Elvenbane

Plague.

We have been afflicted with a terrible, wasting fever. It strikes with no warning, no symptom of illness, and within one hour or less the victim is raving and burning with fever. Oh, I know what is said, that Leland Ander created this disease, and that it somehow escaped him. True, he was meddling with a fever, hoping to create a weapon to be used against the elven lords from afar. And true again, he was the first to fall victim. But I cannot think that he would have been so careless as to let the fever free of his control. No, it was Lord Dyran somehow, I know it in my bones.

Four-week, Month of the One-horn. Now it is my turn. Like the others with the disease, I have locked myself in my room while the rest flee or avoid me. We were so close, so very close, to victory. Not even elf-shot, that cursed missile that kills or paralyzes upon merest contact, could save the elven lords. Nothing stopped us...until we stopped ourselves. I am writing this, I think, in the hope that someday another of halfblood may read these words. Beware the elven lords! Beware their wiles, and expect bought traitors in your own ranks! Most especially, beware Lord Dyran, for he knows the ways to weakness, the paths to subvert the soul. And he will use them.

Shana turned the page, but that was all that remained. She didn't even know the writer's name, much less whether or not he survived the fever.

She slammed the book down in frustration, and went hunting among the shelves for another personal chronicle, but found nothing. At least, not anything more by the unknown journal-writer, and no other personal narratives of the same sort. Finally, in hopes of at least learning more about the old wizards, she sorted the books by category, relegating everything that was not a history of some kind to the back shelves.

Histories remained on the front shelves; not as many of them as she would have preferred. She did find more chronicles of the war, though; these were written with more detail, if less passion.

Through them, she learned some of the tactics the wizards used...and some of the weapons they employed. Either these were tricks the wizards of the present day had forgotten, or else they hadn't yet decided Shana was trustworthy enough to learn them. Again and again, she had to marvel at the old wizards' abilities. And her guess was confirmed, not once, but a dozen times, that the wizards had been defeated by treachery from within...caused by the elves.

Once the resources of the Records room were exhausted, as the winter season continued its slow march to spring outside the Citadel, she went hunting deeper into the tunnel complex, looking for more traces of those last days. Winter meant a little less in the way of mess; people tended to stay in their rooms and putter about rather than venture outside into the cold. Furthermore, faced with a mess they would have to live with, at least for a bit, the wizards also tended to clean up after themselves a little more regularly. That gave her time to explore, and she used every bit of it.

She found a dozen escape tunnels, most unknown to the current occupants of the Citadel, a few of them so long she never bothered to follow them in order to discover where they emerged. She would traverse twisting corridors lined only with tiny sleeping cubicles and closets, expecting to come to more living quarters or storage rooms, only to find a dead end. She would open the door to something she thought was a storage closet, only to find that it let out into a complex of rooms. The deeper she went into the bowels of the place, the more convoluted and strange the arrangements became.

Which was very draconic... Not the structure, but the complicated way it had been built.

Alara had constructed just such dead-end tunnels, just such rooms-within-rooms, in her own lair. And she was by no means among the most fervid builders. The Kin were firm believers in constructing their homes with an eye to protection against invasion; whoever penetrated a dragon's lair would have no notion of how to find his way through it. That same principle seemed to be at work here. No two private lairs were alike; and no two Lairs of Kin-groups were similar, either. The Citadel was built along the lines of lairs within the greater Lair, with a common area that was relatively easy to navigate, and personal quarters deep within the hills that were anything but, each with its own escape route nearby, and each with its own defenses. Shana began to think that, even if most of the construction had been performed by the wizards, a dragon had at least had a hand in it, and she began looking for signs that would prove her theory, besides searching for more of the old records.

One day in the deepest heart of winter, Shana came to yet another dead end, and turned back in weary frustration. It had not been a good day. Master Denelor had taken a cold and gone to bed. That meant no lessons and more work, cleaning up after him; he was not a good patient, and he demanded a great deal of his 'prentices when he was ill. Shana was tired of making tea, reading dull histories, warming milk, changing the bedclothes, brewing medicines, washing the bedclothes, and making more tea. Finally Lanet came to take her place and she managed to escape, taking up yesterday's explorations, only to discover that she had hit yet another dead end.

She turned to retrace her steps...when the light from her mage-globe caught the rock wall of the tunnel in a peculiar way. There seemed to be a perfectly straight crack in the tan wall, a little in front of where she stood.

She stopped; the globe, which she had set to follow her in a certain way, so that its light came over her shoulder without blinding her, stopped too. She turned back, reversing herself, but slowly and deliberately.

The light from the globe glinted on the shiny surface...which was marred by a perfectly straight, regular crack. One that ran from floor to just above her head, and over...

She ran her fingers over the wall, tracing the outline of a door by feel. Just as she got to the place where a handle would have been, she felt the stone give a little, shifting under her fingers.

There were rumors of secret rooms and passages in the Citadel...as if the construction alone wasn't confusing enough...but Shana had never found one, nor had she ever talked to one of the 'prentices who had.

But if there really were secret places, she had a shrewd notion that the senior wizards would keep that little fact to themselves...

She pushed the place that had shifted...and a section of the stone depressed, forming a handle.

It seemed that she had finally found one of those secret passages. Now she began to wonder just how many of those dead-end corridors had held such a secret. Her heart raced with excitement; she couldn't have stopped herself now if someone had told her there was a hungry one-horn on the other side of that door. She fitted her fingers into the recess, and pulled.

The door swung smoothly open, and she stepped inside the room thus revealed.

Rooms. There was a doorway in the opposite wall, and she saw a corner of a bedstead through the opening. But that wasn't what excited her.

As she had passed the threshold, she had felt the tingle of energy on her skin that marked a simple spell upon the room. From the pristine condition of the place, she suspected that it was a preservation-spell, the kind that had been at work in the Records room. Denelor had shown her how to set one just this week, before he had fallen ill. Passing her hand through the field of his spell, she had felt exactly the same kind of tingle as the one she had just experienced.

This room looked as if it were still occupied. The smooth gray rock walls showed no trace of age or dust. The floor, paved in gray-and-white mosaic tile, was just as clean. There were books on the table, pen and ink waiting beside clean paper, a fire laid ready to light in the fireplace.

She started as the door swung closed, and jumped to put her back against the wall, half expecting to see the owner of the room behind her, about to demand the reason for her intrusion...

But she was quite alone. The silence was incredible; she had never been in a place that was quite this quiet.

She moved carefully to the black-lacquered desk, attracted by the books there. It was surprisingly neat, for a wizard's; Denelor tended to pile things up until they fell over. Most of his fellows had the same habits, or so she had learned in talking with the other apprentices.

They're lazy, that's what, she decided abruptly, taking note of the careful placement of everything on the desk. They had 'prentices to clean up after them, so they didn't worry about whether things fell on the floor or not. Back in the old days, everybody was doing something, and there weren't any 'prentices. Every wizard had to clean up after himself.

She scratched her head and wrinkled her nose. Would do them good to have that happen now... losing all the 'prentices might make them get some better habits.

She reached for the first of the books lined up in a careful row between two heavy pieces of rough, uncut crystal. It didn't have quite the look of something "official," like a chronicle, or a spellbook. She hoped it might contain personal notes, or something of the sort. And when she opened it up, she discovered within the first couple of words that it was not even a wizard's book...

For this was a personal journal...like the scribbled journal in the margin of the hog-raising book. But this was something she had not even dreamed could exist here...the diary of a shape-changed dragon, written in the language of the Kin, that rare, written form that she and Keman had learned to read under Alara's tutelage.

Dazed, she put out her hand and caught the back of the chair before her knees went to water. Still in a half-daze, she eased herself down onto the gray, leather-covered cushion, and began to read.

She came back to herself as her stomach began to growl, and only then did she realize how late it was.

Fortunately, she would not be missed until morning...but it must already be well into the evening, and she had barely begun the first of seven volumes chronicling the adventures of the young dragon, Kalamadea. He had begun this change as a test, in yet another example of draconic meddling in the lives of humans, elves, and halfbloods. His journal made it clear just how common a thing that was, even though the numbers of the Kin then on this world were much smaller than they were in the present day. Shana was a little overwhelmed by it all. She'd never suspected just how deeply involved the Kin were...or had been...in the lives of those they studied.

She started to rise, and hesitated. She didn't want to leave...but she had to. She couldn't stay here, after all. And the books wouldn't run away.

If she took these books with her, and somebody happened to find them in her quarters, they'd find out about the Kin...

Worse than that, they'd find out about how the Kin had meddled, and for how long. Kalama had been more frank in this journal than Shana had ever known any of the Kin to be. He hadn't been at all reticent about the fact of his shape-change, of what he was and where he was from, and why he had infiltrated the wizards...

And if anyone read them, the secrets of the dragons would be out in the open...the wizards would start to watch for them, and might even try to kill them. And if the wizards knew about the Kin, they might well leak the information to the elven lords to give their enemies a different target to hunt.

All they had to do was open the book and begin reading at any point to see what the dragons had been up to for centuries, how they had interfered without anyone guessing they existed.

Why, all it would take would be a single glance at the book, written in the strange script...

She began laughing, then, at her own foolishness. What am I thinking of? All they had to do? Of course, that was hardly going to be a simple task! Certainly, a reader could learn about the Kin...If they could read the draconic writings!

Nobody can read this stuff except me!

Even the Kin couldn't all read the written form of their own language; Alara had taught Keman because he was likely to become a shaman, and had taught Shana because she showed some of the same talents. But Myre hadn't wanted to learn, nor had most of the other young of the Kin.

It would be safe to assume that anyone who could read these books already knew everything there was to know about the Kin. In fact, it would be perfectly safe to assume, given what Shana had read already, that anyone who could read these words was a shape-changed dragon, hiding among the wizards for purposes known only to the Kin.

Possibly even to keep an eye on her.

She gathered up the books in one arm, and took them to the door with her. There was no earthly reason why she could not take them with her and read them at her leisure.

Certainly no one else would be able to.

I am alone in the Citadel. The rest are either dead, or gone. Perhaps the reason I survived the fever is because of what I am; certainly no one else that contracted it lived to tell the tale. That I know of; admittedly, I have no idea what happened after I took to my bed, or even what transpired outside the Citadel cavern.

It is just as well that the Kin are prepared to do without food for long periods, so long as we remain inactive. Once my illness became known and I closed the door to the corridor, there was not a soul alive, who would have been willing to help me. Not that I blame them, given the mortality rate of this disease.

When I recovered from my long fever-dream, it was to a silent world. I mustered the last of my strength, and sought the storerooms, hungry enough to have eaten my very books, and too weak to have chewed the pages!

But there was food there; in fact, there were more than enough journey-packs to see me through the initial few days of my recovery. I dragged them...literally, for I could not lift them, I, who once flew with entire fork-horns in my claws...back to my room. I did not even have the strength to shift my shape! Three of the hard cakes of journey-bread are soaking now; and it is all I can do to keep from snatching them up and trying to eat them right now. Try, for that would be all I could do; I am too weak even to pound a piece off to suck on.

I have propped the door open, hoping to hear someone stirring in the far reaches of the Citadel, but there is nothing. I suppose I should be glad, for it means that the elven lords have not found...or been shown...our last hiding place. But I cannot be glad, for I keep wondering about all those companions who built the rebellion with me, and who remained true to its ideals when others fell prey to ambition and greed.

What happened to them? Lasen Orvad, Jeof Lenger, Resa Sheden, where are you? Do you live, did the illness claim you as it did so many others...or did you escape the fever only to fall into the hands of our enemies?

Yes, our enemies, my friends. Though I am not of your blood, and though I came to this enterprise intending only to amuse myself, I came to believe in it, and in you. When I called you my friends, I meant it. And your enemies are mine, for as long as I live, and that will be long, indeed. I shall not let your dream die, if I am permitted to continue.

Three days later: I do not know the real date, for I have no notion how long I lay in fever. A very long time, I think, for dust was over everything, and the journey-bread was stale. Some of my friends escaped, I know now, for I found notes to that effect in their rooms. Though what became of them after they left the safety of the Citadel, I do not know.

I, too, shall escape as soon as I am able. I am afraid that any of the halfblood who returned and found me here would assume I was a traitor. It was known that I had the fever, and I think that any who survived it would likely be suspected to be in the pay and care of the elven lords. Without magic...or a draconic constitution...I cannot see how anyone could survive it.

There are three tunnels I might use. I shall check all of them, and use the best of the three. If luck is with me, I will emerge in the wilderness, and there I will be, able to resume my natural form and rejoin the Kin. If it is not...

But I will not think of that. One day, if I can, I will return and reclaim this journal of the war. If not, it will be a puzzle for whoever finds it. They will surely think it is in some kind of code. I wish them luck in deciphering it!

There the page ended, and the rest of the seventh and last book was blank. Whatever had happened to-the dragon-wizard after that passage, he had not recorded it in his book.

Shana closed the book with a feeling of frustration, put it down on the chest beside her bed, and lay back down, staring at the ceiling as she thought. The globe of mage-light burned steadily, without flickering, as the lights Alara had placed in their lair did, and as did the elven lords' glowing ceilings; unlike the firelight, candles, and lanterns humans made do with.

How much were the halfbloods like their elven fathers, and how little like their human mothers, at least in power? And how very much like the Kin.

The fate of Kalama gnawed at her. She had the feeling that his fate held the keys to hers. If only she knew more! If only she knew at least what had happened to him after he locked his books away and left his rooms for the last time!

Well, now she certainly knew why the Kin shape-shifted. It seemed that their primary form of amusement was to manipulate the elves and their human slaves and see how they would react. And that, indeed, was how Kalama had begun his career.

Her head swam at the thought of all the ways in which the Kin could...and doubtless, did...interfere with elven lives, and so with the humans under their rule. Some did so for sheer amusement. Some did so to test themselves.

But some...like Kalama...began for the sake of entertainment, but continued because they saw a great wrong being done, and decided to help do something about it.

She thought that she would probably like Kalama a great deal, if only she could meet him. He sounded a lot like Keman, with his ideas of what was right and fair. He admitted in his journal that he had started out on this venture with the idea in mind that manipulating the lives of these "lesser creatures" would be entertaining, but before long he was passionately involved with them. He simply could not sit back and permit the wrongs he saw to persist, could not help but interfere, this time with a constructive purpose.

So he had shifted to a halfblood, and joined the newly founded rebellion. He had helped to build the Citadel, and had suggested many of its defenses. He had fought the Wizard War as a participant, not an observer...and not as a leader, either, but as one of the lesser wizards, one who went out and took his place in the front lines of the fighting.

She had learned a great deal about those old ones, not the powers they wielded, but rather, about them personally. Through his eyes she had seen the wizards who had been nothing more than names to her, the leaders who won and lost the rebellion. They became people to her...she learned how their simple quarrels with each other had mounted into hatreds, the animosity that foundered the war. And she became convinced, as he was, that the elves had a hand in their problems.

And now the chronicle was at an end. Shana would know nothing more of the shape-shifted wizard, and she felt an odd kind of loss. She wondered what became of him, though she now knew that he was the one who had found the scribbled over book on hog-farming in the room of a fever victim, and had replaced it in the Records room in the hopes that someone else would come upon it and read it.

Either he finished recovering and left, or one of the halfbloods came back, thought he was an enemy, and killed him. As he had said, if they found him alive, they might think he was a traitor.

She hoped he had escaped. Even as the wizards he described had become people to her, so much more had he come to life in her mind. She felt that she knew him, that he was even a kind of friend. If he escaped, he might well still be alive somewhere, in some other Lair. And since he had interested himself in the affairs of the halfbloods, he might well do so again. She might meet him. She wondered what his reaction would be when she identified herself, using Kin tongue.

She turned on her side and gestured her light-globe away; it dwindled down to a point, then vanished, leaving her in the absolute darkness only found underground.

She would to have to keep quiet about all this, she decided, after a moment of thought. If there were traitors among the halfbloods before, there might well be again. She certainly wouldn't be able to tell. Lord Dyran played some pretty deep games; if he decided it was worth the loss of a few children he'd have to destroy anyway, he could be willing to leave the halfbloods alone as long as they stayed hidden away and didn't steal from him. Which they wouldn't; if Denelor wouldn't, none of them would. And they were stealing from Dyran's enemies, which ought to please him.

The thought that Dyran might know all about them was chilling, and she resolved to get herself out of the Citadel as soon as she was practiced and adept enough to work her magic silently. If even one of elven lords knew about this place, it wasn't a shelter, it was a trap. It was only a matter of time before it became a bargaining chip in their endless games with each other. And it was a chip that an elven lord would never hesitate to gamble away.

She'd go back to the room and return the books, she decided. She didn't want anyone else to find them, even if they couldn't read them. Then she'd see if Kalama had left any of his hoard behind. Elves and humans could mate; maybe shape-shifted dragons and humans could, or elves and dragons. Maybe she was one of those. Or maybe halfbloods could use jewels the way the Kin did, to boost their powers; maybe halfblood magic was enough like the Kin's that gems would work for them, too. It was worth trying. Anything was worth trying, if it would get her out of here faster.

Absolutely anything.

She spent the next several days following the faint personal marks etched on the walls of the corridors of this section, the twisted glyph that stood for "Kalamadea" combined with the one for "Thunder-Dancer," which meant he was a shaman as well as a shape-shifter. He had probably put them here during the building of the place, scratching them in with a talon when no one else was looking, or carving them with his rock-shaping magic. He had signed his chronicles with both of those glyphs, and when Shana had checked outside the door to his lair, she had found that same glyph cut faintly into the rock, just beyond the door, and as tall as she was. On watch for the glyphs now, she found several storage places, now empty, and one or two rooms that looked as if he had used them for experiments in magic. Perhaps he had been trying to duplicate some of the powers the wizards demonstrated.

After nearly a week of searching without reward, her persistence finally paid off. She found a glyph inside one of the storerooms she had already searched. It pointed to another in an otherwise blank wall, one without even a storage rack on it. She put her palm to the glyph on the wall, this time one surrounded by a circle, and pushed and twisted at the same time, in the direction suggested by the glyph. A click heralded her success; a section of the wall a little bigger than her hand loosened on one side, and she pried it open and swung it outwards like a tiny door.

And inside the recess disclosed she caught the glint of jewels, a spark of red and green, a hint of blue.

It wasn't a large hoard; in fact, it probably wasn't Kalama's major hoard. It was probably an emergency cache, the kind Alara had scattered all over the lair and outside it, comprised of secondary gemstones that would serve if she could not, for some reason, reach her primary hoard. There were, perhaps, fifty or sixty stones in it, mostly semiprecious. But that was all right; semiprecious quartz and turquoise had worked as well for Alara as rubies and emeralds. Value and rarity did not matter, so long as the stone worked with the magic.

