Elvenbane

He'd intended to show Keoke how wrong he'd been, how Shana had been the hero, and Rovy the villain. Then when Keoke capitulated he would demand that the Elder go find Shana and bring her back. He never got any farther than insisting on how unfair it all had been. Keoke refused to admit that his decision had been in error, on the grounds that Shana was not of the Kin. "Unfair" simply didn't apply to her, nor did honor or the Law, and that was the end of it.

He wasn't going to get anywhere with his mother, either, that much was certain. She backed Keoke; he didn't know why, but it was plain she had no intention of helping him or Shana.

So if anyone was going to save Shana, it was going to have to be him, all alone.

Do what you think is right, had been Father Dragon's first advice to him about Shana. Well, he knew what was right. If she was going to get thrown off in the desert somewhere, it was only right that he share her exile. After all, she was there because of him.

Except that right now he couldn't fly... which was going to make some serious problems with mobility.

He could fix that problem, he thought angrily, hugging his own little secret to himself. And Mother didn't know he could. She thought he was going to be lying around in bed for at least a week.

He eased himself down into his bed, seething with defiance. I'll show her. I'll show them all.

He arranged his aching limbs carefully, and put himself into the shape-shifting meditation. A common place enough state of mind; he practiced it several times each day. Except that this time he wasn't going to shift anything, he was going to fix it.

Of all the forms he knew, he was most familiar with his own body, naturally enough. He had to be; he had to know what he was shifting out of in order to know what to change. Like all dragons proficient in shape-shifting, he knew exactly how each muscle should look, work, and feel. So in order to heal the damage Rovy had done to him, it was only a matter of taking the damaged muscles and shifting them until they were whole again.

Only...

He had figured this out when he realized that the most proficient dragons never stayed injured for very long. He'd had no idea the actual practice would hurt so much. After all, shape-changing didn't hurt at all.

Within heartbeats his shoulder muscles burned as if he'd poured molten rock on them; his wing muscles twitched wildly and sent stabs of lightninglike pain down his back each time they did. He quit immediately, and tried to figure out what he was doing wrong.

Nothing, he realized finally. He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was just making real changes to things, making himself heal faster. And everything hurt because all the nerves were alive, and hurting the way they would if he was healing, only faster.

He started again, hoping it would be better.

It wasn't.

At least a dozen times he was ready to give up, and let nature heal his injuries in its own time...but each time he did, he saw Shana, bravely standing up to Rovy and telling him off, while the bully ducked and screamed as her rocks hit him.

Shame overcame him; she was somewhere out in the desert, with no shelter, and no water, and no friends to help her. This was nothing. And if he didn't get himself in flying condition soon, she might die.

He went right back to his healing.

Suddenly, after what seemed like days, the pain stopped.

His eyes flew open, and he flexed his arms and wings wonderingly. They worked perfectly; no pain, and not even a trace of stiffness. He couldn't see his own back, but the skin wasn't pulling as if it had been scarred. He had succeeded in healing himself...and no one in the entire Lair knew that he was whole and flightworthy again.

And they weren't going to find out until it was too late.

He climbed out of his bed and stole into the cavern itself, waiting, watching and listening. When he heard and saw nothing, he searched the lair, quietly stealing along the pathways of the cavern with his belly scraping the stone, hiding in shadows whenever he thought he detected a sound that wasn't the steady drip of water. But though he checked every possible corner of the lair, there was no sign of Alara. All he found was Myre, curled up in her bed, sleeping so soundly that an avalanche wouldn't have made her stir.

Good. Everything was clear.

He slipped to the back entrance, pausing only to free all of his pets, even the one-horns.

He wasn't exactly sorry to see them go; lately only Shana could get near them. They seemed even to like her...as much as one-horns ever liked anyone. Keman they charged whenever he neared the paddock, bashing their stupid heads against the stone of the enclosure. And they never learned not to.

The two-horns were harder to free; gentle as they were, he'd enjoyed their quiet company and the antics of their young. Poor old Hoppy had long since suckled her last kid, but her descendants followed their fierce cousins happily enough out to the free pastures beyond the Lair.

The loupers were equally pleased to head into the hills; they'd never gotten used to confinement, and Keman had been contemplating freeing them for some time. Maybe it was all for the best that he was forced into it now.

The only animal Keman didn't free immediately was the otter. Instead, he lured the playful beast to him, and caught it in a net when it came within reach. It meeped reproachfully at him from the net, after struggling unsuccessfully to free itself. He wished he could tell it that he was taking it to the river on his way out on Shana's trail, but he had no way to reach its mind. He could only hope it would do well once it found it was free again.

Then he launched himself heavily into the air, net and all, heading outward from the Lair, the otter dangling from his foreclaws as he took to the night sky.

At least he'd gotten that much out of Keoke, he told himself, as he settled down at the place...he hoped...the Elder had released his foster sister, sometime just before dawn. Five rocks, one of them tall, with a kestrel nesting in a hollow near the top, and sajus all around. Keoke had given him that much detail in the hopes it would make him feel better about Shana...the Elder had assumed that the presence of that much sajus and the nesting kestrel meant that there was water Shana could find and get at relatively close to the surface.

It was just too bad that for Shana that wasn't true. Sajus had deep roots that could reach down ten, even twenty dragon-lengths to get at water, and kestrels got all the water they needed from their prey. All the cluster of bushes meant was that there was water there. Somewhere. Not near enough to the surface to help Shana, and it was too early in the fall for dew to be collecting on the rock at dawn.

He couldn't look for her on the wing; she might be hiding, sleeping, or even unconscious under a bush somewhere. She might change direction at any time. And this was close to the caravan routes; he dared not be seen.

He needed a shape. A good tracker with a keen nose, and something that would be safe out here.

Keman sat for a moment and thought about the shapes he was familiar with. His best bet was a louper...they could smell footprints on the wind. But they were also small, and tended to travel in packs for protection. It was still hard for him to shift into anything as small as a louper, and he needed something that could protect itself.

A one-horn, he decided reluctantly. He knew they were good trackers; they'd follow something for weeks before they'd give up chasing it. He would just have to modify it, so he wasn't stuck with its bad temper, its instincts, and its brainless head. That was going to take time...

But nothing messed with a one-horn. Not even another one-horn. They could eat just about anything, even sajus. And they were almost as good as kestrels about getting water from what they ate.

There was another advantage: If Shana saw him, she wouldn't be afraid of him. He wasn't anywhere near as good as she was at mind-to-mind speech; she would be able to talk to him, but he would not be able to tell her that he was in animal form until she was close enough to touch. But she had come as close to taming the one-horns as had anyone he'd ever heard of, and she might see a one-horn as transportation and protection.

Now he was glad he'd stopped after releasing the otter, to kill and eat two unfortunate antelope. He was already tired when he began the long flight, and shifting both shape and size was going to take a lot of energy.

He locked his joints so that he wouldn't fall over, closed his eyes, and began the patterns of his meditation.

Once he was deeply inside those patterns, he slowly shifted most of his bulk Out, leaving just enough mass to make a really big one-horn.

Then he set the form he wanted to mimic in his mind, and began copying it from the skin out.

He felt his muscles flowing reluctantly, taking the shape that he set them; felt bones lengthening and assuming a new configuration. Felt his spinal crest soften, his tail shrink and sprout hair...and finally felt the pearly horn sprout from the middle of his forehead, stabbing at the sky aggressively.

He cracked one eye to look down at himself, and saw a smooth-haired, silky green leg.

That wouldn't do at all. He concentrated a little more, and watched the leg darken to black. And the heat of the sun hit him hard enough to flatten him, if he hadn't had his legs locked.

Possibly not the best color choice in a desert.

He reversed the process, and watched the skin and hair bleach to a pure, unblemished white.

Already he felt much cooler. Satisfied, he opened his eyes completely, and lifted his nose to sniff the faint breeze.

There was no doubt of it; Shana had been here. He remembered her scent from taking three-horn form; the odd mix of dragon-musk (from her tunic) and two-legger scent was unmistakable. Even if there had been another two-legger somewhere around here...however unlikely that was...they wouldn't have had the scent of dragon on them as well.

Keman put his nose close to the ground and circled around the rock formation. He picked up Shana's trail immediately; found where she had wriggled into the cluster of brush to spend the heat of the day, and where she had come out. There were still tracks she had made, reduced to vague depressions in the sand, but forming a clear line off to the east now that he knew what they were.

He shook his head and mane, put nose to the ground, and followed.

He was doing just fine when the sandstorm hit, just about midmorning.

Fortunately his one-horn instincts, however buried, were still keen enough to warn him in plenty of time to take cover. He was Following Shana's trail with the total, concentrated single-mindedness that tracking in the desert required, when a sudden chill made him toss his head and look up, his eyes widening.

A dark brown cloud that rose in a wall from earth to the sky reached for the sun ahead of him and grew taller even as he watched. In next to no time, it had blotted out the sun completely, and his keen ears picked up a roaring sound in the distance.

Sandstorm! He'd never lived through one, he'd never even seen one except from far away and above.

There was only one thing to do...take shelter, and quickly; it was too late to try to avoid it.

He remembered a cluster of boulders along his backtrail, a semicircle of rock that should protect him from the worst of the wind and punishing, wind-borne sand. And there was something else that he could do to weather this that no real one-horn could manage; he could alter his shape to take the storm. He couldn't change into a rock yet, only living things, but he could change his nose to create membranes he could breathe through; toughen his skin, even put scales back on it.

But first, he had to reach a relatively safe haven.

He whirled on his hind legs, leapt into motion, and galloped at full speed back towards the remembered boulders, his wide, cleft hoof-claws churning up the sand in his wake, his mane and tail flying, his ears laid back. He cast a glance over his shoulder; behind him the wall of brown had grown taller. The storm was gaining on him.

His legs pumped harder. He altered his hooves as he ran, until they were flat, twin-toed, splayed pads that hit the sand and gave him purchase without sinking into it. He looked back again. The storm seemed no closer, but the roaring of the wind was definitely louder.

Wings would do him no good at all at this point, and the delay might even kill him if he stopped long enough to sprout them. He could pop back into his draconic form, but that, too, would cost him time. And he didn't think he could fly any faster than he was running; draconic form was not particularly fast except in a dive.

There were other reasons; things he'd been warned about. If he flew he could get caught in an updraft...and get torn to bits. And the sand would wear his wing-membranes away to nothing in no time.

He looked ahead, desperate to see something besides brush that would do nothing to protect him.

The rocks! He spotted them, only a few dragon-lengths away. He put on a burst of speed he didn't know he had in reserve, scrambled around to the entrance and dove into their shelter, lying down with his head between his knees.

Faster than he had ever thought was possible, he altered the one-horn form; changing the soft skin for his own scales, growing a special membrane over his nostrils and ears to keep the sand from clogging them, weaving his mane into a canopy of tough, scaled skin and spreading it over his head, shrinking the horn so that it was just holding the membrane away from his face. He put his head into a cranny between two boulders, and did his best to seal that skin down against the rock. He had only enough time left to wonder if all he had ,done would protect him. Then the storm hit.

He'd only heard about the force of a sandstorm before this. Despite the relative shelter of the rocks, he quickly decided that it was a good thing he'd exchanged hair for scales. The sand abraded his hide with a force he felt even through the copy of his own draconic skin.

He should recommend sandstorms for the Kin who were going crazy with itching when they shed, he thought wryly. One morning, and it would all be over with.

He also decided that it was a very good thing he had not taken a full draconic form; the little skin frill that was protecting his face was taking a bad enough beating; his wing-membranes would, indeed, have been shredded in next to no time.

He thought suddenly of Shana; thought of her being caught in this thing, with no protection other than her wits and a short, dragon-hide tunic. He could all-too-easily imagine the wind and sand abrading her delicate skin away.

The thought made him want to leap to his feet and charge into the tempest looking for her, and only his own good sense kept him from doing so.

He had to keep telling himself over and over that if he ran out of his shelter, he wouldn't be able to help her, and he might well get himself hurt or even killed. She was somewhere ahead of him; if the sandstorm had caught her, it had done so already, for it had come out of the east where she had been heading. She had either survived it intact, survived it hurt, or not survived at all. And no matter what the outcome, it had already happened.

None of that was any comfort as he waited out the fury of the storm.

The storm passed as quickly as it had descended, and Keman was up and out of his shelter while sand still blew around his circle of rocks.

He looked around and felt his heart plummet in despair, the storm had scoured away every trace of Shana's trail, and when he sniffed the breeze, he scented nothing but the sharp tang of bruised sajus, dust, and the ever-present odor of heated sand. Fire and Rain...how am I ever going to find her now? I'm never going to be able to pick up her trail! His spirits sank, and he wanted to lie right down and weep.

He couldn't give up. He couldn't. He was all she had. He forced himself to change back to pure one-horn form. He sniffed the air, trying to catch a hint of Shana's scent and having no luck whatsoever.

All right, he told himself, as his throat closed and his stomach knotted, I have to think this out. He knew she was going east. If she was still alive, that was probably where she was still heading. What he had to do was quarter the possible trail, with this as his starting point. He could do it, he could find her, he just had to work a little harder.

The midday sun glared down pitilessly on him and on the empty desert, now quite featureless except for the clumps of brush. Even the birds were gone. Never had landscape seemed quite so empty of life.

He gritted his teeth with determination, resolving not to give in to despair, and trudged forward under the white heat of the sun.

Using peculiar rocks and his own innate sense of direction he zigzagged across the desert, nose in the air, testing every breath for a hint of Shana's scent. Even when he felt dizzy from the heat, when the white sand wavered and rippled in his vision, he kept going. By midafternoon another problem began to torture him: hunger. He'd used up a great deal of energy in shape-shifting, and the strain had taken its toll. But there was nothing except sajus, and dry sajus at that. He snatched mouthfuls of it as he passed, but it did little to ease his hunger and nothing to ease his thirst.

By sunset he was half-mad with hunger and thirst combined. That was when he encountered one other large living creature: a real one-horn, a young one.

By then, he was so ravenous with hunger he was ready to pounce on anything that looked appetizing. The one-horn looked more than appetizing...it aroused an instinct in him that no amount of reason could overcome.

Kill!

The one-horn seemed to sense his mood, and broke into a run as it sighted him.

That was enough for him. He reverted back into draconic form and launched himself high into the sky, gaining altitude, then descending on the hapless one-horn in the kind of deadly dive dragons and accipiter hawks had in common. And like the accipiters, when the one-horn took shelter in a clump of brush, Keman went right in after it, hunger making him blind to everything but his quarry, even to the possibility of damage to his wings. He screamed with rage as it paused and turned at bay, his sight red-hazed, his hunger all-encompassing.

It turned, squealed, and struck back at him with its horn; a single, blow, light and glancing, but it was enough to madden Keman past all reason. He screamed, lunged, and seized the beast with talons and teeth, breaking its neck with a single jerk of his head, then tearing out its throat for good measure.

He ripped the limp body of the one-horn limb from limb in his rage, bolting great chunks of bleeding flesh, devouring the creature down to the bare bones in the few moments it took the sun to set. He'd never felt this way before, this unreasoning anger, this blood-lust; it took him with a wild intoxication that had his heart pumping, his wings mantling, and his spinal crest bristling long after the one-horn was a pile of gnawed bones. He couldn't even think in coherent thoughts; he was all feeling, and that feeling was all anger.

A louper howled in the far distance. He raised his head from what was left of the beast, mantling his wings at the rising moon. It took him a moment to realize that the moon was no enemy, and not out to steal his kill. Only then did he finally come to his senses and remember what had brought him out here in the first place.

For one moment longer, Shana no longer seemed important. What was important was the wild wind under the moon, the taste of fresh blood in his mouth, the freedom to go and do whatever he pleased...

Then he shook his head, his mood changing as quickly as the desert sky at sunset, appalled at himself. What's wrong with me? What am I thinking of? Have I gone mad?

He coughed, and shook his head again. He felt very strange, light-headed, dizzy, as if he'd been someone or something else for a moment. He'd never suspected he could feel emotions like that...

Like some throwback. Like Rovy?

No, he didn't think so. He simply had gone rather feral, and only for a moment. Hunger had driven him, not a bad streak. Not like Rovy; Rovy was vicious, cruel.

He took a very deep breath to steady himself. I'm all right. I was just...hungry. Now he knew better than to leave feeding too long. I'll never do that again. Never, never, never. I swear it. He collected himself, his thoughts, stepped away from the pile of gnawed bones and refused to look back at them. He had to get back to the trail. Shana was alone out there, somewhere, maybe hurt, and he had to find her.

He moved off a little, composed and centered himself, and reached for the power to shift. He made the transformation back to one-horn, finding it much easier the second time, and returned to his search.

Night was easier to take; his night-vision was good, and he was no longer tormented by heat, thirst, and hunger. Several times he thought he found the trail, only to lose the scent again, but the fact that he caught a scent at all gave him hope.

At just about dawn he scented water...and Shana.

And nearly a hundred other creatures, two-leggers and animals combined, somewhere over the crest of the hill he was climbing.

Fire and Rain! What...

He thought quickly. He knew he must be near caravan trails, which meant two-leggers.

He couldn't be seen.

But had they found Shana? Or were they just nearby?

He topped the rise, moving silently and cautiously, and found he was looking down on a ruin surrounding a stone-rimmed pool of perfectly clear, blue water. Approaching from the opposite direction was a caravan of two-leggers; merchants, from the look of the laden beasts. And from the dust-covered condition of men and beasts both, they had been caught in the same sandstorm that had delayed him. Somehow, by luck or knowledge, they had found the oasis...but only the worst of luck could have brought them here at this moment in time.

He took to cover, turning his coat a mottled sandy-brown...just as he saw a distant figure that could only be Shana crawl out of one of the ruins and await the approach of the strangers.

Something woke Shana out of a sound, exhausted sleep. She blinked, hearing unfamiliar noises, a babble of voices and the calls of strange beasts.

She felt ill, weak with hunger, and put her hand to her head as she sat up, to stop its spinning. It had been so long since she had last eaten...was she dreaming this, or was it real?

The noise continued; neared. She closed her eyes until her head steadied, then crawled forward a little and looked cautiously out of her little shelter. But when she peered out from beneath the overhanging shelf of wind-worn rock, the first thing she saw was a great copper-colored dragon on the wing, shining in the rising sun.

She panicked immediately. There was only one thing she could think of. Had they decided to follow her? Had Lori decided to risk the censure of the Kin for disobeying the Elders, and kill her?

Fear threaded her spine, and she stared at the dragon with the same fascination as a mouse staring at a hawk. His great wings rippled and snapped in the rising wind. In fact, his whole body rippled as he hovered above the sand...

She came out of her fearful trance. That...doesn't look or sound right...

She blinked again, and rubbed her eyes...and only then did the "dragon" resolve itself into nothing more than an image wrought in some coppery substance on a piece of sky-blue cloth fastened to a stick and flapping in the wind.

Her fear dissolved, leaving her weak-kneed and disoriented. She started to sink back into her hiding place, no longer caring what the noise was all about. But the painted dragon seemed to call to her in a peculiar fashion that she didn't understand.

