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.
The younger elves were far more flexible than their elders, and there were some who had not yet lost their ideals. There were far more who simply disagreed with their elders because they were older and the ones in power.
It was possible that the sons could be induced to take up the cause, even threaten to revolt over this issue…
From what Keman had said, that was one of many possibilities. Some of the younger sons—and possibly daughters, from what she’d seen —were perfectly ready to take up almost any cause, so long as it meant their own particular grievance might also be addressed.
With Valyn to act as their spokesman, it was quite likely that they would be able to attract quite a few of these disaffected youngsters… And those that didn’t bring their own agenda, might be induced to join from sheer boredom.
The turn of her thoughts astonished her, so much so that for a moment she even forgot her anger at Valyn. Since she’d been in the Citadel, she’d learned politics, she thought wryly. That was certainly something she’d never understood before. An awful lot of what the dragons did back at the Lair had begun to make sense. Their politics never got half as complicated as the machinations in the Citadel. And from everything Keman told her, that didn’t begin to compare to politics among the elves.
So Valyn wanted to play with politics, did he?
All right. If he could get Shadow to agree to go along with this, she would, too. But this “handfasting” was going to be in name only, no matter what Valyn thought. And before too long, Valyn was going to be sorry he wasn’t in Shadow’s place.
She turned back to him, clenching her teeth into the semblance of a smile, and gave Valyn her answer.