Free Close Kin by Clare Dunkle Page A

before her eyes.
This was one place, she thought, where the legendary grace of the elves really
would have come in handy.
    She came to a
big round room. In the center stood a large hexago nal piece of furniture carved from the native rock. A
six sided pyra mid formed its
core, raised on a slender column about three feet from the
floor of the cave and surrounded by a hexagonal ring of stone benches. Emily
walked around it, wondering what it was for. Only when she sat down on one of the benches and turned to face the center
did she understand. Each face of the pyramid formed a triangular writing desk, angled to bring the pages of a book
comfortably close to the reader. A
lip at the bottom kept the book from sliding to the floor. Six scholars
could sit around the pyramid and study their books at the same time. This must
have been the library!
    Emily jumped up and examined the
room, her goblin light lead ing the way. Above
the center of the pyramid gleamed a silver globe, but whether it was
suspended from the ceiling or simply hung in space,
she couldn't determine. A faint light came from it, joining her flame to
illuminate six long, narrow fissures that rose in a shallow spiral pattern,
circling the walls. Emily puzzled over them, running her finger down the slanting cavity of the nearest one. It could almost be a bookshelf, she decided, carved
into the rock, if one didn't mind that
the books would not be level. The upper ones would lean against the lower ones, rising in their shallow
curve. A scholar would need lots of strength to pull out the books
closest to the floor -- or the proper magic. But the angled curves of books
would appear to float up the walls in a charming dance.
    Not so much as a scrap of parchment
remained in any of the curving shelves. Emily was disappointed. She supposed
that Ruby was right, and why shouldn't she be? The goblin King himself had
supervised their removal. Returning to the door, she stumbled over something. A
cloth covered bundle lay under one of the benches. Emily pulled away the bulky
cloth and examined her find. It was a leather-bound book.
    Wrapping up her
discovery, Emily hurried from the room. Once again, she had to creep down the dangerous passage by
the cascading waterfall. She tried not to imagine herself swept away by the
rushing water and drowned in some subterranean
tunnel. Any other race would have cut steps
into the rock, but, oh, no, not the elves. Every, thing had to be
perfectly, unnaturally natural.
    Ruby had lit their supper fire near
the semicircle of holly trees, facing the open vista beyond their narrow
valley. Stars were just coming out in the
evening sky. Emily walked up slowly, studying her treasure and trailing
the heavy cloth. She couldn't speak elvish, but goblins and elves shared a script of magical characters. Most nouns and
verbs were represented by a symbol that looked and meant al, most the same thing to an elf or a goblin, even
though it didn't sound the same in the two different languages.
    "What does the character 'ugly'
mean to the elves?" she wanted to know. "I'm finding it
everywhere."
    "That's the
elvish word niddug. It means 'goblins.' Humph!" snorted
Ruby, stirring up the fire. "We have words for them, too." Then she
turned around in surprise. "What do you have there?"
    "Something the ugly goblins
forgot," announced Emily in triumph. "I found an elvish book. Look,
it has the symbol for goblins on almost every page," she said, sitting
down next to the teacher. "And here,
on the first page, is the number four, so it must be a vol ume of a
set."
    Ruby examined the
pages, dumbfounded.
    "Em!" Her
voice was a whisper. "You've found Mouse's book! That's her elvish name,
Lim, on the first page."
    "Mouse?
Who's Mouse? Someone named Four? I'd hate to have a name
like that."
    "She was the fourth baby. It's
so rare for an elf woman to have that many
children that those babies are always named Four. But the goblins never
called her that. Marak Blackwing nicknamed her