Читать книгу The Elvenbane - Andre Norton - Страница 8

Amazing, Alara thought, pulling delicately out of the memory. She found it very hard to believe what she had just seen: the greed, the selfishness, the completely self-centered personality. Even at their worst, the Kin stood together!

The woman was only interested in her own promotion, not in anything that happened to any of the other girls. She went to her Lord, not only willingly, but eagerly. All of them did.

As far as Alara could tell, the concubines were all like her. There wasn’t a single sign of rebellion or unity there.

Alara blinked dazedly. In the past few heartbeats she’d learned more about humans and elvenkind than she had in years. The woman’s memories were so strong – and the pull of her mind well-nigh irresistible. But the temptation to allow herself to be pulled back in was too much; there was so much she was learning about classes of the humans that the Kin had never been able to approach, like the concubines and the gladiators.

The woman was a treasure trove of information; with what Alara was gleaning from her, the Kin would be able to infiltrate elven society in the form, not of other elves, which was chancy and sometimes dangerous, but in the forms of the invisibles –

Best of all would be if they could learn enough to fit in as guards, fighters, duelists –

Her father trained gladiators, Alara remembered suddenly. There was that short memory of the duel in the arena, but there were probably more. She’d have to go look –

Serina half fell into the water, hardly recognizing it for what it was until her arms went under the surface. She plunged her face into the blessed coolness, drinking until she could hold no more, crying tears of relief at the feel of the cold water down her throat, and on the parched and burned skin of her arms and face.

When she could no longer drink another drop, she lay beside the pool, her arms trailing into the water, too weak to move. Too weak even to think.

She was still so hot –

The sun overhead was like the bright lights of the arena, too bright to look at directly …

Today the Lord was garbed in a pure sapphire-blue, and his eyes reflected some of that blue in their depths. Serina thought he was even handsomer than he had been the first time she saw him. ‘In a very real sense,’ Dyran said lazily, as he strolled with his hands clasped behind his back, inspecting Jared’s latest crop of duelists, ‘I owe something of my prosperity to you.’ The men were arranged in a neat line before him, wearing their special leather armor, each set made to facilitate his – or her, there were a few women in the group – weapon’s specialty. They stood at parade rest, like so many sinister statues, helms covering their faces so that only the occasional glitter of an eye showed that they lived.

Serina peered out from under the cover of an old tarpaulin flung over a pile of broken armor heaped atop one of the storage closets. She’d learned how to climb up here when she was five or six; at nine now, she barely fit. A few more inches, and she wouldn’t be able to squeeze in behind the pile anymore. That meant she probably wouldn’t be able to steal any further glimpses of the training, so she had resolved to take full advantage of every opportunity that came along now.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ Jared replied expressionlessly. ‘But it was you, my lord, who gave me the training, and saw to it that I was well matched. It was you who placed me in charge of training the others. I had only the raw ability. You saw to its honing, and made use of it.’

‘True, true … still, you’re a remarkable beast, Jared. Over a hundred duels, and never a loss.’ Dyran stepped back and regarded his slave with a critical eye, his head tilted a little to one side. ‘I daresay you could still take any one of these youngsters, and win. Would you care to try? A real duel, I mean, not just a practice.’

Serina knew her father well enough to know that Dyran’s ‘offer’ shook him to the bone. A ‘real’ duel – that meant to the death. Jared, against one of the young men he’d trained himself. Jared’s experience against a younger man’s strength and endurance – Jared fighting someone who knew what his moves were going to be before he made them.

‘It would be an interesting proposition, my lord,’ Jared said slowly, so slowly that Serina knew how carefully he was thinking before he replied. ‘But I must point out that it could mean the loss of your chief trainer. It would mean the loss of your chief trainer for a month or so, no matter what. I’m not as spry anymore that I can avoid every stroke, and I’m too old to heal in a hurry.’

Serina waited, holding her breath, for Dyran’s response.

He threw back his head and laughed, his long hair tossing, and both Serina and her father heaved identical sighs of relief. ‘I couldn’t risk that, old man,’ he said, slapping Jared on the back, exactly as Serina had seen him slap a horse on the flank; with the same kind of proprietary pride. ‘Not with a half dozen duels scheduled for this month alone. No, we’ll keep the losses among those we can replace, I think. Carry on.’