The problem was the sheer number of stones. There was no way she could put them all in her pockets, and if she carried them in the skirt of her tunic, someone would undoubtedly see them and demand a share, or all. Shana had come prepared, though; she had a square scarf with her that was just the right size to carry the gems in. She reached into the recess and lifted the stones out a few at a time, tying them all up into a bundle inside the scarf. She got them back to her room without incident and hid them under her clothing in the chest. Her hoard had been taken away from her twice, now; she was not in the mood to have it happen a third time.

She didn't get a chance to do anything more that day, but when her chores and lessons were complete the following day she headed straight for her room and took out her little bundle, opening it up as she sat cross-legged on her bed.

She spilled the lot into her lap, trying to simulate the way the dragons lay upon their gems to use them, and put herself into a calm, trancelike state.

Keman, she thought dreamily, once she reached trance-state. The first thing she needed to do was try to talk to Keman.

She closed her eyes and concentrated on the memory of her foster brother's image, building it up, scale by scale. When she thought she had him, when he seemed real enough to touch, she reached, with all her strength.

She had tried this before, but had simply not had the strength to send her thoughts past the borders of the forest. This time she thought she "heard" something, very faint and far off, in response...but it was too faint to make out, and certainly not clear enough to guarantee that she had reached him.

So near...She couldn't resist; she tried to stretch just a little farther, but a sharp pain stabbing between her brows threw her out of trance, and made her give it up as a bad job.

She sighed, opened her eyes, and stared down at the winking jewels in her lap. Maybe the problem was that she was trying to use all of them at once, she thought, finally. Maybe if she tried just one at a time, she'd be able to get it to work.

But there were fifty or sixty gemstones there, and all of them were different. It was a daunting task.

Oh well, she thought with resignation. What else did she have but time?

So she spilled the rest back into their scarf, picked up the first, a cabochon beryl; rested it in the palm of her hand, looked deeply into it, and concentrated...

Alara followed the faint scent of dragon in the thin, cold air, putting all of her strength into each wing-beat as she sent herself higher and higher into the mountains on the western edge of the Kin's territory. The thin atmosphere was hard to fly through; she was panting with effort, and even after shifting her lungs to compensate, she was still having a hard time keeping up the pace in this tenuous air.

Keman had been gone since early fall; it was midwinter, and still Alara had not been able to find him. The Lair was in chaos, with half of the dragons demanding that she go fetch him, and if need be, the halfblood...and the other half demanding that she disinherit him or hunt him and Shana down.

She was in something of a state herself. Certainly Keman was no younger than she had been when she made her first foray into the elven lands, but she had not been alone. And she had not been off on the trail of a halfblood...a creature who, if she were discovered, could get them both killed.

And as for Shana...

Fire and Rain, she thought, with an ache in her heart, of pain and guilt and loss so sharp it might just as well be brand new. She loved that child. She might not be Kin-blood, but she was Kin to the heart, and child of Alara's soul, and had a better grasp of Kin honor than most of the Lair. They should never have done what they had to Shana.

She clamped her jaws together with anger. No matter what the rest said, that had been the worst decision the Kin had ever made. They should have exiled that little bully Rovylern, or sent him to another Lair to teach him discipline. If anything, now that Keman and Shana were both gone, he was acting worse than before. His mother encouraged him, and Lori had all but stolen Alara's own daughter away from her with petting and indulgences. And because Alara was the shaman, she couldn't say or do anything about it. If children chose to leave their blood-mother to go to another, self-chosen foster mother, that was permissible within the Laws of the Kin. If Alara broke those Laws, she'd better have a reason for doing so...

A very good, logical reason. Just now, all she had was an emotional one.

But there was one court of appeal she could still resort to, and desperation had driven her to seek him out. Father Dragon, if she could find him, could lend his authority to her cause.

He was not an easy creature to find. He had long ago given up a lair of his own, having grown past the size where he was comfortable in anything but the most immense of caverns. And since he saw himself as being, not with any one Lair, but with all the Kin, he traveled frequently.

She had traced him from Ladarenao's Lair, to Peleonavande's Lair, to here. Now she was searching the mountains themselves, tracking him by her own knowledge of what he was like, where he tended to perch, what he found interesting enough to watch, and the faintest of hints of scent that came to her on the snow-chilled breezes.

But now the scent was more than a faint hint, and the landscape below her was composed of rocky outcrops overlooking pockets of pine forest or meadow. She flew low over the mountainsides, watching for a sign of him. This was the kind of territory Father Dragon liked the best; he could spend weeks watching the wildlife in a single meadow.

Something moved beneath her; sun glinted off a shiny surface that might have been an ice-formation, but for that movement. She folded her wings and dove without thinking, spreading her wing-membranes at the last possible moment, and landing beside the spot, backwinging and throwing up clouds of powdery snow and ice-crystals.

Father Dragon turned his head slowly; he had bleached his scales to pure white to blend in with the snow and ice around him, but had not camouflaged himself in any other way. Then again, he was so nearly invisible against the white snow and pale ice, he probably didn't need to do anything else.

:Alara,: he acknowledged. :You seem agitated. What brings you to my retreat?:

"I need your help, shaman," she blurted, speaking aloud, her voice echoing across the rocks in the chill, thin air.

He simply looked at her; a blank expression that said, wordlessly, "You know better than to ask for help."

Her face prickled with embarrassment.

A shaman didn't ask for help, she reminded herself. A shaman found answers. That was a stupid request. She knew better than to ask for help.

"I need your advice, Father Dragon," she said, bowing her head a little. "I'm in a terrible position, and I can't see my way out of it. Our Lair is in turmoil. If I can return with advice from you..."

"Don't they trust your advice anymore?" Father Dragon rumbled gently.

Her face prickled again, but she accepted the shame and embarrassment. "No," she admitted, "they don't. I am afraid I am part of the problem."

She continued with the entire story of the situation, beginning with Rovy's bullying of Keman and Shana and ending with Keman's running away for the second time. Father Dragon closed his eyes while she spoke, but Alara did not have the feeling that he was ignoring her. Rather, she got the distinct impression he was concentrating on her every word. She waited, her heart slowing, and her feet growing cold.

He sat in silence for a very long time after she finished her tale, while the sun began to descend towards the horizon, and the air grew perceptibly cooler. He continued his silence while deer emerged from the trees to paw the snow aside and eat the sere grasses beneath.

She composed herself with a little difficulty, changed her circulation to warm her feet, and waited for him to speak.

:The children represent a greater change than the Kin may be prepared to face,: he said suddenly in her mind, making her jump. The deer looked nervously in her direction, and one remained on guard while the others lowered their heads to the grass again. I cannot advise you to any one path. You must decide for yourself whether you are willing to accept that much change, and if the others are willing to follow your example, so be it. The Kin forced Shana to her path, and Keman has obviously already chosen it as well. He has chosen to do without your protection, and this much, at least, you have no choice but to accept.:

She replied the same way, bewildered. :But...what am I going to do about that? He's out there, likely to be caught, and that involves all the Kin...:

:The Kin have lost the protection of their "invisibility, ": he replied immediately. :Nothing you do or don't do will change that. The world at large is about to discover their existence. And in my opinion...which is only my opinion...this is a good thing.:

Alara shivered at the images his words called up; the anger of elven lords in full power, and the terrible things she had witnessed them doing. :How can it be a good thing?: she asked. :The elven lords are powerful and cruel, and once they know we exist, they will give us no peace.:

:Which is a good thing.: He opened one eye to look at her wryly. :Since coming here the Kin have become lazy. In the beginning, yes, we were few, and the elven lords could have destroyed us. We are no longer few, we are no longer weak, and the elven lords are no longer unchallenged. Circumstances have changed, but we have not. And now, without something to challenge us, the Kin are complacent and fat, and disinclined to bestir themselves over anything. The only thing that moves them to any kind of action is the possibility of mischief-making. Now they will have no choice. Now they will be forced to take an active role in protecting themselves, and possibly even seek outside the Kin for allies. But they won't like it.:

He closed his eye again, and settled himself a little deeper into the snow. It was obvious to Alara that he had said all that he was going to.

She waited while the sun set and gilded the snow with a pale flush as it descended. She waited while the moon rose and a million stars appeared overhead, painfully bright in the clear, thin air of the heights.

And finally, as the deer finished feeding and picked their way back to the shelter of their trees, she gave up. She fanned the air with her wings, and leapt for the sky, beating her wings so strongly that another shower of snow flew everywhere, a good deal of it spraying all over the huge, white sprawl of Father Dragon.

He gave no sign that he even noticed.

She circled three times, still waiting for another response, but got nothing. Not even a stirring of thought. Father Dragon might just as well have been a great snow-covered ice-sculpture.

Not only was he not going to solve her problem for her, he had no intention of giving her any more direction than she already had.

She flew off to the east, back towards the Lair, her frustration more than enough to keep her warm on the long flight back.

IT SEEMED VERY strange to be standing on two limbs instead of four, but Keman had gotten used to it.

What he couldn't get used to was all the two-leggers. People, he reminded himself. They were people. Not "two-leggers." Whatever, they were everywhere he went, and everywhere he looked.

This city was as full of them as an anthill, it felt like an anthill, crowded and congested, with every human in the place going somewhere on some task. The elves...might have been the drones. Pampered and cared for, without a great deal of effort on their part. Even the lowest of elves had at least a handful of human slaves to serve him... most had more than a handful. Humans were cheap, plentiful, and constantly reproducing.

Keman looked out of the window of his second-story room at the crowds below, streaming along the street on the other side of the wall around this townhouse, and tried to convince himself that the task he had taken on was not an impossible one. There were times he wondered; times he was tempted to turn right around and run home to his mother.

He had arrived at the city in the guise of a young elven lord; one with just enough magic to be treated with deference, but not enough to be a threat, or even particularly interesting. But by the time he managed to reach the city, after taking a circuitous route to confuse anyone on his trail, it was already autumn, and Shana was long gone.

He found the city alive with rumors and crawling with the agents of every major elven lord he'd ever heard his mother mention. There was no room in any of the inns, even if he'd had the coin to spend, and changing his guise to a human bondling would have restricted his movements too much. He wandered the streets for a couple of days, leaving the city by night to hunt, and tried to find a way to get himself into the circles of those who knew something.

And, just as important, tried to find somewhere he could live, at least temporarily.

He despaired of finding a place to stay until he decided to act like a young elven lord and risk everything in one bold move. To his amazement, it worked. He got himself quarters in Lord Alinor's townhouse by strolling up to the door and announcing that he had been sent. He didn't specify by whom he had been sent, or for what purpose, and no one ever ventured to ask him. Lord Alinor's elven underlings were too busy with matters more important than the presence or absence of one young guest, arid the human bondlings assumed the elves knew what he was there for.

He'd been given one small room...small by his standards, at least...overlooking the street. He figured out pretty quickly what his putative status was. Too high to be put in the servants' quarters, and not high enough to be given a ground-floor or upper-floor suite.

He wasn't the only young elven lord there either, and most of them seemed to have just as little to do as he did..."

He spent most of his time in the streets, either in elven or human guise, listening to anyone who would talk to him, buying drinks for those with loose tongues, cultivating his peers in Lord Alinor's house, and gambling occasionally...never twice with the same person; he'd figured out that much...and always winning. Working with Shana he had learned that draconic magic was suitable for manipulating dice and knucklebones, even if it couldn't pick up rocks and hurl them through the air. He had used some of the gems of his hoard for his first stakes; now he had enough coin in his pocket to buy drink for bondlings and lesser elves who looked as if they might have information, and to entertain the other young elves when their boredom took them out of the house.

And he could usually win whatever he'd spent on them back before the evening was over. There were some advantages to this form, one of which was that no one ever considered he might be cheating. He simply looked too young and callow. And elven magic simply didn't work that way. Anyone who was possessed of magic powerful enough to enable him to cheat at dice would not have bothered with cheating at dice.

He had considered moving himself to an inn after the first couple of weeks...but those were still full, and the agents, human and elven, who had taken the rooms were suspicious of everything and everyone. Above all, he needed to be invisible. Some ^of those agents might be more Kin in shape-change, and if they learned what he was, he might well be recaptured and bundled home to Alara.

He had managed to learn a great deal in the past several weeks; most of it about Shana, and none of it liable to get him to her.

The story was a strange one. Lord Dyran's bondling had bought her at auction; he carried the Lord's own gold, and the representatives, of several other elven lords recognized him.

But then the same man had come running up, out of breath, and as angry as a bondling was permitted to be, just as the auction closed. He swore he had not bought the girl; he swore he had fallen asleep in his room at the Lord's town house...while standing. He had been found on the floor where he had collapsed, by one of Lord Dyran's other slaves. He had been roused and then taken to the auction...only to learn that the girl was gone and he had supposedly bought her!

It was extremely unlikely, so common opinion ran, that the man lied. That could only mean he'd been bespelled and another had taken his place to buy the girl. But who? And, more important to Keman, why?

He was fairly certain that it was not another underling of Lord Dyran, although that was one of the many rumors. If it had been, the bondling who had lost the girl would have vanished, never to be heard of again. And whatever servant had arranged for the actual purchase would be in ascendancy. Instead, the bondling had been questioned and demoted, but was still alive and in Lord Dyran's service. And there had been no power changing hands on Lord Dyran's estate.

So said the most trustworthy and reliable of Roman's informants, another young elven lord, cynical, disaffected from his own father, who would have had ideals if only he didn't see honor, loyalty and truth bartered about among his elders like any other coin. Or so Keman surmised. The young man talked a great deal about these things, but still treated the human slaves like invisible automata with no feelings.

Keman sighed, and turned away from the window to lie down on his bed and think.

The closest he had come to finding out where Shana had vanished was the folded bit of paper under his pillow. His young friend had gotten it from his father's agents, and had copied it for Keman before passing it on to Lord Alinor. That was the main task V'dern Iridelan an-Lord Kedris had; to take select information and pass it to his father's ally. He did this perhaps once every four or five weeks, and the rest of the time he spent on his own amusement. Privately, Keman thought this was hardly the right way to handle someone like Iridelan, but his acquaintance was one of the few young elven lords who had an older brother, the el-Lord, or heir. There he was; useless for a marriage alliance...unless his father found a family with only daughters...and not to be trusted with the reins of the estate and fortune his brother guarded so jealously.

Keman felt obscurely sorry for him. There was something very sad about Iridelan; he was not stupid, he had potential...there were any number of things he could be doing. Even a drone bee had a use...Iridelan had none. He seemed to sense how futile his life was...but he didn't know how or what to do to change it. He had convinced Iridelan that he was in some trouble with his parents, and that only a show of initiative...like tracking down the wild girl everyone seemed to be talking about...would save him from being fostered out to a particularly repellent aunt. He'd gotten that idea from one of the books Alara had brought back from one of her trips for her pupils to read.

He felt under the pillow and brought out the paper again, though he knew the contents by heart.

Collar found in girl's possession had Dyran's brand, identified as concubine collar last worn by Serina Daeth, slave who escaped to desert under sentence of death for bearing halfblood. Slave assumed dead. Girl likely to have found collar, as she made no mention of Serina.

So little, and yet it held so much import.

Keman had long ago given up his fantasies that Shana was really Kin. What he had not known was what, exactly, a halfblood was.

"Human mother, elven-lord father. A myth," Iri had told him last night, when the young elven lord, at least, was deep in his cups. "Like those so-called'dragon-skins' the girl was wearing. Halfbloods are a myth; they were'sposed to have started a war called the Wizard War. That's why it's death t' let a human breed with an elven lord. There was a Wizard War; wiped out about three-fourths of the high mages, but I don' think it had anythin' to do with halfbloods. They're'sposed to be fabulous mages." He had snorted at the thought. "When slaves don't have magic an' even if they did, the collars'd block it, an' even mages like Dyran have t' try decades t' get a kid with th' same power he has...an' outa nowhere, these halfbloods are'sposed to have enough magic t' whip us all?"

"But the Wizard War..." Keman had said tentatively.

"Nursery tales. Stuff t' cover up what really happened. Tell you what, I think the Wizard War had plenty of the lords on both sides. Prob'ly wasn't anything to do with halfbloods at all...most likely the other side was a bunch of the ones got tired of bein' on the bottom all the time, an' got together, an' the winners blamed everything on the halfbloods so their kids wouldn't get ideas in their heads." Iri sloshed the wine in his cup, gesturing with it. "Tell you what, the High Lords could use some young blood in the Council! They could damn well use some shaking up again!"

Then Iri was off on his favorite tirade, about how the old oppressed the young, the powerful oppressed the weak, and how everything would be better if every elven lord was a lord in truth, with one vote to his name, and everything shared out equally, no matter who was a powerful mage and who was a weak one.

Keman refrained from asking, "What about the humans"; he knew from past experience that In would just give him the same kind of look as if he'd asked, "What about the two-horns." When Iri spoke of equality, he meant equality of the male elven lords. Females were to be pampered and protected. Humans were livestock.

But that business about the halfbloods, and the death sentence, had given him the clues he needed to search the library of the town house where they both were staying, and now he knew exactly the kind of danger Shana was in. And he also knew a little more about the Wizard War and the Prophecy of the Elvenbane.

She was a halfblood, she was the daughter of Dyran and his concubine, and by now everyone who wanted to get his hands on her had at least guessed that was what she might be. Keman couldn't imagine how she had managed to find her mother's collar...but that must be why he couldn't speak mind-to-mind with her. Just one more piece of rotten bad luck... if she hadn't found it, likely no one would ever have guessed what she was. But since she had found it, they were bound to at least think about the possibility.

The real fanatics would kill her on sight, just on the suspicion of being a halfblood. Lords like Dyran would take her, try to find out about the dragon-skins, and then kill her.

The only thing that kept his hopes up was the fact that no one, no one at all, had come forward with the "secret of the dragon-skin." And that argued for the idea that someone or something else had got her...

And from all the evidence, it might well have been dragons from another Lair.

He wasn't getting anything done here, he decided abruptly, tearing the paper to bits. It was time to get out of here, before he was challenged and discovered. Maybe he'd have more luck once he got out of the city.

There was nothing he needed to take with him except what he was already carrying. All he had to do was walk out. And all he needed was a destination.

Lord Dyran's estate, he decided, taking his cloak and closing the door of the guest room behind him. That's where she was supposed to be going. Maybe he'd find something out along the way.

She couldn't have been swallowed up by the ground, after all.

