned was not a sorry waste of time after all. The magical characters shared by the two races apparently had the same meaning.

Lying on her stomach, she paged through the big old volume. A spell for preventing worms in deer. A spell for preventing cough in humans. Wonderful, she thought dully. I’m one of the livestock. A spell for producing apples in winter. Not that they’ll cook those apples into anything tasty, she reflected. Their food is simply terrible. A spell for traveling by cloak. By cloak? Mildly cheered, Miranda thought of climbing onto one and using it as a flying carpet. A spell for keeping humans inside the boundary. Her heart fell into her toes once more. She shut the book and pulled her own cloak around herself, closing her eyes.

Much later she became aware that someone was shaking her. “Sika, wake up,” said the elf lord’s soft voice. “I need your help.”

Miranda sat up, blinking. It was dark in the tent. It was always dark, she thought sadly. The only thing that brightened her endless night was the elf lord’s stunning appearance. He knelt by her, his beautiful black eyes shining in the light of her bracelet. “Sika, I need your help against the goblins.”

She stumbled after him through the windy forest. Her cloak whipped behind her and caught on passing bushes. “Against the goblins?” she asked, her brain foggy with sleep and misery. “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing that will harm you,” he replied, walking rapidly and guiding her awkward progress.

Miranda thought about what Sable had told her. “Nir, I don’t want to help you fight goblins,” she told him worriedly. “Why should I?” But the elf lord made no answer.

They came to a perfectly round hill rising out of the woods. The night was moonless, and clouds hid the stars, but Miranda could make out a line of tall, straight ash trees climbing the hill in a curve. Nir led her along a path that lay at their roots, spiraling up the steep slope. The whole dark forest spread out below them.

“Now, do you see the water shining over there, under the stem of the Leaf?” he asked.

Miranda shook her head. “I don’t see any stars,” she told him “The clouds are in the way.”

“Oh, of course they are.” He stood in thought for a moment. Then he lifted his hand, and the night sky went into turmoil. The clouds boiled like froth on a kettle, churning in wild undulations. They split apart and slid rapidly away, revealing the white glitter of stars.

“Now, you see the stem of the Leaf,” he continued as if nothing of importance had happened. “That water beneath it is the brook that passes our camp. I want you to walk back to camp on your own, following the brook upstream. Don’t you think you can do that?”

The shock of Sable’s message, the heavy sleep, and this magical upheaval in the sky had a strange effect on Miranda. The elf lord no longer looked friendly and familiar in the weak light of her bracelet. He was an inhuman, inexplicable presence in the dark, and he frightened her.

“Nir, I don’t want to,” she faltered, drawing back. “I don’t want to help you do something evil.”

“They are the ones who are evil,” declared the tall elf decisively. “They have no business here in my forest. I want you to walk back to camp. That’s all I ask.”

The girl shivered in the black torrent of wind that was pouring over the brow of the hill. “Is it true that you’ve turned me into a weapon that can kill goblins with my bare hands?” she asked.

The elf touched the stars at her wrist and looked down at her. “Yes,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not something I’m asking you to do.”

“You could,” she insisted, and her voice was thin. “You could order me to kill them, and I would have to!”

“Sika,” he said, “the goblins mean to destroy us. All I’m trying to do is to keep that from happening. Why do you listen to them?” His voice was pleading. “Why can’t you trust me?”

Miranda looked up at that pale, perfect face and thought about how much she loved him. “Can I really trust you to do what’s best for me?” she whispered. “What I need, and what I want?”

He looked at her in silence for a few seconds. Then he stepped away. “No, you can’t,” he said sadly. “I want you to walk back to camp now.” And he turned and disappeared into the night.

Miranda’s first feeling was panic. She had never been left alone in the dark. Even if she couldn’t see very far, she could always hear voices talking and laughing in the gloom. Usually some sort of music was playing as well. It filled up the darkness and made it safe.

Now she was all by herself on unfamiliar ground, and she could hear nothing but the rushing of the wind. It was an alarming sound, empty and powerful, with no sympathy for one lonely human. Miranda looked at the white pinpricks of stars, the black forest below her, the strange hilltop she stood on, with its ghostly procession of trees. I don’t belong here at all, she thought desperately, and she started down the path toward the distant elf camp, stumbling, running. Then she stopped abruptly.

