Elvenborn (43 page)

It was just a good thing that Caellach regarded the full hu-

mans with so much disdain, though. She wouldn't have put it past him to use the weapon that she discarded as immoral.

For that matter, was it immoral to be tinkering with the minds of the two Elvenlords?

Probably. But they were already mad. We 'd either have to kill them or fix them in such a way that they can't either betray us or the Iron People. She was caught between two equally dis¬tasteful solutions—but had no real choice, since Mero and Rena had already meddled with the situation past mending.

Both Elvenlords lay on pallets in the middle of a small, dis¬used room, with their human and halfblooded—"physicians"— clustered around them. "Well, it shouldn't be too difficult for ten or twenty of us together to concoct whatever memories of being held you want us to," Narshy told Shana with such supreme self-confidence that Shana felt a kind of grudging ad¬miration. Whether he was right or wrong here, it would be nice to be able to feel, just once, that same sort of self-confidence. "With that many of us working at once, we can just—engrave the new memories in place within a few days. So, where do you want these two to have been held?"

"Umm—" she hadn't thought that far, to tell the truth, but if she admitted that, would she lose authority in their eyes? They were all looking at her as if they expected her to present them with everything they needed, ready to go. "What about the old Citadel?" she suggested, unable to think of anything more clever on such non-existent notice. "That way we won't have to make anything up—wouldn't real memories be better than ones we concocted?"

"But the Elvenlords know about the old Citadel," someone protested. "Wouldn't they have found these two?"

Before Shana could answer that, someone else did it for her, with glee in their voice. "No! Because we can use our memo¬ries of the old Citadel, but we don't have to have them think that the place they were kept was the old Citadel. If we don't leave these two where the old Citadel actually is, whoever finds them will think that their prison was somewhere near where they were found! Let the Elvenlords think that there's another hidden Citadel somewhere."

"What about the forest on the edge of Lord Cheynar's es¬tate?" Lorryn suggested, from the rear of the group. "It's got a bad reputation anyway. Ancestors only know what's in there; plenty of hunters have gone in and never come out again. Chey-nar won't even send his own men in there after escaped slaves anymore."

"That's true enough," Shana said thoughtfully. "I remember that Mero told me about some spooky sort of invisible thing that got his horse in there and nearly got him, when he and Va-lyn were escaping." She couldn't help it; she caught herself smiling grimly. There were plenty of things in those hills that were more than a match for Elvenlords.

"Good enough," Narshy said, taking the decision as made. "That's what we'll do—the lot of you that lived in the old Citadel, let's pry some of those memories out of your skulls and get them shared around so we can stuff these two full of them."

Shana was pleased and amazed at the way he managed to take control of the little group and herd them off to a corner where they could work undisturbed. With a sense of relief that was quite palpable, she realized that this time, for once, some¬one else was going to take care of a problem.

Unbelievable. "Where did you find him?" she asked Lorryn. "He acts as if he's been in charge of people, mages even, before this—"

"He has been—that's why I asked him to take charge of this group of yours," Lorryn replied, then suddenly looked anxious. "You don't mind—I hope—here I've gone and usurped your au¬thority and now so has Narshy. Please tell me you aren't upset!"

"Mind? I should think not!" She shook her head and smiled, tiredly. "I don't know how you just do this, find the right people and get them to take over this or that job—I can't seem to find the right way to get people to think for themselves—or find the ones that can take the initiative on their own." She bit her lip as the all-too-familiar frustration arose.

"Maybe it's because you can't believe that you don't have to do everything," Lorryn said gently. "That's all I do; I find the people who are good at something, I ask them to do the job—

and I believe that they can. Then I get out of the way and let them do it, in their own way, at their own pace."

There was no graceful way to reply to that, and she just sat down on a stone ledge, feeling totally inadequate and utterly deflated. "I never wanted to be a leader," she said, forlornly. "If anybody had asked me, I could have had the chance to say no."