V'kass Valyn el-Lord Hernalth, heir to the vast estates of his father, Lord Dyran, sat in his chair as quietly and motionlessly as a marble statue. His father's scarlet-draped office was as utterly silent as the inside of a crypt. Blood-scarlet draperies and upholstery, white walls, black furniture, the frames carved of onyx, as cold and implacable as Dyran's anger.

Yesterday the room had been entirely green; jade green, an exact match for Dyran's eyes.

My lord father is in a mood, I see. It isn't just me. Something was not going well for Lord Dyran...but it was Valyn who was going to have the brunt of his displeasure. Valyn compressed his lips to hold in his temper, and waited.

"I am not pleased with you, V'kass Valyn," Lord Dyran said, after a long silence that was supposed to cow his errant offspring, and did nothing of the sort. Valyn had played this game before. "I am not pleased with you at all."

"I am sorry, my lord," Valyn murmured, bowing his head in what he hoped was a convincing imitation of repentance. I'm sorry that I couldn't get Shadow away before you started in on him. I'm even sorrier that I'm not old enough to challenge you. One day he would challenge his father, and when Lord Dyran least expected it. Dyran didn't know it yet, but Valyn's magic was stronger than his. What Dyran had that Valyn didn't was experience, and a long history of tricks and treachery.

"Sorry is not enough, V'kass Valyn." Dyran rose, wearing his power like a cloak, flaunting it by creating a subtle glow about himself. The trick didn't work on Valyn though; he'd seen it too many times before.

Besides, he could glow too. That was a baby-trick; he could glow almost as soon as he could walk. Ancestors knew he used it on his nurses often enough.

"No, sorry is simply not enough." Dyran came around his black onyx desk, and stood directly in front of his son, so that Valyn had to look up at him. "You've been sorry before this. Nothing that I have said or done has managed to convince you that humans are not, and never will be, worth the time and effort you put into them. They are tools, Valyn. Nothing more. Exceptionally intelligent tools, but no more than that. They can't even look after themselves without one of us to tell them what to do."

He wasn't convinced, because he had read the histories; because he knew what the truth was, and what the lies they told each other were. The humans used to have a flourishing civilization and culture; the elven lords destroyed it so completely that the humans didn't even know what the names of their old gods were.

Dyran frowned; it took all of Valyn's control not to wince. "You've grown far too attached to this pet of yours, Valyn, and I won't have it. It's about time you saw the real world, and you learned what these animals are like when they aren't properly trained and conditioned." Dyran had chosen gold for this interview with his son; between the glow and the reflection of light off his clothing, it was hard to look directly at him...which-was, Valyn knew, entirely the idea.

"Yes, Father?" he said, since Dyran seemed to be waiting for some sort of response.

"I'm fostering you with one of my liege men, V'kass Cheynar sur Trentil," Dyran said brusquely, turning abruptly and resuming his place behind his desk. "I don't know if you are aware of this, but he breeds common workers. You'll get an eyeful there, I suspect...and you should pick up a proper attitude. You think you know humans...but all you know are the ones...the few...bright enough to be house-trained. The first time one of the beasts turns on you, you'll see I was right about them all along."

Valyn hid his dismay as best he could. Lord Cheynar had made a visit or two to the estate...and had left in his wake a trail of brutalized bodies and traumatized minds. Though his fortune was based on the breeding of common workers, he held humans in contempt that bordered on hatred. Given half an excuse, he'd kill every human on his property... "And Shadow?" he asked quietly.

"Will stay here. And that K final, Valyn. I'm sending him to learn his proper place, with my supervisor Peleden."

Who had a taste for pretty young boys. Ancestors! Shadow would fight back...and Peleden would enjoy it... and enjoy punishing him for it. Valyn could not hide his dismay at that news, and he burned with anger at his father's amusement at his obvious reaction.

Dyran's smile widened. "You'd better get packed, Valyn; you'll be leaving as soon as possible. And you'd better warn your pet that if he doesn't want worse punishment than he got from me, he'd better be very obedient to whatever Peleden wants." Dyran turned his attention back to some papers on his desk, in a clear and unmistakable dismissal of his son and heir.

Valyn rose, silently and gracefully, just as graceful as his father was, and took himself out...

Before he forgot himself and tried to strangle the old bastard.

He let the door close behind him, and hurried to his quarters, where Mero Jenner was still waiting. His "pet," Dyran called the boy...his assigned personal servant. His only friend in all of this house; the only person he could trust.

And, most dangerous of all to everyone involved, his halfblood cousin.

Which no one knew, except Mero, Mero's mother, and Valyn.

It was a strange set of circumstances. When Valyn was four or five, one of Dyran's concubines, Delia Jenner, had been taken off her fertility-suppressing drugs in preparation for breeding to one of Dyran's gladiators. It was a normal enough procedure; quite routine, in fact...Except that during the first week she was fertile...but still in the harem...Dyran's brother, V'kass Treves sur Hernalth, had descended upon the estate during one of Dyran's frequent absences. Treves never came while Dyran was in residence; one reason that Dyran was head of the family, and not his older brother Treves, was that Dyran was, and always had been, ambitious. Treves was not. Treves pursued pleasure the way Dyran pursued power...and when he could not find enough to amuse him on his own small property, he sometimes took advantage of his brother's wider resources. And he had been quite taken with the fragile, dark beauty of the concubine Delia; so taken that during that week, he had ordered her to his quarters every single night.

He left before his brother could return; as expected. Delia had been sent to the gladiators on schedule, and in due course had produced the first of many offspring. Nine months to the day after her first breeding.

A child as dark and fragile as she, but with faintly pointed ears, pale skin, and eyes as green as leaves.

Fortunately, the midwife was half-blind, and did not see the telltale signs of halfblood.

Somehow...and Valyn still marveled at Delia's courage and audacity...the baby's mother had managed to keep him hidden until he was eleven years old. She used a variety of ruses when the overseers came...making him cry so that his eyes were swollen shut, and combing his long hair over his ears, telling them that he had some childish ailment so that she could keep him in bed in a darkened room, feigning sleep. And later, when he was older, instructing him to keep his eyes cast down, always; to hide his ears and sit in the sun until he was as brown as a little pottery figurine. But then the day came when she could no longer put off Mero's collaring...and she had known that when the supervisors saw him, she, and he, would die.

That was when she exercised the ultimate in audacity. She smuggled herself and Mere into Valyn's chambers, and revealed the entire story to him.

Valyn had long been known to be sympathetic to the plight of his father's slaves and bondlings...he had, once he became aware of their plight, often conspired to save them from beatings and other punishments. He had even, though he did not remember it, intervened on Delia's behalf to keep her out of the grasp of a particularly brutal gladiator. Having entirely human nurses might have sensitized him early; or perhaps it had something to do with his first teachers...also human...who made him aware that they were his intellectual equals, and not merely the trainable animals his father thought them to be. Or perhaps it was simply that, rather than reveling in the pain of others as so many of his kind did, he found the very idea abhorrent. And as soon as he became old enough to exercise guile or power on the humans' behalf, he had begun doing so. He knew they were grateful, but he had not realized that they trusted him this much. The combined appeal to his chivalry and his sympathy was too much to contest. That very night, in his father's absence, he announced that he was commandeering the boy to train to serve him, and the supervisor, seeing no need to intervene in so minor a matter, agreed without a qualm. He constructed a collar himself...but instead of holding the beryl that negated the boy's growing magic, it was one that held illusions to make him look entirely human.

For the past five years, Mero had been constantly at Valyn's side, so much so that first the human slaves, and then the elven members of the household, began calling him "Valyn's Shadow." Now scarcely anyone recalled his real name; even Dyran knew him as "Shadow."

Valyn paused before opening the door to his own quarters; he was going to have to face his Shadow, and tell him that they were going to be separated, that Mero was about to be sent to someone even more sadistic than the Clan Lord. And he'd better have an alternative scheme, something that would circumvent Lord Dyran's plans, if he didn't want Mero to do something that would get him killed.

Because Mero was lying facedown on his bed in Valyn's quarters, his back a mass of welts inflicted by that same Clan Lord...and he had sworn when he was carried in that he wasn't going to take that kind of punishment a second time.

Valyn's mind raced. If only there were some way to substitute Mero for the bondling servant that would be assigned to him for this journey...there would be one, of course. There would be no way that his father would entrust his son and heir to the hands of a bondling not trained and conditioned in Dyran's household...not even though the fosterage he sent Valyn to was his own sworn man, one of his oldest allies.

But everyone here knew Shadow...

And then he had his answer. Everyone here knew Shadow. But there would be many stops along the way.

He had been ordered to take his time and to take his shelter only in the households of underlings and allies. There, in a place where no one knew Mero, there could be a substitution. Particularly if his servant became ill and he had to either turn back, or appropriate a new one...

The plan to save the situation blossomed even as he opened the door.

Dyran ended the conversation with Lord Cheynar, and dismissed the communications-spell with a gesture. The fanatical Lord's scowling face faded from the desktop, leaving behind only the reflection of Dyran's own in the shining stone. Dyran sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose with one finger, aware that he had been expending a great deal more energy in magic than he was used to doing. He felt tired and drained, and more than anything else right now, he wanted to retire to the harem for some well-earned pampering. That message completed his preparations to send his son into fosterage...and he should have been able to dismiss the boy, and the entire episode that precipitated this, from his mind.

But he couldn't. The incident unaccountably irritated him, quite beyond reason.

He dimmed the lights with a gesture, lit a soothing incense with another, and stared down at his own vague reflection. It was a pity that he could not keep a closer watch and a tighter hand on the boy. He didn't know where the boy had gotten his odd notions of how one dealt with humans, but it was not from his lord father. And it was a greater pity that the slaves he once had with wizard-powers kept breaking the coercion-spells he placed upon them. If he had one of those, still, he could look into Valyn's mind at will...change it, even. But no; that was a set of tools too dangerous to keep, despite their usefulness. He had done well to destroy them, and to instruct his agents to see that no other lord harbored such tools.

Where there were slaves with wizard-powers, there was always the possibility of another halfblood being born, and that could spell disaster. There was no way of limiting the halfbloods' power, and no real way to keep them under control. Sooner or later they could break any compulsion, any illusion.

And then, without exception, they turned on their masters.

Those same unnatural powers gave them an advantage few elves could cope with. His anger and disgust mounted at the thought of the halfbloods burning deep in his heart, destroying his normal calm. They made him physically ill even to think about. Vile creatures, creeping around inside the minds of their victims...such powers were unclean, and should be wiped from the face of the earth...

With an effort, he cooled his growing rage and returned to the issue of his own son, and the boy's attachment to his human pet.

A good portion of the problem was due entirely to Dyran's own neglect; closer supervision would have prevented his sentimental attachment to a human, and ensured the proper attitude towards the slaves in general.

Slaves are to serve; they do what they are told, when they are told, and there's an end to it. They do not refuse an order.

He should have taken the time to see that Valyn was getting an appropriate education. Now that it was far too late, he saw he had made a mistake in trusting that to the hands of others. He had never really reckoned on Valyn having a will of his own until now...he'd always thought of the boy as a kind of extension of himself. In fact, he hadn't really thought about him much. But he was consolidating power. He had left all that business of taking care of the boy in the hands of those he had thought were capable. He was still consolidating power. Plans he had laid at the end of the Wizard War were only now coming to fruition. No; he had no choice at the time. His attitude might be a fault of Valyn's upbringing, but it was just as likely a fault of his mother's heritage. She was a sentimental child before her accident, and he had often thought there might be some of that same softness in her father.

He felt a moment of weakness pass over him, during which his eyes watered, and his view of his reflection dimmed for a heartbeat or two, and he considered calling for one of the objects in which he had stored power against a time of need...then rejected the notion. This was not a time of need, it was only temporary weakness. A night of rest would cure him soon enough.

And it was not a sign of anything serious. It was only that his son had vexed him so very much and made him use up energy like a profligate.

He should never have given Valyn that pet so young...or else he should have given the boy a horse, or a dog. Children formed such irrational attachments to pets, and this one had given him a distorted view of what the human-creatures were really like.

He rubbed his temples, feeling a headache begin, a sharp pain just under his fingers. This entire crisis had been precipitated by such a trifle...

He couldn't even recall how the slave had angered him. It didn't even matter. He was a slave; slaves needed to be beaten occasionally. It kept them aware of their place.

Perhaps the cause didn't matter...but Valyn's reaction certainly did.

He defied me. The cub swore if Dyran laid a hand to his slave again, he'd regret it. He thought about the confrontation again...and one corner of his mouth twitched upward, just a little. It was not altogether a disaster. He'd learned something he hadn't known; that Valyn had a mind of his own, and spirit to match it. The boy had something of Dyran in him, as well. Dyran's own father had found out that Dyran meant what he said, when the Gate had first been constructed.

I wonder if he regrets not following me across the Gate.

I wonder if he is still alive. Evelon is not a hospitable clime...or was not, when I left...

As for here...it was hospitable enough...now. Few of the elves would admit how near they came to losing it. Humans...

Well, after his careful reeducation, the boy would certainly learn to see the real world as it was, and not as he wished to see it. And perhaps he would, in the end, be grateful that the elves were here, and not in Evelon.

Dyran went over his mental list. Valyn had his orders; he would go with his belongings, one servant, and his hunting birds. And he would be staying with underlings and allies on the trip. None of this camping and scouting he had been talking about.

That was something Dyran simply could not comprehend, this seeking after a primitive life-style, this obsession with nature and pitting one's mind and body against it. Adventuring about was dangerous, even on lands holding allegiance to their Clan. Valyn had a bloodline to carry on, and it was about time he realized it. In fact, it was more than time he acquired some responsibilities.

Everything seemed to be well in hand. Including the careful choice of Cheynar as the point of fosterage. Again, the corner of his mouth twitched. Never do anything for only one reason. That had been a motto that had brought him power and profit, time after time. Cheynar was a fanatic when it came to humans, yes. But he was also the ally Dyran had assigned to learn if there was anything to the rumors of dragons and dragon-skins.

Cheynar had lost the girl, but he had a scrap of skin...or so he said. Valyn could make sure of both. And Cheynar had said nothing else since he reported the failure and the success. It might be he had nothing to report. It might be that he was withholding information. He might be working on his own behalf, or on another's...

As always, the possibilities were many. But with Valyn in place, the boy would not only receive a much-needed education, he would be an information line to Cheynar, whether or not he knew that was the role he was playing. Dyran knew his son well enough to know he would ask the right questions, and learn a great deal from the answers to those questions. And he knew Cheynar well enough to know what those answers might indicate, beyond the obvious.

Yes, everything was in place. Even the reassignment of the pet to the general slave barracks, pending transfer. Dyran was actually of two minds about that. The threat of transfer might give him more power over Valyn than the actuality.

Dyran sighed. His duty had been done; everything that could be taken care of, had been. It was now time to retire to the talented and trained hands of his concubines, to have this infernal headache massaged away.

He shoved himself away from his desk and stood up. The lights brightened as he rose, and he quickly crossed the few paces from the desk to the door to the harem.

It would be good to rest, and better to be indulged.

After all, he had earned it. This had been a fine day's work.

Valyn brought fresh livery from Mero's closet, thinking ironically how his father would blanch if he saw his son playing servant to a human.

"Can you ride?" Valyn asked anxiously as Mero pulled himself up off of the bed with a smothered oath. The boy's back was bandaged and treated with the best the estate had to offer, but it would be days before it healed, and probably half a day before the pain lessened noticeably.

"I don't have a choice, do I?" Mero said around clenched teeth. "It's either ride, or get sent to that..." Valyn waved a warning hand, and Mero subsided.

But he needed to give Mero clearer warning. :You never know when there might be listeners,: he thought as hard as he could, knowing Mero would be able to "hear" what he was thinking. That particular talent had manifested two years ago, and Mero had sharpened it with practice.

Mero nodded.

"I don't know what to say, Shadow." :I'll delay on the road as much as I can,: Valyn told him, :And I think I can manage a couple of days' worth. That ought to get you in place. But are you sure they'll accept that you might have been a fighter in training?:

"I've accepted it," Mero said with resignation, But his fingers were moving in a private code they had worked out together, and his face wore that look of concentration that told Valyn he was "searching" for unseen listeners. "They'll accept anything you put in that note. And I've seen some of your father's assassins; they aren't any bigger than I am. Don't you worry about my convincing them. You just worry about giving me a couple of days for them to get tired and nervous about having me around. I'm going to need enough time to convince them that they'd really rather see the back of me without being obnoxious enough to get another beating."

"I hate to see you leave." That was sincere enough; Valyn was worried about Shadow. A hundred things could happen to him on the way. Not the least of which was that he might well pass out and fall off of his horse. He was not in any shape to ride, much less ride as hard as he was going to have to.

"I'm not exactly thrilled about going. But you told me Lord Dyran's orders. Better get it over with all at once, I say. Start off with marks in my favor for obedience. Maybe that'll counter the stripes I'm wearing."

That had been the covering story Valyn had concocted to explain Mero's disappearance; that he had, as any dutiful son would, taken his father's orders at face value and sent Mero on his way immediately.

When Mero did not arrive at his destination, there might...or might not...be a search sent out for him. The horse would be found...riderless, with everything intact. It would be assumed that Mero did, indeed, pass out and fall off his horse. No one would ever think that a slave might run off and leave such a valuable piece of property as a horse, if he was running away. Though the estate was patrolled, there were always wild beasts to be reckoned with, raiders from the wild humans and from rival elven lords, and packs of feral dogs. If a body was not immediately found, there would be no real concern. One slave more or less made very little difference to the running of the estate, especially if the slave happened to be Mero.

And that, so far as Dyran was concerned, would be the end of the problem. He would probably be relieved, if he thought about the disappearance at all.

In reality, Mero would be riding out on the route that Valyn was to take in the morning. He would push himself and his horse to the limit, while Valyn dawdled. And when he reached the manor of old Lord Ceinaor, an elven overseer of one of Dyran's enormous farms, he would abandon the horse and present himself to the Lord's overseer and hand over a note written by Valyn but signed with Dyran's seal. It styled Mero as a young assassin-cum-gladiator, sent to "recover from injuries." Lord Ceinaor would not know what to think; Dyran had never sent a human to the farm to recover before...but Dyran was not predictable. He might be trying his underling's loyalty, to see whether Ceinaor would obey a truly peculiar request. The human might have been sent as a threat. The human might be a spy. Or he might be recovering from a failed or partially failed attempt on someone else's bondling, and Dyran judged it best that he do so in obscurity.

When Valyn approached that manor, he would use his powers...and his knowledge of herbs, gleaned from Delia...to make his bondling bodyguard desperately ill. Once he reached the manor, he would see Mero, and "commandeer" him to replace his sick servant.