She crawled out from beneath the shelter of her rocks to stare at it in dazed fascination. The stick was attached somehow to a contraption that was in turn strapped onto the back of an animal Shana had never seen before; it had long, gangly legs, flat feet like huge water-worn stones, a lumpy body, and a long neck surmounted by the ugliest head Shana had ever seen. The whole of it was covered in warty gray skin, exactly like a flat-toad. Where did these things come from? And why would anyone put a picture of a dragon on a piece of cloth? Unless...it was another Lair of the Kin. Foster Mother had told her that some of the other Lairs had different customs.

There were more of the beasts behind the first, and half of them were being ridden by...

By...She shook her head, trying to make her mind work. They can't be two-leggers. She was the only two-legger around, anywhere. They must be dragons in two-legger form. But why?

Shana blinked and rubbed her temples; she tried to see the dragon-shadows, but she was so dazed that she wasn't sure what she was seeing. She tried again; and this time she thought she saw a flicker of shadow, a strange, fuzzy halo around each of them that could have been dragon-shaped.

So they were dragons. But why here, and why like this?

Why are they doing this? Is this a game? she wondered confusedly, as she braced herself against the rock with one hand. They must have come from some other Lair, she didn't recognize any of them. That thing...could it be a picture of their Elder? There weren't any Elder copper dragons in her Lair. That must be it; they must come from another Lair. Were they undertaking a test of some kind? Or something like the Thunder Dance...or maybe it was a lesson...

Just then, as she stood there, her head beginning to float a little from hunger, one of them spotted her, pointed, and shouted something. To her amazement she recognized one of the "other" languages Alara had been teaching them; one that Shana had been able to learn fairly quickly.

The others turned to stare at her, their multicolored clothing billowing around them. The first one handed the ropes of his beast to one of them, and came striding across the sand to her. She stayed where she was, partly because she was feeling too dizzy to move, and partly because she was trying to figure out which one of them was the teacher.

I don't see anyone old enough to be a teacher, she thought, vaguely puzzled. Unless the teacher is very young. It might be one of the ones just watching, though. If it was a lesson, it might be a lesson in staying in form. Two-legger form was awfully hard for Keman to keep...

"Child...girl," said the stranger, as soon as he came close enough that he didn't have to shout. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

He tucked the ends of a head-covering into a band that held it in place. She looked at him and considered her reply, her stomach now in knots, which made it very hard to think. If she told them that Keoke had thrown her out of the Lair, they might leave her here. But if they thought she was lost, they might take her with them, and they would probably feed her. She could run away before they got a chance to ask her to shift back.

"My name is Shana," she said, pronouncing the words carefully. "I...I think I'm lost. I've been lost a long time...I'm awfully hungry, please. Could you give me something to eat?"

The stranger looked at her with the oddest expression on his face, then laughed, although she hadn't said anything that was particularly funny. She stared at him, puzzled, rubbing her temple. Her head was starting to ache along with her stomach, and her eyes kept fogging and unfocusing. Right now, she could see dragon-shapes behind a cactus.

"Lost!" He turned to the others behind him, shouting, "She says she's lost! Can you believe it? The child is out here in the middle of nothing, and says she's lost!"

They, too, roared with laughter. Shana felt as if she were being left out of something, and wondered sullenly what on earth she had said that struck them as so very hilarious. But then, the Kin had always had an odd sense of humor.

Then she remembered one of the stranger pastimes of the Kin, a pastime neither Myre nor Keman had been old enough to join...the games they would play, half story, half puzzle, with each participant taking a part. Much of the challenge lay with the individuals making chance encounters work as best he could with the ongoing story. Those who extemporized the best and most creatively won; those who were thrown off by deviations in the story lost.

They did act as if they were working some kind of puzzle, or in a drama-game. That had to be the answer; they were acting something out, and she had given them some kind of clue. She'd better play along and work herself into their story. Once she'd done that, they'd take her with them, and once she was where she could fend for herself, she'd slip off.

"So, lost child, who are your people, eh?" the stranger asked, putting his arm around her shoulders in a friendly fashion, and drawing her back towards the rest of the group. Shana went with him readily enough; so long as he was disposed to be friendly, she was content.

"The Kin, of course," she said reasonably. "Please, I'm awfully hungry..."

In fact, she began to feel as if she were likely to faint at any moment. But the others looked at her in a very strange way when she said that, as if she had spoken nonsense. She intercepted those wary looks, and frowned as she tried to fathom their meaning.

Maybe she wasn't supposed to mention the Kin. Or maybe this other Lair didn't call them the Kin. "You know, the Family." She pointed at the cloth dragon, and instantly the others were all smiles again.

She sighed with relief. I said the right thing...

"Well, if you have lost the Family, child, we must certainly help you," said the smiling man. "You say you are hungry? Come, we will feed you. And"...he got an odd, acquisitive expression..."where did you find this garment you wear?"

"Garment?" she asked, confused again. "My tunic? I made it. I got the..."

Now she was stymied, for she had no notion how to explain "shed skin" in this other tongue. "I...found the...bits and I made it," she finished lamely, looking down at her feet, and hoping she had not failed a test that would make them abandon her as quickly as they had adopted her. The games could be like that; she'd watched enough of them to know.

"Here, child, eat..." Something dry and brown and shaped like a stone was thrust into her hands. She looked at it doubtfully before taking a tentative bite.

To her surprise, the thing had a tough but tasty outside, and an even tastier middle. She devoured it with enthusiasm, drank the metallic-tasting water they gave her, and smiled shyly at her new friends from under her lashes. They crowded around her, moving carefully, as if she were some kind of wild animal that they thought they might frighten.

"Shana, your name is?" said the man who had befriended her first. She nodded, and he moved closer to her, looking at her tunic, but not touching it. "Shana, this thing you wear...would you have this instead?"

He held up a longer tunic than hers, of a beautiful crimson and of material like the cloth dragon. It looked exactly like the ones the rest of them wore; all one piece and one color, not patched, cast-off skin as hers was. She wanted it, wanted it nearly as much as she had wanted the jeweled band, and could hardly believe that he wanted hers in exchange. It did not seem an equal exchange to her.

Maybe he was just being kind, giving her this as a trade so she didn't feel badly about taking the new one. That must be it. Or else she had to dress like them to play in this game; that could be it, too. Well, she didn't care, so long as they would give her that new tunic.

"Please?" she said, and the man laughed and handed it to her. She started to strip off her old tunic, and he suddenly grew alarmed, and stopped her.

"There..." he said, pointing to a building made of cloth. While she had been eating, some of the others had put it up, all in the blink of an eye. "Go there, take off the old garment, put on the new."

She looked at him with her mouth open in surprise, but he was insistent. She obeyed, but wondered what kind of game they could possibly be playing. It certainly seemed very odd...

But as she slipped out of the old tunic and into the new, the silk-wrapped bundle of the jeweled band thudded against her breastbone, and she was suddenly very glad that they were playing such an odd game. If they see this, they'll want it. I can't let them see it. If they do, they'll take it for their own hoards, just like the others took away the gems Keman gave me...

She hastily put on the new tunic, and hid her bundle beneath the high collar, making sure that it didn't show.

That should do. She left the cloth building, and handed her old tunic to the waiting stranger, who took it with every evidence of delight.

"Are you not weary?" he asked, very solicitously. She started to say that she was fine, then caught herself in a yawn.

It must be the food. She was sleepy. She yawned again, and the man chuckled.

"Go inside, in the shade. Sleep. It is very comfortable inside." He motioned to her to go back inside the cloth thing.

"But..." She felt she had to give at least a token objection. "Shouldn't I be...doing something?"

"No, child," he said, and smiled. "You have been lost, and now you are with friends again. Of course you are tired. You must sleep as long as you need to."

He pushed her gently in the direction of the cloth building, and she obeyed his direction without another objection.

She looked around once she was inside, something she hadn't bothered to do before. There was a kind of nest of fabric to curl up in; it looked even more comfortable than the one she had made in Alara's lair.

She flopped down into it, and discovered that several of the pieces of cloth were stuffed with something soft and incredibly cushiony, and that there was more of the same stuff inside a bigger, flatter piece of cloth under all the fabric. It felt wonderful, and she sprawled at her ease, for once in her life finding herself in a position where there was nothing digging into her, and nothing hard and unyielding to have to cope with.

Once lying down, she discovered she couldn't keep her eyes open. She tried, but her lids kept drifting down, and she kept dozing off. Not that it mattered now. She was among friends, the stranger had said so. She would be fed and taken care of.

No matter what kind of strange game they were playing.

She let her eyes close, and sleep take her.

CAN YOU BELIEVE OUR luck?" Kel Rosten laughed, and the caravan chief fingered the strange tunic the wild girl had worn. Dripping between his hard brown hands, it glittered in the sunlight like a thousand jewels; he couldn't imagine what it could be made of. Skin of some kind, of course, some sort of reptile skin, but it was like nothing he'd ever seen before. The reptiles themselves must have been very small, for the tunic was made of many patches sewn carefully together. But the colors were quite amazing; gold-washed vermilion, purple-washed blue, silver-washed green...

In all of his life as a trader for K'trenn Lord Berenel Hydatha, he had never seen anything like it. And if he could find out the source of these wondrous skins...

"The lords'll eat that stuff up," his second-in-command said, touching the tunic with a wondering finger. "Demonspawn! That's just fair amazin' skin. C'n you picture Berenel's Lady in that? Or th' young Lord? Strut around like peacocks, they would. An' hev' ev' other elven lord beggin' fer some fer himself."

"It'll make a fortune for Lord Berenel," Kel agreed, "and if it makes a fortune for him, that means easy living for us!"

Berenel believed that a contented human was a profitable human...unlike some, Kel reflected. When his bondlings did well, they were rewarded with luxury. Lord Berenel's people gave short shrift to troublemakers, and actively looked to increase their Lord's profits.

Ardan's eyes glazed over with anticipation. "Wine," he murmured. "Quarters in the Big House. Fine food, fine drink, pick o' the' concubines..."

"All that and more, my friend," Kel agreed affably, slapping his second on the back. He mentally congratulated himself for finding a man with both the ability to command and no ambition whatsoever. Ardan's dreams and tastes were simple: a life of relative luxury, and the leisure to pursue his hobby of becoming an expert on vintages. And since he towered a good head over any other man in the caravan, and could use both fists and the knife he carried with speed and skill, no one ever gainsaid him. A man whose muscles matched his height, his canny brown eyes promised peace to those who kept it, and trouble for those who didn't. He favored unobtrusive robes of pale gray over his crimson tunic, unlike the chief trader's flamboyant dragon-scarlet, and his choice of clothing reflected his preferred life-style.

"Lord Berenel's a generous lord, and he believes in sharing good fortune," Kel continued. "If we can find out where this came from, he'll do more than give us pick of the concubines...he'll retire us. No more caravans, and easy living for the rest of our lives! Think of that! The worst we'll have to sweat is when we stand at stud!"

"No more caravans...no more sandstorms!" Ardan grinned, his teeth showing white in his black beard. "That last one was enough for me! Demon's eyes! I thought we was gonna lose the whole pack-train! If I never see 'nother storm like that, it'll be too damn soon."

"Got that right." Kel folded the tunic carefully, admiring how easily it compacted into a tiny package. He listened a moment at the door of the tent, then lifted the entrance flap and discovered that the drugged water had finally put the wild girl to sleep. He motioned Ardan to follow him inside.

He moved several bundles to one side, and stowed the tunic away in the secret bottom of one of his pack-baskets. "Remember where that is, in case something happens to me," he told Ardan, who nodded. "That has to go to the Lord, no matter what."

"No fear of that," Ardan replied with another grin. "But I'll be watchin' yer back, in case some 'un gets ideas."

Making him my second was the smartest thing I ever did. "Good man," Kel said, slapped Ardan companion-ably on the shoulder, and went back to the entrance, calling out to one of the boys for food and water. He had no fear he'd wake the girl now; he'd put enough black poppy in that water to knock out a pack-grel.

"Take a seat, old man," he said, gesturing to one of the piles of cushions. "The girl's good till sundown at the least. I've no mind to have to tend a wild thing if it wants to run, nor damage good, sound merchandise; I figure on keeping her well muddled until we reach Anjes."

"Kel...I don't s'ppose there's any chance that girl could have been planted, is there?" Ardan said, with a sudden frown, as one of the 'prentices, a thin, nervous boy, brushed aside the canvas flap, bringing a skin of water fresh from the pool, bread, and goat-cheese. "The Lord has a powerful lot of enemies. And it's kind of odd, finding that girl out here, alone, claimin' she's lost."

Kel bit off a mouthful of bread and considered the idea. No matter what the others thought, Ardan was anything but stupid, and that was just the kind of twisted trap one of the other lords might think up...

He stood up, strolled over to the girl, and looked down at her, thoughtfully. She looked nothing like the instrument of a plot; tangled in the pillows and silk covers, she looked even younger than he supposed she was. His guess was that her age was maybe fourteen; she looked eleven at most, with her face slack with sleep.

He noted her work-worn hands, the tough, sinewy muscles, the scratches and scars and half-healed cuts. Her bare feet were as tough as boot-leather. And there was a fair amount of abrasion on her arms and the back of her neck and legs...signs that she, too, had been caught in the storm.

"Well," he said, after a moment of study, "she's scratched up, callused, with a skin like a field hand. From the look of her, she's been through that storm. And nobody could've known we were gonna find this place...I mean, I knew it was on the map, but that don't mean water's gonna be where the map says."

"Lord could've drove us with that storm," Ardan countered. "Girl could be a field hand. Tunic could have a glamorie on it."

"True enough. But I got a test for that, remember?" Kel returned to the pack-basket that held his prize, and extracted it again. He pulled a silk-wrapped bundle out of his belt-pouch, and carefully unwrapped it, revealing a pendant wrought of an odd, dull metal of a greenish cast, centered with a black stone. He applied the stone to the tunic, taking care not to touch it with his bare fingers.

"There, see?" he said triumphantly, when the stone remained a glossy black, and the tunic remained unchanged. "If there was any glamorie around, this'd take care of it."

Ardan nodded thoughtfully. "Girl don't act like anythin' but wild, I'll give you that. All things considered, I'd be willin' to lay down money that she's a wild 'un, an' you know I don't bet on nothin' but a sure thing. I gotta think of these things, Kel, it's m'job."

"And I'm right glad you do it." Kel stowed the tunic back in hiding, and the pendant in his belt-pouch. "So, if you'll bet she's wild, then I'll take that as good as trade-gold. Now, tell me something, what do you think of the girl? Will she be worth selling, you think?"

Ardan cocked his head a little to one side. "Huh. I think so. Once we find out where she got the stuff...if she knows, if she ain't too feebleminded to remember. Some of these wild 'uns, their memory ain't too good." Ardan scratched his side through his tunic, and ate a piece of cheese. "You get bondlings what's escaped, or some of them rogues, runnin' around wild...half the time they starve, or eat bugs or somethin'. They have any kids, they get brought up the same, they have problems thinkin' about anythin' that ain't got somethin't' do with food."

"Don't imagine eating bugs does much for their brains," Kel agreed. "Brains don't matter much, though, not in a girl. Don't need brains to make a bed, nor to lie in it, eh?" He laughed, and Ardan joined him. "You're a good judge of flesh, Ardan, what else do you think?"

"Well, since you're askin' my opinion, I'd say she's no beauty, but she'll fetch a fair price." Ardan craned his neck up a little to get a better look at the sleeping girl. "That red hair's nice; too bad she cut it so damn short. 'Nother thing you might bark her for is fighter. Don't need brains to be in the arena, either, just a healthy sense 'f wantin' t' stay alive an' some good reactions. And these wild ones, they make good fighters if you catch 'em young 'nough."

"Now that's a thought," Kel said, pleased. Too bad he couldn't just sell her and pocket all the money...but somebody'd snitch, sure as the sun rose. Lord Berenel was all right, but no way was he going to put up with that. He'd have Kel's hide on his wall if Kel cheated him.

But sell her and keep part, especially if he could get a good price...that was something else. Berenel didn't mind a little skimming, now and again, especially on a pure windfall...

Ardan rose to his feet and joined Kel in looking down at the sleeping girl. As Ardan had said, she was no beauty, but she wasn't ugly either. Attractive, Kel decided. That pretty much described her. Dark red hair in tangled curls covering her ears down to her shoulders, sun-bronzed skin, decent figure. Good face; arching brows and high cheekbones, with a pointed little chin that made her look like a vixen-fox.

Attractive, healthy, and tough. She ought to bring a decent price; more than a decent price if he could parlay the fact that she was wild into an asset, as Ardan had suggested.

Sometimes Ardan came up with the best ideas out of nowhere.

"Not bad," Ardan said, after a moment of long study. "Y'know, you put her in a short little leather tunic t' show off them long legs, grow her hair more, put her out in the arena, she'd make a good novelty. 'Specially if it turns out she can fight. I think we oughta have them auctioneers bark her that way."

Ardan's judgments on trade, though seldom offered, were never wrong. Kel nodded, and made up his mind to share the profit-skim equally with his second.

"You think there's any harm in keeping her sleepy'till we get to the city?" he asked.

Ardan shook his head. "Naw. We can't waste time with a kid tryin' t' fight us. We ain't set up f r the slave trade. I'sped if we keep tellin' her that we're friends, we're takin' her somewhere safe, an' keep feedin' her poppy, we'll be better off."

"We're about...three days from Lord Dyran's land...a bit more than a week from the city. Think there'll be a problem with keeping her on the poppy that long?" Kel had some experience with poppy addiction; his current supply came from a drover who'd been tied to the stuff. He'd gotten so out of control when Kel took it away from him that Ardan had to kill him.

A waste, but there it was. Demons only knew where he'd gotten it, or got the addiction in the first place.

"Week, two weeks, that won't be a problem. Make it easier to try and get sense from her, about where that skin came from, too." Ardan knew more about drugs and their effects than Kel; he doubled as the caravan's rough herb-healer and bonesetter. Kel was living proof that he knew his business. Ardan had patched up more than a few little gashes of his.

"Then I think we've got ourselves a nice little piece of property, eh?" Kel grinned at the bigger man, and Ardan grinned back.

They both returned to the comfort of their cushions, Kel feeling very much at ease with the world. He sipped at the cool water, admiring the purity of it, and the sweetness. On caravan neither he nor Ardan ever touched a single drop of spirit, nor took any drug they didn't absolutely have to have...like poppy after a serious wound. He'd always felt that a leader could never be anything less than at his absolute peak of alertness. Ardan not only agreed with Kel, he followed his leader's example, even when he plainly longed to try a glass of some new vintage or other.

"So," he asked, reaching for a piece of bread, "still think that sandstorms are all bad?" He laughed at his own joke, passing the big man another chunk of bread for himself.

Ardan chuckled. "Not if they blow a bit of sand like that our way," he replied. "In fact, if they'd do that more often, I could come to like them!"