Why does he want me to walk this way alone? she asked herself, very troubled. How will my taking a walk on my own help him to fight goblins? Maybe he knows that the Guard will come out to greet me and try to take me back. Maybe he’s waiting nearby, and he means to kill them.

She sat down at the foot of one of the ash trees, in a drift of slippery, crackly dead leaves. What should I do? she thought miserably. Catspaw didn’t marry me, and I’ve turned my back on the goblins. I’m important to the elves. I can’t imagine Nir hurting me, but he admits that I can’t trust him. Maybe his magic is making him do something cruel.

Marak, what should I do? she asked the darkness. I thought you knew everything, but now you’re lost and empty, like the wind. I never wanted to be anywhere but with goblins while you were alive. Now I can kill goblins with my bare hands, and they’re supposed to be the ones who are evil.

“I told Cook I was learning goblin,” announced the little girl, “and she said goblins are evil fairies who steal little children and boil the meat from their bones.”

“Did she really?” asked Marak. He glanced up, an angry gleam in his eyes. “And is this woman still on the staff?”

“Do you have any idea,” Til demanded furiously in return, “how few really good servants will come out to this wilderness? That woman is a treasure. All my guests are jealous. Mrs. Hempstead actually complimented her turtle soup.”

Marak considered her dispassionately for a moment. Then he bent over his little girl once more. “Miranda, goblins aren’t fairies, and they’re no more evil than anyone else. And they would never boil children. That’s revolting.”

Young Miranda had not really understood that it was revolting and had harbored secret hopes that the goblins might do something about her brother Richard. “Are you sure?” she asked in disappointment.

“Yes,” said Marak. “I am the goblin King, and I rule all the goblins.”

Miranda stared at her strange guardian, deeply impressed and terribly excited. “Oh, I wish I could tell Cook!” she exclaimed.

“All right, you can,” promised Marak with a chuckle. “You tell Cook that you know the goblin King, and he wanted you to tell her that goblins aren’t evil fairies and that boiling children is a disgusting idea. And I’ll tell you what,” he added carelessly, fishing a coin out of his pocket, “give her this and tell her it’s a present from the goblin King.”

The next afternoon Til had company down for the week, and Cook was deep in the middle of preparing a meal for twenty guests. She and her girls were filling meat pies when an intruder wandered into the kitchen.

“I know the goblin King,” announced Miranda.

“Do you,” grunted the busy woman, flicking her eyes critically over the child. Miranda behaved well, but the servants didn’t like her. She had a poise that no little girl should have, and her eyes watched them coolly as if she knew secrets.

“The goblin King wanted me to tell you that goblins aren’t evil fairies,” declared the young messenger, but her audience did not reply. “And the goblin King says,” Miranda continued, “that boiling children is a disgusting idea.”

“He can have an opinion, I suppose,” muttered Cook, reaching for a giant bowl of filling.

“And he wanted me to give you this,” added Miranda, holding up a coin. Cook stopped and stared at it. Then she wiped her hands and reached for it. The girls came over to gawk at it, too. It was solid gold.

“It’s a present from the goblin King,” said the little girl sincerely, and Cook’s face turned irritable again. She tucked it into her apron pocket and went back to work without a word. Miranda felt distinctly disappointed.

“May I have a tart?” she asked.

“No,” snapped Cook. So the child turned with a sigh and wandered back out of the kitchen. As the door shut, she heard an outburst of excited, disapproving chatter. Then she heard a muffled bang.

Til was quite bitter over it the next time Marak came to visit. “Quit and gone in the middle of an afternoon, and the rest of the kitchen staff, too!” she shrilled. “Strange creatures leaping out of aprons and popping like fireworks, and my hunting party completely ruined! Mrs. Eliot will tell everyone, and I’ll never live it down.”

The goblin King just laughed until he cried.

Miranda laughed, too, savoring the memory. No, Marak’s goblins weren’t evil. The elf lord was beautiful, but she would never help him hurt a goblin. She wouldn’t go back to his camp. Sable was right, and he himself had confirmed it: he didn’t care what happened to her. He had given her no order, so she was free to do as she liked. She would go back to the goblin kingdom.