Half of this plan was Valyn's, and half Mero's, It had been Valyn's notion to replace his own servant with Mero in some place where Mero was not known. Mero had come up with the ways and means to do so.

:You know, you could be really dangerous, given Half a chance,: Valyn thought wryly at his friend, as he helped him into his livery.

"Comes with practice, Valyn," Mero replied in hand-sign. "Practice...and the fact that you saved me from being conditioned like the rest. I can think for myself. Most humans don't have that luxury."

Valyn didn't reply to that; there really wasn't a great deal he could say. He simply straightened Mero's tunic, and stepped away.

"Here," he said, handing Mero what looked to be one note, but was actually two. The second one was to Lord Ceinaor, the first to the stable servants. The first was under Valyn's signature, the second under Dyran's seal. Valyn had half a dozen blank notes, already sealed, hidden away against emergencies. "Take this down to the stables, and they'll give you a horse. Good luck, Shadow. I'll miss you."

Mero took both, and pocketed them. "Just so that nobody else misses me," he said lightly, and Valyn winced.

But then he added, "There's no one watching, not even by magic. I checked. Your honored father is getting his brains scrambled by the ever-lovely and talented Katrina. He's much too busy to worry about trifles like us."

Valyn winced again, and blushed. His father's latest favorite concubine was rather...exotic. And utterly without shame. She'd even approached him, with an invitation that had filled him with confusion. Not that he hadn't gotten his share of experience with females...but...

It wasn't what she said, it was the way she had said it! And what she was doing while she said it!

But Mero would be gone in a few moments. Since no one was watching, he could do what he'd been longing to do since they had decided on this. He reached out, and...carefully...embraced his half-cousin.

"You take care of yourself, little brother," he said, his voice thickening a little. "I want to see your ugly face glaring at me from among old Ceinaor's servants."

Mero returned the embrace, with interest. "I'll be there," he said huskily. "You don't get rid of me that easily."

Then he let go of Valyn's shoulders, and walked stiffly to the door. "Luck ride with both of us, brother," Valyn called softly after him, unable to think of anything else to say.

Mero turned, and grinned crookedly. "Luck and a fair wind at my back...and a foul one in your face!"

And with that, he was gone. The door swung shut behind him; the door and wall were so well-made that Valyn could not even hear Mero's footsteps heading for the staircase.

The suite had never felt so empty before. Or sounded so empty. For the past several years, Valyn had never been anywhere without someone...usually Mero...along with him. Even on his own carefully supervised excursions to the harem. He was the heir; his safety was of paramount importance to Dyran's staff, who knew they would die to a man if anything ever happened to him. Now, for the first time, he was completely alone.

Valyn restrained his impulse to run after his "little brother" and returned to his own room to pack.

Then went to bed, but kept waking every time he thought he heard a sound, then would lie staring up at the invisible ceiling for what felt like an eternity until he fell asleep again.

I wish I could really show him how much I love him, he thought, only now regretting the things he hadn't said all these years. I can't. I don't know how. All my life they've punished me every time I showed my feelings, and now...there's nothing, I feel it, but nothing gets past the surface. I haven't cried since I was two... most of the time I don't laugh, either. There's just...nothing. Like what's inside and what's outside are two different people.

He swallowed, and turned on his side, dry-eyed. I hope he understands how much there is I'm not telling him. I hope. If this doesn't work...if any thing happens to him...

It was a very long time until dawn.

SHANA HELD HERSELF in her trance by sheer force of will. She was looking through another's eyes, that of a wizard-gifted child in charge of feeding the others in the slave pens. She didn't want to watch this, and yet she could not look away. There was a young woman in this pen; a child-woman who reminded her of Meg so much that Shana was trembling in reaction. She had been following this girl's story most of the afternoon, picking up information through the wizardling's ears, listening in on the conversations of guards.

The girl cowered in one corner of the slave pen; an ordinary human child, one without wizard-powers, one who simply had the misfortune to fail the promise of early beauty. At six, she had been stunning; at twelve, merely lovely. But at fourteen, in the midst of concubine training, she had put on a spurt of sudden growth. Her features had coarsened, her limbs lengthened. Now she was simply attractive.

That was not enough for a concubine. A concubine had to be supernally beautiful.

The girl, gently reared, who had never once had a voice raised in anger against her, much less a hand, had been sent to the common pens as a breeder. The guards, who seldom saw a girl as unspoiled and attractive as this one, were wagering who would get to enjoy her first.

But as Shana watched, surreptitiously, through her host's eyes, the decision was taken out of their hands.

A man she recalled only too well entered the room; a tall, blond man with cruel eyes. The guards seemed to know him, too; their conversation ceased, and they backed slowly away from him. Shana's host froze in place, but it wasn't the young boy that this nightmare out of Shana's past wanted...

He scanned the room coldly...and his gaze alighted on the girl. He pointed.

"That one," he said, smiling thinly. "I'll take that one."

One of the guards made as if to protest, but a single glance from the blond one's eyes stopped him; the guard shrugged, and turned away. One of the other guards made his way through the rest of the waiting slaves, seized the girl by the arm, and hauled her to her feet. He would not look at her; he simply pulled her back across the room, and shoved her into the blond man's arms.

The girl looked up into her captor's face, and something she saw or sensed there made her blanch.

The blond man laughed...and as Shana watched in numb horror, drew on an odd, studded glove, and slapped the girl across the face with it, knocking her to the ground. As the girl fell back, Shana saw that her face was cut in a series of shallow, parallel lines, from which blood was welling.

The man looked about at the rest of the slaves. "Someone here is a troublemaker," he announced indifferently. "This is what happens to slaves who make trouble."

Then he hauled the girl to her feet, and began to beat her, starting with her face...

Just like Meg...

Shana fled her host's mind, vowing through her tears as she did, that this would be the last time she ever stood by and watched the elven lords or their henchmen torture and murder again. One day...soon...she would have the power herself to deal with them.

And the wizards already did.

Shana wanted to scream in frustration. She had requested this private interview with her teacher, and it was going badly; much, much worse than she had ever thought it could. She clenched her hands on the arms of her chair, and tried again.

"We have to do something," she said carefully. "I told you what it's like out there; I told you that I think the elves are too busy going at each other's throats to even notice us, if we keep our interference small. But people...good people...are being murdered every day, master! We can't just sit here and let it continue!"

Denelor shook his head. "It's just not possible, Shana," he said. "We simply can't do anything. The humans will have to get along the best they can, just as they've always done. If they want freedom, they'll have to learn to fight for themselves."

Right. The slaves should fight for themselves, when they were collared and conditioned against even thinking for themselves! "But why aren't we doing anything?" Shana cried rebelliously. "There are more of us than there ever were, except before the Wizard War! We don't have to have another war, but we could at least be doing something, instead of hiding like frightened mice!"

Denelor colored a little, and looked away. "Shana...you just can't understand. The situation is a great deal more complicated than you realize. There are too many factors involved. What good would we do if we helped a handful of halfbloods...or humans...and got ourselves uncovered in the process? How would you like it if the elves discovered the Citadel? Where would you go? Back to the desert?"

"Why should they find the Citadel? It didn't happen before," Shana pointed out, her hands still clamped on the arms of her chair, as she tossed her hair angrily. "And that was in the middle of the Wizard War, when the elves knew what we were and what we could do! Not even Dyran knows we exist, you know that! Why should it happen now? Our ranks are closer than they've ever been, because no one wants to chance another split like the one that lost the war! What reason do you have for thinking something like that would happen?"

"Because...because it could," Denelor faltered. "The Citadel isn't invisible, you know. We can be discovered, if the elves know what to look for. And it's doubly likely to happen if we start aiding humans."

"I don't see why..." Shana began.

He interrupted her. "Do you think that they are all going to welcome us with open arms, greet freedom with gratitude? If you do, you're living in a dreamworld, my child."

He sat back in his chair, his confidence restored, and Shana sensed that her advantage was slipping.

"Let me enlighten you. Most of the humans out there don't even call themselves'slaves' because they don't think of themselves as slaves. The elven lords have them conditioned to obey...and to think of their fellow humans as the enemy, the rivals. It isn't the elven lords they really worry about...it's the overseer, who is quite likely to be human, and the fellow working next to them. Fully half of them have never seen one of the lords, and don't particularly care if they never do. All they care about is getting that overseer's job... and his privileges. They're only interested in the immediate future."

He actually smirked, and Shana flushed in frustration.

"That's the difference between us and them, child," he said fatuously. "They can't see beyond their noses to the vast horizon. And if we threaten to take away the little privileges they've worked so hard for, and give them only this dubious freedom in return, they won't thank us for it. To them, it'll be freedom...to starve, to shiver in the cold, to lose the promise of a steady meal and guaranteed shelter, with guaranteed rewards if they are good and do what they are told. That is who would betray us, those same humans you want us to help...because we wouldn't be giving anything to them that they want, or need. We would be the enemy, because we threaten their way of life."

And was that what he kept telling himself, Shana thought, a bit contemptuously. She didn't have a great deal of use for humans...but they weren't the problem. The elves were. The elves were the ones who gave the orders; the humans only obeyed. And she could not understand why the wizards were cowering behind the protections of the Citadel...as she had said, like so many frightened mice. There was no reason why they couldn't be helping the humans covertly...or saving a lot more of the halfblood babies and youngsters than they were now. Most of the halfblood children resulted from encounters with accidentally fertile concubines or with breeders, and most of those were eliminated as soon as they were born. It wouldn't take much work to start substituting wizards for midwives, and the illusion of a dead baby for the reality of a live one.

She had approached her teacher about doing something with purpose in the world outside the cavern; actively helping the halfbloods out there...and intervening on behalf of the humans with wizard-powers as well. She remembered what had happened in the slave pens all too clearly, particularly on long, sleepless nights.

Denelor had seemed sympathetic enough during discussions with his apprentices, but she had discovered during the course of this conversation that he was like all the rest of the senior wizards. So long as what he did would not put him at risk, he would act. The moment there was the slightest chance that any action would alert the elven lords to the reemergence of the wizards...and thus threaten his comfortable life...he would sit back and do nothing.

Just like the humans he thought of so contemptuously.

But he was not the worst of his kind here...

Denelor finished his lecture, and looked at her expectantly. She shook her head, and gave it one more try. "It's not right, master," she said stubbornly, hoping that one last appeal might turn him to consider her argument. "It's just not right. We have power; doesn't that mean we have responsibility, too? Isn't that what you've been telling us? The greater the power, the more the responsibility? Who are we responsible to, if not to those who are helpless?"

"Our responsibility is first to ourselves, Shana," he replied, after a moment of hesitation. "We can't do anything if we're under siege by the elves. Think of all the halfbloods we'd be unable to help, if the lords knew we existed."

Think of all the ones you don't help now, because you're afraid to, she replied, but only in her mind, and under the tightest of shields.

"We do what we can, but we have to be here to do it," he said, with an air of finality. "I know it's hard to accept, but just because something isn't right, that doesn't make it less true." He paused a moment, then finally looked at her again, this time with concern. "Shana, I hope you're keeping this to yourself. I probably shouldn't say this, but there are those among the senior wizards who are...ah...disturbed by you. I'm sure it's no surprise to you that you have a great deal of power. You've surprised me with it, more often than I'd like to admit. Some of my colleagues are afraid of that power. Some of them are suspicious of you; they think you could be a plant by the elven lords. Most of them don't understand how a child as young as you are, and without formal training, could acquire the kind of power and expertise you have." Now he looked at her as if he suspected something. "There are those who think you may be planted on us by the elven lords, or that you may even be a fullblood..."

Shana's eyes widened, and she said defensively, "I told you, I had to learn by myself just to stay alive! Do they think that living out in the middle of a desert is easy! Besides, I have the mind-powers, and you know I do. You've been the one training me. No one of full elven blood has the mind-powers, and I do."

"You do," Denelor agreed, looking a little easier. "And those can't be duplicated by magic. But you could still be a plant, a halfblood raised and trained by elves to infiltrate our ranks."

Shana frowned. "How could I be a plant if the elves don't know we exist? And besides, I'm trying to get everyone to do something about the elves, to fight back against them, and if I was a plant, why would I be doing that?"

Denelor shook his head. "Child, that's precisely what would make them even more suspicious. How else would the elves find out where we were, unless we attacked them or even worked more actively against them at a time when they have been alerted to look for the source of those actions? Please, Shana, be more careful of what you say. You're making people uncomfortable, and that makes them irrational."

Shana sighed, and gave it up as a lost cause. She agreed that she would be more careful, shared a cup of tea with her master, and then let herself out of Denelor's quarters.

Well, that's that. She grimaced, and set off down the halls to her own room. If Denelor wouldn't back her up, there was no hope of convincing any of the other senior wizards. She had some supporters among the apprentices, and there were a few of the junior wizards, like Zed, who agreed with her. But for the most part, Shana's cause looked pretty hopeless.

She shoved her hands into her pockets and slouched back to her room. The halls were mostly empty; at this time of the day, people were generally amusing themselves before dinner. The really powerful ones mostly wanted to be as much like the elves as possible, she thought cynically. With their comforts, their entourages, their little intrigues...they did things with magic, instead of with slaves, and it was on a smaller scale, but that was what they wanted. Right down to pushing people around who didn't want to think for themselves. That's why she made them uncomfortable, because they were afraid she couldn't be manipulated, and she had so much power... power they would like to control.

She'd been watching and listening...her few days in the slave pens had taught her a lot about that...and she'd seen the pattern to life in the Citadel. And life in the Citadel was like life in one of the Great Households of the elves. On top was Parth Agon, the chief wizard...the strongest, rather than the eldest...who liked things the way they were and did not want to see his tiny kingdom disrupted. Below him were the wizards who felt as he did, the ones given the highest positions. And below them, on the bottom, were the ones who might have felt differently...but saw no reason to risk themselves.

Just before this meeting she'd said as much to Zed, who'd only shrugged his shoulders. "Lots of people here escaped being killed in the nick of time," he pointed out. "Maybe they don't want to have to go back to living each day afraid."

"Neither do I!" she'd exclaimed, "But I'm not going to let that keep me from doing what I know is right!"

"Tell me that when the hunt's on your tail," Zed had replied, then strolled off to vanish down one of the mazes of corridors. Zed had that talent; if he didn't want to be found, he could vanish as completely as Father Dragon...

She looked for him, in a desultory fashion, all the way back to the apprentices' quarters. She didn't see him, which probably meant he still didn't feel like being social. And in her current mood of disgust with the lot of them, she wasn't sure she wanted to see him, either. But when Shana reached her room, after the conversation with Denelor, it seemed to be singularly confining. She found herself longing for a glimpse of the sky, of a leafless, winter-bound tree, of anything that wasn't within the walls of the Citadel. She thought about going to round up some of her own tiny circle of adherents, the ones she was teaching what she'd discovered about the power of jewels...but that seemed too much like the same manipulative games the older wizards were playing.

So instead she closed the door and began restlessly roaming the confines of her quarters. They didn't enlarge any for all her pacing.

"I want to do something!" she said to the four walls of her room as she prowled back and forth like a caged animal. "I want to make a difference out there! I want to do more than the Kin are doing..."

So why don't I?

The thought took her by surprise, and made her steps falter and stop. She rubbed her head, then sat down on her bed to think about the idea a little further.

Why didn't she do something? She probably could, all by herself. She didn't need their cooperation, or even their permission. With the jewels, she could do just about anything, really. She could certainly reach just about anywhere.

That was something of an exaggeration, but the jewels did help, they gave her reach and power she wouldn't have had without them. Not that she depended on them, but they were a wonderfully useful tool... oddly, it was the least precious that did the most. Considering that the Kin held that the exact opposite was true, she found that fact rather funny.

A great deal of practice had revealed some general rules. Crystalline forms boosted power, and lens-shaped forms concentrated it. She worked better with some specific kinds of stones than with others, and what worked well for her did not necessarily work for someone else. For her, quartz-crystals, semiprecious agates, and amber did the most...the precious stones like rubies and emeralds accomplished little more than to catch the light, in her hands.

That had led to an ironic situation. She no longer feared having her hoard discovered...no one would want the specific stones that were the most valuable to her...a double-ended spear of clear quartz, common enough; an irregular globe of polished amber, perfectly clear, with no inclusions of seeds or bits of leaf; and a handful of assorted moonstones. But with these, she suddenly felt certain that she could reach beyond these walls, to affect the real world beyond them.

Or at least see what was going on out there...

She put her back against the wall and reached out for the crystal spear, where she had left it on the chest beside her bed. She held it where the light from her magically powered lamp would shine into it, and cradled it in the palm of her hand, staring deeply into it, past the surface reflections.

When she felt ready, she reached out with her mind as Alara had taught her when she was learning to speak mind-to-mind...but sent her thoughts into the crystal, instead of seeking a specific person.

Now she closed her eyes and held her mind very still, as she identified and closed out all the thoughts closest to her. There weren't many; most of the wizards preferred to be under mind-shields at all times. Though she had not understood why at first, it seemed a sensible precaution now, and a courtesy, when there were many others who could hear thoughts about you...and some who might not yet be able to close them out.

She moved her "self" out of the Citadel, and into the forest, seeking for a viewpoint, her mind spread out like a fine net to snare errant thoughts. In moments, she had found one; she caught a thought and held it, and was looking through the eyes of a canny mountain-cat, crouched over a game trail.

She stared in mute fascination. Some snow fell in the area of the Lair in winter, but not much...a similar amount of rain fell in there in the summer. Keman had gone up into the higher country where there was more, but he could fly; she couldn't. And she had not been outside the Citadel since she had arrived here.

She had never seen so much snow before. The ground was white, snow-covered as far as the cat's eyes could see. The cat perched on a heavy limb of an evergreen of some kind, the branches above him so snow-laden that they sagged down over the one he had chosen, giving him a truly effective hiding place.

She held down her elation, so as not to startle her temporary host, but she felt a pardonable surge of triumph. She had moved outside the Citadel...and for the first time, had made contact with the mind of a creature she did not actually know was there.

Next jump...farther out...

She cast herself loose from the cat and reached out again; "listened" for further thoughts...and snatched at the first ones that presented themselves.

And this time found herself looking at the world through elven eyes.

There was no doubt of it; the hands she looked down on were long, slender, and as pale as her moonstones. And elves saw things a little differently from humans; everything living had a kind of shimmer about it, like heat-haze. Anything nonliving didn't. And if that wasn't enough, there was another elven lady sitting beside her, in the attitude of a teacher, watching every move she made.