"I know." He sat down beside her. "I'd rather you were free to do what you're good at; planning, thinking, coming up with solutions. You're all bogged down with trying to get people to see that your solutions are sensible—or to come up with better ones. You spend half your time trying to convince people, and the other half trying to herd them into working on the solution rather than sitting around and arguing about it. I'd rather you -didn't have to worry about all that."

"So would I." Suddenly she felt like weeping, and swallowed the lump in her throat, blinking rapidly. "But—"

He interrupted her. "Would you trust me to take what you aren't good at off your plate?" he asked, looking earnestly into her eyes. "I'm beginning to think that I am a leader, that it's in my nature—people listen to me, and I'm good at getting them to cooperate. But would you trust me to do what I'm good at so that you can do what you're good at?"

It took her a moment to work out what he was getting at, and he probably wasn't entirely certain of it himself. Would she put him in the position that Caellach Gwain wanted so badly, trust him to carry out what she could see were the right plans and de¬cisions for her? Shouldn't she have someone older, someone from the original Wizards of the Citadel?

But neither Denelor nor Parth Agon—who should have been the leaders, and who Shana had expected would act as the leaders—seemed to be up to the job. Instead they had been del¬egating more and more authority to her, regardless of how she felt about it. Denelor never had cared to stir himself more than he had to, after all—she already knew that his besetting sin was sloth—and Parth—

Parth, she suddenly realized, was old. How old, she didn't actually know, not in years—but once they had gotten settled here and it seemed that she and her young wizards had the situ-

ation well in hand, he'd started taking a back seat, letting her fight with Caellach and his cronies, waiting for her to make the decisions. From vague hints over the years, she realized that he must be at least a century old, and perhaps more.

He's too old and tired to lead anymore, especially now that the Wizards are doing things and not just hiding. He doesn 't want the leadership position either. It's too much for him now.

Maybe that was the case with Denelor, too.

But could she hand over that much authority to Lorryn? It would make her terribly vulnerable.

As vulnerable as if he truly is my lover, the way everyone seems to think he is—and this is the sort of thing they'd expect me to do, start making him my—my—ruling consort. This will only make them more certain that we're lovers even though we 're not—even though I—

She flushed as that thought came, unbidden, and she must have forgotten to shield it, for suddenly he flushed, too. "I can't help what other people think," he said, defensively. "I can't help it that we—that I—"

She flushed again, fumbled for words, and couldn't find any.

"This isn't a very nice position for you," he said at last. "Even my own sister thinks we're—you know. No matter what we do, people are going to make up their own minds about your personal life and there's nothing you can say or do that will change what they think. But that doesn't make things easy for you, when there's nothing going on between us."

"Nor for you," she managed. "I mean, here I've been dump¬ing all these things on you, and people are making all these as¬sumptions, and you aren't even getting—" Now her face reddened so it felt as if she were inches from a fire.

"Assumptions! I don't mind, but I'm not in the same position that you are. It's got to be intolerable for you!" he exclaimed. "I—Shana—I wish—"

Suddenly, everything fell beautifully into place, as if the broken shards of a vase flew back together again before her eyes. She knew what he wished; he didn't need to say it, he was projecting it so forcefully that he was almost shouting the words in her head. He wanted those assumptions to be true, but

he had been afraid that if he tried to push himself onto her, she would react by sending him away. He—he loved her. He really did! And—

Fire and Rain! I feel the same way!

Lorryn wasn't just a supportive and clever friend anymore. It wasn't just his friendship she needed and wanted. How long had she been feeling this about him? When did she stop feeling mere attraction, just enjoying his company, and suddenly start needing his presence the way she needed to breathe?

"I didn't—I don't want to force you into anything," he was saying, a little wildly. "I knew how you'd felt about Valyn and I didn't want you to think I thought I could replace him! I wanted us to be friends, really good friends, and I wanted it to be that we could depend on each other, and then after a while, when things started to get calmed down, and we had the leisure to think about ourselves we could—I mean I know that—I don't know—"

"Oh, hush," she said, suddenly full of a half-mad joy, and kissed him, putting everything she felt behind it just so she could get it all past the wild tide of his feelings.