Keman hid in the ruined tower, and watched the humans from behind its meager protection. He had never been terribly good at reading thoughts, even the thoughts of one of the Kin, but these humans were all possessed of something that kept him from gleaning even the most rudimentary information from their minds. He remembered his mother saying something about "collars"...and since they all seemed to be wearing metal or leather collars around their necks, it seemed safe to assume these collars were responsible. He cowered in the shadow and tried to make himself shadow-colored, pressing his belly to the sand as he concentrated on overhearing their words, since he could not eavesdrop on their thoughts.

He feared the absolute worst from them; their everyday chatter could easily be covering up darker intentions. He'd already lost sight of Shana; they'd lured her into their tent, and presumably they had put one of their collars on her as well, since he couldn't even read her thoughts.

His stomach was rolling like a wind-weed, and every muscle in his body ached with tension. He wanted to dive right in and rescue her from their clutches...but he couldn't; he didn't know where she was exactly, or whether she was all right. And there was no way to just swoop down out of the sky and carry her off. For one thing, he wasn't sure he could. He'd never tried to fly carrying her before. For another, he wasn't sure how he'd extract her from that tent.

So the question was, how was he to get near her?

He couldn't appear as a dragon; that was forbidden. He couldn't take one-horn form; they'd shoot him on sight with one of the powerful little bows he saw several of them carrying. In fact, any four-footed creature of any size would probably be greeted with a flight of arrows.

If they didn't think he was a danger, they'd probably think he was dinner.

He couldn't try to slip in as a human, either, in a group this small, they all knew each other, and a stranger would automatically be thought of as an enemy. Especially with the men of a trade-caravan.

He had to join them, somehow. He had to be something they'd want, but something that was not a threat.

He rubbed his dry eyes with his knuckle and sighed. It was nearly sundown, and he'd been out in the heat most of the day. Being this close to water and unable to go take a drink was sheer torment. He watched with raw envy as one of the pack-beasts ambled up to the pool to drink its fill. If only he could do that...

Huh. A way into the camp suddenly presented itself to him. Why couldn't I do that?

It only took a moment of concentration to shift form; when that moment had passed, one of the ugly, warty-skinned pack-grels stood in the place Keman had been.

He ambled down to the oasis, heading straight for the water, as if that was the only thing on his mind, joining the others at the waterside.

He put his head down and slurped with the rest, going weak-kneed for a moment as the ecstasy of the cool water passed over his dry, parched tongue. It was all he could do to keep from gulping the liquid and foundering himself.

It took a moment for his presence...and the fact that there were now ten pack-beasts where there had been nine before...to register with the humans. But when they noticed, they greeted his arrival with greed and pleasure. Four of the drovers surrounded him; he raised his head and blinked mildly at them. They exchanged grins and one of them strolled up to him and put out a hand. He nuzzled it briefly, trying not to wrinkle his nose at the man's rank scent, before putting his head down in the water again.

They allowed him to finish drinking, at least, before putting a halter on him and leading him to the picket line. There, in the company of nine other specimens of beauty, Keman closed his eyes and tried his best to touch Shana's mind, straining until he had a headache in one temple that throbbed in time with his pulse.

With no result whatsoever.

He continued to try, off and on, while the humans around him puttered about, starting cook-fires, making dinner. One of them came by with a measure of grain for each of the grels, and Keman licked his up as quickly as any of the real grels. By sunset Shana still hadn't emerged from the tent, and Keman suspected that something terrible had happened to her. He strained his tether rope to the breaking point, trying to get as close as possible to the tent, trying not to imagine all the horrible things that could have befallen her in there. But he couldn't help it; he kept seeing her bound, gagged, tortured...

Finally he had his answer as to why she hadn't appeared, when one of the two men who seemed to be in charge of this group, a big man in a gray desert-coat over his scarlet tunic, passed by his picket, measuring a few pinches of some kind of powder into a fresh skin of water.

A drug... He altered his ears, making them keen enough to hear a gnat breathe, as the man pushed aside the flap of the tent and went in.

He heard Shana's voice then...it sounded dazed and sleepy. "H'llo," she said, slurring the word. "I'm...awful tired. Sorry."

"Do not apologize for weariness, child," another man replied. "You must sleep as long as you need. But drink, first. The desert air is dry, and you must drink often."

"Thanks..." said Shana, and then she said nothing more. Both men emerged, looking very satisfied with themselves. The second man was dressed all in crimson, with crimson braid decorating his clothing, but otherwise he was unremarkable. His hair and eyes were brown, he was bearded, and he was a head shorter than the first man. He laughed softly, as if to himself, just as he passed the grel-picket.

Keman couldn't help himself; he snapped at the man as he walked by, but the man simply reached out and brought his fist down hard on Keman's nose.

Ayeee! His bellow matched the cry of pain in his mind. The only time Keman had ever experienced pain like that was when Rovy was on his back, digging his claws into Keman's shoulders. The young dragon went to his knees, still bellowing in surprise and hurt, as the man passed on, taking no notice.

Oh...he thought, tears of pain coming to his eyes, as he moaned involuntarily. Fire and Rain, that hurt! He thought his nose was broken...

But as the pain died, he discovered that the man had done no such thing. His nose was perfectly all right; it wasn't even bleeding. He had just discovered the grel's one point of weakness. It was a lesson he wasn't likely to forget in a hurry.

The picket line had been left alone in the dark, and Keman was once again trapped with his own thoughts and fears.

So the men had drugged Shana, and were keeping her drugged and collared. Why wasn't she afraid, he asked himself, yearning towards the tent. Why hadn't she wondered why she couldn't see thoughts anymore?

Then it occurred to him...she had no reason to suspect that these people were dangerous...or even human. She had every reason to suppose that they were just more of the Kin, probably playing a drama-game.

Mother had never told her that the elven lords and the humans still existed. In fact, Mother had given her every reason to think that they had either died out in the Wizard War or lived so far away that the Kin would never see them. None of the other adults ever talked to her, and the only dragonets that told her about humans had been ones she'd never believe...Rovy and Myre. She had learned to write from books the Kin wrote in elven tongue, and those were never histories of anyone but the Kin.

They had kept her blind. Even if she suspected these people weren't Kin, she was so drugged now she had probably lost the thought entirely. She wouldn't want Kin to know what she could do...like see thoughts. She might not even have bothered to try reading thoughts, not if she was drugged.

And even if she had...she'd told Keman how her powers faded for a bit after she killed that ground squirrel. She might just think that they had faded again.

What am I going to do? How can I get us away from here when I can't even warn her that I am here?

It was a very long night, spent mostly without sleep.

The sun rose, silvering everything the first rays touched, sending long, blue shadows across the flat sands. A single bird cried; Keman didn't know what kind it was. That was the only break in the silence.

Keman was exhausted. He'd never spent a sleepless night before. He yawned, and shifted his weight restlessly, wondering what was going to happen next.

One of the humans came out of his tent; a much smaller tent than the one Shana was in. He dropped another ration of grain before each of the grels, then bent again to fling a pack-saddle on him.

He started; then, without thinking, bucked it off.

The human tried again; he bucked just as hard. This time when he launched it into the air, it landed quite a distance from the picket line.

The human muttered something under his breath, and went after it. He manhandled it back to the picket line and heaved the saddle onto Keman's back, with a repetition of the entire sequence.

This went on for some time. Finally, when Keman was really beginning to enjoy himself, another human, an older one, came up beside the boy. This one stared at him for a moment, and he noticed the human balling his hand into a fist.

Abruptly he became a model of docility, letting the boy fasten the cinches without complaint, then kneeling and permitting the humans to load a variety of packs and baskets of goods onto his back. He had learned his lesson and he saw no particular need to repeat it.

By that time all the other beasts were loaded, and Keman rose to his feet again. Just as he got himself and his load balanced, and looked around, a human scout returned, riding a horse with a bird on a special perch on the saddlebow. Shortly after that, the tent-flaps opened, and the two men who had been in there before came out with Shana between them.

Keman's stomach churned with anxiety. She was clean, dressed in a new scarlet tunic, and wore a collar like the others. But she stumbled, rather than walked; her eyes were glazed, and she was dazed and plainly only half-aware of her surroundings.

The two men helped her into the saddle of the beast whose load Keman had been gifted with, and tied her there. The grels were lined up, and tied one behind the other in a long string. Shana was on the end; only three beasts behind Keman. So very near...and yet, he could do nothing about her or their situation. He was just as trapped as she was, because he refused to leave without her. And he couldn't help her.

As the drovers goaded all the beasts...including him...into getting on the move, he bellowed with the rest of them. But the reasons for his crying were as different as his mind was from theirs.

Keman knew from the drover's talk that the caravan was less than a day from their goal, the gates of the trade city where Shana would be further interrogated, then sold.

And he still hadn't been able to free her, or even talk to her.

He plodded along the dusty road, breathing in the dust of the grel in front of him, kicking up dust of his own for the men walking behind him to inhale. Around him were Lord Berenels fallow fields; fields that at one time had been cultivated, full of his scarlet-clad slaves tending his crops. But, according to the drovers, that was before the Lord hosted a small war; now those fields lay fallow for the next decade. When the bodies...human bodies...had turned to rich, black earth, and the bones could be plowed up and crushed for fertilizer, Lord Berenel would plant again. Knowing that his fields would yield tenfold what they had before the war had been fought on them.

He was going to have to get away. And he was going to have to do it without Shana. Once he was in that city...

I don't know, maybe it will be easier there to get her loose, maybe if I turn into elf-form I can order her release...

But that was a foolish hope, and he knew it. A low-ranking elven lord was only marginally better than a high-ranking human, and no one in Lord Berenel's service was going to release this particular captive on some unknown elven lad's say-so.

Because they still hadn't managed to get an answer they understood from Shana about where her tunic had come from.

She just didn't have the words, the language, for one. But more importantly, she obviously believed that her "friends" were of the Kin, and she couldn't understand why they kept asking the same question about her tunic, over and over. She thought she was being asked who the skin was from. She told them. She told them any number of times.

They thought she was mumbling gibberish, and began treating her as simpleminded.

He still didn't know what he was going to do. He had to do something, but what?

Then, in the moment between one breath and the next, the question was taken out of his hands.

The cloudless blue sky above was split with a high-pitched roar that was like nothing he'd ever heard before. He, along with every other living creature in the caravan, looked up.

Diving out of the sky in a stoop, shrieking as she dove, was his mother. He knew her immediately; how could he not? It was easy enough to recognize her.

She was in pure, unadorned dragon-form.

She pulled up with a snap of wing-membranes at the last possible moment, cutting across just above the heads of the grel-riders. She gained altitude rapidly, readying herself for another stoop. Keman was tailmost today; he froze in pure astonishment, legs locking...but that wasn't what anyone or anything else in the caravan did.

The grels, one and all, decided en masse to bolt, as Alara circled around for the second dive. Keman, standing stock-still, was unprepared; he was braced and the grel in front of him was leaping away...the tether snapped with a whip-crack sound, leaving him standing alone in the middle of the road. Alone, because the men had taken to their heels as well; some scattering over the fields, looking for somewhere to hide, and some belting after the vanishing grel.

....Mother!: Keman called, as she began her second stoop. :Mother, stop! Mother, you have to...:

Either she couldn't hear him, or had no intention of heeding him. The result was the same, either way. As she plunged towards him, he saw her foreclaws out, saw that they were padded.

Too late, he tried to make a run for it.

She hit him with enough force to knock the wind out of him, and snatched him up with her hindclaws, all in a single, smooth motion. And with him firmly caught in her claws she proceeded to gain altitude and distance, taking him farther and farther away from Shana, ignoring his protests entirely.

Shana was black-and-blue from head to toe. Grels, it seemed, were not smooth runners. Shana had been bounced around on the back of hers until she thought she was never going to sit comfortably again.

When the caravan stopped to allow the men on foot to catch up with them, she looked about herself, puzzled. Alara hadn't actually hurt anyone...she'd only launched a teasing raid on the train. The worst she'd done was to carry off one of the pack-beasts. That was nothing more than a basic prank among the Kin.

Befuddled as she was, she couldn't imagine why they were so genuinely terrified of a simple dragon in stoop, and a trick-raid.

She struggled with her straps, while the men straggled in, winded and weary. The more she fought the soft leather straps, the more alert she felt. Finally she freed herself from her straps, and slid down off the back of the grel. She looked for Kel or Ardan, but all she saw were the drovers, sitting or lying on the ground in postures of profound exhaustion.

They weren't going to help.

She started to wander off, hoping to find someone to explain it all to her.

That was when her "friends" Kel and Ardan appeared, suddenly changed; they grabbed her before she could get too far, as if they were afraid that she was going to run away. When she tried to wriggle free of them, Kel hit her.

She hit back; and kicked and bit, for good measure. That was enough to trigger a full-scale fight. She screamed and clawed and kicked with everything she had, but they were much bigger than she was. They kept trying to pin her to the ground, and never uttered a sound except when she kicked them especially hard.

She was convinced that both Kel and Ardan had gone mad.

Finally they subdued her by the simple means of tripping her and sitting on her.

While she continued to fight, they kept her pinioned. Now they began to talk, and it made no sense. Kel produced rope and they tied her hands together, then threw her on the back of her grel and tied her hands to the saddle and her feet to the stirrups, all the time babbling about the "monster" that had attacked them.

Now that they had run themselves into exhaustion, the grels had quieted. As Shana clung miserably to her saddle, the caravan plodded...or rather, staggered...towards the gates of the city in the distance. And at the sight of that city, its high walls, its thousands of inhabitants, a terrible and frightening realization came to her. Because there weren't that many dragons in the entire world, which could only mean one thing.

They weren't Kin.

Which meant they were two-leggers. Real two-leggers, of both kinds.

They were two-leggers. Like her. That was why Foster Mother didn't stay; she must have seen Shana with them, and she thought Shana was all right...

But she wasn't all right. Her "friends" goaded the poor grel into a bone-shattering trot as soon as the city gates were in sight, and it was entirely obvious that she was a prisoner. Though for what reason...

The tunic! she realized abruptly. That was why they kept asking about it. They wanted to know where I got the bits from.

If they didn't know, they'd never seen a dragon. If they'd never seen a dragon, there must be a good reason. The dragons must not want them to know that they existed.

If she told them where she really got the skin, they'd try to find more.

She shivered, seeing exactly where that would lead. They'd hunt the Kin down and kill them for their skins. And it would be her fault for telling. She wouldn't mind seeing Rovy's hide on someone's back...but Keman's or Foster Mother's...

Fire and Rain, what am I going to do? What are they going to do with me?

The city gates grew closer and closer, and the nearer they were, the bigger they looked. Shana had never seen that much worked stone in her life. And that frightened her even more.

How many people did it take to build all that? And...they must have so much magic to do it...

The caravan passed beneath the walls; thick walls, wider than the grels were long, built of cold, dank stone, strange and hostile. She shivered in the shadow of the walls, and not from chill, but from fear, as the caravan waited, some of the men with the caravan talking at length with some men who were not, and who wore green-and-gray tunics and leg-coverings, all alike.

Finally the caravan moved on, out into the sunlight.

About then was when the city rose up to hit her in the face.

As soon as they passed through the gates, Shana was assaulted by the babble of thousands of voices, by the bawls of thousands of animals, by the heat concentrated because the place was paved over, with never a spot of green anywhere. The intense heat made the odors worse; the smells of excrement and raw meat, of hot oil, of sweat of man and beast, of perfume, of flowers, and of things Shana couldn't even put a name to, warred with each other. And everywhere was color and motion; hundreds, thousands of people of both kinds of two-legger; jostling, brawling, gossiping, looking at things...dressed in everything from a simple rag to an amazingly elaborate gown worn by one of the pale, tall ones, that changed color whenever the wearer moved.

Shana reeled in her saddle, and was glad enough of the straps holding her down. Right now they were more support than confinement. She had never imagined that there could be this many two-leggers in the world!

After a moment, some things began to resolve themselves. Next to the wall they had just passed through was an enormous square space ringed with buildings, with tunnels or narrow canyons between some of the buildings. The caravan inched its way across this open space, which was thronged with people; it seemed as if their goal was one of those tunnels between two buildings. Sun beat down on them, heat rose up to choke them, and people jostled against the grels without ever looking to see who or what they were shoving against. It took them forever to cross that expanse.

They moved by single steps at a time, with many pauses for someone to clear the way ahead. Shana tried not to be sick, and wished she was out of there, across to that mysterious tunnel, where there weren't so many people.

But when, at long last, they reached it...Shana regretted her earlier wish.

BACK AT LAST.

Harden Sangral dismounted from his grel, held the reins of the fractious beast so that it couldn't escape him, and surreptitiously patted the front of his belt-pouch.

It was still there, that heavy little silk-wrapped bundle that had fallen from the wild girl's tunic during the fight to subdue her. Neither Kel nor Ardan had noticed it drop, but Harden had. He'd picked it up quickly and stowed it away for later perusal. There was just too much about that girl that was odd, and it was one of Harden's duties to take note of the odd.

The caravansary courtyard held only themselves and their beasts, though Harden could tell by the fresh droppings swept into a corner that at least two other caravans had come in today. He frowned, that meant he'd be waiting for everything. If it hadn't been for that sandstorm, they'd have made the city two days ago.

One of the caravansary servants came to take away his grel as the caravansary master showed up with his list in hand; he let the beast go gratefully, and got in line with the others to get his new orders. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Ardan take the girl into the slave-house by the simple expedient of picking her up bodily and carrying her there.

She had been in a kind of shock since the fight on the trail; this woke her up in a hurry. And despite being bound hand and foot, she still managed to kick and scream like a dortha-lizard in rut. He didn't envy Ardan, or the slave-keepers, either.

The caravansary master, a very low-ranking elven lord, had an unusually long list in his hands when Harden got to him. The fighter prepared himself for the worst...it wouldn't have been the first time he'd been sent out as a caravan guard as soon as he dismounted from the last job.

"Name?" asked the named-looking elven lord, sweat plastering his fair hair to his forehead. Every elven lord Harden had ever seen was damnably handsome...it seemed to go with the blood, because even those low-rankers with weak magic looked like the answer to a maiden's prayer...but this one looked a little on the shopworn side. Perhaps it was the heat; perhaps simply that the fellow was overworked.

"Harden Sangral, lord," he replied promptly. You couldn't be too polite and obedient with the elven lords; you never knew when one of them might have just enough magic to make your life pure hell for the next few breaths.

"Harden, Harden," the elven lord repeated under his breath, scanning down the list. "Ah, here we are. You're in luck, boy. No duties for two days. Go inside, clean up, get a bunk and a meal, and if there are any girls free today, take one. Only one round, mind, then send her back for another job."

"Yes, lord," Harden said, gratefully. "Thank you, lord. Profit to Lord Berenel."

"Aye, profit to Lord Berenel," the harried functionary replied absently. "Next?"

Harden hurried inside the welcoming door, the temperature difference between inside the building and out was incredible. He didn't wonder that the caravansary master was rushing his job; if Harden had been stuck out there, he'd have rushed the job too, just to get back into the cool. He lingered for a moment in the white-tiled entry, noting that the only place there wasn't a line was at the window to get a room. He sighed, and resigned himself to spending the day waiting.

