Elvenborn

21

Rena took her place on the carpet next to Mero in Diric's tent. The flaps were rolled knee-high, and scrims of loosely woven linen kept bugs out while allowing a breeze to flow through. It was dinnertime, a meal much enlivened these days by the addition of vegetables supplied by trading and the gardens that the Corn People were growing, as well as by the changed herbs provided by Rena herself. Dinner, shared with Diric and Kala, was a more-than-pleasant meal, now that the first lot of crude iron ingots had arrived from the Citadel. Once again, Diric's star was in the ascendant, so far as his people were concerned; and he had lost that worried frown. Kala was just as pleased and far more open about it. After all, the Iron People now had everything they needed—iron, good grazing and water, and even the remains of their old allies, the Corn People, to settle in somewhere nearby and commence the farming that they would not or could not do.

Rena and Mero were reaping the benefits as well; as the representatives of the Wizards, everyone with a forge wanted to know what they knew about possible future production, and there were no few folks who wanted to see if they could somehow ease to the head of the queue waiting for the next shipment. The Trader clans were a little discomfited to find that they were no longer the only source of iron, but they'd gotten over it, particularly now that the women among the Iron People had begun to experiment with faceting the fool's gold and polishing yet another form of mineral with a high iron content that the Traders had brought in. Both made fine "gems" for setting, the new "oil-iron" in particular having a lovely liquid-black sheen to it that looked wonderful in blackened-iron filigree. So now the women had more material for their tiny jewelry workshops than they'd ever had before and the new materials had brought on a spate of creativity that had even the men intrigued and hovering over the women's work, trying to reckon how they could coax their mates, mothers, sisters, and friends to produce some of the new work for them. Diric already sported leather arm-guards inlaid with iron settings that held large oil-iron cabochons, courtesy of Kala's hands, and she was working on a matching collar as well. He was setting something of a fashion, much to Rena's silent amusement and Kala's open glee.

It seemed an auspicious time for Rena to see about something she had been planning for a while.

Kala brought in plates of flatbread, broiled meat, thinly sliced vegetables, and bowls of soured cream. The Iron People could now enjoy one of their favorite meals—flatbread rolled around spiced meat strips and vegetables, garnished with dollops of cream. Rena and Mero had come to enjoy these as much as their hosts, and Mero quickly made himself a roll as soon as Kala set the platters on the carpet before them.

"How badly do you want to keep your two Elvenlords, Diric? They don't look very healthy to me," Rena asked, as Diric reached for a piece of flatbread.

He didn't even pause in his motion. "They haven't been a lot of use for some time," he admitted, laying a paper-thin slice of cucun-pod and some of Rena's sweetened and tenderized grasses on the flatbread, following it with strips of meat and a dollop of soured cream. "Out of respect for your wishes they haven't been entertaining us, but I don't think they would now even if we tried to force them into it with beatings. I think they're going mad, actually. Their keeper can barely get them to eat and drink; I'm told all they do is stare at whatever they're pointed at."

"I think they've gone mad," Rena replied, relieved to hear the matter-of-fact tone in his voice. "You can still get Kelyan to talk if you try hard enough, but Haldor—your keepers are having to feed him by hand. I want them, if you don't."

"Tell me what you want to do with them, first," Diric replied cautiously.

Rena took a deep breath and looked to Mero, who gave her an encouraging smile. She looked back into Diric's sable-brown eyes, and told herself what a fundamentally reasonable man he was. "I want—I want to try something. I want to see if my magics can change people's memories. There have been rumors, oh forever, that some of the Old Lords can do that, and I should think that since women's magics among my people are used delicately, it should be easier for a woman to do that than a man. Since Kelyan and his friend are already mad, I can't hurt them further, and I may be able to help them." She steeled herself. "If I can—help them, that is—there are several things I want to do with them. The first thing is to find out how the elf-stones of the slaves' controlling collars are made and how the slaves are controlled by them."