Dyran strolled away, still chuckling, as Jared marched his men back towards their quarters –

The bright lights of the arena … How many times had she stood under them? The lights illuminated the audience as relentlessly as the fighters, for the elven lords came to the duels to be seen as well as to be spectators themselves. And they never disputed her presence there, however much it was against custom. They had seen how Dyran wanted her there, and none of them dared challenge Dyran on his home ground. She had made herself indispensable, but it had taken more work than any of them guessed, for no other concubine had dared to do the things she had done …

No other but me, she murmured to herself, her mind and body floating somewhere strange and bright. None but me.

Serina had learned early how to keep up with Dyran’s long, ground-eating strides without looking as if she were hurrying. She would never, ever allow herself to look less than graceful. One slip, and she might find herself replaced.

But this was an important part of her plan to make herself Dyran’s permanent favorite. She went anywhere with him that she could, provided she was not specifically forbidden to accompany him. Rowenie had never left the harem; Rowenie had never lifted a finger for herself, much less waited on her Lord.

So Serina followed Dyran everywhere, and waited on him with her own hands. Not adoringly, no – invisibly. So that he never noticed who was serving him unless he looked straight at her. Which he had done in the first few months of her ascendancy, and been surprised to find her there, with the goblet, the plate, the pen and tablet. And never did he see her looking back at him with anything other than a challenging stare: Dispute my right to be here, if you dare! Yes, he had been surprised. Then amused at her audacity, at her cleverness. Now he depended on her, on her ability to anticipate his needs, something he’d evidently never had before.

That she could surprise an elven lord was a continual source of self-satisfaction for her. A lord like Dyran had seen nearly everything in his long span, and to be able to provide him with the novelty of surprise would make her the more valuable in his eyes. Or so she hoped.

And I have ample cause for pride, she thought, gliding in his wake, taken for granted as his shadow. If nothing else, this self-appointed servitude was far more entertaining than staying in the harem, trying to while away the time with jewels and dresses and the little intrigues of the secondary concubines.

Today Dyran’s errand took him to a part of the manor she’d never visited before; outside, in fact, to a barnlike outbuilding with white-washed walls, a single door, and no windows, just the ubiquitous skylights. She hesitated for a moment on the threshold; blinked at the unaccustomed raw sunlight in her eyes; felt it like a kind of pressure against her fair skin, and wondered faintly how the field-workers ever stood it. She had been outside perhaps a handful of times in her life – when she was taken from her parents and the training building and barracks and moved to the facility for training concubines, again when she became a concubine and was taken to the manor itself – and most of those times she had been hurried along in a mob of others, with no time to look around. She found herself shrinking inside herself at the openness of it all. And the sky – she hadn’t seen open sky since she was a child. There was just – so much of it. So far away – no walls to hold it in –

She fought down panic, a hollow feeling of fear as she gazed up, and up, and up –

She closed her eyes for a moment to steady herself, then hurried after Dyran. She wasn’t certain how much more of this she was going to be able to bear …

But they were back under a roof soon enough. She paused behind Dyran as he waited for a moment in the entry. She welcomed the sight of the familiar beams and skylight – the gentle, milky light – feeling faint with relief. So much so, that she did not notice, at first, what it was that Dyran had come to inspect, not until Dyran cleared the doorway and she got a clear view of the room beyond.

Children? Why would he need to see children?

There were at least a hundred children of both sexes, mostly aged about six or thereabouts. All of them wore the standard short tunic and baggy pants of unbleached cloth, the garb of unassigned slaves, the same clothing Serina had worn until she was taken to be trained at age ten. The elven overseer had ordered them in ragged lines of ten, and they stood quite still, in a silence unusual for children of that age. Some looked bewildered; some still showed traces of tears on their chubby cheeks, some simply looked resigned. But all were unnaturally, eerily silent, and stood without fidgeting.

‘My lord.’ The elven overseer, garbed in livery and helm, with a face so carefully controlled that it could have been carved from granite, actually saluted. ‘The trainees.’

The trainees? Now Serina was very puzzled. What on earth was he talking about?

‘Have you tested them?’ Dyran asked absently, walking slowly towards the group of children, who one and all fixed their enormous eyes on him with varying expressions of fear. ‘It wouldn’t do to send Lord Edres less than the very best.’

Lord Edres? What did he have to do with children?

‘Yes, my lord,’ the overseer replied, never moving from his pose of attention. ‘Reactions, strength, speed, they’re the top of their age-group. They should make fine fighters.’

