Elvenblood (31 page)

Rena took the strip away
from
him, before he'd even managed to worry a bit off. Before he could object, she'd handed it back. "Try that now," she suggested.

He did—and to his surprise, it was tender. It still
tasted
like unflavored dried meat, but now one could eat it without getting sore jaws.

"I didn't know you could do that with anything other than plants," he said in surprise.

She shrugged. "Neither did I until just a moment ago."

He felt his eyebrows rising. With every day that passed, she offered yet another surprise. Now she was trying her magic on something that was no longer alive—and making it work. What would she be able to do in a month?

Enough, perhaps, for them to win free of these people?

It could be. After all that they had been through so far, he was not willing to put
any
limitations on her potential abilities anymore.

He managed to muster up the energy to work the spell of tongues on Rena after a short nap, before anyone looked in on them. That was just as well, for immediately after they broke their fast, another young Priest arrived to bring them to the Chief Priest for another round of intense questioning. This time he concentrated as much of his attention on Rena as he did on Lorryn, pretty much dividing his questions equally between the two of them.

Not that this proved to make things any easier, at least for Lorryn. He was constantly worrying that Rena would say something wrong—not that
he
would know what was wrong or right! But the Priest—who finally introduced himself, belatedly, as "Diric"—was far more intent on learning what she knew about the wizards than about anything else.

Finally, after hours and hours of this interrogation, Diric dismissed them into the cool of the early evening. "Do not speak to anyone else, particularly not the prisoners," he cautioned sternly. "Be polite to any of my folk who speak to you, but answer to questions only that Diric has not given you leave to speak. Otherwise you may go about the camp and observe whatever you choose."

He did not insult their intelligence by ordering them not to try to escape; that was obvious. It was equally obvious, at least to Lorryn, that any attempt to use magic against the Iron People would be as futile as his own attempts at reading their thoughts. Obviously if magic could have gotten anyone free around here, neither the two elves nor the four wizards would still be captives.

He and Rena wandered about the camp, simply observing things, for
the
rest of the evening. No one stopped them or gave them orders to go elsewhere, and people seemed quite willing to talk to them and answer their questions. Lorryn found himself fascinated in spite of their obvious danger; he had never seen anyone who lived as these people did.

Their entire way of life revolved around their cattle. Fully half their food came from the cattle themselves; what Lorryn had thought was
wool
felt that made the tents proved to come from the carefully husbanded winter hair the cattle shed in the spring. While they might call themselves the "Iron People," they could with justification have referred to themselves as the "Leather People"; Lorryn had never seen anyone use leather in so many ways and for so many purposes. Often what he had taken for woven fabric turned out to be supple leather, thin and fluid as any woven goods, and cleverly dyed and embroidered to resemble cloth.

They had cloth as well, but Rena learned by asking a woman who was busy redyeing a faded shirt over a pot on the fire that it was all obtained by trade. "We have had no trade, and no new cloth, for many moons," the woman said sadly, stirring the dye-pot with a stick. "We are not poor, but we must husband our cloth as if we were the poorest Clan among the People! It is a sad thing."

They walked on through the warm evening breeze, the sharp scent of the dye following them.

Their next campfire proved to belong to some of the warriors—and there was a single woman among them, a woman who wore virtually the same garments and armor as a man, and who was treated exactly as another man. There he learned what the "Man-Hearted Women" were that Diric had obliquely referred to, for she was one of them—women who took vows to forgo marriage and children in order to join the warriors' society. There were not many of them, and it was often difficult to pick them out from the young men, so hardened were they by their intense training. The term seemed to refer, not to their courage, but to the fact that their hearts chose a way otherwise reserved for men.

Were there such things as "Woman-Hearted Men"? When he asked that question, the answer was a matter-of-fact "Of course—but I doubt you could tell them from maidens."

