Elvenbane (44 page)

That earned him a wan chuckle and, feeling a little better, he turned his attention back to the trail.

Shana tensed, and snatched up the bow that had been lying beside her, as a chill of fear ran like icy lightning down her spine. She scanned the darkness beyond the range of the firelight, with eyes and mind; there was someone out there, out in the dark, watching them. Someone who hadn’t been there a moment before—

Or who had been cloaking his presence until this moment, which meant magic, the kind of magic only an elven lord or a halfblood could use. Humans could hide their
thoughts
if they had the power, or if they had been collared, but only elven magic could hide someone’s presence. The greatest of the wizards could, in the old days, even conceal the telltale “sounds” of magic use. Elves could do it routinely, but seldom bothered. Which meant the intruder was either an elf, or a wizard more powerful than any Shana knew.

No, wait. Her chill deepened, and her hands closed harder on the bow. The unknown was cloaking a
double
presence. There were two of them out there. One of them moved, and the sharp scent of disturbed, wet leaves came to her nostrils.

:Yes
,: came the halting voice in her mind, before she could barricade it.
:-There are two of us. We have been trying to find you. We need your help, most urgently
.:

The “voice” was uncertain, uneven in tone and strength, as if the “speaker” was not used to communicating this way. Shana’s fear did not lessen, however, and she remained tense; she had never yet come across a case where an elven lord had used a human or halfblood with wizard-powers, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen—there were those suspicions in the old journals after all. Was this, the worst of her fears, about to be shown as the truth?

“Come out here where I can see you,” she said aloud.

:Shana, one of them is
—: Keman began, as the two lurking in the shadows stepped into the light of their fire. The light reflected off dark hair, slightly pointed ears and green eyes—and, features shadowed behind his companion, white-blond hair, sharply pointed ears, angular features, pale alabaster skin and green eyes.

:—
an elven lord
,: Keman concluded lamely.

Well, there was this much; the elven lord didn’t look very lordly at the moment. Wet hair straggled down into his face, obscuring what the shadows didn’t. They both looked very much the worse for wear, rain-soaked, dirty, and weary, with clothing torn by brambles, and faces pale with cold. The expression in the halfblood’s eyes was one Shana might have empathized with: hopeful, and not a little desperate.

:My friend and cousin
,: amended the halfblood defiantly. He stepped forward, placing himself between the young elven lord and Shana. “We came to find help, Valyn and I. He’s saved me so many times I’ve lost count,” the halfblood continued aloud. “He’s not like the others—and right now, he’s in just as much danger as we are. Maybe more.”

A nice story, if it’s true
. Shana leveled her crossbow at his chest; at this range, especially with her own magics backing it, the powerful bow could quite easily send its single bolt through both of them. They both backed up a step, and she leveled an openly hostile gaze on them. “That’s exactly what you’d say if he was using you to find more wizards,” she pointed out, stalling for time while Keman readied himself for a quick change if need arose. “You’ve come out of nowhere, when I
know
I’m being followed by elves, and you tell me that I should help you because you’re in danger. That sounds like a trap to me. Right now I don’t see any reason to believe you. He could easily be controlling you.”

The halfblood’s reaction surprised her; he cursed, and reached up to his own throat, tearing off the collar and throwing it to the ground. “There!” he said angrily. “Does that convince you? Dammit, we’re cold, we’re hungry, we’re tired, we’re in as much danger as you are—and we’re helpless!”

“All of which can be feigned,” she replied coldly. “And he could be controlling you by some means other than a collar. Collars just
happen
to be a convenient vehicle for the coercion- and conditioning-spells.”

The elven lord—Valyn?—stepped out from behind his companion, though his face was still in the shadows. “You seem to know quite a bit about it,” he said mildly. “But Mero says you have much stronger mind-powers than he does. So why don’t you read his thoughts and see if what he is saying is true. Ancestors, for that matter, you can read mine, and welcome!”

That rather surprised her. Shana looked over at Keman, who shrugged. “I can watch them, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said quietly. “They won’t be able to get past me, I don’t care how good they are.”

Shana privately doubted that he could stop them, but she kept her doubts to herself. He’d been among elves for months, and he’d seen some of what they could do. If Keman thought he could counter the work of a powerful elven mage, then perhaps he could.

