Elvenblood (9 page)

Triana was said to indulge in every excess known; Lorryn's friends were children playing kissing games by comparison. Most of her circle were the offspring of parents who were only a bare step up from being pensioners on some greater lord's favor—or were rare third or fourth children, useless to their parents, since no lord would ever divide his estate, and no lord would wed his child to a landless spouse unless he had no other choice. They could afford to debauch themselves; no one cared what they did, and no one would ever give them a scrap of responsibility. Most of them spent their time in endless parties, or traveling from city to city, staying at the town houses of friends or the friends of their parents.

They were generally granted just enough wealth to keep them busy in the spending of it, and not enough to get them into real trouble.

Which is a pity; surely one or two of them are brighter than poor Gildor, and would make a much better heir to
his
father's estate than Gildor would. For that matter, I can think of some girls that would do better than he would
.

She grimaced at the thought of Gildor. The salvation of his attention would probably be short-lived, knowing Lord Tylar. True, she
had
followed Lord Tylar's orders, the letter of them, anyway, but it had only been the merest chance that led even a nonentity like Gildor to pay any attention to her. For all the rest of the younger er-Lords, she might just as well have been one of the tame animals. The odds of anything at all to satisfy Lord Tylar's demands coming out of last night's fete were slim indeed.

If I'm lucky, Father will have enough on his mind that he'll just leave me to my own devices again. If I'm not
—
when no inquiries come about me, he'll blame me and Mother for it. He'll probably even forget the fact that Katarina completely captured Lard Ardeyn and blame us for not somehow enthralling
him!
Then
—
I
suppose I'll have to resign myself to a year of dancing lessons, music lessons, walking lessons, talking lessons, dressing-lessons
…

At least it would be something to do.

But all those lessons would take away her precious free time. There would be no more rides with Lorryn, unless he could somehow spirit her away from her teachers. There would be no hours in the library, browsing through books collected, not only by the House of Treves, but by the House of Kaullis before them. There would be very little time for the garden and her birds…

And yet—it would be freedom of a sort, for there would be no time for
any
of that if she was no longer Sheyrena an Treves, but Lady Sheyrena, wife of—of someone else. Eventually Lord Tylar would decide she'd had enough lessons, especially once her teachers pronounced her proficient, and he would leave her alone again.

How can I not be proficient
? She asked herself wryly.
I've had more lessons on being the perfect lady than any three other girls combined. If lessons could make me captivating, Katarina would never have stood a chance against me
.

And if it took lessons to earn her the tiny amount of freedom she enjoyed now, then she would endure the lessons as worth the reward.

Freedom always seems to come at a cost, and the more the freedom, the higher the cost
, she thought, with a sigh.
And what would true freedom cost me, I wonder? Probably more than I would ever want to pay, I suppose. But
—
it would be nice to know it was available
…

She reached under her pillow for the book she'd put there, one that was supposed to be a story of romance and treachery (did they always go hand in hand?) from the time when all the elves dwelled in Evelon.

If she could not read about dragons, this was the next best thing. And while she had a little free time to read, she would make the best use of it that she could.

A suntailed hawk soared high above the valley, on the watch for unwary rabbits in the meadows below. Lashana linked her mind loosely with his, enjoying the sensation of flight without the work. She had been doing quite enough of work lately, and it wasn't over yet. With power—or the appearance of power, anyway—came a
terrible
amount of responsibility.

This was a beautiful valley, and whether or not the rest would admit it, a site much superior to that of the original Citadel. Old habits died hard, and they would probably build their new fortress-home here with all the concealments of the old, but they wouldn't necessarily
have
to. The elven lords were far from here, and neither she nor any of the other scouts had seen any signs of habitation for several days' journey in any direction. The dragons were of the opinion that this site was blessed with a temperate climate; the forest that grew so thickly here was of mixed deciduous and coniferous trees, and was very, very old. Game was abundant, and would continue to be so if it was carefully husbanded and harvested. The one problem would be how to acquire foodstuffs other than meat; the wizards were so used to purloining what they needed from the stores of the elves that very few of them were woods-wise. She doubted that more than three or four knew what wild-growing forest plants were edible. They
could
clear some few acres and plant crops there—but that would be an open sign that they were living here, and she doubted most of the older wizards would even consider such a move.

Not to mention the fact that planting, tending, and harvesting a crop is hard, physical work, and very few of them would care to subject themselves to anything like manual labor.

Still, at the moment, all those decisions lay in the future. For once, she would not think about the future. For once, she would simply watch the land through the eyes of a hawk, and take in the beauty of the river below, the blue of the sky, the stately trees reaching up—

"Well, Elvenbane, how does the business of being a hero set with you?"

Shana released the hawk's mind, turned away from the hawk itself, and frowned at the great dragon Kalamadea, who was currently shifted into the form of a crinkle-faced old halfblood wizard. In this form, he had the bright green eyes and pointed ears of a presumed elven parent, but the coarser features, weathered skin, and gray hair that would have come from a human mother. "Father Dragon, I wish you wouldn't call me that," she said, crossly. "I don't like it."

"Why not?" Kalamadea replied, sitting down beside her, on the ridge of rock that crowned this hillside. "It suits you—or you suit it."

"What? Hero or 'Elvenbane'? I don't like either of them," she replied, turning her gaze back toward the sky, searching for that hawk again. "I don't like being called Elvenbane because I don't want people to—to look at me as if I was some sort of icon of destiny. I'm
me
, plain, ordinary, Lashana, and I can't help it if some people seem to think I match a crazy legend that you dragons made up in the first place! There are plenty of people who could be made to fit that particular legend, anyway! Why not call
Shadow
the Elvenbane? Or Zed, or even Denelor?"