Finding herself in an elven mind was so much of a surprise that she nearly lost her hold on the elven lord's...-or rather, lady's...thoughts. But she steadied herself down quickly, and began taking in her surroundings.

It was a girl, not a woman. That was the first realization. This was a girl about her own age. She was clothed in shimmery silks of an opalescent green, and she moved with studious grace, practicing the kind of movement Shana had always thought was natural.

Her hostess was flower-sculpting...a term Shana plucked out of the girl's memory. Not arranging...that was different, and something the girl left up to her slaves. The girl...

She knew, with the certainty of her own name, that of the elven maiden. Sheyrena an Treves.

Sheyrena, then...was delicately shaping the petals of the living flower before her. She spun them out, her magic delicately rearranging the form, and making the petals thinner, turning them into gossamer webs of color. She had finished two of the four petals of what had been an ordinary poppy. Now it looked as if it had been made of silk; transparent, crimson silk, that billowed about the dark heart in carefully arranged folds. She finished the third petal even as Shana watched, and began on the fourth.

Shana took careful notes. She'd had no idea anything like this was possible. And it was absurdly simple as well. Already she had several ideas on how else she could use this particular spell of manipulation.

When the girl had finished, she turned to her mother, her face carefully schooled into a calm mask, for approval. No elven lady should ever be seen as less than perfect, and perfectly controlled. Shana caught that thought as the girl smoothed the hope from her expression.

Poor thing... For a moment, Shana actually pitied the girl.

"Very good, dear," Viridina an Treves said, nodding her head slowly and graciously. Her expression was that mask of perfect serenity her daughter strove to imitate. The rest of her was just as flawless. Viridina wore her silver gown with a complete unconcern that made it seem a part of her. The elven lady's pale gold hair was arranged in an artfully careless fall over one ear, no less a sculpted work of art than the flower her daughter had just transformed, and yet showing no sign of how much time had gone into its creation.

Her daughter permitted herself a smile of acknowledgment of her mother's compliment. Viridina responded with an answering smile of approval for her daughter.

Her very young daughter; Shana realized with a start that she had made a mistake in her assessment. The mind she had touched was that of a child no more than ten or twelve. The child had power...that was what had deceived her...

No, that wasn't it at all. The child had control. Very little power, really; what she had was total control over all the power she possessed. And all it would ever be good for was to manipulate tiny things...

Her spells would always be minor ones, like flower-sculpting, or water-weaving, or light-arranging...Shana saw that in her memories of her lessons and what her mother could do. Her father could do more; he was quite adept at illusions. But all Viridina and her daughter could use their insignificant power for was the kind of spells that were decorative...

Or stopping someone's heart, Shana's mind whispered eagerly, at this hint that the girl thought of herself as something less than the males of her kind. Little things weren't necessarily minor. Tell her. Show her.

She shook off the temptation. Even if she thought of herself as inferior, she was still of elven blood; she was still one of the masters. If the girl had been a human, though, and otherwise helpless...

But something she had not consciously noted alerted that other part of her mind. Wasn't she helpless, as helpless as the slaves? Look at the mother's face...and into the mother's mind!

Unable to resist the temptation, Shana did so, and saw the real state of most of the ladies of the elven Clans.

They were pampered...as a prize brood-mare was pampered. Protected...as a valuable gem. Allowed no choice of fates, any more than a slave was. Allowed no freedom at all until a child was conceived and carried to live birth...

The future that awaited this girl was as bleak as a slave's. A loveless mating to someone who valued her only for her potential power, the dower she brought from her father, the alliance she represented, and the heirs she might breed. A life spent in the confines of the "bower," the women's quarters, with nothing of any importance to do. Ladies were not expected to exert themselves, and few did. Most whiled away the long hours with music, flower-sculpting or playing other similarly mindless games.

This was the life the girl's mother had endured for the past four hundred years...with no end in sight. An endless pastel existence, close-confined, safe...

Shana shuddered, and withdrew a little.

The girl picked up another flower, and began on it; a wild rose, this time. She touched the first petal, spinning it out into a thin mist of palest pink.

Shana couldn't bear it any longer. Well, why shouldn't she at least...suggest what she could do. Where was the harm in that? She might need it someday. If she had the courage to use the information... Why not? If the girl doesn't use it, no harm; if she does...someone will get what he deserves. She would just hint at the possibilities.

A kind of reckless intoxication impelled her to do just that, hiding the suggestion deep in the girl's mind...If you can change a flower petal, what else can you change?...

The girl didn't seem to notice that anything had happened. Certainly her mother didn't. They continued to make their artistic little flowers, placing them carefully in a studied arrangement for tonight's banquet, for magically formed flowers were too important and delicate to be entrusted to slaves. When Lord Treves's guests saw these, and knew the powers of the daughter, there might be marriage proposals...

Shana couldn't take anymore. She withdrew her mind completely and let herself drift back to the safety of the Citadel before anyone detected her meddling.

She centered herself; woke herself carefully from trance, speeding her heartbeat, letting the blood flow freely through her veins.

As she opened her eyes again, she realized what it was that drove the dragons to shift their shapes and take the forms of men and elves. It was a different kind of power...

And it was a heady experience. And addictive...

With time, she became more and more adept at reading the minds of distant elven lords and their ladies. The human minds, of course, remained closed to her, because of the collars the human slaves wore.

Those collars could, and did, function in a way that kept prying thoughts out as well as developing mind-powers locked within. But the elven lords were wide open to her questing mind, and she took full advantage of the fact. Shana came to know all of the neighbors bordering the wild lands that held the Citadel.

She also came to learn more of what she could do with magic; power did not have to be overwhelming to be effective...something as "simple" as the elven maid's flower-sculpting ability could be as devastatingly effective as calling lightning.

And a lot less draining.

As spring approached, she took to spending all her free time "watching" through the eyes of others, mostly elves, even as she had spent all her time last fall in roaming the corridors of the Citadel. Her goal was the same: knowledge. Now she knew pretty much what the old wizards could do, and she was on her way to duplicating a number of those powers. What she didn't know was what elven lords were capable of. She wanted...no, needed,...to know, both to know what she might have to counter one day, and to determine what she might be able to duplicate herself. And here were teachers, all the teachers she could ask for. She began learning by observation.

Not even the senior wizards knew some of the tricks she was picking up from the elven mages...or if they did, they hadn't shown any of them to their pupils. And fully as important as magic...at least to Shana's mind...she was learning how the elven lords thought.

Which turned out to be a great deal like the way the senior wizards thought...

Shana told herself to be patient; she was the only member of the group accustomed to thinking of gems in terms of being power-sources. Blond, shaggy-headed Kyle frowned, and stared at the carnelian in his hand. She "heard" him fumbling around, trying to use the stone, and getting nowhere, as if he were trying to cut wood with a hammer.

He looked up at her, and shook the hair out of his eyes. "But what if I'm not getting any more power with this thing?" he asked petulantly.

Shana sighed, and dark Elly rolled her eyes and shrugged. Elly, several years younger than Kyle, had already mastered the basics, and was working on finesse.

Shana decided to let her explain. Maybe he'd pay attention to someone he knew. "Lens-shaped stones focus, Kyle," Elly said slowly and carefully. "It's the crystals that increase power. You're using a cabochon-cut stone; you could push from now'till next spring and still have the same amount of power going in as coming out of there. That stone is going to concentrate the power to a little point..."

Someone pounded on the wooden door of the room Shana and her little circle were using as a meeting place. All conversation stopped dead, and Shana started guiltily; and she wasn't the only one to jump. Not that they were doing anything wrong, but none of the senior wizards actually knew anything about these meetings. They weren't forbidden...but if the senior wizards knew about them, they might be.

Operating on the principle that what the authorities didn't know about, they couldn't forbid, Shana had taken great care to see that they didn't learn about the lessons in the first place. She didn't see any reason why she should share the new knowledge she had been gaining with people who weren't going to use it...or at least, weren't going to use it for anything useful.

So the meetings were held in one of the empty rooms in the maze of corridors winding deeply into the living rock of the Citadel. And the only people who knew which room it was were her fellow apprentices...and Zed.

"Shana!" It was Zed's voice, muffled by the door, but recognizable. "Shana, it's me! I've got something to tell you! It's important!"

Shana jumped to her feet and hurled the door open quickly. Zed slipped inside as soon as she had it open a crack, and shut it behind him. "Listen," he said, looking around at all of them with a peculiarly intense expression on his face. "Do you people really intend to start doing something about what's going on out there, instead of sitting on your thumbs? Or are you all talk and no action?"

"Why?" Shana demanded, a stir of excitement and anticipation prickling the back of her neck.

"Because I just found out that one of Lord Treves's overseers is going to cull about a dozen kids, that's why," Zed said, anger creeping into his voice, a fleeting expression of outrage moving across his face like a shadow. "And the mud-clods in charge around here won't do one damn thing to stop them!"

Kyle blanched; he'd very nearly been "culled" himself, and only escaped when his mother smuggled him out and left him in the woods. "W-why not?" he stammered. "Th-they've intervened on Treves's land before! Wh-what's stopping them?"

Zed leaned back against the door, and crossed his arms, all trace of his earlier emotion gone, as if it had never been. "Because," he drawled, "this time the kids are all full-human. They've got the human magic, that's why they're being culled. Master Parth doesn't see any reason to help mere humans, especially not when the overseers already have all the uncollared kids locked up, and we'd have to actually break them out."

"Master Parth is...not the only answer around here," Shana said flatly, cold anger settling just under her breastbone. "And yes, I'm ready to do something." She looked around her, challenge in her gaze. "What about the rest of you?"

"You can count me in," Kyle said immediately, though he was still pale, and looked more than a little frightened.

"And me," Elly added, an eye-blink after him.

There was no dissension, and no hesitation; the rest followed Shana's lead in agreeing to help within a heartbeat of one another.

"Fine," Zed said with satisfaction and approval. He pushed away from the door and joined them. The rest of the apprentices looked up at him expectantly. "Here's what's going to happen. The overseers don't actually know which kids have the wizard-powers, so they rounded up every uncollared child in the area and they're going to be testing them tomorrow. I know who they are, and the kids all know who they are. And if we work fast, and together, we should be able to get them out of the pen before the overseers find out which ones are the kids they really want. So, first off, have any of you ever seen the holding pen at Treves's manor?"

Kyle had, as Shana knew. Kyle had most certainly seen it; he'd been in it before he was taken by his mother to be left for the wizards to find.

Kyle didn't hesitate; he grabbed a stick of charcoal and a bit of scrap paper and began drawing a map for the others. Within moments they were huddled together over the drawing, proposing and discarding plans.

Shana turned back to Zed, to see that he was grinning from ear to ear.

"You planned this, didn't you?" she said accusingly, whispering so that the others wouldn't overhear. "You did...I know you did..."

"Not this, exactly," he admitted, "but I knew something like this would come up. I'm getting tired of Faith's attitude about full-humans. I've been tired of the way he won't interfere in any situation that looks the tiniest bit risky, and I've felt that way for a long time. And after I saw how you were shaping up, I was hoping you were going to put some spine into some of the 'prentices so we could have a group to work with. One or two couldn't make much difference...but a group this big can."

"I tried to put some spine into some of the masters," she said sourly, "but it didn't work."

Zed's only reply was a snort. Then he leaned over the shoulders of the huddled 'prentices, and studied Kyle's sketched map.

"All right..." he said, and they quieted down so quickly that Shana was consumed with envy. "This is what I'd do..."

The fire crackled, and scented candles burned all over the room, imparting a warm light no mage-made glow could duplicate. Parth Agon sipped his stolen wine, and frowned at the goblet. Not because of the bouquet of the wine...that was fine. It was something else entirely that left a sour taste in his mouth.

The new 'prentice, Shana, to be precise.

He turned the goblet in his hands, watching the play of light over the matte metal surface without really seeing it. Shana was a problem, and was likely to become a greater one.

Somehow, some way, she had learned to shield her mind even from him. Somehow she had acquired the power to keep that shielding intact against all of his efforts to penetrate it. That was cause enough for alarm. Parth had gotten and held his power by knowing exactly what the others were thinking at all times. Shana represented a disturbing blank spot in his knowledge.

Furthermore, she had begun teaching a carefully chosen circle of her peers how to accomplish exactly the same thing. The blank spot was spreading. He was not pleased. And that was by no means all...

She was a bad influence, he brooded, holding his goblet in both hands as he slumped in his chair. She was asking questions the masters would rather not answer...and that he would just as soon she didn't ask. Why the wizards were remaining in hiding, for instance; never interfering except when there was no chance they could be detected...and why they wouldn't aid humans, even those with wizard-powers of their own. She was implying that they were cowards, lazy, or both. She was encouraging the 'prentices to think about acting directly against the elves.

The 'prentices didn't like the answers they were getting from their masters. Or the lack of answers. And it was entirely possible they'd started to act on their own.

That thought led inevitably to another.

I'm losing control.

That was the worst thought of all; his hands tightened on the cool metal of the goblet as he gritted his teeth in carefully restrained anger. The candles flickered in a bit of draft.

She was working against him. But she was only a child...she couldn't be doing this on her own. So who was behind her? Who in the Citadel was teaching her these things? It wasn't Denelor... it couldn't be. That lazy fool couldn't have taught her half of what she had learned this winter.

But if it wasn't Denelor, then who was it?

He ran down the entire list of senior wizards in his mind, and couldn't find a connection between any of them and Shana. Half of them didn't even know she existed; they were lost in their little otherworlds of illusion, trance, and daydream. The other half didn't care she existed. They played out their dance of control and power within the microcosm of the Citadel, and cared nothing for the outside world. And none of them would have been willing to risk putting their precious safety in the hands of these reckless children, if they'd known what their 'prentices were up to.

But dealing with them...which really meant dealing with their ringleader, Shana...presented something of a problem. She hadn't actually done anything yet, and neither had they. Parth couldn't prove that she was even thinking of it, and even if he could, thinking was no crime. Until they made an overt action that truly, demonstrably, endangered the Citadel, he could only watch her.

And even if he caught her at something...aiding halfbloods to escape to the Citadel without her master's permission, for instance...there were still limits to the punishments he could or dared impose on her.

He couldn't expel her from the Citadel; the elven lords would catch her before very long. And as soon as they questioned her, the elves would know about the halfbloods.

He wished passionately that it was Shana's neck between his hands, rather than the goblet. He would give so much to be able to strangle the baggage... which he couldn't do even if he caught her red-handed. There were laws about that, laid down because of what had divided the wizards at the end of the war. If she were caught and If the entire populace of the Citadel found her guilty of acting against the Citadel, the worst that could be done to her would be to send her into the desert, back where she came from.

He couldn't "dispose" of her either; she hadn't actually done anything, and the others would certainly take exception to his taking the law into his own hands on a mere supposition.

I wish I knew what she wanted.

I wish I knew who was behind her!

He had never been so frustrated in his life. From the time he had reached the Citadel and became the protected protege of the most senior wizard of the time, to this moment, his life had been one smooth climb to the high seats of power. No one had ever thwarted him before. No one had ever challenged him before. He was not enjoying the experience.

He sat, slumped over in his chair, for the remainder of the afternoon, trying to think of some way he could either dispose of the girl or control her, and coming up with nothing. The candles guttered down to the sockets, and his own 'prentice...not one of the young rebels...came in to replace them, and still he was unable to think of an answer to the problem.

Finally he was forced to conclude that he was going to have to leave her alone. He set the empty goblet down on the little table beside his chair, and sat up a bit straighter, trying to divorce himself from the emotions that raised in him. He stroked his beard with one hand, forcing himself to accept that solution.

He decided, slowly, to leave her alone. Unless she brought the elves' attention down on the halfbloods. Then he could move against her.

He nodded to himself, and refilled the goblet, taking it up again. Oddly enough, the conclusion was not as hard to take as he'd thought it would be. It was not an end; it was merely a delay. The girl was reckless; she took wild chances. With luck, one of those risks would catch up with her.

And then...she's mine.

With a creak of tortured metal, the stem of the goblet bent double beneath the pressure of his tightening fingers. Parth Agon did not notice.

"Dear Ancestors, I'm bored," Valyn said, flinging down his book on the cushion of the window seat, and staring out at the gloomy, dark pine woods beyond his window. Cheynar's manor was unlike any Valyn had ever seen before; it had none of the glowing ceiling lights that most of the elven-made buildings he'd been in boasted. Instead, illumination was supplied by day with natural light, through skylights and windows. And at night, Valyn either had to glow his own magic-lights, or make do with lanterns and candles. Magic was clearly at a premium on this estate.

And yet, Cheynar was considered a power to be reckoned with among Dyran's allies and underlings.

Today Valyn was considering lighting a glow even though it was not much past noon. The sky outside was a flat, dark, slate-gray. Rain dripped down through the branches, and more rain misted the air between the window and the trees.

Shadow sneezed, and rubbed his nose. "I thought you were supposed to be learning something from Lord Cheynar," he observed with a sniff. "But all we've done since you got here is sit around this suite or go out riding in the rain." Shadow sniffed again.

"Riding in the rain, and catching colds," Valyn replied, immediately guilty. "Sorry, Shadow. That cold of yours is my fault. We shouldn't have gone out yesterday. I didn't mean to act like a spoiled brat about the riding, but I just couldn't stand being inside one moment more..."

"I know, I know..." Shadow blew his nose, and took a long drink of hot tea. "And it's not your fault elves don't catch colds. I just wish I shared that immunity."

Valyn shrugged apologetically. "I wish I could cure it." He looked back outside; the gloomy woods had not changed a fraction. "I wish we had something to do. Anything."

"I guess we should both be just as glad Lord Cheynar hasn't been paying much attention to us," Shadow observed, as he joined Valyn in the window seat. "It surely makes it a lot easier to stay out of his way."

Valyn glanced at his cousin out of the corner of his eye. Shadow had bounced back from his beating so fast even Valyn was impressed, though he seemed much quieter than usual. But perhaps that was only because of the cold.

Shadow folded his arms on the window ledge and rested his chin on them, watching the wet pines as if he found them completely fascinating. "On the whole," he drawled, "I think I'll take bored. It's much better than having Lord Cheynar's overseers asking me pointed questions about my background."

Valyn gave himself a mental kick for being such a donkey. Of course being bored was better than being noticed! Even a fool would have been able to figure that out! As long as he and Shadow were left to their own devices, there was very little chance that Lord Cheynar would check back with Dyran and possibly let slip the description of Valyn's "bodyguard." And there was no chance that Shadow would find himself being interrogated by Cheynar's men.

