BACK AT LAST.
Harden Sangral dismounted from his grel, held the reins of the fractious beast so that it couldn’t escape him, and surreptitiously patted the front of his belt-pouch.
It was still there, that heavy little silk-wrapped bundle that had fallen from the wild girl’s tunic during the fight to subdue her. Neither Kel nor Ardan had noticed it drop, but Harden had. He’d picked it up quickly and stowed it away for later perusal. There was just too much about that girl that was odd, and it was one of Harden’s duties to take note of the odd.
The caravansary courtyard held only themselves and their beasts, though Harden could tell by the fresh droppings swept into a corner that at least two other caravans had come in today. He frowned, that meant he’d be waiting for everything. If it hadn’t been for that sandstorm, they’d have made the city two days ago.
One of the caravansary servants came to take away his grel as the caravansary master showed up with his list in hand; he let the beast go gratefully, and got in line with the others to get his new orders. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Ardan take the girl into the slave-house by the simple expedient of picking her up bodily and carrying her there.
She had been in a kind of shock since the fight on the trail; this woke her up in a hurry. And despite being bound hand and foot, she still managed to kick and scream like a dortha-lizard in rut. He didn’t envy Ardan, or the slave-keepers, either.
The caravansary master, a very low-ranking elven lord, had an unusually long list in his hands when Harden got to him. The fighter prepared himself for the worst—it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d been sent out as a caravan guard as soon as he dismounted from the last job.
“Name?” asked the named-looking elven lord, sweat plastering his fair hair to his forehead. Every elven lord Harden had ever seen was damnably handsome—it seemed to go with the blood, because even those low-rankers with weak magic looked like the answer to a maiden’s prayer—but this one looked a little on the shopworn side. Perhaps it was the heat; perhaps simply that the fellow was overworked.
“Harden Sangral, lord,” he replied promptly. You couldn’t be too polite and obedient with the elven lords; you never knew when one of them might have just enough magic to make your life pure hell for the next few breaths.
“Harden, Harden,” the elven lord repeated under his breath, scanning down the list. “Ah, here we are. You’re in luck, boy. No duties for two days. Go inside, clean up, get a bunk and a meal, and if there are any girls free today, take one. Only one round, mind, then send her back for another job.”
“Yes, lord,” Harden said, gratefully. “Thank you, lord. Profit to Lord Berenel.”
“Aye, profit to Lord Berenel,” the harried functionary replied absently. “Next?”
Harden hurried inside the welcoming door, the temperature difference between inside the building and out was incredible. He didn’t wonder that the caravansary master was rushing his job; if Harden had been stuck out there, he’d have rushed the job too, just to get back into the cool. He lingered for a moment in the white-tiled entry, noting that the only place there wasn’t a line was at the window to get a room. He sighed, and resigned himself to spending the day waiting.
Unlike the Great Halls, there were large, glass-covered windows in the caravansary, at least on the ground floor. The entry gave on three doorways; to the left was the one leading to the meal hall; in the middle was the one leading to the showers; to the right, the hall leading to the rooms, and the window with the bored-looking room attendant leaning out of it.
Harden joined the line of men (and a few women) heading for the showers; he stripped when he reached the dressing room, threw his filthy tunic and trews into a pile of similarly filthy garments, and took his personal belongings with him. The line continued through a narrow room lined with pipes spouting lukewarm water, first soapy, then clear. He passed with the others under each set of pipes, glad of the chance to rid himself of the dust of the journey and the sweat of fear. Like the others, he held his belt with his pouch and knife well out of the way of stray splashes, transferring it from hand to hand as he cleaned himself.
At the other end of the shower room he took a rough towel from a pile of clean ones, dried himself with it, and left it in another pile of used towels. He rummaged through a stack of clean tunics and trews in Lord Berenel’s colors, found one of each in his size and donned them, belting the tunic to his body with his damp leather belt.
He returned to the entry and joined another line going to the meal room. This time when he reached the end of the line, he got a bowl of thick, tasty stew, a chunk of fresh, hot bread dripping with butter, and a mug of cold beer. He found himself a place at one of the many rough wood trestle tables and began applying himself to the food.
When he’d wiped the bowl clean with his last bit of bread, and swallowed down the last drop of beer, he rose from the table to have his place taken immediately by another fighter, a woman this time. He didn’t bother to give her a second glance; she was one of the warriors, and didn’t represent the kind of “girl” the caravansary master had told him to requisition.
He took his empty bowl and cup to the kitchen window, and returned to the front of the caravansary. There he approached the bored-looking human manning a counter that stood in front of a board full of colored trinkets of fired clay.