Unlike the Great Halls, there were large, glass-covered windows in the caravansary, at least on the ground floor. The entry gave on three doorways; to the left was the one leading to the meal hall; in the middle was the one leading to the showers; to the right, the hall leading to the rooms, and the window with the bored-looking room attendant leaning out of it.

Harden joined the line of men (and a few women) heading for the showers; he stripped when he reached the dressing room, threw his filthy tunic and trews into a pile of similarly filthy garments, and took his personal belongings with him. The line continued through a narrow room lined with pipes spouting lukewarm water, first soapy, then clear. He passed with the others under each set of pipes, glad of the chance to rid himself of the dust of the journey and the sweat of fear. Like the others, he held his belt with his pouch and knife well out of the way of stray splashes, transferring it from hand to hand as he cleaned himself.

At the other end of the shower room he took a rough towel from a pile of clean ones, dried himself with it, and left it in another pile of used towels. He rummaged through a stack of clean tunics and trews in Lord Berenel's colors, found one of each in his size and donned them, belting the tunic to his body with his damp leather belt.

He returned to the entry and joined another line going to the meal room. This time when he reached the end of the line, he got a bowl of thick, tasty stew, a chunk of fresh, hot bread dripping with butter, and a mug of cold beer. He found himself a place at one of the many rough wood trestle tables and began applying himself to the food.

When he'd wiped the bowl clean with his last bit of bread, and swallowed down the last drop of beer, he rose from the table to have his place taken immediately by another fighter, a woman this time. He didn't bother to give her a second glance; she was one of the warriors, and didn't represent the kind of "girl" the caravansary master had told him to requisition.

He took his empty bowl and cup to the kitchen window, and returned to the front of the caravansary. There he approached the bored-looking human manning a counter that stood in front of a board full of colored trinkets of fired clay.

"Name?" that colorless individual asked him.

"Harden," the fighter replied.

The human traced down a list on the wall using his finger, his lips moving as he sounded out names. Finally, he found the one he was looking for, and reached for a clay figure.

"Harden, here we are." He turned, and gave the fighter a black, three-petaled flower. "That's your room, ground floor, down that corridor. There won't be any girls free for a while yet; why don't you go rest, and check back around suppertime? We serve supper most of the evening here, and if you wait until the first rush, you're likely to find several girls free. I don't know about you, but I like a little choice in my girls. I don't like having to take the first thing available."

"Aye, thanks for the advice," Harden replied, taking his trinket. "I'll do that."

He entered the white-tiled hallway, lined with wooden doors on either side, and followed his instructions, matching his flower against the symbols painted on the door to each cubicle, until he came to the one with the same black figure on it. He pushed the door open, finding, as he had expected, a narrow, wooden-walled room, just big enough to hold the pallet he found on the floor. Windowless, of course; the light was supplied arcanely, set by one of Lord Berenel's builder-mages, and would go out at the same time each night and wake everyone in the caravansary by coming on in the morning. He was glad to be a fighter, all things considered. Fighters had the luxury of individual quarters; common slaves made do with a pallet in a barracks.

In truth, he was just as glad that there weren't any girls free. He really itched to investigate that heavy little bundle in private.

He closed the door and sat down on the bed with his back to it, pulling the package out of his belt-pouch, then taking his knife and a sharpening-stone and putting them beside him so that if anyone interrupted him, he could snatch them both up. With careful-fingers, he undid the knots holding the bundle shut, cursing at the silk for being so uncooperative.

Finally he untied the last of them, and the silk fell open, revealing a glory of wealth and color.

He caught his breath. No wonder the thing was so heavy. He'd never had that much gold in his hand in his life... It was a collar, a slave-collar, but solid gold, and encrusted with gems in patterns, gems that ranged from as small as a single grain of sand to as large as the nail on his little finger.

It had to be a concubine's collar. There was nothing else it could be. But what was a wild girl doing with a concubine's collar?

He picked the thing up carefully and turned it around in his hands. And right over the clasp, he saw the unmistakable imprint of a phoenix picked out in carved gold, with tiny rubies for eyes.

Lord Dyran. He knew that mark like he knew his own name; he ought to. It might have been Berenel's caravans he guarded, but Dyran was his real master.

He reviewed the events of the past several days slowly, to make sure that he had forgotten nothing. First, there was a sandstorm that drove the caravan off course and forced them to look for water. They found it. Then a wild child showed up there, a girl in a tunic made of something no one recognized. A girl who carried a concubine's collar. An extra grel appeared from out of nowhere. Then there was a magic attack on the caravan, an attack by something that looked just like Berenel's own best illusions, the ones of dragons, like the dragons that the elven lord had standing beside the gates of his estate. There was something happening. Harden didn't know what, but it wasn't what it looked like.

He pondered the collar, holding it in both hands. Could the girl have been planted? Could she have been put there so one of the other lords would know where the caravan was, and send a magicked beast to attack it? But why? To scatter the caravan, to make them lose the grel and ruin the mission? But if that was the case, it should have happened while they were out in the desert or at the oasis. And why steal only one grel? Unless...unless that grel was carrying something important.

It could have happened that way. The lords didn't confide in their underlings, and they didn't confide in those beneath them. Demons only knew exactly what the caravan was carrying. Even Kel and Ardan might not have known the whole of it. The caravans had carried secret cargo before, and humans had died because of it. That was part of the risk that fighters took, which was why fighters got special treatment.

So suppose that the steadiest grel was carrying something special; something the Lord's agents made certain to get on that grel at the road-head. Each grel carried the same pack for the entire journey...but when the wild girl showed up, and a spare grel, Ardan would logically have put the girl on the steadiest beast in the caravan, and shifted its burden to the new beast.

So then the "dragon" would know exactly what beast to snatch; and certainly the girl had not seemed at all afraid of the monster. That seemed to imply that she knew something like that was going to happen.

That would certainly make sense. There weren't too many elven lords with the power to make that kind of construct, though. That narrowed the list down quite a bit.

It could even be the work of his own Lord. It lacked the subtlety of one of Lord Dyran's plans, but he surely had the sheer, raw power to construct something like a dragon. He'd constructed them before; dragons, and things even larger. Large constructs seldom lasted more than half a day before fading away, but that was generally all you needed them for.

It didn't matter, he decided. Whoever it was, it didn't concern him. If it was Lord Dyran, the Lord would know Harden was serving him well when he reported this. And if it wasn't, the elven lord would know who to look at, and what he wanted to do about it.

All things considered, Harden was rather glad of the enchantment on his collar that prevented any other spells from affecting him, even Lord Dyran's, unless the Lord specifically countered it. He had the feeling that there was probably something on this bit of jewelry to make the holder want to wear it...and that would cause no end of trouble.

Oh, I can just see myself prancing out of here into the street with this bit around my neck! Then I'd really be for it! There's rules about nonconcubines wearing high-rank collars. I'd just as soon not cross them.

He took the collar and put it inside a tiny leather bag, sealing the edges by pressing the leather together. Now no one would be able to open that pouch but Lord Dyran or one of his trusted associates.

He rose from his bed, left his room, and went out the front door of the caravansary, strolling out into the square with the air of someone who is out simply to stretch his legs. But his stroll took out him of the square and far beyond the area ruled by Lord Berenel, where all the streets were marked with a copper-and-red checkered brick just past the crossroads. He took himself to a part of the city he knew very well indeed, where the crossroads were all marked with bricks of gold and red.

Once there, he wound his way down into an area where fighters with reward-tokens to spend congregated, using them on stronger drink, stranger food, and wilder women than they could have at the caravansary. Everything was owned by Lord Dyran, of course, but it gave the fighters something special to strive for, something beyond what "everyone" could have. Something that had at least the appearance of the forbidden, and that was iced with the sweetness of real luxury.

Harden found an establishment with a sign depicting a phoenix engaging in an anatomically unlikely act with a wildly beautiful, implausibly endowed, red-haired young woman. He got into the place, which was guarded by a large, well-armed individual, seemingly by telling the guard at the door a rather odd, pointless joke. That was what passers-by would think; in actuality, he was giving the guard not one, but a series of passwords. The guard let him into the main room; he stood on the top stair of three that led down into the room, had a moment to look around before the denizens of the place noticed him.

It hadn't changed much; the red silk shrouding the walls was new, and the incense heavily perfuming the air was jasmine instead of orchid this time. But for the rest it was the same; chattering girls in things that were more ornament than garment lounged on cushions in the center of the room, and a soft, amber light glowed from the ceiling. The walls were covered with silk hangings, which Harden knew concealed the entrances to little cubicles much like the one back at the caravansary, except that the pallets were softer, the cubicles a little bigger, and there was a rack of implements of the young lady's specialty in each. Oils for massage, for instance...or a musical instrument...or other things.

And for those who preferred absolute privacy and extensive attentions, there were soundproof rooms upstairs.

This was not an establishment normally frequented by humans. Elven lords of too low a rank to own concubines came here, as did young elven lords seeking excitement in the "lower city," and the very occasional high-ranking lord who felt a need for variety, but not a pressing enough need that he felt he had to add to his harem to get it. The humans who did come here were generally fighters being rewarded for unusual service. As such, Harden looked the part.

Harden stepped down into the room, and was immediately surrounded by young women who did not have much more in common with the lady of the sign than sex, general attractiveness, and red hair.

"Is Marty free?" he asked the first one to take hold of his arm, knowing what the reaction would be. Much as he would have enjoyed dallying here with the girl, he knew what the penalty would be if he did so without explicit permission. She let go of him immediately, a frightened and panicked look transforming her face into that of a terrified child, as the rest of the girls vanished as quickly as they had materialized.

"Y-y-yes," she stammered, obviously hoping he wasn't going to ask her to escort him there. He toyed with the idea for a moment, because she was so very frightened, and it would have been rather amusing; but he was not by nature a cruel man, and decided against it.

"Off with you," he said, slapping her on her mostly bare buttocks, so that she squealed and jumped. "I can find my own way."

She followed the example of her "sisters" in fleeing to one of the many curtained cubicles lining the walls, whisking through the curtains as if he were a demon. Harden ignored her, heading instead for the only true door in the room, a massive, uncarved ironwood piece, red-and-brown-grained wood blending into the red, watered silk of the hangings. He knocked once, then entered.

The same amber light gleamed down on wood-paneled walls and a crimson-carpeted floor. Marty looked up from his desk, the room's single piece of furniture, as Harden closed the door behind himself. Marty was...a prodigy. He couldn't have weighed more than half what Harden weighed; he was slender as a willow-twig, with a mild, even sweet, face. Truth to tell, he looked like a girl with a mustache. There were men who'd taken that sweet face for an indication of Marty's preferences in partners.

Those men had never had a chance to make a similar mistake; they'd been dead before their bodies hit the floor. Marty was one of Lord Dyran's own highly trained assassins. He was also Dyran's chief agent in the city, and had replaced the contact Harden had worked with two years ago. That contact had been an old man; Harden knew that he had been retired to one of Dyran's estates to train younger agents. He knew, because he himself was still alive. If the human had betrayed the elven lord, Lord Dyran would have eliminated every agent that had reported to him as well as the traitor.

Harden rather liked the lad; demons knew he hadn't many other friends. The girls were terrified of him, and for no good reason, so far as Harden could see. Maybe his tastes were a little more exotic than even they cared for. Maybe it was just what he represented...

Maybe it was that, in his capacity as the manager of this house, he held the power of life and death over them. And at the hands of a trained assassin, death could be very prolonged, and very unpleasant.

"Harden, good to see you," the young man said warmly, rising to offer Harden his chair. Harden shook his head at the implied offer of hospitality.

"I can't stay long," he said. "I'm supposed to be getting a girl at suppertime and since I've been on the road for weeks, if I don't show up, it'll look odd. Here. This needs to get to the Lord."

He tossed the little leather pouch down on the desk. Marty looked at it curiously, but didn't touch it.

"Now, this is where it came from..." Harden said, and explained, as briefly and concisely as he could, the events of the past several days. "So when the girl started to fight, she dropped this. I had to wait until I got to the city to check it out. It's a collar, gold and jewels; looks like a concubine's collar to me. And it's got Lord Dyran's seal on it."

"Lord Dyran's seal, on a concubine's collar, held by a wild child." Marty tilted his head a little to one side. "Well, the obvious solution is that she found it. The Lord has had caravans lost in the desert before, some with high-ranking concubines on them."

Harden grimaced, chagrined that he hadn't thought of that possibility.

"But..." Marty continued, "I must admit that having the monster attack the caravan is stretching coincidence a great deal. All things considered, we'll let the Lord handle it however he sees fit. You did well, Harden. If nothing else, in returning a valuable bit of jewelry to Lord Dyran. Certainly Berenel's men would not have bothered."

That was a dismissal, no question about it.

"I'll be getting back to the caravansary," Harden said quickly. "If I hear anything, I'll let you know."

"There is one thing I would like you to find out," Marty said, just as Harden got his hand on the door handle.

Harden turned immediately.

"There was a runaway concubine about fifteen years ago, a pregnant favorite near her time, and she escaped into that particular area of the desert..." Marty didn't say anything more, but Harden knew more than enough to fill in the rest. Far more than most humans would.

If she had actually been pregnant by Lord Dyran...if she had survived long enough to whelp the child... A halfblood was forbidden, absolutely forbidden, and this child was near enough in age to be that halfblood...

"The girl's red-haired and about twelve or fourteen," he offered. "Now, I didn't see any wild magic out of her, and I think I would have when she fought Kel if she'd had it."

"But she was drugged," Marty reminded him. "And what about that monster? What if she conjured it to distract the rest of you while she escaped?"

"But she didn't try to escape," said Harden, then thought a moment. "Of course, her grel took off with her, and she just might not have been able to control it. Still I'd think anybody that could produce a monster could control a grel."

"A good point," Marty acknowledged. "But keep an eye on her, if you can. It's stretching coincidence to think that this girl could be the concubine's child, but...it's better to let Lord Dyran decide what he wants to do about it. And at any rate, if there is any indication that she's a halfblood, come straight to me, and I'M see that Lord Berenel's stewards hear about it. If there's one thing that the lords are united on, it's that halfbloods need to be destroyed on sight."

Harden nodded. And since there seemed to be no more forthcoming, pulled the door open and left.

Shana huddled in a corner of the enormous room into which she had been thrown like so much refuse. She shivered, as much from shock as from cold. The last half-day had been the most terrifying of her life. Not even the wait to learn what would be done with her back at the Lair had been this bad.

At least, at the Lair, she'd known she had a few friends. Here she had no one and nothing, and she had no idea what was coming next.

Once they had entered the quiet tunnel, Shana had found it was much shorter than the one under the walls. It led to a square empty place with walls on all four sides. The big man had plucked her off the back of the animal she rode, and carried her, fighting as well as she could with bound hands and feet, to a door in an otherwise blank wall at the rear of the square. There he had put her into the hands of three more people as big as he was. They had effectively immobilized her, and that was when she discovered that her magic didn't work anymore. She didn't even get the feeling of thwarted power, it was as if she had never possessed the abilities she'd used against Rovy.

They took her into a white room filled with steam, stripped her to the skin, and threw her under a torrent of warm water, still tied hand and foot. They'd scrubbed her with what felt like sand, until her skin burned, then hauled her out and untied her long enough to wrestle her into a plain, brown tunic. By that time she was so exhausted and terrified she hardly had the strength to fight them. The three strangers seemed to realize this; two of them left, leaving one to shove her into this huge, blank-walled, echoing, pale pink room, filled with more people in the same kind of tunic she was wearing, and flat cloth things on the floor, like she had seen in Kel's cloth building, only covered with the same kind of fabric as her tunic, and barely as thick as her thumb.

They closed the door, which had no way to open it on her side, leaving her with a roomful of two-legger strangers who stared at her, but otherwise left her alone.

She had edged her way around the room, keeping her back against the wall, until she came to the farthest corner from the door. She looked up, but couldn't see the sky; only a glowing roof that supplied all the illumination in the place, a kind of amber glow that cast no shadows. There she huddled, still with her back to the wall, her arms wrapped around her knees, shivering with fright and delayed shock, and the cold that seeped through her thin tunic from the stone floor.

She wished she was back; she wished none of this had ever happened. She wished she was dreaming. If she had been dreaming, she could wake up, and she'd be in her own bed, and Foster Mother would be there, and Keman...

Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks; her throat was so tight she couldn't swallow, her eyes burned and her stomach hurt.

At least, at home, she knew what was going on. She understood the Kin, she knew how to stay out of trouble, she knew what she could do and what she couldn't.

At least, I think I knew the Kin.

Maybe she really didn't. Foster Mother had taken care of her just like Keman, but when it all came down to it, Alara had let the rest throw Shana out into the desert. Alara could have come after her to help her once everybody in the Lair thought Shana was gone for good...but she didn't. And when Alara showed up over the caravan, she had ignored her foster daughter, she just stole an animal and ignored her, it was as if Shana didn't even exist to her. Alara didn't even talk to her with thoughts. She could have at least told her how Keman was doing.

I think maybe Keman would have come after me if he could have...

She hugged her knees tighter and hid her face, while hot, silent tears ran down her cheeks and dropped onto her tunic, making two big, dark spots on the light brown fabric over her chest. She wallowed in misery for a while, until another thought occurred to her. After all, Alara had shown both of them how parent animals sent their offspring out into the world when it was time for them to grow up and become adults.

Maybe Alara thought that it was time for Shana to leave. She used to let Shana get hurt if that was what the girl needed in order to learn something. Maybe this was that kind of lesson.

She used to show both of them how birds would leave their young ones unfed until they fledged the nest, and how animals would even drive their little ones away from their territory when they were old enough to fend for themselves. The Kin didn't do that...but maybe two-leggers did. Maybe Shana was supposed to be old enough now. Maybe she was supposed to be able to take care of herself...

Maybe this was supposed to be good for her.

But it didn't feel like it was good for her. She bit her lip to keep from sobbing out loud in front of all these strangers, and the tears fell even faster.

But if it was good for her, why were these people hurting her and locking her up? And if Foster Mother knew what they were going to do, what they were like, why didn't she give some kind of warning? Why didn't she tell Shana that there were other two-leggers around? Why didn't she tell the girl what they were like? If Alara wanted to make sure Shana would be all right, why didn't she at least get Keoke to tell her what to be careful of before he left her in the desert?

The only answer seemed to be: because Alara didn't care. Because to her Shana was an animal, as she was to the other Kin; because she considered Shana to be no more than an outgrown pet of her son's.

Because Rovy and Myre were right.

And that hurt worst of all.

Kel waited expectantly on his padded stool in front of his master's desk while the caravan overseer unwrapped the skin tunic the wild girl had worn. In the magic amber light of the offices, it looked even better than it had in the sunlight; the colors were subtler, the shading of each piece showing undertones and pearly hues he hadn't even guessed were there under the bleaching sun of the desert.

And the value of this new discovery just might negate the loss of the grel and its packs to the raiding monster. He could be held responsible for that...

