Elvenblood (14 page)
"Oh, aye!" the human trader laughed, as if Parth had told him a joke. "Oh, aye, an' well-come indeed!"
Chapter 4
SHEYRENA COULD HARDLY believe her luck when, the day after the fete, absolutely nothing happened. She had spent the day in a state of dulled dread, expecting—at the least—to be called into her father's presence and interrogated about just whom she had spoken and danced with, and what they had said. Worse were the fears that Lord Tylar would somehow discover her lack of "conquests," and call her to account for that.
Instead, there was no summons, not even a note. She was, as usual, ignored. With the sole exception of the fact that she was permitted to sleep late, her day passed precisely as any other day. She walked in the garden and tended her birds, had her lessons in music and etiquette, and made her daily call upon her mother in her mother's bower. Only there did she have any reminders that this was not quite an ordinary day. She and Lady Viridina discussed nothing but the gowns the other elven ladies had been wearing—speculating on how they had been made and of what materials, deciding whether or not the particular style would be suited to Rena or the Lady herself. In other bowers, with a collection of elven ladies, there
would
have been other comments, too, of course—comments on how poorly suited the gowns of certain ladies (absent from the current group, of course) had been, either in terms of style or in terms of the wearer's endowments. Lady Viridina did not encourage gossip, however, so none of that entered the discussion in
her
bower.
Nor were there any discussions of which young lords seemed to have paired off with young ladies. That, in Lady Viridina's opinion, was also gossip, and of no one's concern except the parties involved.
The truth of the matter in the bower today was that Lady Viridina discussed the gowns, and her slaves-of-the-wardrobe murmured appropriate comments. Rena simply listened, and not very attentively. Oh, normally she enjoyed the topic as much as anything except riding with Lorryn, but today she had rather not be reminded how wonderful the other ladies looked—not when she had suffered in all ways by comparison. She had thought until last night that she had no pride left to bruise, but that was simply not true. It had hurt to look into the mirror and see a laughingstock. It still hurt this morning.
I
wish there were a way to destroy that horrid gown
, she thought resentfully.
I
don't ever want to see it again
!
Viridina didn't seem to notice her silence, though, which was just as well. As she rattled off details of trains and trimming, it occurred to Rena that her mother was oddly distracted, as if Lady Viridina also had something weighing heavily on her mind, and was trying to disguise the fact with idle chat.
She's probably worried about Lorryn
,
I
suppose. I rather doubt it has anything to do with me
.
After what seemed like half the day, Viridina finally dismissed her daughter, and Rena was free to return to her garden and her books. There, with two of her birds sitting on her shoulders, she carefully worked out the spell that had been used on the birds at the fete, the one that made them fly off to make their droppings, then return. That was the most useful spell she had ever seen, and it was
definitely
going to come in handy here!
She set it on only one of the birds, at first—she didn't want to hurt them by getting the spell wrong, after all—but when it worked perfectly, she quickly made it part of every flying thing in her garden. Now she could pet and play with them to her heart's content, and never have to worry about the results!
One of the prettiest, an especially gentle little thing with bright red feathers and a hooked bill, loved to sit on her shoulder and press his face and body against her neck for hours at a time. She'd been reluctant to let him do that for very long, and especially reluctant to allow him to sit there when she was reading, since she tended to forget where she was—with the result that Visyr would usually do something unfortunate before she noticed, and she would have to run and change her gown before either her mother or her father saw it. There were days when she'd had to change her gown no less than three times! So that afternoon was an occasion of perfect enjoyment for both of them—for Rena could sit in the garden with her book, and Visyr could sit on her shoulder and be petted for as long as he liked. She discovered that his capacity for being petted was a great deal greater than she had ever suspected. He was the perfect tranquilizer, and she ended the day in a calm and cheerful mood.
She woke with the same apprehension as before, though, for her dreams had been filled with images of Lord Tylar and the punishments he was creating for her, for not having caught a husband.
But once again, her fears were all for no cause—nothing happened that was out of the ordinary during the entire day.
The next day, and the day following, were repetitions of the same. Most important, there were
no
expressions of disapproval from Lord Tylar. Rena began to relax, slowly, as she attempted to puzzle out just what was occupying her father. At a guess, the political connections that her father had made at the fete were proving to be so engrossing that he had forgotten his original, intention—that of ensuring she found an advantageous alliance. That would, indeed, be typical for his thinking. Anything having to do with her and her future (or lack of it) would always take a poor second place to Lord Tylar's personal aspirations, and that was precisely how she wanted things at the moment. The more he thought of himself, the less he would think of her.
The only cloud on her cautious happiness was that Lorryn was still recovering from his illness, and had not come to visit her. Normally he would find an excuse to stop by her garden at least once during the day, and more often if he planned to include her in a surreptitious excursion. Indeed, the word from the slaves was that he had not even left his suite since before the fete. There was no hint that his case was more serious than she had been told, only that he had exhausted himself more completely than anyone had initially thought
She would really have been worried sick about him if there had been any indication that something was wrong with him. As it was, she missed him; not only because she truly loved and admired him, but for his conversation. The slaves were hardly up to much clever repartee, and he was the only person besides Myre who didn't treat her as if she had the same mental capacity as a child. Even her mother spoke to her as if she were
always
as dazed and absentminded as she had been over the past few days.
Still, he shouldn't have been sick for this long; attacks had never laid him low for more than a day before. She fretted over him as she walked in her garden, and stared in the direction of his suite. What had he done to himself? Was this why her mother was upset, and covering her concern with false cheer?
She went to bed on the evening of the third day following the fete in a state of anxiety herself, when repeated messages to him brought only the reply that he was a little ill, but would be all right eventually. Eventually? Just how long could "eventually" be? She even forgot most of her worries for herself in worries over her brother.