"Shana's got this idea that would take less iron than the jewelry," Mero put in helpfully, his green eyes alight with enthusiasm for his friend's plans. "Sort of a clamshell arrangement to close around the beryl like this—" he demonstrated with his two hands snapping together "—and cut it off from magic getting out or in. Those would be easy to get in to the slaves in sackfuls, and if everyone who was ready to escape all snapped their iron-clamshells over their stones at once, they could make a njn for it. The Elvenlords wouldn't be able to pursue any single individual or track him either, and by the time someone with enough magic to cast levin-bolts was summoned, the slaves would be long gone."

"But we have to know how the elf-stones work so we can see if the plan would work," Rena continued, as Diric set down his half-eaten flatbread and leaned forward, intrigued by the idea. "I never learned how, and I don't think Lorryn ever did, either, but Kelyan probably did. So I want to see if I can get him to show me. If I can't trick him into doing it, maybe Mero can get the memory straight out of his mind. Once we know how to make the elf-stones, we can test the clamshells."

"But that is not all you plan, I gather?" Diric asked, with heavy eyebrows raised. He looked more than intrigued now, he looked enthusiastic.

"Um—no." She decided to go ahead and tell him her entire plan while he still was open to it. "I want to wipe away every trace in their minds of being captured, of the Iron People, and replace it with something else."

"What else?" Diric wanted to know. "Why?"

"I thought—" she faltered for a moment, then went on. "I thought I'd construct some new memories—illusions really— out of the way Lorryn and I wandered around in the wilderness. Or maybe Mero can help me put things in their minds, when I've blanked out the old memories. And once I knew that they weren't going to remember anything about the Iron People or the Wizards or dragons or anything, I'd put them to sleep and get Keman or one of the other dragons to drop them somewhere near enough to an estate for them to find their way back." She bit her lip and waited for the inevitable reaction.

"You mean that you intend to free them?" Diric's eyebrows had crawled all the way up to the top of his forehead. "You think we should let them go to join the rest of our enemies?"

"Well, we can't kill them!" she said, a little desperately.

For a moment she feared that Diric would respond with, "And why can't we?" But he regarded her thoughtfully, pulling on his lower lip, and said nothing for a very long time.

"If that was your plan," he replied, pitching his voice low, "it seems a waste of a perfectly good resource for deception that we can further use against the Demons that you call Elvenlords. Rather than giving the prisoners memories of wandering about in the wilderness, why not give them memories that are completely erroneous?"

"Such as—?" Rena asked, her heart lifting. He was going to let her do this! Finally she was going to be able to do something that would help poor Kelyan and Haldor, but maybe help out Shanaas well!

"Oh—I think we can work out something. Make them think that they were held captive by the Wizards, more Wizards than the Elvenlords have any notion exist." Diric grinned in that sudden way that made him look like a boy full of mischief. "And in their minds we can locate their prison in some impregnable fortress somewhere in the opposite direction from the real Citadel." He winked wickedly. "For that matter, concoct a set of Wizards that have never even heard of our set! Make the Demons think that they have an enemy that until that moment they had known nothing about! Make them waste time and warriors trying to find this new set of Wizards!"

Mero uttered a whoop of laughter. "Ancestors! What an idea! It'll have them scrambling to guard their rear, it'll have them fighting over which set of Wizards are the most dangerous, and best of all, it will buy us more time to get stronger!"

"Exactly so." Diric picked up his forgotten meal, and waved his free hand at Rena. "If that is your plan, child, take them and welcome. They are nothing but a burden now, and if you can succeed in your plan, you will convert them to an asset."

He said nothing about what would happen to them if she couldn't wipe their memories clean, but she decided that she would deal with that if the occasion arose. She thanked the Iron Priest and turned to her own untouched meal with a good appetite.

Diric had something he wanted to discuss with Mero after dinner, and Rena decided that she might as well tackle the first part of her plan straight off. Not being a halfblood was something of a handicap, as she couldn't read the minds of the two Elvenlords directly—so what she planned to do was to try and coax the information out of them using words, illusion, her own sex, and gentle prodding. She'd had the Traders bring her an old, deactivated collar from one of the escaped slaves working with Shana; she brought this with her as she entered their tent.