:oh: she heard in her mind.

And then, for some timeless time, there was no room in ei¬ther of their minds for words at all. Finally, for that one mo¬ment, no matter what would come after, everything was perfectly, completely, right. And she knew that she could trust Lorryn more than she could even trust herself.

"This isn't exactly the choicest spot—" he said, finally, into her hair. "We're rather out in public, not to mention our audi¬ence."

"I suppose they could wake up." Shana sighed and reluc¬tantly broke the embrace.

She smoothed down her hair, self-consciously. He brushed a strand or two out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear for her. "Have you any time to spare?" he asked wistfully.

No—there's this, and the forges, and the slave-collars, and the defenses and—

"I'll make some," she replied.

The irony of the situation was that the only people affected by this sea-change in their relationship were Lorryn and Shana themselves. But oh, the difference for them!

No one seemed to have noticed that Lorryn's quarters had been stripped and converted into a storage area. Spiteful com¬ments from Caellach Gwain as reported by Shana's sharp-eared observers among the children were in no wise changed. And yet—the difference to her!

But the world outside their chamber was not going to go away.

A plan—a large and complicated plan to safeguard the Citadel forever—was beginning to take shape between the two of them. When news came from Keman that Lord Kyrtian had either given or been ordered to give the command of the army to someone else while the Council debated its future, the need for that plan took on a new sense of urgency.

The old Citadel had defenses that this one didn't; it was time to put them in place. Alara and Kalamadea were the chief ar¬chitects of the Citadel, and it was time to consult with them.

She and Lorryn, Alara and Father Dragon sat together over a three-dimensional "map" of the Citadel, sculpted in removable layers, trying to plan what next needed to be molded out of the rocks of their mountain. One grim consideration—escape tun¬nels. Just in case the Great Lords decided to send the formida¬ble Lord Kyrtian after them. Another, a duplicate of the Citadel far enough away to flee to, but near enough that an evacuation could take place by means of the transportation spell. There were enough Wizards able to use it now that the entire popula¬tion could be evacuated within hours, and the advantage of the spell was that there would be no tracks to trace them by.

The existence of this duplicate—which was near enough to Zed's iron-mines to provide extra protection, but at this point hardly more than a few chambers molded out of the rock by some of the youngest dragons—was for now a closely-kept se¬cret. Even from the dragons working on it. Alara had told them it was nothing more than a new set of lairs.

Which we also need, Shana thought, wondering just how

thin their resources could be stretched before things started snapping.

"The prisoners—how goes the memory-making?" Father Dragon asked. He and Alara were in halfblood form at the mo¬ment, or they would never have fit into the map-chamber. "I do not wish to alarm you unduly, but the sooner we can drop those two where they can be found, the better."

"Narshy's sorted out who's the best at planting the new memories, and he's got them stuffed with about a year's worth," Shana replied, tracing a possible exit tunnel from the lowest storage chamber onto the model with a wax pencil. "We de¬cided to make the memories confused and foggy, as if they'd been kept drugged."

"We nominated Caellach as the Chief Wizard of this imagi¬nary lot," Lorryn put in, getting a grin from Father Dragon and a head shake from Alara. "We had to have somebody, and at least he's memorable."

"Narshy says we should be able to plant them in a few days. He took the real memories of being captured, put new faces on the people doing the capture, then took it from there." Shana brooded over the model. "He's using as much of their real memories as he can, just changing the faces to Wizards, the tents to rock walls—and eliminating the iron collars. He's mak¬ing those into something like slave-collars, so that the Elven-lords will think that this new lot of concocted Wizards are actually better at using elven magic than the Elvenlords them¬selves are."

"A good touch," Father Dragon Said, admiringly.