But the morning of the fourth day brought an end to Her peace of mind, in the form of a message from Lord Tylar.
It arrived with her breakfast, an elegantly written note, folded and inserted beneath her plate—
Lord
Tylar never delivered messages in person if he could avoid it. She picked it up, and unfolded it, expecting the worst.
You will come to Lady Viridina's bower at the hour of the Skylark to discuss a matter of some importance
. That was all it said, but that was enough to completely shatter her illusions of peace.
She stared at the note, her hand shaking only a little, and carefully put it down, her appetite quite gone. Discuss? Oh no, that was hardly what would happen—given that the note was in her father's handwriting and with his personal sigil impressed into the paper. No, Lord Tylar had
orders
for her, and her mother was the one, as bound by his will as any of his slaves, who would deliver them. Having Lady Viridina deliver these orders only proved that they were going to be unpleasant He always had his wife handle domestic orders that were going to bring trouble. He felt it was her job to ensure
his
domestic peace, even if it was
his
orders that were about to destroy that peace.
Her stomach churned and knotted, as she tried to guess just what the "matter of some importance" was. Had he finally noticed that there were no suitors clamoring for her? Had he gotten back reports from some of his underlings that showed she had spent more time with the tame animals than with any male? She would not have put it past him to have set spies on her, or questioned his associates about her movements.
Unreasoning dread blossomed in her heart, an evil flower of darkness and foreboding. Was he going to order a whole new round of lessons for her, designed to mold her into something more desirable than she was—or—
And one of her nightmares of the first night returned to make her "unreasonable" dread only too reasonable.
There was something worse, much worse, that he could do to her—or have done. The nightmares she had been enduring had been about a possibility mat she had not even considered, had not even remembered, until her own evil dreams brought it back to her.
If he was not happy with her, and saw no possibility of voluntary improvement, there was one other step he might take. It was drastic, but he was ruthless enough to take it, if he could find a mage powerful enough to oblige him. She had dismissed the possibility because she could not imagine him ever devoting that
much
of his profit and resources to
her
. But if he was angry enough, economic considerations might vanish before the prospect of having his will thwarted by his ill-mannered, unsatisfactory daughter.
He could have me Changed.
The Change was something only whispered about in the bowers. No maiden of Rena's acquaintance had actually
known
a girl who had been Changed, but everyone had a cousin or a friend who did. If a maiden just was not
satisfactory
to her father—or, more rarely, a wife was not satisfactory to her husband, and the husband could get her father to agree to the Change—there was a remedy. Great elven mages had created beasts like the alicorns in the past, after all, creating them out of common beasts of the fields. And hadn't she herself changed the drab sparrows and pigeons into charming companions? Changing a maiden—making her more beautiful, more graceful—was just a bit more subtle than creating an alicorn.
Especially if one is not terribly worried about damaging her, so long as it doesn't show
. A maiden would never have to gallop across a battlefield, after all, and if, afterwards, she was just a bit delicate, a bit sickly, so long as she could bring forth
one
heir, that was really all that mattered. Once the heir had been produced, another wife could be found—or done without, as the case might be.
A maiden was taken away, so the whispers went, and when she returned, she would no longer be merely attractive, she would be a beauty, a living work of art. She would be incapable of a clumsy movement, of a missung note, of a social mistake. She would always be graceful and gracious. She would never lose her temper, never weep, never complain.
but show the same smiling face of peace and contentment wherever she went, in public or in private, to her peers or to her slaves. She would obey her father's or her husband's every wish, willingly and immediately. She would become the perfect wife, the perfect lady, in every possible way.
The trouble was, the Change worked in the mind as well as the body, and maidens who underwent the Change were rumored to lose some vital spark of themselves. They had no ambitions, no interest outside their own bowers, and no creativity. If given a work to play or a piece of embroidery already designed and ready to sew, they would go about playing the piece or embroidering the design with mechanical perfection. But they could not design a piece of embroidery for themselves, or compose their own music, even if they had been superb artists or musicians before the Change.
Nor was that all. Their pleasures turned to simpler things; they lost interest in anything that was an intellectual challenge. They generally stopped reading or writing, left the household accounts to underlings, often left anything vaguely creative in the hands of their slaves, and saw no reason to leave their own bowers except at the insistence of their husbands. Their lives became centered on three things: their appearance, pleasing their husbands, and childbearing. They became obsessive about jewels and gowns, often changing four and five times in a day, they would throw themselves off a cliff if that would make their lords happy, and they longed for nothing more than to bear as many children as they could, and as quickly.
In short, they were as controlled as the human concubines, and just as compliant. It was no accident that while the Change was worked on a maiden's body, her ruler saw to it that it was worked on her mind as well. Why alter the body only, when with an exercise of magic, discontent, improper ambitions, and inconvenient interests could be wiped away as cleanly as if they had never existed in the first place? One could completely remold a maiden or a wife to suit one's own needs.
How convenient for their lords.
She'd had that nightmare about being Changed, enduring the pain of the Change itself and the horror of feeling her mind, her
self
, drain away, and had done her best to forget the dream and how vivid it had been. Now it came back to her with redoubled clarity, as if it had been, not a dream, but a premonition.
Her hands and heart went cold as ice.
She fought her fear down. No, Lord Tylar wouldn't have her Changed, surely! It was
very
difficult, and very expensive, either in terms of strict recompense or in terms of the demands the mage would later make on the "customer." Only the greatest of mages dared to meddle in such ways, and the greater a mage, the more power and prestige he
already
had. Surely there was nothing Lord Tylar could offer that would tempt one of the High Lords to help him in such an undertaking!