But you love him! protested a part of her brain as she studied the stars to try to find her way. I do, she confirmed, feeling a painful stab of grief, but I’m not going to help him do his killing.

Miranda set off along the pathway that spiraled down the hill, the straight sentinel trees making her uneasy. She hurried toward the forest that began at the foot of the slope, and the ragged tangle of woodland blocked out the stars as she made her way into its depths. But here was something new: a clear path in the underbrush right at her feet. Miranda welcomed its tidiness in that leafy chaos. A few more feet, and an ash tree loomed ahead of her. Starlight shone down on her again. Another ash tree past that one, and another, in a gentle curve. Miranda stopped in confusion. She was climbing back up the hill.

This time she walked slowly into the dim forest, turning around frequently to keep an eye on the hill behind her. The thick boughs of trees closed in over her, and the forest swallowed her up. She crept along, making a direct path for herself, gauging the angles from trunk to trunk. The next trunk was straight, with an ash tree’s diamond ridges. Stars broke through the vine-hung gloom. She was walking up the hillside path once more.

Spirals played in patterns inside the girl’s dazed and desperate brain. This spiral could loop around on itself, she decided. Very well, she would abandon the path and escape its devious tricks. She went sliding and scrambling right down the face of the hill. She felt it level off, saw the uneven edge of forest ahead of her, and ran under its branches. The next thing she knew, she had run right through the black fringe out into starlight again. She was climbing the steep hillside before she could even stop.

The elf lord found his human huddled at the foot of the bottommost ash tree, her face a study of bewilderment and distress. He knelt down by her side and put his arms around her.

“I’m sorry that upset you,” he said. “It was wrong to frighten a child like that, but I didn’t know how else to test this spell.”

Cold and miserable, Miranda nestled into the warmth of his arms.

“That’s all I am to you, aren’t I?” she said. “Just a child.”

“Of course you are,” he said kindly. “I’m not like that fur-handed monster.”

“But I’m only a child for two more weeks,” she said with a sigh. “Then you won’t have to take care of me anymore.”

Nir was puzzled by her unhappy expression. “I thought you wanted to be a grown woman,” he pointed out.

“Not anymore,” she whispered. “I’m glad I still have two weeks.”

“I don’t blame you for feeling sad,” he said sympathetically. “At the very end of your tragic childhood, you’ve finally found someone to take proper care of you. It’s too cold for you here. I’ll take you back to camp.”

Miranda let him help her up and lead her through the endless shadows. “I wasn’t going back to camp,” she confessed wretchedly.

“I know,” he replied. “I’m sorry for tricking you. You can see that I don’t trust you, either.”

The next night, Nir left camp to go hunting. He didn’t hunt deer, but he found exactly what he was after. As Sable came slipping through the trees, he stepped out to confront her.

“Stop!” he called. She yelped in fright, but she stopped. “You’ll tell me what I want to know,” he said with stern satisfaction, walking up to her. “You’re an elf, so you don’t have a choice. What did you tell Sika-—Miranda—last night that’s made her so unhappy?”

“I told her that the goblin King has arranged for her escape,” retorted Sable, turning away from him and staring at the ground. “I tried to convince her to take advantage of it.”

“You tried?” echoed Nir in some surprise. “Why did she need convincing?”

“She loves you,” muttered Sable reluctantly. “She wants to stay with you.”

“The human girl loves me!” exclaimed the elf lord incredulously, and he gave a triumphant laugh. “That’s dealt a nice blow to the goblin King’s plots for her, hasn’t it? Tell me, how did you try to convince her?”

“I told her what you elf men are like,” snapped Sable, “that you have no feeling at all for her, that you’re just waiting until her marriage moon to throw her out of your tent. I told her how dangerous you are, that you’re insane, that you even killed your own wife.”

The elf lord’s face went white with indignation and fury. “How dare you say such things! How dare you bring harm to your own people!” “The goblins are my people, not the elves,” replied Sable. “I’d never live among people like you who have no feelings for others.”

