Read Online In The Coils Of The Snake by Clare B. Dunkle - Free Book Online

crypt. Maybe he still
walked in some world beyond hers, but she didn’t know how to reach him.
Lost. Hopelessly lost. He was gone from
her, too. She could see his dead face before her eyes as the lovely
melody drifted away.
    The elf lord turned
to Seylin. “An elf cross, but more powerful than most of the members of my
camp,” he commented, and then stopped short as she burst into tears.
    “Kate!”
cried Emily, coming to hug her, and she put her head on Emily’s shoulder and
wailed with grief. Seylin stared at her, aston ished,
and the goblin King looked stunned.
    “What did you
do?” demanded Catspaw angrily. “What kind of magic was that?”
    “I don’t know,”
said the elf, at a loss. “I tested her. I don’t know why it would make her
cry.”
    “A test!”
exclaimed the goblin in a fury. “Do you expect me to believe that? I’d like to see what you would do
if I did that to one of your people!”
    “I’m sure you’ll
have your chance,” murmured Nir bitterly.
    “It may be an
aspect of elf healing,” suggested Seylin, “some thing only an elf could do for her. She needs to
cry. She hasn’t cried over your father at all.”
    “Why would she
cry over the goblin King?” asked Nir.
    “Because he’s
dead,” snapped Marak Catspaw in an icy rage.
    “Because
she loved him,” answered Seylin a little more helpfully.
    Nir’s frown
deepened. He was genuinely distressed. He hadn’t meant to make the poor woman cry. Stars above, her life must have been
abominable enough without that. He wondered what had hap pened. So often he didn’t understand his own magic. He turned back
to Seylin, ignoring the outraged goblin King.
    “I
won’t touch the others,” he promised, and he and Seylin walked
on, leaving Kate sobbing in her sister’s arms.
    The two elf women
stood together, and Tinsel had his arms around them both. Irina gazed at the
ground, plucking nervously at her bracelets.
Sable was glaring across the truce circle at the band of elves, and Nir turned
to see what had attracted her attention. Willow stood there with his arm
around his own wife. The elf lord turned back to look at Sable again, his gaze
thoughtful.
    “These two are
Irina and Sable, both brought to the kingdom thirty-one years ago,” Seylin
announced.
    “I
know their history,” he responded quietly. That they were elves
he knew without needing to test them; he could feel it about them. And yet they
weren’t his people. They didn’t even look like elves in their shiny, fussy dresses. Nir looked at the big gray goblin who
was holding them, at his bright silver hair and blue eyes. Here was elf blood,
too, he could tell, warped into grotesque ugliness.
    “Sable is from
the high families,” said Seylin. Nir stared at her angry, fixed expression and the faint scars on her cheeks. “They
both showed up as pure elf when their blood was tested.”
    The elf lord turned
to Seylin, struggling to control his agitation.
    “Their blood?”
he echoed, a gleam in his dark eyes. “How could blood go through a test?”
    “The
goblin King mixed a number of ingredients with the blood,”
Seylin answered. “I could show you the spell.”
    “You mean he
bled them,” said the elf angrily, walking away from the enslaved women. “Tell
me, does all goblin magic involve slicing open elves?” And he eyed the
King with cold distaste.
    “Does
all elf magic involve reducing women to wrecks?” coun tered
Marak Catspaw with a steady glare. Nir glanced at the goblin King’s mother. She
wasn’t crying anymore, but she still huddled in her sister’s arms. He felt
himself growing even more angry at the inexplicable wrongness of it all.
Something bumped into his leg, and he looked down into the face of Sable’s
little granddaughter. Trina beamed up at him, her arms around his knees.
    “The pages
laugh at me and say I’m an elf,” she said, “so I’m coming to live
with you now because you’re an elf.”
    Nir knelt down, eye
to eye with the