Elvenbane (8 page)

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 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
—

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 so 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 whitewashed 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—

She closed her eyes for a moment to steady herself, then hurried after Dyran. She wasn’t certain how much more of this she was going to be able to bear…

But they were back under a roof soon enough. She paused behind Dyran as he waited for a moment in the entry. She welcomed the sight of the familiar beams and skylight—the gentle, milky light—feeling faint with relief. So much so, that she did not notice, at first, what it was that Dyran had come to inspect, not until Dyran cleared the doorway and she got a clear view of the room beyond.

Children? Why would he need to see children?

There were at least a hundred children of both sexes, mostly aged about six or thereabouts. All of them wore the standard short tunic and baggy pants of unbleached cloth, the garb of unassigned slaves, the same clothing Serina had worn until she was taken to be trained at age ten. The elven overseer had ordered them in ragged lines of ten, and they stood quite still, in a silence unusual for children of that age. Some looked bewildered; some still showed traces of tears on their chubby cheeks, some simply looked resigned. But all were unnaturally, eerily silent, and stood without fidgeting.

“My lord.” The elven overseer, garbed in livery and helm, with a face so carefully controlled that it could have been carved from granite, actually saluted. “The trainees.”

The trainees? Now Serina was very puzzled. What on earth was he talking about?

“Have you tested them?” Dyran asked absently, walking slowly towards the group of children, who one and all fixed their enormous eyes on him with varying expressions of fear. “It wouldn’t do to send Lord Edres less than the very best.”

Lord Edres? What did he have to do with children?

“Yes, my lord,” the overseer replied, never moving from his pose of attention. “Reactions, strength, speed, they’re the top of their age-group. They should make fine fighters.”

Now
Serina understood, and understood the references to
Lord
Edres. Dyran’s ally and father-by-marriage trained the finest of duelists, gladiators, and guards; Dyran had begun a stepped-up breeding program with
his
fighters as soon as the ink on the marriage contract was dry; no doubt part of the bride-price was to be paid in slaves for training. These children were evidently the result of that program.

“I believe they’re ready for you, my lord, if you’re satisfied with them.” Now the overseer stepped back several paces as he spoke, as if to take himself out of range of something.

“Yes, I think they’ll do.” Dyran raised his hands, shaking back his sleeves—and she felt a moment of unfocused fear, as if something deep inside her knew what was going to happen next, and was terrified.

Dyran clapped his hands together and Serina was blinded by a momentary flash of light, overwhelming and painful—when her eyes cleared, the children stood there still, but all signs of fear or unhappiness were gone. Each wore a dreamy, contented smile; each looked eagerly from Dyran to the overseer and back, as if waiting for an order to obey—

A tiny fragment of memory: standing in line with the other ten-year-old girls. Lord Dyran, in brilliant scarlet, raised his hands. A flash of light. And
—Serina shook her head, and the tiny memory-fragment vanished, as if it had never been.

“Exactly what are these going to be trained for?” Dyran was asking the overseer. The other removed his helm, and Serina recognized him; Keloc by name, and one of the few of Dyran’s subordinates he actually trusted.

“Half of them are going straight into infantry training; line soldiers, my lord,” Keloc said, shaking back his hair. “A quarter’s going into bodyguard training, the rest are for duelists. Lord Edres wanted about a dozen for assassins, but I told him we had nothing suitable.”

“Rightly,” Dyran replied with a frown. “I’m a better mage than he is, but that doesn’t rule out the chance of him allying with someone who’s as good as I am and breaking my geas. It would be a sad state of affairs to find assassins with
my
brand on them making collops of my best human servants.”

“Exactly so, my lord,” the overseer replied. “Did you sense any resistance? I didn’t specify an exact number to Lord Edres, only a round figure. I weeded out what I could, but I’m not the mage you are.”

Dyran looked out over the sea of rapt young faces. “No,” he said, finally. “No, I don’t think so. These should do very well. Excellent work, Keloc. You’re getting better results with these than with the horses.”

The overseer smiled a little. “It’s easier to breed humans, my lord. So long as you keep an eye on them, damage during breeding is minimal, and they’re always in season. And you’ve always had good stock, my lord.”

Dyran chuckled, with satisfied pride. “I like to think so. Carry on, Keloc.”

The overseer clapped his helm back on and saluted. “Very well, my lord.”

Alara was disappointed, though not by the clarity of the woman’s memories. It wasn’t going to be possible to pose as either a bodyguard
or
a concubine, she decided. That was really too bad; either position would have been ideal for gathering more information than the Kin” had access to at the moment. At least one thing was explained: It looked as if the elven lords encouraged rivalry among their humans, while maintaining control over them with spells—or at least, that was what happened with the humans they allowed close to them. So they kept the humans at odds with each other, while looking to their lord with complete loyalty.