Elvenbane

Book One of the Halfblood Chronicles

SERINA DAETH. I am...Serina Daeth. Serina clung to her name as the only thing she was still certain of, the only thing the sun could not burn away from her. The sun...it was high overhead now, beating down upon her, trying to evaporate her.

Hot...she'd never been so hot. It was hard to think, hard to remember that she must keep moving. She couldn't see her feet under the swollen ball of her belly...she felt them, though, every step an agony. But it would be worse if she stopped.

Her throat and mouth were so dry; there was nothing left from the dew she'd drunk this morning, lapping it off the rocks like an animal.

I am Serina Daeth. I am...

Ah, gods, that it should come to this.

A few months ago she had been Lord Dyran's favorite. A few days ago she had hopes of hiding her pregnancy until the damned brat was delivered. She had planned to get rid of it, then return to the harem to give that bitch Leyda Shaybrel exactly what she deserved. She couldn't have told Lord Dyran what Leyda had done to her, but she could have found some way to bring her down. Leyda had enemies; all the women of the harem had enemies. It was just a matter of making common cause until Leyda was ousted...

But Dyran returned from Council unexpectedly, and Leyda was waiting...

I will live, I will return, and I will find a way to make her suffer...

Lord Dyran had found their rivalry amusing, and encouraged it, by promising Leyda any number of things, but keeping Serina in the number-one position. When Leyda failed to oust Serina as favorite, and realized that Lord Dyran had no intention of replacing Serina, she had not given" up. Undoubtedly she had turned to sabotage.

She must have. How else could I have conceived?

She must have substituted all of Serina's food for a month with that intended for the elves. That had been several months ago, just before Lord Dyran went off to Council...

The Council lasted eight months. Would that it had lasted longer! I would have been free of this burden, and none the wiser!

Lord Dyran had left before Serina realized she was pregnant.

As soon as she knew, she had been in a panic.

To be pregnant with an elf-lord's child, a halfblood, was a death sentence unless the lord was very lenient. And even if Dyran didn't kill her, he'd have cast her off.

That would be as bad as death. To be given to some underling, or to the fighters as a breeder...or worst of all, given to Leyda as a servant...

No, never, not after what she had been, all she had fought to achieve...

All she had fought to achieve... for so long, and so hard...

Serina pinned an errant strand of russet hair back in place, and surveyed her image in her silver-rimmed mirror critically. She nodded a little, and turned her attention to her makeup. She was in competition with the best, and that left no room for anything other than perfection.

The current standard of beauty in Lord Dyran's harem...as set by the style of his favorite...was for an ethereal, innocent, fresh look. Serina knew very well what Rowenie was using as a model, even if the other girls hadn't figured it out yet. She was trying to be as elvenlike as possible, fashioning herself after the highbred maidens she'd seen being paraded before Lord Dyran in hopes of a marriage alliance.

That meant pale gold hair worn loose, or garlanded with artificial flowers made of gemstones; creamy rose-and-white complexions; wide, childlike blue eyes; sylph-slim figures. Serina went counter, wildly counter, to that standard. Her hair was a fiery red; her eyes so dark a violet as to be nearly black, and seething with carefully controlled emotion. Her mother called her figure "generous," but that was an understatement, and said nothing about the slim waist, kept that way by years of dancing lessons, the hips that could distract even hardened gladiators from their practice, and the high, proud breasts that did more than distract them, to the point that her father had forbidden her the practice ground since she was thirteen.

Serina smiled at her reflection, and examined the smile with careful detachment. It would do. She kept the smile, and continued to examine her own handiwork, tossing tiny brushes down on the floor beside her when she was finished with them. The drudges would clean it all up as soon as she was gone.

While the other girls being groomed as concubines bleached their hair, dusted their cheeks with powder, and starved themselves to fit into the delicate skirts and tunics Rowenie Ordone favored, Serina flaunted her differences and learned to enhance them. She found rinses that made her hair even more lustrous and vivid, and painted her lids with purple and violet to bring out the color of her eyes, and brushed rose across her cheekbones. She kept up her dancing lessons and exercised in secret, adding tone and strength to her limbs. And she sought out the teachers of the bed-secrets, and begged extra lessons. Sooner or later Lord Dyran would tire of pale and ethereal, of coy and delicate, of dainty and timid. The Lord was not noted for steadfastness. And when he tired of the cool Zephyr, Serina was determined to catch him with Flame.

She corrected a smudge of deep violet above her eye with a careful fingertip and stood up, smoothing the soft panels of her wine-velvet gown. Let Rowenie keep to her pale pastel silks, all flutters and lace. They made almost anyone else look like a pale-pink lettuce, or an overblown cabbage rose. It would not be much longer before the Lord demanded spice instead of sugar.

Serina edged the stool in front of her dressing table back with a careful foot, so as not to tear or crease her gown. There wasn't much room in this little cubicle; just her bed, stowage beneath it for undergarments, a hanging rack for gowns, and her dressing table, mirror, and little stool. But it was more room than she'd had with her mother; just a little closet hardly large enough for her bed. And she intended to have more, soon.

She left her little cubicle, keeping to a graceful, swaying walk as though the Lord himself were watching her. After all, who was to say that he was not? The elven lords were all-powerful, and it might well be that the Lord would choose to spy on the unguarded moments of his harem. Her father claimed he did so with the gladiators.

She glanced at the tall, green-glass water clock in the center of the indoor courtyard as she pushed aside the curtain to her cubicle to show that she was gone. Sunlight streamed in through the frosted dome of the skylight above; by the level in the glass delphin's tail, there was plenty of time before the Lord made his daily visit to his concubines. In fact, most of the curtains still hung across the doors of the little swans' cubicles, showing that the younger concubines were either still asleep or disinclined to leave. Serina was a "little swan," a girl in her first six months of office. In fact, she had only begun her post as concubine a week ago. Most girls did not survive the initial six months; most were ignored, and after a mere six weeks were sent down to the breeders, to become the living rewards to the Lord's most successful gladiators.

Serina's own mother was one such; and she had been lucky. Jared Daeth was the most successful ever of Lord Dyran's hundreds of single-combat fighters. He had won so many duels for the Lord that he had stopped counting, and only the odds makers kept track. Ambra had been his reward on his retirement, still unbeaten, to become a trainer, he had taken to her, and she to him, and the Lord had indulgently agreed to allow them to pair permanently.

Most of the girls rejected by the harem-master were given to any successful fighter who wanted a woman, and few of those men were as gentle and kind to their women as Jared. Serina had seen some of them the morning after; bruised and sometimes bloodied, weeping...and on one, never-discussed occasion, dead. Often the girls were bred once a year to the best, to produce more fighters for the Lord's stables. Once their bearing days were past...provided that repeated child-bearing had not killed them first...they became the drudges of the Lord's household; the laundry-women, pot-scrubbers, cleaners and sweepers, often in service to that very harem where they had enjoyed a brief place in the sun.

This worked in odd ways; many of the little swans, certain from the beginning that they would never catch the Lord's eye, made their demands as infrequent upon the drudges as possible. They chose garments only of white, or some other color easy to clean, garments with little or no ornamentation. They asked for nothing out of the ordinary; they cleaned their own cubicles. Serina knew that the laundresses cursed her for her vivid scarlet, purple, and emerald gowns, and the sweepers for the disarray in which she left her quarters. She didn't care. At the very worst, Lord Dyran had noticed her, she'd seen to that, running to do his bidding before the servants themselves could react to his orders, offering to dance anytime he looked the least bored or distracted, or dancing even when he had not called for it, anytime the musicians played. She had seen his eyes upon her, and the eyes of some of the other elven lords he had entertained as guests. At the very least he would give her away to a visiting lord, should one admire her. At the best...

At the best, she would supplant Rowenie.

She would never, ever even permit herself to contemplate a future as a breeder and drudge. That was tantamount to anticipating failure. She would not fail.

And success would bring luxury not only to herself, but to her mother and father. With luck, they would be allowed to become overseers at one of Dyran's distant breeding farms, far away from the Lord's capricious whims.

She crossed the carpeted floor of the courtyard, carpet that mimicked the grass she never saw anymore. Her bare feet made no sound in the deep pile of the carpet. All slaves went barefoot, except those who had to work outside the manor. When, as a child, she had asked why, her father had laughed. "How far can you run on bare feet?" he'd asked. She'd never figured out the point of the joke.

The courtyard of the little swans gave out on a similarly carpeted, white-walled corridor lined with the doors...real, wooden doors, not curtains...leading to the quarters of the full-fledged concubines. Most of the doors were still closed, as well. The concubines had their own bathing rooms, and did hot have to use the common room shared by the little swans. Serina had made it a point to be up, bathed, dressed, and in place well before the rest, again on the off chance Lord Dyran might be watching. For one thing, she enjoyed having the bathing room all to herself. She got to pick and choose among the soaps and oils laid out, and never found herself with a shortage of towels. For another reason...why not? She had little else to do. A single shimmering curtain of light divided the concubines' quarters from the great hall where Lord Dyran took his ease; a visible reminder of the elven lord's magic power. It was completely opaque and of silvery color, over which ever-changing rainbow hues crawled and flowed. Neither light nor sound passed the wall of liquid iridescence, and Serina felt a tingle and a hint of resistance as she passed fearlessly through it. Her father had told her that these curtains could be set to stun, or even kill, but that had never happened in his lifetime. She supposed the curtain was there to prevent intruders from entering the harem...she couldn't imagine anyone wanting to escape it.

As usual at this hour of the morning, Serina was alone in the hall. She didn't mind; among other things, it gave her the opportunity to prowl the place and look for any changes that the Lord might have made overnight. He was given to using his magical powers to effect changes without warning. The most drastic had been the time he had caused an entire jungle of plants to spring up overnight, seemingly rooted in the floor. Rowenie had been delighted and the entire harem had played at being shepherdesses all day...Dyran had even indulgently created a sheep or two. The next day, the plants were gone.

Serina blinked in surprise as she looked about. There was one very obvious change this morning: The marble mosaic floor was no longer patterned in a delicate, pale green with pastel flowerets. Now it was a cool, deep blue, of lapis lazuli, with no patterns at all. The cushions placed in piles at the edge of the room had likewise changed to deeper, vivid colors. Up on the dais at the end of the room, the Lord's couch was still the same; thickly upholstered in his house colors of wine-red and gold, but the favorite's cushion was now a wine-red to match. The white, unembellished walls remained the same, but the domed, frosted skylight above them now had a center inset of vivid stained glass in an abstract pattern of reds, blues, violets, and emeralds. Serina could dimly see cloud shapes moving through the clear colors, and made out a colored pattern cast by the light through the glass on the dark blue, gold-veined floor.

Serina fingered the textured gold of her collar as she gazed about, wondering what this change meant. Had the Lord finally tired of pastel prettiness? Did that mean he was ready for richer fare?

A whisper of sound alerted her to the presence of someone else in the room. She whirled, startled, at the sound of a footstep behind her.

The Lord stood, poised on the threshold of the entrance behind the dais, waiting for her response. He was wearing his house colors, in an elaborately draped silken tunic, one hand on his hip, the other resting on the bejeweled hilt of his dagger. His hawklike face seemed calm, but she could see in his eyes that he was curious about her...or her reaction to the changes he had made.

Serina sank immediately to the floor in a graceful curtsy, her skirts falling around her, as if she knelt in a pool of her own heart's blood. She remained that way, head bent, staring at the velvet softness of her skirts, as the Lord's slow footsteps told her that he approached her.

"You may rise, my swan," came the indulgent, velvet-soft voice.

My swan! She exulted. That means he's promoted me!

She obeyed, rising as slowly and gracefully as she had bowed, her gaze rising past the strong, athletic legs in tight leather breeches and wine-colored suede boots; past the casually unbuttoned tunic, with gold embroidery winking at her from the collar. She continued to raise her eyes after she stood erect, bringing them up to meet his emerald ones in full challenge, instead of keeping her chin modestly down as Rowenie would have done.

"So, you have a spirit with fire." Lord Dyran chuckled, his thin lips forming a smile. "I like that. Do you wear my colors thinking to flatter me, my swan?"

"Is that not my purpose, my lord?" she replied immediately. "Is not all I think and do for one purpose only, and that to serve your pleasure?"

"Would you truly serve my pleasure?" He did not wait for a reply, but seized her wrist and pulled her toward him, bringing his mouth down demandingly on hers.

But Serina had planned for this moment from the very instant she entered the harem. Rowenie would have shrunk away with artificial shyness; Rowenie would struggle a little, feigning modesty. Serina did nothing of the kind. She molded her body against his, running her hands over his body in the ways she had been taught, returning the demands of his kiss with demands of her own. She had no idea how he felt, but she was on fire with need, her loins burning, when he broke away from her and put her at arm's length.

He looked as cool and calculating as before; he shook back his long, white-gold hair over his shoulder as he released her, and smiled a little as he rubbed his square chin with a long, graceful hand. "My Lord Ethanor admired Rowenie at dinner last night," he said, after a long moment. "I gave her to him."

It took Serina a few heartbeats for his words to sink in. When the meaning of them penetrated, she stared at him, not daring to speak, but afire with wild surmise.

"Such diligence as yours in my service should be rewarded," he continued, when he saw that she understood him. Then he held out his hand. "Come, my swan. I would like you to see your new quarters. Then...after a suitable interval...we shall reveal your new status to the rest of the flock. Hmm?"

She shivered with excitement and anticipation. And a little dread. Lord Dyran's tastes were said to be somewhat exotic...

But she was trained for that, and a life of luxury and power awaited in return for what he demanded. He would not damage anything so valuable as the concubine who alleviated his boredom.

And he was waiting for her reply. "After a suitable interval," she said, placing her hand in his. "Of course, my lord."

For one short moment, she relived her triumph; then she was back, her body still placing one foot in front of the other, like a mind-controlled slave.

Every bit of exposed skin burned with a torment that had passed beyond pain long ago. It was so hard to think... So hard to remember who and what she was, and why she should keep fighting to stay alive.

I am Serina Daeth, daughter of...daughter of...Jared Daeth. Trainer of gladiators to Lord Dyran...

Little Serina perched on the edge of a bench high above the arena, up in the shadows where the lesser elves sat when the Lord entertained. The arena itself was not very large; it probably didn't seat more than four or five hundred, and the floor, covered with soft sand, could not hold a combat involving more than four men. This was strictly a dueling arena, meant for challenge-combat and not much else. It was a sign of Lord Dyran's wealth that he maintained his own arena. It was also a sign of the number of challenges he played host to; either his own, or those arranged for others. Like the other rooms of the manor, it was lit by day by a large, frosted-glass skylight. The seats immediately surrounding the combat area were covered in leather padding; those up here were simple wooden benches. Nevertheless, humans never took these seats when there was a real combat underway.