“Name?” that colorless individual asked him.
“Harden,” the fighter replied.
The human traced down a list on the wall using his finger, his lips moving as he sounded out names. Finally, he found the one he was looking for, and reached for a clay figure.
“Harden, here we are.” He turned, and gave the fighter a black, three-petaled flower. “That’s your room, ground floor, down that corridor. There won’t be any girls free for a while yet; why don’t you go rest, and check back around suppertime? We serve supper most of the evening here, and if you wait until the first rush, you’re likely to find several girls free. I don’t know about you, but I like a little choice in my girls. I don’t like having to take the first thing available.”
“Aye, thanks for the advice,” Harden replied, taking his trinket. “I’ll do that.”
He entered the white-tiled hallway, lined with wooden doors on either side, and followed his instructions, matching his flower against the symbols painted on the door to each cubicle, until he came to the one with the same black figure on it. He pushed the door open, finding, as he had expected, a narrow, wooden-walled room, just big enough to hold the pallet he found on the floor. Windowless, of course; the light was supplied arcanely, set by one of Lord Berenel’s builder-mages, and would go out at the same time each night and wake everyone in the caravansary by coming on in the morning. He was glad to be a fighter, all things considered. Fighters had the luxury of individual quarters; common slaves made do with a pallet in a barracks.
In truth, he was just as glad that there weren’t any girls free. He really itched to investigate that heavy little bundle in private.
He closed the door and sat down on the bed with his back to it, pulling the package out of his belt-pouch, then taking his knife and a sharpening-stone and putting them beside him so that if anyone interrupted him, he could snatch them both up. With careful-fingers, he undid the knots holding the bundle shut, cursing at the silk for being so uncooperative.
Finally he untied the last of them, and the silk fell open, revealing a glory of wealth and color.
He caught his breath. No wonder the thing was so heavy. He’d never had that much gold in his hand in his life____It was a collar, a slave-collar, but solid gold, and encrusted with gems in patterns, gems that ranged from as small as a single grain of sand to as large as the nail on his little finger.
It had to be a concubine’s collar. There was nothing else it could be. But what was a wild girl doing with a concubine’s collar?
He picked the thing up carefully and turned it around in his hands. And right over the clasp, he saw the unmistakable imprint of a phoenix picked out in carved gold, with tiny rubies for eyes.
Lord Dyran. He knew that mark like he knew his own name; he ought to. It might have been Berenel’s caravans he guarded, but Dyran was his real master.
He reviewed the events of the past several days slowly, to make sure that he had forgotten nothing. First, there was a sandstorm that drove the caravan off course and forced them to look for water. They found it. Then a wild child showed up there, a girl in a tunic made of something no one recognized. A girl who carried a concubine’s collar. An extra grel appeared from out of nowhere. Then there was a magic attack on the caravan, an attack by something that looked just like Berenel’s own best illusions, the ones of dragons, like the dragons that the elven lord had standing beside the gates of his estate. There was something happening. Harden didn’t know what, but it wasn’t what it looked like.
He pondered the collar, holding it in both hands. Could the girl have been planted? Could she have been put there so one of the other lords would know where the caravan was, and send a magicked beast to attack it? But why? To scatter the caravan, to make them lose the grel and ruin the mission? But if that was the case, it should have happened while they were out in the desert or at the oasis. And why steal only one grel? Unless—unless that grel was carrying something important.
It could have happened that way. The lords didn’t confide in their underlings, and they didn’t confide in those beneath them. Demons only knew exactly what the caravan was carrying. Even Kel and Ardan might not have known the whole of it. The caravans had carried secret cargo before, and humans had died because of it. That was part of the risk that fighters took, which was why fighters got special treatment.
So suppose that the steadiest grel was carrying something special; something the Lord’s agents made certain to get on that grel at the road-head. Each grel carried the same pack for the entire journey—but when the wild girl showed up, and a spare grel, Ardan would logically have put the girl on the steadiest beast in the caravan, and shifted its burden to the new beast.
So then the “dragon” would know exactly what beast to snatch; and certainly the girl had not seemed at all afraid of the monster. That seemed to imply that she knew something like that was going to happen.
That would certainly make sense. There weren’t too many elven lords with the power to make that kind of construct, though. That narrowed the list down quite a bit.
It could even be the work of his own Lord. It lacked the subtlety of one of Lord Dyran’s plans, but he surely had the sheer, raw power to construct something like a dragon. He’d constructed them before; dragons, and things even larger. Large constructs seldom lasted more than half a day before fading away, but that was generally all you needed them for.
