by Andre Nolton
"Debased creatures, are we?" came an angry shout from one of the carters who had brought the last batch of iron ingots up from the mine. "I'd like to see you try your hand at a little honest work, you soft white worm!"
"You can just fetch and carry for yourself from now on!" came another, disgusted voice, along with a chorus of similar sentiments. Even some of the children that Caellach had cowed into obeying his demands took heart from the sentiments of their elders, and added their shrill voices to the rest.
Caellach and the others woke to their danger, but considerably too late for any retraction. They gathered in a knot around Caellach and it became painfully clear to them how tiny a minority they formed, as a sea of angry faces surrounded them. Shana and her shortcomings were quite forgotten.
Lorryn allowed them enough time to really begin to frighten Caellach, before using a little touch of magic to amplify his voice so that it carried over the noise of what was fast becoming a mob.
"Friends!" he boomed. "Quiet! Please!"
Surprise silenced all the voices for the moment—just long enough for one single voice, the voice of her foster mother Alara, to be heard.
"Shana, the objections seem to be to all of the changes," Alara said, in the first reasoned voice Shana had heard in the last few moments. "And you really were the author of most of them. So what have you to say about the objections?"
"If you don't change," she said, very slowly, choosing each word as carefully as if she picked her way across a treacherous swamp. "I think you become just like the Elvenlords."
That brought true silence, in which even the sighing of the breeze in their clearing seemed loud. It was a silence that begged for an explanation and drew further words, however unwillingly, out of her.
"They haven't changed, not since they conquered this place, and maybe not even in longer than that," she continued. "They assume that they're the proper lords of the universe and that nothing they want or think or do can be wrong—no matter how many times things happen that prove that they are wrong. When you don't change, you get brittle, and the next thing that hits you will break you."
She looked past the faces of her own friends, out to the humans, in whose eyes smoldered resentment for all Wizards now, even her. "Changing means that we can't sit in our Citadel and think we're superior to anything just because we can do some things well. Don't you see?" She fumbled a little. "We all need each other. Oh, I can bring in a live sheep from the hills with magic, but I don't have the first idea of how to take clay and make a watertight cup, and let's face it, if I'm thirsty, I need that cup, and the person who can make it is superior to me at that moment! Don't you see?" she pleaded. "I never wanted to be a leader, but—I don't know, maybe Kalamadea is right and hamenleai has something to do with it and I just can see that we all need to change and we all need each other if we are going to survive—and maybe, if they'll learn to change a little, we even need—them—"
She gestured helplessly at Caellach and his friends, unable to put what she wanted to show them into words—the great puzzle that she saw in her mind that somehow had places for all of them to fit into.
But evidently, although there was some puzzlement out there, she got part of her point across. The resentment and anger had faded, and although there were grimaces at the thought of including Caellach and his ilk back into the fold, there seemed to be acceptance of the idea, too.
Then came the thing she hadn't expected—
"It's hard on an old man, all this changing," said one of Cael-lach's cronies plaintively. "It's hard, girl. You go along with your life all even, then suddenly it's all upset—but—"
He took a deep breath, and shuffled across the space between Caellach's crowd and the rest of the convocation. He looked up at her, and heaved a sigh. "I hate all of this uncom-fortableness and having to do without," he continued, half in complaint, half in resignation, "but I'd rather stand with you than against you. Just don't ask too much all at once of an old, tired man, will you?"
She got down off her slice of tree-trunk and offered her hand. He took it, and that was the beginning of the end. In ones and twos, the rest of Caellach's followers came over to her side, although most of them just tried to blend back into the crowd and didn't actually come to stand with her. It didn't matter; they'd abandoned Caellach. Even if they didn't entirely agree with her, even if they were still going to argue and grumble, they'd abandoned their leader and they had opened themselves up to the possibility of change.
It was enough. For now, it was enough.
21
Rena took her place on the carpet next to Mero in Diric's tent. The flaps were rolled knee-high, and scrims of loosely woven linen kept bugs out while allowing a breeze to flow through. It was dinnertime, a meal much enlivened these days by the addition of vegetables supplied by trading and the gardens that the Corn People were growing, as well as by the changed herbs provided by Rena herself. Dinner, shared with Diric and Kala, was a more-than-pleasant meal, now that the first lot of crude iron ingots had arrived from the Citadel. Once again, Diric's star was in the ascendant, so far as his people were concerned; and he had lost that worried frown. Kala was just as pleased and far more open about it. After all, the Iron People now had everything they needed—iron, good grazing and water, and even the remains of their old allies, the Corn People, to settle in somewhere nearby and commence the farming that they would not or could not do.