Now Serina understood, and understood the references to Lord Edres. Dyran’s ally and father-by-marriage trained the finest of duelists, gladiators, and guards; Dyran had begun a stepped-up breeding program with his fighters as soon as the ink on the marriage contract was dry; no doubt part of the bride-price was to be paid in slaves for training. These children were evidently the result of that program.

‘I believe they’re ready for you, my lord, if you’re satisfied with them.’ Now the overseer stepped back several paces as he spoke, as if to take himself out of range of something.

‘Yes, I think they’ll do.’ Dyran raised his hands, shaking back his sleeves – and she felt a moment of unfocused fear, as if something deep inside her knew what was going to happen next, and was terrified.

Dyran clapped his hands together and Serina was blinded by a momentary flash of light, overwhelming and painful – when her eyes cleared, the children stood there still, but all signs of fear or unhappiness were gone. Each wore a dreamy, contented smile; each looked eagerly from Dyran to the overseer and back, as if waiting for an order to obey –

A tiny fragment of memory: standing in line with the other ten-year-old girls. Lord Dyran, in brilliant scarlet, raised his hands. A flash of light. And –

Serina shook her head, and the tiny memory-fragment vanished, as if it had never been.

‘Exactly what are these going to be trained for?’ Dyran was asking the overseer. The other removed his helm, and Serina recognized him; Keloc by name, and one of the few of Dyran’s subordinates he actually trusted.

‘Half of them are going straight into infantry training; line soldiers, my lord,’ Keloc said, shaking back his hair. ‘A quarter’s going into bodyguard training, the rest are for duelists. Lord Edres wanted about a dozen for assassins, but I told him we had nothing suitable.’

‘Rightly,’ Dyran replied with a frown. ‘I’m a better mage than he is, but that doesn’t rule out the chance of him allying with someone who’s as good as I am and breaking my geas. It would be a sad state of affairs to find assassins with my brand on them making collops of my best human servants.’

‘Exactly so, my lord,’ the overseer replied. ‘Did you sense any resistance? I didn’t specify an exact number to Lord Edres, only a round figure. I weeded out what I could, but I’m not the mage you are.’

Dyran looked out over the sea of rapt young faces. ‘No,’ he said, finally. ‘No, I don’t think so. These should do very well. Excellent work, Keloc. You’re getting better results with these than with the horses.’

The overseer smiled a little. ‘It’s easier to breed humans, my lord. So long as you keep an eye on them, damage during breeding is minimal, and they’re always in season. And you’ve always had good stock, my lord.’

Dyran chuckled, with satisfied pride. ‘I like to think so. Carry on, Keloc.’

The overseer clapped his helm back on and saluted. ‘Very well, my lord.’

Alara was disappointed, though not by the clarity of the woman’s memories. It wasn’t going to be possible to pose as either a bodyguard or a concubine, she decided. That was really too bad; either position would have been ideal for gathering more information than the Kin had access to at the moment. At least one thing was explained: it looked as if the elven lords encouraged rivalry among their humans, while maintaining control over them with spells – or at least, that was what happened with the humans they allowed close to them. So they kept the humans at odds with each other, while looking to their lord with complete loyalty.

He had spoken of a geas; Alara wondered what it was they really did, how it was set. Was it just to keep the humans from being disloyal to their lord? Or was it more complicated than that? The father and mother kept saying that ‘everything comes from the Lord.’ She wondered if that was part of it too?

But it couldn’t be foolproof; Dyran had said something about ‘resistance.’ Which had to mean the geas could be fought, or even broken, by the human himself …

She wondered if one of the Kin could break it, too …

Well, even if they couldn’t get into the ranks of the fighters, Alara could at least see one of the duels through the woman’s memory.

It could be very enlightening.

Serina drifted on clouds of light, too overcome with lassitude to wonder at anything. A few moments later, she found herself standing behind Dyran, in her place behind his seat in the arena. He was not alone.

The arena was alive with color and light, and buzzing with conversation. Serina replaced a red velvet cushion that had fallen from Lord Dyran’s couch, trying to remain inconspicuous and very much aware that she was the only other human in the audience.

She had followed Dyran out to the arena, even though it meant crossing under that horrid open sky to do so, and he had made no move to stop her. Nor had anyone barred her from his side when he took his place in his private box with his guests, V’Tarn Sandar Lord Festin and V’Kal Alinor Lady Auraen. The Lady had given her a very sharp and penetrating look when Serina entered behind Dyran, but when she made no move to seat herself, but rather, remained standing in a posture of humility, the Lady evidently made up her mind to ignore the human interloper.