It didn’t matter, he decided. Whoever it was, it didn’t concern him. If it was Lord Dyran, the Lord would know Harden was serving him well when he reported this. And if it wasn’t, the elven lord would know who to look at, and what he wanted to do about it.
All things considered, Harden was rather glad of the enchantment on his collar that prevented any other spells from affecting him, even Lord Dyran’s, unless the Lord specifically countered it. He had the feeling that there was probably something on this bit of jewelry to make the holder want to wear it—and that would cause no end of trouble.
Oh, I can just see myself prancing out of here into the street withthis bit around my neck! Then I’d really be for it! There’s rules about nonconcubines wearing high-rank collars. I’d just as soon not cross them .
He took the collar and put it inside a tiny leather bag, sealing the edges by pressing the leather together. Now no one would be able to open that pouch but Lord Dyran or one of his trusted associates.
He rose from his bed, left his room, and went out the front door of the caravansary, strolling out into the square with the air of someone who is out simply to stretch his legs. But his stroll took out him of the square and far beyond the area ruled by Lord Berenel, where all the streets were marked with a copper-and-red checkered brick just past the crossroads. He took himself to a part of the city he knew very well indeed, where the crossroads were all marked with bricks of gold and red.
Once there, he wound his way down into an area where fighters with reward-tokens to spend congregated, using them on stronger drink, stranger food, and wilder women than they could have at the caravansary. Everything was owned by Lord Dyran, of course, but it gave the fighters something special to strive for, something beyond what “everyone” could have. Something that had at least the appearance of the forbidden, and that was iced with the sweetness of real luxury.
Harden found an establishment with a sign depicting a phoenix engaging in an anatomically unlikely act with a wildly beautiful, implausibly endowed, red-haired young woman. He got into the place, which was guarded by a large, well-armed individual, seemingly by telling the guard at the door a rather odd, pointless joke. That was what passers-by would think; in actuality, he was giving the guard not one, but a series of passwords. The guard let him into the main room; he stood on the top stair of three that led down into the room, had a moment to look around before the denizens of the place noticed him.
It hadn’t changed much; the red silk shrouding the walls was new, and the incense heavily perfuming the air was jasmine instead of orchid this time. But for the rest it was the same; chattering girls in things that were more ornament than garment lounged on cushions in the center of the room, and a soft, amber light glowed from the ceiling. The walls were covered with silk hangings, which Harden knew concealed the entrances to little cubicles much like the one back at the caravansary, except that the pallets were softer, the cubicles a little bigger, and there was a rack of implements of the young lady’s specialty in each. Oils for massage, for instance—or a musical instrument—or other things.
And for those who preferred absolute privacy and extensive attentions, there were soundproof rooms upstairs.
This was not an establishment normally frequented by humans. Elven lords of too low a rank to own concubines came here, as did young elven lords seeking excitement in the “lower city,” and the very occasional high-ranking lord who felt a need for variety, but not a pressing enough need that he felt he had to add to his harem to get it. The humans who did come here were generally fighters being rewarded for unusual service. As such, Harden looked the part.
Harden stepped down into the room, and was immediately surrounded by young women who did not have much more in common with the lady of the sign than sex, general attractiveness, and red hair.
“Is Marty free?” he asked the first one to take hold of his arm, knowing what the reaction would be. Much as he would have enjoyed dallying here with the girl, he knew what the penalty would be if he did so without explicit permission. She let go of him immediately, a frightened and panicked look transforming her face into that of a terrified child, as the rest of the girls vanished as quickly as they had materialized.
“Y-y-yes,” she stammered, obviously hoping he wasn’t going to ask her to escort him there. He toyed with the idea for a moment, because she was so very frightened, and it would have been rather amusing; but he was not by nature a cruel man, and decided against it.
“Off with you,” he said, slapping her on her mostly bare buttocks, so that she squealed and jumped. “I can find my own way.”
She followed the example of her “sisters” in fleeing to one of the many curtained cubicles lining the walls, whisking through the curtains as if he were a demon. Harden ignored her, heading instead for the only true door in the room, a massive, uncarved ironwood piece, red-and-brown-grained wood blending into the red, watered silk of the hangings. He knocked once, then entered.
The same amber light gleamed down on wood-paneled walls and a crimson-carpeted floor. Marty looked up from his desk, the room’s single piece of furniture, as Harden closed the door behind himself. Marty was—a prodigy. He couldn’t have weighed more than half what Harden weighed; he was slender as a willow-twig, with a mild, even sweet, face. Truth to tell, he looked like a girl with a mustache. There were men who’d taken that sweet face for an indication of Marty’s preferences in partners.