The overseer, a middle-aged, balding human, turned the garment inside-out with his thick, callused hands and examined the construction, then turned it right-way-round again and looked over each piece carefully.

"Well," he said finally, looking up, "it certainly looks like you found us something out of the ordinary, Kel."

"Out of the ordinary...and damned valuable, unless I miss my guess," the caravan master replied boldly. "Seems to me the lords would stand in line for things made out of that stuff. I've never seen anything look like that unless it had been glamoried."

The overseer turned the tunic about in his hands and nodded slowly, then rubbed one hand over his shiny pate. "Well, I'd guess you're right, Kel. You did check for glamories on this before you brought it to me, didn't you?"

"First thing I thought of," Kel assured him. "Absolutely. Not a sight nor sign of magic. This stuffs the real thing, all right."

The overseer laughed, and refolded the garment. "The question is, real what! What are we supposed to call this stuff? Lizard-hide? That doesn't exactly sound like anything I'd want to wear."

Kel thought about that for a moment, then smiled. After all, why not? This stuff could be worth so much more than what was stolen that the monster was going to turn out to be a good omen. But that was not the reason he would give.

"Lord Berenel's device is a dragon," he reminded the overseer. "Why not call it'dragon-skin'?"

The overseer laughed heartily. "Why not?" he agreed. "It's a good name, it sounds impressive...and some folks might just be stupid enough to believe it! Everybody with any sense knows there's no such things as dragons."

"Everybody," Kel replied quickly, relieved that the earlier loss was already forgotten. "Everybody with any sense."

Lord Berenel caressed the dragon-skin tunic, marveling anew at the pearlescent play of the scale-colors in the light, how the edge of each scale reflected every variation on the base color, how the scale surface refracted the light in subtle rainbows. It lay on the black marble surface of his desk like a pile of jewels, and worth far more, if he was any judge.

It was no heavier than a leather tunic of the same size and thickness, but was much more supple. It was a pity that the inexpert workmanship had ruined the edges of the patched-together pieces that composed it; if it had been sewn perfectly, it would have been something his own Lady would have been pleased to wear.

If he'd been willing to give it to her, that is. Right now he didn't want it out of his keeping for a moment.

It was indeed ironic that his underlings should have chosen to call the substance "dragon-skin," for Lord Berenel now held in his hand what he considered to be material proof that a lifelong quest of his was about to be fulfilled.

As a young lord, just after the Wizard War, Berenel had suffered a series of raids on his prize horse stock, pastured near the great desert. Unable to trust his own underlings, who had come into his hands at the defeat of one of his rivals, he had set a trap himself to catch the culprit responsible.

He had truly thought that the depredations were the work of another elven lord, and had every expectation of discovering magic at work. Instead, shortly after settling himself in his blind, he had heard the sounds of horses stampeding, and the death-scream of one of his mares.

He dashed out...and very nearly impaled himself on his own weapon, as he literally ran into a feeding dragon.

The beast mantled, then produced something like lightning that shot out at him from the wings, knocking him unconscious. When he woke, there was no sign of dragon or mare; only a bit of blood and a flattened place in the grass.

No one believed him when he returned. The general consensus, even among his own supporters, was that he had come upon the work of a rival, one more powerful in magic than he, and had been defeated and knocked unconscious. And that his vision of the dragon was only that; a vision, an illusion built by the unknown rival. After a time, rather than continue to suffer ridicule, he chose to make a boast of what others considered his "foolishness," and took the dragon as his own device.

But ever since that day he had sought, quietly, the proof that what he had seen did indeed exist. That there were dragons in this world. That he had not been a fool, to believe in his own hallucinations.

And now he had that proof within grasping distance.

His hand clenched on the tunic, and he looked up at his seneschal, a smooth and obedient minor elven lord, who was waiting patiently on the other side of his desk to receive his orders. The youngster was one of the few he trusted, having raised and schooled the boy himself.

"The two men who first found the girl..."

"Kel Rosten and Ardan Parlet," the seneschal supplied helpfully, with a glance at the notes he held in his right hand.

"Retire them from caravan duties. Give them something profitable, but not too taxing." Slaves were slaves, after all, and meant to be worked, but Berenel could afford to grant them a position that wouldn't appear to be work.

"Kel Rosten has been on the caravan routes for many years," the seneschal said, a crease of thought between his sketchy brows. "He's always been known as a man who could turn a profit, and one who could deduce that unlikely objects might prove to have value. Perhaps this is a heritable trait, or a teachable one. In the former case, we should put him to stud. In the latter, assign him to training the youngsters."

"Do both," Berenel told him, dismissing the human from his mind. "And the other?"

The seneschal smiled. "Ah, that is an easy one; I know how he would best serve from personal experience. Ardan knows wine like no one else on the caravan trade, and is responsible for most of the vintages gracing your table, my lord."

"Didn't my wine steward just die?" Berenel said, recalling something of the sort being said a month or two ago, and how he had complained at the time that it was hardly worth putting these short-lived humans into important positions. Why, the man had hardly held his office more than twenty years! "How old is this Ardan?"

"Indeed, your memory is as accurate as always, my lord," the seneschal replied with a ingratiating smile. "And you anticipate my suggestion. Ardan would make an excellent wine-steward, and as he is a young man, not yet twenty-five, he should serve you for fifty years, barring accidents."

"Make it so," Berenel said, pleased to have the business so profitably taken care of. It did no harm to be known to the slaves as a lord who rewarded good service and a limited amount of initiative. But now that these minor matters were disposed of, he moved briskly and confidently on to the major matters at hand. "Now about the girl...it may well be she's feebleminded. A lot of these wild ones are. Send someone to question her and see if they can determine whether she found the skin, or killed the creature it came from, or knows where to find more. But don't waste a great deal of time on it. Give it, oh, ten days at most, then sell her; I haven't the time or trainers to waste on a wild child. Meanwhile, I want you to send a party into the desert, find that oasis, and see if you can track her back to wherever she came from. Take...hmm...Lord Quellen. His magic ought to be enough for the job. Supply them and give them their orders yourself, and don't let them talk to anyone before they go, not even wives and mates."

"Yes, my lord," the seneschal replied with a bow. "Is there anything else, my lord?"

"I'll call you if I think of anything," Berenel said, caressing the tunic again, his mind crooning with muted joy. "That will be all."

The seneschal bowed himself out, and Berenel examined the tunic again, both physically and magically, seeking more clues to its origin.

And over and over, the words sounded in his mind, like a call to arms: "Soon, now. Soon."

Shana shivered on her pallet, startled awake by the sudden light, as she had been every morning for the past five. Already she had a little better idea of how things were in this new world; not that it made things any easier, just helped her to anticipate the worst dangers.

The pale ones were the "elven lords" of the writings, wielders pf magic, and overlords of everything. Any individual with pale skin, green eyes, pale gold hair and pointed ears was trouble...and had the power of life and death over any two-legger of the other variety.

The others were "humans," which, she had supposed, she must be, since the elven lords treated her in the same way as the rest of the people here. These, she knew now, were "slaves," and all wore the brown slave-uniform her captors forced her into when she first arrived here.

There were other humans who were not slaves, such as Kel and Ardan, the rest of the men in the caravan, and other people whose orders were obeyed. These were "bondlings," and usually wore the scarlet tunic and trews that showed they served the highest elven lord, the one she had never seen, who ruled over all the other elven lords here; Lord Berenel.

Her days were predictable now. The amber light appeared. Then, when everyone was awake, the "overseer" arrived. This individual herded them all into the room with hot water coming from the walls. Everyone took off his tunic, bathed, and got a new tunic. They were led to another room, where they got a piece of the crusty stuff Ardan had given her..."bread," they called it, and a bowl of something they were supposed to eat with the bread. The taste of the stuff changed from day to day. Then some of them were singled out and taken away. Those never appeared again; Shana had learned that they went to new masters, but what happened to them then, she could only guess. The rest went back to the big room, to while away the time in talk, meaningless games of chance, and bullying those who were easily intimidated.

All but Shana. She would be taken away to a small room, where people asked her endless questions about her dragon-skin tunic.

Thanks to the way in which her first questioners had treated her, she'd had the wit to act very stupid. The more brainless she acted, the less her questioners seemed to pay attention to what she said.

Partly she did so out of fear of her captors, elven lords and humans alike. The elven lords she feared more than the humans; one of them, displeased by a perceived lack of deference, had done something to her...something that sent her screaming to the floor in pain. All he had done was touch her...but her entire body had convulsed as if she had been dragon-shocked, and she couldn't speak for the rest of the day.

So she shivered in fright, and cowered before them...she didn't have to feign it, she was terrified of them. And she feigned stupidity; that was easy, since she spent most of her time in that little room frightened out of her wits.

Every day she woke wondering if today she should tell the truth. And every day, by the time she faced her captors in that little room, she had decided that she didn't dare.

For if she betrayed the dragons, those she still loved would undoubtedly be hunted down and killed. The elven lords made that clear, although they probably didn't realize it, in the tone of their questions. The idea of one day seeing Alara's skin adorning the back of an elven lord was enough to seal her lips against almost anything.

And for those moments of supreme weakness when an elven lord threatened her with more pain, there was another consideration. The Kin took the forms of two-leggers, elves and humans, and Shana no longer supposed it was for amusement's sake among the Lairs. No, they undoubtedly came among these people in disguise. And if...no, when...any of them learned that she had betrayed them, they would find her, and they would kill her in a way that would make the worst the elven lords could do seem pleasant. She had no doubts of that. The ones like Lori, who thought she was a rabid beast, would see to it.

So she shivered on her flat brown pallet until they took her away, then she endured the questions in silent desperation, pretending she hardly understood them, and pretending that she had simply found the bits of skin.

Her ploy did seem to be working; their manner seemed to become more and more perfunctory with her, as if her answers no longer mattered. That was the good part; the bad part was that they always saw that she violated some rule or other every day. That meant a beating; and with the beating came descriptions of what she could expect when a "master" bought her at the auction...descriptions that left her no doubt at all that the beatings she endured daily were nothing compared with what was coming. She almost came to welcome the appearance of her questioners: It meant one more day she would not have to face the unknown terrors of being sold.

Maybe today they wouldn't come for her, she thought, without real hope, as she sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. Her green eyes, which she had learned to hide, thanks to the one friend she had made here.

She reached over and gently shook Megwyn's shoulder. The graceful older woman didn't wake when the light came on; she had told Shana, ruefully, that she once slept through an earthquake. Of her fellow slaves, only Megwyn had proved to be at all interested in anything outside of her own well-being. The first morning after Shana had been penned here, one of the others had tried to steal her morning's ration of bread and soup. A tall, black-haired woman with bright brown eyes and a beautiful smile had been sitting across the table, and had stood up unexpectedly and cuffed the bully across the side of the head.

The overseer, seeing the scuffle, had hurried over. Shana had cringed, but Meg had explained the circumstances in matter-of-fact tones before the bully had a chance to think up a story. The bully was taken to another table; and Meg became Shana's protector.

There were three kinds of slaves, Meg explained that first day: the hopeless, the helpless, and the loupers. The loupers preyed on the others, she'd said, in a way that Shana readily understood. The hopeless were too afraid someone would use them to make friends, and the helpless had given up on everything.

"And what kind are you?" Shana had asked the older woman, innocently.

Meg had laughed. "None of them," she had said. "I'm not a slave. Or at least, I wasn't. I was a bondling."

That was when Shana had learned the difference that tunic-color made. And had learned about the concubines.

For Megwyn Karan had been a concubine. "And a good one," she'd said proudly. But another woman, a jealous rival, had accused her of thieving a valuable gem from her elven lord, one of Berenel's underlings, and planted the stolen object under her bed. Disgraced, Meg had suffered the worst punishment any concubine could have; she had been sent down to be auctioned as a common slave.

"That's what I get for being nice to the bitch," Meg had said bitterly, and then would say no more.

She readily admitted to Shana what had made her decide to protect the girl. "It's your green eyes," she'd said. "And if you look real close, your ears are kind of pointy. You'd better hide them both, unless you want a lot of trouble. You're a halfblood, girl. I don't know how you got away without being spotted before this, but you're a halfblood."

Meg had explained all about the halfbloods, and the little she knew about the Wizard War. When Shana had told her, tentatively, about the power she used to have, Meg had nodded knowingly. "That's wizard-power, all right," she'd said. "If you can just get it back, you'll be able to get us both out of here. Then we can head for the forest. Folks say there's wizards there...if I'm with you, if you maybe say I'm your mother, they'll take me in too."

If they ever got away. If Shana's powers ever came back. If she lived through the day's questions.

She shook Meg again, and this time the woman opened her eyes...and that same moment, not one, but several of the overseers came through the open door of the room.

"Shana!" called one, and Meg sat up quickly, as if they had called her name. She looked over her shoulder at the newcomers, and looked back at Shana, frowning.

"Don't answer, child," she whispered, a slight tremor in her voice. "Make them come to us. These aren't Lord Berenel's men; they've got no business here."

Indeed, the men wore blue tunics and trews, not red. "Which one of you is Shana?" the nearest one growled, seizing the arm of a slave and shaking the man. The slave pointed, and the overseer looked up, scowling.

"Here they come," Meg growled, putting her hand on Shana's shoulder. "Don't move. You have rights as Lord Berenel's property. I'll be with you."

Shana couldn't have moved if she had wanted to. She was paralyzed with fear. She knew that kind of swagger, the look in those eyes; it was what the bullies wore when they knew they weren't going to be caught.

And with every step they took, she shrank further inside herself. For every step seemed to land right on her heart.

WHICH ONE OF you is Shana?" asked the tallest of the men, a blond, bearded one with a hard face and strange, colorless eyes. He looked down on them both as if they were something he'd found in the street, and was debating on whether to kick it away.

"That Shana is a girl, remember?" the dark one at his right said, waving dismissingly at Meg. "It can't be that old hag."

This second man, a chunky, black-haired human, shoved Meg aside and hauled Shana to her feet, his fingers clamped hard and painfully on her shoulder. "This has to be the one we want, Ran." Shana hung in his hands, limp with fear, as Meg rose to her feet.

"Now you just wait a moment, boy," she said haughtily, taking on a pride and an air of authority Shana had never seen her use before. She raised her chin, and looked down her nose at him, as if he were something unpleasant she'd just stepped in. "You aren't Lord

Berenel's people...who gave you leave to come in here and traffic with his slaves?"

For a moment, all four men stepped back a pace, even the hard-faced man looking doubtful...but then, when one of the other slaves let an hysterical giggle slip, they seemed to recollect themselves.

The hard man stepped forward again, raising his arm, and slapped Meg with the back of his hand; the crack of flesh-on-flesh echoed across the room, making the already silent slaves shrink back against the walls. Meg's head snapped back with the force of the blow, and she dropped to the ground, stunned.

"That's our authority, bitch," snarled the blonde, a cruel smile barely curving his thin lips as he massaged his reddened hand with the other.

Meg started to struggle to her feet again, doggedly persistent in facing them down. Shana couldn't understand why, and tried to free herself for one moment, before the man holding her shook her so hard her teeth rattled and she went limp again.

"I think she needs to learn about authority, Ran," the dark one said. "I think they all need a lesson."

The blonde shrugged, and waved a hand at him. "Go ahead," he said. "Give her the lesson. I can wait."

The dark-haired man shoved Shana into the blond man's strong, cold hands, and his two nondescript companions hauled Meg to her feet. The two subordinates held her erect between them, while the dark-haired man looked her in the eyes.

"This is the difference between me and you, slave," he said, and slapped her as the blond man had. Her head snapped back, but this time she couldn't drop to the floor.

"And this." Crack. "And this"

He beat her coldly and systematically, starting with her face, and working downwards from there, delivering horrible blows to her body that left her breathless, trying to suck in air.

Meg screamed and fought at first, but it did her no more good than it had Shana. When the blonde dropped Shana, she hid her head in her arms, unable to watch, curled in a fetal ball at his feet. Soon Meg's screaming died down to whimpers, and then to moans, as the thick sounds of blows continued to ring dully across the otherwise silent room.

The creaking of the door was loud enough in that silence to make even the dark-haired man stop what he was doing. Shana looked up...

She wished she hadn't, for she was looking straight at Meg. Meg was a battered, bloody thing, hanging limply in the arms of her tormentors, her eyes swollen shut, and blood dripping from dozens of cuts on her face and oozing from the corner of her mouth.

Footsteps from the door made Shana turn to see who was there, and for a moment, she hoped Meg was saved, for it was one of Berenel's red-clad overseers.

But the overseer only cast a perfunctory look at Meg, and turned to the hard-faced man. "Do you want to talk to this one, or don't you?" he asked, poking Shana with a toe.

"I do," the blonde said. "I just got distracted by this woman. Bad training, boy. Doesn't know her place."

The overseer took another look at Meg, then waved at the door. "I'll take care of that," he said. Two more red-tunicked men came through it; they took Meg away from the men who were holding her, and dragged her off between them, hauling her as if she were nothing more than a bag of worthless garbage.

By then, Meg had revived enough to be aware of what was happening. Shana's last sight and sound of her was seeing her pulled through the doorway, wailing, leaving a trail of blood smeared on the floor.

Shana looked up at the hard-faced blonde, then dropped her eyes quickly, as he looked down at her. She didn't even try to resist when he grabbed the back of her tunic and pulled her to her feet.

But there was one thing certain, as he shoved her ahead of him, so that her foot slipped in one of the bloodstains on the floor. She wasn't going to have to pretend to be unable to answer his questions.

She was too terrified to speak.

In the tiny anteroom, Kel confronted Lord Revenel's agent, seething with anger and ready to take the slightest excuse to order the man flogged out of the building. It was bad enough that this Ran character had frightened the wild girl right out of what few wits she had, but he'd walked into the slave barracks as if he owned them, beat a former concubine to death, and put the rest of the slaves into such a panic that now none of them would have anything to do with Shana.

That pretty much put an end to Kel's own hope that the girl would confide some clue to one of the other slaves. He had been hopeful that the concubine could get something out of her...and he knew Megwyn's type well. The promise of being taken out of the pens would be enough to make her willing to talk to him. The pledge of becoming his permanent mate...and he'd been promised one...would have pried out of her-everything she had heard from the girl's lips.

And she'd been a pretty thing too...more than that, she was trained. It wasn't often a bondling like Kel got a chance at a trained concubine, at least not as a mate.

But this fool had ruined the entire plan.

"I'd like to hear what you have to say for yourself," he told the stone-faced blonde belligerently. "You've killed a good piece of property, and you've ruined another. Lord Berenel told us to keep that girl safe, you fool! He didn't tell us to frighten her into feeblemindedness! You had the right to question her...question her, and no more than that. If your Lord's agent gets her at auction, then you can do what you like with her...but until then, she's the Lord's, dammit!"

The man shrugged, his blue tunic straining against muscles that rivaled Ardan's. "The girl knows something," he said, his jaw hardening. "I tell you, she knows something. This idiot act of hers is just that...an act."

Kel thought quickly. He wasn't certain what the man's rank was...but it was probably higher than his own. A confrontation would do no good.