“What would you know about the feelings of elves?” cried Nir. “Fine! You’ll have what you want. Look at me,” he commanded, putting his hand on her head, and she looked up at him for the first time. “And listen,” he said in a low, firm voice, looking into her eyes. “I tell you that you are not an elf. You are a goblin instead. Go back to your King and say that the elf lord tells him that his spies won’t plague me much longer. I’m giving him fair warning: if I catch him meddling with Sika again, I’ll murder any goblin I find. Now get away from here. And don’t let me see you again.”

Sable shook all over, seeming to shrink before his eyes. When he released her, she staggered backward and fell onto the damp ground. Mindlessly, automatically, she crawled away from him, but her eyes never left his face. Torn between grief and disgust, Nir watched her go, the elf that wasn’t an elf. Then he turned and walked back to camp.

Hunter was waiting for him by the tents.

“Some tracker you are!” he scoffed, his blue eyes bright. “I caught my quarry long ago, and she’s already flayed and carved.”

“So’s mine,” sighed Nir. “Please gather the others. I have to talk to them.”

Miranda was sitting by Galnar, listening to his violin. Half the camp was dancing to the music, but she was too unhappy to dance. Before Sable’s warning, she would have wandered the camp boundary to watch for Nir to come back from hunting. She wouldn’t let herself do that anymore, but she was still impatient for his return. She had only two weeks to spend with him before it was too late.

The elves all gathered under the shelter of the bluffs and listened to their lord. Miranda couldn’t understand his rapid elvish, but she heard different names mixed into it, and a thrill of excitement went through the crowd. She wandered over to Hunter, who stood to one side.

“What’s he saying?” she whispered. Hunter turned with a bewildered expression and leaned toward her, cupping his hand around his ear. “You heard me!” she whispered. “I know you speak English.” He smiled indulgently at her and patted her on the head. She glared at him. Elves are so silly, she thought.

Nir finished speaking, and the assembled elves dispersed, heading off on different errands. The lord walked up to his friend and his prisoner. “Hunter, Sika is your responsibility in my absence,” he said, “but she can stay alone in my tent. Sika, follow his orders as you would mine. That is to say, reluctantly,” he added, a smile lighting his dark eyes.

“In your absence?” asked Miranda anxiously.

“Yes, I have to leave tonight,” he said. “There’s a spell I need to work. I’ll be back at the full moon.”

“The full moon!” gasped Miranda. “No! That’s too late! Take me with you,” she begged.

“I can’t, but I’ll be back soon,” he promised. Soon, thought the stricken Miranda. As soon as I’m a grown woman, and you stop worrying about me. My last two weeks, gone. She wandered away from the men as they talked, and crept into his empty tent.

Miranda didn’t let herself cry. She lay facedown on her pallet, overwhelmed by misery. She wished she were asleep, unconscious, dead. She heard Nir crawl into the tent and felt him sit down next to her, but she didn’t move.

“Sika, you asked me last night if you could trust me to do what you want,” he said. “I don’t know the answer. I have to do what’s best for the elves, but I’ll make you happy if I can.”

“Catspaw told me the same thing,” she muttered, “that he would give me anything to make me happy, anything. But he wouldn’t give me the one thing I wanted, and neither will you.”

“You can’t be sure of that,” he replied. “Tell me what you want. I’ll give you anything that’s in my power to give.”

Miranda felt again the despair of Marak’s death and the loss of her tidy future. Her dignity, her hard work, even her perfect manners—nothing in her life had any meaning.

“Very well,” she said with bitter fatalism. “If you really want to know, I want you.” A lump rose in her throat at the pitiful hopelessness of it all.

“You want me?” said the elf lord softly. “That’s good. That’s in my power to give.”

Miranda was just breaking into tears when she heard him. She sat up slowly, wiping her eyes. “But,” she began. “But—you can’t, you know. Elves don’t marry human women.”

“This elf does,” replied Nir with a smile.

“But you don’t want to marry me,” she insisted helplessly.

The elf lord looked puzzled. “Maybe humans think backwards,” he remarked thoughtfully. “You’re telling me things that you couldn’t possibly know without asking questions about them first. Telling me I can’t marry you. Telling me I don’t want to marry you. How do you know that, Sika? Have you asked?”

She stared at him. “Do you want to marry me?” she whispered.

“Of course I do,” said Nir. “Why do you think we’re always together?”

