Elvenbane

should buy us some time.'

Father Dragon's face cleared as both Denelor and Parth nodded. 'That should buy us quite a bit of time,' he said. 'Possibly enough to get the rain started again. Can you gentlemen organize that?'

'Immediately,' Denelor replied. Parth was already on his way, stopping to talk to each of the wizards on the wall in turn. Denelor hurried below. As Shana shaded her eyes to peer out over the walls, wisps of smoke began rising where the siege equipment stood. Slaves rushed to put the fires out, but with relatively few pieces of siege equipment, and many wizards, several were able to concentrate on each piece. Before long, the fires were burning with fierce flames and thick, black smoke.

'Thank you, little one,' Father Dragon said quietly. Shana turned to him with surprise.

He was looking at the rising flames but clearly not watching them. 'This...brings back many memories. Most, not pleasant. I feared that history would repeat itself here...so many dead...'

'Only if we're too stupid not to learn from the past,' she said fiercely. 'We won't let that happen, not any of us, not even Parth Agon. Haven't you seen what he's been doing? When a personal quarrel breaks out, he's right there. If it can't be patched up...and so far, he's been able to do that...he sees that the people involved are separated and given someone to watch them so they don't stir up trouble. All the water and food is being purified before we use it, so they can't sneak a plague in on us. And we are all working together.'

Father Dragon turned a little, and smiled at her. 'So you are.'

'What we need is someone who knows warfare,' she pointed out. 'That's you. That's why we need you and made you the leader.' Then she grinned a little. 'Besides, old Parth himself said that no one was going to argue with a leader who had teeth as big as he was tall!'

Father Dragon actually chuckled a little. 'An astute observation. Well then, I suppose I had better do my part. I doubt there is anyone here who knows more about Lord Dyran...and he is our most implacable enemy...'

He turned his eyes back towards the enemy army, but Shana saw that the expression of strain he wore had been replaced by one of thought...and the set of his jaw argued his renewed determination that this conflict not end as the last had.

There was pain there, still, from those old memories. But pain could be dealt with. And now he had decided to do so.

She smiled, and trotted off to join one of the others fighting to keep a battering ram ablaze.

Valyn wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand and staggered away from the jakes. His first reaction, on seeing the helpless, weeping children herded before the fighters in a human shield, had been horror. The second, as they tried to turn and run, and as the fighters behind them slaughtered those who would not cooperate in their own peril, was to be suddenly, violently, sick.

Valyn had hunted all his life, but he had never seen another thinking creature die. He had never seen the violent death of another adult until this conflict, much less that of a child.

He'd run from the walls to the safety and shelter of the fortress, and once there, had succumbed to his own weakness.

Outside, muffled by several thicknesses of stone, the sounds of the conflict continued, and increased as the elven lords regained control over the weather and cleared away the storm that had hampered them.

He leaned his back and head against the cold stone wall, wrapped his arms around himself, and shook...because he alone, of all the people here, truly knew his father. This atrocity was only the beginning.

He'd seen this before...there was even an elven term for it, the strange fixation on some object or cause that came after living centuries. Shi maladia. He'd known that Dyran had fallen into that fixation when the others had described his father's changed behavior. Dyran was not sane, as the halfbloods knew the meaning of the term.

He was sane enough by elven standards, but he had no balance when something triggered the malady, and no sense of proportion. There would be worse to follow, horror piled atop horror, until, even if they were in a position to win the fight, the wizards would surrender. And then, no matter what terms Dyran agreed to, he would violate them, and kill them all as remorselessly as the dragons killed a deer for dinner. Shana kept talking about achieving a truce, he thought in despair, but there wasn't anything that would hold Dyran to truce terms. He simply didn't care. The others might hold to a sworn truce, even Cheynar. But not Father. Not now.

Valyn had seen his father twice in a mood like this...both times when he had run into unexpected opposition. Once, in the process of getting an ally onto the Council, and once when negotiating an alliance marriage for himself. In both cases, he had not given up on the task until the opposition was not only eliminated, but buried. In the second case, where the girl herself had pulled the unexpected maneuver of running off with someone else, he had not rested until both the girl and her lover were dead.

No one had suspected anything at the time. Elves did not connive in the deaths of other elves...and both deaths were accepted as tragic accidents... but Valyn wondered. There had been unsettling signs...and just before each 'accident,' his father had trained and sent away a particular 'bodyguard.' A bodyguard who had returned after the accidents, to be retired.

Human life was hardly worth commenting on to an elven lord. Halfbloods were less than vermin. And there was no vow strong enough to hold Dyran to a treaty with either. He would see that they were all utterly destroyed.

Unless Dyran was somehow stopped.

Unless he could be calmed, broken out of the obsessive-compulsive cycle, and convinced that he, personally, would lose too much by continuing the fight. Unless he could be brought out of his... state... to a point where he was able to think rationally again.

There was perhaps one person valuable enough to him to convince him to give up the fight as futile. One person he would not slay out of hand.

Or so I tell myself, Valyn thought. He pushed away from the stone wall, no longer shaking, but quite thoroughly determined.

A few days ago, he had made a tentative plan, and to secure it, he'd had Shadow steal a particular beryl out of Dyran's tent. The elven lord, preoccupied as he was with the larger threats, had taken no thought to the fact that locked cabinets were not enough to stop a determined wizard. Especially one who knew exactly where a small valuable might be. Valyn felt for the stone in his pocket and found it, warm from the heat of his body. This was one of Dyran's talismanic stones, gems in which he stored some of his own power against a time of depletion. More than that, it was one of the first of those stones, a gem he had worked with for centuries, and attuned to him as few other things were. With this in Valyn's possession, anything Dyran tried should be fed right back to him.

So if Dyran tried to strike him, his father would feel it too, Valyn thought, as he made up his mind, and went down to the ground floor in search of Zed. That should be enough to make Dyran think. And he might be able to use it to control his father, at least a little. It was at least worth trying.

Zed was with another of the young dragons (in halfblood form), both of them working furiously to make the last of the claw-tips into finished arrows. Zed had just finished setting the last of the claw-scraps into an arrow- point when Valyn found him.

'Zed?' Valyn said diffidently. 'Can you do me a favor? It's a big one...'

'I think so,' Zed replied, putting the last of the arrowheads on the pile beside the young dragon-fletcher...who was taking green, crooked, virtually useless branches, rolling them between his hands, and transforming them into perfectly straight, smooth, arrow-shafts, then molding a slot for the arrowhead, slipping the arrowhead into place, and passing the result on to another wizard-child for binding and feathering. Zed stood up, wincing a little as cramped muscles protested his movement.

'What do you need, Valyn?' the wizard asked, tucking his long hair in back of his ears with a gesture that seemed to be habitual. Valyn beckoned him to follow, and once they were in a secluded corner, out of earshot, turned to face him.

'First of all,' the elven lord said quietly, 'I think you should know that I'm not a halfblood.'

'You're not?' Zed said in surprise. 'But...'

'I'm full-elven,' Valyn confessed. Then, while Zed was still recovering from that revelation, he added, 'Dyran's my father. I'm his heir.'

Swiftly Valyn explained the reasoning that brought him to seek out Zed. 'You know all the exits and entrances