All three elven lords were in high formal garb, in their house colors, wearing elaborate surcoats stiff with bullion, embroidery in gold and silver thread, and bright gemstones, all in motifs that reflected their Clan crests. Dyran sported gold and vermilion sunbursts, Lord Sandar wore emerald and sapphire delphins, and Lady Alinor pale green and silver cranes.

The occasion for all this finery was the settling of a disagreement between Lord Vossinor and Lord Jertain. Serina wasn’t entirely sure what, exactly, the disagreement was about. It did involve a disputed trade route, and a series of insults traded in Council – and it was by the ruling of the Council itself that the duel was to take place.

‘… and I, for one, am heartily sick of it,’ Lady Alinor murmured to Dyran as she dropped gracefully into her seat. ‘Jertain might actually be in the right this time, but he has lied so often that how can one know for certain? I truly believe that he doesn’t know the truth of the matter anymore.’

‘The Council is exceedingly grateful to you and Edres for providing the means of settling the damned situation once and for all,’ Sandar said, with just the faintest hint of annoyance.

Dyran only smiled graciously. ‘I am always happy to be of service to the Council,’ he said smoothly, handing Lady Alinor a rosy plum from the dish Serina held out to him.

He’s been working toward this for months, Serina thought smugly, offering the dish to Lord Sandar as well. This way the Council owes him for getting a nuisance out of their hair, and neither side can expect him to take a side. No matter who wins, he wins. Not to mention the favors owed for providing a neutral place, and fighters matched to a hair.

‘And what about the dispute between Hellebore and Ondine?’ Sandar asked Alinor. ‘Is there any word on that?’

‘Oh, it’s to be war, as I told you,’ she replied offhandedly. ‘The Board is going to meet in a few days to decide on the size of the armies and where they’ll meet. After that it will be up to the two of them. I told you they’d never settle an inheritance dispute with anything less than a war.’

‘So you did, my lady,’ Dyran replied, leaning toward her with an odd gleam in his eye. ‘And once again, you were correct. Tell me, which of the two of them do you think likely to be the better commander?’

He’s been so – strange – about Lady Alinor. She’s challenged him in Council, and he doesn’t like it. But he’s been challenged before, and he never acted like he is with her. It’s almost as if he wants her, wants to possess her, and she keeps rejecting him in ways that only make him more determined to have her. Serina shivered, and did her best not to show it. Dyran had never been this obsessive about anything before. She wasn’t sure what to do about it – or even if she dared to try.

Lady Alinor laughed, laughter with a delicate hint of mockery in it. ‘Ondine, of course –’ she began.

A single, brazen gong-note split the air, silencing the chatter, and causing every head to turn towards the entrance to the sands. A pair of fighters, one bearing a mace and shield, the other, the unusual weapon of single-stick, walked side-by-side into the center of the arena. The mace-wielder, with shield colors and helm ribbons in Lord Jertain’s indigo-and-white, turned smartly to the left, to end his march below Jertain’s box. The other, with helm ribbons and armbands in Vossinor’s cinnabar-and-brown, turned at the same moment to the right, to salute Vossinor’s box.

Both elven lords acknowledged their fighters with a lifted hand. The gong sounded again. The two men turned to face each other, and waited with the patience of automata.

Dyran rose slowly, a vermilion scarf in his hand. Every eye in the arena was now on him; as host to the conflict, it was his privilege to signal the start of the duel. He smiled graciously, and dropped the square of silk.

It fluttered to the sand, ignored, as the carnage began.

In the end, even a few of the elven spectators excused themselves, and Serina found herself averting her eyes. She’d had no idea how much damage two blunt instruments could do.

But Dyran watched on; not eagerly, as Lady Alinor, who sat forward in her seat, punctuating each blow with little coos of delight – nor with bored patience, as Sandar. But with casual amusement, a little, pleased smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and a light in his eyes when he looked at Alinor that Serina could not read.

And when it was over – as it was, quickly, too quickly for many of the spectators – when all of the other elven lords had gone, he made his move. Toward Alinor. A significant touch of his hand on her arm, a few carefully chosen words – both, as if Serina were not present.

White with suppressed emotion, she pretended not to be there; pretended she was part of the furnishings. Certainly Lady Alinor took no notice of her.

The Lady stared at Dyran as if she could not believe what she had heard – then burst into mocking laughter.

‘You?’ she crowed. ‘You? I’d sooner bed a viper, my lord. My chances of survival would be much higher!’