But the combat in the arena today was strictly for practice, though it was performed at full speed, and with real, edged weapons. Good weapons, too, straight from the Lord's forges.

Jared had taken his daughter to see the forges today, as a part of her education in the reality of being bound to Lord Dyran, and she had been suitably impressed with the fires, the heat, the smoke, and the huge, brawny men and women who worked there. Most valuable of all of Lord Dyran's slaves, the forge-workers received attention and reward even above a successful duelist.

"We have a good lord," Jared had said in his stolid way. "Good work is rewarded. The Lord could ignore us, or treat us like cattle; many lords do. Just you remember that, girl. All benefit and all reward come from Lord Dyran."

The iron from which steel blades were made had to be pure; it was smelted ten times to remove any contaminants before it underwent the final process of smelting with charcoal and air to make it into true steel. Then, when it had undergone that transmutation, the smiths took it and made it into the weapons for which Lord Dyran was famed. No few of the elven lords came to Lord Dyran for their weapons, or so Jared told his daughter.

For the fighters of the elven lords' armies, they made fine swords, spear- and axe-heads, and tiny, razor-sharp arrowheads that could not be pulled from a wound, only cut out. For the duelists, however, the gladiators and other fighters, the weaponry was far different...weapons meant to wound rather than kill. Chain-flails, maces, short, broad knives, metal-barbed whips, tridents...all meant to prolong combat, all requiring great skill in the handling.

The two fighters in the arena now, practicing under her father's careful eye, were armed with gladiatorial weapons. One had a trident, the other, a chain-flail; both were also armed with knives.

The exchange seemed to be an even one; the red-haired giant with the chain-flail managed to stay out of reach of the trident points, while the swarthy man with the trident avoided having his pole fouled by the chains of the flail. Serina watched them with wide eyes, remembering that she had seen one of the breeder women taken from the red-haired man's cubicle this morning, her face a mass of bruises.

And she knew already that she was destined to serve these men, or others like them...unless she managed to save herself from that fate.

"Your fate is in your own hands," Jared had said. "Always remember that, girl. Make it your first concern to please your Lord, because no one else can make any difference to you."

The slave-master had already remarked to Ambra, her mother, just how fast she was growing, and how she was going to have to go into training soon. Serina knew what that training was for; Jared had explained it to her with blunt words; explained the difference between a concubine and a breeder. And he had hammered home the lesson that any change in her fate lay only in Lord Dyran's hands and her own diligence.

She had seen already how true his words were. Only last year they had taken her older brother Tamar away, sold or given him to another elven lord who had admired his fragile grace. Her younger brother Kaeth was being trained now in the assassins' school, taken there two weeks ago, when his agility had been uncovered during a foray on the Lord's fruit trees.

She had cried when Kaeth left in the hands of his trainers, and her mother had taken her aside, into her own room, and sat her down on the edge of the bed; told her sternly to dry her tears. "The lords rule everything," Ambra had said, without pity, but with tears shining in her eyes, tears that Serina sensed she dared not shed. "We are fortunate in having a lord such as Lord Dyran to rule us. He rewards us well for good service; there are lords who reward no one and nothing, and punish as their whim leads them. If Kaeth does well, he will be rewarded. He deserved to be punished for stealing fruit, and instead he is being given a wonderful chance. He could have been killed out of hand. That is the difference between our Lord and others."

"But why? she had cried. " Why do they rule us? Who said they could? It isn't fair!"

Another parent might have cuffed her; might have said: "Because that's the way it is." But not Ambra.

"They rule us because they are strong, and powerful, and they have magic," she said, and Serina sensed a resigned sadness in her words. "We are weak, and the gods gave us no magic at all. The lords live forever, and our lives are short. If we are to prosper, we must please the lords, for the gods love them, and despise us."

"But why? Serina had wailed.

Ambra only shook her head. "I do not know. There are those who say that the lords are the children of the gods; there are those who say the lords are demons, sent by the gods to punish or test us. I only know that those who please them live and are rewarded, and those who do not, die. It is up to Tamar and Kaeth now, to please their lords. As you must please Lord Dyran, and those he sets over you. Nothing else matters, and neither I, nor your father, nor your kin or friends can help you. They can only hinder you. If you would rise, you must do so alone."

Serina remembered that, and remembered the glimpse she'd had of Lord Dyran this afternoon, when he had come to see how the training of his fighters was progressing. She'd watched as her proud, stern father bent until his forehead touched the ground; how the other fighters had knelt in obeisance. And how Lord Dyran had seemed a creature out of a tale; tall, haughty, clothed from head to toe in cream-and-gold satin, and cream-colored leather, so supple and soft-looking that Serina had longed to touch it. How he seemed to shine, taking in the light of the sun and sending it back out redoubled. He was so beautiful he made her breath catch, and she had thought, He must be a child of the gods... And the woman with him, like a jewel herself, made Serina ache with envy. The woman was clothed in the softest silks Serina had ever seen, and laden with a fortune in gold chains. Gold chains formed the cap that crowned her golden hair, gold chains depended from the cap and flowed down her back, gold chains circled her neck and arms, and held her cream-colored dress closely to her body at the waist. She was magnificent, nearly as beautiful as the elven lord beside her, and Serina wanted to be wearing that dress, standing in her place.

She recalled how Lord Dyran had taken an imperfectly made sword that her father had brought to him in complaint, and bent it double, then bent the doubled blade back on itself a second time. That strength took her breath away once more, and sent little chills over her. What would it be like to have that strength...or be the one for whom it was gentled?

Then he had the smith who made the blade brought to him. All he had done was stare at the man for a moment, then make a little flicking motion of his hand...but the man had bent over double and had dropped screaming to the ground, and had to be carried out. No one protested or lifted a hand to help him. She had heard later that the Lord had cast elf-shot at him; and that should he ever again pass an imperfect blade, the tiny sliver of elf-stone lodged in his chest would lash him again with the same agonies.

Serina wondered; if her father sent out a fighter judged to be "imperfectly trained," would the same thing happen to him?

She shivered as she realized that the answer was "yes" and that no excuses would be accepted.

"If you would rise, do so alone," she heard in her mind, and recalled the gold-bedecked woman at Lord Dyran's side, watching the smith writhe in agony at her feet, her face impassive.

The lesson was there, and easy to read.

Rise alone and fall alone. If he had cared half as much for me as he did for the purity of his blades...but I was less than a blade, and he had a replacement standing ready.

As she took each step, each breath in agony, there was a hotter fire burning in her mind. Once Lord Dyran had grown tired of her, she was of less use than one of his pensioners. And he no longer cared what happened to her.

The pensioners...once she had scorned them; the weak in power, or elven "lords" fallen on hard times, who had lost too much in the ever-renewing duels. The duels were fought by their trained gladiators, but they represented very real feuds, and the losses incurred when their fighters lost were equally real...

Twice as pathetic were the sad cases whose magic was too weak to accomplish more than self-protection. Though these "pensioners" could not be collared, they could be coerced in other, more subtle ways. They often served as overseers, as chief traders, and in other positions of trust. They were neither wholly of the world of the High Lords, nor pampered as luxuriously as the treasured slaves, such as concubines and entertainers. Serina had pitied them, once.

No. Better to fall, she thought, than eke out a miserable, scrabbling existence like theirs...

Better to have reigned at least for a little while; to have stood at Lord Dyran's side, and answered to no one but her master... to have feared only purely mortal trickery. Unlike the pensioners, whose every action was a move in a game they did not understand.

"So," Dyran said, regarding the top of the trembling overseer's head, as the elven subordinate knelt before him. "It would seem the quota cannot be met." He was all in black today, and the milky light from the skylight overhead made his hair gleam like silver on his shoulders. He had a look about him that Serina knew well, a look that told her his mood was a cruel one, and she hoped he would appease it on the person of his overseer.

"No, my lord," the elven overseer replied, his voice quavering. There was nothing in his appearance...other than his clothing...to tell a human of the vast social gulf between himself and Dyran. His hair, tied back in a neat tail, was just as long and silky, just as pale a gold. His eyes were just as green, his stature equal to Dyran's. Both had the sharply pointed ear-tips of their race, and both appeared to be fighting men in the prime of life. The overseer wore riding leathers; Dyran fine velvet. But there were differences between them not visible to the human senses; differences that made Dyran master. "There have been too many injuries, my lord, to..."

"Due to your neglect," Dyran reminded him silkily. Serina saw that his goblet of wine had warmed, and replaced it with a chilled one. He ignored her, all his attention bent on his victim.

The overseer blanched. "But my lord, I told you that the forge chains needed..."

"Due to your neglect," Dyran repeated, and settled back into his ornately carved wooden chair, steepling his long, slender hands before his chin. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to teach you a lesson about caring for your tools, Goris. I believe you have a daughter?"

"Yes, my lord," the overseer whispered. He glanced up briefly, and Serina noted that he had the helpless, hopeless look of a creature in a trap. "But she is my only heir..."

Dyran dismissed the girl with a gesture. "Wed her to Dorion. He's been pestering me for a bride, and his quota has been exceeded. We'll see if his line proves more competent than yours."

The overseer's head snapped up, emerald eyes wide with shock. "But, my lord!" he protested. "Dorion is..."

He stopped himself, and swallowed suddenly, as his pupils contracted with fear."

Lord Dyran leaned forward in his seat. "Yes?" he said, with venomous mildness. "You were about to say...what?" He raised one eyebrow, a gesture Serina knew well. It meant he was poised to strike, if angered.

The overseer was frozen with terror. "Nothing, my lord," he whispered weakly.

"You were about to say, 'Dorion is a pervert,' I believe," Dyran told him, his voice smooth and calm, his expression serene. "You were about to take exception to the fact that Dorion prefers human females to tedious young elven maids. As do I. As you finally remembered."

"No, my lord," the overseer protested, barely able to get the words out. Serina noted that he was trembling slightly, his hands clenched to keep from giving himself away.

Dyran held him frozen with his eyes alone, a bird helpless in the gaze of a deadly viper. "You would be correct to believe that Dorion prefers his concubines to insipid little elven maids. Nevertheless, Dorion intends to do his duty and breed an heir, however distasteful and depressing that may be. As I did. And you have a suitable daughter. Nubile, of breeding age. Barely, but close enough. Nubile is all that Dorion requires; frankly, I think he might even prefer it if she were unwilling. You will wed her to Dorion, Goris. See to it."

The overseer went white-lipped, but nodded; rose slowly and painfully to his feet, and turned to leave.

"Oh, and Goris..."

The overseer turned, like a man caught in a nightmare, his face gray with dread.

"See to those forge chains yourself. You have enough magic for that." The elven lord smiled sweetly. "That is, if what you have told me is true. Barely enough, but that will do. If you show you are willing to exert yourself on my behalf, I might arrange for your daughter to be divorced once she breeds."

Dyran laughed as the overseer plodded to the door, his head bowed, his shoulders sagging. Serina knew why he laughed. If Goris had "just barely" enough magic to mend the forge chains, that meant that he would be lying flat on his back with exhaustion for weeks afterwards, and be unable to use what magic he did have without suffering excruciating pain for a month or more.

As for Goris's young daughter, the elven overseer Dorion would undoubtedly bed her as soon as he wed her, and keep bedding her lovelessly until she conceived, then abandon her for the arms of his concubines.

Dyran reached for his wine and waited for his seneschal to bring him the next piece of business. Serina refilled his goblet as soon as he removed his hand from it. She had no pity for Goris's daughter. If the girl wanted to succeed, she would have to be as ruthless as any other elven lord or lady. If she could not manage that, she deserved what came to her.

Goris doesn't know that his forge chains were sabotaged. That was one of the many advantages of being at Dyran's side constantly; when the damage was first reported, Serina had been privy to the report, and to the knowledge that they had been weakened by magic. The saboteur might even have been Dorion; for the moment, however, Dyran chose to assume it was the work of one of his rivals on the Council. It might well have been; that kind of sabotage was typical for the Council members, as well as those who aspired to Council seats. It was just one more move in the never-ending cycle of feuds and subterfuge.

It was a game that Goris and Dorion would have played, had they been equal to it. But their weak positions and equally weak magic ensured that they would always be in the service of a stronger elven lord. Only one thing stopped the elven lords short of outright assassination of each other: births were so rare among them that an elven pair might strive for decades before producing a single child, and once wholesale assassination started, the perpetrator would find himself on the top of everyone's list as the next victim.

With an entire world to plunder, one would think that the overlords would despoil and move on. But the elven lords did take a reasonable amount of care with their properties...which sometimes made Serina wonder at this unusual restraint. They did not take an equal amount of care with their human resources, however, humans birthed often, and there were always more slaves on the way when the current batch was used up. Only the special, and the skilled, were valuable.

"If you would rise, rise alone."

Serina was very careful to keep herself counted among the "valuable."

She was proud of Dyran; already in the past few months he had eroded Lord Vyshall's power by planting a rumor with just enough truth to be believed that he was thinking of divorcing his current lady and arranging another marriage. He had traded information on the vices of Lady Reeana for that bit of news. And he had managed to buy out the entire iron ore trade secretly, making himself the sole possessor of the most vital component of steel production. Now even his competition would have to come to him...or else tax themselves and their resources in discovering new deposits of the mineral.

But his most recent triumph was his own marriage, an amazingly fertile marriage, that had produced an unheard-of set of twins.

The next business was with the overseer of Dyran's farmlands. Since Branden was a depressingly honest sort, and there was nothing more boring than listening to a recitation of weather and expected harvests, Serina allowed her mind to wander.

Lady Lyssia... Serina's lips curved in a slight smile. Lady Lyssia, Dyran's espoused, then divorced, wife had never been any threat to her position.

V'Sheyl Edres Lord Fotren had a daughter, Lyssia by name. And unwedded, despite her father's position in Council and wealth as the supplier of the finest trained gladiators to be had. Lyssia had taken a fall from a horse in her childhood, and as the result of that fall, was possessed of just enough wit to feed and clothe herself and play simple games. In short, though physically in her early twenties, she remained at the age she had been when she took the fall: about five.

Not the most exciting of conversationalists...unless you're willing to listen to her babble about her dolls.

Because of that flaw...and because those who knew of it often assumed that the defect in her mind was the result of breeding and not an accident...she had never been considered as suitable material for marriage. But she was her father's only child; despite many attempts, he had never been able to produce another to supplant her as heir. Those of elven blood lived long, but not...as the humans believed...forever. Her father, beginning the long, slow decline into elven old age, had been growing quietly, but increasingly, desperate.

Which was where Dyran entered the picture. He despised the women of his own race, preferring to seek his amatory adventures in the talented and trained arms of his concubines. But he needed an heir; and more, with an alliance to Lord Edres, he would be in a position to arrange many duels, supplying the means and the weapons with absolute impartiality for those who kept no fighters of their own.