He also learned that the smiths were as honored among these people as the warriors—although there had been no metal for the smiths to forge for some time, a fact that made all the people restless and a bit uneasy. Their god was the First Smith, after all, who had given to humans fire and the knowledge of metalcraft. To be unable to worship this god by working in metal was unsettling to everyone in the encampment. So the Iron People were suffering many deprivations besides that of new cloth.

Although women could be smiths as readily as men, there were again differences in
what
they wrought, based on their sex. Men tended to concentrate on arms and armor—women on the iron jewelry that both sexes wore. Men's jewelry was utilitarian and based on armor—wrist cuffs, torques, headbands, belts, and ankle cuffs. Women's jewelry, however, though also of iron, was the most amazing stuff Lorryn had ever seen. As delicate as black lace, the filigree-work done by the women smiths would have attracted the envy of any elven crafter. It was sophisticated and lovely, and it would not have been at all difficult to start a fad for the jewelry among not only the elven ladies, but among their lords as well.

The sound of distant music caught both his attention and Rena's; they followed their ears to the tent where the music originated, and
that
was where they discovered why the Iron People had kept a pair of elven captives in the first place.

After the initial shock wore off, and the initial feeling of smug self-satisfaction at the fate of two who would in another time and place have been his enemies, he was reduced to feeling an odd sort of pity for them. Both of them were hardly more than caricatures of what they must have been when they'd first been captured. Neither could survive in his own society anymore, even if they somehow won free. It was impossible to feel anything
but
pity for them.

But as he and Rena returned to the relative security of their own tent, he wondered how long he would have for the luxury of pity for anyone but himself.

For Keman, the arrival of the new humans that their captors called "the Corn People" was only the second surprise of the day. The first was something he had not even told Kalamadea about, because he was not certain what it meant, nor what he was going to do about it.

One of the pack-beasts, oxen trained to carry enormous loads on their backs, had a dragon-shadow.

Back in the long-ago time before he and Shana had any notion that elves
or
humans existed, Shana had showed him how he could look for a dragon shape-shifted into something else by a kind of "shadow" it had, a wisp of form that showed its true nature. The more of its mass a dragon had shifted into the Out, the stronger the "shadow" would be, although as far as he knew, only he, his mother, Alara, and Shana knew how to spot those shadows. You had to know what you were looking for, then be looking at the right time to see it. It wasn't like breaking an illusion, which only needed disbelief.

He was rather fascinated with the variety of livestock the Iron People had bred for their uses, taking the place of beef and milk cattle, horses, donkeys, and grels. He had taken to watching the herds, idly trying to spot something new. This morning he had been looking over the pack-beasts, a variety of short-horned, broad-backed cattle with stout legs and placid tempers, when one of them caught his attention, perhaps because it moved just a little differently from the rest.

That was when he spotted the other difference; a dragon-shadow.

Certain that he was somehow mistaken—or that the circumstances of their captivity were doing something to his mind—he watched that particular animal all morning, right up until Shana called him after her session with Diric for their little meeting.

He returned to that herd, looking for it, as soon as the meeting was over. It was still there, and it still had a dragon-shadow.

He sat down to watch it while the afternoon sun crawled across the sky and headed for the horizon, oblivious to the heat, to the flies that came to drink his sweat and went away disappointed. He watched it from the best vantage points he could manage, moving with the herd until he was certain it did not act like the others.

Or rather, it
acted
like the others; its actions and movements were a little stilted, a bit of a caricature. After studying the beast for some time, he realized that it had selected one particular ox and was copying everything
that
ox did, acting a heartbeat or so behind it. When it bent its head to graze, so did the cow. When the ox turned to look at something, so did the cow. When it ambled down to the river for a drink, the cow followed, and when it lay down in the afternoon to chew its cud, the cow did the same a few feet away. The cow never once took its eyes off the ox, which was very peculiar behavior for a herd-beast, and a female at that.

Which meant that he wasn't delusional; that dragon-shadow
was
there. The pack-beast was a shape-shifted dragon.

