LITMIR.BIZ

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      The girl uttered a strangled yip as Alara stood, and backed away. Alara gathered her rags around her as if they were the silken robes she had lately worn, and stared straight at the girl, her expression stern and forbidding. Since she looked blind, this unnerved the girl even more. ‘There will come a child,’ Alara whispered. ‘One born of human mother, but fathered by the demons, possessed of magic more powerful than the elven lords! By this shall you know the child, that it shall read the very thoughts upon the wind, travel upon the wings of demons, and master all the magics of the masters ere it can stand alone! The child shall resemble a human, yet its eyes will be those of the demons; of the very green of the elf-stones. The child shall be hunted before its birth, yet shall escape the hunt. The child shall be sold, and yet never bought. The child shall win all, yet lose all.’

      Standard prophetic double-talk, she thought to herself. If the slaves had any belongings of their own, she could make a fortune in preaching. You could tell them anything as long as it sounded impressive and mysterious, and they’d believe it.

      ‘And in the end,’ she concluded, her voice rising, ‘the child shall rise up against the masters and cast them into the lowest hell, there to make of them slaves to the demons of hell!’

      The girl stepped an involuntary pace forward, fascinated in spite of herself. Her eyes were bright with mingled fear and excitement, and her curly hair damp with nervous sweat. Alara looked straight into her eyes, and thrust a bony finger at her.

      ‘Hear the words of the Prophecy!’ she shrieked, as the girl jumped back. ‘Hear them and heed them!’

      ‘Jena! What’s going on down there?’ a deep female voice scolded from the top of the staircase.

      Young Jena jumped again, and went pale and frightened. ‘N-nothing!’ she called back.

      ‘Then who the hell are you talking to?’

      ‘I – uh –’ The girl looked at Alara in confusion; Alara remained silent and statue-still.

      ‘Get your rump up here now, girl!’

      Jena looked helplessly at Alara, and scampered up the stairs as fast as her legs could carry her.

      But when she came back down, trembling with fear, the kitchen overseer behind her, there was no sign of a mysterious old woman. In fact, there was no sign of anyone at all.

      But there was one extra wine cask, if anyone had bothered to count …

      And shortly thereafter, twenty or thirty witnesses, including two elven overseers, saw a Great Kite launch itself from the roof of the manor. It rose into a bloody sunset, wings blotting out the sun itself, screaming doom down upon the Clan of V’Larn.

      That was fun, Alara decided, even if the rest of the Lair would have had a fit about the shaman risking herself like that.

      The elven lords suppressed the Prophecy and those who spread it whenever they could – but the best way to spread something is to try to outlaw it, as they found to their frustration. It was hard to do anything about it when it was being spread by old men and women who vanished into thin air – and the more they punished those who had listened to the forbidden words, the more others wanted to hear what was so dangerous.

      It was just one more way to make the lives of elvenkind a little more uncomfortable. The elves hated and feared the Prophecy, not the least of which because there was a germ of truth in it.

      It was not commonly known, but elves and humans were cross-fertile. The offspring were relatively rare, even when contraceptive measures were not being taken, but there had been halfblood children in the past. And those children, like many hybrids, had gifts that surpassed those of their parents.

      That was why the elves controlled the fertility of their slaves through contraceptive measures in the very food they ate. Breeding was permitted only under the eyes of the overseers.

      Humans had magic of the mind; speaking mind-to-mind across vast distances, reading the thoughts of others, seeing things at a far distance, or in the past or future, or manipulating and moving things without the use of their hands. Elves had magic as the dragons understood the concept, for dragons had the magic of shape-shifting and a few other, minor abilities. Those who became shamans tended to have the ability to read thoughts, but not to the extent that talented humans or halfbloods could.

      But the children of mixed blood had both human and elven magics, and the human mental gifts tended to amplify their abilities as magicians.

      ‘Wizards,’ the elves called the halfbloods, and attempted to use them in their own never-ending feuds with each other. But the wizards were not helpless creatures like the human slaves, and used their own magic to win free of their masters.

      Right then the elven lords should have welcomed the wizards into their own ranks, Alara thought cynically. That’s what I’d have done. There’s nothing like a life of luxury to make thoughts of revolution melt away like snow in the sun.

      But the elves didn’t; instead, they panicked, and tried to destroy their halfblooded offspring.

      So the Wizard War began, with the wizards ranged on one side, and the elven lords and their slave armies on the other.

      The dragons entered the world before the Wizard War and the defeat and destruction of the wizards, but for the most part were too busy with their own establishment to pay much attention to the goings-on across the desert. Later, they became aware of at least some of what had happened through faulty, faltering, human word-of-mouth and through elven history, and through the memory of those few of the Kin who did pay attention to the elves’ troubles – most notably, Father Dragon.

      As a result of that War, halfbreeds were hated and feared, and if by accident a human woman were bearing an elven lord’s child, she and the child would be put to death as soon as it was known.

      Alara wasn’t sure where the Prophecy came from, if it had been created by the Kin or was something one of the Kin picked up and decided to use, but it certainly kept the elves nervous …

      And by now, between the disappearance of his ‘bride,’ the re-emergence of the Prophecy among his slaves, and the Great Kite appearing as an omen of disaster, Lord Rathekrel was probably paralyzed with rage. That had been several months ago, long enough for word to spread among the other elven lords and give them time to complete plans of their own for him. And meanwhile, a dozen of the other power brokers were undoubtedly jockeying for position, hoping he’d fall.

      It was about time for a Council session. If he was thrown out of his Council seat for incompetence, that would upset the balance of power. The elves would all be too busy trying to find a compromise candidate to pay any attention to what went on out on the borders, which should make it safer to hunt this way for a while, and those rumors that Rathekrel had seen dragons were going to be completely discredited –

      Which was what she would tell the others if they ever found out what she was doing. But she would have done it all anyway. Elves deserved to have trouble visited on them, the hateful creatures.

      Still, none of this had anything to do with the meditation she was supposed to be doing. In fact, she’d actually been distracted enough that she had shifted form a little, allowing her tail to move a claw-length. She gave herself a mental shake, and tried to settle down again.

      But something had entered the immediate vicinity, something that was not a dragon. She felt its – her – presence.

      She abandoned all thought of mischief, and all pretense at meditation, as a human female staggered from behind the wall and fell against her side.

      Alara shifted back quickly, all but a very thin veneer of her surface. She still looked like a rock, but now she had eyes and ears, and she employed both cautiously.

      The woman, heavily pregnant, moaned and got to her hands and knees, crawling towards the water. This was not the sort of desert traveler Alara would have expected; the woman was young, unscarred, burned red and blistered by the sun,

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