He presented himself as a suitable mate; Lord Edres was ready to take an overseer for the girl by then, and risk having a grandson with weak magic. Dyran must have seemed god-sent. The contract was set up to be fulfilled once two living children had been produced; one to be Dyran's heir, and one to be Edres's.

Dyran intended to fulfill that contract as quickly as possible, and he was one of the few elves whose magic worked on the level of the very small as well as the very large. Any powerful elven lord could call down lightning; Dyran could knit up a bone, and more, if he chose. And using his powerful magics to enhance his own fertility and that of the girl, he mated with the child with the same indifference as one of his gladiator-studs. The experiment succeeded so well that he had kept the means of it secret, to be used at some later-date. At a time when most elves were satisfied with one child in a decade, Dyran fathered male twins upon her. One went to her father's house as a replacement heir, much to the Lord's relief. The other came with Dyran, to be lodged with all due pomp in the nursery.

The concubines were not permitted to enter the nursery, so Serina had never seen the boy. The child's nurses were all human, but so carefully bespelled that they could not even think without asking permission of the Lord. Guards just as carefully bespelled stood sentry at every possible entrance. Only when the boy was able to protect himself...which would be at age thirteen or thereabouts, if his powers were as strong as his father's...would the protection end. Meanwhile, his every moment would be overseen, and every need or want would be attended to. He would not be spoiled; spoiled children rarely survived the cutthroat competition of elven politics. But he would be carefully educated, carefully nurtured, carefully prepared...

And he would live in luxury that made Serina's pale by comparison.

Not that it mattered to Serina; the mother was hardly a rival for Dyran's fickle affections, nor, in an odd way, was the son. Dyran cared nothing for his son, except as a possession, the all-important heir, and that was where his interest in him ended. There had been a brief flurry of activity when the child was brought to the manor and installed in the nursery; after that, everything went back to normal. And that was all Serina knew or cared. Thanks to the drugs in every human concubine's food, she would never be pregnant, except at the Lord's orders, and then only by another human.

Still, keeping Dyran's attention could be terribly wearing...

She found herself eyeing one of the Lord's elite guards; a handsome brunette youngster, firmly muscled, with a strong chin and earnest dark eyes, and young enough that he might not be so hardened a beast as some of the gladiators. In general, the guards were more personable than the duelists, though they were just as well rewarded, and just as proud of their status. There were weeks, months, when Dyran was away, that time sat heavy on her hands, and the nights, especially, seemed to take forever to pass. No elven lord took his concubines with him when he traveled; that would be insulting the hospitality of his host. No matter how indispensable Serina thought she had made herself, in the end, it seemed, she could be done without...

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad to find herself a handsome young stud and have herself assigned to him, to gracefully slip into retirement... Perhaps if she pleased Dyran enough, when he tired of her, he would permit her to have a mate of her own choosing. A youngster like that, perhaps, fresh enough to be pliant to her wishes...

Demons! What was she thinking? Fool! That was a certain way to be supplanted!

She strengthened her resolve never to even think of being replaced. It would be better to die than become a breeder.

And as she schooled her expression into that sensuous smile Dyran liked, she swore that she would keep Dyran's interest, no matter what it took.

A stumble over something hidden in the sand brought her to her hands and knees, and brought an end to her drift into memory. Memory that was kinder than reality...

She tried, and failed, to get to her feet, as the sun punished her unprotected back.

It would be easy to give up; to lie in the sand and wait for death. She wondered why she had ever thought death preferable to disgrace and displacement. Death was no easy slide into sleep...it was the parched pain of a dry throat and mouth, a need for water driving out all thoughts, the agony of burned and blistered skin.

I will not die. I will not! I am Serina Daeth, and I will live and have revenge!

So she began to crawl, with the same mindless determination with which she had continued to walk. Somewhere out here, there must be shelter, water. She would find both. Someone must live out here. She would buy their aid, with whatever it took.

But it was so hot.

NOTHING VEILED THE brilliance of the sky, a clear and flawless turquoise bowl inverted over the undulating dunes of the desert, and the sun blazed in the east in solitary glory. Alamarana closed her inner eyelids against the white glare of sun-on-sand below her, spread her wings until her muscles strained, and spiraled in an ever-lower circle in the thermal she had chosen. Her destination, the ruin of a long-abandoned dragon-lair complex, was hardly more than a flaw in the silver-gilt sand beneath her scarlet-and-gold wings, but the pool beside it was visible at any height, reflecting the sky above like an unwinking cerulean eye.

She corrected her course with tiny changes in the web of her wings as she drifted a little away from her goal. Months ago she would have folded her wings tight to her body and plummeted down on the ruins from above, ending her dive in a glorious, sand-scattering backwash of braking wing-beats. Not today. Not while she still carried the little one; no recklessness when she would be risking two, not one, with her aerobatics.

She tilted her wings, spilled air, dropped a little, spilled air again. The spring-fed pool beckoned with a promise of serenity; she was tired, wing and shoulder muscles aching with the strain of so much flying, and glad this stop marked the end of her journey. Already she had spent her appointed times on Father Dragon's mountaintop, in the surf beneath the cliffs that stood sentry on the Northern Sea, and deep within the redolent tree-trunk "halls" of the endless cedars of Taheavala Forest. Thus she had joined with air, water, and earth...and this final station on her pilgrimage represented a melding with the element of fire. Not for all dragons, this pilgrimage of the elements, but for a shaman it was the nearest to mandatory the dragons ever came.

She furled her wing-sails a little, angling her flight into a tighter curve, and drifted downward until she was a body-length from the ground, and close to stalling speed. She spread her huge wings to their fullest and cupped the air beneath them, hovering for a moment before dropping as lightly as any bird to the sand.

The heat felt wonderful after the chill of the upper air. For a moment she kept her wings spread, and soaked up the blessed sun-rays with her eyes half-closed and all four of her taloned claws digging happily into the burning sands. She wriggled her toes in luxury, reveling in the heat, and in the strength the sun's rays gave back to her. Within her, the little one stirred restlessly, bumping against her ribs. Her time would be soon, now, though unless she suffered some kind of strain, not until Alara willed it so. That was one control, at least, that a female shaman had over her biological destiny.

She basked with no thought of time, until the sun rose to its zenith and the sand beneath her cooled in the shadow of her body. Finally she sighed, and opened her eyes.

I am wasting time. The sooner I finish, the sooner I can be home. She turned her head slowly, looking for a good place to settle for her final meditation.

The ruin had been so long abandoned that there was little left of it. Its most notable feature was a single long, low wall, rising from drifts of shining sand like the spine of a snake, the sinuous curves typical of draconic workmanship. Beyond it, something square rose barely above the surface, the hints of a foundation, architecture copied from elves or humans. A heap of pink shapes marked the toppled, sand-worn stones of what had been a tower. A few plants and scrawny grasses, a half dozen trees, were the only growing things; all were within half a dragon-length of the pool.

Beside the wall was the stone-rimmed pool itself, of course. Spring-fed, and colder than her kind preferred, it was so pure as to be dangerous to drink in any quantity, at least for the dragons, who thrived on the alkaline salt-pools that poisoned other creatures.

This was not a site of disaster, nor even of ill-chance. There was no hint of violence here, only the work of time and the hand of nature.

Stupid to settle here in the first place, so near the elven lands...

Irilianale's Lair, it had been called. "As impulsive as Iri" was the saying, and "More persuasive than Irilianale," by which the entire story could be implied. Iri had taken a liking to the spot, a desert oasis perfect for the heat-basking the dragons, with their high metabolism, craved. Though the pool could not be drunk from regularly with any safety, there were plenty of deposits of metal salts nearby. And then Iri had discovered the real treasure of the site...

And somehow managed to convince a score of otherwise sane dragons to follow his lead.

But nearness to elven lands and lack of game forced the dragons to abandon it before very long. Every virtue but one that the site possessed was duplicated elsewhere in places of greater safety. The only attraction that was not duplicated lay at the roots of the pool itself, for the rift in the earth that let the spring rise to the surface marked a "spring" of another kind. The energies of magic leaked through here, mingling with the waters and keeping them pure, here where six ley-lines met in a perfectly symmetrical star. This magic that kept the water of the pool free of the alkaline salts that saturated most of the water in the Mehav Desert was something that kept the dragons returning even after the settlement had been abandoned. It was a source of pure magical power unmatched anywhere in this world, and dragons returned here; despite that the place had been abandoned long before Alara was born. Lack of game could have been compensated for, as had been done elsewhere by careful management. It was really the encroachment of elves and their human slaves that caused them to leave the place to the desert hawks, ruby-lizards, and their ilk.

And that was the concern of greatest moment to Alara. If she didn't want to be detected, there was only one form she could take. She was going to be here a while, and she wanted to be comfortable. After a moment of inspecting the ruins, Alara found the perfect place to take up her station; a hollow in the shelter of the wall that could have been created to cradle her body, swollen with pregnancy. It lay full in the sun and she curled herself into it, tucking tail and wingtips in neatly.

No use in making her shift any harder than it had to be, she thought with wry good humor. Father Dragon didn't call her "lazy" for nothing...though she preferred to think of herself as "efficient."

The sand was soft and yielding, and silken against the scales of her sides. She contemplated the pool for a moment, letting its deep, silent water give her the pattern for her meditations. Gradually she let her mind sink into it, down through the blue-tinged waters, into the indigo depths, to the sand-strewn bottom, where the cold water welled up from a hidden crack beneath the sands. There was the magic, welling up as serenely as the water, from the joining of the six shining ley-lines. She saw them with her overeyes, glowing moon-on-dragon-scale silver, that peculiar sheen of pure metal with the overlay of draconic iridescence, a furtive rainbow that was all colors and none at all. And where the lines met, a silent fountain of power sang upward, rising toward the sunbeams lancing down to meet it.

If only the elves knew... Alara chuckled to herself. The elvenkind were so jealous of power, hoarders of any and all sources, and as greedy of its possession as a child with a sweet. But the elvenkind could not see the ley-lines, and could not avail themselves of the strength inherent in them. Only the dragons could...and the humans...

Alara was not certain why the dragons were able to tap the alien energies of this world. Perhaps, though they were not native to this place, it was because their power came from shifting themselves to live in harmony with whatever world they found themselves on. The elves, equally foreign here, could not sense nor use these energies...so Father Dragon said...not only because they were no more native to this world than the dragons, but because they made no attempt to fit themselves to it. Instead, they chose ever to fit the world to themselves.

As for the poor humans...those that were left with the ability to see the power had little notion of how to use it, and if ever their masters learned they did have that gift, they speedily met their end in the arena or at the hands of an overseer. The elves did not tolerate such talents among their servants.

. And yet the gifts persisted, as if the land itself needed them.

An interesting thought. Not now, though... Alara tucked that notion away for later contemplation, and proceeded with her own magic-weavings, tapping into the upwelling magic of the pool to lend her the strength and power for such a complicated shifting. She was here for a purpose, and idle thoughts of elves and humans could wait until that purpose was accomplished.

She drew yet more of the power away from the spring, spinning it into a gossamer thread that sparkled to her innersight and caressed her with a rich and heady taste like the sparkling vintages she had enjoyed in her elven form. She took the power to herself and spun it through her body until she shimmered like a mirage from nose to tail-tip. Tension built in her, as she drank in more and more of the power, drank it in and held it until she could hold no more, until she strained with it as a water-skin filled nigh to bursting.

Now...she thought, and felt the ripple of change start at her tail and course through her in a wave, leaving in its wake...

Stone.

Not just any stone. Fire-born stone, the frozen wrath of volcanoes, the glassy blood from the heart of the world. The closest any living thing could come to fire itself.

In the blink of an eye, she shifted. No longer was there a dragon curled shining in the sun. In her place, the hollow of sand cupped a dull obsidian boulder, vaguely draconic in shape, smooth and sand-worn as the stones of the wall behind her, taking in the blistering heat of the sun's rays and absorbing them into its dusty black surface.

Now she could relax and let her mind drift where it would. Four times she had shifted: into an ice-eagle, a species near as large as the dragons themselves and so at home with the currents of the upper airs that they ate and slept on the wing; into a careless delphin, as at one with the waters as the ice-eagle was in the air, into a mighty cedar, with roots deep in the soil...and now, most difficult of all because it was not living, the fire-stone. Not all female dragons need take this pilgrimage of powers when a birth was imminent; only the shamans, like Alara, to fix a oneness with this world into their offspring, in hopes that one or more would in turn take up shamanistic duties to serve dragonkind.

Indeed, she found herself hyperaware of the earth about her, of the molten core beneath her. Here and there, close to the ruins and near to the surface, she sensed deposits of metallic salts. She made careful note of those; they might be needed, one day, when deposits nearer Leveanliren's Lair were worked out. It would have been better if the deposits nearer home had been purer ores, and better still if they had been salts as these were; dragons needed substantial quantities of metal in their diets...the closer to pure, the better...for the growth of claws, horns, and scales.

Shed skin carried the old scales with it...she supposed one could eat one's old skin, but that seemed so barbaric, somehow.

This ruin was perilously close to one of the elven trade routes, but it should be possible to mine the deposits with scouts in the air.

Alara's thoughts darkened as she scanned the trade route for elven minds, or the blankness that meant collared slaves and bondsmen. So far the Kin had been both lucky and careful. Elvenkind did not know that they truly existed. And the Elders were right and Father Dragon was wrong, she thought. They must never learn that dragons existed. One at a time, even with magic to aid them, the elves were no match for one of the Kin... but if elves came upon the Kin in force...

If she had not been stone, the spines on her neck would have risen. She remembered all too clearly her encounters with elves, moments when they had caught her on the ground, in draconic shape. Only shifting quickly into elven form, and presenting the effect as an illusion, had saved her.

Sightings in the air presented no problem; in fact, that was something of a game with the younger dragons...they would find a remote spot with only a single elven observer, and shift briefly into dragon-shape, then land when they knew they had been spotted. Once on the ground, they would shift again; into some animal, or into elven form. When the observer came looking for the dragon, the "elf" he encountered would deny having seen any such thing.

Only once had a dragon made the mistake of shifting into human form for an encounter.

Alara felt herself starting to shift back, her anger overcoming her control of her form.

Shoronuralasea would never walk without a limp after that encounter, but there was one less elf in the world.

A few such inescapable confrontations had taught dragons that the elves, for all their power, were vulnerable in curious ways. The alkali of the water the dragons preferred was secreted into poison sacs in their claws...and the merest scratch from a dragon's talon, even unvenomed, was enough to send an elf into a shock-reaction.

And if she had to, she thought grimly, yet with an odd satisfaction, let one of them get within touching distance or between her wings, and there would be nothing left to question.