"But you are the only one who actually instigated and led a revolt against the elven masters, to the betterment of at least a few fully human slaves," Kalamadea replied roguishly, tugging a lock of her long hair playfully. "And the only one who brought the dragons to help her!"

"Oh,
please"
she groaned, giving up the search. "If I hadn't done something,
you
would have found a way to interfere again, and
you
would have led the others to help the wizards, somehow. You know you would have!"

"Would I?" was Kalamadea's only reply. "But I am no hero, Shana."

"And neither am I," she said stubbornly. Then, with a heavy sigh, added, "And I'm no leader either. I wish I was. I wish I'd been trained for this, handling people. I hate to have to put all my trust in Parth Agon after the way he tried to use me, but at least
he
knows how to make people do what he wants them to do. People are used to thinking of him as the Senior Wizard anyway; often as not, they just obey him without thinking twice about it. They don't listen to me. Oh, they
say
I'm their leader, but I can't even get them to see sense when it's right in front of their noses. Look how I managed to find them the best site in the whole world, a
huge
cave complex, above a river in a rich valley, and
still
they have to argue about building the new Citadel here! And that Caellach Gwain is
not
helping matters at all."

"You do better than you think you do—" Kalamadea began, when he stopped in midsentence. Shana followed his gaze, catching sight of a dragon—in full, impressive draconic form—and his halfblood rider, kiting up the slope of the hill below where they sat, riding a rising thermal just above tree-top level. "Ah," he said, squinting into the bright sunlight. "Your foster brother and your young friend, I think. There must be word from the rest of the wizards."

A good guess, since the dragon was smallish by draconic standards, and bright blue, and the rider no larger than Shana herself. They glided up the slope swiftly, and, with a thunder of wings and a wind that blew bits of grass into the air, landed beside Kalamadea and Shana in the clearing along the top of the ridge.

The slight, dark-haired rider tumbled off of the blue dragon's back quickly enough—dragon-riding, as Shana knew well from experience, was far from comfortable—and joined the two of them as the dragon shifted shape into wizard-form to take up less space. Shana averted her eyes while Keman took his new shape, that of a short, brown-haired, muscular young halfblood; the peculiar rippling and changing that accompanied the transformation always made her stomach queasy if she watched too closely.

"I have good news and bad news," Mero announced, as he got within easy conversational distance, close enough for the emerald eyes and barely pointed ears that marked him as a halfblood to be clearly visible. "The good news is that even Caellach has finally accepted the caves as the best site for the new Citadel; Keman found a spring at the back of the complex, and brought the water up through the floor. With a constant source of fresh water right in the heart of our holding, there's no reason to look anywhere else for a home."

"And the bad news?" Shana asked, knowing from the tiny quirk of Shadow's mouth as he tossed his long hair out of his eyes that it was likely to be more humorous than truly "bad."

"The bad news is that the only place he could bring it up into was that group of caves you wanted for your own lair," Mero told her, the quirk turning into a grin that displayed a strong set of fine, white teeth. "Sorry about that; it's now all underwater. Very
cold
water, I might add."

She groaned, but only halfheartedly. The complex of caves she and the other three had found here was vast enough that there were plenty of other choices for everyone, and
still
the caves would not be more than a tenth occupied, dragons, wizards, former human slaves, and all. And even though it was a great deal closer to the elves than Shana really liked, it was well outside the borders of any lands the elves actually held under control.

If it hadn't been for the dragons, though, the caves
would
have been a very poor choice for a new home. Wizards though the halfbloods were, they could not bring water where there was none, nor could they shape rock with anything other than physical tools and their hands. Their magics were of illusion, of attack and defense, of the ability to move objects or people, and very occasionally, of the ability to create something. If they had been searching for a new home without the dragons, they would have had to build everything on their own, and unmodified caves made for damp and often hazardous dwellings. And everyone agreed that the new Citadel should have an internal water source, for obvious reasons.

After centuries of living in the comfort of the Citadel the first wizards built, they were not prepared to use either their hands or tools, 1 expect
, Shana reflected, and not for the first rime. Before she turned their world upside down, the wizards had lived a life of relative luxury and indolence. Anything they needed, they had used their magic to steal from the elves. The Citadel was already built, and built to last—they had not even bothered to keep it repaired, and when something happened to make one room or suite of rooms uninhabitable, the wizard in question simply moved. There were dozens, hundreds, of rooms unused and unoccupied since the Wizard War. For those tedious little chores of cooking and cleaning, there were always the apprentices, halfblooded children spirited away by wizard-agents before they could be discovered and killed by their fathers and masters. That was the price of
becoming
a wizard: to pay for one's apprenticeship by being the servant of an acknowledged wizard until the rest of the brotherhood accepted that you had mastered your powers. There were always plenty of apprentices; Denelor, Shana's own master, hadn't lifted a finger to clean his own quarters, even, for decades.

It hadn't always been that way; when the wizards first banded together, there had only been the "experienced" and the "inexperienced"—there were no apprentices in service to masters. They had all worked side by side to create the Citadel in the first place, and then to engineer the revolt against the elven lords and free themselves and the human slaves.

Well, I certainly took can of that
. Shana could not help but feel a certain grim satisfaction; for all that she really liked old Denelor, she had not much cared for playing servant to him, and there were plenty of other wizards who had taken shameless advantage of their situation. Now they would all be working side by side again, like it or not. The few humans—former slaves—that were with them now were mostly children, and even the hardest-hearted wizard would not put a child to that kind of work. Only an elven lord would be that cruel, to force little ones less than ten years old into the hard manual labor of an adult.

No, the caves would have been fit only for use as temporary shelter at best, if it hadn't been for the dragons.