She abandoned all thought of mischief, and all pretense at meditation, as a human female staggered from behind the wall and fell against her side.
Alara shifted back quickly, all but a very thin veneer of her surface. She still looked like a rock, but now she had eyes and ears, and she employed both cautiously.
The woman, heavily pregnant, moaned and got to her hands and knees, crawling towards the water. This was not the sort of desert traveler Alara would have expected; the woman was young, unscarred, burned red and blistered by the sun, and the clothing she wore was of delicate silk, fit for a boudoir, but hardly for desert travail. Her long red hair had been looped up in a series of elaborate braids; now half of her coiffure hung down in her face, and the rest was a tangled mess. Her feet were bare, the soles burned and cut, but she seemed oblivious, so delirious she was beyond pain. Even as Alara watched, she fell again, but not before she had reached the pool.
She dragged herself to the water’s edge, put her face down into the water, and lapped at the cool liquid like an animal. And the moment she touched the water, there was a sharp click.
The woman clawed at her neck, and an elaborately jeweled slave-collar came away in her hand. She dropped it unheeded beside her, and sank back on the stones, exhausted.
Alara’s attention was caught and held by the sunlight winking on the gems of the neckpiece. All humans wore slave-collars, but she had never seen one this ornate. Easily a thumb-length wide, it seemed to be made of solid gold, with emeralds, sapphires and rubies arranged in a series of geometrical patterns all around it. Her acquisitive soul hungered for it; no dragon ever had enough gems for its hoard, and this bit of jewelry drew her as nothing before ever had. She wanted it, not only to possess it, but to wear it.
And that anomaly warned her off, before she shifted fully back to draconic form in order to seize the thing. Suddenly alarmed, she eyed the collar carefully. Sure enough, there, among the gems, just over the point where the collar fastened, were three tiny, inconspicuous elf-stones. She knew the type, and the setting of the stones. One to hold the collar locked onto the slave’s neck, one negating any mind-magic the slave might have, and one, evidently still active, holding a spell of glamorie that made anyone who saw the collar want to wear it. A safe way to ensure that no slave ever abandoned his collar willingly.
Suddenly the collar no longer seemed quite so desirable.
Then, like a shout, a voice cried inside Alara’s mind. :Ah, gods –!:
Alara had one moment of surprise before she found herself pulled into the woman’s mind.
Serina Daeth. Not ‘the woman.’ Alara was just barely able to hold on to her own identity, caught in the desperate grip of Serina’s mind.
Serina was too fevered to actually build coherent thoughts; Alara found herself overwhelmed by memories, feelings, emotions, all tumbled together, out of sequence.
Alara pulled herself free of the woman’s mind with a gut-wrenching effort, and lay for a moment with her head pounding and a terrible pain between her eyes.
She’s a concubine, the dragon thought, amazed. She had never even gotten near enough to one of them to really see them well, much less listen to their thoughts. Lord Dyran – that must be V’Kass Dyran Lord Hernalth. He was an elder; practically chief in Council. But how did a High Lord’s concubine end up in the desert?
She reached out a little cautious mental finger, and touched the edges of the woman’s mind as lightly as she could manage.
With patient sifting, she gleaned a few facts; Serina had been the favorite of the harem, proud of her position, status, and her ability to ride out her Lord’s arbitrary nature. That is, until a new girl had been given to Lord Dyran by an underling who specialized in the breeding of beautiful human concubines, male and female. Leyda Shaybrel was just as beautiful as her owner had advertised, and as ruthless as she was beautiful.
When Leyda failed to oust Serina as favorite, and realized that Lord Dyran had no intention of replacing Serina, she turned to sabotage.
That had been several months ago, just before Lord Dyran went off to Council – which, due to the havoc and the feuding caused by Alara’s meddling, would last a record eight months. Lord Dyran left before Serina realized she was pregnant.
As soon as she knew, she must have been in a panic. That’s death – even if Dyran didn’t kill her, he’d cast her off. Alara was fascinated. This was a glimpse into the humans’ world she’d never had before. I wonder if I can get into her memory? This could be so useful –
Maybe if I just nudge her a little –
Chapter 3 (#ulink_45306a80-ba22-518c-8daf-075b6e65723b)
Amazing, Alara thought, pulling delicately out of the memory. She found it very hard to believe what she had just seen: the greed, the selfishness, the completely self-centered personality. Even at their worst, the Kin stood together!
The woman was only interested in her own promotion, not in anything that happened to any of the other girls. She went to her Lord, not only willingly, but eagerly. All of them did.
As far as Alara could tell, the concubines were all like her. There wasn’t a single sign of rebellion or unity there.
Alara blinked dazedly. In the past few heartbeats she’d learned more about humans and elvenkind than she had in years. The woman’s memories were so strong – and the pull of her mind well-nigh irresistible. But the temptation to allow herself to be pulled back in was too much; there was so much she was learning about classes of the humans that the Kin had never been able to approach, like the concubines and the gladiators.
The woman was a treasure trove of information; with what Alara was gleaning from her, the Kin would be able to infiltrate elven society in the form, not of other elves, which was chancy and sometimes dangerous, but in the forms of the invisibles –
Best of all would be if they could learn enough to fit in as guards, fighters, duelists –
Her father trained gladiators, Alara remembered suddenly. There was that short memory of the duel in the arena, but there were probably more. She’d have to go look –
Serina half fell into the water, hardly recognizing it for what it was until her arms went under the surface. She plunged her face into the blessed coolness, drinking until she could hold no more, crying tears of relief at the feel of the cold water down her throat, and on the parched and burned skin of her arms and face.