That led to thoughts of impatience. She welcomed and wanted this child, but there were so many things she dared not do...size-shifting was not encouraged during most of pregnancy, and for good reason. To shift size meant that one would have to shift a great deal of mass into the Out, and such a shift could have dire consequences to a developing child. Alara missed the freedom to take whatever shape she pleased. But most of all, Alara missed the Thunder Dances, when all the dragons called in a lightning storm and flew among the clouds at the height of it.

Dragons sometimes died in a Thunder Dance, dashed to the ground by a sudden, unexpected down-draft. Or met with disaster as wingbones broke or membranes tore, leaving them to flail helplessly, falling to their deaths. Occasionally one of their fellow dancers would notice the plight, or hear the mental screams for help, and wing in to the doomed one's side in time to save him, but that didn't happen too often.

But the risk was part of the attraction after all.

Alara thought back to her last Thunder Dance with a longing so intense she would have shivered in any other form, and a deep and abiding hunger. And she bad been the FireRunner, the position of most honor and most danger...

Rising and falling, the plaything of the winds, steering through them by yielding to them...

That showed mastery of the air, more than any gymnastics in gentle thermals ever could.

Calling the lightning to herself as it leapt from cloud to cloud, letting it run over her skin and arc up into the thunderheads above, every scale, every spine outlined in white fire...

And a single momentary lapse of concentration would let the lightning flow through her instead of over her impervious skin, paralyzing her or even killing her.

Casting lightnings of her own, from wingtip to wingtip, or from wingtip to cloud...

Most dragons could arc while on the ground; only the ones with skill hard-won from years of practice could arc and fly. That Alara could even arc to another point was a measure other skill, skill that had won her a most desirable mate after the last Dance.

If she had possessed lips, she would have licked them at the memory of Reolaha|, shaman of Wav|na's Lair. Long, lithe, lean...in color a dusky gold beneath the rainbow iridescence of his scales...a mind as swift as the lightning and a wit as sharp as his claws; in short, he was a combination Alara found irresistible. He was the FireRunner now, for both their Lairs, until the little one was born and she could resume her full duties. Double duty...twice the danger, for Running in so many Thunder Dances, but twice the thrill as well. And, unless circumstances threw them together again, it was unlikely they would meet except at Dances, much less become permanent mates. Neither his Lair nor hers would be willing to do without their shaman. The duties of the shaman were too time-consuming for either of them to make the three-day flight between the two Lairs very often. She permitted herself a moment of self-pity. A shaman's life was not her own.

But Alara was not of the temper to wallow in self-pity for long. Duties, yes, she mused, but pleasures as well. Best of all was being the FireRunner...

There was nothing like it; choosing the fiercest of the weather patterns, forcing the lightning to hold back until the breaking point...

Then calling it, a hundred killer bolts at once, and streaking down out of the sky with the fire a spine's length away from her tail, diving, falling like a stone out of the heavens and down, into a narrow cleft just wide enough for her to drop through it, lined on all sides with carefully placed jewels, gems that the lightning would tune and charge...

Gems winking, a rainbow of stars set in the walls, the rock itself a breath away from her wings, the air actually splitting with her passage, and the fires of heaven chasing her down into the earth...while the gems in her wake blazed until the cleft behind was alight with a hundred colors of glory...

Until at the last minute she would break through into the cavern beneath, spread her wings with a thunder of her own, and snap-roll out of the way as the last of the lightning discharged itself into the floor of the cavern, fusing the rock and sand at the contact point, and stray discharges crackled over her as she landed...

She started to sigh; then, when she couldn't, recalled her form and purpose for being here. She was supposed to be contemplating Fire. Earth-fire. She didn't think lightning counted.

She stretched her earth-senses again, sending them resolutely downward. She hoped she was doing it right. She wasn't a shaman when she carried Keman. And all Father Dragon would tell her when she had left on this pilgrimage was: "Do what you feel is right." She still felt more than a little disgruntled by his apparent lack of cooperation. She knew it was part of a shaman's work to give no direct answers, but she thought it was carrying things a bit too far to play the same game with another shaman!

And she could almost hear Father Dragon saying "Oh, no it isn't..."

There were times when this business of being contrary got on her nerves, and she was the one being contrary!

But that was what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to keep the Kin awake; supposed to see that they didn't become too complacent and look for easy answers. Or frivolous ones...

Easy answers and complacency were very much a danger among the Kin. Ever since they had come to this world, there had been very little to challenge them.

Alara herself had been born here, but she had memorized every tale and image Father Dragon had imparted to the younger shamans. Home was a place no one wanted to return to, a world of savage predators fully a match for a grown, canny dragon; of ice storms that blew up in a heartbeat and left the hapless dragon caught in them to freeze to death within moments of shelter, of ruthless competition for food. Their shape-shifting abilities had been forged of necessity, hammered into shape by competition, and honed by hunger and fear. Life was brutal, ruthless, and all too often, short. Then, one day, one of the Kin discovered something odd in the depths of a cavern he was exploring with an eye to making it a Lair.

One of the entrances off the main cavern gave off, not into a side cave, but into another world. And such a world! A place of green, growing forests, long, lazy summers, an abundance of food...and nothing, seemingly, large or savage enough to threaten them.

And yet not all of the Kin chose to escape through that Gate, after Shonsealaroni had stabilized it with one of his precious hoard-gems. Some stubbornly insisted that Home was better. In the end, perhaps half the Kin passed through...and the moment Shonsea took away his gem, the Gate collapsed.

By then, however, the Kin had learned how to create Gates of their own. Some of them had taken a liking to the place. Though accident and murder were the common shorteners of life among the Kin, if violent death could be avoided, a dragon lived a very long time indeed. In the new world, which they named "Peace," they discovered how long, and that the one common bane to the long-lived is boredom.

That was when some of the Kin took to world-hopping, seeking challenges and amusements.

There was certainly enough to keep them occupied here! Once Father Dragon discovered the elves and their slaves...

The first Gate had probably been a construct of the elves or something like them, or of a mage ill taught.

Father Dragon suspected that it was, indeed, these elves, in an attempt ill directed to bridge the worlds, that bridged instead Home and Peace.

For when the Kin found the elvenkind, they learned that the elves themselves were alien to this place, and had built themselves a Gate to take them from a place in which their lives were imperiled to a place where they would be the masters. It was somewhat ironic that the Kin had been gifted with a Gate and thought only of escape, where the elves who had constructed it thought only of conquest. Father Dragon, who had studied the elvenkind the longest of any dragon, speculated that the peril the elves had found themselves in was a peril caused by their own actions. Alara had never yet seen nor heard anything to disprove that, and many things seemed in accord with that theory. The elvenkind occasionally spoke in Council of Clan Wars, the destruction of vast stretches of land, of strife by magic "until the rocks ran like water," and the overwhelming need to prevent another such conflict. There were no evidences of any warfare on a scale that vast here; conflict between Clans or individuals was kept within acceptable bounds.

So perhaps they warred until their own home-world was destroyed. Or perhaps they were the losers in a conflict that would permit the survival of no one but the winners. Another reason to keep our existence from them...

Only the humans were native; whatever level of culture they had achieved before the arrival of the elves was long lost by the time the Kin appeared. By then, the elves had firmly imposed their order on the world about them, with the elves as undisputed masters and the humans as subject slaves.

And that, of course, was a situation creating fertile ground for mischief...

She was drifting again. She became annoyed at herself. She had managed the other three shifts easily enough. She had been able to keep her mind on her element. What was wrong with her now?

She started to stretch; remembered, again, that she couldn't and decided irritably that the problem was the simple one of boredom. As the eagle, she had learned entirely new things about flying and wind and air-currents; feathers behaved in a manner altogether unlike membranous wings. As the delphin, she'd had a whole new world to explore; it had been very hard to leave that form and journey onwards. Even as the cedar, there had been a forest full of life around her, and she had been able to move, at least to a limited extent.

Here, in the desert, there was nothing but herself and the magical energies of the spring.

Maybe if she did something instead of sitting there...like a...a stone!

Alara had not seen even fifty of this world's summers...as the Kin of her Lair went, she was very young. Some said too young, especially for the position of shaman. Some said too headstrong, too contrary, never mind that the shaman was supposed to be the dissenting voice.

She broke custom too often for comfort. She broke it in taking the rank so young; she broke it whenever it seemed to her that "custom" was just an excuse for not wanting to change. They listened to her, but they thought she was reckless, headstrong. And maybe they were right. But maybe she was right, and the Kin were letting this soft world lure them into a long dream in the sun.

At least they still listened to her.

So far. She wondered how far she could push them. They couldn't unmake her, but they could ignore her.

If the others knew of her forays into elven lands, though, they'd have been outraged. Not that taking elven form and brewing trouble wasn't a standard game for the Kin...tricks of that kind were fine if you were an ordinary dragon.

But that a shaman would so risk herself would have horrified the rest of the Lair.

That was part of the problem right there; the Kin were only taking acceptable risks. Ever since Shoro had been hurt, no one wanted to take high risks anymore.

That was why no one had come here in so long; they didn't want to risk being seen, however unlikely that was. And they didn't want to risk playing with energy this powerful; it might lash back at them.

Which was why no one else wanted to be FireRunner, except another shaman. Father Dragon said that the Kin used to compete for the privilege, but now, if there was no shaman, there was no Thunder Dance, and that was the end of it. Was it laziness, or something else? Why, in the past year, there couldn't have been more than a half-dozen of the Kin among the elvenkind, and those were mostly quiet spying trips! It was almost as if the others were afraid to go...

She certainly enjoyed her forays among the elves.

The last expedition had gone particularly well. V'larn Lord Rathekrel Treyn-Tael was not a patient soul...

And Alara had exploited that impatience, weaving a web of trouble for him with the dexterity of an orb-spider...

Why was it that flowers never smelled so sweet as when they were dying?

Alara reached out to the bouquet of white blooms on the dressing table, and caressed the stem of a wilting lily, reviving it with a touch. Once again, she glanced up at the mirror above the flower arrangement; once again, she could find no flaw in her disguise. From the white-gold hair, to the narrow, clawlike feet, she was the very epitome of highly bred elvenkind. Her hair cascaded down her back to the base of her spine; her wide, slanted eyes glowed the preferred blue-green. Her face could have been carved from the finest marble, with high cheekbones, broad brow, thin nose, generous mouth and determined chin. She spread out her hands before her; strange, to see long, slender, talonless fingers instead of five claws, and equally strange to see pale skin, translucent as fine porcelain, instead of rainbow scales, with the iridescence overlaying a deep red-gold.

And stranger still to walk upright, balancing on two legs. She felt as if she were always about to fall.

She had chosen to be female this time; simulating a male could be awkward, especially with some of the assumptions the elven lords made about guests. Once she had even been offered the services of a concubine, and had escaped the situation only because she had not planned to spend the night.

She would not even know how to go about mating as a male dragon, much less one of them!

There was another advantage, one which made the current jest possible. Being in female form...most lissome and, as elves reckoned, desirable female form...she could create a situation built on pressures and assumptions that not even the cleverest of elves could anticipate.

She knew from her study of him that Rathekrel was very susceptible to certain pressures. Although he was nothing short of a trading genius, there his expertise ended. He was hot-tempered, inclined to indulge that temper, and had a long history of making disastrous mistakes where the females of his kind were concerned.

Alara had decided to help him make another.

She turned away from the silver-framed mirror, and back towards the important decision of choosing a gown.

She considered, then discarded as too girlish, a high-necked autumn-rose brocade. A sable satin piece, displaying as much bosom as the previous gown concealed, was too obvious. Finally she settled on a flowing robe of shimmer-silk in emerald green, with sleeves that swept the floor, a bodice that clung to her like a second skin before flaring out into a full skirt and train that could have concealed an army of midgets. Although the neckline was high and demure, the cut and tight fit of the garment above the waistline left nothing to the imagination.

She summoned the maids and waited passively while they gowned, coifed, and bejeweled her at her direction. The human slaves had gentle, deft hands, and they worked in complete silence; it was easy to imagine that she was surrounded by invisible sprites of the air instead of a bevy of young girls in the uniform household tunic of white banded with silver.

Rathekrel's manor was not the largest she had ever visited, but it was by no means the smallest. Containing twenty-five guest suites alone, it was staffed by hundreds of human slaves, and supported a good hundred subordinate elves. The chamber in which she sat was plushly appointed, and one of three that made up the suite of rooms...lavish dressing room, sitting room, and bedroom, all decorated chastely in the house-trademark white-and-silver, with a private bath sculpted to simulate a hot spring sunk in snowbanks, an illusion broken only by the silver spigots in the form of fish, and mounds of plush, frost-white towels beside it.

In fact, most of the house was done in white-and-silver. The decor made Alara cold and uncomfortable. And she recognized it as a subtle means for Rathekrel to overwhelm his guests, no matter what reason had brought them here.

She was willing to bet that Rathekrel's chambers didn't look as if he were holding court in a glacier.

Even the furniture was just slightly uncomfortable.

The style was slim, unadorned, austere. The padding on the seat-cushions was a shade too thin. The lack of ornamentation made the white-lacquer furnishings seem to fade into the white-satin walls. The bed was just a trifle too hard.

Her gown, a vivid green, shouted defiance at the rest of the room, as she sat quietly, with her hands folded, on the little white-lacquer stool in front of the mirrored white-lacquer vanity table, surrounded by her white-clad attendants.

She was glad she hadn't chosen either the red or the black, she thought, taking care to keep her huge, emerald-green eyes glazed with dreamy lassitude that she in nowise felt. The red would have looked like blood on snow; the black as if she were declaring open war on his Clan. And she was supposed to be from an ally.

The last of the humans patted a final hair into place, and stood away. Alara contemplated the results, analyzing everything Rathekrel would shortly be seeing across the dinner table from him.

Her pale gold hair was now an artfully sculpted tumble of curls, woven with a chain of gold and tiny emeralds, two larger gems winking from her earlobes. At her direction, the slaves had left her face bare of most cosmetics. After all, she was trying to enhance the impression of being an untried maiden. She had only allowed them to darken her lashes, dust her lids with a whisper of malachite, and her cheeks with powdered pearl, making her pale face paler still.

Around her neck she wore a small fortune in emeralds, and they were not gifts from her host. That alone would make a statement; a direct challenge to Rathekrel's wealth.

The dress draped sensuously, exactly as she hoped it would, cupping her small, high breasts, flowing over her hips.

The hint of sex, not the promise. A suggestion of innocence.

Ostensibly, she was only a messenger from one of Rathekrel's allies. She had given Rathekrel every reason to believe, however, that she was, in her own person, a more direct offer of alliance-by-marriage. Why else send a female messenger?

Or so Rathekrel would think.