"Kelyan?" she called; she'd put on die illusion of one of the fine gossamer gowns she'd worn in her old life, and as Kelyan roused from his apathetic trance and slowly raised dull eyes to look at her, she created a second illusion, that they were in a typical room that one would find in an Elven manor. She used as her model one of the rooms in which her father would informally entertain guests, but kept the place shrouded in shadows.

Kelyan looked terrible; his emerald eyes were clouded, his pale hair hung lank and brittle, the only time he changed his clothing was when his keepers stripped him of the soiled clothing. Rena wasn't sure what had triggered this dive into insanity— perhaps he'd just snapped when he'd first seen Keman in dragon-form, or perhaps he had just given up when it became obvious that even though the Wizards had been accepted as allies, there was no way that two Elvenlords were going to be released. But his current confusion, and the way in which he drifted in and out of a world of his own making, would help her. She hoped that in his current mental state he would either believe that he was back among his own people, or was dreaming; either would serve her equally well. It was unlikely that he would recognize the Rena he knew in the Elven lady-guise she had just created for herself; she'd even done herself up in High-Fete fashion with exaggerated cosmetics.

His eyes brightened as he took in her and her surroundings; there still wasn't a great deal of sanity in them, but there was more sense. To reinforce the illusion she had created, she hid Kelyan's companion in captivity in the shadows so that he wouldn't see Haldor's motionless form and have his illusion broken. He didn't seem to notice or care.

"My lady—?" his head tilted inquiringly, showing that he really didn't recognize her.

"Sheyrena," she supplied. "Welcome to my fete, Lord Kelyan."

"My Lady Sheyrena." He nodded his head. "Do I know you?"

Good. He doesn 't remember or recognize me, or something deep in his mind doesn't want to. He'd much rather live in dreams than in the world he's in now.

"I am the daughter of a friend of your mother's," she replied, aping as best she could her own mother's manner when with a guest. "Thank you for coming with your mother to my little entertainment. I wondered if I could impose upon your good nature for a trifling task?"

"I am at your command," he responded, with a hand over his heart and a slight bow.

"I have taken a new body-slave, a little girl who has not yet been fitted with a collar," she lied glibly. "As you know, my father will not return from his meetings with the Council for several days, and I wondered—could you—help me with clearing and setting this so that I can use it on the child?" she held out the collar, and he took it from her fingers.

And frowned, slightly. "This is hardly a fit collar for the neck of a lady's slave," he pointed out.

She pouted. "It is the only one I could find that has not been set and placed on the neck of a living slave, and I don't want to wait for someone to construct one for me," she said with just a hint of petulance. "Besides, I've taken a particular fancy to this one child. She's quite pretty, and I don't want Father to decide to give her to someone. If she's sealed to me, he shan't be able to."

Kelyan smiled, and she smiled back, instantly forming a conspiracy of two against their greedy elders. "In that case, I shall be happy to set it to you on your behalf," he replied easily.

He bent over the collar and went immediately to work on it—

And she followed the slightest nuance of that work with an intensity that surely would have startled him, had he not been concentrating on the collar to the exclusion of all else.

She had been doubly-prepared; in case she needed to use this ploy again, she didn't want him to think it was anything other than a dream.

When he finished his magics, she thanked him prettily. "You have done me a great good turn, Lord Kelyan," she said, flirting subtly with him in a way that would probably have had Mero wild with suppressed jealousy. "How can I properly thank you?"

She plied him with drugged wine as she fluttered her eyelashes at him, perfectly aware that he wouldn't actually do anything other than flirt back. There was a rhythm to this sort of courtship; until he had her father's tacit permission to approach her, he would only indicate gallant interest. He wouldn't want to find himself called into a challenge that he might not have the trained slaves to meet. Leasing gladiators to meet a challenge was possible, but expensive, since some of them would almost certainly die in the combat. Better to be cautious.