And perhaps he couldn’t. There really was no telling. But right now the situation was at a stalemate; they couldn’t trust these strangers, but neither could they drive them away.

She nodded reluctantly. “All right,” she said, lowering her bow. And, to Keman, :
I hope I know what I’m doing, here. And I hope you weren’t boasting
.:

She closed her eyes…

A moment later she opened them, grinning like a fool.

“Get in here and get warm,” she told them, as first Mero, then his cousin, relaxed visibly. “We have a lot to talk about.”

Mero grinned uncertainly back, and moved aside to let his cousin get by him. Valyn raked his sodden hair out of his eyes, and smiled at her, and only then did she really see him.

She flushed, and stared at him, then quickly looked away from him. Rain-soaked, filthy, and worn as he was, she had never seen a more incredibly handsome being in her life…

And she hadn’t the foggiest idea what to do about it.

WE KNEW THE whereabouts of the elves by the aura, the sound of power wherever they were, and the location of their human slaves by the peculiar thought-void caused by the collars.

That quote came directly from Kalamadea’s journal.

No matter where they were, nor how expert and powerful, they could not conceal those twin clues.

Shana’d had plenty of chances to test those journal entries over the past couple of days. The dragon-wizard had been correct. No matter what shielding the elven lords placed on themselves, that faint hum of magic, detectable only by one who herself was a mage, persisted, like the hum of a beehive in the distance.

She stared, not at the flames of their little fire, but through them, letting her mage-senses seek back along the territory they had already crossed.

One party—two—

Fire and Rain.
Three
hunting parties behind them! What kind of hornet’s nest had she stirred up?

Or maybe all this pursuit had nothing to do with the rescue of the children, and everything to do with their current company.

You’d think I’d be over this by now
, Shana thought fretfully, doing her best
not
to stare at the chiseled perfection of Valyn’s face, and completely unable to stop herself. It had been days since Valyn joined them. Weeks, even. And he still made her feel… funny. She didn’t understand it. And she didn’t like it. Except that she
did
like it.
Fire and Rain, I’m so confused
!

It wasn’t just that Valyn was so infernally gorgeous. Shana had seen plenty of handsome elves; actually,
all
elves were handsome enough to make most humans envious. She knew any number of halfbloods, though, who were just as good-looking as an eleven lord. Zed, for one. Most of the halfbloods were fascinating enough to turn anyone’s head…

In fact, since being captured, she had encountered no lack of attractive young men. Not one of them had affected her in the least.

So why did Valyn make her so… nervous?

Every time she looked at him, she felt self-conscious and oddly shy. Every time he looked at her, she knew he was doing so; she felt his eyes on her as surely as if they were tiny twin suns shining on her. She wanted, desperately, to please him, to make him proud of her. And it had been this way since that first night around their shared campfire.

When he watched her, she alternately flushed and chilled; when he spoke to her, she lost track of what she had been saying. Compared to him, his cousin Mero was little more than the shadow he was named for. She watched him at every opportunity by day, and dreamed of him at night.

The farther they went into the wilderness, the stronger her feelings became—and yet she was mortally afraid to
tell
him how she felt about him, as if telling him would unmake all the dreams she spun every night.

Maybe that was it. While he stayed aloof, she could dream as much as she wanted to. If she told him how she felt, he would have to respond in some way—and his response would mean that, one way or another, everything would change between them.

She didn’t even know how to deal with what they had now… or even whether they had anything at all.

She brooded on his flawless profile across the camp-fire from her, as he talked with Keman and his cousin. His speech, like everything else about him, was gentle and courteous; his speaking voice was as musical as many humans’ singing voices.

If she told him, he was either going to laugh at her, or else he was going to take her seriously. Either way, the dreams would be gone. She wanted to keep dreaming a while, to imagine all the possibilities between them…

What she
didn’t
want to have to deal with was reality, after all, how likely was it that a gently reared elven lord would find
her
attractive? Surely what he really wanted was a full-elven lady, like the ones she had spied upon. Surely it was not autumn-leaf hair he dreamed of, but silk and sunlight. Her manners alone must be enough to drive him away in less desperate circumstances; she had none to speak of. She was rough and plain-spoken; tough enough to have crossed the desert on her own. A gentle elven maiden would likely have fainted away at the mere thought of such a trek—and an elven lady never spoke plainly about anything.