She rose, and the humans fell back in a well-trained wave, one scampering to open the door for her, the rest already falling to the task of cleaning up the room and the debris of preparation.

The white-and-silver door closed behind her, leaving her in a white hallway lit by silver lanterns in the shape of swans, and paved with the purest white marble Alara had ever seen.

She glided over the cool stone at a sedate walk, the only sound being the hiss of her skirt over the spotless paving, her thin doeskin slippers permitting her to feel that there were no cracks or crevices in the seamless marble.

She kept her pace to a swaying, sedate walk. No well-bred elven maid ever produced so vulgar a sound as a footfall, nor hurried her steps, no matter how urgent the cause.

Poor things, Alara thought pityingly. Unless they had the power, the spirit, and the temper to challenge the customs, they were as much pawns and slaves as their humans.

The elvenkind as a whole respected one thing: power. Those that had the power made the rules apply to everyone but themselves. Those that didn't were forced to obey the rules decreed by the others.

Those rules made elven females the property of the males of their Clan...subject entirely to the will and whim of the ruling male, and used as trade-markers in an elaborate dance of matrimonial alliances.

Only when a maiden demonstrated both a powerful gift (of magic, intrigue, a fine mind), and the will to use what she had ruthlessly, then she could escape the destiny her sex decreed for her.

Alara trod the smooth marble and recalled those she knew of who had escaped that destiny. There were female Clan heads; V'jann Ysta er-Lord Daarn, for one, who came to power by defeating the head of V'jann in a mage-duel that had lasted three days. V'lysle Kartaj er-Lord Geyr, who inherited on the death of her brother, and then revealed that it had been she who had masterminded his rise in Council. V'dann Triana er-Lord Falcion, who simply outlived all the other, hedonistic heirs, defeated pretenders in conventional duels, and settled down to shorten her own lifespan by means of every vice that had killed off her relatives. V'meyn Lysha er-Lord Saker, who some suspected of the quiet assassination of the husband she had been sent to wed, as soon as the ink was dry on the marriage vows... though nothing could be proved against her.

As many as a quarter of the Clan heads were female, and treated as absolute equals in power and Council. Alara suspected that many more were content to rule from behind the facade of a male spouse or relative.

But for the rest, their lives were spent close-cloistered until they delivered their virginity to the appropriately selected spouse, cloistered further until the production of a suitable heir. And then they were left to their own devices, to amuse themselves however they could. Lesser members of the Clan tended to trade, production, and the manor. Wives, unless they carved themselves a position, had nothing more to do than look appropriately ornamental and produce one child. More, if they could, but one was enough. After that...some lost themselves in endless games of chance, some in pretense at art or music, others in a never-ending round of costume creation...and no few in the privacy of their quarters, in the arms of carefully selected human slaves.

This was the part Alara was playing: a Clan daughter, attractive, virginal, with enough magic to cast minor glamories, and no ambition.

No ambition in the fields of power, that is; to pique Rathekrel's interest, she pretended at an ambition in art...or rather, Arte. She had styled herself not an artist, but an Artiste. Rathekrel considered himself something of a connoisseur, and the credentials she had presented had included some of "her Work."

As she reached the end of the hall, another set of silver-inlaid, white-lacquered doors swung open before she could touch them, and she stepped forward and paused on the lintel of the cavernous dining hall. The hall had not been behind those doors the last time Alara had passed them; that was a measure of Rathekrel's strength in magic. Special corridors such as the one she had just used opened onto whatever Rathekrel chose; they were, in fact, tiny Gates that could be reset at his whim.

Alara had read something of this in the minds of the humans that had served her, though thanks to the inhibiting collars they wore, she could get only fleeting glimpses, and then only when they actually touched her. The humans were terrified of these corridors and would never use them. As they came and went from her guest suite, Alara had made note of every "normal" passage built for their use, and where each one went. She was going to need that information for the second part of her plan.

The dining hall was another place that terrified the humans, and with good reason.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness beyond the double doors. She waited on the threshold once she was able to see...

That was odd. She thought it smelled like...a storm. And a sea-wind...

She blinked in surprise at what lay below her.

My, my, she thought. Lord Rathekrel was certainly out to impress the child...

Hundreds of yards beneath her feet, breakers foamed and roared over savage rocks, while above her a clear night sky held more stars than ever appeared over this world. Three moons sailed serenely overhead, flooding the sea below with pure silver light. Spray flumed up, creating gossamer veils of sparkling droplets surrounding her, but never quite touching her. And although it appeared that there was a gale-force wind blowing, the gentle zephyr stirring her hair was not enough to disarrange a single strand.

She raised her eyes from the crashing breakers beneath her, and gazed out over the seeming ocean. There was one spot of soft light in the midst of the wind-tossed waves; in the middle distance, an island rose above the churning foam, its top planed level, and illuminated by floating balls of silver. On that island stood a great white-draped table, and two silver chairs. One of those chairs was already occupied.

She wondered what he planned to do for an encore.

Alara stepped out onto the open air confidently, as if she walked every day upon thin air, above fanglike rocks and surging seas. This particular type of illusion was a common one for the powerful elven lords, who changed the appearance of their "public" rooms to suit their mood, sometimes many times a day. This dining hall could just as easily have been the setting for a sylvan glade, or a mountaintop, or a marketplace in some exotic city.

And indeed, her feet told her that she walked upon some cool, smooth surface...probably another white marble floor...even as her eyes said she trod only upon air. From the door, it seemed as if the island was a far enough walk that a gently reared girl would be quite tired by the time she reached it, but the apparent distance to the table was deceptive; another illusion, as Alara had suspected. She took her time, placing each step carefully, and still attained her goal in less than a hundred paces. As she reached the "island," set her feet again on solid, nonillusory ground, and bent in a deep curtsy, she hid a smile. Rathekrel had kept to his white-and-silver motif here, at least. After the black water, the midnight-dark of the sky, and the wind-whipped waters, the table and its environs made a study in contrast, of quiet and peace.

Rathekrel was going to extremes to court his guest; the kind of illusion he had chosen was an expensive one to maintain, and displayed his power to advantage. Yet he had made it clear that it was only an illusion; he had controlled his effects with absolute precision, permitting only enough breeze to refresh her, and not enough to tousle his guest's careful coiffure, nor to disarrange her gown. And while he had created the voices of the ocean's roar and the howling of the wind, it had only been enough to give an air of reality...not enough to interfere in any way with normal conversation.

This was the first time she had seen her host face-to-face. In her form of a human slave, of course, she seldom saw the Lord, and would have risked his wrath if she had dared to look at him directly. He was handsome enough, by elven standards; his hair was more silver than gold...a characteristic of several of the Clans, his included. He wore it long, and pulled back in a tail at the nape of his neck, held there by an elaborate silver clasp that matched the silver headband he sported. His forehead was broad, his eyes deep-set beneath craggy browridges. His cheekbones were even more prominent than Alara/Yssandra's. His aquiline nose and long jaw gave him a haughty air, and his thin lips did not auger for generosity.

But when had elves ever been generous?

She wore emeralds, priceless...and useless. He wore beryls, the elf-stones, set in his silver headband, in the torque around his neck, in the rings on four of his fingers. Common stones, common enough to be set into every slave-collar...and unlike their sparkling cousins, capable of enhancing an elven mage's power, or holding the spells he set into them. The more beryls a mage wore, the more power he controlled.

He was dressed formally: high-collared, open-necked shirt of sherris-silk, stiff with silver embroidery at the cuffs and neck-band; white velvet, square-necked tunic banded with silver bullion at hem and neck, skintight sherris-silk leggings and equally tight silver-encrusted boots to display his fine legs to best advantage.

The overall impression was of an elegant, frost-fair hunter, deadly, unpredictable, and quite fascinating. And Alara had no doubt that he was enhancing his real charms with set-spell glamories. He wanted this child, and he was taking no chances.

If she were a real elven maid, she doubted she could resist him at that point. It was a good thing glamories didn't work on the Kin.

She rose from her curtsy and approached the table. As she neared, the empty silver chair moved silently away from the table for her. As soon as she had seated herself, it moved back, smoothly.

This was yet another display of power no human slaves to perform these tasks. She suspected then that he would probably materialize the dishes of the dinner by magic, and whisk them away by the same means.

He did. She played the attentive and admiring maiden...V'Heven Myen Lord Lainner, from whose household she had supposedly come, was not a powerful mage; his strength and influence came from astute trading, and from rich deposits of copper and silver on his lands. The kind of child she was impersonating would not have seen this kind of profligate use of magic more than once or twice in her lifetime.

The meal progressed as she had expected; the courses whisking in from nowhere, serving themselves, and whisking out again. The delicate food was, of course, exquisite; cold dishes frosty, hot dishes at a perfect temperature, and no exotic viands to startle an inexperienced girl. The Lord exerted himself to be charming, telling her that she needed his "artistic support" in all things, and extolling her (marginal) talent.

So the bait is taken, she thought.

This was really no great surprise to Alara, as she had chosen her victim with care; Lord Rathekrel's last five wives had perished in childbirth, and there were very few elven lords these days willing to risk their own precious offspring to whatever lethality Rathekrel carried in his seed. Alara had heard rumors that he was considering seeking a bride among the hangers-on and subordinates of his estate.

With the dessert came the proposal, in the form of a white sugar swan that flew to her plate and proffered something it held hidden in its beak. She looked up at Rathekrel inquisitively.

"Take it, my dear,", he said, sure now of his reception. "Take it. It is not my heart, but let it stand as a fitting substitute."

Did he really say that? she thought, astonished, Would even a fool like me fall for something than patently fatuous?

Oh well, she supposed she would.

She held her palm out to the sparkling sugar bird, and it inclined its neck and dropped a silver marriage band in her outstretched hand.

She accepted the band, placed it carefully on the index finger of her right hand to indicate that the proposal had been accepted with the ring, and calmly ate the swan.

That concluded the meal. Lord Rathekrel bid her good night with carefully restrained glee, and she made her solitary way back over the calming sea to the light of the open corridor door.

The humans descended upon her again and she permitted them to undress her, envelop her in a silken sleeping robe, braid up her hair, and conduct her to her bed. The fact that the white-and-silver walls and furnishings were no longer stark, but held a delicate undertone of warm pink, did not escape her notice, nor that the subtly uncomfortable chair and bed were now mysteriously soft and welcoming. The humans vanished, the last one pausing just long enough to murmur an unheard congratulation speech, and the lights extinguished themselves.

She waited for the sounds of the house to settle, and when she was certain she could hear nothing, shifted her form and made her escape, using the same door the humans had taken when they left her.

Draconic memory was precise, and as vivid as the first-time reality. The look on Rathekrel's face when he discovered that his bride-to-be had vanished had been well worth all the trouble and the year-long setup. Alara laughed silently to herself...one thing she still could do as a rock.

He thought he had protected himself in every way possible. He had warded his rooms against elven magic and even against another of elvenkind crossing the threshold, but not against a human servant moving about; and, she reflected smugly, he had never thought for a moment about checking among the humans afterwards, except in a very cursory fashion, to see if his "bride" was hiding among the slaves.

The slaves were practically invisible, so long as there wasn't one or more fewer, absences that couldn't be accounted for. Who looked for one more human slave in the slave quarters? There were always empty beds somewhere, she thought ruefully, given the rate those lords used up their servants, and empty stools at the table. If another slave appeared who wasn't on the roster, it was always assumed someone else ordered him bought or brought in from elsewhere on the property.

She knew Rathekrel never counted noses, and he never would have put together the fact of one extra slave and the fact that the Lord's bride-to-be had evaporated without a trace from a mage-guarded room. But that wasn't the cream of the jest...

Alara stood quietly, behind the Lord's desk, one ordinary, dusky human boy among the other white-and-silver-clad servants. There was nothing to link her with the vanished Yssandra, not even sex.

She actually had been part of the frantic search effort, as Rathekrel sent every able body out looking for the vanished maiden, or at least some hint as to her whereabouts or who could have taken her.

But a complete search of the entire manor had yielded no clues, and no sign of forced abduction. Alara had been very careful about covering her tracks.

This, so the humans were whispering, could only mean that the elven maid had left of her own accord. Not a very flattering scenario for Rathekrel. And a considerable blow to more than his pride; with the number of glamories he had placed on the child as she accepted his ring, she should not have been able to even voice so much as her own opinion if it contradicted his. That she had escaped him and his magical influence did not augur well for his perception nor for his power.

Now the Lord found himself in the humiliating position of having to call the family, and inform them that their daughter, his affianced bride, had apparently run away.

Alara had insinuated herself into the handful of servants sent to the library; it hadn't been difficult, as most of the other young men of the household had sought other duties, any other duties, as soon as it became obvious that Yssandra was nowhere on the estate. They knew very well what would happen to Rathekrel's temper if the maiden was not found.

Those assumptions were entirely correct. The Lord was angry and humiliated, and when an elven lord was unhappy, his humans generally suffered.

In fact, ran the fear-filled rumors, there might well be some deaths in the slave quarters before the day was through. If Rathekrel could not find a scapegoat, he tended to create one.

The library was the last place any human wanted to be stationed right now. Alara noted from her vantage point that it was a remarkably unlikely setting for violence, entirely furnished in white and silver. The house colors were present even in the private quarters; Alara wondered at Rathekrel's incredible Clan-pride. But these were not the austere surroundings he had placed his "guest" among; the library was a comfortable place, with soft white curtains shrouding all the harsh angles, a white carpet so dense that even heavy-footed humans made no sound to disturb the silence, and formless seats that embraced the user, seats that could have been clouds come to earth. The desk was another such construction, with its top planed off to a glossy, flat surface. Lord Rathekrel contemplated that surface with his narrow face creased with frown lines, and his shoulders tensed.

Alara would have liked to try touching his thoughts, but decided to be very cautious about doing so. She did not want to chance the elven lord's detection of someone probing his mind. She doubted that he would suspect her, but there was no point in taking that kind of risk.

Most especially now, when he was about to invoke magic, and would be most sensitive to a probe. She decided to wait until his concentration was so occupied that he would be unlikely to notice anything else.

So she waited patiently, one more "invisible" slave among the rest. Finally he waved his hand over the desk, and a bottomless black rectangle appeared in the surface before him, as the substance of the desk seemed to dissolve away, fading, rather than melting. He placed his hands, palms down, on either side of the newly formed space.

The elven mage stared at the place for a moment, then let out his breath in a hiss.

His fingers flexed, and blue sparks crackled out from them to slither across the surface of the desk. Some of the humans shuffled their feet uneasily, and one youngster on the end looked to Alara as if he would very much like to run away. The sparks danced and crawled for some few moments, finally consolidating in the area of the rectangle, until that empty space between Rathekrel's flattened palms flared to life in a glowing rectangle.

A voice called, seemingly out of nowhere. The humans started, and one looked about covertly for the speaker.

