Elvenborn hc-3

by Andre Nolton

  She plied him with drugged wine as she fluttered her eyelashes at him, perfectly aware that he wouldn't actually do anything other than flirt back. There was a rhythm to this sort of courtship; until he had her father's tacit permission to approach her, he would only indicate gallant interest. He wouldn't want to find himself called into a challenge that he might not have the trained slaves to meet. Leasing gladiators to meet a challenge was possible, but expensive, since some of them would almost certainly die in the combat. Better to be cautious.

  "Performing any service for a fair lady is a privilege, not a burden," he replied, downing the wine in a single gulp. As she had planned; she'd doctored the wine to make its taste smoother than honey and disguise its nature. She refilled his glass, and he downed that as well. She passed him a little bowl of highly-salted, toasted bits of root—also manipulated by her magic. The more he ate, the thirstier he would become.

  "Thank you," he said after his first taste, and when she left the plate there beside his hand, he didn't object. "I do not have the company of a lovely lady often enough that I see it as less than a reward in and of itself," he continued, now sipping from his glass and nibbling at the snacks.

  She laughed softly, producing a tinkling little sound that surprised her and made his eyes widen with approval.

  "I do not have the company of fine young lords often enough to think it less than a treat," she replied in the same vein. "Tell me something of yourself."

  He was not at all loath to do so, and she continued to ply him with wine as well as conversation until his eyes drooped, his head dropped, and he collapsed limply down onto the pallet he'd been sitting on all this time. With a thought and a flick of her fingers, she banished all the illusions she had created, leaving him again in the felt-walled tent. When he woke the next morning, if he recalled the incident at all, it would probably be as a dream.

  Then she blew out the lights, and left him in the darkness, turning the collar over triumphantly in her hands.

  Now it was Kala's turn on the new project to liberate the slaves; she examined the collar and the stone, and set about making the clamshell clasp that would lock the stone away from wearer and mage. She was certain she could make such a mechanism; the trick would be to create one that was small enough to conceal, but large enough and sturdy enough to have an effective seal.

  Meanwhile, dropping her guise and coming as herself, Rena attempted to engage the two Elves in conversations every day while Mero "eavesdropped" on their minds. As she talked to them—or, as often as not, at them—she played, delicately, with her magic inside their heads.

  When the Great Lords removed memories, they did so wholesale, leaving behind a blank. She had delved into the mysterious workings of the brain as well as she could, and now she suspected their crude efforts, difficult as they were, created a mental infant. Probably afterwards their victim had to be re-taught even the simplest of things, which was why she—it was usually a rebellious girl who was so cavalierly treated— wouldn't make a reappearance for a year or more after she was subjected to the treatment. Rena wanted to be more subtle.

  So while she talked and spied upon the physical workings inside their heads, she did so on the same minute level that she worked when making the leaves and plants sweet and tasty—or just plain edible. When Mero "saw" a memory that he knew they needed to expunge—which would be when one of the Elves actually thought about it—he signaled Rena. She would know then where it physically resided, and that, she could change. After a few days, she began doing just that. Gently, she broke the connections that made the memories, then erased them altogether with the tiniest of shocks—much, much smaller and more subtle than those that caused brainstorms. When she was done, those particular memories were gone. Ask Kelyan about them, and he would look at her blankly.

  She had hoped that she would be able to remove the memories sequentially, but alas, that was not possible. Memory, it seemed, was a peculiar thing. It wasn't sequential; memory chains led oddly to incidents that seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the triggering recollection.

  But one thing was absolutely certain, and that was the more she erased, the more normal Kelyan—and in particular Haldor, since he was the most withdrawn—became.

  When that happened, memories were easier to trigger and thus, to remove. Rena's progress with them came in leaps and bounds, and soon they were both as active and alert as they'd been when first captured. That was promising, since it would have been the next thing to murder to drop the two of them unconscious somewhere if Haldor was still near-catatonic, but it created a new problem.