When they first arrived, Cheynar had received Valyn in his office, with the same cold courtesy Valyn fancied he used with his underlings. He had taken a scant moment to glance at the sealed letter from Lord Dyran that Valyn presented to him, then thrown the packet on a corner of his desk, and leaned over the broad expanse of cherry-wood to pin Valyn in his chair with his dagger-keen glare.

"I want one thing understood, young Valyn," he'd said, his voice completely without expression. "You're on my estate now, not your father's. You will follow my orders. Is that perfectly clear?"

"Yes, my lord," Valyn had murmured, in his most submissive tone. Cheynar had sat back in his seat with a fleeting expression of satisfaction.

"In that case, we'll get along just fine," Cheynar stated flatly. "Right now, I am sorry I simply don't have time to see to your amusement, but something has come up that requires all of my attention. I shouldn't have taken the time to meet with you myself, but I wanted to make certain that you understood how things are here. Do you?"

"Entirely, my lord," Valyn had replied, looking down at his clasped hands.

"Good." Valyn looked up at the scrape of wood on stone. Cheynar stood, obviously impatient for him to be gone. "There's a slave just outside the door, he'll show you your quarters. I'm sure they'll be satisfactory."

And without waiting for a reply, Cheynar had turned and walked away, leaving Valyn to stare after him, a bit stunned.

Since that time he had not once set eyes on the Lord of the estate. He had been left to amuse himself however he wished. More than once, he had decided that Cheynar's dour manner was due entirely to the estate itself. Bordering the wilderlands, the manor was surrounded on three sides by tall, greenish-black pine trees with thick, drooping branches that blocked the sun for most of the day, and were home to what seemed like hundreds of owls at night. And for some reason, at least since Valyn arrived here, it had rained at least part of every single day.

There was no hunting to speak of, except for Valyn's accipiter hawks, who were nasty-tempered enough to fling themselves into the thickest of underbrush after prey. But the hawks were not willing to fly in weather this foul, and after having one goshawk turn on him in frustration at having missed a kill, Valyn was not inclined to press his luck with them. The gos missed his face by a breath with those wicked talons, and only Shadow's Intervention had gotten the hawk calmed.

There was no hunting with hounds; Cheynar did not keep a pack. His dogs guarded the pens of his slaves, and he did not have enough of them to spare for such frivolities as hunting.

The only other form of exercise and amusement was riding...through cold, dark pines that dripped constantly, even when it wasn't actually raining.

Other than that, there wasn't much of anything to do. Valyn had often thought that he was bored back on his father's estate. Now he knew what boredom really was.

:On the other hand, we could have Lord Cheynar's undivided attentions,: he thought wryly, and saw Shadow nod.

"There are always worse situations, brother," Shadow said aloud, and sneezed again.

"Like having a cold..." Valyn teased, producing a handkerchief and handing it to him. "Or being out in that with a cold. Or keeping my gos from taking your eye out."

"Like being the person...or persons...who really have Lord Cheynar's undivided attentions," Shadow corrected, and bent closer, lowering his voice. "My lord is not at all happy at the moment. It seems there's been a disturbance at one of his breeding farms."

"Oh?" Valyn suddenly found the view out the window just as fascinating as Mero did. There probably weren't any watchers...or at least Mero couldn't detect them...but it was a good idea to exercise a little caution now and again, just in case. "And what was this disturbance?"

"When we first arrived here, he had a message that the latest crop of youngsters included an unknown number with wizard-powers among them," Shadow informed him, as they both stared fixedly out the window at the dripping pines. "That was just before he met us, when he sent me to the suite with the baggage and took you off to his office. I haven't said anything until now, because he's had someone watching us. Either he can't spare the watcher, or he's convinced we're harmless."

"I devoutly hope the latter," Valyn replied grimly. "So, there were children with wizard-powers... Halfbloods?"

Mero shook his head. "No. Full-humans. There isn't a chance you'd get a halfblood on this estate. He sterilizes all his concubines, and elves caught using anything other than a sterile concubine get thrown out without a copper piece."

"Full-humans." Valyn mused on that for a moment. "I take it that the signs were objects flying about, and the rest of the usual symptoms?"

Shadow turned his head just enough so that his cousin could see his approving smile. "Your father taught you better than he knew."

"My father doesn't know that I know that," Valyn corrected. "Most of the elven lords my age think human magic is a myth, and I think my father wants to keep it that way. So, what happened to the children?"

"Ah, now that is what has Cheynar's undivided attention," Shadow whispered, a hint of satisfaction in his voice. "It seems that they vanished, right out of the slave pen, before they could be identified positively. About a dozen, more or less; that night they were bedded down with the rest, the next morning, they were gone. You might almost say, they disappeared."

"They what! Valyn kept his voice down with an effort. "How could they..."

"With help." Shadow licked his lips, and Valyn felt a tingle of excitement. "I've been hearing magic since we arrived, Val. Quite a lot of it, in fact, but none of it on this estate. It's all out there in the woods. I think it's probably safe to assume that it had something to do with the children disappearing out of the slave pens."

"So there are more halfbloods?" Valyn whispered, half to himself, half to Shadow. When he got no reply, he turned back to see his cousin watching him soberly, red nose and all.

"I don't know, Val," Shadow replied. "I'm just not that good, to tell what and who is out there. But I do know that those children are gone, and magic had something to do with it, and Cheynar is really, really worried. And that is all I can tell you."

"That's enough," Valyn said, excited at the very idea. "That's enough for me to do something. I haven't been able to train you, because I didn't really know what you could do. But if there's a wizard out there good enough to steal children, if I can scry and watch him, I can start showing you what to do."

"Well..." Shadow said suddenly, his eyes going distant, his brows creasing, "better get ready to watch, then. Because I hear it...them...and they're right out there in those woods!"

KEMAN STOPPED IN the middle of the road, with a chilly spring breeze whipping his mane and tail, and raised his head suddenly at the unexpected trill of melody in his mind.

Magic...an elven lord? Here? It "sounded" like someone he knew...

Then he realized why it "felt" so familiar. The last person on earth he expected. Fire and Rain, it's Shana! She's alive! She's all right!

Now Keman knew what was meant by the two-legger expression, "It made the hair on the back of my neck crawl"...if that was the right expression. Did hair crawl? Feeling Shana's magic at close range for the first time in months did something like that to him. The hair of his mane actually stood upright, and he raised his tail a little as he cast about for direction.

It's her! he thought, first stunned, then incredulous, then overwhelmed by an avalanche of simple joy. It's her! I found her! I found her!

And it was Shana's magic; there was no doubt of that. But it was much, much stronger than it had been when she'd been driven out of the Lair. Stronger, and more controlled as well; be read that in the complexity and implicit power of the melody, and the general feeling that it was effortless. The change in her was astonishing.

All of which boded interesting times for the Kin and the Lair when they got back. If she'd been this strong, she wouldn't have been driven out in the first place...and they wouldn't be able to drive her out again! No one would be able to do anything to her anymore...

But that was secondary, really. What was important was that he had found her in the first place. I can't wait to see her, to find out what's happened to her! He tossed his head and pranced with glee, all of his discouragement and depression changed in that single moment of discovery.

He looked about quickly, out of sheer force of habit. It was growing dark, and he hadn't seen anyone on this wilderness track for...days. There was absolutely no point in keeping to the one-horn form he'd taken to keep predators and hunters away, not now, not when there was no one to see him. Without another thought, he sprang into the air and shifted in midleap, resuming his Kin-shape with a sigh of relief.

Not for the first time, he wondered how his mother could stand it. Anything else felt like his skin was too tight. He'd had no choice, until now. Several times, when he'd thought he was safe, he'd rounded a bend in the road and come face-to-face with a collared human out on some errand of his master's...or even an entire pack-train of them. With the collars on, it was impossible to sense them; impossible to know where they were. So Keman had kept to a form that, while unusual, was also threatening enough to keep the curious at a distance.

The seductive song of magic came again, this time sustained, as if Shana was doing something that took a good deal of time. And it was joined by other, lesser melodies. She wasn't alone, then. No, he could feel...hmm...six or seven other wizards, and a lot more people. Humans, but uncollared, and young, he thought. Keman caught his direction and flew off, wings beating strongly, at just above treetop-level. And with every wing-beat, he wanted to sing along with the melodies of well-constructed magery, caroling with joy. I can't believe it...I finally, finally found her! And no one is ever going to take her away from me again!

It had been a discouraging winter. Lord Dyran's estate had proved as barren of information as the city, and his rivals offered little more. Keman's guise of a young elven lord made him practically invisible...and for some cases, shifting into human slave form was even better, for very little attention was paid to slaves on most estates, so long as they were either working or at least not absent from an appointed duty. But none of this helped Keman in his quest for information, for Shana might just as well have vanished down a hole to the center of the earth.

Finally, for lack of anything else, Keman had taken to the wilderness. There were "wild humans" rumored to be living there; Shana might have escaped to them. Certainly, between them, the terrain and the wildlife made traveling the few roads that passed through those lands quite difficult.

All of which just proved that the elven lords didn't have quite as much control over this world as they thought they did.

Elves didn't take to those tracks willingly, and humans not at all unless ordered. Every year, pack-trains were lost to causes unknown, and more than a few travelers desperate or stupid enough to journey alone never reached their destinations. The elves claimed officially that the losses were due entirely to weather and wildlife, but rumors spoke of huge bands of bandit humans, commanded by some unknown or unnamed elven lord, who swooped down on the unwary traveler to rob and kill.

And there were other rumors, spoken in whispers, in corners, that said those bandits were commanded by no elven lord, but by other humans, and that they had sworn to die before wearing a collar.

In honest truth, during all his time here Keman had seen no sign of "huge bands of humans," collared or otherwise. What he had seen was the result of elven tampering with weather and ecology; terrible storms that could sweep up out of nowhere, pounding an area with wind, torrential rain, and lightning, or burying it in snow and ice. He had never seen so many one-horns before, black and white...he guessed that at least half the one-horns still alive and breeding were here, in these wilderlands. And one-horns were by no means the fiercest of the predators prowling these woods. He'd encountered many creatures he had no name for, more evidence of failed elven tampering in hopes of producing creatures that could be sent out to kill hundreds of human pawns in their staged battles. Evidently they had not learned their lesson with the one-horns.

But there was no need for "huge bands of bandits" to explain the losses on these roads. Elven interference and indifference were more than enough to ensure that these wilderlands remained hostile.

The light was failing, but Keman altered his eyes for night-vision; both to use all the available light, and to see things by the heat they radiated. The second gave him an odd kind of view down through the boughs of the trees below. Pine-scent blew up to him as the branches tossed with his passing, as if he were creating a kind of tiny windstorm as he flew.

The magic-song ended, but Keman had his bearings. His own mind-reach was limited, but as soon as he thought Shana might hear him, he began calling with his mind. At first there was no answer, which was pretty much what he had expected, but as he neared, he heard a reply, and much sooner than he thought he would.

:Keman?: The voice in his head was incredulous, faltering a little, a bit stunned. :Keman, is that... That is you! Fire and Rain, I never thought...where are you?: She sounded even better than her magic; her thoughts were strong and clear, and he thought fleetingly that Alara would be proud of her control.

:Northeast of you, and closing.: he replied smugly, feeling rather proud of himself. :Did you really think I'd let you get thrown out here and not at least try to find you? I've been looking for you since before the snow fell, and...:

:Keman, I've got people with me.: she interrupted warningly. :Halfbloods and humans, and I can't leave them. And they can't see you, you know that. You know what would happen to you, and to Foster Mother. It's bad enough that the elven lords have dragon-skin. At least most of them don't have the faintest idea what it is. But if anyone, even the elven lords' enemies, see a real dragon...:

:Not a problem, don't worry,: he assured her. :I know how to handle the situation. Just be ready for your long-lost foster brother to find you shortly. He's been looking for you since those humans stole you out of the desert. Umm...halfblood brother, or human?:

Silence for a moment, while powerful wingstrokes closed the distance between them. :Halfblood; I may have to bring you back with me to the Citadel...never mind, I'll explain all that. You just think up a convincing story about how you found me, why you came looking for me, and how you tracked me from the desert. I've told them that's where I lived, and I said I was a fosterling, but I never mentioned you or Alara.:

:All right,: he replied...scanning the forest ahead for an unusually large grouping of heat-sources. I think I see you,: he said, when one appeared just ahead of him. :I'll land and walk in.:

With that, he cut off his mental sendings; landing in trees this thick was going to take all his concentration. In fact, for a moment he wasn't sure he was going to manage it at all...

Then he spotted the clearing, where one of the forest giants had fallen, taking down an entire swath of lesser trees with it. There was just enough room along the path of its destruction for him to make a prey-catching stoop and backwing into a good landing without getting impaled on the branches...

Moments later, he was in halfblood form, and lurking in the shadows, watching from behind the shelter of a tree trunk and trying to think of how best to approach the camp. He couldn't see Shana from this angle, but there were three or four others in plain view from where he crouched, one human and two halfbloods, firelight flickering on their faces. They looked very young, at least to him...the human especially couldn't have seen more than a dozen summers. He was afraid to walk right up to them, for fear he'd startle them; the halfbloods probably could do the same kinds of things Shana could, and he didn't feel like getting pummeled by rocks...or worse, they might well be able to hurt or even kill with their powers. But he didn't want to sneak up on them, either; that could be misconstrued, too.

Someone solved the problem for him.

"Don't move," said a hard, controlled voice in his ear, as something very sharp poked into his ribs. "And be grateful your ears are a little less pointed than an elven lord's, or you wouldn't be standing here alive."

The pure, expressionless cold of that voice sent shivers up his back, and ice down his veins. He swallowed, and coughed to clear his throat. "I...uh...I'm looking for someone," he began. He wondered if he ought to turn around, then decided that he probably had better not.

"I'll bet you are," the voice said, with just a trace of mockery.

"No, really...I'm looking for my sister, my foster sister, I mean, and I've come a long way," he said, babbling desperately. "All the way from the desert. I've been looking for her since fall. She was taken by humans..."

"The desert?" The point digging into his ribs eased up a little. "What's her name, stranger?"

"Shana," he whispered, relaxing as the pointed object was removed from his side entirely. "She's been gone for months and months...the others didn't want me to look for her because they were afraid of the elven lords finding out about us, but I had to come. I've been looking for her for so long, and there hasn't been a trace of her anyplace and..."

"That's because she's been with us for months and months," the voice said dryly. "You're not in the clear yet, stranger, but you're closer. Let's just move into camp, and see if Shana recognizes you."

Keman stepped carefully from behind the tree trunk and picked his way across the branch-strewn, root-rutted, uneven ground towards the circle of firelight. As soon as he got a little closer, he saw Shana, who appeared to be deep in conversation with one of the human children. That was when he noticed something interesting...most of the halfbloods were in their late adolescence, and there wasn't a single human that could be called anything but a child. Although Keman was no kind of expert, he judged them to be no more than ten, and several were younger.

Although Shana had every appearance of being engrossed in talk, Keman saw her taking quick glances about her out of the corner of her eye. Watching for him, he had no doubt. He did not reopen his mental contact with her, though. If she didn't know when he was going to appear, her surprise would be more genuine, and more believable to his captor. Keman also had no doubt that this was the one to convince of his veracity. This one was woods- and worldly-wise. He had been keeping watch while the others huddled about the campfire. If Keman slipped, he'd catch it.

A twig snapped under his foot just as he entered the circle of firelight, and everyone looked up, variations on alarm and surprise on their faces. And a fraction of a heartbeat later, Shana leapt to her feet, and flung herself at him.

"Keman!" she cried, as he caught her awkwardly. "Oh, Keman, Keman..."

Then she burst into tears, which was not something he expected at all; he held her awkwardly, while the owner of the voice chuckled, and came around the two of them, into the firelight.

"Looks like you're what you say you are," the young halfblood said, tossing long, dark hair out of his eyes, and bestowing a half smile on his erstwhile captive. Keman had the oddest feeling, looking at the young man's deep, troubled eyes, that a half smile would be all anyone would ever get from him...

"Look, family reunions are wonderful, but we've got a problem here, Shana," said another young man...not with the kind of disparaging self-importance that would normally accompany words of that nature, but as if he was genuinely afraid. "We've got a dozen human kids with wizard-powers, and nowhere to take them. So now that we've got them loose, what are we going to do with them?"

One of the youngest girls snuggled up to him, and he put his arm around her as she looked up at him with frightened eyes.

"He's right, Shana," Keman's guard said soberly. "You know we can't take them to the Citadel, and they aren't old enough to survive out here on their own...and even if they were, the elven lords would track them down in a season. They've hardly even seen the outside World, they certainly don't know how to take care of themselves in the wilderness!"

One of the other children began to cry softly, and a halfblood girl got up to comfort her.

Shana stood away from Keman and wiped her eyes, becoming all business. "Why can't we take them to the Citadel?" she asked, challenge in her voice and stance. "Why not? Who told you that? Who made the rule that we weren't to let full-humans in?"

The second young man spluttered for a moment, and the one who'd caught Keman moved back a step, startled. "We can't" the second managed to get out. "It's never been done. The wizards would never..."

"The wizards did, back in the old days," she said triumphantly. "And there's no rule against it, either! That's one of the reasons why the Citadel's so big...half the people there were full-humans with wizard-powers, and not halfbloods at all! And there's records in my room that prove it!"

The second boy's mouth fell open...and Keman thought he caught a glimmer of approval from the first one. She really was leading them all, he thought with surprise. She was the one making the plans and doing the thinking.

Shana had changed; she'd been rebellious in the Lair, but in a disorganized way. She was still a rebel, but now she had battle-plans to get where she wanted to go...and Fire and Rain weren't going to stop her.

"Look," she said, dropping her voice. "Right now the real problem is getting the elven lords off the track. They're definitely hunting us; Zed's caught them trying to find us with magic, and I've been watching them too. So let's split the party. If you take the children back to the Citadel, and smuggle them in by night, the masters won't have a choice about letting them in or not, because they'll already be there. Use one of the escape tunnels I showed you, instead of the front entrance, and they won't know until it's too late."

"And meanwhile you'll be doing what?" the first wizard asked, in a matter-of-fact tone that suggested to Keman that he already knew the answer.

"Keman and I will be decoying the pursuit," she said confidently, though he could feel her trembling. "Between the two of us, we can convince them that you're all still with us, I think. It'll take some work, but in some ways it will be easier than if we were all still together."

Keman nodded, feeling that some sort of show of agreement was called for at this point. "Shana and I have done things like this before, losing enemies. We've been at it all our lives," he said truthfully. "We'll confuse your trail, and make ours the only clear one. Really, it's easier for two people to look like two dozen than for two dozen to look like two. We'll lead them north, I think, then lose them."