Those men had never had a chance to make a similar mistake; they’d been dead before their bodies hit the floor. Marty was one of Lord Dyran’s own highly trained assassins. He was also Dyran’s chief agent in the city, and had replaced the contact Harden had worked with two years ago. That contact had been an old man; Harden knew that he had been retired to one of Dyran’s estates to train younger agents. He knew, because he himself was still alive. If the human had betrayed the elven lord, Lord Dyran would have eliminated every agent that had reported to him as well as the traitor.
Harden rather liked the lad; demons knew he hadn’t many other friends. The girls were terrified of him, and for no good reason, so far as Harden could see. Maybe his tastes were a little more exotic than even they cared for. Maybe it was just what he represented…
Maybe it was that, in his capacity as the manager of this house, he held the power of life and death over them. And at the hands of a trained assassin, death could be very prolonged, and very unpleasant.
“Harden, good to see you,” the young man said warmly, rising to offer Harden his chair. Harden shook his head at the implied offer of hospitality.
“I can’t stay long,” he said. “I’m supposed to be getting a girl at suppertime and since I’ve been on the road for weeks, if I don’t show up, it’ll look odd. Here. This needs to get to the Lord.”
He tossed the little leather pouch down on the desk. Marty looked at it curiously, but didn’t touch it.
“Now, this is where it came from—” Harden said, and explained, as briefly and concisely as he could, the events of the past several days. “So when the girl started to fight, she dropped this. I had to wait until I got to the city to check it out. It’s a collar, gold and jewels; looks like a concubine’s collar to me. And it’s got Lord Dyran’s seal on it.”
“Lord Dyran’s seal, on a concubine’s collar, held by a wild child.” Marty tilted his head a little to one side. “Well, the obvious solution is that she found it. The Lord has had caravans lost in the desert before, some with high-ranking concubines on them.”
Harden grimaced, chagrined that he hadn’t thought of that possibility.
“But—” Marty continued, “I must admit that having the monster attack the caravan is stretching coincidence a great deal. All things considered, we’ll let the Lord handle it however he sees fit. You did well, Harden. If nothing else, in returning a valuable bit of jewelry to Lord Dyran. Certainly Berenel’s men would not have bothered.”
That was a dismissal, no question about it.
“I’ll be getting back to the caravansary,” Harden said quickly. “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”
“There is one thing I would like you to find out,” Marty said, just as Harden got his hand on the door handle.
Harden turned immediately.
“There was a runaway concubine about fifteen years ago, a pregnant favorite near her time, and she escaped into that particular area of the desert…” Marty didn’t say anything more, but Harden knew more than enough to fill in the rest. Far more than most humans would.
If she had actually been pregnant by Lord Dyran—if she had survived long enough to whelp the child… A halfblood was forbidden, absolutely forbidden, and this child was near enough in age to be that halfblood…
“The girl’s red-haired and about twelve or fourteen,” he offered. “Now, I didn’t see any wild magic out of her, and I think I would have when she fought Kel if she’d had it.”
“But she was drugged,” Marty reminded him. “And what about that monster? What if she conjured it to distract the rest of you while she escaped?”
“But she didn’t try to escape,” said Harden, then thought a moment. “Of course, her grel took off with her, and she just might not have been able to control it. Still I’d think anybody that could produce a monster could control a grel.”
“A good point,” Marty acknowledged. “But keep an eye on her, if you can. It’s stretching coincidence to think that this girl could be the concubine’s child, but—it’s better to let Lord Dyran decide what he wants to do about it. And at any rate, if there is any indication that she’s a halfblood, come straight to me, and I’M see that Lord Berenel’s stewards hear about it. If there’s one thing that the lords are united on, it’s that halfbloods need to be destroyed on sight.”
Harden nodded. And since there seemed to be no more forthcoming, pulled the door open and left.
Shana huddled in a corner of the enormous room into which she had been thrown like so much refuse. She shivered, as much from shock as from cold. The last half-day had been the most terrifying of her life. Not even the wait to learn what would be done with her back at the Lair had been this bad.
At least, at the Lair, she’d known she had a few friends. Here she had no one and nothing, and she had no idea what was coming next.
Once they had entered the quiet tunnel, Shana had found it was much shorter than the one under the walls. It led to a square empty place with walls on all four sides. The big man had plucked her off the back of the animal she rode, and carried her, fighting as well as she could with bound hands and feet, to a door in an otherwise blank wall at the rear of the square. There he had put her into the hands of three more people as big as he was. They had effectively immobilized her, and that was when she discovered that her magic didn’t work anymore. She didn’t even get the feeling of thwarted power, it was as if she had never possessed the abilities she’d used against Rovy.