  As they regressed into the past, they no longer had the memories that told them that resistance was of no use, that escape was not possible. By having their evening food drugged, building illusions, and interrogating them separately, Rena was able to convince them that she and her questions were no more than an intriguing dream. She didn't even have to convince them that they were in the midst of a dream sequence, since she was able to erase the memory of each night before she left them drugged and sleeping.

  "But what are we going to do with them?" she asked Mero desperately, three days after she had begun this task, when Hal-dor had announced his intention to escape from their current captivity the next day. She dropped down beside him on the grass outside their tent, both of them staring up at the star-begemmed sky over their heads. Her hand reached for his, only to find his reaching for hers. She took comfort from the touch. "Sooner or later, they're going to try to make a run, and that's only going to make a terrible amount of trouble."

  "Keep 'em drugged by day," Mero advised, squeezing her hand. "We have to figure out how to give them a new past, and I haven't worked that one out yet." Moonlight flooded the camp, almost bright enough to read by. He shook his head at her. "I don't know. Illusions? But that would take as much time to show them as it would for them to live it? I might be able to stick new memories right in their heads where the old ones were, but for one person to create all that—"

  "Does it have to be one person?" Rena interrupted. "What if there were several?" She flushed with the excitement of suddenly seeing a possible solution. "We don't have to be the ones to make the new memories! We could ask Kalamadea and Alara to come get them, and Shana and Zed and some of the other Wizards could all pitch together and do it!"

  Mero shook his head. "I don't know," he replied dubiously. "Wouldn't those memories get awfully confusing with so many people meddling?"

  "Isn't it better for us if they are confusing?" Rena countered, feeling even more certain that this was the right way to handle the problem. "We don't want them to have a whole picture, we just want them to have fragments, don't we? Let them think they were drugged most of the time, or enspelled, but the more confusing their memories are, the more confused the Old Lords will be."

  "And the more confused the Old Lords are, the more likely that they'll be alarmed—I see where you're going with this." Mero chuckled unexpectedly, and hugged her. "You're right, Rena, you're right! I'll try and reach Shana and explain all this and see if she falls in with the plan. I'll keep trying until I reach her."

  "And I'll wipe their memories back to their capture," she said happily, secure now that her plan would work exactly as she had hoped.

  In a few days, the dragons arrived—but quietly, without fanfare, in the guise of Wizards. Rena had never seen Alara in that form; Shana's foster-mother had chosen to resemble a very sturdy woman of indeterminate age, with high cheekbones and hair of deep brown. Kalamadea, of course, wore the guise with which the Iron People were already familiar, and when he and she walked into the camp at dawn, Diric and the other leaders of the group welcomed him—though the welcome was tempered with the memory of the last time they had seen him, in his real shape of a huge, blue-black dragon.

  "We've come to carry off your inconvenient guests," Father Dragon said genially, beaming as if he'd had the greatest of treats bestowed upon him. No matter that the last time anyone of the Iro
n People had seen him, it was as a dragon; he behaved so normally, and looked so harmless, so inoffensive, that it was hard for anyone to think of the menacing dragon with those guileless green eyes peering at them out of a sea of wrinkles. Father Dragon played the part of an eccentric little old man to perfection, and soon had Diric chatting with him like the old friend he was. With Diric acting so normally, the rest of his people relaxed as well.

  "And what have you done with Myre?" he asked, at last. "We gave her over to the keeping of the Corn People for now; they do not trust her in the least, for I told them only that she had nearly betrayed us and her own people to the Demons." Diric looked smug, and Rena had to smile. That was at least partly true, after all! "They give her field tasks to do, and no food if she will not work. She has quickly learned the value of carrying out what she is told to do."

  "Obviously, you aren't concerned about her escaping?" Alara made that a question; she couldn't quite control the pain she felt at this position her second-born found herself in, but Diric misinterpreted it.