"Performing any service for a fair lady is a privilege, not a burden," he replied, downing the wine in a single gulp. As she had planned; she'd doctored the wine to make its taste smoother than honey and disguise its nature. She refilled his glass, and he downed that as well. She passed him a little bowl of highly-salted, toasted bits of root—also manipulated by her magic. The more he ate, the thirstier he would become.

"Thank you," he said after his first taste, and when she left the plate there beside his hand, he didn't object. "I do not have the company of a lovely lady often enough that I see it as less than a reward in and of itself," he continued, now sipping from his glass and nibbling at the snacks.

She laughed softly, producing a tinkling little sound that surprised her and made his eyes widen with approval.

"I do not have the company of fine young lords often enough to think it less than a treat," she replied in the same vein. "Tell me something of yourself."

He was not at all loath to do so, and she continued to ply him with wine as well as conversation until his eyes drooped, his head dropped, and he collapsed limply down onto the pallet he'd been sitting on all this time. With a thought and a flick of her fingers, she banished all the illusions she had created, leaving him again in the felt-walled tent. When he woke the next morning, if he recalled the incident at all, it would probably be as a dream.

Then she blew out the lights, and left him in the darkness, turning the collar over triumphantly in her hands.

Now it was Kala's turn on the new project to liberate the slaves; she examined the collar and the stone, and set about making the clamshell clasp that would lock the stone away from wearer and mage. She was certain she could make such a mechanism; the trick would be to create one that was small enough to conceal, but large enough and sturdy enough to have an effective seal.

Meanwhile, dropping her guise and coming as herself, Rena attempted to engage the two Elves in conversations every day while Mero "eavesdropped" on their minds. As she talked to them—or, as often as not, at them—she played, delicately, with her magic inside their heads.

When the Great Lords removed memories, they did so wholesale, leaving behind a blank. She had delved into the mysterious workings of the brain as well as she could, and now she suspected their crude efforts, difficult as they were, created a mental infant. Probably afterwards their victim had to be re-taught even the simplest of things, which was why she—it was usually a rebellious girl who was so cavalierly treated— wouldn't make a reappearance for a year or more after she was subjected to the treatment. Rena wanted to be more subtle.

So while she talked and spied upon the physical workings inside their heads, she did so on the same minute level that she worked when making the leaves and plants sweet and tasty—or just plain edible. When Mero "saw" a memory that he knew they needed to expunge—which would be when one of the Elves actually thought about it—he signaled Rena. She would know then where it physically resided, and that, she could change. After a few days, she began doing just that. Gently, she broke the connections that made the memories, then erased them altogether with the tiniest of shocks—much, much smaller and more subtle than those that caused brainstorms. When she was done, those particular memories were gone. Ask Kelyan about them, and he would look at her blankly.

She had hoped that she would be able to remove the memories sequentially, but alas, that was not possible. Memory, it seemed, was a peculiar thing. It wasn't sequential; memory chains led oddly to incidents that seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the triggering recollection.

But one thing was absolutely certain, and that was the more she erased, the more normal Kelyan—and in particular Haldor, since he was the most withdrawn—became.

When that happened, memories were easier to trigger and thus, to remove. Rena's progress with them came in leaps and bounds, and soon they were both as active and alert as they'd been when first captured. That was promising, since it would have been the next thing to murder to drop the two of them unconscious somewhere if Haldor was still near-catatonic, but it created a new problem.

As they regressed into the past, they no longer had the memories that told them that resistance was of no use, that escape was not possible. By having their evening food drugged, building illusions, and interrogating them separately, Rena was able to convince them that she and her questions were no more than an intriguing dream. She didn't even have to convince them that they were in the midst of a dream sequence, since she was able to erase the memory of each night before she left them drugged and sleeping.