"How?" the first one asked, skeptically.

Shana smiled. "Oh, trust me, Zed; they'll think we sprouted wings and flew away."

Keman coughed to cover the fact that he almost choked on that statement. When they looked at him curiously, he flushed. "There...there's dozens of one-horns farther on," he improvised hastily. "Shana's always been able to control them. If we drove them down our backtrail, not even a demon would be able to pick it up again."

Zed shrugged, but Keman caught admiration in his eyes for a moment. "All right. If you can do that, I guess I can take on the masters when they find out about these kids. Maybe I can get Denelor and Agravane to take our side; neither one of them can resist a kid. When do we start?"

"At dawn," Shana said with determination. "Especially if a storm comes up to wash out your trail."

-:Well, Keman,: the young dragon heard in his mind. :How good are you at calling rain these days?:

:As good as I have to be,: he told her, soberly. :You're not the only one who's been learning things.:

:Neither are you. That idea of using the one-horns is a good one, and we might as well do it if we get the chance. Well then,: she replied, with the same seriousness, something that seemed alien to the Shana he had known, :it's about time we showed each other what we've learned.:

Keman hugged her shoulders, a two-legger gesture he had observed, but never had a chance to use. To his surprise, it felt good. Very good. It made him feel... no longer alone.

:I agree,: he said, some of that warmth spreading into his thoughts and coloring them with confidence. :Let's show them all.:

She looked at him in surprise; then, slowly smiled.

Valyn crouched on his heels and stared at the muddied ground for a moment, rain dripping from his hat-brim down his back. He saw no reason to use magic to keep himself dry; there was too much magic in use out here as it was. And he wasn't supposed to be in these wild lands in the first place; if anyone detected him, they'd know in a moment that there was an elven mage out here, and the hunt might switch to him. After all, there had been rumors for decades that there was an elven lord acting as a bandit leader, operating out here with a band of collared humans. Catching such a renegade as that would be as useful as capturing the unknown parties who had released the slaves...in fact, such a leader might well be the one who had released them.

He didn't need that, and neither did Shadow.

Cheynar didn't know Shadow was a halfblood, but if he decided to be ruthless and use his coercion-spells on Valyn again...

He just might babble it, he thought unhappily. Now he knew why Cheynar didn't use magic much. He saved it all for those moments when he really needed to know what was going on in someone's mind, what things they were hiding, and he was good at it. If he hadn't stopped questioning me, I would have told him about Mero, I know I would have.

"The bigger party went off that way," he said, pointing. "And I think with luck, this rain is going to wash the trail away long before Cheynar and the others find it. But the one halfblood we want to follow went off that way, or that's the way it looks, and she isn't making any attempt to hide her trail."

"She's acting as a decoy," Shadow said flatly, peering through the rain in the direction Valyn pointed. "I'm sure of it. She's the best they've got...Valyn, I have to find her, or I'm never going to learn what I can do, because none of those others will ever trust someone..."

He broke off, and flushed with embarrassment. Valyn stood up, and patted his shoulder awkwardly. "I know," he said, a little sadly. "I'm a liability to you, aren't I? If I just went back right now..."

"You can't, and we both know it," Mero replied fiercely. "If you go back now, heir or not, your father...I don't know what he'll do to you. He might even be willing to kill you. He'll certainly hurt you a lot, and...you know what he can do. He'll work spells on you, and when he's done, you won't be Valyn anymore. You don't have a choice. But she's the one who saved the humans, and she's the one who convinced the others to take the kids back to...wherever the other wizards are. If anybody will accept both of us, it's her. And I'm not going without you."

Valyn swallowed the lump in his throat that threatened to choke off his words. Cheynar had discovered him scrying, tracing the movements and actions of the young wizards, where he and his men had been able to read little or nothing.

He had not been amused. Valyn should have come running to him with everything the young Lord had learned, and they both knew it. So he had used his toughest coercive spells to pry everything he could out of Valyn, and left him in his room, in a sweat-sodden, helpless heap, when he'd heard what he thought was the end of it; where the outlaws were, what they were doing, and that Valyn had been spying on them for his own purposes.

Cheynar thought he knew what those purposes were, that Valyn was working for Dyran, or possibly even working for himself against both Dyran and Cheynar. It was a logical assumption; it wouldn't have been the first time a son had acted against his father. Cheynar himself had done so, allying himself with Dyran and eventually taking the estate from his father.

Thank the Ancestors, Cheynar had been wrong about Valyn, and had been impatient to take up the hunt. If he'd questioned Valyn a moment longer...

But he hadn't. Shadow had come in sometime later...how long, he couldn't say, his mind was still fogged with the effects of Cheynar's spells...and managed to wake him up. That was when he realized exactly what the results of all this would be, when Lord Cheynar returned, successful or not, from his hunt.

First, as soon as he recovered from the draining of his own magic, he would be at Valyn again, and this time he would not stop until he knew everything the young elven mage did.

He would learn that Shadow was not the trained bodyguard he was supposed to be. He would learn why Shadow was with Valyn...and what Shadow was.

And he would have a halfblood in his possession.

Then he would report everything Valyn had done to Lord Dyran...possibly turning Shadow over to him, possibly not; he might choose to eliminate the "dangerous halfblood" himself. It didn't much matter. The moment Cheynar returned, Shadow was doomed, and so was Valyn.

Though he had been weak-kneed and shaking, Valyn had laid his plans and packed everything he thought he might need...and so did Mero. In the morning, claiming that they were following Lord Cheynar on his orders, they set out for the wilderness with packs and horses.

Within hours of entering the confines of the forest, they lost the horses...one, while they were setting up their first camp, to something they never even saw, only heard; the second to a broken leg as it fled whatever had carried off the first.

At least they hadn't lost the packs.

Perhaps it was just as well. If the horses...or their remains...were ever found, it might be assumed that Valyn and Shadow had fallen victim to the unknown predator as well. A young and zealous elven lord might well have decided to follow Cheynar on his father's behalf, with or without orders. That would give them at least the semblance of innocence, and might prevent Cheynar from being suspicious about why they had left the estate so abruptly.

Losing the horses left them afoot, but gave them an unexpected advantage. Cheynar and his hunters completely overshot the actual location of the wizards, and were now far beyond them. Valyn and Shadow, on foot, but with superior information, found their campsite just before the rains came pouring down out of the leaden, sullen sky.

It would not be long until every trace of the trail of the group was wiped out. The girl's track, on the other hand, was so clear that it would probably withstand a flood...and that, given her actions so far, had to be deliberate.

Valyn hitched his pack a little higher on his shoulders, and set off on the girl's trail, bow in hand, with Shadow following closely behind, keeping mental track of her. In this much, at least, Valyn had an advantage over Shadow; one of the expected pastimes of young lords was hunting, and Valyn had a great deal more practice at handling his bow than Shadow had. In fact, it was a violation of rules that Shadow knew the use of weapons at all. Only fighters, gladiators, and assassins, all of them carefully conditioned and trained, with special coercions on their collars, were allowed the use or knowledge of anything other than a simple kitchen-knife. Mero's possession of weaponry had raised no eyebrows in Cheynar's household, since he was assumed to be an assassin/bodyguard...but in Dyran's, it could have been punished with death.

So Valyn took the lead, in case they roused something else as formidable as whatever killed their horses. And if an arrow tipped with elf-shot couldn't kill whatever came at them, magic certainly could.

Or so I delude myself. Valyn had taken a look at the prints left by the thing that killed their horse, and had a fair notion of its speed. If it or another like it was lying in ambush for them, he wasn't sure he'd have the time to get that first shot off.

But he wasn't going to tell that to Mero. The young man was already apprehensive enough about being out in this untamed forest. Mero knew life between four walls very well; he was adept at intrigue and the ways to circumvent nearly anything. Out here, he was quite lost.

"How far ahead of us is she?" he asked over his shoulder. Mero was plowing doggedly through the underbrush, plainly miserable, head down and shoulders hunched.

He couldn't help it; the cruelly logical and analytical part of him added: And paying no attention to anything around him, just on the ground in front of him.

"I think we can catch up with her just after dusk," Mero said, his voice muffled and indistinct. "She'll probably make camp about then. I doubt Cheynar will be close enough to pick up her trail until tomorrow, he's off west and south of here, sure as anything that the goat he's following is her."

Valyn choked on a laugh.

"I just thought I'd tell you," Mero continued, with just a hint of sullenness, "there isn't anything close enough to be dangerous for...well, for a lot farther than we need to worry about. I am checking. I'm not as useless as you might think."

Valyn flushed, wondering if Shadow had picked up some of his earlier thoughts. But then he remembered last night... and spoke, words he really hadn't meant to say, but said anyway.

"That's assuming it can't hide its mind from you," he retorted. "The thing last night could...or at least you didn't know it was there until it got the horse!"

"I wasn't looking for it!" Mero shot back resentfully, raising his head to glare at his cousin. "I'm looking now!"

"Are you willing to bet your life on being able to'see' it?" Valyn said, after a moment of silence between them. "I'm sorry, Mero...I'm not. I'm not willing to bet my life on much of anything right now."

More silence. Valyn glanced back over his shoulder, to see Mero plodding along, head down again. Then...

"Neither am I," came the quiet reply.

Valyn checked the arrows in his quiver, and the tension on his bowstring. "Then let's both do the best we can," he suggested gently, guilty for making the point in the first place, even if it was a good one. "And let's find this girl as quickly as we can, because she's obviously better at this than both of us together!"

That earned him a wan chuckle and, feeling a little better, he turned his attention back to the trail.

Shana tensed, and snatched up the bow that had been lying beside her, as a chill of fear ran like icy lightning down her spine. She scanned the darkness beyond the range of the firelight, with eyes and mind; there was someone out there, out in the dark, watching them. Someone who hadn't been there a moment before...

Or who had been cloaking his presence until this moment, which meant magic, the kind of magic only an elven lord or a halfblood could use. Humans could hide their thoughts if they had the power, or if they had been collared, but only elven magic could hide someone's presence. The greatest of the wizards could, in the old days, even conceal the telltale "sounds" of magic use. Elves could do it routinely, but seldom bothered. Which meant the intruder was either an elf, or a wizard more powerful than any Shana knew.

No, wait. Her chill deepened, and her hands closed harder on the bow. The unknown was cloaking a double presence. There were two of them out there. One of them moved, and the sharp scent of disturbed, wet leaves came to her nostrils.

:Yes,: came the halting voice in her mind, before she could barricade it. :There are two of us. We have been trying to find you. We need your help, most urgently.:

The "voice" was uncertain, uneven in tone and strength, as if the "speaker" was not used to communicating this way. Shana's fear did not lessen, however, and she remained tense; she had never yet come across a case where an elven lord had used a human or halfblood with wizard-powers, but that didn't mean it couldn't happen...there were those suspicions in the old journals after all. Was this, the worst of her fears, about to be shown as the truth?

"Come out here where I can see you," she said aloud.

:Shana, one of them is...: Keman began, as the two lurking in the shadows stepped into the light of their fire. The light reflected off dark hair, slightly pointed ears and green eyes...and, features shadowed behind his companion, white-blond hair, sharply pointed ears, angular features, pale alabaster skin and green eyes.

:...an elven lord,: Keman concluded lamely.

Well, there was this much; the elven lord didn't look very lordly at the moment. Wet hair straggled down into his face, obscuring what the shadows didn't. They both looked very much the worse for wear, rain-soaked, dirty, and weary, with clothing torn by brambles, and faces pale with cold. The expression in the halfblood's eyes was one Shana might have empathized with: hopeful, and not a little desperate.

:My friend and cousin,: amended the halfblood defiantly. He stepped forward, placing himself between the young elven lord and Shana. "We came to find help, Valyn and I. He's saved me so many times I've lost count," the halfblood continued aloud. "He's not like the others...and right now, he's in just as much danger as we are. Maybe more."

A nice story, if it's true. Shana leveled her crossbow at his chest; at this range, especially with her own magics backing it, the powerful bow could quite easily send its single bolt through both of them. They both backed up a step, and she leveled an openly hostile gaze on them. "That's exactly what you'd say if he was using you to find more wizards," she pointed out, stalling for time while Keman readied himself for a quick change if need arose. "You've come out of nowhere, when I know I'm being followed by elves, and you tell me that I should help you because you're in danger. That sounds like a trap to me. Right now I don't see any reason to believe you. He could easily be controlling you."

The halfblood's reaction surprised her; he cursed, and reached up to his own throat, tearing off the collar and throwing it to the ground. "There!" he said angrily. "Does that convince you? Dammit, we're cold, we're hungry, we're tired, we're in as much danger as you are...and we're helpless!"

"All of which can be feigned," she replied coldly. "And he could be controlling you by some means other than a collar. Collars just happen to be a convenient vehicle for the coercion- and conditioning-spells."

The elven lord...Valyn?...stepped out from behind his companion, though his face was still in the shadows. "You seem to know quite a bit about it," he said mildly. "But Mero says you have much stronger mind-powers than he does. So why don't you read his thoughts and see if what he is saying is true. Ancestors, for that matter, you can read mine, and welcome!"

That rather surprised her. Shana looked over at Keman, who shrugged. "I can watch them, if that's what you're worried about," he said quietly. "They won't be able to get past me, I don't care how good they are."

Shana privately doubted that he could stop them, but she kept her doubts to herself. He'd been among elves for months, and he'd seen some of what they could do. If Keman thought he could counter the work of a powerful elven mage, then perhaps he could.

And perhaps he couldn't. There really was no telling. But right now the situation was at a stalemate; they couldn't trust these strangers, but neither could they drive them away.

She nodded reluctantly. "All right," she said, lowering her bow. And, to Keman, :I hope I know what I'm doing, here. And I hope you weren't boasting.:

She closed her eyes...

A moment later she opened them, grinning like a fool.

"Get in here and get warm," she told them, as first Mero, then his cousin, relaxed visibly. "We have a lot to talk about."

Mero grinned uncertainly back, and moved aside to let his cousin get by him. Valyn raked his sodden hair out of his eyes, and smiled at her, and only then did she really see him.

She flushed, and stared at him, then quickly looked away from him. Rain-soaked, filthy, and worn as he was, she had never seen a more incredibly handsome being in her life...

And she hadn't the foggiest idea what to do about it.

WE KNEW THE whereabouts of the elves by the aura, the sound of power wherever they were, and the location of their human slaves by the peculiar thought-void caused by the collars.

That quote came directly from Kalamadea's journal.

No matter where they were, nor how expert and powerful, they could not conceal those twin clues.

Shana'd had plenty of chances to test those journal entries over the past couple of days. The dragon-wizard had been correct. No matter what shielding the elven lords placed on themselves, that faint hum of magic, detectable only by one who herself was a mage, persisted, like the hum of a beehive in the distance.

She stared, not at the flames of their little fire, but through them, letting her mage-senses seek back along the territory they had already crossed.

One party...two...

Fire and Rain. Three hunting parties behind them! What kind of hornet's nest had she stirred up?

Or maybe all this pursuit had nothing to do with the rescue of the children, and everything to do with their current company.

You'd think I'd be over this by now, Shana thought fretfully, doing her best not to stare at the chiseled perfection of Valyn's face, and completely unable to stop herself. It had been days since Valyn joined them. Weeks, even. And he still made her feel... funny. She didn't understand it. And she didn't like it. Except that she did like it. Fire and Rain, I'm so confused!

It wasn't just that Valyn was so infernally gorgeous. Shana had seen plenty of handsome elves; actually, all elves were handsome enough to make most humans envious. She knew any number of halfbloods, though, who were just as good-looking as an eleven lord. Zed, for one. Most of the halfbloods were fascinating enough to turn anyone's head...

In fact, since being captured, she had encountered no lack of attractive young men. Not one of them had affected her in the least.

So why did Valyn make her so... nervous?

Every time she looked at him, she felt self-conscious and oddly shy. Every time he looked at her, she knew he was doing so; she felt his eyes on her as surely as if they were tiny twin suns shining on her. She wanted, desperately, to please him, to make him proud of her. And it had been this way since that first night around their shared campfire.

When he watched her, she alternately flushed and chilled; when he spoke to her, she lost track of what she had been saying. Compared to him, his cousin Mero was little more than the shadow he was named for. She watched him at every opportunity by day, and dreamed of him at night.

The farther they went into the wilderness, the stronger her feelings became...and yet she was mortally afraid to tell him how she felt about him, as if telling him would unmake all the dreams she spun every night.

Maybe that was it. While he stayed aloof, she could dream as much as she wanted to. If she told him how she felt, he would have to respond in some way...and his response would mean that, one way or another, everything would change between them.

She didn't even know how to deal with what they had now... or even whether they had anything at all.

She brooded on his flawless profile across the camp-fire from her, as he talked with Keman and his cousin. His speech, like everything else about him, was gentle and courteous; his speaking voice was as musical as many humans' singing voices.

If she told him, he was either going to laugh at her, or else he was going to take her seriously. Either way, the dreams would be gone. She wanted to keep dreaming a while, to imagine all the possibilities between them...

What she didn't want to have to deal with was reality, after all, how likely was it that a gently reared elven lord would find her attractive? Surely what he really wanted was a full-elven lady, like the ones she had spied upon. Surely it was not autumn-leaf hair he dreamed of, but silk and sunlight. Her manners alone must be enough to drive him away in less desperate circumstances; she had none to speak of. She was rough and plain-spoken; tough enough to have crossed the desert on her own. A gentle elven maiden would likely have fainted away at the mere thought of such a trek...and an elven lady never spoke plainly about anything.

She should know; she'd been watching them through their own eyes long enough. They played games of innuendo and deception that differed from their lords' only in the amount of power involved.

But then again, why shouldn't he be attracted to her for her very differences? Might he not be weary of coy elven maidens, with their feigned innocence? Why shouldn't he be fascinated by her hardihood and her adventurousness? And he could very well be tired of elven women's perpetual ice-statue perfection. Those long looks he kept bestowing on her could easily be longing looks.

Was this love? All she had to go on was what she had occasionally read in the archives of the Citadel, or the books from which she and Keman had learned elven tongue. The latter had not spoken much of "love"...that emotion played very little part in elven matings. It was a rare thing when elves admitted to love, and rarer still when they could act on it. The complexities of elven politics usually made love impossible.

And as for the archives...well, there had been romances and ballads galore in the archives, and for the most part she had ignored them all in favor of the histories. She had wanted fact, not fantasy; the means to power, not distraction.

Now she regretted not reading a few of them, at least. She could only watch Valyn as covertly as she could manage, and wonder, and daydream.