She shook off his hand and swept out of the arena, head high, her posture saying that she knew he would not dare to challenge her. If he did, he would have to say why – and being rejected by a lady was not valid grounds for a challenge.

Dyran went as white as Serina; he stood like one of the silent pillars supporting the roof, and Serina read a rage so great in his eyes that she did not even breathe. If he remembered she was there – he would kill her.

Finally he moved. He swept out of the arena in the opposite direction that Lady Alinor had taken, heading for the slave pens.

Serina fled for the safety of her room and hid there, shivering in the darkness and praying he had forgotten her. After a long while, she heard muffled screams of agony from Dyran’s suite.

He’s forgotten me, she thought, incoherent with relief and joy. He’s forgotten me. I’m safe …

If I dared, I would shift and fly off, Alara thought in disgust. The last scene replayed in Serina’s memory had left the dragon limp and sick.

The duel was bad enough. The Kin had no idea that this was the kind of thing that went on in these duels. The sheer brutality of two thinking beings battering each other until one finally dropped over dead – moments before the other also succumbed – was something Serina took for granted. It was that, as much as the duel itself, that made Alara ill. How could she – she didn’t feel anything at all for those two men, she basically just reacted to the blood and injuries. She would have been just as nauseated seeing someone gut a chicken. Probably more. Those were her own kind, and she watched them slaughter each other to settle someone else’s quarrel without a second thought!

But then, her reaction when Dyran chose some poor, hapless victim to torture – to feel joy that the victim was someone else –

The dragon forced herself to calm down, closing her mind to the human’s for a moment, telling herself that it didn’t really matter. These weren’t the Kin; they were Outsiders. It shouldn’t matter what they did to each other or what was done to them.

Yet she was utterly disgusted by the way the woman had let herself be manipulated, geas or not. The human was intelligent, she saw what was happening, and Alara guessed that she had come very close to breaking her own geas a time or two. Yet nothing of what she saw mattered to her; only her own well-being, her luxurious life. Perhaps at one time she would have felt something – but that time had vanished with her childhood.

Even freedom didn’t matter to her. Only pleasure.

I really should just abandon her here to die, Alara thought, feeling as if she had bitten into something rotten. She didn’t owe the woman anything. She wasn’t of the Kin. She wasn’t even worth saving. Alara could almost agree with the elvenkind about these humans, how base they were, how much they really deserved to be slaves. She could at least agree with Dyran’s faction, anyway.

Alara had often discussed politics in her guise as a low-ranking elven lord, or had them discussed in her presence as a human slave. Having served as an elven page for several Council sessions, and eavesdropped in many ways and many forms on others, Alara knew considerably more about elven politics than Serina had ever learned, especially where the treatment of humans was concerned. Oddly enough, for all his cruelty, Dyran was one of the better masters. The Council faction he headed held that humans were something – slightly – more than brute beasts. He allowed his human slaves to rise as high as overseer, as he had Serina’s father. He obviously believed what his party used as their platform: that one could despise, or even pity one’s human slaves, but that there was potential there to be exploited. So long as human greed and elven magic held, humans could be allowed a bit of freedom on their leashes, and permitted to make decisions on their own. Such freedom was profitable to the master, after all – it meant that he needed fewer elven subordinates, whose loyalty might be in question, and whose interests were undeniably their own. The humans owed everything to their lords; the elves might well decide to seek greener pastures. Humans were simple in their greed; elven emotions were more complex and harder to manipulate, even for a master like Dyran.

From what Alara had gleaned, Dyran’s faction was slightly in the minority. The majority of the Council were of the other party; the party that felt that the humans were dangerous, near-rabid creatures, unpredictable and uncontrollable. That every human should be kept under guard, with the strictest kind of supervision; coerced into their duties, with that coercion aided by magic whenever possible. And that those humans that showed any signs of independent thought must be destroyed before they contaminated the rest.

Predictably enough, Dyran’s faction contained most of the younger elves, who looked upon the survivors of the Wizard War as reactionary old fools, frightened by an uprising that could never recur into watching their very shadows.

But Dyran knew something that Alara was fairly certain he had not told the others, who had been born after the Wizard War. She knew he knew this little fact, because he himself had brought up the subject, more than once, in Council.

Human magic was still cropping up in the race. And the elves had no idea how or why.