They took her into a white room filled with steam, stripped her to the skin, and threw her under a torrent of warm water, still tied hand and foot. They’d scrubbed her with what felt like sand, until her skin burned, then hauled her out and untied her long enough to wrestle her into a plain, brown tunic. By that time she was so exhausted and terrified she hardly had the strength to fight them. The three strangers seemed to realize this; two of them left, leaving one to shove her into this huge, blank-walled, echoing, pale pink room, filled with more people in the same kind of tunic she was wearing, and flat cloth things on the floor, like she had seen in Kel’s cloth building, only covered with the same kind of fabric as her tunic, and barely as thick as her thumb.
They closed the door, which had no way to open it on her side, leaving her with a roomful of two-legger strangers who stared at her, but otherwise left her alone.
She had edged her way around the room, keeping her back against the wall, until she came to the farthest corner from the door. She looked up, but couldn’t see the sky; only a glowing roof that supplied all the illumination in the place, a kind of amber glow that cast no shadows. There she huddled, still with her back to the wall, her arms wrapped around her knees, shivering with fright and delayed shock, and the cold that seeped through her thin tunic from the stone floor.
She wished she was back; she wished none of this had ever happened. She wished she was dreaming. If she had been dreaming, she could wake up, and she’d be in her own bed, and Foster Mother would be there, and Keman…
Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks; her throat was so tight she couldn’t swallow, her eyes burned and her stomach hurt.
At least, at home, she knew what was going on. She understood the Kin, she knew how to stay out of trouble, she knew what she could do and what she couldn’t.
At least, I think I knew the Kin.
Maybe she really didn’t. Foster Mother had taken care of her just like Keman, but when it all came down to it, Alara had let the rest throw Shana out into the desert. Alara could have come after her to help her once everybody in the Lair thought Shana was gone for good—but she didn’t. And when Alara showed up over the caravan, she had ignored her foster daughter, she just stole an animal and ignored her, it was as if Shana didn’t even exist to her. Alara didn’t even talk to her with thoughts. She could have at least told her how Keman was doing.
I think maybe Keman would have come after me if he could have …
She hugged her knees tighter and hid her face, while hot, silent tears ran down her cheeks and dropped onto her tunic, making two big, dark spots on the light brown fabric over her chest. She wallowed in misery for a while, until another thought occurred to her. After all, Alara had shown both of them how parent animals sent their offspring out into the world when it was time for them to grow up and become adults.
Maybe Alara thought that it was time for Shana to leave. She used to let Shana get hurt if that was what the girl needed in order to learn something. Maybe this was that kind of lesson.
She used to show both of them how birds would leave their young ones unfed until they fledged the nest, and how animals would even drive their little ones away from their territory when they were old enough to fend for themselves. The Kin didn’t do that—but maybe two-leggers did. Maybe Shana was supposed to be old enough now. Maybe she was supposed to be able to take care of herself…
Maybe this was supposed to be good for her.
But it didn’t feel like it was good for her. She bit her lip to keep from sobbing out loud in front of all these strangers, and the tears fell even faster.
But if it was good for her, why were these people hurting her and locking her up? And if Foster Mother knew what they were going to do, what they were like, why didn’t she give some kind of warning? Why didn’t she tell Shana that there were other two-leggers around? Why didn’t she tell the girl what they were like? If Alara wanted to make sure Shana would be all right, why didn’t she at least get Keoke to tell her what to be careful of before he left her in the desert?
The only answer seemed to be: because Alara didn’t care . Because to her Shana was an animal, as she was to the other Kin; because she considered Shana to be no more than an outgrown pet of her son’s.
Because Rovy and Myre were right.
And that hurt worst of all.
Kel waited expectantly on his padded stool in front of his master’s desk while the caravan overseer unwrapped the skin tunic the wild girl had worn. In the magic amber light of the offices, it looked even better than it had in the sunlight; the colors were subtler, the shading of each piece showing undertones and pearly hues he hadn’t even guessed were there under the bleaching sun of the desert.
And the value of this new discovery just might negate the loss of the grel and its packs to the raiding monster. He could be held responsible for that…
The overseer, a middle-aged, balding human, turned the garment inside-out with his thick, callused hands and examined the construction, then turned it right-way-round again and looked over each piece carefully.
“Well,” he said finally, looking up, “it certainly looks like you found us something out of the ordinary, Kel.”
“Out of the ordinary—and damned valuable, unless I miss my guess,” the caravan master replied boldly. “Seems to me the lords would stand in line for things made out of that stuff. I’ve never seen anything look like that unless it had been glamoried.”