But since it hadn't made itself known to him, it wasn't one of the rebels who had cast their lot in with Shana and the wizards; they all knew what his halfblood-form looked like, and one of them would have signaled to him as soon as they saw him. So what Lair was it from? That was important; if it was from his old Lair, it was likely to be an enemy, and might cause trouble for him and for Shana if it knew they were here. If it was from another Lair, there was no telling how it would feel about them, and it still might cause trouble for them.

So just at the moment, it didn't look as if it would be a good dung to just stroll up to it and greet it in the dragons'-tongue, or speak to it mind to mind. Best to keep quiet and study the situation, perhaps.

So he continued to watch the beast as the sun sank and twilight turned the sky a deep blue, adjusting his eyes to compensate for the growing darkness. Insects called from the grass around him, and the herds settled for the night

His secret weapon was Kalamadea; if this was a stranger, the presence of Kalamadea, the oldest dragon in any of the Lairs he knew, could be enough to make it simply go away if it came to a conflict. Unless, of course, it was from his old Lair, in that case, it
might
go away peacefully, unless it happened to be one of a handful of dragons who would be only too happy to discover mat Kalamadea was as helpless as he and Shana, and who would take immediate advantage of the situation.

He debated the question with himself as twilight turned to true night, and as the moon rose to gild the backs of the cattle with a soft dusting of light, without coming to any land of a conclusion. He started to head back to the tent and the others, but found himself drifting back toward the herd to stare at the not-cow and ponder his options.

I
wonder; she
—
if it is a "she" and the sex as well as the form hasn't been shifted
—
is just as vulnerable as we are right at this moment. As Kalamadea pointed out when we were caught, shifting takes time, and if I raised a fuss about her, she wouldn't be able to get away quietly
.

The not-cow was watching him as warily as he was watching her, as a soft evening breeze ruffled his hair. Had she noticed his regard? Could
she
see dragon-shadows too?

If she can
—
then she knows. And if she knows, she could get away as soon as I leave and she can work her way beyond the edge of the herds, out of sight of the herdsmen
,

That decided him; he had no options now, and there was no time to get Kalamadea. He was going to have to do something, and he'd better figure out what it was, and quickly!

The dragon-cow moved uneasily, and he
knew
that she realized he was watching her. She had just forced him to act

He could only hope that what he was about to do would be the right action for all of them.

Rhiadorana had chosen to follow this clan of the Iron People mostly because they happened to be passing through her Lair's territory during the season she had chosen to undergo her Adult Trial. Her Lair had the custom of sending the adolescents out one at a time to spend at least a season shifted into a single form—generally one in which they could spy on the doings of humans.
Humans
, not elven lords; the elves were too far away, quite out of the Lair's territory, and too dull and predictable to prove to be any danger or even challenge to the Lair. There had been some rumors a few seasons ago to the effect that the situation among the elves had changed drastically, but they were still too far away to bother with. Life in the mountains and plains of the South and West was quite exciting enough without going that far afield only to be disappointed.

It had been a real trial to control her shape for such an extended period of time, but that was the point of the exercise, after all. It had turned out that she had made a good choice of subjects, too, for this clan, driven out of their old range by an extended drought, was doing some entirely new things for the tradition-bound Iron People. If Dora was any judge, there was going to be a revolution here, and the War Chief was going to try to become the
only
leader of the clan. She'd shifted into a beast of burden that bore his brand upon her precisely so she could hear rumors about him, and even some of his own intriguing, and what she had learned was going to be very valuable to the Lair. He had ambitions, did Jamal. He wanted to be the ruler of
all
the Iron People. And the way things were going, he just might be able to achieve that goal, especially if old Diric underestimated his ambition or his guile. This was an unusual Clan even without Jamal; they were the only Clan Dora had ever seen that had ever taken elven slaves. They could turn out to be unusual in other ways as well, perhaps enough to be a threat to the Folk.