"But what are we going to do with them?" she asked Mero desperately, three days after she had begun this task, when Hal-dor had announced his intention to escape from their current captivity the next day. She dropped down beside him on the grass outside their tent, both of them staring up at the star-begemmed sky over their heads. Her hand reached for his, only to find his reaching for hers. She took comfort from the touch. "Sooner or later, they're going to try to make a run, and that's only going to make a terrible amount of trouble."

"Keep 'em drugged by day," Mero advised, squeezing her hand. "We have to figure out how to give them a new past, and I haven't worked that one out yet." Moonlight flooded the camp, almost bright enough to read by. He shook his head at her. "I don't know. Illusions? But that would take as much time to show them as it would for them to live it? I might be able to stick new memories right in their heads where the old ones were, but for one person to create all that—"

"Does it have to be one person?" Rena interrupted. "What if there were several?" She flushed with the excitement of suddenly seeing a possible solution. "We don't have to be the ones to make the new memories! We could ask Kalamadea and Alara to come get them, and Shana and Zed and some of the other Wizards could all pitch together and do it!"

Mero shook his head. "I don't know," he replied dubiously. "Wouldn't those memories get awfully confusing with so many people meddling?"

"Isn't it better for us if they are confusing?" Rena countered, feeling even more certain that this was the right way to handle the problem. "We don't want them to have a whole picture, we just want them to have fragments, don't we? Let them think they were drugged most of the time, or enspelled, but the more confusing their memories are, the more confused the Old Lords will be."

"And the more confused the Old Lords are, the more likely that they'll be alarmed—I see where you're going with this." Mero chuckled unexpectedly, and hugged her. "You're right, Rena, you're right! I'll try and reach Shana and explain all this and see if she falls in with the plan. I'll keep trying until I reach her."

"And I'll wipe their memories back to their capture," she said happily, secure now that her plan would work exactly as she had hoped.

In a few days, the dragons arrived—but quietly, without fanfare, in the guise of Wizards. Rena had never seen Alara in that form; Shana's foster-mother had chosen to resemble a very sturdy woman of indeterminate age, with high cheekbones and hair of deep brown. Kalamadea, of course, wore the guise with which the Iron People were already familiar, and when he and she walked into the camp at dawn, Diric and the other leaders of the group welcomed him—though the welcome was tempered with the memory of the last time they had seen him, in his real shape of a huge, blue-black dragon.

"We've come to carry off your inconvenient guests," Father Dragon said genially, beaming as if he'd had the greatest of treats bestowed upon him. No matter that the last time anyone of the Iron People had seen him, it was as a dragon; he behaved so normally, and looked so harmless, so inoffensive, that it was hard for anyone to think of the menacing dragon with those guileless green eyes peering at them out of a sea of wrinkles. Father Dragon played the part of an eccentric little old man to perfection, and soon had Diric chatting with him like the old friend he was. With Diric acting so normally, the rest of his people relaxed as well.

"And what have you done with Myre?" he asked, at last. "We gave her over to the keeping of the Corn People for now; they do not trust her in the least, for I told them only that she had nearly betrayed us and her own people to the Demons." Diric looked smug, and Rena had to smile. That was at least partly true, after all! "They give her field tasks to do, and no food if she will not work. She has quickly learned the value of carrying out what she is told to do."

"Obviously, you aren't concerned about her escaping?" Alara made that a question; she couldn't quite control the pain she felt at this position her second-born found herself in, but Diric misinterpreted it.

"Oh, no, lady! If she wishes to run off, we will let her! She is not so great a help to us that we would miss her, and she cannot remove the collar that keeps her looking as one of the Demons' slaves. She cannot go back to the Demons, so—the Wizards, we, the Corn People and the Traders all know of her treachery and would not remove it." He smiled. "If she wishes to wander the plains, alone and unaided, in preference to remaining with the Corn Folk where she has food and shelter, well, let her savor her freedom."

Alara sighed, but said nothing; Kalamadea covered her silence with chatter. Rena gave her a look of sympathy; for all that Myre had been a miserably thankless child, Myre was her daughter. It must have torn poor Alara's heart to have to side with one child—or children, counting Shana as Alara's foster-daughter—against another.