The overseer turned the tunic about in his hands and nodded slowly, then rubbed one hand over his shiny pate. “Well, I’d guess you’re right, Kel. You did check for glamories on this before you brought it to me, didn’t you?”
“First thing I thought of,” Kel assured him. “Absolutely. Not a sight nor sign of magic. This stuffs the real thing, all right.”
The overseer laughed, and refolded the garment. “The question is, real what ! What are we supposed to call this stuff? Lizard-hide? That doesn’t exactly sound like anything I’d want to wear.”
Kel thought about that for a moment, then smiled. After all, why not? This stuff could be worth so much more than what was stolen that the monster was going to turn out to be a good omen. But that was not the reason he would give.
“Lord Berenel’s device is a dragon,” he reminded the overseer. “Why not call it’dragon-skin’?”
The overseer laughed heartily. “Why not?” he agreed. “It’s a good name, it sounds impressive—and some folks might just be stupid enough to believe it! Everybody with any sense knows there’s no such things as dragons.”
“Everybody,” Kel replied quickly, relieved that the earlier loss was already forgotten. “Everybody with any sense.”
Lord Berenel caressed the dragon-skin tunic, marveling anew at the pearlescent play of the scale-colors in the light, how the edge of each scale reflected every variation on the base color, how the scale surface refracted the light in subtle rainbows. It lay on the black marble surface of his desk like a pile of jewels, and worth far more, if he was any judge.
It was no heavier than a leather tunic of the same size and thickness, but was much more supple. It was a pity that the inexpert workmanship had ruined the edges of the patched-together pieces that composed it; if it had been sewn perfectly, it would have been something his own Lady would have been pleased to wear.
If he’d been willing to give it to her, that is. Right now he didn’t want it out of his keeping for a moment.
It was indeed ironic that his underlings should have chosen to call the substance “dragon-skin,” for Lord Berenel now held in his hand what he considered to be material proof that a lifelong quest of his was about to be fulfilled.
As a young lord, just after the Wizard War, Berenel had suffered a series of raids on his prize horse stock, pastured near the great desert. Unable to trust his own underlings, who had come into his hands at the defeat of one of his rivals, he had set a trap himself to catch the culprit responsible.
He had truly thought that the depredations were the work of another elven lord, and had every expectation of discovering magic at work. Instead, shortly after settling himself in his blind, he had heard the sounds of horses stampeding, and the death-scream of one of his mares.
He dashed out—and very nearly impaled himself on his own weapon, as he literally ran into a feeding dragon.
The beast mantled, then produced something like lightning that shot out at him from the wings, knocking him unconscious. When he woke, there was no sign of dragon or mare; only a bit of blood and a flattened place in the grass.
No one believed him when he returned. The general consensus, even among his own supporters, was that he had come upon the work of a rival, one more powerful in magic than he, and had been defeated and knocked unconscious. And that his vision of the dragon was only that; a vision, an illusion built by the unknown rival. After a time, rather than continue to suffer ridicule, he chose to make a boast of what others considered his “foolishness,” and took the dragon as his own device.
But ever since that day he had sought, quietly, the proof that what he had seen did indeed exist. That there were dragons in this world. That he had not been a fool, to believe in his own hallucinations.
And now he had that proof within grasping distance.
His hand clenched on the tunic, and he looked up at his seneschal, a smooth and obedient minor elven lord, who was waiting patiently on the other side of his desk to receive his orders. The youngster was one of the few he trusted, having raised and schooled the boy himself.
“The two men who first found the girl—”
“Kel Rosten and Ardan Parlet,” the seneschal supplied helpfully, with a glance at the notes he held in his right hand.
“Retire them from caravan duties. Give them something profitable, but not too taxing.” Slaves were slaves, after all, and meant to be worked, but Berenel could afford to grant them a position that wouldn’t appear to be work.
“Kel Rosten has been on the caravan routes for many years,” the seneschal said, a crease of thought between his sketchy brows. “He’s always been known as a man who could turn a profit, and one who could deduce that unlikely objects might prove to have value. Perhaps this is a heritable trait, or a teachable one. In the former case, we should put him to stud. In the latter, assign him to training the youngsters.”
“Do both,” Berenel told him, dismissing the human from his mind. “And the other?”
The seneschal smiled. “Ah, that is an easy one; I know how he would best serve from personal experience. Ardan knows wine like no one else on the caravan trade, and is responsible for most of the vintages gracing your table, my lord.”