Not that she didn't have plenty to occupy her attention; Lord Cheynar and his cohorts were still out hunting for them...and when she and Keman weren't laying false trails and working themselves deeper and deeper into the wilderlands, she was teaching Shadow the use of some of his powers. Trying to teach him, anyway. Valyn was such a distraction...and Shadow, although he was nice enough, seemed to resent her admiration of his cousin.

Maybe he was just jealous. But she didn't know; he wanted her to teach him, but now there were times when he acted as if he didn't entirely believe what she told him.

Whatever the reason, every time she tried to show him something, he'd watch her as if he suspected her of hiding something from him. Then he'd bristle and get pathetically defensive when she tried to correct him. While she usually felt sorry for him because it wasn't easy to live in the background of someone as spectacular as Valyn, she was occasionally getting tired of his attitude, and increasingly distressed at the way things seemed to be bothering him.

She wished, very much, that he'd make up his mind about what he wanted. She felt uneasy when he kept watching her out from under that thatch of unruly dark hair. She was very tired of the way he kept watching her like a nervous hawk every time she said something nice to Valyn, or glanced at the elven lord out of the corner of her eye.

This association had started out well enough, but it had deteriorated rapidly. Between Valyn's aloofness, Shadow's nerves, the rotten rainy weather, and the constant presence of pursuit, she was on the verge of telling them both to go fend for themselves and leave her and Keman alone.

Except that would mean that she would likely never see Valyn again. Even if he survived the pursuit, there was nowhere he could go. He certainly couldn't try to gain entrance to the Citadel. Even if he could find it, he'd never get in; they'd probably kill him on sight.

There was just no answer, she thought, brooding into the flames of the fire. No answer at all,

Valyn stared into the glowing coals at the heart of the fire...the first they'd had in the past three days. Either there hadn't been any way to shelter the thing from sight, or there hadn't been enough dry fuel to keep it going without sending up a telltale stream of smoke. He could have used magic to keep them all warm, of course, but that would have been another kind of telltale, as certain to some "eyes" as lighting a beacon. It was better to shiver than bring Lord Cheynar down on them.

But tonight they'd found a tumble of rocks that they could roof over with pine boughs, and nearby, a fallen tree with some dry wood sheltered under it, enough to start the fire and keep it going until after sunset. And once it was dark, the plume of smoke rising from the fire when they started mixing green wood with dry wouldn't matter.

A fire had meant a hot supper of cooked meat instead of the roots and raw fish they'd had for the past three evenings. That should have made them all well-content, but it didn't. All four of them huddled around the pocket of light, as if they were hungry for its warmth...and yet, they strained away from each other, trying too hard not to touch each other.

There were invisible currents tugging them this way and that, currents of emotion that were likely to split them apart before they even had much of a chance to see how well they could work together. For instance: Valyn knew very well how Shana felt about him. How could he not? Even without the ability to read minds, her infatuation was unmistakable. It wasn't the first time he had been the object of some young girl's desires, and not always just for the prestige of being taken to his bed. More than one concubine truly, sincerely, loved him...or thought she did. Lusted after him, at least. Certainly yearned after him.

But this particular infatuation was dangerous. Shana was a lovely wench, in her own way; a bit fiery for his taste, but very much the kind of young woman Dyran would have snatched up in a trice and installed in the harem...

Which was exactly the problem. Dyran had snatched up a woman very like her. Her mother, Serina. Valyn didn't remember Serina or the row her flight had caused in the harem, but he had certainly heard about it as he was growing up. She was something of a legend, enough so that her story had intrigued him, though he could never learn why she had fled. Then, from Mero's mother, he had learned the truth; she had been carrying a halfblood child like Mero, and her condition had been betrayed to Dyran. There had been orders out to kill her, but she had learned of them in time to escape. Everyone assumed she had perished in the desert.

From what Shana and Keman had told them, and from what he knew about Serina Daeth, he had no doubt whatsoever who Shana's mother must have been. In the past sixteen or seventeen years there had only been one escaped, pregnant concubine...and add to that fact that only someone of Serina Daeth's astonishing beauty could have produced a daughter like Shana...and the final fact of the infant Shana's birth and subsequent rescue by the dragon...there was only one conclusion he could make. Shana was his half-sister. Which meant that even if he'd been enamored of her, she was strictly out-of-bounds. And not even a dragon would make him think any other way.

Dragons. No, not even Keman could persuade him. Not that Keman would want to, he didn't think...but then who knew how a dragon reasoned?

Valyn certainly didn't, not even after having spent many days with one. He never would have known Keman wasn't another halfblood, if Shana and her "foster brother" hadn't decided to tell both of them. He had been getting a bit suspicious though, because of the way that Keman would vanish just at sunset, and return just afterwards. He'd tried to find a way to follow, but Keman always lost him. Then Shana had caught him following...and that was when they had decided to show him what was going on, so that Keman could go off to kill and feed without having to sneak away.

That had given him something of a turn, to see one of the legended dragons with his own eyes.

They told him before Keman made the shift that Shana's foster mother had been a dragon; and he'd thought, at first, that Shana and her foster brother were somehow trying to make him look like a fool. But then Keman had proved that there were dragons, after all, in the most final way possible.

When Keman had first shifted shape for them, Valyn had been so shocked, so completely taken by surprise, that he was tempted to conclude that either he had fallen ill and was suffering with a fever, or Shana and Keman were superb illusionists. But he was as healthy as he had ever been...and Keman was quite solid and real to the touch, the proof that he was not any kind of illusion.

So now Valyn knew why Keman and Shana could not return to the wizards' hiding place...at least not until the dragon could learn to conceal those parts of his thoughts that would reveal what he truly was. Which put him on something of the same footing with them, since there was no way he could go there unless and until he learned to mimic wizard-powers and found a way to build and maintain an illusion of being halfblood.

And the true halfbloods were devoted to their "brothers." Shadow wouldn't leave him; Shana wouldn't leave Keman.

Which left them all out here in the wilderness...with Keman and Shana having a distinct advantage over himself and Mero. They knew how to live, even prosper, out here. He and Mero were, if not totally helpless, certainly at an extreme handicap. When he and Mero had been out hunting or camping, it had been in the relatively tame woods of the estate, with a dozen slaves to tend to anything they needed, and most of the comforts of being at home available to them. The chances of being able to survive out here on their own were not very good.

If they had to leave Shana and Keman, he and Shadow might as well just stand around and wait for one of those things to come carry them away. She had been the one finding most of the food, especially the roots and things. And even though she'd been teaching Shadow how to use his power to track some of the stranger beasts that hunted these woods, Valyn didn't think his cousin was quite experienced enough at it yet. He had missed the last one-horn, and had never even known that the tree-lurker was anywhere around.

The fire popped and crackled; he threw another log onto it, and watched as the bark burst into flame.

If Shana took it into her head to leave them...as she just might, if he rejected her...he didn't think that he and Shadow would have much of a chance out here. More than once, Keman had shifted to his dragon-form to frighten away predators that neither he nor Mero saw or sensed in any way. Once or twice Shana summoned a small herd of one-horns to trample over their backtrail to confuse it. More often than not, it was Shana or Keman who found and killed the game they ate. The only contribution he and Mero had been able to make was to start fires and rig shelters.

Valyn sighed, and watched the flames die down to glowing coals. The problem was, he'd have been perfectly willing to bed the girl until her infatuation wore off...if only she wasn't his half-sister. Unfortunately, he couldn't prove that she was. He was absolutely certain...but even if she was Serina's daughter, that didn't prove that Dyran was her father!

And even if he had been able to prove it to her satisfaction, he wasn't entirely sure it would make any difference to her. She often didn't seem to have any familiarity with concepts he considered quite basic, and he had the sinking feeling that even if she knew, she wouldn't care.

Whereas he...well, the mere thought of bedding his own sister was enough to make his skin crawl. There had been quite enough of that sort of thing in the early days of the elven settlement here. Valyn half wondered if that wasn't the cause of there being so few births now. Certainly matings and marryings between close kin had caused some real horrors in the way of offspring, as well as other troubles...more than enough to instill in everyone of elven blood now alive a real aversion to the bare thought of incest.

So there was no way she was ever going to get what she thought she wanted from him...and that was going to cause trouble, more trouble than they had even now.

Shadow was getting tired of her attitude, and the way she was neglecting his teaching. She had already threatened to leave them all over little things, and more than once.

If only he had some way of keeping her with them...some bond even she would not be willing to break.

But what kind of bond would that be? Friendship obviously wasn't enough; it would have to be something stronger, something official.

If only there was some; way to bring her into the "family" and make her feel as if they needed to be together.

He sensed that she felt that need of family; that at least part of her unhappiness...and part of the cause of her infatuation...was that she felt so very alone. After all, she didn't have anyone but Keman anymore. She'd formed no strong ties with any of the wizards.

If he could just find some way to show her that he thought a great deal of her, and wanted very much to make some kind of tie between them all...even though he was not in the least in love with her.

She didn't understand sworn brotherhood, or blood-oaths. And he didn't want to offer anything that could be misconstrued.

It was just too bad that she couldn't have chosen Shadow for her infatuation. She seemed to like him well enough, and he liked her, or so he had confessed to his older cousin. But she made him nervous, and it often appeared that she was just as nervous around him.

If they just got to know each other, they might take to each other. Then she wouldn't even think about leaving. How could he make her stay?

Then he had it...

Handfasting. The dragons had something like it; she'd understand that. If he handfasted her to Shadow, that would bring her into Valyn's family, and protect everyone. It was a perfectly good arrangement...better than most elven marriages, really, since she knew Shadow and there seemed to be some friendship and affection there. He'd put it to her as a Clan alliance. If she'd been watching the elven lords, she'd understand that. If she accepted, she might even start to transfer some of that infatuation to Shadow; but at the least she'd have an obligation to teach him adequately. She'd take that duty seriously...and she wouldn't be distracted by Valyn as much. She wouldn't be quite so ready to run off and leave them.

He felt terribly pleased with himself for coming up with such an elegant solution; elven training made him preen a little for arriving at a solution that wouldn't involve him. And after all, she liked Shadow, she'd told him that more than once. If she were to be handfasted to him...and if Mero would just exert himself to be as charming as Valyn knew he could be...she just might find that infatuation of hers not only turning from Valyn to Mero, but into something more than just infatuation. That would be good for everyone.

If Mero could charm half the women of the harem, experienced as they were, he could certainly charm one young girl with no real experience whatsoever.

He sighed, and relaxed, feeling the tension flow out of him. Across the fire he saw Shana look up at him; he smiled at her, and she smiled in return.

Yes, I think that- will work, he thought to himself.

think that definitely will work. And I'll ask her tomorrow.

Shana was not entirely certain she'd heard Valyn correctly. This was not what she had expected to hear from him when he took her aside from the others at their midday break, off to the bank of the brook they'd halted beside, where the sound of the water would cover their voices. There were plenty of other worries; Cheynar and his trackers seemed to have figured out how to follow them, Cheynar was closing in from the rear, though he was several days' worth of travel behind them, and there were two other groups coming in from either side. And they were running out of places to hide. There was only so much wilderness left before they either had to double back and risk running into Cheynar, or they would come out in some lord's estate. Shana knew vaguely where they were, but only vaguely; they'd been traveling blind for some time now. Shana had been confident and secure in her own abilities when this trek started; now she was shaken.

The weather had continued to be bad, though today was pleasant enough...one of these days they were going to have to decide where they were going to go to ground. Right now the Citadel was still out of the question.

So of all the times to pick this particular subject, this was not the one Shana would have reasonably expected.

"You want what?" she asked incredulously. "You want me to what! With Mero?" She raked her hair behind her ears, and stared at him.

Valyn sat on a protruding root with his back to an enormous willow trunk, and waved at a similar root just opposite where he sat, as if they had all the time in the world. He had on his best "patient older man" look, the one she'd seen all too often with the wizards when they were about to treat her like a child.

Shana stood there with her mouth hanging open, feeling too stunned to close it.

"Please, sit down," Valyn said, smiling with incandescent charm. "It's giving me a cramp in my neck to have to look up at you."

Shana sat, or rather, dropped down on the root like an alighting hawk, as if any moment she might take alarm and fly off. She definitely felt that way.

"I think you and Mero ought to be handfasted, Shana," Valyn said earnestly, leaning forward a little. "Call it a Clan alliance...you know what that means. It's not as if any of us believe in any of the romantic ballads...we all know the ways alliances are really important...in leverage and power. It could mean a great deal, not only to the four of us, but to humans and halfbloods in general. Look, Mero knows elvenkind; he knows them incredibly well, he's been in the middle of one of the Clans all his life, with his mind-powers intact. He can be so much help, not only to the halfbloods at the Citadel, but in moving against the elven lords for the sake of halfbloods and humans with wizard-power."

"But what about you?" she managed. She leaned forward as well, and he edged back nervously. "You can be just as much help. Maybe more! And you're an elven lord..."

"Which is precisely why your wizards would never accept me on my own," Valyn replied, a slight frown appearing as he tried to impress on her the importance of his idea. "But if you're handfasted to Shadow...well, Shadow is my cousin. That's a blood-tie. They'll understand and accept that."

"Assuming they give you a chance to explain yourself," Shana said sharply.

Valyn shook his head confidently. "Oh, they will. And they'll listen to me...just, without knowing I'm bound by blood-ties, I don't think they would be nearly as ready to believe me."

Shana stared past him, at the churning waters of the brook. "So say they let you in...or even near the Citadel. Then what?"

"Then I tell them that it's time to start working to overthrow the elven lords," Valyn replied...though he didn't sound nearly as confident. "I'll show them that if they don't, one of these days the Clans will decide they're real, and they're more than just a minor nuisance and move to get rid of them. And I can prove that part. I think that when I tell them that they will have to work against the Clans, and I tell them what the Clans are doing to strengthen their hold on humans, the way that they are catching the ones with the power and killing or sterilizing them, then they might believe me. So long as you've thrown your lot in with me and Shadow."

"But..." she protested.

"And this handfasting is for your protection too, Shana," he continued. "After all, you've got no guarantee we wouldn't just run off and leave you in this wilderness."

She stayed silent, seething a little. Why should she worry? She could get along perfectly well without any of them...in fact, if she didn't have them along, she could probably go right back to the Citadel.

"And Mero is much better than either you or your foster brother at self-defense...physically, I mean, not magically."

Better than a dragon four times the length of a horse? How could he possibly be better than that? And it hadn't been Mero who'd been driving away the big predators...

In all honesty, she had to admit that if they found themselves in a situation where Keman couldn't shift, Mero truly was the expert. Keman couldn't possibly defend himself in a hand-to-hand situation, and she wasn't all that good. Neither she nor Keman could use any weapon other than a knife; the game she caught she generally snared, or lulled to sleep and slit its throat painlessly, and the game Keman caught he hunted in dragon-form. Both Mero and Valyn were experts with bows, at least to her eyes, and Mero had hinted he knew other things as well. Maybe there was something to this idea, after all...

But what was wrong with her handfasting to Valyn instead?

Valyn continued with his little speech, ignoring or simply unaware of her reactions. "He could teach both of you so much, not only about that, but about how to live among the elven lords, in case the two of you ever have to. You know, he's really incredibly lucky he never got caught. Pretending to a rank higher than your real one carries some very stiff punishments. If you ever have to hide among the elves, you'd better have Mero with you."

And on the other hand, she could get along just fine by reading thoughts to find out what was expected of her.

"Besides," he continued persuasively, "think of what a handfasting with an alliance to an elven Clan would mean to the halfbloods...and the humans! We could become a rallying point for those who want to change the way things are! The four of us together can do so much for them! But we won't convince them without some kind of formal allegiance among us. The younger elves who might be sympathetic will be suspicious that you are using or controlling me, and the humans and halfbloods will be certain that I am controlling you."

All the while he was delivering this speech, Shana had been staring at him, at first in stunned amazement, then in dismay.

She couldn't believe that he actually believed what he was telling her. It all sounded like an excuse of some kind. But an excuse for what? He couldn't know how she really felt about him, could he? So why would he be trying so very hard to push her off on Shadow?

Shadow had taught him applications of his magic that mimicked wizard-powers, which included the ability to hide his thoughts; she had never been able to read his mind clearly, but now she could hardly sense what he was thinking at all.

Which forced her to guess what he might be up to; and the sense that he was hiding something, something fairly important, made her immediately suspicious of his motives.

And she was, in her heart of hearts, a little hurt. During the entire speech, she had been watching him very closely. He had been holding himself carefully a little away from her, even when he was trying to make a point of something. As if he didn't want to get too close to her for some reason. Every time she made eye-contact with him, he looked away. Every time she tried to get a little close, he moved.

He didn't want her. He wasn't interested, not even a little. Disappointment followed that realization, then a certain amount of anger. But why not? What was wrong with her? His father liked humans well enough!

Then she was forced to admit exactly how his father "liked" humans...and in what context.

The answer was painfully simple, really. She didn't even have to search for one very far. She was a halfblood, and he was an elven lord. She was far below him...not quite an animal, but not far from one. Certainly not the kind of creature that he would even consider a physical alliance with, except the most base and basic sort. He was too much his father's son.

That led her to other conclusions.

He did know how she felt. But he thought she was beneath him. So he offered her Shadow instead, hoping that would appease the animal in season. No matter how many pretty words he used to describe it, she was sure that was what he was thinking.

At first, her only reaction was a white-hot anger. It flared up...and died down as quickly as it rose. It was followed by shame, shame at his having seen her interest, shame at being given a sop to content her... a scrap from the dinner table. Just as he'd reward his faithful dog.

She had a terrible thought. And am I supposed to be Shadow's reward?

Then, after the shame, anger again, but this time cold and calculating. She stared at the brook sparkling cheerfully in the sunlight, a complete contrast to the darkness inside her.

She could tell him to go take a long hike, she thought. She could tell him that she and Keman were going one way, and he and Shadow could take any other route they chose so long as it wasn't the same one. She ought to do just that. It would serve him right...

But he was right about one thing; the plight of the halfbloods and the humans with wizard-powers. If she went along with this, it would give her the power to start doing something about the situation. After all, ties did work both ways. If this handfasting tied her to Shadow, it also tied Shadow to her. And by his own admission, tied her to Valyn. She would be constantly in his company, one way or another. He might come to regret having tied her to his cousin, in fact...

And he did have power she doubted he even guessed, power to make a very real difference in the way humans in general were treated, even before any revolt could take place. Valyn was Lord Dyran's son and heir. Valyn could, if he chose, have the ear of many more lords, and as important, their heirs.