Miranda’s world had fallen apart a couple of times, and she had tackled the wreckage with vigor. But her world hadn’t gone from horrible to splendid in a second. She didn’t know what to do. Marak had raised her to do her duty for the admiration that it would bring. He had taught her to defend herself against cruelty and disappointment—and not to trust anyone but him.

“Do you love me?” she breathed.

“Yes,” he answered. “Not that I understand you very well. You’re so different from us. The elves all belong to me, but you don’t. I suppose that makes you very appealing.”

Miranda thought about this in complete amazement. The elf lord was remarkable, inhumanly handsome, unlike anyone she had ever known. It had never occurred to her that she might be unlike anyone he had ever known.

She wanted to prove to herself that this was really happening, so she reached out and took his hand. She could feel her face beaming with joy, and she didn’t know what to do about it. After a lifetime of hiding her emotions, she felt exposed by her own happiness. She didn’t dare to look at him. He would surely see what she was feeling.

Nir leaned his head against hers and looked at her hand holding his, wondering what she was thinking. “This engagement has seemed very long,” he reflected. “I’m glad it will be over soon. I’ll finish my magic, and we’ll dance on the night of your marriage moon. We can survive until then, don’t you think?”

Miranda looked up, and he smiled at her. She smiled back and felt a lightness sweep over her, as if her heart were a little flake of ash that had just flown up the chimney. But a second later, she came back down to earth with a thump. She remembered that he was leaving.

“I want to come with you,” she said. “You took Kara on your trips.”

“And so I would you, if I could,” said Nir, “but this is a difficult trip: constant walking, constant magic, too cold and hard for a delicate human who can’t see in the nighttime woods.”

Miranda thought about Kara and remembered what Sable had said about elf men and human women. “Maybe your magic is getting rid of me,” she exclaimed in distress.

“No, it’s not,” said the elf lord reassuringly.

“But I—I probably—well, maybe certainly—can’t have children, either.”

Baffled, Nir studied her anxious expression. “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all,” he remarked. “Please worry about something that makes sense to me, like whether or not it’s going to rain tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to have a child years from now. That seems very strange.” He put his arms around her and held her close. “I have to go.”

She walked with him to the boundary. “Can’t you kiss me good-bye?” she begged.

“No,” he said, smiling, “but I’ll kiss you hello.” And then he walked away. She stood at the edge of camp and watched him disappear into the blackness, the stars at her wrists and ankles sparkling as she struggled to follow him. How pointless, she thought bleakly. How completely irrational. Her new guardian came to stand beside her.

“Hunter, he’s gone!” she exclaimed in despair.

Hunter thought up several witty replies to this but looked at her face and decided against them. “You’re right,” he concluded. “But you’ll be glad he’s gone. I’ll feed you better.”

“How’s that?” Miranda asked absently. “You’re not a lord.”

“That’s just it,” the blond elf assured her. “No special privileges for Nir. He says that’s what ruined the elves in the first place, excess and caprice at the top. But I always eat better than everyone else. A little excess and caprice at the bottom never hurt the elves.”

“Elf food is terrible anyway,” said Miranda. “I don’t see what difference it’ll make.”

“Not elf food!” insisted Hunter. “Just Nir’s food. No, you take it from me, all dried deer meat is not the same. It may look the same, it may smell the same—”

“It may taste the same—” said Miranda, smiling.

Hunter drew himself up indignantly. “Oh, go ahead, mock a serious subject!” he declared. “That’s all you humans think about anyway, making silly jokes.” Miranda laughed, which had been Hunter’s goal all along. He was very pleased with himself. He was sure the elf lord could still hear her.

Miranda went to the tent alone that morning, happy that the spell would shortly force her into sleep. She awoke with a start, knowing even before her eyes opened that something was wrong. Then she heard the shouting.

She scrambled out of the tent. Elves were screaming, running, frozen in confusion, stunned, and terrified. But the shouting was in English. She ran toward the sound.

Just beyond the boundary stood sixty goblin soldiers, the finest and most hideous of the King’s Guard. In front of them stood the goblin King, shouting for Nir.

“Come out of there, elf lord!” he called. “Don’t make me wait all night. We’re not here to hurt your elves, I promise. We’re just here to kill you.”