“Didn’t my wine steward just die?” Berenel said, recalling something of the sort being said a month or two ago, and how he had complained at the time that it was hardly worth putting these short-lived humans into important positions. Why, the man had hardly held his office more than twenty years! “How old is this Ardan?”
“Indeed, your memory is as accurate as always, my lord,” the seneschal replied with a ingratiating smile. “And you anticipate my suggestion. Ardan would make an excellent wine-steward, and as he is a young man, not yet twenty-five, he should serve you for fifty years, barring accidents.”
“Make it so,” Berenel said, pleased to have the business so profitably taken care of. It did no harm to be known to the slaves as a lord who rewarded good service and a limited amount of initiative. But now that these minor matters were disposed of, he moved briskly and confidently on to the major matters at hand. “Now about the girl—it may well be she’s feebleminded. A lot of these wild ones are. Send someone to question her and see if they can determine whether she found the skin, or killed the creature it came from, or knows where to find more. But don’t waste a great deal of time on it. Give it, oh, ten days at most, then sell her; I haven’t the time or trainers to waste on a wild child. Meanwhile, I want you to send a party into the desert, find that oasis, and see if you can track her back to wherever she came from. Take—hmm—Lord Quellen. His magic ought to be enough for the job. Supply them and give them their orders yourself, and don’t let them talk to anyone before they go, not even wives and mates.”
“Yes, my lord,” the seneschal replied with a bow. “Is there anything else, my lord?”
“I’ll call you if I think of anything,” Berenel said, caressing the tunic again, his mind crooning with muted joy. “That will be all.”
The seneschal bowed himself out, and Berenel examined the tunic again, both physically and magically, seeking more clues to its origin.
And over and over, the words sounded in his mind, like a call to arms: “Soon, now. Soon.”
Shana shivered on her pallet, startled awake by the sudden light, as she had been every morning for the past five. Already she had a little better idea of how things were in this new world; not that it made things any easier, just helped her to anticipate the worst dangers.
The pale ones were the “elven lords” of the writings, wielders pf magic, and overlords of everything. Any individual with pale skin, green eyes, pale gold hair and pointed ears was trouble—and had the power of life and death over any two-legger of the other variety.
The others were “humans,” which, she had supposed, she must be, since the elven lords treated her in the same way as the rest of the people here. These, she knew now, were “slaves,” and all wore the brown slave-uniform her captors forced her into when she first arrived here.
There were other humans who were not slaves, such as Kel and Ardan, the rest of the men in the caravan, and other people whose orders were obeyed. These were “bondlings,” and usually wore the scarlet tunic and trews that showed they served the highest elven lord, the one she had never seen, who ruled over all the other elven lords here; Lord Berenel.
Her days were predictable now. The amber light appeared. Then, when everyone was awake, the “overseer” arrived. This individual herded them all into the room with hot water coming from the walls. Everyone took off his tunic, bathed, and got a new tunic. They were led to another room, where they got a piece of the crusty stuff Ardan had given her—”bread,” they called it, and a bowl of something they were supposed to eat with the bread. The taste of the stuff changed from day to day. Then some of them were singled out and taken away. Those never appeared again; Shana had learned that they went to new masters, but what happened to them then, she could only guess. The rest went back to the big room, to while away the time in talk, meaningless games of chance, and bullying those who were easily intimidated.
All but Shana. She would be taken away to a small room, where people asked her endless questions about her dragon-skin tunic.
Thanks to the way in which her first questioners had treated her, she’d had the wit to act very stupid. The more brainless she acted, the less her questioners seemed to pay attention to what she said.
Partly she did so out of fear of her captors, elven lords and humans alike. The elven lords she feared more than the humans; one of them, displeased by a perceived lack of deference, had done something to her—something that sent her screaming to the floor in pain. All he had done was touch her—but her entire body had convulsed as if she had been dragon-shocked, and she couldn’t speak for the rest of the day.
So she shivered in fright, and cowered before them—she didn’t have to feign it, she was terrified of them. And she feigned stupidity; that was easy, since she spent most of her time in that little room frightened out of her wits.
Every day she woke wondering if today she should tell the truth. And every day, by the time she faced her captors in that little room, she had decided that she didn’t dare.
For if she betrayed the dragons, those she still loved would undoubtedly be hunted down and killed. The elven lords made that clear, although they probably didn’t realize it, in the tone of their questions. The idea of one day seeing Alara’s skin adorning the back of an elven lord was enough to seal her lips against almost anything.