But there still might be a way to turn disaster into some profit. As long as the man was convinced that the child was withholding information, he might well convince others. And that would drive up the girl's price, part of which would come to him. "That may be true," he growled. "But you still had no right to even lay a hand on her. And you killed a skilled slave, a concubine! What do you intend to do about that?"

Ran raised a skeptical eyebrow. "And just what was a trained concubine doing in the pens?" he drawled, plainly disbelieving Kel's words.

"She was a thief," Kel said crisply, as he shoved the roster into the other man's hands. "Look for yourself. Megwyn Karan, trained concubine, the property of Lord Berenel himself and given to Lord Jondar...sent here for theft. But that charge of theft doesn't negate the woman's training or her value. I had my eye on her, as a matter of fact."

As he'd guessed, the man didn't know how to read. The blonde glanced at the list...which he held upside down...and shrugged again, but this time apologetically. "I didn't know," he said shortly. "She acted like one of those house-slaves you get sometimes, who think they're bondlings. How much was she worth?"

Kel baldly quoted a figure that was double Megwyn's real price.

"I'll tell you what. I'll give you twice that," Ran said, dropping his voice, and delivering the words in a confidential tone. "That ought to make up for everything. You ought to be able to get another trained girl somewhere, maybe over across town at Lord Dyran's auctions. Tell her that her name's been changed to Megwyn Karan, and your Lord won't know the difference."

Kel's head swam for a moment...and, for a moment, he was tempted to pocket the money...

But Lord Berenel was a decent master. And if he told the Lord about the payoff, Berenel's overseer would see to it that he didn't lose by the transaction.

"I'll do that," he said, relaxing his stance just a little. Ran stretched his lips in what was probably supposed to be a smile, and slipped him a heavy little pouch.

"Thanks, friend," he said. "Glad you understand how it is."

"Well, I hope you understand why I can't let you at the girl again," Kel told him. "I'm not supposed to let anyone talk to her more than twice, but after you scared the life out of her..."

"Aye, I understand," the blonde said, albeit reluctantly. "It'd be your skin. Guess that means I've got no second interview."

"That's about it. Cheer up, there's always the auction." Now that everything had been settled, Kel wanted the man to leave, badly. Those water-pale eyes gave him chills, and the cold, expressionless cast of the man's face didn't inspire much confidence either. He had the uneasy suspicion he was harboring a killer. A killer who enjoyed killing.

But it seemed that Ran was going to accept this particular defeat philosophically.

"True enough," he said, with no inflection. The man turned away, and the slave at the door opened it quickly for him, the boy's eyes wide with terror. Ran smiled, and the boy nearly fainted.

The boy must have heard what happened to the woman. With an effort, Kel kept himself from shoving Ran out the door.

Ran looked back over his shoulder. "My thanks," he said curtly.

"Profit to your Lord." Kel couldn't bring himself to wish the man himself well.

But Ran didn't seem to notice the lapse. "And to yours." And he walked out of the door, and hopefully, out of Kel's life.

Kel waited a few moments for Ran to clear the hallway, then headed straight for his own overseer.

This ought to drive the wild one's price right through the roof, he thought smugly. And if reporting this bribe and all didn't earn him a trained girl of his own, nothing would. Megwyn was already fading from his mind. He began to daydream, glimpses of the concubines he'd escorted across the trade routes flitting enticingly through his memory. Probably he'd even get his pick. He'd always fancied one of those tiny little black-haired creatures, the ones that danced so well. He smiled with anticipation. Or maybe one of the ones with hair like an elven lady and skin like snow. Or maybe a little red-haired she-cat...

Perhaps this day's work would not turn out so badly after all!

The huge, rose-pink auction room was like a bowl, with Shana at the bottom of it. Rose-pink light came from the ceiling, the same directionless light as in all the places she'd been so far. In the past twenty days, she hadn't once seen the sun.

She stood all alone on the auction platform, her heart pounding so loudly she could scarcely hear, half-fainting with fear. Above and all around her were hundreds of avaricious faces, some human, some elven, all of them heartlessly watching her as the auctioneer described her origin and ascribed abilities to her she had no notion she possessed.

"Take a good look at her, gentles and lords! Strong, limber, she fights like desert whirlwind, but responds like a well-trained hound! A jewel of the sands, she needs a knowing master to bring out the fire lying smoldering beneath her surface! Look at those muscles, those sculptured bones, there's not one ounce of fat on that girl, and nothing that doesn't please the eye! Imagine her spellbound as your personal guard! Imagine her fighting and winning in the arena, with the skills of a born desert killer!"

Fighting? A killer? Me? But...

The auctioneer prodded her until she moved, reluctantly. There was nowhere to hide from all those staring eyes; she shivered with cold, then flushed with heat, as the auctioneer made her move all around the platform while he continued his set-speech.

There were a few faces in the crowd that she recognized; most notably, the blond-haired, cruel-faced man who had stood by while his companion killed Meg. He was in the second tier of seats, with the wealthiest of the buyers. He waited as patiently as a scorpion at midday, standing just behind an elven lord in blue livery similar to his own, but richer, and more heavily ornamented with silver braid. She stared into those colorless, cold eyes, mesmerized.

The auctioneer brought his speech to a close; with a start, the first bid from the cruel man's overlord shocked Shana to her senses. She looked away, her heart racing, her throat tight, her head swimming.

Bids came quickly after that; Shana had a hard time keeping track of them at first. It seemed that most of the people in the auction room had come here to bid on her. Voices called out numbers, each number higher than the one before, sometimes two and three men shouting numbers at the same time.

There aren't any women out there. Why aren't there any women?

There wasn't a single friendly face in the lot. Each one, elven or human, seemed colder and harder than the last. Her eyes followed the bids from man to man, hoping for a sign of pity, if nothing else, and finding nothing there but greed, excitement, or cold calculation.

Except for the cruel man. Now he began to show some reaction. The elven lord with him kept bidding steadily, and soon every other bid was his. As the bidding began to fall off, and fewer of the bidders continued responding to the challenge, the cruel man licked his lips, as if he were anticipating the taste of something pleasing.

Shana watched him in terror-stricken fascination. He looked straight into her eyes when he saw that she was looking at him, deliberately licked his lips again, and smiled.

That smile nearly dropped her to the platform; her heart stopped, and her breath seemed to freeze in her chest. It was the most sadistic smile she had ever seen.

It was the same smile he'd worn as his underlings beat poor Meg to death; every cry she'd made had caused a flicker of that smile to cross his face.

One by one the other bidders dropped out, and his smile broadened. Finally, there was silence in answer to his master's final bid, and he grinned broadly.

"Going once!"

Shana closed her eyes, and tried to will herself to die, right there on the spot. I can't go to him, I can't, he'll do worse than kill me, I'd rather be dead...

"Going twice!"

I'll find a knife, a sliver of glass, a rock, something sharp, and I'll kill myself, I will, I will...

Then another voice rang out.

"Three hundred!"

Shana's eyes flew open, and the crowd turned with a murmur, to see a sandy-haired human sitting inconspicuously in the upper tiers, standing up to indicate the bid was his.

A bid that topped the last by a hundred gold pieces.

The crowd noise rose to a hum. The auctioneer frowned. "I'll have to verify you have that much, bondling," he began...then the man moved further into the light, showing his livery. The auctioneer paled.

"Forgive me," he babbled. "Lord Dyran's man is welcome to make any bid he pleases."

"And I bid three hundred," the fellow said coldly.

The auctioneer, now sweating freely, turned to the cruel man's elven master. "Lord Harrlyn?"

The elven lord looked up at the man in the top tier, and shrugged, his pale gold hair rippling with the movement. "Far be it from me or my Lord to deny Lord Dyran his pleasure. The prize is his."

He sat down; the cruel man sat an instant later, his face gone cold and closed-in...but Shana got a glimpse of his eyes, and what she saw there was enough to make her vow never, ever to allow herself to fall into his hands.

"Going once?" The auctioneer paused, but no more eleventh-hour bids were forthcoming. "Going twice...going three times! Sold, to Lord Dyran's man! And now, gentles and lords, a set of matched twin dancers, male and female! Just wait until you see these beauties perform!"

One of the bondlings came up onto the platform and guided her off; he snapped a cord onto her collar as soon as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

That shocked her awake.

She woke up even more when the bondling handed the cord to the man who had bought her in exchange for the heavy pouch he tossed carelessly at the young man. For the first time she got a good look at the man, and her heart sank.

He had a proud, haughty expression; his thick, sandy hair had streaks of gray in it and the lines in his squarish face matched that gray. But they were not lines that smiling had etched there; they were frown lines, and the crow's feet around his opaque brown eyes made Shana think of an ill-tempered lizard.

His livery was richer than the elven lord's; all of silks and velvets, gold and crimson, with real gems winking from his collar...

Like the collar she'd found, only not as pretty.

"Come along, girl." A tug at her leash sent her stumbling forward a pace, stubbing her bare toe. The man lifted a lip in disdain, sneering at her and her clumsiness. "Why my Lord wants this thing, I'll never know," he said in a confiding voice to the young bondling. "She doesn't seem very useful. But one doesn't question one's orders."

The young man nodded warily and shoved Shana a little, in the direction she'd been tugged. "Go with him, girl," he said harshly, as if he was glad to see the last of her. "You belong to Lord Dyran now."

The man jerked at her leash a second time, then turned abruptly, and began striding down the hall that ran under the auctioneer's platform. She hurried after to keep him from hauling her forward again. As they emerged into the main hallway, she rubbed her neck where the collar had chafed it, wondering if she hadn't exchanged a bad fate for a worse one.

Dyran must be an elven lord so powerful the others wouldn't bid against him. That meant his magic was much more powerful than theirs. What did he want with her?

He surely wanted the secret of the dragon-skin. And if his magic was that much better...

She began to shiver, although the man who held her leash took no notice of the fact. He simply kept walking, after a single backward glance at her.

They emerged from the door at the end of the hallway into sunlight.

Shana looked up at the sun, at the beautiful, blue, open sky above the buildings, at the freedom of the world she used to take for granted. She thought of all the times she'd spent out under that same sun and sky, times she hadn't even considered her freedom, because it had been something she had taken for granted. Her heart and throat ached.

Keman...oh, Keman, what am I going to do?

Without meaning to, she started to cry.

The man jerked hard on her leash, sending her stumbling forward, although she didn't...quite...fall. She coughed and choked on the constrictions of the collar, and he grimaced angrily. "Come on girl, I haven't got all day!" he snarled, and pulled her forward again. Then he set off at a pace that Shana's shorter legs could hardly keep up with. She stumbled after him, blinded by tears, both hands holding her collar away from her throat, lest it choke her.

They crossed the empty courtyard quickly...so quickly that she had barely regained her balance by the time they reached the tunnel into the great city square outside. He didn't stop for a moment; he just pulled her out through the tunnel and into the noise and chaos of the crowded, blindingly hot square in front of the city gates.

Once tangled in the crowd he could not move as quickly, which gave Shana a chance to breathe a little easier. He led her for a short space, until someone tried to shove between them, choking her, and threatening his hold on her leash. Then he grabbed hold of her elbow, and pulled her in front of him, to keep from getting separated by the crowd.

On the other side of the square, just inside the tunnel leading under the walls, there was a man waiting with two horses, both beasts bedecked with leather straps and some kind of pad on their backs. They made straight for him, and he waved once when his eyes met those of Shana's captor.

She wondered why on earth the horses were tricked out that way...it would be awfully difficult to divest the beasts of their complicated trappings to eat them, though the harness might serve to keep them quiet while you killed them...

"Any trouble?" asked her captor, when they reached the man's side, in a voice so low Shana was surprised the other man could hear him.

"Nothing yet," the other fellow said, a thin man with dark hair falling over his eyes in a kind of shaggy forelock. He looked nervously over his shoulder. "But I was beginning to get worried."

The other man's frown deepened. "The sooner we're out of here, the better. If you're getting worried, I should be worried." To Shana's utter astonishment, the man dragged her over to the side of one of the horses, hoisted her up, and dumped her across the front of the pad.

What are they doing? They want me to ride a horse as if it was a grel? But...

She struggled to get her leg over the horse's neck and sit up, the way she'd ridden the grel, as the man put his foot into a socket on the side of the pad. He swung his own leg over the horse's rump, so that she was sitting in front of him. He secured her leash to the front of the pad, then nodded to his sullen-eyed companion, and they sent the horses trotting down the echoing tunnel to the wide spaces beyond. Before long, they were so far from the city walls that the men atop them were scarcely more than specks. The city itself dwindled behind them quickly; the horses were much faster than Shana had guessed.

They rode in complete silence, except for the clopping of the horses' hooves on the hard-packed road, for a long time. The sun had been overhead, about midday, when they left, and they didn't stop even to rest until the sun was touching the horizon. In that time the land had changed from flat to hilly, and from fallow through cultivated and at last, to wooded. Deep woods, and wild-looking; Shana had the distinct impression that this was not a road often taken, an impression borne out by the fact that it dwindled to a mere thread of track between the trees.

Shana was in considerable pain by the time they stopped. Riding a horse was not like riding a grel; the only time a grel got out of an easy walk was when it was frightened. The only time the horses got out of a trot was when the men reined them in. And a trot, so she had learned, was easily the single most painful gait...at least for the rider...that a horse was capable of. Add to that the fact that she didn't know how to ride a horse; every move she made to try to make her ride easier seemed to be the wrong one. She was constantly off-balance and bouncing, and her acute, muscle-cramping discomfort was enough to make her forget totally the fears of the morning.

The two men rode their horses off the main track, and onto a game trail that crossed it. They followed this even fainter path for some distance until it crossed a stream. There they stopped, and Shana waited in renewed fear...she had no idea what to expect, and that itself was frightening.

The silence in this forest was not as total as Shana first thought. Once the horses stopped moving, she heard little rustlings in the underbrush, and the movements of birds in the tree branches overhead. Different sounds from the dry, scrub-groves of the land around the Lair, and yet oddly the same.

Both men dismounted, their boots thudding dully onto the turf, and Shana's captor indicated with a curt gesture that she should slide off as well. She didn't even consider disobeying...after all, she had no idea how to control this beast she bestrode, and without him holding her on, she probably would have fallen off long ago.

She managed to get her aching leg over the horse's neck, and slid down; it was a good thing that her captor was ready to catch her, because her knees simply would not hold her. She collapsed into his arms, her legs one long knot of cramped muscles. She bit her lip until the tears came, and willed them to relax.

He let her down onto the old leaves of last year's autumn...and put his hands to her throat.

She squeaked in surprise, and sudden terror.

Before she had any notion of what he was about, he had unfastened her collar and thrown it, leash and all, into the woods, the expression on his face the same as someone who has just disposed of a viper.

And then, for the first time since the oasis, she could hear thoughts. His thoughts!

:Be easy, child. You're with friends now. I'm sorry I had to be so unkind to you back there, but I dared not betray what I was with softness.:

"My name is Rennis Draythorn, child," he said aloud. And as he spoke, his face underwent an abrupt transformation. His hair and build were still generally the same, but if Shana had not seen the change take place, she would never have known he was the same man who had won her at the auction.

It was as if his features blurred for a moment, and then cleared, rearranged. His face grew younger, his eyes turned green, and the tips of his ears lengthened and became slightly pointed. But the biggest change by far was in his appearance and in the clothing he wore. His expression softened and grew more cheerful, and the rich livery vanished altogether, being replaced with an ordinary, brownish shirt and trews, belted with a plain leather belt.

Altogether a completely different person. One whom she liked as much as she had disliked...and feared...the man who bought her.

"Wh-wh-what are you?" she stammered, her eyes round with amazement.

The thud and jingle of harness hitting the ground made her start and turn to look behind her, at the second man. "He's a wizard, of course," snapped his companion, pushing the harness over to one side with his foot. "Like I am. Like you'll be, if you live that long."

Shana looked closer, and saw that the other man's features had undergone the same kind of changes that Rennis's had, although his clothing remained the same. But then, he hadn't worn livery.

Her erstwhile captor patted her awkwardly on the head. "It's all right, child. You're safe with us. We are always watching for halfbloods. We learned about you, and managed to find a way to buy you without raising suspicion." Rennis smiled, after giving his fellow a sharp glance. "I wish we could have warned you that we were working to free you, but the slave-collars block our magic. If you ever go out in public as we do, we'll give you a blank collar, one that looks like one of theirs, but has had the spells taken off. That way you can work a glamorie to look like a fullblood human, and be able to work as an agent for us. If that's what you want to do, of course. After you learn to control your powers, what you do will be up to you. To tell the truth, there aren't many who leave the Citadel."

"Why did you help me?" she asked, thinking at the same time, This is like a tale, it isn't like real life. Rescues don't come at the last minute out of nowhere. This shouldn't be happening, it doesn't make any sense. Am I asleep and dreaming?

:You're not dreaming, child,: Rennis said directly into her mind, just as Foster Mother used to. :This is quite real. You aren't the first wizardling we've bought at auction, and you won't be the last. The only difference is that very few of the others cost as much as you did!:

She blinked, now completely stunned. "But..."

"We only just managed to save you, you know," he continued, ignoring her bewilderment. "There was a real emissary from Lord Dyran coming to buy you. We intercepted him at the inn; I wore his face and carried his gold...and he woke up just in time to hurry to the auction and discover you were gone. That was probably when he also learned that his pocket was much lighter. He'll have a lot of explaining to do to his Lord."

They wanted something, she thought suspiciously. Nobody would do this without wanting something. But she had learned enough in the slave pens to keep her mouth shut on that observation. Whatever it was that they wanted, she'd learn it soon enough. As long as it wasn't the secret of dragon-skin...

"What were all those rumors about'dragon-skin'?" his companion asked Rennis. "It was all over the city. Something that was going to make a fortune for the Lord whose bondlings found the dragons. If I hadn't been staying in character, I'd have laughed my kejannies off. I've never heard so much bunk in my life!"

Rennis shrugged. "Ask the girl, Zed," he said shortly, turning to work on his own horse's harness. "I heard less than you did, and I didn't bother to read Tarn before I put him out."

Zed spend a moment with his packs before finally turning reluctantly to Shana. "So," he said in a condescending tone, "what was all this about dragon-skin?"

She decided to lie and see if she could get away with it. If these people were reading her mind all the time, they'd know if she was lying. But if they weren't...or if she was stronger than they were...they would have no idea. It would be a good test, since she would then know exactly how private her thoughts were.

"I found these little lizards in the desert," she said boldly. "They had really beautiful colors, mostly because they were poisonous enough to drop a full-grown one-horn."

"They could drop an alicorn!" Zed was clearly impressed. "I thought nothing could poison those things but their own spite! That's one nasty lizard, girl!"

Shana nodded solemnly, encouraged at his response.

Evidently Zed, at least, was unable or unwilling to test her thoughts. "It's funny, in the desert, things that are really deadly seem to be really pretty."

Rennis looked up from his work and smiled. "That is because nature has evolved them so that their colors advertise their danger to other creatures."

