LITMIR.BIZ

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Alinor. A significant touch of his hand on her arm, a few carefully chosen words – both, as if Serina were not present.

      White with suppressed emotion, she pretended not to be there; pretended she was part of the furnishings. Certainly Lady Alinor took no notice of her.

      The Lady stared at Dyran as if she could not believe what she had heard – then burst into mocking laughter.

      ‘You?’ she crowed. ‘You? I’d sooner bed a viper, my lord. My chances of survival would be much higher!’

      She shook off his hand and swept out of the arena, head high, her posture saying that she knew he would not dare to challenge her. If he did, he would have to say why – and being rejected by a lady was not valid grounds for a challenge.

      Dyran went as white as Serina; he stood like one of the silent pillars supporting the roof, and Serina read a rage so great in his eyes that she did not even breathe. If he remembered she was there – he would kill her.

      Finally he moved. He swept out of the arena in the opposite direction that Lady Alinor had taken, heading for the slave pens.

      Serina fled for the safety of her room and hid there, shivering in the darkness and praying he had forgotten her. After a long while, she heard muffled screams of agony from Dyran’s suite.

      He’s forgotten me, she thought, incoherent with relief and joy. He’s forgotten me. I’m safe …

      If I dared, I would shift and fly off, Alara thought in disgust. The last scene replayed in Serina’s memory had left the dragon limp and sick.

      The duel was bad enough. The Kin had no idea that this was the kind of thing that went on in these duels. The sheer brutality of two thinking beings battering each other until one finally dropped over dead – moments before the other also succumbed – was something Serina took for granted. It was that, as much as the duel itself, that made Alara ill. How could she – she didn’t feel anything at all for those two men, she basically just reacted to the blood and injuries. She would have been just as nauseated seeing someone gut a chicken. Probably more. Those were her own kind, and she watched them slaughter each other to settle someone else’s quarrel without a second thought!

      But then, her reaction when Dyran chose some poor, hapless victim to torture – to feel joy that the victim was someone else –

      The dragon forced herself to calm down, closing her mind to the human’s for a moment, telling herself that it didn’t really matter. These weren’t the Kin; they were Outsiders. It shouldn’t matter what they did to each other or what was done to them.

      Yet she was utterly disgusted by the way the woman had let herself be manipulated, geas or not. The human was intelligent, she saw what was happening, and Alara guessed that she had come very close to breaking her own geas a time or two. Yet nothing of what she saw mattered to her; only her own well-being, her luxurious life. Perhaps at one time she would have felt something – but that time had vanished with her childhood.

      Even freedom didn’t matter to her. Only pleasure.

      I really should just abandon her here to die, Alara thought, feeling as if she had bitten into something rotten. She didn’t owe the woman anything. She wasn’t of the Kin. She wasn’t even worth saving. Alara could almost agree with the elvenkind about these humans, how base they were, how much they really deserved to be slaves. She could at least agree with Dyran’s faction, anyway.

      Alara had often discussed politics in her guise as a low-ranking elven lord, or had them discussed in her presence as a human slave. Having served as an elven page for several Council sessions, and eavesdropped in many ways and many forms on others, Alara knew considerably more about elven politics than Serina had ever learned, especially where the treatment of humans was concerned. Oddly enough, for all his cruelty, Dyran was one of the better masters. The Council faction he headed held that humans were something – slightly – more than brute beasts. He allowed his human slaves to rise as high as overseer, as he had Serina’s father. He obviously believed what his party used as their platform: that one could despise, or even pity one’s human slaves, but that there was potential there to be exploited. So long as human greed and elven magic held, humans could be allowed a bit of freedom on their leashes, and permitted to make decisions on their own. Such freedom was profitable to the master, after all – it meant that he needed fewer elven subordinates, whose loyalty might be in question, and whose interests were undeniably their own. The humans owed everything to their lords; the elves might well decide to seek greener pastures. Humans were simple in their greed; elven emotions were more complex and harder to manipulate, even for a master like Dyran.

      From what Alara had gleaned, Dyran’s faction was slightly in the minority. The majority of the Council were of the other party; the party that felt that the humans were dangerous, near-rabid creatures, unpredictable and uncontrollable. That every human should be kept under guard, with the strictest kind of supervision; coerced into their duties, with that coercion aided by magic whenever possible. And that those humans that showed any signs of independent thought must be destroyed before they contaminated the rest.

      Predictably enough, Dyran’s faction contained most of the younger elves, who looked upon the survivors of the Wizard War as reactionary old fools, frightened by an uprising that could never recur into watching their very shadows.

      But Dyran knew something that Alara was fairly certain he had not told the others, who had been born after the Wizard War. She knew he knew this little fact, because he himself had brought up the subject, more than once, in Council.

      Human magic was still cropping up in the race. And the elves had no idea how or why.

      Most of the younger elven lords thought that human magic had vanished after the last of the halfbreeds had been killed and the human ‘mages’ had been identified and destroyed. That simply wasn’t true, as this woman Serina proved so clearly. Though untrained, she had been strong enough to trap Alara’s mind with her own. Granted, that was largely because of the strength of her fear and hatred, since this ‘natural magic’ was fueled by the power of emotion. Still, Alara was a shaman of the Kin, and it took a powerful force to trap and hold her for even an instant.

      The elves had been trying to breed the ‘mind-magic’ out of their humans for centuries, yet the ability kept showing up, over and over again. No matter how carefully they studied their slaves’ pedigrees, no matter how many children they destroyed as soon as the ability manifested, the powers kept recurring.

      Some children were hidden, of course, kept out of the way of overseers until they learned to conceal their gift – and once collared, of course, the situation was moot. Another problem: despite careful pairing, some supposed ‘fathers’ were not the real sires of ‘their’ children. Human fertility had baffled the elves since they had taken this world for their own; and human inheritance baffled them still further. Elven magic was inherited in simple ways; two strong mages produced powerful children, a strong mage mated to a weaker produced something in between, and two weak mages (like Goris, Dorion, or Goris’s unfortunate daughter) produced weak mages. Never did a mating produce a stronger mage than the strongest of the pairing. Never did a strong pair produce a weak child, only to have the power reappear in the next generation. Power simply could not be passed that way.

      But that sort of inheritance pattern occurred all the time in humans, and the elves were utterly bewildered by it.

      So the elf-stone-studded collars always carried two stones, as Serina’s had (and apparently sometimes a third to make sure the human wanted to wear it) – and one of those stones nullified human mind-magic if kept in physical contact with the human. Every human slave wore one from the time he or she was taken from the parents; they were fitted with collars as soon as they were placed in training, from the simple ‘This is a hoe’ that began for the dullest of the slaves at age six or eight, to the complicated training of the concubines and fighters. The simplest were made of leather with a metal clasp, with the owner’s brand burned into the leather and the stones embedded in the clasp itself; those were the collars Alara

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