And for those moments of supreme weakness when an elven lord threatened her with more pain, there was another consideration. The Kin took the forms of two-leggers, elves and humans, and Shana no longer supposed it was for amusement’s sake among the Lairs. No, they undoubtedly came among these people in disguise. And if—no, when —any of them learned that she had betrayed them, they would find her, and they would kill her in a way that would make the worst the elven lords could do seem pleasant. She had no doubts of that. The ones like Lori, who thought she was a rabid beast, would see to it.
So she shivered on her flat brown pallet until they took her away, then she endured the questions in silent desperation, pretending she hardly understood them, and pretending that she had simply found the bits of skin.
Her ploy did seem to be working; their manner seemed to become more and more perfunctory with her, as if her answers no longer mattered. That was the good part; the bad part was that they always saw that she violated some rule or other every day. That meant a beating; and with the beating came descriptions of what she could expect when a “master” bought her at the auction—descriptions that left her no doubt at all that the beatings she endured daily were nothing compared with what was coming. She almost came to welcome the appearance of her questioners: It meant one more day she would not have to face the unknown terrors of being sold.
Maybe today they wouldn’t come for her, she thought, without real hope, as she sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. Her green eyes, which she had learned to hide, thanks to the one friend she had made here.
She reached over and gently shook Megwyn’s shoulder. The graceful older woman didn’t wake when the light came on; she had told Shana, ruefully, that she once slept through an earthquake. Of her fellow slaves, only Megwyn had proved to be at all interested in anything outside of her own well-being. The first morning after Shana had been penned here, one of the others had tried to steal her morning’s ration of bread and soup. A tall, black-haired woman with bright brown eyes and a beautiful smile had been sitting across the table, and had stood up unexpectedly and cuffed the bully across the side of the head.
The overseer, seeing the scuffle, had hurried over. Shana had cringed, but Meg had explained the circumstances in matter-of-fact tones before the bully had a chance to think up a story. The bully was taken to another table; and Meg became Shana’s protector.
There were three kinds of slaves, Meg explained that first day: the hopeless, the helpless, and the loupers. The loupers preyed on the others, she’d said, in a way that Shana readily understood. The hopeless were too afraid someone would use them to make friends, and the helpless had given up on everything.
“And what kind are you?” Shana had asked the older woman, innocently.
Meg had laughed. “None of them,” she had said. “I’m not a slave. Or at least, I wasn’t. I was a bondling.”
That was when Shana had learned the difference that tunic-color made. And had learned about the concubines.
For Megwyn Karan had been a concubine. “And a good one,” she’d said proudly. But another woman, a jealous rival, had accused her of thieving a valuable gem from her elven lord, one of Berenel’s underlings, and planted the stolen object under her bed. Disgraced, Meg had suffered the worst punishment any concubine could have; she had been sent down to be auctioned as a common slave.
“That’s what I get for being nice to the bitch,” Meg had said bitterly, and then would say no more.
She readily admitted to Shana what had made her decide to protect the girl. “It’s your green eyes,” she’d said. “And if you look real close, your ears are kind of pointy. You’d better hide them both, unless you want a lot of trouble. You’re a halfblood, girl. I don’t know how you got away without being spotted before this, but you’re a halfblood.”
Meg had explained all about the halfbloods, and the little she knew about the Wizard War. When Shana had told her, tentatively, about the power she used to have, Meg had nodded knowingly. “That’s wizard-power, all right,” she’d said. “If you can just get it back, you’ll be able to get us both out of here. Then we can head for the forest. Folks say there’s wizards there—if I’m with you, if you maybe say I’m your mother, they’ll take me in too.”
If they ever got away. If Shana’s powers ever came back. If she lived through the day’s questions.
She shook Meg again, and this time the woman opened her eyes—and that same moment, not one, but several of the overseers came through the open door of the room.
“Shana!” called one, and Meg sat up quickly, as if they had called her name. She looked over her shoulder at the newcomers, and looked back at Shana, frowning.
“Don’t answer, child,” she whispered, a slight tremor in her voice. “Make them come to us. These aren’t Lord Berenel’s men; they’ve got no business here.”
Indeed, the men wore blue tunics and trews, not red. “Which one of you is Shana?” the nearest one growled, seizing the arm of a slave and shaking the man. The slave pointed, and the overseer looked up, scowling.
“Here they come,” Meg growled, putting her hand on Shana’s shoulder. “Don’t move. You have rights as Lord Berenel’s property. I’ll be with you.”
Shana couldn’t have moved if she had wanted to. She was paralyzed with fear. She knew that kind of swagger, the look in those eyes; it was what the bullies wore when they knew they weren’t going to be caught.
And with every step they took, she shrank further inside herself. For every step seemed to land right on her heart.