She should know; she’d been watching them through their own eyes long enough. They played games of innuendo and deception that differed from their lords’ only in the amount of power involved.

But then again, why shouldn’t he be attracted to her for her very differences? Might he not be weary of coy elven maidens, with their feigned innocence? Why shouldn’t he be fascinated by her hardihood and her adventurousness? And he could very well be tired of elven women’s perpetual ice-statue perfection. Those long looks he kept bestowing on her could easily be
longing
looks.

Was this love? All she had to go on was what she had occasionally read in the archives of the Citadel, or the books from which she and Keman had learned elven tongue. The latter had not spoken much of “love”—that emotion played very little part in elven matings. It was a rare thing when elves admitted to love, and rarer still when they could act on it. The complexities of elven politics usually made love impossible.

And as for the archives—well, there had been romances and ballads galore in the archives, and for the most part she had ignored them all in favor of the histories. She had wanted fact, not fantasy; the means to power, not distraction.

Now she regretted not reading a few of them, at least. She could only watch Valyn as covertly as she could manage, and wonder, and daydream.

Not that she didn’t have plenty to occupy her attention; Lord Cheynar and his cohorts were still out hunting for them—and when she and Keman weren’t laying false trails and working themselves deeper and deeper into the wilderlands, she was teaching Shadow the use of some of his powers. Trying to teach him, anyway. Valyn was such a distraction—and Shadow, although he was nice enough, seemed to resent her admiration of his cousin.

Maybe he was just jealous. But she didn’t know; he wanted her to teach him, but now there were times when he acted as if he didn’t entirely believe what she told him.

Whatever the reason, every time she tried to show him something, he’d watch her as if he suspected her of hiding something from him. Then he’d bristle and get pathetically defensive when she tried to correct him. While she usually felt sorry for him because it wasn’t easy to live in the background of someone as spectacular as Valyn, she was occasionally getting tired of his attitude, and increasingly distressed at the way things seemed to be bothering him.

She wished, very much, that he’d make up his mind about what he wanted. She felt uneasy when he kept watching her out from under that thatch of unruly dark hair. She was very tired of the way he kept watching her like a nervous hawk every time she said something nice to Valyn, or glanced at the elven lord out of the corner of her eye.

This association had started out well enough, but it had deteriorated rapidly. Between Valyn’s aloofness, Shadow’s nerves, the rotten rainy weather, and the constant presence of pursuit, she was on the verge of telling them both to go fend for themselves and leave her and Keman alone.

Except that would mean that she would likely never see Valyn again. Even if he survived the pursuit, there was nowhere he could go. He certainly couldn’t try to gain entrance to the Citadel. Even if he could find it, he’d never get in; they’d probably kill him on sight.

There was just no answer, she thought, brooding into the flames of the fire. No answer at all,

Valyn stared into the glowing coals at the heart of the fire—the first they’d had in the past three days. Either there hadn’t been any way to shelter the thing from sight, or there hadn’t been enough dry fuel to keep it going without sending up a telltale stream of smoke. He could have used magic to keep them all warm, of course, but that would have been another kind of telltale, as certain to some “eyes” as lighting a beacon. It was better to shiver than bring Lord Cheynar down on them.

But tonight they’d found a tumble of rocks that they could roof over with pine boughs, and nearby, a fallen tree with some dry wood sheltered under it, enough to start the fire and keep it going until after sunset. And once it was dark, the plume of smoke rising from the fire when they started mixing green wood with dry wouldn’t matter.

A fire had meant a hot supper of cooked meat instead of the roots and raw fish they’d had for the past three evenings. That should have made them all well-content, but it didn’t. All four of them huddled around the pocket of light, as if they were hungry for its warmth—and yet, they strained away from each other, trying too hard not to touch each other.