When she could no longer drink another drop, she lay beside the pool, her arms trailing into the water, too weak to move. Too weak even to think.
She was still so hot –
The sun overhead was like the bright lights of the arena, too bright to look at directly …
Today the Lord was garbed in a pure sapphire-blue, and his eyes reflected some of that blue in their depths. Serina thought he was even handsomer than he had been the first time she saw him. ‘In a very real sense,’ Dyran said lazily, as he strolled with his hands clasped behind his back, inspecting Jared’s latest crop of duelists, ‘I owe something of my prosperity to you.’ The men were arranged in a neat line before him, wearing their special leather armor, each set made to facilitate his – or her, there were a few women in the group – weapon’s specialty. They stood at parade rest, like so many sinister statues, helms covering their faces so that only the occasional glitter of an eye showed that they lived.
Serina peered out from under the cover of an old tarpaulin flung over a pile of broken armor heaped atop one of the storage closets. She’d learned how to climb up here when she was five or six; at nine now, she barely fit. A few more inches, and she wouldn’t be able to squeeze in behind the pile anymore. That meant she probably wouldn’t be able to steal any further glimpses of the training, so she had resolved to take full advantage of every opportunity that came along now.
‘Thank you, my lord,’ Jared replied expressionlessly. ‘But it was you, my lord, who gave me the training, and saw to it that I was well matched. It was you who placed me in charge of training the others. I had only the raw ability. You saw to its honing, and made use of it.’
‘True, true … still, you’re a remarkable beast, Jared. Over a hundred duels, and never a loss.’ Dyran stepped back and regarded his slave with a critical eye, his head tilted a little to one side. ‘I daresay you could still take any one of these youngsters, and win. Would you care to try? A real duel, I mean, not just a practice.’
Serina knew her father well enough to know that Dyran’s ‘offer’ shook him to the bone. A ‘real’ duel – that meant to the death. Jared, against one of the young men he’d trained himself. Jared’s experience against a younger man’s strength and endurance – Jared fighting someone who knew what his moves were going to be before he made them.
‘It would be an interesting proposition, my lord,’ Jared said slowly, so slowly that Serina knew how carefully he was thinking before he replied. ‘But I must point out that it could mean the loss of your chief trainer. It would mean the loss of your chief trainer for a month or so, no matter what. I’m not as spry anymore that I can avoid every stroke, and I’m too old to heal in a hurry.’
Serina waited, holding her breath, for Dyran’s response.
He threw back his head and laughed, his long hair tossing, and both Serina and her father heaved identical sighs of relief. ‘I couldn’t risk that, old man,’ he said, slapping Jared on the back, exactly as Serina had seen him slap a horse on the flank; with the same kind of proprietary pride. ‘Not with a half dozen duels scheduled for this month alone. No, we’ll keep the losses among those we can replace, I think. Carry on.’
Dyran strolled away, still chuckling, as Jared marched his men back towards their quarters –
The bright lights of the arena … How many times had she stood under them? The lights illuminated the audience as relentlessly as the fighters, for the elven lords came to the duels to be seen as well as to be spectators themselves. And they never disputed her presence there, however much it was against custom. They had seen how Dyran wanted her there, and none of them dared challenge Dyran on his home ground. She had made herself indispensable, but it had taken more work than any of them guessed, for no other concubine had dared to do the things she had done …
No other but me, she murmured to herself, her mind and body floating somewhere strange and bright. None but me.
Serina had learned early how to keep up with Dyran’s long, ground-eating strides without looking as if she were hurrying. She would never, ever allow herself to look less than graceful. One slip, and she might find herself replaced.
But this was an important part of her plan to make herself Dyran’s permanent favorite. She went anywhere with him that she could, provided she was not specifically forbidden to accompany him. Rowenie had never left the harem; Rowenie had never lifted a finger for herself, much less waited on her Lord.
So Serina followed Dyran everywhere, and waited on him with her own hands. Not adoringly, no – invisibly. So that he never noticed who was serving him unless he looked straight at her. Which he had done in the first few months of her ascendancy, and been surprised to find her there, with the goblet, the plate, the pen and tablet. And never did he see her looking back at him with anything other than a challenging stare: Dispute my right to be here, if you dare! Yes, he had been surprised. Then amused at her audacity, at her cleverness. Now he depended on her, on her ability to anticipate his needs, something he’d evidently never had before.
That she could surprise an elven lord was a continual source of self-satisfaction for her. A lord like Dyran had seen nearly everything in his long span, and to be able to provide him with the novelty of surprise would make her the more valuable in his eyes. Or so she hoped.
And I have ample cause for pride, she thought, gliding in his wake, taken for granted as his shadow. If nothing else, this self-appointed servitude was far more entertaining than staying in the harem, trying to while away the time with jewels and dresses and the little intrigues of the secondary concubines.
Today Dyran’s errand took him to a part of the manor she’d never visited before; outside, in fact, to a barnlike outbuilding with white-washed walls, a single door, and no windows, just the ubiquitous skylights. She hesitated for a moment on the threshold; blinked at the unaccustomed raw sunlight in her eyes; felt it like a kind of pressure against her fair skin, and wondered faintly how the field-workers ever stood it. She had been outside perhaps a handful of times in her life – when she was taken from her parents and the training building and barracks and moved to the facility for training concubines, again when she became a concubine and was taken to the manor itself – and most of those times she had been hurried along in a mob of others, with no time to look around. She found herself shrinking inside herself at the openness of it all. And the sky – she hadn’t seen open sky since she was a child. There was just – so much of it. So far away – no walls to hold it in –
She fought down panic, a hollow feeling of fear as she gazed up, and up, and up –