Rena and Mero were reaping the benefits as well; as the representatives of the Wizards, everyone with a forge wanted to know what they knew about possible future production, and there were no few folks who wanted to see if they could somehow ease to the head of the queue waiting for the next shipment. The Trader clans were a little discomfited to find that they were no longer the only source of iron, but they'd gotten over it, particularly now that the women among the Iron People had begun to experiment with faceting the fool's gold and polishing yet another form of mineral with a high iron content that the Traders had brought in. Both made fine "gems" for setting, the new "oil-iron" in particular having a lovely liquid-black sheen to it that looked wonderful in blackened-iron filigree. So now the women had more material for their tiny jewelry workshops than they'd ever had before and the new materials had brought on a spate of creativity that had even the men intrigued and hovering over the women's work, trying to reckon how they could coax their mates, mothers, sisters, and friends to produce some of the new work for them. Diric already sported leather arm-guards inlaid with iron settings that held large oil-iron cabochons, courtesy of Kala's hands, and she was working on a matching collar as well. He was setting something of a fashion, much to Rena's silent amusement and Kala's open glee.
It seemed an auspicious time for Rena to see about something she had been planning for a while.
Kala brought in plates of flatbread, broiled meat, thinly sliced vegetables, and bowls of soured cream. The Iron People could now enjoy one of their favorite meals—flatbread rolled around spiced meat strips and vegetables, garnished with dollops of cream. Rena and Mero had come to enjoy these as much as their hosts, and Mero quickly made himself a roll as soon as Kala set the platters on the carpet before them.
"How badly do you want to keep your two Elvenlords, Diric? They don't look very healthy to me," Rena asked, as Diric reached for a piece of flatbread.
He didn't even pause in his motion. "They haven't been a lot of use for some time," he admitted, laying a paper-thin slice of cucun-pod and some of Rena's sweetened and tenderized grasses on the flatbread, following it with strips of meat and a dollop of soured cream. "Out of respect for your wishes they haven't been entertaining us, but I don't think they would now even if we tried to force them into it with beatings. I think they're going mad, actually. Their keeper can barely get them to eat and drink; I'm told all they do is stare at whatever they're pointed at."
"I think they've gone mad," Rena replied, relieved to hear the matter-of-fact tone in his voice. "You can still get Kelyan to talk if y
ou try hard enough, but Haldor—your keepers are having to feed him by hand. I want them, if you don't."
"Tell me what you want to do with them, first," Diric replied cautiously.
Rena took a deep breath and looked to Mero, who gave her an encouraging smile. She looked back into Diric's sable-brown eyes, and told herself what a fundamentally reasonable man he was. "I want—I want to try something. I want to see if my magics can change people's memories. There have been rumors, oh forever, that some of the Old Lords can do that, and I should think that since women's magics among my people are used delicately, it should be easier for a woman to do that than a man. Since Kelyan and his friend are already mad, I can't hurt them further, and I may be able to help them." She steeled herself. "If I can—help them, that is—there are several things I want to do with them. The first thing is to find out how the elf-stones of the slaves' controlling collars are made and how the slaves are controlled by them."
"Shana's got this idea that would take less iron than the jewelry," Mero put in helpfully, his green eyes alight with enthusiasm for his friend's plans. "Sort of a clamshell arrangement to close around the beryl like this—" he demonstrated with his two hands snapping together "—and cut it off from magic getting out or in. Those would be easy to get in to the slaves in sackfuls, and if everyone who was ready to escape all snapped their iron-clamshells over their stones at once, they could make a njn for it. The Elvenlords wouldn't be able to pursue any single individual or track him either, and by the time someone with enough magic to cast levin-bolts was summoned, the slaves would be long gone."
"But we have to know how the elf-stones work so we can see if the plan would work," Rena continued, as Diric set down his half-eaten flatbread and leaned forward, intrigued by the idea. "I never learned how, and I don't think Lorryn ever did, either, but Kelyan probably did. So I want to see if I can get him to show me. If I can't trick him into doing it, maybe Mero can get the memory straight out of his mind. Once we know how to make the elf-stones, we can test the clamshells."
"But that is not all you plan, I gather?" Diric asked, with heavy eyebrows raised. He looked more than intrigued now, he looked enthusiastic.
"Um—no." She decided to go ahead and tell him her entire plan while he still was open to it. "I want to wipe away every trace in their minds of being captured, of the Iron People, and replace it with something else."
"What else?" Diric wanted to know. "Why?"
"I thought—" she faltered for a moment, then went on. "I thought I'd construct some new memories—illusions really— out of the way Lorryn and I wandered around in the wilderness. Or maybe Mero can help me put things in their minds, when I've blanked out the old memories. And once I knew that they weren't going to remember anything about the Iron People or the Wizards or dragons or anything, I'd put them to sleep and get Keman or one of the other dragons to drop them somewhere near enough to an estate for them to find their way back." She bit her lip and waited for the inevitable reaction.
"You mean that you intend to free them?" Diric's eyebrows had crawled all the way up to the top of his forehead. "You think we should let them go to join the rest of our enemies?"
"Well, we can't kill them!" she said, a little desperately.
For a moment she feared that Diric would respond with, "And why can't we?" But he regarded her thoughtfully, pulling on his lower lip, and said nothing for a very long time.
"If that was your plan," he replied, pitching his voice low, "it seems a waste of a perfectly good resource for deception that we can further use against the Demons that you call Elvenlords. Rather than giving the prisoners memories of wandering about in the wilderness, why not give them memories that are completely erroneous?"