"Lord Rathekrel?"

The Lord shifted his position to look down upon his creation, and Alara could not see anything of the rectangle itself, only the light coming from it, reflecting oddly upwards into the elf-lord's face. Now was the time to insinuate that little probe.

Rathekrel, from the little Alara could read of his thoughts, was expecting immediate recognition; after all, Yssandra had been sent as a tacit proposal of alliance, and by all rights he should have been responding to that proposal.

But to his surprise, the underling was startled to see him in the teleson. "My lord, what can our house do for you?"

"I want to speak to your Lord," Rathekrel snarled, his thoughts telling Alara that he suspected insult in being answered by a subordinate. "Now."

He waited, with visible impatience, and beside Alara one of the humans shivered, nervous sweat running down his face. Finally the quality of the light coming from between Rathekrel's hands changed, and Alara knew that someone else had taken the underling's position at the screen. From Rathekrel's nod of stiff recognition, she knew it was V'Heven Myen Lord Lainner.

"Greetings, my lord..." a tired voice said cautiously. "I beg your pardon for having to wait, but there is a problem at..."

"There's more than one problem in your house, my Lord," Rathekrel growled. "Your daughter seems to have vanished from her quarters. After accepting my proposal of marriage, I might add. I had thought better of your training than that."

The speaker's reply came as a startled yelp. Not a sound one normally heard from a powerful elven lord. "My what?

Rathekrel's face contorted, and the human beside Alara winced. "Your training, man! No daughter of mine would dare walk off after accepting a proposal of marriage! What's wrong with your house when mere females..."

Rathekrel's voice rose steadily as his anger increased, and it was obvious that he was building into a fine froth of rage. But the angrier he became, the more the humans around Alara relaxed, and several of them sighed with relief. She knew what was on their minds, for all that she could not read their actual thoughts. The Lord had found a way to blame his humiliation on someone else. Oh, humans would die, no doubt of it, but it would be the fighters and gladiators in challenge, not the house-slaves. They were safe.

"Where is she?" Rathekrel thundered, standing up suddenly and pounding the desk with his fist. "Where have you hidden her? She couldn't have gotten off this estate without magic aid, and we both know it!" He remained standing over the mage-crafted construct, staring down into it in self-righteous wrath. He did not expect the answer he received.

"My lord," came the stiff reply, "I do not have a daughter of an age that a normal-minded man would consider nubile. My children number three: two boys, of thirteen and six, and a girl of ten. Kevan, Shandar, and Yssandra."

Rathekrel froze, his fist halting in midair above the desktop. Alara controlled her face as he realized that he had never bothered to check on the age of "Yssandra," only that the Lord in question did, indeed, have a daughter of that name. He had not wanted to advertise the fact that he was considered a less-than-desirable mate by actively seeking a spouse among his inferiors; he had been hoping one would offer so that he would be able to look "gracious." When "Yssandra" had appeared at his door, he thought his prayers had been answered, and had been so busy sweeping her off her feet he had neither chance nor time for anything else. Alara's credentials had been perfect; the message she bore plausible. They should have been; Alara had stolen them from an excellent source.

"I would suggest, my lord," continued the other, a certain smug, self-assured arrogance creeping into his tone, "that you have been the victim of a very poor joke. And if I were you, I should be grateful that the joke never went so far as wedlock. I..."

But that was too much.

"A joke! Is this your idea of a joke?" Rathekrel exploded with anger, backing a single pace and destroying teleson, desk, and all with a single mage-bolt.

The slaves scattered to the corners of the library, ducking to avoid the shower of debris. Difficult though elven thoughts were for a dragon to decipher, his rage made them clear enough to Alara, and they were everything she could have wanted. The unfortunate choice of the word "joke" had triggered a set of assumptions and reactions Lord Myen never intended.

There were any number of people who would profit by Rathekrel's embarrassment, and Lord Myen was high on the list. Furthermore, Myen could argue that he, too, had been injured by this unknown prankster, since his name had been stolen for the ruse.

But the last time someone had played a double-dealing trick on Rathekrel...and apparently upon another lord as well...the perpetrator turned out to be the same person who claimed equal injury...

Therefore, by Rathekrel's logic, Myen was the guilty party.

And since he was the perpetrator, Rathekrel would see him punished for it. Lord Myen would regret this "joke." Lord Myen would pay, in ways he had not even imagined.

It was truly amazing how a few, ill- (or well-) chosen words could set a spark to the dry tinder of Rathekrel's uncertain temper.

He whirled, and only then noticed the humans, as one of the youngest shrank back, cowering in his corner, and whimpered.

"OUT!" he screamed, his face white, his pupils dilated so that his eyes were black holes of rage, rimmed by a thin line of emerald.

The slaves sprinted for the door, only too happy to obey, Alara with them. And as she slipped into the corridor, she heard a rumble, followed by a tremendous crash. It sounded like a great block of stone being ripped up from the floor, and flung across the room.

She did not stay to investigate.

But for the moment, she also could not leave. There were limits to her powers and abilities, and she was reaching them. The perimeter of the estate was still sealed off, and there were guards on all of the entrances to the manor itself. While she would have no trouble passing the perimeter, there was still the matter of getting outside to do so. She didn't particularly want to shift into something the size of, say, a house cat. She was already pushing her resources to stay human-sized. She planned to leave on the wing, but in the form of a Great Kite, a bird with a wingspan rivaled only by the ice-eagles, and massing about the same as a human male. And a bird that was particularly ill omened. That should set Rathekrel on his pointed ears, and confirm in most minds that Rathekrel was losing his luck, and quickly.

So while she waited for an opportunity to reach the roof, she decided to create another episode in a long-running ploy most of the Kin had played with at one time or another...

The Prophecy of the Savior of Humanity, the Elvenbane.

She found a pile of bags in the corner of the kitchen, filled one with the rest, and headed down into the cellar.

She had discovered some time ago, that if she acted as if she had business in a place and was under orders, humans tended to leave her alone. She had only to avoid elven overseers, who questioned everyone and everything out of the ordinary. This time was no exception; she carried the overstuffed burlap bag right past the cook and the kitchen overseer...who was, fortunately, human...and opened the cellar door without ever being challenged.

Since there was quite a bit of traffic up and down the cellar stairs, the staircase was well lit, as were most of the areas where common things were stored. Cool, damp air, fragrant with onions, garlic, sausage, and the earthy smell of vegetables, struck her in the face as she hurried down the steps.

She waited a few moments to ensure that she was alone, then she shifted form again, this time into that of an old, seemingly blind human woman. She could see perfectly well through what looked to be milky cataracts, but no one looking at her would know that. Clothing herself roughly in the burlap sacks, and hiding her white-and-silver tunic, she seated herself just under the light at the bottom of the cellar staircase, and waited for the next servant to be sent after something.

In fact, the next slave down the stairs was as near to perfect a victim as she could have asked for; young, female, and so burdened with a stack of empty boxes that she couldn't see and was having to check for each stair with a cautiously outstretched bare toe. Alara waited until the girl had reached the bottom of the staircase, then spoke, in a voice like a rusty hinge.

"Hast thou heard the Word, child?"

The girl shrieked in startlement and jumped, boxes flying in all directions. She wound up with her back to the wall, her eyes round with fear and surprise, her hair straggling over one eye in untidy curls. Alara sat like a statue, white-filmed eyes staring straight ahead.

"Gods' teeth, ol' mam!" The girl panted, one hand at her throat. "Ye 'bout frighted me t'death!"

Alara said nothing.

The girl pushed away from the wall, and peered at Alara, her eyes still round with alarm. "How ye get down here, anyways? Ye don' b'long t' th' Lor' Rathekrel..."

Alara raised one hand, and pointed upwards; the girl looked up involuntarily, then dropped her gaze to Alara's "sightless" eyes. "The Voice of the Prophecy belongs to no one, mortal or immortal," Alara intoned, doing her best to sound mysterious. "Only to the ages."

The girl's brow wrinkled in puzzlement. "I don' know no Lor' Ages." She started to edge away, and cast longing looks up the stairs. "Belike I better get th' cook..."

"Hear the Prophecy!" Alara cried, forestalling the girl by standing up with a swiftness at odds with her apparent age, interposing herself between the slave and the staircase. "Hear and remember! Remember, and whisper it, and pass it onward! Remember the foretelling of the Elvenbane!"

The girl uttered a strangled yip as Alara stood, and backed away. Alara gathered her rags around her as if they were the silken robes she had lately worn, and stared straight at the girl, her expression stern and forbidding. Since she looked blind, this unnerved the girl even more. "There will come a child," Alara whispered. "One born of human mother, but fathered by the demons, possessed of magic more powerful than the elven lords! By this shall you know the child, that it shall read the very thoughts upon the wind, travel upon the wings of demons, and master all the magics of the masters ere it can stand alone! The child shall resemble a human, yet its eyes will be those of the demons; of the very green of the elf-stones. The child shall be hunted before its birth, yet shall escape the hunt. The child shall be sold, and yet never bought. The child shall win all, yet lose all."

Standard prophetic double-talk, she thought to herself. If the slaves had any belongings of their own, she could make a fortune in preaching. You could tell them anything as long as it sounded impressive and mysterious, and they'd believe it.

"And in the end," she concluded, her voice rising, "the child shall rise up against the masters and cast them into the lowest hell, there to make of them slaves to the demons of hell!"

The girl stepped an involuntary pace forward, fascinated in spite of herself. Her-eyes were bright with mingled fear and excitement, and her curly hair damp with nervous sweat. Alara looked straight into her eyes, and thrust a bony finger at her.

"Hear the words of the Prophecy!" she shrieked, as the girl jumped back. "Hear them and heed them!"

"Jena! What's going on down there?" a deep female voice scolded from the top of the staircase.

Young Jena jumped again, and went pale and frightened. "N-nothing!" she called back.

"Then who the hell are you talking to?"

"I...uh..." The girl looked at Alara in confusion; Alara remained silent and statue-still.

"Get your rump up here now, girl!"

Jena looked helplessly at Alara, and scampered up the stairs as fast as her legs could carry her.

But when she came back down, trembling with fear, the kitchen overseer behind her, there was no sign of a mysterious old woman. In fact, there was no sign of anyone at all.

But there wax one extra wine cask, if anyone had bothered to count...

And shortly thereafter, twenty or thirty witnesses, including two elven overseers, saw a Great Kite launch itself from the roof of the manor. It rose into a bloody sunset, wings blotting out the sun itself, screaming doom down upon the Clan of V'Larn.

That was fun, Alara decided, even if the rest of the Lair would have had a fit about the shaman risking herself like that.

The elven lords suppressed the Prophecy and those who spread it whenever they could...but the best way to spread something is to try to outlaw it, as they found to their frustration. It was hard to do anything about it when it was being spread by old men and women who vanished into thin air...and the more they punished those who had listened to the forbidden words, the more others wanted to hear what was so dangerous.

It was just one more way to make the lives of elvenkind a little more uncomfortable. The elves hated and feared the Prophecy, not the least of which because there was a germ of truth in it.

It was not commonly known, but elves and humans were cross-fertile. The offspring were relatively rare, even when contraceptive measures were not being taken, but there had been halfblood children in the past. And those children, like many hybrids, had gifts that surpassed those of their parents.

That was why the elves controlled the fertility of their slaves through contraceptive measures in the very food they ate. Breeding was permitted only under the eyes of the overseers.

Humans had magic of the mind; speaking mind-to-mind across vast distances, reading the thoughts of others, seeing things at a far distance, or in the past or future, or manipulating and moving things without the use of their hands. Elves had magic as the dragons understood the concept, for dragons had the magic of shape-shifting and a few other, minor abilities. Those who became shamans tended to have the ability to read thoughts, but not to the extent that talented humans or halfbloods could.

But the children of mixed blood had both human and elven magics, and the human mental gifts tended to amplify their abilities as magicians.

"Wizards," the elves called the halfbloods, and attempted to use them in their own never-ending feuds with each other. But the wizards were not helpless creatures like the human slaves, and used their own magic to win free of their masters.

Right then the elven lords should have welcomed the wizards into their own ranks, Alara thought cynically. That's what I'd have done. There's nothing like a life of luxury to make thoughts of revolution melt away like snow in the sun.

But the elves didn't; instead, they panicked, and tried to destroy their halfblooded offspring.

So the Wizard War began, with the wizards ranged on one side, and the elven lords and their slave armies on the other.

The dragons entered the world before the Wizard War and the defeat and destruction of the wizards, but for the most part were too busy with their own establishment to pay much attention to the goings-on across the desert. Later, they became aware of at least some of what had happened through faulty, faltering, human word-of-mouth and through elven history, and through the memory of those few of the Kin who did pay attention to the elves' troubles...most notably, Father Dragon.

As a result of that War, halfbreeds were hated and feared, and if by accident a human woman were bearing an elven lord's child, she and the child would be put to death as soon as it was known.

Alara wasn't sure where the Prophecy came from, if it had been created by the Kin or was something one of the Kin picked up and decided to use, but it certainly kept the elves nervous...

And by now, between the disappearance of his "bride," the reemergence of the Prophecy among his slaves, and the Great Kite appearing as an omen of disaster, Lord Rathekrel was probably paralyzed with rage. That had been several months ago, long enough for word to spread among the other elven lords and give them time to complete plans of their own for him. And meanwhile, a dozen of the other power brokers were undoubtedly jockeying for position, hoping he'd fall.

It was about time for a Council session. If he was thrown out of his Council seat for incompetence, that would upset the balance of power. The elves would all be too busy trying to find a compromise candidate to pay any attention to what went on out on the borders, which should make it safer to hunt this way for a while, and those rumors that Rathekrel had seen dragons were going to be completely discredited...

Which was what she would tell the others if they ever found out what she was doing. But she would have done it all anyway. Elves deserved to have trouble visited on them, the hateful creatures.

Still, none of this had anything to do with the meditation she was supposed to be doing. In fact, she'd actually been distracted enough that she had shifted form a little, allowing her tail to move a claw-length. She gave herself a mental shake, and tried to settle down again.

But something had entered the immediate vicinity, something that was not a dragon. She felt its...her...presence.

She abandoned all thought of mischief, and all pretense at meditation, as a human female staggered from behind the wall and fell against her side.

Alara shifted back quickly, all but a very thin veneer of her surface. She still looked like a rock, but now she had eyes and ears, and she employed both cautiously.

The woman, heavily pregnant, moaned and got to her hands and knees, crawling towards the water. This was not the sort of desert traveler Alara would have expected; the woman was young, unscarred, burned red and blistered by the sun, and the clothing she wore was of delicate silk, fit for a boudoir, but hardly for desert travail. Her long red hair had been looped up in a series of elaborate braids; now half of her coiffure hung down in her face, and the rest was a tangled mess. Her feet were bare, the soles burned and cut, but she seemed oblivious, so delirious she was beyond pain. Even as Alara watched, she fell again, but not before she had reached the pool.