  "Oh, no, lady! If she wishes to run off, we will let her! She is not so great a help to us that we would miss her, and she cannot remove the collar that keeps her looking as one of the Demons' slaves. She cannot go back to the Demons, so—the Wizards, we, the Corn People and the Traders all know of her treachery and would not remove it." He smiled. "If she wishes to wander the plains, alone and unaided, in preference to remaining with the Corn Folk where she has food and shelter, well, let her savor her freedom."

  Alara sighed, but said nothing; Kalamadea covered her silence with chatter. Rena gave her a look of sympathy; for all that Myre had been a miserably thankless child, Myre was her daughter. It must have torn poor Alara's heart to have to side with one child—or children, counting Shana as Alara's foster-daughter—against another.

  "We'll wait until dark to take them, so we don't distress your people unduly," Kalamadea was saying quietly, as the other Elders of the tribe made their cautious greetings, lost interest, and went back to their usual tasks. "That is well," Diric said judiciously, then brightened. "But you must also see the progress my Kala has made upon your other need! And you must see the new jewels my lady-smiths have made! Come!"

  Rena and Mero spent the rest of the day in the company of Diric and the two dragons. Diric must have shown them every jewelry forge in the camp, and although Alara did not once ask to see her wayward daughter, Rena had to wonder if Diric was trying to distract the dragon to keep her from making that very request.

  At last—at long last, for even Rena was beginning to tire of watching jewelers at work, a task she normally found fascinating—the sun set, and darkness fell.

  She left then, to see to the two she now considered "her" charges. She found them insensible, so thoroughly drugged that not even a hearty shaking could wake them. Nothing less would do; obviously they couldn't ride out of here as she and Mero had done, a-dragonback. They would have to be carried.

  She and four of the younger Iron Priests bundled the unconscious Elves into the same kind of swaddlings that the Iron People used for their infants, only adult-sized, complete with a rigid board very like a cradle-board. The swaddlings would prevent them from moving, the board would ensure that they wouldn't bend in the middle; now they could be put in a net sling, to be carried in dragon-claws back to the Citadel.

  Once packaged up like a pair of parcels for delivery, the Iron Priests each took an end and unceremoniously carried the motionless bundles out into the darkness.

  Rena followed behind, as the young Priests in their peculiar cloth headresses and leather aprons carried the bundles as far as the open grasslands outside of the camp, put them down in the waiting nets, and hurried off. They didn't look back and Rena didn't blame them; if she herself hadn't spent so much time with Keman in all of his forms, she would have been nervous around the dragons.

  And Kalamadea and Alara would be back from feeding at any moment....

  The sudden "wind" that came up all around her, the thunder of unseen wings overhead, warned her that they were here.

  Silvered by the moonlight, casting black shadows that stretched across the frantically-waving grasses in front of them, they backwinged in beside their charges. Rena stepped back involuntarily; she had somehow forgotten how big the fully adult dragons were in their true forms. Father Dragon usually reduced his, to fit in with the others, and to be able to use the lairs inside the Citadel—but dragons never stopped growing entirely, and he easily dwarfed Alara, and Alara was twice the size of her son, Keman.

  They were like forces of nature, too big, too powerful to really comprehend; she put her hands out in an unconscious gesture of warding. She might not even have been there for all the notice that they took Of her.

  They had eaten well among the herds, and they had a long way to go, all of it this very night, before the two Elves woke. There was no time for farewells, and in her heart, Rena couldn't blame Alara for wanting to be gone from the place where her youngest languished in her prison of iron collar and human flesh.

  Instead, each paused on the ground only long enough to seize a net and hook it into claws as long as Rena's arm. Then, with a leap for the sky and a tremendous booming of wings, they were off.

  In moments, they were only dark shadows, beating slow wings against the silver moon. Then, gone.

  Rena strained her eyes, but couldn't see them—and jumped when Mero touched her arm.

