Elvenbane

The wizards combed the hills for such abandoned children, and kept careful watch for the 'noise' of untrained magic-use to catch the children that had escaped exposure. Those they either bought at auction, as they had bought Shana, or used their magics to abduct, a safe enough procedure, since the children of human slaves were seldom watched too closely. Shana was the first of their numbers in a very long time to have joined as a near-adult, and the first to have had such an extensive retrieval effort made on her part.

She had a few friends, mostly apprentices, though the young wizard Zed seemed to thaw once he had reached the safety of the Citadel. But she was afraid to allow anyone too close, given the lessons she had learned from losing Keman and Megwyn. She was simply not willing to risk so much of herself to a deep friendship, and most of the apprentices seemed to find her too alien to want anything beyond mere acquaintance.

Her chores occupied the mornings, for when she wasn't cleaning up after her master or herself, she was 'loaned out' to wizards who had no apprentices, or only one or two; in the afternoons, she joined half of Denelor's apprentices in her lessons in magic.

And those were revelations in themselves.

Floor-sweeping kept her occupied until just after the lessons were scheduled to start. She tossed her apron in a corner and ran for the stairs to Denelor's quarters, expecting a rebuke when she got there. But when Shana knocked on the door and joined the group, she saw to her surprise that all of Denelor's six apprentices were present, instead of only half.

She took a place on the floor, near the back of the room. There were only three chairs in the room, and Denelor had one of those. The other two had been taken by the youngest apprentice, Kyle, and the other girl, Mindi. Shana didn't mind: the floor of Denelor's room was carpeted with something soft and warm, a vast improvement over the stone of the caves and the tile of the slave pens.

'All right, children, it's our turn for procurement,' said the portly, soft-spoken Denelor, as he gathered his apprentices about him for what ordinarily were the afternoon lessons. As always, the lesson was held in Denelor's quarters, in a room he called the 'sitting room,' which nomenclature had thoroughly confused Shana. After all, she reasoned, couldn't you sit anywhere? Why have a single room devoted entirely to sitting?

The oldest apprentice, a wraith of a boy who so closely resembled his elven father that his mother had actually gone to the 'wizard woods' an hour after giving birth to leave him there, sighed dramatically. 'I thought it was Umbra's turn,' he complained. 'I know her 'prentices all went through a lot to bring that gold up out of the mine, but I never heard anyone change the rules about rotation just because someone did something extra...'

Denelor shook his head, his mild green eyes wide with amusement. 'Umbra did last week, right on schedule, and the schedule is posted, you know. It's our turn, fair and square, Lanet. Unless you'd rather eat mutton and lentils for the next several days...'

Lanet shuddered dramatically. 'I think not, Master Denelor. Procurement it is.'

Shana waited patiently, as she had learned to wait since arriving here, for an explanation of 'procurement.' Denelor might remember that she was new...and he might not. If he did, he'd explain; if he didn't, she would find out if she kept her ears open.

Denelor chuckled, and handed the apprentice a piece of smudged paper. 'Your choice, lad. Mostly it's food this time, but winter's coming on, and there are a couple of new apprentices with no winter clothing, and a lot more who've grown out of theirs...'

That seemed to remind him of Shana's presence, and he looked for her among the others. 'Procurement is when we use our magic to get things we need from the elven lords, my dear,' he said over Lanet's head. 'All the masters and apprentices take it in rotation, six days at a time, and we actually work only three days out of the six. That is because it's wearying work, and you won't be good for much but eating and sleeping the day after you fetch your allotment.'

Shana noticed that he was no longer using the tone and simple sentences with her that he had been; speaking to her as if she were a very small child.

When she had called lightning she must have convinced him she wasn't simpleminded. That little incident might well be responsible for a few more of the white hairs among Denelor's sandy-brown.

Lanet looked the list over and sighed dramatically. 'I guess I really ought to leave the smaller stuff for Shana, since it's her first time. Winter clothing, I suppose. Ugh. That means I'll have to look for it, too.'