"Such as—?" Rena asked, her heart lifting. He was going to let her do this! Finally she was going to be able to do something that would help poor Kelyan and Haldor, but maybe help out Shanaas well!
"Oh—I think we can work out something. Make them think that they were held captive by the Wizards, more Wizards than the Elvenlords have any notion exist." Diric grinned in that sudden way that made him look like a boy full of mischief. "And in their minds we can locate their prison in some impregnable fortress somewhere in the opposite direction from the real Citadel." He winked wickedly. "For that matter, concoct a set of Wizards that have never even heard of our set! Make the Demons think that they have an enemy that until that moment they had known nothing about! Make them waste time and warriors trying to find this new set of Wizards!"
Mero uttered a whoop of laughter. "Ancestors! What an idea! It'll have them scrambling to guard their rear, it'll have them fighting over which set of Wizards are the most dangerous, and best of all, it will buy us more time to get stronger!"
"Exactly so." Diric picked up his forgotten meal, and waved his free hand at Rena. "If that is your plan, child, take them and welcome. They are nothing but a burden now, and if you can succeed in your plan, you will convert them to an asset."
He said nothing about what would happen to them if she couldn't wipe their memories clean, but she decided that she would deal with that if the occasion arose. She thanked the Iron Priest and turned to her own untouched meal with a good appetite.
Diric had something he wanted to discuss with Mero after dinner, and Rena decided that she might as well tackle the first part of her plan straight off. Not being a halfblood was something of a handicap, as she couldn't read the minds of the two Elvenlords directly—so what she planned to do was to try and coax the information out of them using words, illusion, her own sex, and gentle prodding. She'd had the Traders bring her an old, deactivated collar from one of the escaped slaves working with Shana; she brought this with her as she entered their tent.
"Kelyan?" she called; she'd put on die illusion of one of the fine gossamer gowns she'd worn in her old life, and as Kelyan roused from his apathetic trance and slowly raised dull eyes to look at her, she created a second illusion, that they were in a typical room that one would find in an Elven manor. She used as her model one of the rooms in which her father would informally entertain guests, but kept the place shrouded in shadows.
Kelyan looked terrible; his emerald eyes were clouded, his pale hair hung lank and brittle, the only time he changed his clothing was when his keepers stripped him of the soiled clothing. Rena wasn't sure what had triggered this dive into insanity— perhaps he'd just snapped when he'd first seen Keman in dragon-form, or perhaps he had just given up when it became obvious that even though the Wizards had been accepted as allies, there was no way that two Elvenlords were going to be released. But his current confusion, and the way in which he drifted in and out of a world of his own making, would help her. She hoped that in his current mental state he would either believe that he was back among his own people, or was dreaming; either would serve her equally well. It was unlikely that he would recognize the Rena he knew in the Elven lady-guise she had just created for herself; she'd even done herself up in High-Fete fashion with exaggerated cosmetics.
His eyes brightened as he took in her and her surroundings; there still wasn't a great deal of sanity in them, but there was more sense. To reinforce the illusion she had created, she hid Kelyan's companion in captivity in the shadows so that he wouldn't see Haldor's motionless form and have his illusion broken. He didn't seem to notice or care.
"My lady—?" his head tilted inquiringly, showing that he really didn't recognize her.
"Sheyrena," she supplied. "Welcome to my fete, Lord Kelyan."
"My Lady Sheyrena." He nodded his head. "Do I know you?"
Good. He doesn 't remember or recognize me, or something deep in his mind doesn't want to. He'd much rather live in dreams than in the world he's in now.
"I am the daughter of a friend of your mother's," she replied, aping as best she could her own mother's manner when with a guest. "Thank you for coming with your mother to my little entertainment. I wondered if I could impose upon your good nature for a trifling task?"
"
I am at your command," he responded, with a hand over his heart and a slight bow.
"I have taken a new body-slave, a little girl who has not yet been fitted with a collar," she lied glibly. "As you know, my father will not return from his meetings with the Council for several days, and I wondered—could you—help me with clearing and setting this so that I can use it on the child?" she held out the collar, and he took it from her fingers.
And frowned, slightly. "This is hardly a fit collar for the neck of a lady's slave," he pointed out.
She pouted. "It is the only one I could find that has not been set and placed on the neck of a living slave, and I don't want to wait for someone to construct one for me," she said with just a hint of petulance. "Besides, I've taken a particular fancy to this one child. She's quite pretty, and I don't want Father to decide to give her to someone. If she's sealed to me, he shan't be able to."
Kelyan smiled, and she smiled back, instantly forming a conspiracy of two against their greedy elders. "In that case, I shall be happy to set it to you on your behalf," he replied easily.
He bent over the collar and went immediately to work on it—
And she followed the slightest nuance of that work with an intensity that surely would have startled him, had he not been concentrating on the collar to the exclusion of all else.
She had been doubly-prepared; in case she needed to use this ploy again, she didn't want him to think it was anything other than a dream.
When he finished his magics, she thanked him prettily. "You have done me a great good turn, Lord Kelyan," she said, flirting subtly with him in a way that would probably have had Mero wild with suppressed jealousy. "How can I properly thank you?"