She dragged herself to the water's edge, put her face down into the water, and lapped at the cool liquid like an animal. And the moment she touched the water, there was a sharp click.

The woman clawed at her neck, and an elaborately jeweled slave-collar came away in her hand. She dropped it unheeded beside her, and sank back on the stones, exhausted.

Alara's attention was caught and held by the sunlight winking on the gems of the neckpiece. All humans wore slave-collars, but she had never seen one this ornate. Easily a thumb-length wide, it seemed to be made of solid gold, with emeralds, sapphires and rubies arranged in a series of geometrical patterns all around it. Her acquisitive soul hungered for it; no dragon ever had enough gems for its hoard, and this bit of jewelry drew her as nothing before ever had. She wanted it, not only to possess it, but to wear it

And that anomaly warned her off, before she shifted fully back to draconic form in order to seize the thing. Suddenly alarmed, she eyed the collar carefully. Sure enough, there, among the gems, just over the point where the collar fastened, were three tiny, inconspicuous elf-stones. She knew the type, and the setting of the stones. One to hold the collar locked onto the slave's neck, one negating any mind-magic the slave might have, and one, evidently still active, holding a spell of glamorie that made anyone who saw the collar want to wear it. A safe way to ensure that no slave ever abandoned his collar willingly.

Suddenly the collar no longer seemed quite so desirable.

Then, like a shout, a voice cried inside Alara's mind. :Ah, gods...!:

Alara had one moment of surprise before she found herself pulled into the woman's mind.

Serina Daeth. Not "the woman." Alara was just barely able to hold on to her own identity, caught in the desperate grip of Serina's mind.

Serina was too fevered to actually build coherent thoughts; Alara found herself overwhelmed by memories, feelings, emotions, all tumbled together, out of sequence.

Alara pulled herself free of the woman's mind with a gut-wrenching effort, and lay for a moment with her head pounding and a terrible pain between her eyes.

She's a concubine, the dragon thought, amazed. She had never even gotten near enough to one of them to really see them well, much less listen to their thoughts. Lord Dyran...that must be V'Kass Dyran Lord Hernalth. He was an elder, practically chief in Council. But how did a High Lord's concubine end up in the desert?

She reached out a little, cautious mental finger, and touched the edges of the woman's mind as lightly as she could manage.

With patient sifting, she gleaned a few facts; Serina had been the favorite of the harem, proud of her position, status, and her ability to ride out her Lord's arbitrary nature. That is, until a new girl had been given to Lord Dyran by an underling who specialized the breeding of beautiful human concubines, male and female. Leyda Shaybrel was just as beautiful as her owner had advertised, and as ruthless as she was beautiful.

When Leyda failed to oust Serina as favorite, and realized that Lord Dyran had no intention of replacing Serina, she turned to sabotage.

That had been several months ago, just before Lord Dyran went off to Council...which, due to the havoc and the feuding caused by Alara's meddling, would last a record eight months. Lord Dyran left before Serina realized she was pregnant.

As soon as she knew, she must have been in a panic.

That's death...even if Dyran didn't kill her, he'd cast her off. Alara was fascinated. This was a glimpse into the humans' world she'd never had before. I wonder if I can get into her memory? This could be so useful...Maybe if I just nudge her a little...

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 so 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 whitewashed 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 singlestick, 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 area 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 night 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 no? 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 Sienna'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 preference 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.

"ONCE AGAIN, ALARA was tempted to simply fly off. There was no reason to become involved with this human. There was every reason not to become involved. She was going to die; there was no way that she would survive the ordeal she had just been through and childbirth as well. And Alara was appalled by her attitude towards her fellows.

The logical thing to do would be to abandon her to her fate. And yet...

Telling herself that she was a fool, Alara insinuated herself into the woman's mind, to weave a fantasy composed of hallucination, old memories, and wish-fulfillment...

Serina tried to relax into the soft cushions holding her up, bit her lip until it bled as the pain came and went, and smiled at Lord Dyran, who patted her hand fondly. "That's a good child," he said, with a warmth she had only seen him display with a favorite hound or horse about to give birth. She smiled thinly, attempting to give him the impression that this was nothing worse than a minor indisposition. Dyran hated a fuss, and hated even more being subjected to hysterics. "It will all be over shortly, and I will be truly thankful to have you back at my side."

Her ex-rival Leyda, relegated to scrubbing the floors of the birthing room until they gleamed, scowled, but dared say nothing. When Dyran had tracked her through the desert, he had stayed his hand long enough to hear her side. Although he had not punished Leyda physically, what he had done was far worse. He had given the former concubine to Serina as a personal drudge.

What happened to that baby? she wondered for a moment. But it didn't really matter. Dyran had probably rid her of it, then erased the memory from her mind. He could do things like that, if he chose.

"You and that fine young stud will present me with a sturdy lad, I've no doubt of it," the Lord continued, as another pain came and went, and sweat poured down her forehead. She smiled through clenched teeth and nodded. "Just what I've been needing for my son's own personal guard. If you do well, perhaps I shall ask you to present me with another, hmm?"

"Aye...my lord..." she managed to gasp, although at the moment she would far rather he asked her to scrub floors as Leyda did! It was a pity he didn't see fit to erase this from her mind.

"That's a good girl." He patted her hand once again, and left the white-tiled birthing room. He also hated a mess. For the moment, the only thing untidy about Serina was the sweat beading on her forehead; the rest of her was swathed in concealing masses of silk. But as soon as he passed the threshold, that all changed, as the nurses and midwives descended on her.

She hadn't minded at all when Lord Dyran had requested...not ordered, but requested, her to breed him a special guardsman. He'd wanted something very particular, a child of the finest lines to be trained to guard his own son; a very personal guard, schooled to the task from the moment he could toddle and assigned to the boy as quickly as possible. He hadn't dared entrust this task to anyone else, he'd told her...no one else had served him so faithfully; no one else would take enough care. He told her she would want for nothing, and he would reward her beyond her wildest dreams.

She would never tell him, but the young guardsman he had assigned to her for the breeding, he of the thoughtful eyes and rippling muscles, had been beyond her wildest dreams. He did everything she told him to; it had been altogether intoxicating to be the one in the position of power for a change. And equally intoxicating to be the one to whom pleasure was given, rather than the one who gave it.

Perhaps she would ask for him to be assigned to her permanently as part of her reward...

The pain came again, and she cried out with hurt and anger. What was wrong with the midwives? Why didn't they do something? Didn't they realize how important she was?

She tried to say something, to give them the tongue-lashing they deserved for their carelessness, but she couldn't manage a single word. Only gasps of agony as the pains came closer and closer together, until she was reduced to moaning mindlessly, like an animal.

Alara decided that she didn't care if Serina was a heartless beast. She didn't care what Serina had done in the past. She was a female, about to give birth, and in that she appealed to the dragon's deepest instincts. Alara had to help her.

The decision was hardly even a conscious one; Alara couldn't help herself. There were precautions she could take against discovery, in the unlikely event that the woman came out of her delirium. It was foolish, it was sentimental, and it certainly violated the letter, if not the spirit, of the law against being discovered. But at this point, after spending so much time living in Sienna's thoughts, she felt she had to intervene, if only as recompense for the stolen memories.

One last look into the human's mind before she brought her barriers up gave her what she needed: the form of one of the midwives of the estate.

Quickly, she reached for the free power of the pool, and a ripple went through her as she shifted most of her mass into the Out. She shifted carefully, so as not to" disturb the equilibrium of the child within her, and just to be on the safe side, as she shifted her own form into human, she shifted the child's as well. It was a time-consuming operation: The sun was nearing the western horizon, and the woman was close to actual birth, growing weaker with every breath, when she finished.

As she knelt beside the laboring woman's body, lifting her easily into a more comfortable position, she saw Serina's eyes fix on her for a moment with sense in them. Sense enough to recognize what and who she was masquerading as, at any rate.

The woman opened her mouth, but no words emerged. Alara trickled a handful of water into her mouth. Then, under the pretext of supporting her head, Alara gently exerted a little pressure on certain nerves of the spine, at the point where the neck joined the shoulders.

Serina swallowed; her eyes went wide with surprise for a moment as the pain ceased. Then she closed her eyes against the light of the westering sun, and slipped further into delirium.

It was an easy birth only in the sense of being quick. Alara was appalled by the amount of damage and knew, as Serina began to bleed profusely, that there was nothing she could do about it. Within moments the child lay on a scrap of cloth torn from Serina's skirt, cradled in a hollow scooped in the sand. A little girl...and as ugly as only a human child could be.

And as the child slipped from her, the mother heaved a great sigh, and then breathed no more.

Alara stared at the wet, red, wrinkled mite, revolted, and wondering why on earth she had bothered to save the child.

Fire and Rain! The creature wasn't even finished yet! She should just leave it here to die with its mother, it would be better that way. She didn't even know exactly what to do with it...she'd probably kill it by accident. What an awful little beast-Then the little creature opened its tiny mouth...and a thin, unhappy wail rose above the desert silence.

That wail cut straight to Alara's maternal heart, as sure as elf-shot, and as deadly... and she knew she couldn't leave it here. Not after all this. It was only a baby. She ought to be able to figure out how to care for it. It couldn't be that different from other cubs and kits.

She immersed the baby in the pool just long-enough to clean her, and wrapped her in the remains of Serina's dress. She didn't look any better clean...but she stopped crying. Though Alara felt unformed waves of hunger coming from the child, she simply stared into the dragon's eyes with odd intelligence, as if she was able to focus on things even at this early age.

It's my imagination.

Fire and Rain, what am I going to do with the child?

Take it home, I suppose.

She reached again for the energy flowing from the pool, and let it ripple through her as she shifted back into her native form. The child lay in the sand, bathed in the golden rays of the sunset, and made no sound at all. Alara was beginning to be a bit unnerved by this silence, as well as by the way the infant seemed to be able to track on her.

The shaman stretched out her wings to their fullest extent, catching the last of the heat of the sun, her shadow falling long and black over the sand and the child. She'd better go now, while she could catch thermals, she decided. Keman had a whole little zoo. Maybe he could put this thing to nurse with one of his pets.

She hooked her foreclaws into the fabric cradling the baby, taking extra care not to scratch it, and launched herself into the cobalt sky with powerful beats of her wings and legs.

You know, she thought to herself, as she took her bearings from the sun and the evening star, and headed back to her Lair, there really ought to be something in the Prophecy about this. Hmm. Maybe I'll put it there myself.

Now wouldn't that sound impressive in the mouth of the old, blind holy woman! "Child of dragons, the Elvenbane. ..."

She chased the setting sun across the desert and into the high plains. Beneath her, herds of antelope and grass-deer moved out of the shelter of scrub where they had spent the day, heading for water and open grazing. When the shadow of her wings passed over them, they invariably took fright and ran for cover.

Not tonight, you juicy little creatures. I'm not out hunting right now.

Besides, that would be poaching. One of the other Lairs managed this part of the country; Leanalani's Lair, if she recalled correctly. It wasn't polite to swoop down on another Lair's territory and hunt without permission.

The herds kicked up a lot of dust as they ran. It had been a very dry summer here so far. The clouds of dust glowed in the last rays of the sun, red and gold-red; shadows stretched out in purple fingers from every thing, across the gilt-edged grass and scrubland. Before her, the sun died in a blood-red and gold sky, behind her the sky had deepened to indigo. Overhead, a thin crescent moon peered wanly down at her.

From below came the hot breath of the plains; redolent with the aromas of dust and sun-baked vegetation, with a hint of deer-musk and now and then a breath of hidden water.

As she continued to press westward, the setting sun seemed torn in half along its lower edge, a jagged line of black cutting across it before it reached the horizon.

Those were the mountains. Not long now...

Beyond the desert which the elvenkind would not cross, beyond the territories managed only for game, lay the Lairs themselves, nestled into valleys in the mountains. Home had never looked so inviting; and not even the halfblood child swinging from her claw had much importance.

In fact, Alara longed for her own place, her own cave, so much that she completely forgot she had never completed her meditations.

Alara circled over the Lair for a moment, waiting for the sentry on duty to acknowledge her before setting down. Old habits died hard; perhaps it was no longer necessary for dragons to worry about who and what came winging in over their Lairs, but sentries were still assigned, and no dragon would ever land without being acknowledged by the sentry. Weary as she was, Alara was not weary enough to violate that protocol.

: Who flies?: came the ritual question.

:Alamarana,: she replied, just as formally. :Have I landing right?:

:Landing and Kin-right, by Fire and Rain. Welcome home, Elder Sister!:

She didn't recognize the 'Hone" of the voice; probably because she was so tired. Must be one of the youngsters, she thought. She hovered for a moment over the cluster of "buildings" set into the sides of the valley, orienting herself. Below her the buildings, of every possible form and style, were hardly more than darker shapes against the pale, weathered rock. There were no lights, which would have sorely puzzled any elf or human who approached, even more than the wildly disparate buildings themselves.

Alara finally realized why she couldn't see; she'd been so tired she hadn't bothered to shift her eyes from day-sight to night-sight. Cursing herself for stupidity, she made the tiny adjustment, and suddenly the valley took on a crystalline clarity.

And there was her home; or rather, the building that marked the entrance to her home. Some dragons actually preferred surface dwellings and tended to spend a great deal of time in forms other than draconic. The huge, manorlike constructions were theirs, though they were situated without regard to surface access or water supply. There was, in fact, one enormous castle built right into the side of one of the cliffs, close enough to touch as Alara glided past.

It was new. Alara wondered who had built that monstrosity; it looked like something a newly rich overseer would build.

Other dragons preferred caves, but not the deep caves of Home; they chose shallow caves high on the side of the mountain, where they could sunbathe on ledges all day if they chose. As she winged past one of these, she saw eyes shining at her out of the darkness. Three sets of eyes, all quite close together.

So Ferilanora had managed to coax her brood up the cliff at last. Alara had begun to think she would never get them out of the valley.

And some of the Kin, like Alara, felt most comfortable in extensive underground lairs, the kind of places the Kin used at Home. They felt more comfortable and secure with solid rock overhead, a myriad of hiding places, and multiple exits. This community of the Kin was blessed with a valley suitable for all three preferences.

Those that preferred caves or caverns tended to construct at least a semblance of a building to mark the entrance to their homes and protect it from storms. Alara's was a copy in stone of V'Sharn Jaems Lord Kelum's pleasure gazebo in his rock garden. She saw it once during a kind of open-house party, and had found it charming.

She couldn't say the same for him, however.