"We'll wait until dark to take them, so we don't distress your people unduly," Kalamadea was saying quietly, as the other Elders of the tribe made their cautious greetings, lost interest, and went back to their usual tasks. "That is well," Diric said judiciously, then brightened. "But you must also see the progress my Kala has made upon your other need! And you must see the new jewels my lady-smiths have made! Come!"

Rena and Mero spent the rest of the day in the company of Diric and the two dragons. Diric must have shown them every jewelry forge in the camp, and although Alara did not once ask to see her wayward daughter, Rena had to wonder if Diric was trying to distract the dragon to keep her from making that very request.

At last—at long last, for even Rena was beginning to tire of watching jewelers at work, a task she normally found fascinating—the sun set, and darkness fell.

She left then, to see to the two she now considered "her" charges. She found them insensible, so thoroughly drugged that not even a hearty shaking could wake them. Nothing less would do; obviously they couldn't ride out of here as she and Mero had done, a-dragonback. They would have to be carried.

She and four of the younger Iron Priests bundled the unconscious Elves into the same kind of swaddlings that the Iron People used for their infants, only adult-sized, complete with a rigid board very like a cradle-board. The swaddlings would prevent them from moving, the board would ensure that they wouldn't bend in the middle; now they could be put in a net sling, to be carried in dragon-claws back to the Citadel.

Once packaged up like a pair of parcels for delivery, the Iron Priests each took an end and unceremoniously carried the motionless bundles out into the darkness.

Rena followed behind, as the young Priests in their peculiar cloth headresses and leather aprons carried the bundles as far as the open grasslands outside of the camp, put them down in the waiting nets, and hurried off. They didn't look back and Rena didn't blame them; if she herself hadn't spent so much time with Keman in all of his forms, she would have been nervous around the dragons.

And Kalamadea and Alara would be back from feeding at any moment....

The sudden "wind" that came up all around her, the thunder of unseen wings overhead, warned her that they were here.

Silvered by the moonlight, casting black shadows that stretched across the frantically-waving grasses in front of them, they backwinged in beside their charges. Rena stepped back involuntarily; she had somehow forgotten how big the fully adult dragons were in their true forms. Father Dragon usually reduced his, to fit in with the others, and to be able to use the lairs inside the Citadel—but dragons never stopped growing entirely, and he easily dwarfed Alara, and Alara was twice the size of her son, Keman.

They were like forces of nature, too big, too powerful to really comprehend; she put her hands out in an unconscious gesture of warding. She might not even have been there for all the notice that they took Of her.

They had eaten well among the herds, and they had a long way to go, all of it this very night, before the two Elves woke. There was no time for farewells, and in her heart, Rena couldn't blame Alara for wanting to be gone from the place where her youngest languished in her prison of iron collar and human flesh.

Instead, each paused on the ground only long enough to seize a net and hook it into claws as long as Rena's arm. Then, with a leap for the sky and a tremendous booming of wings, they were off.

In moments, they were only dark shadows, beating slow wings against the silver moon. Then, gone.

Rena strained her eyes, but couldn't see them—and jumped when Mero touched her arm.

"Well," he said quietly, "it's out of our hands now. You've given Shana a tremendous weapon, my love, and now it's up to her to make the best use of it. You've done your part; you can relax."

Only when he said that did she realize that she could. And that Mero had said that she had, at last, given Shana material help unaided by anyone. She glowed with pleasure at the mere thought, and laughed a little.

"I suppose I can, can't I?" she replied, and turned so that his arm went around her shoulders. "Well, then—" she continued, playfully, feeling strong and emboldened by her success, "Don't you have some—ah—courting to catch up on?"

For a moment he stared at her, as if unsure of how to react. "I do?" he said, a little stupidly.

—then he grinned, broadly. "I suppose I do," he said with far more sense ...

... then proceeded to make a very good start on all that catching-up.