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

“Hello, door!” she called out. “Let me back into the kingdom!” It rattled in consternation.

“King’s Wife!” it boomed. “What are you doing outside? I didn’t let you out.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Kate. “Quick, let me back in. I need to see the King.”

There was a pause. Perhaps it wasn’t a long one, but to the anxious Kate, it certainly seemed to be.

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

Kate started to reply, but a metallic zing made her pause. “Listen to me, little door!” buzzed Charm ominously. “You are endangering my King’s Wife with your stupidity. If you do not open immediately and without further discussion, I will twine myself through your lock and your hinges and throw you down twisted and broken, and the goblins will put in a new door that understands its obligations.”

The door creaked open, rattling sulkily as Kate swept in with the baby, the golden snake twining majestically about her shoulders and the wolf with its pup and riders marching behind.

“I never knew that snake could talk,” muttered the door.

Kate hurried to the banquet hall. She peeked in anxiously, and her heart stopped. Of all the pallets she had left here a few days ago, only one remained, and she knew whose silent figure lay upon it. She ran pell-mell across the hall, the wolf galloping behind her.

“Marak, Marak!” she cried, dropping down onto the pallet and staring, heartsick, at his still face. “Please wake up! You have to wake up now!”

“All right,” he agreed in an amiable whisper, and he opened his unmatched eyes to smile up at her. Looking into those eyes, Kate realized that she had lied to that loud woman after all. Of course she had lost her heart to him right away. For two days she had been thinking of things to tell him, but now she couldn’t think of one. She just stared at him, her heart full.

Marak freed one arm from the blankets and reached up to touch the cut on her cheek.

“I remember that,” he said softly. A metallic zing sounded, and the golden snake was with them once more.

“Oh, King,” hissed the snake ceremonially, “I have bitten a man. He lies in the city of Liverpool, awaiting the King’s Judgment. I bit another man, too,” Charm continued with an unhappy buzz, “but he no longer requires your attention.”

Chapter 14

Marak was ill for months, exhausted from fighting the sorcerer. Unable to go to court, he took care of important matters from his bed, and he continued to rely on Seylin’s help for some time to carry out the Kingdom Spells. He sent Thaydar out to deliver the King’s Judgment on Bingham, but Thaydar returned with the news that the paralyzed coachman had already been killed. Marak was disappointed. The goblin revenge that he had chosen for the young man would have been considerably worse than death.

It was in part Marak’s desire to work the Kingdom Spells that kept him bedridden for so long. Given only so much strength, he preferred to spend it on useful magic rather than on walking. Always practical, he embarked on a review of the King’s Wife Chronicles as a way to use his convalescence. Kate spent hours every day reading to him in her stumbling goblin while the wolf and pup slept by the bed and little Matilda played on the floor beside them. The dwarves were already making her elaborate baby toys, but Til enjoyed playing with the wolves more than anything else. She pulled their fur and disturbed the King’s rest with her laughter until the servants came and took her away.

As soon as he had the strength, Marak erased the Door Spell, judging that he had no right to withhold freedom from someone who had braved such dangers to free him. He asked only that Kate wait until their son’s birth before using her newfound liberty and that she confine her outside visits to the goblin lands. Before, Kate would have been wild at the long wait, but now she was resigned. She had seen enough horror outside to feel content in the goblin kingdom for some time. But she did go often to visit the front door. “I am the King’s Wife,” she would call. “Open up.” And the poor door would have to open. It didn’t try to argue with her anymore.

“Thank you,” Kate would say, “but maybe another time.” And she would walk back to the palace again, leaving the door rattling back and forth in frustration.

Emily was disappointed that Kate had forgotten her almond brittle, but the gift of the little monkey made up for everything. “I never had a pet who had a pet before,” she said wonderingly, watching her monkey cuddle the one-armed mouse. Emily had rather ordinary human looks, but when she went about in bright silks and satins, with her hair done up in ribbons, her hands, arms, and neck covered in jewelry and the monkey and mouse riding on her shoulders, she went as far as an average human could toward attaining a bizarre goblin presence. Certainly, Kate had misgivings when she saw her little sister thus and wondered what their father would say if he could see her.

The wolf mother refused to be given away to anyone. She never left Kate’s side if she could help it, trotting behind as Kate went from place to place and lying down on her feet the minute she stopped. This achieved two important canine goals. First, Kate always knew that someone loved her devotedly, and second, every bright gown received a generous sprinkling of coarse gray hairs. The thin pup grew into a handsome beast in time. Having spent his early months at the side of the convalescing Marak’s bed, he formed a strong attachment to the goblin King and followed him everywhere. Kate, dipping into her educated past, tried to name the pair Helena and Constantine, but Marak persisted in calling his companion Dog, or, when they were both in the room together, Your Dog and My Dog. Kate decided rather disgustedly that this was to be expected from a husband who shared his own name with one hundred and sixty seven of his predecessors.

