Elvenbane

among us who think you might have wasted some of the time you could have spent on fulfilling those duties in tending this fosterling of yours. No, we'll take care of the child. You deal with your own son and daughter, and your office.'

Alara bowed her head in submission; she wanted to scream in angry protest that to be a shaman was to be contrary...but she knew, now, that there was a fine line between being contrary and being enough of an annoyance to be looked on as a danger.

That put an end to the meeting, for all practical purposes. There was a certain amount more of discussion...mostly involving Lori, who was not pleased with the outcome, nor with the censure her son had incurred. But in the end, she left, defeated and unsatisfied.

Alara returned to her lair and Keman, with a heavy heart. She had not even been permitted to bid Shana good-bye.

She stood in the sunlight outside the entrance to her home and watched Keoke taking off, something small clutched in his right foreclaw. That something was her fosterling, bearing nothing with her except the tunic she wore.

Alara could hardly bear to watch...and yet she could not look away. Forbidden even to speak mind-to-mind with the halfblood, she bid Shana a silent, sorrowful farewell, her eyes burning and her stomach knotted with sorrow and loss.

My little one...my poor, innocent little one...She stared after them, long after Keoke had vanished into the blue glare of the cloudless sky, wishing with all her heart that there was something she could have done to prevent all this. Then she descended into the cool depths of the caverns, wondering how she was going to break the news to Keman.

Shana spent most of her captivity crying, both from anger and from fear. Anger at the injustice of it all...and fear of what they might do to her.

The cave they'd left her in was cold and unfinished; they hadn't even made a light to leave with her. They hadn't let Alara near her, and no one would tell her where Keman was or even how he fared.

It was all so unfair! Rovy outweighed her and Keman together...he was a known bully and troublemaker, and there wasn't a single one of the young dragons (except, perhaps, Myre) who didn't rejoice in the fact that someone had at long last given him a trouncing.

And Rovy had transgressed far more than Keman had five years ago...he'd been inflicting damage on the younger dragon that could easily have been permanent. Yet she was being confined as if she had done something vile!

But that was not the worst aspect of this miscarriage of justice; she'd heard Lori's shrill calls for her death...Lori had been against her from the beginning, and there were plenty of the Kin who agreed with her. Shana didn't think Foster Mother would let them kill her...

But the idea was enough to frighten her into tears long after her anger had faded away.

She couldn't make out anything of what was being said, out there in the big cavern. The voices echoed too much. She heard her name from time to time, and Rovy's, and Keman's, but that was all.

Finally the noise died down, and she heard only murmuring; she waited for someone to come and tell her what was going to be done with her. It seemed to take forever as she crouched on the cold, bare stone in near- darkness, with only a bit of light leaking around the rock they had used to cover the entrance to her prison.

She hugged her arms to her chest and shivered, and not just from the chill.

Finally she heard the clicking of talons on the floor, and the mumbling of two voices. There was a grating noise of rock on rock. The huge boulder rolled slowly to one side, as progressively more light poured in through the widening opening, and she saw the dark, spidery shape of a taloned claw pulling at the side of the boulder.

She felt she should meet them standing. She got to her feet, slowly and awkwardly, feeling every bruise and scrape she had acquired in her scramble over the ridge, her muscles aching and stiff from the cold. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and blinked in the yellow glow from the light-ball hovering over Keoke's head. Orola was with him, but left as soon as the boulder cleared the doorway.

Keoke watched her warily for a moment, as if waiting for her to hurl rocks at his head. In fact, his unguarded thoughts made it quite clear to her that this was precisely what he was waiting for.

:I wish I knew what she was thinking,: she 'heard' him say, as he stared at her. She saw herself through his eyes; not the tiny, dirt-smudged, helpless creature she felt herself to be, but something alien and unreadable, and no less deadly than a dragon for all of its small size. :The scorpion is small.: she heard, :and the fanged spider. Both of them can kill. She could hurt even me, if she chose to. She could hurl a stone at my head as easily as she did at the boy's.:

I kind of wish I could... She was utterly exhausted by her exercise of her powers against Rovy. If she hadn't been so frightened and so apprehensive in her little prison, she probably would have fallen asleep.

'I hope you don't expect me to say I'm sorry,' she said sullenly, 'because I'm not. I'd do it again. Rovy's a toad, and I think you all were horrid to let him get away with bullying us for so long.'

To her surprise, Keoke chuckled sadly. 'No, I don't expect you to apologize, child, and if I were in your place, I venture to say I would feel the same.'

She rubbed her hands along her arms, trying to warm herself, but stayed where she was. Keoke's thoughts were guarded now, and she couldn't read them without alerting him to the fact that she was doing so. Since she couldn't see what he was thinking, she didn't know what he had planned, and she didn't intend to move until she did know.

'So why did you put me under a rock, like a mouse you were saving for dinner?' she asked, making no attempt to hide her anger. 'If I didn't do anything wrong, why are you punishing me?'

Keoke sighed, and relaxed his crest. ''Child, you represent something new and strange...you've done something we can't. Everything alive fears what is strange, Shana, even the Kin. We love change, but only if it is under our control...and, frankly, only if it doesn't materially affect us. Perhaps it is foolish to fear a young child most of us could crush with a single claw, but we do.' He lowered his head and looked a little to one side of her, as if be was ashamed. 'I'm sorry, Shana, but what you did to Rovy would not have been wrong if you were of the Kin. He deserved it, and you have told us you could have hurt him worse than you actually did. But...'

'But I'm not of the Kin,' she replied flatly. Somehow she had known it would all come down to this.

'Exactly. And some of the Kin even think you are some kind of animal that has turned on its masters, like a one-horn.' He blinked, and she sensed that he was embarrassed. 'We managed to convince the rest that you weren't, but you can't stay here anymore, Shana. I'm sorry. I'm going to have to take you far away from the Lair, far enough that you won't be able to make your way back, and set you on your own.'

The words fell on her like the stones she had launched at Rovy, and left her just as stunned. She could only stare at Keoke numbly, unable to move, or even speak, her mind going in tiny, panicked circles like a mouse caught in a jar.

Take me away? Where? What will I do? What's going to happen to me?

She was so sunk in shock that she never noticed that Keoke was moving. She had no idea what he was going to do, until his great foreclaw closed around her waist and he lifted her up and out of her prison.

And then, of course, it was too late for anything, even for tears.

Keoke dropped her...literally...somewhere in a desert. He didn't even land long enough to put her down; he just hovered, his wings throwing up huge clouds of sand, opened his claw, and let her fall. It wasn't a long drop...little more than her own height...but it was unexpected.

She went limp as she landed, and tumbled, rolling over her shoulder to keep from hurting herself as she hit. She lay in the hot sand for a moment, collecting her scattered wits. By the time she had picked herself up, Keoke was a tiny speck against the hard blue turquoise bowl of the sky.

She brushed sand off herself, looked about at the desolation she had been left in, and was tempted to give in to a fit of hysteria. But tears and screaming wouldn't change anything...

So instead she clamped control down on herself and took stock of her surroundings.

He could have picked a worse place to leave me, she thought glumly.

There had been plenty of worse places on the way; they had flown over a flat salt