The Hollow Kingdom

by Clare B. Dunkle

  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.

  Court proceedings took place in goblin, but Marak stopped what he was doing every now and then to tell Kate what was going on. She looked at the work drawings with him and used her small stock of goblin speech on the dwarves standing nearby. Dwarves were terribly dignified, and Kate’s gentle manner had already won them over. Rings and bracelets covered her small hands, and they were forever bringing her more. Some of the jewelry was magical. Her favorite bracelet was a triple rope of diamonds that sparkled with a clear light whenever she was in the dark. But she found it tiresome to wear so much jewelry. She had never had a taste for it.

  That afternoon they went to Marak’s library. Kate already knew it well. Here were the records from all the previous reigns since the founding of the kingdom under the Hill. Marak showed her the King’s Wife Chronicles. Fascinated, she paged through the old leather-bound volumes full of different handwriting styles as one King after another took up the tale. She couldn’t read them because they were in goblin, but Marak read a few entries to her. Then he worked on some chronicling of his own as she continued to look through the old books. While scholars did a certain amount of the record keeping, the Kings recorded much of their reigns themselves.

  Kate became interested in one particular story that she found. The handwriting was easy to read, and she found several script characters that she knew, including the King’s Wife Charm, repeated quite frequently. So far, the charm had been nothing but a painted snake to her, and she wondered what it could have done.

  “Marak,” she said, coming over to him, “tell me about this one.” The goblin King glanced up from his own page to study the story for a minute. Then he looked at her with a shrewd smile and shook his head.

  “Let’s read it tomorrow,” he proposed cheerfully.

  Kate’s bad mood instantly returned. “You’re keeping something from me,” she accused.

  “I certainly am,” he agreed. “That story. Today’s not the day for it.”

  Kate sat down across from him. “You’re treating me like a child,” she protested. “I went with you to court, and you promised to read these in return. I hate being read to like a child, and now you’re hiding some secret as if I really am one. This is a story about a King’s Wife, and I’m a King’s Wife. I ought to know what it says.”

  The goblin King studied her for a minute. “All right,” he said calmly, putting aside his own work, “but you’re not happy about being a King’s Wife right now, and this story isn’t going to help. This is about the elf wife of a King who was four feet tall and dark green. She lived for only three years, and she tried to kill herself six different ways. The charm always saved her. One time she threw herself off our balcony into the lake valley, and the snake wound itself around a hook in the palace wall as they fell by.”

  Kate stared at him in horror. That poor woman, trapped just like she was. “Did she finally succeed?” she whispered.

  Marak scanned the pages. “No,” he said. “She died when the Heir was born. There were complications. He weighed twenty pounds.”

  Kate shivered, the hair rising on the back of her neck. Those hideous, deformed babies. Marak continued to read. “This is nice,” he added. “He’s written a tribute to her determination and resourcefulness.”

  Kate jumped to her feet. “You people are just ghastly!” she cried. The goblin King shook his striped hair out of his face and looked up at her with a smile.

  “Which ones of us?” he asked.

  “All of you! You wife stealers!”

  “I didn’t steal you,” replied Marak complacently.

  “But you’re just like that other King!”

  Marak laughed as he shut the book. “No,” he retorted. “I’m not green.”

  Kate was beside herself. “You know what I mean!” she shouted. “You’re one of them! The descendant of all those wife-stealing Kings!”

  He thought about that as she marched from the room. “I’m the descendant of all those wives, too,” he mused, but Kate had already slammed the door.

  She roamed the stone gardens alone that evening, unable to calm down. When she went looking for her sister, she found that Emily had left with Seylin. Mindful of their elf blood, Marak let them go outside at night, provided they stayed leashed together. He trusted Seylin to come home, but he wasn’t so sure about Emily. The distraught Kate took her sister’s absence as a personal insult. How dare she come and go while Kate was trapped down here! Feeling betrayed, she headed for the front door.

  “Hello, King’s Wife,” boomed the door politely but a little unhappily. It knew what these visits meant.

  “Hello, door,” said Kate decisively. “Please open up and let me through.”

  “But you’re the King’s Wife,” protested the door.

  “Yes, I know that,” Kate said. “Please open up.”

  “But you have the symbol on you,” the door added.

  “I know that, too.” Kate could feel it. The symbol was starting to smart.

  “I can’t open for the King’s Wife,” explained the door ponderously.

  “Not even if I was on the outside?” Kate asked in sudden inspiration.

  “But you’re not,” the door cautiously answered.

  “But I could be,” Kate insisted.

  “How?” asked the door. And this Kate couldn’t answer. She put her hand to her forehead as the letter began to throb.

  “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I was on the outside,” she suggested.

  “What does that mean?” the door wanted to know.

  “It means that I say something, and then we argue about it,” explained Kate. “Assuming I’m on the outside, would you open then?”

  “But you’re not,” said the door triumphantly.

  “But I’m saying it for the sake of argument!” shouted the frustrated Kate.

  “I’m arguing,” said the door.

  Marak came up then and put his arms around his harried wife, pulling her hand away from her forehead and replacing it with his own. Under his soothing magical touch, the pain slowly began to ebb.

  “Do you know what’s wrong, Kate?” he asked, holding her. “The same thing that was wrong last month. There’s a full moon rising outside, and it’s dancing night for the elves. You’ve known it all day, and it’s making you miserable.”

  Kate started to protest that she wasn’t an elf, but the longing for that full moon overwhelmed her. She thought of it rising above the forest, riding up th
e vast sky, silvering everything it touched with its beautiful light. The goblin King felt her droop in his arms, exhausted and discouraged.

  “Poor little elf, locked up underground,” he said kindly. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”

  Kate lay in the darkness, trying not to cry. He’s right, she thought unhappily. He didn’t steal me. “Marak?” she said softly, turning toward him. He laid his cheek against her hair.

  “What is it?” he asked quietly.

  “Do you write about me?” she asked. He nodded. “What kinds of things do you write?”

  “The same sorts of things as the other Kings,” he said. “What you love about your new life, what you hate.”

  “What do I love?” she wondered.

  “It hasn’t been very long,” he answered, “but I think you love coming with me to my workroom.”

  Kate thought about that. As the realm’s greatest magician, the goblin King worked magic all the time, whether he was healing illness, supporting building projects, or making sure the correct weather occurred. Sitting on her high stool, Kate watched him preparing and mixing things, and he showed her odd bits of magic as he studied and practiced. She enjoyed the magic; it was one of the things she was starting to appreciate about her unusual husband. The workroom was like a refuge to her. It was almost the only place in the entire kingdom where no one was watching her.