Most of the younger elven lords thought that human magic had vanished after the last of the halfbreeds had been killed and the human ‘mages’ had been identified and destroyed. That simply wasn’t true, as this woman Serina proved so clearly. Though untrained, she had been strong enough to trap Alara’s mind with her own. Granted, that was largely because of the strength of her fear and hatred, since this ‘natural magic’ was fueled by the power of emotion. Still, Alara was a shaman of the Kin, and it took a powerful force to trap and hold her for even an instant.

The elves had been trying to breed the ‘mind-magic’ out of their humans for centuries, yet the ability kept showing up, over and over again. No matter how carefully they studied their slaves’ pedigrees, no matter how many children they destroyed as soon as the ability manifested, the powers kept recurring.

Some children were hidden, of course, kept out of the way of overseers until they learned to conceal their gift – and once collared, of course, the situation was moot. Another problem: despite careful pairing, some supposed ‘fathers’ were not the real sires of ‘their’ children. Human fertility had baffled the elves since they had taken this world for their own; and human inheritance baffled them still further. Elven magic was inherited in simple ways; two strong mages produced powerful children, a strong mage mated to a weaker produced something in between, and two weak mages (like Goris, Dorion, or Goris’s unfortunate daughter) produced weak mages. Never did a mating produce a stronger mage than the strongest of the pairing. Never did a strong pair produce a weak child, only to have the power reappear in the next generation. Power simply could not be passed that way.

But that sort of inheritance pattern occurred all the time in humans, and the elves were utterly bewildered by it.

So the elf-stone-studded collars always carried two stones, as Serina’s had (and apparently sometimes a third to make sure the human wanted to wear it) – and one of those stones nullified human mind-magic if kept in physical contact with the human. Every human slave wore one from the time he or she was taken from the parents; they were fitted with collars as soon as they were placed in training, from the simple ‘This is a hoe’ that began for the dullest of the slaves at age six or eight, to the complicated training of the concubines and fighters. The simplest were made of leather with a metal clasp, with the owner’s brand burned into the leather and the stones embedded in the clasp itself; those were the collars Alara had seen. She’d never even glimpsed anything like Serina’s gold, begemmed piece of fantasy jewelry; that was why she had nearly been tricked into seizing it.

As Serina’s memories had confirmed, the elves controlled the fertility of their human concubines with fanatic strictness. What Serina did not know was the reason why. Elves were not only cross-fertile with humans, they were more fertile with humans than with their own kind. Nowhere near as fertile as humans were alone, but there had been enough elven-human crossbreeds to make a formidable force in the Wizard War.

All the elven factions destroyed the offspring, should a slip occur, as soon as the pregnancy or resulting child was discovered.

The halfblood wizards had come very close to destroying their former masters, closer than the elves cared to admit, even in the chronicles of the times. When she was researching the war at Father Dragon’s urging, Alara herself had been forced to read between the lines to discover how much damage had actually been done, by finding the rolls of the dead, and the account of destruction of property as noted in the surveys at the end of the war. Entire elven Clans had been wiped out; many, many of the strongest mages had learned too late that the human mind-magic not only combined well with elven powers, but could even increase the sorcerous strength of the wielder; from doubling it, to squaring it.

If it hadn’t been for a schism that developed within the ranks of the wizards, the elves would be the slaves, the hunted. She wondered what position the full-humans would have had in that society. And would the halfbloods have kept any elves around to ensure that their kind continued? The elves surely wondered about that before the conflict was over. That factional fight on the verge of victory was the only thing that saved them. With luck like that, maybe they had a reason to think of themselves as children of the gods –

Serina moaned and Alara turned her attention outward, watching the human woman speculatively. The former concubine should, by all rights, be dead – she should never have been able to escape. If her lord had been anyone but Dyran, she’d have been struck down by magic as soon as her elven master learned of her pregnancy. Dyran somehow underestimated her – or her rival had. By the time the guards came for her, Serina had made her escape, bare feet, inadequate clothing, fear of open spaces, and all. Somewhere in her was still a spark of courage, an echo of the child that had found a way to watch the fighters practice, a hint of the woman who had the strength of will to defy elven custom to claw her way to Dyran’s side. No one else had ever dared do that; Alara had never heard of a human concubine dancing such close attendance on her lord, whether or not custom permitted it. That will and wit had given her the seed of rebellion, and survival instinct had overcome every mental and physical obstacle standing between herself and flight.