Shana nodded; that was exactly what Foster Mother had said, though not in the same words. "Most poisonous creatures are brightly colored, because they do not need to protect themselves with camouflage. And sometimes, their pretty colors attract the foolish and unwary to become their dinner."

She continued her tale-spinning. "Anyway, since they were really poisonous, they were pretty easy to kill as long as you did it from a distance; they couldn't move very fast, and they liked to spend a lot of time sunning. I started killing them because I didn't want any of them being where I was sleeping; I was pretty good at getting them with rocks. But it seemed a waste to just kill them...I couldn't eat them, they were poisonous to eat, too, so I started skinning them and I made a tunic out of the skins. The men that found me called it'dragon-skin,' I don't know why. And they wouldn't believe me when I told them where it came from."

Zed snorted in disgust, and shook his head so that his forelock flopped into his eyes. "Elves! There's always got to be a secret; someone's always got to be hiding something. They couldn't even tell their own mothers a straight story, and they don't believe anyone else would, either."

For some reason, her story seemed to make Zed a little friendlier, at any rate, he stopped scowling at her and started explaining things, while he unpacked what seemed to be three sets of bedding.

"We're going to spend the night camped out here in the woods," he said, pulling a metal bowl, and some things Shana didn't recognize, out of the bags he'd had tied behind him during the ride. He looked up at Shana, and raised an eyebrow at her doubtfully. "You aren't going to have any problem with that, are you? This is pretty rough camping. I mean, there's no showers, no real beds, and not a lot to eat..."

It was her turn to look sardonic. "I spent most of my life in hills drier than this," she pointed out. "With less cover and less to pile up between me and the rocks. I've slept with runner-birds and two-horns, on sand. I've caught my own food. I survived a sandstorm."

The younger man blinked, his jaw dropping. "Oh," Zed said weakly, somewhat taken aback. "You really are a wild child, aren't you?"

She shrugged. "If you know so little about me, why did you rescue me?" she asked, voicing the question that had been eating her alive since the moment Rennis had told her how much gold and effort they had expended on her part.

"Because of the power, child," Rennis said from the other side of the clearing where he was unpacking his goods, entering the conversation again. He stood up, and walked toward her. "Magic is...noisy, so to speak. It makes something like a mental'sound'; the more magic, the more sound, unless you are very, very good...good enough to mask that sound. The more power, the more sound. Your collar inhibited your magic, yes...but to do so, it required power, and so created a sound. In your case, a very loud sound, which told those of us that could hear it that your own power was very great indeed. That was why we came to save you...your potential power is enormous, and well worth the risk. Now, would you care for something to eat?"

The abrupt change of subject took her by surprise, and she only nodded. Rennis went back to his bags and began rummaging through them. As Shana watched him, rubbing her feet, a question occurred to her. One that she did not ask.

Why would they need someone with a lot of power...and need her badly enough to risk getting caught themselves?

Rennis returned, and gave her a piece of fruit and some hard bread and a bit of dried meat. She thanked him, and since her legs still ached, stayed where she was while he and Zed set about making a campsite.

What did they want her for, she wondered.

But the answer was not forthcoming.

THUNDERCLOUDS PILED BLACKLY Overhead, and the rumble of distant thunder was a constant undercurrent to the argument. "No!" Keman shouted, his tail lashing. "I don't believe you, Mother! Shana is my sister, she's more my sister than that lazy lump of spite everyone else calls my sister! She is in danger, and you took me away before I could help her! And I'm going back there, and nothing you can say is going to stop me!"

"Keman..." His mother glanced over her shoulder uneasily; they were arguing in the middle of the Lair valley, and his shouting was beginning to attract a crowd.

"I told you, I'm going back, and you can't stop me!" he repeated, uncomfortably aware that his voice was cracking from the strain, which wasn't doing much for the confident, adult image he was trying to project.

"Maybe she cannot," a voice rumbled warningly behind him, "but we can. The halfblood was cast out, young Keman, and there's an end to it."

Keman managed to suppress the immediate reaction of turning round about and cowering submissively to Keoke. The time was over for submission, and the fact that Keoke was an Elder had very little bearing on the matter. Keoke was wrong, and Keman had decided on the flight home, ignobly carried in his mother's claws, that he was no longer going to submit tamely to injustice, even if it was delivered by an Elder.

"Shana was punished, when Rovy should have been, and you all know it, Mother! I am not going to stand here and let your cowardice hurt her any..."

A wing-buffet from behind sent him rolling end over end, coming up against a rock, and sprawling ungracefully at the foot of the cliff.

Keoke towered over him, the Elder's eyes red with anger, but it was to Keman's mother he spoke, not to Keman.

"That is beyond the bounds, even for your son, shaman," Keoke growled. "I suggest that you confine him to your lair until he has learned some manners and some concern for the Kin instead of placing so much importance on his own peculiar ideas of justice."

Alara hung her head as the rest of the dragons around her rumbled their agreement. Keman stood up, shaking his head to clear it, and found himself surrounded too closely even to allow him to spread his wings. He had no doubt that if he tried, the others would seize them, and too bad if the membranes tore in the process.

He was "escorted" to the lair, his mother trailing along behind, and he sulked every step of the way.

Rocks for brains and stones for souls, every one of them, he thought angrily, making no effort to shield his thoughts, and not caring who happened to overhear. Too stupid to change and too complacent to want to. If we were back Home right now, they'd probably refuse to use the Gate! Hidebound, overfed, underexercised, feckless, selfish, prejudiced, unreasonable, obstinate...

:That will be quite enough, Keman,: his mother said sharply. :Everyone in the Lair knows your opinion by now, I'm sure.:

Good, he thought. :Fine, let them cast me out too,: he replied bitterly. :I deserve it as much as Shana. After all, I didn't sufficiently humble myself to Rovy, so obviously I provoked him into a justifiable attack on...:

:I said enough, Kemanorel,: his mother interrupted. Warned by her tone, Keman subsided until they both were deep inside the lair. Their escort had tactfully remained outside.

Alara paused; Keman didn't. He kept going right past her, head down, tail dragging, making straight for the dubious sanctuary of his own cavelet.

"Keman," she said tentatively.

"What?" he replied churlishly, smoldering with anger and making no effort to hide it.

"Keman, I'll find Shana, and I'll take her somewhere safe," she said. "I'll do my best..."

He turned, and looked her straight in the eyes. "Mother," he said coldly and clearly, "I don't believe you."

And with that, he flung himself into his cave, extinguished the light, and curled up in the dark with his back to the entrance.

He waited, while Alara stood just outside, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Finally she left, without saying a word.

Thunder echoed down through the entrance of the lair, and the earth shook with it, even this far underground. This would be a storm of monumental force...

Which suited Keman's plans entirely.

Keman waited a moment to see if his mother would return, but there was no sign of her. But rather than creep to the entrance of his cave and look, he stretched himself out on his hoard, rested his chin on his foreclaws, and closed his eyes.

He reached out, carefully, delicately, with his mind.

He made no attempt to make contact with those minds he sensed around him, only to identify who they were and, more importantly, where.

In the passageway leading to the rear entrance, swelling with self-importance, was Myre. Just beyond her, lurking outside the entrance, Rovy. Predictably, the bully was lurking above the entrance, so that he could drop down on Keman if he tried to escape that way. And lying across the front entrance was his mother, her mind dark with guilt.

So. They thought they had him pinned down.

They thought they'd covered all the entrances.

But none of them had accompanied Shana on her little rounds of exploration, and none of them knew that the wall at the rear of the storage caverns that separated Alara's lair from an empty one was no longer quite intact.

Keman slunk out of his cave, belly flat to the ground, his scaled hide changed to a rough blue-gray texture that matched the stone around him. Whenever he thought he heard or sensed something, he froze. Unless someone knew exactly what to look for, they never would have spotted him.

He reached the storage caves without incident, while thunder continued to roll down the long, echoing tunnels of the lair, giving only a hint of the fury outside.

He took his time, carefully displacing stones so that they wouldn't rattle against each other and alert Myre or his mother. He considered, briefly, trying to build it up again from inside, then decided against it. He wouldn't be back to need this particular escape route again. He had every intention of seeing to it that he never set eyes on another of the Kin.

The next lair was a small one, in poor repair.

Thunder pounded through it, echoing off every wall as clearly as if he stood beneath the open sky. Fitful flashes of directionless light accompanied it. He picked his way carefully across the stone-strewn floor, sometimes catching a claw on a stray rock, or stubbing a toe painfully. Fortunately he and Shana had fully explored this little retreat; and once he reached the far wall, he saw clearly what he had been watching for: the flickering blue fire of lightning, illuminating the ceiling and the chimney-hole that pierced the center dome of the lair.

That hole was his route to freedom, which would take him outside above the heads of everyone watching for him, under cover of the storm.

All he had to do was reach it.

He sighed, transformed his claws into something much more suited to rock-climbing. Talons thickened, straightened into short, hard spikes; claws became more handlike, and covered with tough skin. He set all four feet into the wall, and began his ascent.

Outside nothing was visible but a tree-covered hill. There was no sign of anyone living here, much less all this!

Shana stood at the entrance to the cave, with the mage-curtain sparkling behind her, and gawked without shame. If the Kin ever saw this, it would start a whole new fashion! Buildings inside a cave...and this one must be bigger than that place they held her in. She still couldn't believe it.

"This is the Citadel," Rennis said, waving his hand at the edifice beyond. "You can't see all of it, of course; the old wizards used a lot of the tunnels and caverns behind the building as well. That tripled the size of the inhabited section, at least at the height of our glory. So, there it is: the Citadel, never discovered, never taken, not even when the wizards themselves were defeated."

Even in ruins, with the facade of the building crumbling from age, and what plaster remained spotted with mildew, it was an impressive sight. The ceiling of the cave was hidden, as in the elven lords' buildings, behind a soft, amber glow. Unlike the little light-balls created by the dragons, this magically created light-source illuminated clearly everything in the main cavern. The shield-wall spell across the entrance, which would admit only those it was keyed to, effectively hid the reality of the Citadel behind an illusion of a shallow, uninteresting rocky cavity in the hillside, floored with dry leaves and sand and hosting only a spider or two.

This was not a water-carved cave as was the lair...or at least, there was no sign here of the hand of nature. Floor, walls, and ceiling were smooth, unmarked expanses of rock. A shallow staircase, also carved from the living rock, led down to the floor of the place. The entire hill had been hollowed out by magic, energies still resonating faintly in the walls, with the massive, yet graceful building dominating the farther wall, and artificially nurtured plants and trees growing right up to the staircase at their feet. Sheep grazed in little white clumps across the cavern, completely unconcerned that their backs were being warmed by magic, and not natural sunlight.

A stone-paved path led across a lawn of rough, sheep-cropped grass towards the building. The Citadel was made of the same yellow stone as the cavern, constructed as completely unlike an elven lord's hall as possible. This place was multistoried, and virtually all the space that was not load-bearing was devoted to windows looking out on the artificial park.

Zed, growing impatient, pushed past them, muttering something.

Over the yellow stone, plaster had been applied, to make the building glow a pure, unsullied white.

It must have been magnificent when it was new, Shana thought, wishing that she could have seen it.

Surely it had gleamed in its little green park like a moonstone on velvet.

Now most of the windows were dark, empty sockets. The plaster had fallen from the stone, leaving large patches of yellow. The stonework itself was cracked, and the grass was taking over the path. The trees and bushes had been allowed to spread without hindrance, and were shaggy and unkempt, except where the sheep had nibbled them.

Still, there was something impressive about it even yet. Certainly taken as a unit, with the building and the cavern that housed it counting as "the Citadel," it was the single most remarkable piece of human handiwork Shana had ever seen. They rivaled even the elven-built city in some ways, because the city had been mostly built by human hands, not elven magic. The Citadel was entirely halfblood work, and constructed entirely by magic.

And that it all stood after these many hundreds of years was a further testament to the powers of those old wizards. They must have been so powerful...

"Well, come along, Shana," Rennis said, patting her on the shoulder, startling her. "You have a lot of things you have to do so you can get settled in." He walked forward and down the steps, leading his horse carefully so that it didn't stumble.

"I do?" she said, following him, while Zed strode ahead of them stiffly, already leading his horse up the path to the Citadel.

"Of course," Rennis replied indulgently, looking back over his shoulder at her. "You'll have to meet your master, be shown your quarters, learn where everything is..."

"Wait!" Shana said, stopping dead in the middle of the path, alarmed at the word "master."

"I thought you said there weren't any slaves here!"

"What?" Rennis turned back to her with a face full of astonishment. "Of course there aren't any slaves..."

She planted her feet far apart, and set her hands on her hips. "Then why am I going to have a master?" she asked, raising her chin aggressively.

To her surprise...and anger...Rennis began to laugh. She'd had more than enough of being laughed at lately, she thought with annoyance. It wasn't her fault she didn't understand things! She would very much have liked to see how he would do, plopped down in the middle of the Lair!

"I'm sorry, child," Rennis said...though he didn't sound in the least sorry. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "I keep forgetting how little you know of us. Your 'master' will be a senior wizard, Denelor Vyrthan, and he will be your 'master' only in the sense that he is the master of his magical abilities and your teacher, while you will be his apprentice and his pupil. Along with several other young wizards, of course. Mind, you will be expected to clean up and cook for him, and do a few other things for him; that's what apprentices do to pay for their teaching. But you'll have several other youngsters to share the work with you."

"Oh," Shana replied, since some sort of reply seemed in order. "All right, then. But I can't cook."

"I suppose not," Rennis replied thoughtfully. "Well, you ought to learn. If you go out on a journey, how do you expect to get your meals otherwise?"

She'd eat them raw, of course, she thought derisively. What was wrong with that?

"Now, first things first," Rennis said, resuming his journey towards the building. "Let's see about your quarters..."

Shana had somehow gotten the impression that living among the wizards would be very like living among the Kin.

She learned that in some ways she had been right, but in most ways she was completely wrong.

Dragons seldom needed to "clean up" anything, with the exception of Keman, who needed to clean the pens of his pets, sometimes daily. But that was a simple process of raking out excrement and throwing down fresh sand or straw.

When Shana had been held in the slave pens, there hadn't been anything to "clean up" either. Slaves owned nothing, their bedding was taken away periodically and exchanged for new, their tunics taken away daily, and they themselves washed daily.

But the wizards had possessions, and created others, and in the process, created a mess. Things needed to be cleaned; bedding, garments, dishes, dwellings. Things needed to be put away; clothing, books, writing materials, personal possessions.

There were other considerations to this new lifestyle. The slaves had been "hosed down," as Zed put it, once a day. Two-leggers, when not enslaved, did not always care to clean themselves as slaves did. Some, especially the old and stiff-jointed, or the young and sybaritic, preferred long soaks in deep tubs of hot water...which needed to be scrubbed afterwards.

The wizards had leisure time and the freedom to indulge themselves in it. That meant hobbies and other recreational pastimes, and those usually produced some kind of a mess. Floors collected dirt, and needed to be swept.

Then there was food. Shana had always eaten everything raw when she'd been with the Kin, and as a slave she had eaten what she'd been given. Here, meals had to be cooked, which meant they not only had to clean the dishes food was eaten from, but also all the varied cookware used to produce the meal.

It was a complicated life, with much of the drudgery being done by the apprentices.

As the newest of Denelor's apprentices, and the only one who could not cook, and had no idea of how to properly put things away, Shana got most of the truly tedious or unpleasant tasks, and most of those involved cleaning something. It was a continual puzzle to her, this obsession with possessions that the two-leggers had. If they had owned less, their lives would have been considerably less complicated.

Then again, she had to admit that there were aspects of two-legger life that were profoundly superior to life with the Kin. Cooked meals...real meals, and not the bland, watery fare served up to the slaves...came as a surprise and a real, anticipated pleasure. Denelor's senior apprentice, who did most of the cooking, served up food with flavors and combinations of flavors Shana had never even dreamed of.

There were other pleasures associated with her new life...those hot baths, for one; the wonderful, cushioned sleeping-room for another. She had her own, private room which was always warm and dry, with one of the sleeping-places called a "bed" and a chest to put things in. She never quite came to place the kind of value in clothing and self-ornament that some of the others did, but it was good to have clean trews and tunics all the time, even if she was the one who had to wash them.

Music was another delightful surprise. The dragons never sang; the closest they came was the recitation of epic poetry. Shana had listened with pleasure to birds singing, of course, but the first time she heard Denelor pick up a katar and sing to its strumming, she nearly exploded with excitement. Much to her own chagrin, she soon discovered that she had no talent in that direction. Her "range" was about three notes, and she had no sense for anything but rhythm patterns. But she could...and did, with great enthusiasm...still enjoy the efforts of others.

The others never forgot that she was an outsider, though, and neither did she. Most of them had either been brought here as small children, kidnapped before they could be collared, or as babies, left on the hill to die by their frightened mothers. The penalty for bearing a halfblood child was death for the mother and child alike, which tended to keep such conceptions secret when they occurred, and forced the mothers to rid themselves of the infant as soon as possible after it was born. Some, because of circumstances, could not expose the halfbloods as infants; the ones that didn't kill the children themselves lived in fear...until the day when their child went out to play and did not return, or vanished from his bed. Then they breathed sighs of relief as they reported the missing child to their overseer.

The wizards combed the hills for such abandoned children, and kept careful watch for the "noise" of untrained magic-use to catch the children that had escaped exposure. Those they either bought at auction, as they had bought Shana, or used their magics to abduct, a safe enough procedure, since the children of human slaves were seldom watched too closely. Shana was the first of their numbers in a very long time to have joined as a near-adult, and the first to have had such an extensive retrieval effort made on her part.

She had a few friends, mostly apprentices, though the young wizard Zed seemed to thaw once he had reached the safety of the Citadel. But she was afraid to allow anyone too close, given the lessons she had learned from losing Keman and Megwyn. She was simply not willing to risk so much of herself to a deep friendship, and most of the apprentices seemed to find her too alien to want anything beyond mere acquaintance.

Her chores occupied the mornings, for when she wasn't cleaning up after her master or herself, she was "loaned out" to wizards who had no apprentices, or only one or two; in the afternoons, she joined half of Denelor's apprentices in her lessons in magic.

And those were revelations in themselves.

Floor-sweeping kept her occupied until just after the lessons were scheduled to start. She tossed her apron in a corner and ran for the stairs to Denelor's quarters, expecting a rebuke when she got there. But when Shana knocked on the door and joined the group, she saw to her surprise that all of Denelor's six apprentices were present, instead of only half.

She took a place on the floor, near the back of the room. There were only three chairs in the room, and Denelor had one of those. The other two had been taken by the youngest apprentice, Kyle, and the other girl, Mindi. Shana didn't mind: the floor of Denelor's room was carpeted with something soft and warm, a vast improvement over the stone of the caves and the tile of the slave pens.

"All right, children, it's our turn for procurement," said the portly, soft-spoken Denelor, as he gathered his apprentices about him for what ordinarily were the afternoon lessons. As always, the lesson was held in Denelor's quarters, in a room he called the "sitting room," which nomenclature had thoroughly confused Shana. After all, she reasoned, couldn't you sit anywhere? Why have a single room devoted entirely to sitting?