Lanet took his scrying-stone out of his pocket, threw his white-blond hair out of his eyes with a toss of his head, and placed the polished slab of emerald beryl on the carpet in front of him. He stared into its crystalline green depths for a long moment, then finally spoke. 'There's quite a lot of clothing stockpiled in Lord Dyran's warehouses, at the edge of his estate. I doubt he'd miss a bale or two of slave tunics and trews.'

But Denelor shook his head immediately. 'No; I can't permit that. Doing anything around Dyran is too dangerous. He might not have shielded his storehouses, but he's certainly warded the estate, and we don't dare take the chance of alerting him to our existence.'

Shana shifted her weight restlessly. There it was again; that law of theirs. 'Never be discovered.' They'd never do anything if it brought a chance that some elven lord might figure out that the wizards were back again. There must have been hundreds of children they never rescued. Sometimes they never even retrieved their own agents when they got into trouble because of that fear. I'm surprised they went after me, really. Fire and Rain, they're as bad as the Kin...

The Kin...suddenly an entire series of realizations clicked into place, like the pieces of a puzzle. Oh. Oh.

What if that was the reason why Foster Mother hadn't helped her...not that she didn't want to, but that the others wouldn't let her, for fear the elves would discover the existence of dragons? From what she had seen the Kin had as much to fear from the elven lords as the halfbloods...

Lanet startled her out of speculations. 'Well,' he said, sounding weary already, 'there's a wagon-load of something on its way to Altar's estate. I don't know if it's got winter clothing in it or not, but it's full of bales and the bales have Redrel's mark on them.'

'And since Redrel's specialty is the manufacture of slave and bondling clothing, it's a good bet,' Denelor said with satisfaction. 'I doubt one or two bales will be missed until it's too late. Is the wagon covered, or open?'

'Covered, of course,' Lanet replied, with obvious irritation. 'I wouldn't bother reporting an open wagon, they're useless for our purposes.'

'True enough, lad. Well, the bales won't be missed until the wagon is unloaded. Fine, that's a good target, Lanet.'

Lanet didn't reply, he just raised his hands over his head and stared at a place on the carpet just beyond his scrying-stone. The other apprentices got out of the way to give him plenty of room. After a moment or two, his hands seemed to be glowing; a moment more, and Shana saw that it wasn't his hands that were glowing, but the rosy mist of light surrounding them.

And in the back of her mind, as she had now learned to 'hear,' the manifestation of the spell was accompanied by 'noise.' Not a great deal of noise, for Lanet was quite good at keeping his magic 'quiet,' but there was certainly an audible component to his magic. When compared to Lanet, Shana's magic roared like a spring thunderstorm, a fact she was profoundly ashamed of once she learned it.

Shana's magic sometimes sounded like music, and sometimes like thunder. Lanet's magic had the sound of a very light rain, a soft pattering, barely perceptible.

Shortly after the glowing mist formed around Lanet's hands, a tiny, rose-colored spark of light appeared above the spot he was staring at. It increased in size, until there was a globe of the rosy mist floating above the carpet itself, a globe just big enough to hold two bales of the size clothing usually was bundled into.

A ghost-image appeared within the mist, of something bulky, box-shaped, and brown. It solidified, until it was no longer an image, but seemed to be a real bale. It was joined shortly by a second, brought into manifestation in the same way.

'Two had better be enough,' Lanet said, his voice weak, 'because they were farther than I thought. That's it, Master Denelor.'

He clapped his hands together and the rosy light vanished. The bales fell to the carpet with a thump. followed by Lanet as he sagged forward with weariness.

Mindi eased forward and carefully cut the burlap covering of one of the bales, exposing a bit of burnt-orange that looked like wool. 'Well, it isn't slave clothing,' she said, 'because it's dyed in colors. It might be blankets,