It certainly wasn’t maternal instinct that drove her; Serina’s thoughts had revealed that she considered the child she carried to be nothing more than a dangerous burden. She knew the elves hated the halfbloods, and that it was death to bear one, should the lords discover it, though she had no idea why. The humans, never taught to read or write, had no record of the Wizard War. Only the Prophecy spread by the Kin kept alive any distorted echo of what had occurred. And the Prophecy was nothing that had ever come to Serina’s ears; in this, as in many things, the concubines were sheltered from ‘contamination’ by lesser slaves.

Alara knew from being inside Serina’s thoughts that if she had gotten any notion what the desert was like, she never would have fled into it. But she knew nothing of anything so simple as weather changes, or how the sun could punish and burn the unwary. She had escaped the manor and the grounds, fled past the cultivated gardens and out into the area no longer irrigated and kept verdant by Dyran’s magic. She had seen the vast stretch of sand lying under the rising moon, and had thought only that the soft sand would be kind to her bare feet. She knew a little of tracking from Dyran’s discussions of hunts with his guests. She saw the wind scouring the sand and realized it would hide her tracks, and she knew that on shifting sand the hounds would be unable to find her scent. She had never thought about the sun, and how warm it would get during the day with no shade, or where she would find water or food. Her first day of staggering blindly over the sand had taught her to rue her choice, but by then she was utterly lost. She had been so sheltered that she had no notion that the sun rose every day in the east and set in the west, and without landmarks she was helpless. A thunderstorm the first night had given her water and revived her; clouds had shadowed the sun and kept her going on the second day. But on this, the third day, she was near to the end. Alara found it impossible to care very much, except in the abstract, as a kind of indicator of what might be happening to other women bearing halfblood children.

Alara wondered … if Serina managed so nearly to keep this child a secret, even with a rival waiting for her to slip, it really was possible that there were still other halfbreeds in existence. The casual rape of a fertile field-hand, a mistake in the contraception treatments, an affair by a younger elf with a simple servant or a breeder – there must have been a dozen ways a conception could occur. Human traits would tend to overcome elven …

Depending on what they looked like. That pale elven skin and white-gold hair would give them away. You couldn’t hide that in a crowd of field hands …

Wait; she remembered something about that …

Father Dragon said something about the halfbreeds. Elves didn’t brown in the sun, but halfbreeds did; they tended to inherit their human parents’ hair color, but the elven green eyes with the oval pupils. As long as a child kept its head down until it learned to conceal its eye color with magic … and the collars only blocked the human magics, not the elven. For that matter, since the halfbreeds tended to have stronger magic in the first place, they might even be able to work around the collars’ inhibitions.

There were elven women who headed their Clans … and needed heirs. She wondered if any of them ever toyed with the idea of making an official alliance, then quietly stepped over to the slave quarters. And would those halfbreeds look the same? The child’s mother would probably put an illusion on the child from birth to make it look elven. There might well be some halfbloods among the elven women, even now.

But even a halfblood with an elven father could probably make it into adulthood, if he was hiding in the ranks of the common servants or field hands. And then he’d reach adulthood. That meant a collar, and possible detection. What would he do then, she wondered.

He could run. She knew there were ‘wild’ humans, although the elven lords didn’t like to admit the fact. At least one of the great hunts last year had been for two-legged prey. There were plenty of places to hide – the Kin might not even find them, given that there were plenty of areas in the wilderness they didn’t care to frequent.

The woman was quiet now, sleeping in the shade of the wall beside the pool, her exhaustion overcoming everything else; she had drunk her fill of the pool, and its magic had healed her burns enough for her to sleep, but the water’s very purity was working against her. It wasn’t only moisture she lacked, it was minerals lost in perspiration and the damage the heat had done to her already overburdened body. The sleep she had slipped into would probably tip over into shock before too long. Alara came very close to feeling sorry for her at that moment, and only the memory of Serina’s own callousness towards her fellow humans kept her from sympathy.

She and Dyran were well matched, the dragon thought cynically. He was right when he accused his underling of thinking of him as a pervert. The older elven lords had been saying for years that his ‘sympathy’ for humans was due entirely to his sexual fixation on them. Most of his generation kept one or two concubines at most, and then only because they had no intention of doing without when their ladies were indisposed. And the ladies did tend to be ‘indisposed’ a great deal, poor things; it was the one weapon that the weak ones had in dealing with their mates …

But the elders were discreet; they didn’t talk about their concubines, often they didn’t even admit that the women were concubines, and they kept the women closed up in special quarters. They certainly didn’t go about openly with human females, allow them to dance attendance on them in public situations.