The oldest apprentice, a wraith of a boy who so closely resembled his elven father that his mother had actually gone to the "wizard woods" an hour after giving birth to leave him there, sighed dramatically. "I thought it was Umbra's turn," he complained. "I know her 'prentices all went through a lot to bring that gold up out of the mine, but I never heard anyone change the rules about rotation just because someone did something extra..."

Denelor shook his head, his mild green eyes wide with amusement. "Umbra did last week, right on schedule, and the schedule is posted, you know. It's our turn, fair and square, Lanet. Unless you'd rather eat mutton and lentils for the next several days..."

Lanet shuddered dramatically. "I think not, Master Denelor. Procurement it is."

Shana waited patiently, as she had learned to wait since arriving here, for an explanation of "procurement." Denelor might remember that she was new...and he might not. If he did, he'd explain; if he didn't, she would find out if she kept her ears open.

Denelor chuckled, and handed the apprentice a piece of smudged paper. "Your choice, lad. Mostly it's food this time, but winter's coming on, and there are a couple of new apprentices with no winter clothing, and a lot more who've grown out of theirs..."

That seemed to remind him of Shana's presence, and he looked for her among the others. "Procurement is when we use our magic to get things we need from the elven lords, my dear," he said over Lanet's head. "All the masters and apprentices take it in rotation, six days at a time, and we actually work only three days out of the six. That is because it's wearying work, and you won't be good for much but eating and sleeping the day after you fetch your allotment."

Shana noticed that he was no longer using the tone and simple sentences with her that he had been; speaking to her as if she were a very small child.

When she had called lightning she must have convinced him she wasn't simpleminded. That little incident might well be responsible for a few more of the white hairs among Denelor's sandy-brown.

Lanet looked the list over and sighed dramatically. "I guess I really ought to leave the smaller stuff for Shana, since it's her first time. Winter clothing, I suppose. Ugh. That means I'll have to look for it, too."

Lanet took his scrying-stone out of his pocket, threw his white-blond hair out of his eyes with a toss of his head, and placed the polished slab of emerald beryl on the carpet in front of him. He stared into its crystalline green depths for a long moment, then finally spoke. "There's quite a lot of clothing stockpiled in Lord Dyran's warehouses, at the edge of his estate. I doubt he'd miss a bale or two of slave tunics and trews."

But Denelor shook his head immediately. "No; I can't permit that. Doing anything around Dyran is too dangerous. He might not have shielded his storehouses, but he's certainly warded the estate, and we don't dare take the chance of alerting him to our existence."

Shana shifted her weight restlessly. There it was again; that law of theirs. "Never be discovered." They'd never do anything if it brought a chance that some elven lord might figure out that the wizards were back again. There must have been hundreds of children they never rescued. Sometimes they never even retrieved their own agents when they got into trouble because of that fear. I'm surprised they went after me, really. Fire and Rain, they're as bad as the Kin...

The Kin...suddenly an entire series of realizations clicked into place, like the pieces of a puzzle. Oh. Oh.

What if that was the reason why Foster Mother hadn't helped her...not that she didn't want to, but that the others wouldn't let her, for fear the elves would discover the existence of dragons? From what she had seen the Kin had as much to fear from the elven lords as the halfbloods...

Lanet startled her out of speculations. "Well," he said, sounding weary already, "there's a wagon-load of something on its way to Altar's estate. I don't know if it's got winter clothing in it or not, but it's full of bales and the bales have Redrel's mark on them."

"And since Redrel's specialty is the manufacture of slave and bondling clothing, it's a good bet," Denelor said with satisfaction. "I doubt one or two bales will be missed until it's too late. Is the wagon covered, or open?"

"Covered, of course," Lanet replied, with obvious irritation. "I wouldn't bother reporting an open wagon, they're useless for our purposes."

"True enough, lad. Well, the bales won't be missed until the wagon is unloaded. Fine, that's a good target, Lanet."

Lanet didn't reply, he just raised his hands over his head and stared at a place on the carpet just beyond his scrying-stone. The other apprentices got out of the way to give him plenty of room. After a moment or two, his hands seemed to be glowing; a moment more, and Shana saw that it wasn't his hands that were glowing, but the rosy mist of light surrounding them.

And in the back of her mind, as she had now learned to "hear," the manifestation of the spell was accompanied by "noise." Not a great deal of noise, for Lanet was quite good at keeping his magic "quiet," but there was certainly an audible component to his magic. When compared to Lanet, Shana's magic roared like a spring thunderstorm, a fact she was profoundly ashamed of once she learned it.

Shana's magic sometimes sounded like music, and sometimes like thunder. Lanet's magic had the sound of a very light rain, a soft pattering, barely perceptible.

Shortly after the glowing mist formed around Lanet's hands, a tiny, rose-colored spark of light appeared above the spot he was staring at. It increased in size, until there was a globe of the rosy mist floating above the carpet itself, a globe just big enough to hold two bales of the size clothing usually was bundled into.

A ghost-image appeared within the mist, of something bulky, box-shaped, and brown. It solidified, until it was no longer an image, but seemed to be a real bale. It was joined shortly by a second, brought into manifestation in the same way.

"Two had better be enough," Lanet said, his voice weak, "because they were farther than I thought. That's it, Master Denelor."

He clapped his hands together and the rosy light vanished. The bales fell to the carpet with a thump. followed by Lanet as he sagged forward with weariness.

Mindi eased forward and carefully cut the burlap covering of one of the bales, exposing a bit of burnt-orange that looked like wool. "Well, it isn't slave clothing," she said, "because it's dyed in colors. It might be blankets, though."

"Either bondling clothing or blankets will do fine," Denelor said with satisfaction. "If it's blankets they can be cut and sewn into warm over-tunics. That's enough, Lanet; well done, and thank you."

"It had better be enough," came the muffled response, "because that's all you're getting from me today."

Now that Shana had seen what was to be done...use whatever form of distance-seeing worked for you, then use the transportation-spell to bring the sought-after objects to Denelor's room...she thought she could probably do her share. But it would be noisy...which meant that if she was going to escape detection by the elven lords, she'd better steal something that was well away from one of the powerful magicians. And that might be a little hard to do.

"I'll take the flour," Denelor was saying, handing the list to Mindi. "It's the bulkiest, so it would be the hardest for you youngsters. That leaves some easier foodstuffs for you youngsters."

"Butter," said Mindi after a quick look at the list. "And cheese. My mother worked in the dairy at Altar's estate; the dairy is half the estate away from the Great House. I know where everything is stored, and I should be able to filch some of both from there without making too big a show."

"I don't know," Kyle mumbled doubtfully, while Shana took a peek over his shoulder at the list. When she saw the fourth item, she suddenly had an idea.

"Master Denelor, would anyone object to fork-horn...I mean, deer...for the meat?" she asked the master wizard.

"I don't think so," he replied, though he looked confused. "Why? What did you have in mind?"

"I know how to find animals, how to scry them out," she said confidently. "I used to scry them for my foster brother." And that was no lie; she used to find Keman the creatures for his kills all the time. She didn't know how to scry then, either. She didn't see why she shouldn't be able to find about any kind of animal now. "I know right now I can't try to manifest anything living and have it survive the trip, but that wouldn't matter if all I was after was meat. I could find a live fork-horn and bring it in ready to clean and skin."

"And that neatly gets around your problems with being so noisy," Denelor said with warm approval. "Excellent notion, Shana. Although, I do think trying to manifest an entire grown deer might be a little beyond your strength. Are you sure you wouldn't care to settle for a flock of ducks or a few rabbits? You could take them one at a time."

She didn't say anything; she simply let him think she agreed with him. Then she sent her mind ranging, looking for a fork-horn. The larger, the better.

She found what she was looking for right away; a buck just out of his prime, a buck that was hanging around the fringes of a herd, with fresh battle-scars on his hide. That meant he had lost his herd to a younger, stronger male. In the way of nature, he was redundant now, as he would pine away over the winter and die in the spring.

Unless she interfered.

She raised her hands, closed her eyes, and began the manifestation.

She was so lost in the spell that she really didn't hear what was going on in the room; all she knew was the moment of trigger, when the (now dead) buck was fully materialized and she could release the spell. She sagged, her chin down on her chest, as the wave of exhaustion hit her.

There was nothing but dead silence in the room.

She looked up finally, when no one even took an audible breath...and met six pairs of round, shocked eyes.

She glanced over at the buck taking up most of the free floorspace; a nice one, if a little bigger than the fork-horns she was used to. He ought to supply enough meat for the entire Citadel for the next week or so.

She looked back at Denelor; he looked positively speechless. He blinked and cleared his throat. In fact, he cleared it three times before he managed to get a word out.

"Th-thank you, Shana," he said carefully. "I think you can take the rest of the week off. You have quite exceeded your...ah...quota."

When Shana wasn't doing chores or having lessons, she liked to explore the unused corridors and tunnels behind the Citadel. Ever since she had learned to make light, she had spent as much time as she could back there. It felt a little like "home," the tunnels of the Lair, except that these tunnels were so regular. Still, as long as she was in the deserted sections, she could dim the light and imagine herself back with Keman, playing hide-and-seek among the caves.

From time to time, it seemed to her that dragons might have had a hand in the building of the Citadel, particularly in the tunnel complex. There were many things that were familiar in the way the tunnels were carved and organized that reminded her of the Lair, most particularly the careful layering, and the multiple entrances and exits. The use of a building to mark the beginning of the tunnels themselves might be coincidence, but that, too, was typical of Kin work.

When Denelor dismissed her, she didn't even go back to her room. Aside from a moment of exhaustion, she felt fine...even though she had moved as much material as Lanet, and Lanet had to be helped to his bed.

But she was never really tired, she thought, watching as one of Rennis's 'prentices came to help Lanet up to his room. Not the way the others were, anyway. Was that what Rennis meant when he said she had a lot of power? Or was it just that Lanet spent a lot more energy in keeping quiet than she did? Did that mean that when she learned how to be really quiet that she would be as worn out as he got when she did magic?

That hardly seemed worth the price of "silence."...

Whatever the cause, she simply wasn't ready to rest when Denelor let her go. So instead of returning to her room, she turned down the corridor into the unused sections, created a light-ball to follow her, and headed for the last place she had been in her explorations.

After a bit of retracing of her steps in the dust, she found the place she had marked with an X of chalk on the wall. She rubbed the mark out, and prepared to explore new territory. This was definitely the oldest part of the Citadel; undisturbed dust lay thick on the floors, and the rock walls were not quite as perfectly finished as in the living quarters. The rooms here also had the look of storage areas; every door she peeked into opened into a place lined with shelves, although whatever had once adorned those shelves was gone.

The room she had last visited, like several others along this corridor, had a name carved into the door: SUPPLIES. She had run out of time when she'd last been here, and had to turn back.

Today she ventured farther along the corridor, only to discover that it made an abrupt right-angle turn when she went beyond that last door and could see farther. She turned that corner, expecting to find only another tunnel, and instead, came to a dead end. The corridor ended, disappointingly, in another heavy wooden door, with a word carved into it.

But she kept going rather than turning back, and she found herself staring at an entirely different word. It had been carved into a thicker door than the others, and was partially worn away by the touch of many hands.

RECORDS, it said.

She felt a tingle of excitement; she unlatched it and pushed the door open. Like all the rest, this room was unlocked, but unlike all the rest, this room contained something. Quite a bit, in fact. And her skin tingled with the unmistakable feel of magic...

A magic that must have been used to preserve the contents of this room.

Records, indeed. Books, scrolls, and piles of loose paper. Thin metal plates with words etched into them, vellum black with age, and yellowed parchment. Row after row, shelf after shelf, an entire roomful of writings. It took her a moment to realize what it was she had stumbled upon.

The...the records of the old halfbloods, the ones that started the Wizard War! Fire and Rain...nobody had ever come looking for them, they'd told her that all the records had been destroyed, but they hadn't been, they were here all along!

Her first impulse was to run back to the inhabited section and fetch her teacher, Denelor. But a second thought stopped her before she even turned around.

She didn't know what was stored here yet. It could be the records everyone claimed they wanted to find. It could just be copies of things they already had. And it could be a worthless lot of junk. She had better see what was here, first, before she got too excited about it.

She chose something at random; a massive, handwritten book that looked important, if weight was anything to go by. The dust that flaked off of it when she picked it up made her sneeze, and the thing proved to be so heavy that she had to put it down on the floor before she could open it to read the first page.

From the Pelugian Chronicles of Laranz, Late Truth-Seeker of the Citadel: In the five hundredth day after the great plague of stygian-hearted beasts called the Elven Kind came to rule over the arid wilderlands called the Uncertain Sands (though not completely, for they never mastered the full-human rovers called the grel-riders) the quills of humans and halfbloods both arose to record one of those unpredictable happenstances which arise from time to time to shift the balance of both the Seen and the Unseen.

The so-called "civilized" Clans of the Elven Lords...most especially the High Lords, whose power is of the greatest, and whose magic seems to know no bounds...looked upon the Desert as a vexing and frustrating enigma, that seemed to exist only as a continual goad and irritant upon the refined and delicate sensibilities of their enlightened kind. Truthfully, the grel-riders had no organization to speak of, owing to their particularly intractable nature, the impossibility of ruling over such an expanse of nothingness, the hereditary hatred with which each Clan of a particular lineage greeted every other Clan, and the Desert itself, with its extremes of heat and cold, its poisonous creatures, its lack of water, and its unpredictable weather. Therefore the Elven Lords let necessity make a virtue of the inevitable, and permitted the grel-riders to not only maintain their hold upon the Desert expanse, but establish lawless trade-enclaves upon the borders of their estates, often to the detriment of their own stock, and the peace and prosperity of their bondlings.

For the grel-riders were the last agents of rebellion, and the only members of the human race who had not fallen in subjugation to the Elven Kind. Yet, because of the implacable hatred which they held for those who lived not in the Desert, they held the rest of mankind to be as much their enemies as the Elven Lords.

Seeking allies, the rebels among the Elven lands sent agents to the riders, but all to no avail, and three half-crazed sisters even sought a tripartite talisman among the ruins of the cities the Elven

Lords had destroyed, a talisman that was said to be the final protection of Mankind against any and all foes. They died horribly, and...

Shana blinked, and closed the cover of the book. "What on earth did they do?" she asked the other volumes about her. "Pay this fellow by the word?" Then she looked again at the thickness of the book. "Or was it by the weight?"

She regarded the book thoughtfully for a moment. Finally, she shoved it against the door, which kept threatening to swing shut. It made an admirable doorstop. In fact, it might have been created just for that purpose.

She smiled and turned back to the shelves again...skipping anything that was too heavy to lift.

AND I CANNOT understand what madness has come over us. We stood upon the very brink of victory; the elven lords were besieged in a handful of fortified estates, their armies reduced to a fraction, their bondlings in revolt and their own numbers decimated. And yet our leaders stopped short of the final conflict to turn against one another. It is insanity, and if the elven lords do not take advantage of our foolishness, I will next expect three moons to rise instead of one.

Two-Week, Month of the Spring Moon. It has happened as I feared; the elven lords have broken the siege, and are now, in turn, harrying us. I was of no party in particular, I cared only that those devils in fair-seeming be destroyed as they destroyed so many of their slaves. To that end I worked; to that end I continue to work, though now the cause seems hopeless indeed. The elves are regaining all the ground they lost, and more of the humans desert us every day.

Three-Week, Month of the Spring Moon. While Jasen disputed tactics with Lorn Haldorf, and Mormegan quarreled over territory with Atregale, the elven lords were not idle. They struck down Lorn by magic, taking Jasen in the very next instant with that thrice-damned elf-shot. Not a week agone, Mormegan called Atregale out and the twain dueled with knives...and both died. Four of our leaders gone, in less than a month! And I fear there is worse to come. The scattered armies of the elven lords are regrouping, and yet our own leaders are too lost in their own squabbles to take note of disaster after disaster...

Shana puzzled her way through the blotched, stained book with its crabbed, slantwise writing in the margins with excitement and sympathy for the author. She had discovered this strange journal, written in the empty space of an otherwise uninteresting treatise on hog-farming, during the course of going through the books in the Records room. Most of them up until now had been accounts of stores, or very dull histories of the land before the arrival of the elves, with an occasional chronicle on the original conquest of the humans by the elven lords. The doorstop was one such; Shana had tried three times without success to thread her way through the labyrinthine prose. The most she could glean from it was that the author had a sneaking admiration for the elven overlords, however much he protested otherwise...she often got the feeling that he considered the elven lords to be a civilizing force on the otherwise barbaric humans. If he was a typical specimen of an educated halfblood, small wonder that the elves had held sway for as long as they had. The book always made her want to wash her hands after she put it away, and not because of physical dirt. She was quite certain that if she had ever met the author of that work, she would have found him as repellent as his views.

But this...this was no chronicle written by an effete scribe sitting on a fat cushion and watching others act, with the detachment of a little tin god. This was a personal diary, a day-by-day account of the last moments of the Wizard War, written by someone who could understand no more than Shana why they had failed so close to victory.

But she was getting some hints as to the "why"...and the "how" was self-evident...

What if the elves had used traitors; humans or halfbloods intended to make trouble? Suppose they used halfbloods with mind-powers to actually manipulate the leaders of the wizard side, to make them jealous of each other, to make them so confident of winning that they figured they could take the time to get rid of a rival... or two... or three.

That was what this journal was beginning to suggest, at least to her mind. Trouble within the ranks, but caused by the elven lords. That was a possibility that had evidently never occurred to the author of those scrawled passages; he could not imagine anyone of human or halfblood lineage who could willingly choose the elven lords' side over the wizards'.

It had to be: How else would they have known, over and over, exactly when and where to strike the leaders in the midst of their own quarrels?

It certainly made a great deal of sense, especially if that traitor had the human-magic powers to meddle with other peoples' minds. That was the one thing the wizards didn't guard against, because the elves couldn't read or influence thoughts. They never entertained the idea that one of their own might turn against them.

One name kept recurring over and over...not as a powerful war-leader among the elves, but as a lord who was always at the right place, at the right time, taking wizard after wizard by surprise. It was a name that Shana had heard before, one she was coming to dread.

Lord Dyran.

From everything she knew or had learned these past several weeks, Lord Dyran was a lord to be reckoned with. Unlike his fellow lords, he gave humans (and, one supposed, halfbloods) full credit for intelligence. He had never been known to underestimate an enemy, and his schemes always contained layers of contingency plans. Clever, crafty, completely without scruples, it would be typical of him to think of subverting one of the wizards to his side. And that name had just cropped up again in the journal.

Two-week, Month of the One-horn. Lord Dyran had been seen riding the bounds of the forest that hides us, and I feared the worst. Now the worst has come to pass. The last of us sought shelter here in the Citadel, thinking we could, perhaps, hide here in peace until the elven lords ceased to search for us. But another enemy has found us out, and although I have no proof, I feel Lord Dyran had something to do with it.