There were invisible currents tugging them this way and that, currents of emotion that were likely to split them apart before they even had much of a chance to see how well they could work together. For instance: Valyn knew very well how Shana felt about him. How could he not? Even without the ability to read minds, her infatuation was unmistakable. It wasn’t the first time he had been the object of some young girl’s desires, and not always just for the prestige of being taken to his bed. More than one concubine truly, sincerely, loved him—or thought she did. Lusted after him, at least. Certainly yearned after him.

But this particular infatuation was dangerous. Shana was a lovely wench, in her own way; a bit fiery for
his
taste, but very much the kind of young woman Dyran would have snatched up in a trice and installed in the harem—

Which was
exactly
the problem. Dyran
had
snatched up a woman very like her. Her mother, Serina. Valyn didn’t remember Serina or the row her flight had caused in the harem, but he had certainly heard about it as he was growing up. She was something of a legend, enough so that her story had intrigued him, though he could never learn
why
she had fled. Then, from Mero’s mother, he had learned the truth; she had been carrying a halfblood child like Mero, and her condition had been betrayed to Dyran. There had been orders out to kill her, but she had learned of them in time to escape. Everyone assumed she had perished in the desert.

From what Shana and Keman had told them, and from what he knew about Serina Daeth, he had no doubt whatsoever who Shana’s mother must have been. In the past sixteen or seventeen years there had only been
one
escaped, pregnant concubine—and add to that fact that only someone of Serina Daeth’s astonishing beauty could have produced a daughter like Shana—and the final fact of the infant Shana’s birth and subsequent rescue by the dragon—there was only one conclusion he could make. Shana was his half-sister. Which meant that even if he’d been enamored of her, she was strictly out-of-bounds. And not even a dragon would make him think any other way.

Dragons. No, not even Keman could persuade him. Not that Keman would want to, he didn’t think—but then who knew how a dragon reasoned?

Valyn certainly didn’t, not even after having spent many days with one. He never would have known Keman wasn’t another halfblood, if Shana and her “foster brother” hadn’t decided to tell both of them. He
had
been getting a bit suspicious though, because of the way that Keman would vanish just at sunset, and return just afterwards. He’d tried to find a way to follow, but Keman always lost him. Then Shana had caught him following—and that was when they had decided to
show
him what was going on, so that Keman could go off to kill and feed without having to sneak away.

That had given him something of a turn, to see one of the legended dragons with his own eyes.

They told him before Keman made the shift that Shana’s foster mother had been a dragon; and he’d thought, at first, that Shana and her foster brother were somehow trying to make him look like a fool. But then Keman had proved that there were dragons, after all, in the most final way possible.

When Keman had first shifted shape for them, Valyn had been so shocked, so completely taken by surprise, that he was tempted to conclude that either he had fallen ill and was suffering with a fever, or Shana and Keman were superb illusionists. But he was as healthy as he had ever been—and Keman was quite solid and real to the touch, the proof that he was not any kind of illusion.

So now Valyn knew why Keman and Shana could not return to the wizards’ hiding place—at least not until the dragon could learn to conceal those parts of his thoughts that would reveal what he truly was. Which put him on something of the same footing with them, since there was no way he could go there unless and until he learned to mimic wizard-powers and found a way to build and maintain an illusion of being halfblood.

And the true halfbloods were devoted to their “brothers.” Shadow wouldn’t leave him; Shana wouldn’t leave Keman.

Which left them all out here in the wilderness—with Keman and Shana having a distinct advantage over himself and Mero. They knew how to live, even prosper, out here. He and Mero were, if not totally helpless, certainly at an extreme handicap. When he and Mero had been out hunting or camping, it had been in the relatively tame woods of the estate, with a dozen slaves to tend to anything they needed, and most of the comforts of being at home available to them. The chances of being able to survive out here on their own were not very good.

If they had to leave Shana and Keman, he and Shadow might as well just stand around and wait for one of those things to come carry them away. She had been the one finding most of the food, especially the roots and things. And even though she’d been teaching Shadow how to use his power to track some of the stranger beasts that hunted these woods, Valyn didn’t think his cousin was quite experienced enough at it yet. He had missed the last one-horn, and had never even known that the tree-lurker was anywhere around.

The fire popped and crackled; he threw another log onto it, and watched as the bark burst into flame.