  "Well," he said quietly, "it's out of our hands now. You've given Shana a tremendous weapon, my love, and now it's up to her to make the best use of it. You've done your part; you can relax."

  Only when he said that did she realize that she could. And that Mero had said that she had, at last, given Shana material help unaided by anyone. She glowed with pleasure at the mere thought, and laughed a little.

  "I suppose I can, can't I?" she replied, and turned so that his arm went around her shoulders. "Well, then—" she continued, playfully, feeling strong and emboldened by her success, "Don't you have some—ah—courting to catch up on?"

  For a moment he stared at her, as if unsure of how to react. "I do?" he said, a little stupidly.

  —then he grinned, broadly. "I suppose I do," he said with far more sense ...

  ... then proceeded to make a very good start on all that catching-up.

  22

  Lady Triana supervised the preparation of her reception chamber with the same care a good general would have given to the preparation of battle-plans. Things were beginning to move, at last, although not entirely in the direction she had wanted. Aelmarkin was on his way to her manor—she knew this, of course, because she had not given him an access-key to her Portal, and as a consequence he had to make the last leg of his journey the hard way, overland from the manor where Aelmarkin had a friend willing to allow him the use of his Portal. He probably didn't even know that she had a Portal. There weren't many who she trusted with keys to it, so it wasn't common knowledge.

  She'd had plenty of time to prepare for him by now, and he knew that. Already she had an advantage over him.

  She had been expecting this visit for some time; in fact, she was surprised that he hadn't turned up before this. Aelmarkin's cousin Lord Kyrtian, rather than disgracing himself, was distinguishing himself on the battlefield against the rebellious Young Lords. After that last rout of the Young Lords, his star was particularly high with the Council. Aelmarkin must be furious.

  She only wished that she had nearly as much of an advantage over Aelmarkin as she was going to pretend she had. Her little spy in the household, kept as she was in the harem and with no access to young Kyrtian when he was away on his martial business, had proved of little use. The domestic details that the slave had been sending were only of interest in that they showed how thoroughly Kyrtian's mother held the reins of the manor. A pity, that. It appeared that Triana was going to have to do most of the work of subverting Lord Kyrtian herself.

  But it was, of course, not to her advantage to all
ow Aelmarkin to know any of this, and she didn't intend to. She would probably let him know that she had the spy; that would be useful without giving away too much.

  When Aelmarkin arrived, what she did intend was that Ael-markin would see a side of her that he would never have expected. All he had ever seen was the temptress, and that was all he was ready for. He probably expected that she would try to use her wiles on him.

  Men were so predictable.

  She had two different reception chambers, for two very different purposes; this one also served as the office from which she ran her own little estate, and as such, it was both totally "like" her and completely unlike any of the faces she presented to the outside world. It was not spare and ascetic by any means; the desk behind which she sat was a work of art, fitted together from massive pieces of hand-carved, petrified wood polished to a mirror-gleam, and fitted around her so that she could keep every bit of work near at hand without having to reach for it. The charcoal-colored, leather-upholstered chair that cradled her was as comfortable as any sybaritic couch, and glided on rails into and out of the niche within the curve of the desk. There was a matching couch across from the desk; it matched superficially, that is, but it had been made so that, although it was extremely comfortable, it was treacherous. Be the occupant ever so tall, whoever sat there would find that his head was lower than hers, and getting up created some awkward moments. For the rest, the chamber exuded a restrained opulence; soft, dark grey carpet with subtle grey-on-grey pattern, silver-grey satin draperies covering the walls, lighter in color than the carpet but with the same pattern. The only color in the room lay in the stone of the desk, which drew the eye like a magnet, away from Triana. Which was the point; it was difficult for a beautiful elven lady to appear intimidating, but the desk managed to overwhelm simply by being.

  Aelmarkin had reached the gates of her estate and been admitted not long ago. He would arrive at any moment, and she was perfectly ready for him.