The result was a hodgepodge of every type, style and size of building imaginable. Pleasure gazebos perched atop knolls or nestled into the sides of cliffs. Manors and fanciful castles huddled at the bottom of the valley like surly hens, or were balanced on the tips of peaks or on cliff ledges. Temples to gods long gone huddled cheek-by-jowl with human-designed pyramids and brothels.

It looked rather as if some tremendous windstorm had swept through a half dozen cities and deposited the remains here.

She circled the valley slowly, gently losing altitude. The child in her claws had been quite silent all through the journey, and if Alara had not felt strange little thoughts coming from its mind, she would have thought it asleep or dead.

Those thoughts...or rather, thought-forms; they were in nowise clear enough to be considered thoughts...were quite strong. Stronger, in fact, than a newborn of the Kin.

If this was any indication of how strong it was likely to be when it got older, she was not surprised the halfbreeds gave the elves such trouble.

Below her, she saw the rest of her Kin emerging from their lairs. From above, they looked very odd indeed, especially by night-sight, which lacked all color. Without the color patterns to tell her who they were, and shrouded in their dark wings, they made a very odd effect against the stone.

One, however, she recognized at once. Her son Kemanorel bounced in place, unable to restrain his excitement.

:Be careful when I land, dearest,: she said to him, as soon as she was low enough that she knew she was within his limited range. I have a...a kind of new pet, I think. A baby one. I am going to need your help with it; it's lost its mother.:

Keman's reply was clouded by bursts of glee; if she'd been on the ground, she knew she'd have heard him squealing. Beside him was another dragon she recognized by the sheer size and the silver glitter of his scales in the moonlight: Father Dragon. She watched him drape a taloned claw over Keman's back, as the youngster threatened to leap into the air with anticipation.

The little one looked up at Father Dragon, and even at this distance Alara felt waves of calm coming from the chief shaman.

Most especially she was glad to be back with Keman. Even if he did drive her to distraction occasionally, she thought indulgently; and then she was on the long, difficult approach to landing. Difficult, because she was carrying something, because she was heavy and unwieldy with her own child-to-be, and because this was not the open land of the desert. Her long glide was interrupted by quick wing-beats to give her little lifts over projections, and twists and turns of wings and body to avoid rock formations.

With weary pride, she fanned her wings as she approached the waiting group of curious Kin, and dropped down gracefully into a three-clawed landing.

She placed her burden carefully on the ground, and for the first time since the child had been born, it uttered a cry, a pitiful little mew.

"Fire and Rain!" exclaimed one of the others. "What in blazes is that?

Within the time it had taken Alara to land, what had been a peaceful homecoming had turned into a spreading altercation.

Never mind that she had just spent the better part of a moon away from home. Never mind that she was the shaman of this Lair, and presumably entitled to a modicum of respect. None of that mattered once the Kin caught sight of the halfblood baby. The other dragons surrounded her, their presence, though nowhere near as threatening to a flighted creature as one held to the ground, was intimidating enough. In the thin moon- and starlight their colors were muted, even to her night-sight, but she identified them easily enough. She had never felt her youth so acutely before, surrounded as she was by those who were technically her Elders, and she drew herself up to her full height, determined not to show herself intimidated.

"Whatever possessed you to bring that home?" one complained loudly, his tail twitching and stirring up the dust behind him. "It's bad enough that it's uglier than an unfledged bird, but it's not only ugly, it's dirty and noisy. It'll need constant cleaning, and it doesn't have the decency to keep quiet, ever." His tail twitched harder. "Your lair is right next to mine. I don't want that thing wailing because it's got a problem in the middle of the night, and waking me up!"

"Not to mention the fact that you won't be able to get anything sensible or useful out of it for years," said another, raising her head contemptuously. "It will need special food, special care, and be a waste of time you could spend better attending to your studies and duties. We've done without our shaman long enough."

"And don't expect any of us to help, either." That was a voice Alara recognized; Yshanerenal was as sour in nature as an unripe medlar, and carried grudges for decades. "You brought the thing home, you can take care of it. And if it makes a nuisance of itself, we'll expect you to deal with it or put the thing down." He hunched his head down between his shoulders and raised his wings belligerently.

"It's not a thing," Alara protested, facing the opposition and giving no clue that she felt challenged. She raised her own wings, and her spinal crest. "It's a child, and not a great deal different from our children."

"Maybe not from yours, dear," young Loriealane purred sweetly, looking down her long, elegant snout at the shorter shaman. "But the rest of us come from better stock than that."

One of Lori's older sibs smacked the side of Lori's head with his wing before Alara could react to that insult. "Watch your tongue, you flightless lizard," Haemaena growled, as Lori mantled and hissed at him in anger. He batted her a second time to make her cool down. "Or are you trying to prove you don't deserve Kin-right? If the shaman wants a pet, even a weird pet, that's no reason to insult her lines." The tone of his voice conveyed as much that he felt a superior cynicism as a wish to conciliate the shaman. In a way that was just as cutting as Lori's outright insult. Alara bristled a little more, but his spinal crest lay flat, and his ears were angled forward; he wasn't trying to insult her, he simply didn't think she and the child were worth getting into an argument over. His next words proved that, sounding positively patronizing. "After all, she's breeding, and breeding females should be granted their little whims."

Alara restrained herself from smacking him...with great difficulty. After all, he was on her side. Sort of.

Immediately behind Lori stood Keman; behind him, a protective claw on the youngster's shoulder, was Father Dragon. Keman was the only child in the gathering, and looked from one adult to another as the taunts and acidic comments flew, puzzlement written in every tense little muscle. Alara spared a moment of pity for him, and repressed the urge to send him back to the lair until this was all over.

The child had to learn someday that the Kin were by no means of a uniform opinion on many subjects. And he had to learn just how cynical and coldly callous most of the older dragons were, and how indifferent to the troubles of any creature outside-the Kin.

They were just like the elven lords in that, she thought angrily, turning more and more stubborn with every negative comment, every aggrieved complaint. They didn't care about anything or anyone else, and any other race was somehow inferior to them. Even though the Kin had been driven out of Home, they had no feeling for creatures who suffered the slavery they had escaped. The universe revolved around the Kin, and they wouldn't see it any other way.

There was a larger issue here than simply the adoption of a strange pet, and every one of the dragons knew it, though none of them voiced it. Alara had breached the walls of secrecy, to bring in a member of another race to a Lair of the Kin. A child, a baby, helpless and wildly unlikely to be a danger to them...but still, there it was. She had bent the unwritten Law, if not broken it. Shamans were permitted that license, but she might have gone beyond the bounds of what even a shaman might do. Were they to uphold the letter of the Law, or the spirit? Most of the Kin would say, "the spirit," but most of the Kin were not faced with a halfblood child in their very midst.

That was what lay behind every taunt: the uneasy feeling that Alara had gone too far, and that no matter what her motive was, she had to be made to realize that she was in the wrong. That self-centered blindness was what had driven Alara from annoyance to anger, with an admixture of plain, simple stubbornness.

She felt that it had become a moral question. A child was a child, no matter that the child was a halfblood two-legger. It was a child of intelligent beings, completely deserving of protection and of shelter, precisely because it could not protect itself.

While the altercation continued, and the words grew fewer but more heated, Father Dragon simply watched, silently, restraining Keman whenever he looked ready to leap to his mother's defense. He loomed against the star-spangled sky, the darkest of all the dragons, like a great thunderhead that promised storms to come, yet inexplicably held off.

Alara slowly became aware of his silence, and it occurred to her that he was watching all of them, but seemed to be keeping an especially careful eye on Alara herself. That close regard made her feel uneasy; it made her feel as if she were being judged or tested in some way.

He might truly be watching, testing her, simply because she was a shaman, and as chief of the shamans, Father Dragon was making careful note of her actions.

It might...and it might mean something else. Father Dragon had always, so far as Alara knew, been vitally interested in the actions of the elves and their human slaves. He had, at times, been a lonely voice advocating intervention in the humans' condition. There had been many times in the past when he had urged more action than simple observation, when he had encouraged the Kin to go far beyond the kind of tricks and sabotage that Alara played among the elven lords.

It might mean a great deal...

And it might mean nothing at all. Alara knew that if she was contrary and difficult to predict, Father Dragon was doubly so. He might simply be enjoying her discomfiture. He was undoubtedly enjoying the stir she was making. Draconic mischief-making was not limited to races outside their own.

And Father Dragon was well known for playing pranks on his own kind.

Alara dismissed the whole puzzle. If Father Dragon wasn't going to intervene, it didn't matter. She could fight this battle on her own, and win.

"I am going to keep the child," she said challengingly, planting her feet and raising head and wings, bringing up ears and spinal crest, and looking them all in the eyes in turn. "It will make a good playmate for Keman. He will be able to learn how to mimic the two-legs, human and elven, more effectively with an example beside him. And who knows what we shall learn from having a specimen to study from infancy! I learned more from the mind of her mother than any of you would believe."

That caused a stir; heads turned, and crests were raised or lowered according to how the owner felt. "It's an animal," Oronaera hissed, mantling a little. "I've no objection to keeping the thing as a pet, but raising it alongside our own young ones? Outrageous! As well bring in great apes and delphins!"

Alara mantled back at him, narrowed her eyes, and imparted a dangerous edge to her tone. "Perhaps that would be no bad idea!" she snapped, her claws digging great furrows in the hard-packed dirt. "Perhaps then you who never leave the Lair except to feed and sun yourselves would learn the difference between animals and those who are your equals in mind...and certainly far more interesting!"

"Equals? These animals?" Lori snorted. Before Alara could stop her, she reached out and picked up the baby by one ankle. It wailed in distress and she wrinkled her nostrils disdainfully. "Shaman, you have lost your wits, what few you had. This is nothing more than a food beast, and you know it. I've heard that these young ones make good soup..."

And there it ended, for Alara did the unthinkable, goaded past anger into an act of aggression against another dragon. Lori was not prepared, for Alara had never fought back when stressed, even as a child. It was, in fact, something no one would ever have dreamt her capable of, despite her demonstrated bravery in the Thunder Dance.

She reared on her hind legs, her tail lashing wildly, which had the effect of clearing the others from behind her as they leapt to avoid it. Her right foreclaw shot out, caught at Lori's shoulder before the other dragon could dodge out of the way and squeezed, hard. Her talons dug into the softer skin around the joint, until Lori squealed and started to let go of the child.

"Gently," Alara growled from between clenched teeth. "On the ground. Don't bruise her, or by Fire and Rain, you'll regret every mark on her skin, for I'll duplicate them on yours, if I have to strip away the scales to do so!"

Lori lowered the child to the dirt; it stopped crying the moment it felt a firm surface beneath it Alara released Lori, who lowered her ears and spinal crest in submission and backed away. Several of the others backed away as well, some as submissively as Lori.

She stood over the child and glared at the rest of the Kin. "I'm keeping it," she said firmly. "I'm raising it with Keman. It is a child of intelligent creatures, and it needs someone to protect and care for it." She glared around the circle, at the lowered snouts and downcast eyes. "It will be of no danger to us. It can't betray us, for it will never know its own folk, unless we see fit to introduce it to them. And by then, if we have treated it well, it will be more dragon than human. I have broken no Law here, and you well know it."

Father Dragon, who until this moment had not stirred, raised his head. "You should keep and raise the child, Alara," he said, his deep voice like the rumble of thunder in the far distance. "It has great hamenleai. Interesting things will befall around it, and because of it."

Alara's eyes widened in startlement. It was not often that any shaman could attribute hamenleai, the potential to make changes in the world, to a specific being or action. Alara had done so once in all the time she had been a shaman. And for Father Dragon to say that the child had great hamenleai was extraordinary...Father Dragon had never once been wrong that Alara had ever heard. Her own decision had just been vindicated for not only the Kin of this Lair, but all of the Kin everywhere.

She stretched her wings out to their fullest, her eyes shining with triumph.

And at that moment, a ripple of contraction surged across her belly, and she gasped and doubled over as she felt the first pain of labor.

KEMAN WATCHED HIS mother defend the human cub with bewilderment. Not that he couldn't see why she was defending it, it was that he couldn't see why the others were so determined to oppose her. Their ears were back, their spinal crests up or aggressively flattened, their tails twitched, and all their muscles were tensed.

What's wrong? He wanted to ask Father Dragon. It's only a baby, just a cub. It can't hurt anyone, certainly not one of the Kin! Why don't they want Mother to keep it?

But the others were sometimes cruel, too...like Lori, who kept threatening to take Keman's pet two-horns for a snack rather than fly off to hunt one. Perhaps that was why they were being so mean.

But his mother was standing up to them, all of them; she wasn't going to back down without a real fight. And right when he almost flew out from under Father

Dragon's wing to stand by her, Father Dragon laid a restraining claw on his shoulder.

So he stood by, and fretted, until Lori tried to take the human cub to eat. He nearly jumped on Lori's tail right then; he had his claws all set to snatch at it, and his teeth all set to bite her. And that was when Keman's gentle, tiny mother somehow grew to three times her normal size and forced Lori to submit to her. She caught Lori's shoulder, right where the scales were really small and didn't protect much, and squeezed, hard, like the young buck-dragons did playing dominance games. She caught Lori by surprise, and she hurt Lori...and Lori could never tolerate being hurt. She had once made an incredible fuss over the removal of a bone-splinter from her foot. Lori backed down, and the rest followed her lead.

The threat was over then, and Keman relaxed. He paid no more attention to the doings of the adults; the human cub had all of his attention.

It was really kind of cute, he thought, watching it as it squirmed in the dust, moving arms and legs feebly. He wondered how old it was. Mother had said she wanted him to help take care of it...if it was like the two-horns, it probably needed milk, and she didn't know how to get the two-horns to take different babies from their own. But he did.

Keman had been bringing home "pets" ever since he was old enough to go out beyond the village alone. Some of his pets had proven useful...the family of spotted cats, for instance, that had taken up residence in their lair and cleaned out all the vermin. Or the myriad lizards, who had taken care of the insects that had been too small to interest the cats. He had gained a certain amount of notoriety among the Kin; some of them even brought animals back from their hunting expeditions for his little "zoo." Father Dragon, for one; he'd brought in the rare one-horn doe, as big as a horse, that looked like a cross between a two-horn and a big plains three-horn, except its cloven hooves were closer to being claws. It had been pregnant, and had dropped triplet fawns. All were as foul-tempered as their mother, and permitted no one near except Keman. He used them to guard the rest of his foundlings. Even Lori avoided the one-horns, which were as aggressive and mean-spirited as two-horns were sweet and gentle.

But this was the first time anyone had brought Keman anything so newborn and feeble. This human cub would be interesting to tend.

She'd do all right with the two-horns, he decided. If there were loupers nursing, that would have been better, because she was kind of soft...but if he put her with Hoppy, the three-legged two-horn, Keman didn't think she'd get stepped on.