But Dyran – to the other elders, he was like a man who not only openly mates with animals, but one who flaunts his preferences as if to dare the rest to challenge him on his behavior. It was only his magic power that kept them from doing just that – he wouldn’t kill anyone, it was against law and custom, but he could certainly work a lot of sabotage magically. And his duelists were better than anyone else’s. And then there was the number of nasty little secrets he had collected about the rest of them.

She reflected on all the things she had learned about Lord Dyran over the years; little tidbits stored away against a later time. It took a lot of concentration; draconic memory was excellent, but dredging up information relegated to long-term storage required a near-trance state, and a great deal of patience.

There was no doubt that he was sybaritic and self-indulgent; one had only to look at his estate through Serina’s eyes to know that. No expense was spared for his comfort and pleasure. But most of the elven lords were like that, if they could afford to be. And as soon as one of the elvenkind rose to any amount of power or acquired wealth, he immediately set about making himself as cozy a little nest as he could manage. The luxury trade was a profitable one for many elves, and no few Clans had built fortunes that way; silken fabrics, jewels, perfumes, delicate foods and rare spices and incense, all things found, grown, excavated or created by the hands of their slaves. Very few elves could create things out of the thin air, as could Dyran, when he chose to expend the considerable energy this required. The most they could manage were illusions; most convincing illusions, but still, illusions. Though that in itself was another profitable trade; there were elven illusion-artists, and their services were in high demand.

But on the whole, especially for the higher elven lords, reality was always preferable to an illusion. Elves were acquisitive by nature, and hungry for new sensations, and things of beauty. And for those elves who were the laborers themselves, the apparent idleness of the High Lords kept them in a continual state of envy. The height of ambition for many elven lords, especially the pensioners or underlings, was to be in a position to be able to do nothing unless it were pleasurable.

Since Dyran was one of the elders, he had spent two or three centuries doing just that. Which was probably why Serina had been such an attractive piece of property; she had been able to surprise him, which made her very valuable to a being as jaded as Dyran had become over the decades.

Now that he had acquired the leisure to be idle, and had exhausted the possibilities of sloth, he sought other pleasures. His chief amusement, recreated in miniature in his harem, was to manipulate the lives of those around him by exploiting their weaknesses and emotions. Hence the way in which he encouraged rivalry, even feuding, among his concubines and underlings.

Like what he did to that overseer of his … Alara stirred uncomfortably at the memory, and realized that in her preoccupation with her own memories, she had transformed back to her draconic form entirely. If there had been anyone here to actually see her, a lapse like that could have had terrible consequences.

Well, the only one here was Serina; the woman was unconscious, and it probably didn’t matter.

What Dyran had done was so calculatedly cruel, it was beyond horrible; destroying the man by giving his only child to an unfeeling monster, then ordering him to exhaust himself to rectify what could well have been his enemy’s fault. It was typical of the way Dyran operated. If he didn’t have a way to control the lives of those around him, he would make a way.

Dyran went to great lengths to gain information on his rivals, his peers, and his underlings. More than once, when in elven form on missions of her own, Alara had discovered herself being questioned by those who later proved to be his agents. Persistent and patient, he was not content unless he had hold over anyone he came into contact with.

And there was something Serina had only guessed at, when she had seen him in defeat: he was absolutely ruthless when thwarted. Obsessive, even. And his obsession with defeat could well have begun with the incident with Lady Alinor. While Alara could not be certain, she suspected it might have been the first time in a very long time that he had met with real opposition. And at his age – that could do some odd things to the elven mind.

Serina had been lucky he had been in a good mood when he came home, and assuredly she knew it. If he’d been defeated, or even blocked in Council, he’d have blasted her on the spot. If he’d even come home annoyed, he’d have held her paralyzed until his guards found her, then he’d have made her execution as long and painful as possible, and probably part of a public entertainment.

Instead, he was quite pleased with himself, and chose to amuse himself before sending anyone after her. And her own little spies told her that her rival had given away the secret of her pregnancy and that the guards would be coming at dawn.

Alara would have been willing to lay a bet that Dyran had guards watching the edge of the desert, to make sure Serina died out here. He couldn’t let her live – but she surprised him again, and if he was still in a good mood, he’d be willing to let her die a ‘natural’ death.

A moan caught Alara’s attention, and she realized that during her preoccupation with her own thoughts, Serina had slipped from sleep into hallucination, and the strain of her journey had finally brought on labor. She lay helplessly on her side, twitching, and moaning, as the muscles of her stomach tightened.

There was no way she was going to survive childbirth.