The goblin King was well by the time the Heir was born. As he had long ago predicted, the birth was a very hard one, and it took all his attentive magic to get Kate through it. “And very lucky you are, little elf, to be married to a goblin,” he told her firmly, “or you’d have gone the way of your mother, her grandmother, and the grandmother’s own mother, I expect.” Kate, pale and sweaty, didn’t open her eyes to acknowledge this smug remark. After the last twenty-four hours, she didn’t feel lucky to be married at all.

“A new Marak!” announced Agatha, bringing over the goblin baby. Kate heard the old Marak give a cry of delight. She reminded herself decisively that she was ready for this moment. Nothing about the son she had had with her beloved husband could possibly upset her. Opening her eyes, the exhausted Kate took one look at her baby and promptly burst into tears.

She didn’t cry because the baby, larger and longer than a human baby, was staring at her steadily with one green eye and one blue eye. His skin was more silvery than Marak’s, and his lips were considerably closer to a rosy color. She didn’t cry about the hair, lying in silky locks around his high forehead, although that was a bit of a disappointment. As the King had predicted, the baby had his mother’s golden hair, but marbled among the golden curls were soft locks of Marak’s own beige. No, it was the right hand, or rather, the lack of it that had the weary and somewhat hysterical Kate bawling into her pillow. From the shoulder to the elbow, the right arm was a chubby baby arm, but from the elbow down it was the forearm and paw of a tiny lion cub.

Marak couldn’t have been more thrilled as he held his newborn son and watched him wave the fuzzy, speckled paw in the air. “What a King he’ll be!” he declared happily to his sobbing wife. He stroked the soft baby locks, stirring their golden and pale curls with a finger. “Kate,” he added with a puzzled frown, “I thought you hated my hair.”

“I do hate your hair,” sniffed Kate indignantly. But then she remembered all the times she had seen him looking at her through those pale wisps or jerking out the ribbon and running his hands through the wild mane as he thought. “Oh, well,” she said with a tired giggle. “I suppose it made an impression.”

“Just look at him,” insisted her husband joyfully, setting their son down on the bed beside her. “What a stunning boy he is, every inch a goblin King! What could you possibly be crying about?”

“But, Marak,” Kate protested, “he has a paw!” She looked at it dubiously. She was somewhat calmer now that the shock was wearing off, but she still wasn’t happy about it.

“And do you remember the last goblin King who had that paw?” demanded Marak. “Lionclaw, the greatest of all the Kings. Marak Lionclaw led the goblins to this kingdom and ended the migration. He was the greatest magician the goblins have ever had. The records say that he was the one who enchanted Hollow Lake to hold up the water. Just imagine,” he exclaimed, “what magic he’ll work with that right hand!” And as his tired wife wiped her eyes on her blanket, Marak played with the little paw, pressing it gently to make the sharp claws extend.

“Look, Kate!” he hooted. “It’s just like a cat’s paw!” And Catspaw was the son’s name from that moment until the day he became Marak in his father’s place.

Publication Info

Special thanks to my editor, Reka Simonsen,

for her keen interest in developing good fantasy for children

and for all her hard work on this book.

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Publishers since 1866

115 West 18th Street

New York, New York 10011

www.henryholt.com

Henry Holt is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Copyright © 2003 by Clare B. Dunkle

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunkle, Clare B.

The hollow kingdom / Clare B. Dunkle.

p. cm.

Summary: In nineteenth-century England, a powerful sorcerer and

King of the Goblins chooses Kate, the elder of two orphan girls recently

arrived at their ancestral home, Hallow Hill, to be his bride and queen.

[1. Goblins—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Sisters—Fiction.

4. Orphans—Fiction. 5. Coventry (England)—History—

19th century—Fiction. 6. Great Britain—History—19th century—

Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.D92115Hol 2003 [Fic]—dc21 2002038899

ISBN 0-8050-7390-6

First Edition—2003

Book designed by Amy Manzo Toth

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. ∞

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Front Flap

She had never screamed before,

not even when she overturned the

rowboat and almost drowned.

But now she screamed, long

and loud, with all her breath.

Hallow Hill has a strange and tragic

history. For thousands of years, young

women have been vanishing from the

estate, never to be seen again. Now Kate

and Emily have come to live at Hallow

Hill. Brought up in a civilized age, they

have no idea of the land’s dreadful

heritage. Until, that is, Marak decides

to tell them himself.

Intelligent, pleasant, and completely

pitiless, Marak is a powerful magician

who claims to be a King—and he has

very specific plans for the two new girls

who have trespassed into his kingdom.

Rear Flap

Clare Buckalew Dunkle

grew up in north Texas, where her

favorite activity was living inside other