The Kingdom - Clare B Dunkle - Hollow Kingdom 01 - The Hollow Kingdom

This time they walked up staircase after staircase. Kate was desperately tired. I promised to do this, she reminded herself sternly; I’m married, and I live here now. But she just couldn’t bring herself to face the thought.

They came up a wide staircase, the steps gleaming like gigantic gold bricks. They struck Kate as rather gaudy. The wide hallway that opened out at the top had a gold floor to match them, and the walls were composed of small, precise geometrical inlays of stone that repeated continually up their surfaces. They, too, were rather gaudy, like something in the palace of an Oriental despot. Great square windows lined one side of the hallway, but only one broad set of doors faced them. Kate could see from her vantage at the top of the stairs that guards stood on either side of the doors.

“This is our floor,” said the goblin King, “the royal rooms. Would you like to see them?” he asked, evaluating her thoughtfully. Kate hastily shook her head, thinking with a homesick rush of her little wooden-floored room at the Lodge, her shoes still in a row under the bed. “No, I didn’t think you would,” he laughed, “since you’re not sleepy.” At the word, Kate felt such a wave of exhaustion come over her that she thought she would drop onto the floor. “I brought you up here to see something else, anyway,” he added more kindly. “Through here.”

Marak turned toward the window to their right and led her out onto a shallow balcony. Kate felt dizzy at the view. They were high above the broad, bowl-shaped valley. Tiny lights twinkled across it, seemingly for miles. Above the valley was a velvety blackness. No, not a blackness, a dark purple. Kate had a sense of lofty space as she stared up into the purple heights.

Marak waved her to a couch between two of the windows. Then he stepped away for a moment, and the light from the windows went out. Kate leaned back against the couch, and Marak sat down beside her.

“How can a cave this big fit under the Hill?” she asked curiously, turning toward him. She couldn’t really see him in the gloom.

“It doesn’t,” he answered, looking down at the white face and heavy-lidded blue eyes, which he could see perfectly. “You’re looking up through the lake. I told you the first time we met that it was hollow.”

Kate stared up at it, aghast. Then she looked down at the twinkling lights in the valley. They looked so pleasant and cozy, blinking away under vast tons of suspended water.

“But what holds the water up?” she gasped.

“Magic, of course. Do you know anything else that could do it? This isn’t our first home, but it’s an ancient one. The elves came to this region millennia ago, and we goblins followed the elves. My palace looks like a building, but it’s more of a subtracting. Originally it was a solid wall of rock between the two parts of my kingdom. Above and behind us, the wall continues, becoming the shore of the lake at the foot of the Hill. Farther up in that wall is the window that forms my water mirror. The same force that keeps the water from pouring into that cavern keeps all the rest of the water from pouring down onto the valley.”

Kate gazed up at the water sky. It seemed to her that it was not so dark a purple as before. She thought sleepily about the strange world she belonged to now. Palaces, hollow lakes, elves and goblins. The twinkling lights spun and blurred in her drowsy vision. Marak folded his arms and patiently waited for her to fall asleep. He could have enchanted her in an instant, but he scorned the thought of inflicting unnecessary magic on her now that she was his wife.

“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.