Mercedes Lackey - Elvenblood

The crowd parted suddenly; Diric marched up the middle of the empty space, followed by four of the Man-Hearted Women who had Jamal surrounded. He was not in chains, but from his demeanor he might as well have been. His shoulders were hunched, and he would not look at anything but the ground.

But Keman saw the fury in his eyes, though he tried to hide it. He was defeated, but he would never forget this defeat, and if he ever got a chance at revenge, it would be terrible.

All the reason never to give him a chance, then.

"While you did battle in the air, my champion," Diric said to Keman, gravely, "I did battle on my own on the ground."

He raised his voice. "Hear, oh my people, of the foolishness and the pride of your War Chief, who would risk your lives and the lives of your families that he might achieve a fleeting glory for himself!"

He began a highly edited version of everything that had happened since the wizards had been captured; Keman didn't pay too much attention to his speech once he realized what the gist of it was going to be. Instead, he watched Myre, who, despite the warning, had evidently tried something a little more potent than anything he or Kalamadea had attempted while wearing their collars. She stifled a cry of pain, blanched a dead white, and the skin beneath the collar reddened and blistered.

He could have felt sorry for her, if he hadn't still been so angry with her.

Lorryn was staring at her, though, with his mouth hanging wide open.

"What's the matter?" Keman asked softly. "Why are you staring at my sister?"

"That—that's my sister's maid, the one that helped us escape," he managed to stammer as he continued to stare. "But—wasn't she a dragon a little bit ago?"

"She's also my sister, and she's been trying to kill Shana and anyone who was a friend of Shana since before the Wizard War," Keman replied grimly. As Lorryn turned toward him, eyes wide with a thousand questions in them, he just shook his head. A great deal was becoming clear now, but it would all have to wait. "I'll explain it all later; we have more important things to handle right now than her."

He ground his teeth together, as Diric's oration wound to its close, with the declaration that Jamal would be branded with the mark of a traitor and cast out from the Clan. "Right now," he continued, "we have a war to prevent. If we still can!"

By the time night fell, Rena's head was reeling; this was too much to take in, all at once! Her maid, her friend—or so she had thought—was really a dragon? That much she could accept, somehow, for Myre had known an awful lot about the dragons, more than she should have even if she were an agent of the wizards. But to discover that she was a bad dragon, one who'd meant mischief, not good, by helping them escape—

It shook her, and it hurt her. She'd had so few friends, and she'd thought that Myre was one of them, despite the differences between them. Hadn't she gone out of her way to be kind to the girl? Hadn't she told Myre all of her secrets? The stories and romances all talked about the pain of betrayal; well, now she knew what they meant! How could she trust anyone after this? For that matter, whom could she trust after this?

That was her initial reaction, as she tried to take in all of the changes and make some sense of them. But as the moments flew past and her mind began to work again, she had to admit to herself that in the larger scheme of things—her own hurt was a very little incident in light of the things that Myre had revealed. She had not heard the "voice in the mind" that her brother described, but Kalamadea, Shana,

Lorryn, Mero, and (oddly enough) Diric all had. The danger to the wizards in their new home was not on the horizon—yet—but it most certainly would be soon!

"You are free to go as soon as you want," Diric was saying; once again, they were in his tent, but this time for comfort rather than secrecy. Jamal was already beginning his exile—Diric had not thought it a good idea to leave him within the Clan where he might manage access to Myre. A new War Chief had been appointed with Diric's full approval. Myre languished in the prison tent with the two elves, for Keman had reckoned that leaving her in Diric's custody was better than letting her wander around on her own. With the collar locked around her neck, she would certainly never be able to shift again. She might be able to escape, but where would she go? In her human form, that of the slave from Lord Tylar's estates, she would be pathetically vulnerable. Without being able to work magic to defend herself, there were a hundred deaths she could meet with out in the wilderness; all of them unpleasant.

So for the moment at least, Myre was no longer a threat to anyone. Later? Well, Rena was not so sure. If it had been up to her, Myre would be locked away for the rest of her life in a very deep, dark place, with food and water lowered to her on a rope.

"You have won us as allies, according to all our traditions," Diric continued, speaking mostly to Shana and Lorryn. "You defeated Jamal's champion in the view of everyone in the Clan. I do not know what we can do to aid you—but if there is anything we can offer, you have but to ask!"

Shana started to shake her head; Rena couldn't help but see how her mood had darkened in the last few hours. She was tense, very tense, and although she wasn't fidgeting, Rena guessed that if she had her way, she would have been a-dragonback and gone right after the fight. "Right now it looks like what we need most is an army. I won't ask you to come up against the elves; I wouldn't ask that of anyone. We both know it would be a slaughter, and what would be the point, anyway? But—"

Lorryn interrupted her. "Shana, wait a moment. The elves are not prepared to attack now. They are still trying to reconcile all their old grievances! What if we interfered with that process?"

"How?" she asked, skeptically. "I won't ask the dragons to go into their lands shape-shifted as elves; it's too dangerous! Now every elven lord that appears is going to be under the tightest of scrutiny, and will have to be vouched for by a dozen others! And if they went as slaves—they couldn't do a thing besides watch. I can't ask the wizards to go in, either, not when the elves are watching for illusions! How can we do anything from a distance?"

"Lorryn and I can go," Rena offered shyly. "I'm not sure what he has in mind, but we can do it. He could be any young er-Lord, or even a third or fourth son—no one pays any attention to them, or to women, either. We could go a lot of places, without ever meeting anyone who would recognize us."

Mero reached out and caught her hand and squeezed it. "If they go in, I'll go with them," he volunteered bravely, as Shana's eyes widened with shock. "I know plenty about the High Lords and their estates. And I know some about the cities, too. I could always pass as Lorryn's slave, after all. I am used to that role."

Shana looked over at Lorryn, who was nodding. "You obviously have some plan," she said slowly. "There's something you know that we don't—"

"One small thing, yes," he agreed. "And, Lord Diric, mere is something your people can give me that will help that plan along immensely. The jewelry that your women make."

Diric raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "This sounds more and more complicated," he said. "I hope it is not so complex as to forbid success."

But Lorryn shook his head. "Actually, it isn't all that complex at all," he replied. "There is an ancient rift among the elven lords that no amount of negotiation is ever going to cure," he told them all. "And that is the rift between the powerful and the weak."

Now Rena saw where he was going, and she knew why he wanted the jewelry too! "The difference between the powerful and the weak is a matter more of magic than of wealth or property," she said excitedly, rather than waiting for him to explain. "Those lords with a great deal of magic make virtual slaves of those with little. Worse than slaves, in fact! That is a chasm so wide that nothing could ever bridge it; the hurts have gone on too long and have been made too deeply to ever be healed!"