Elvenbane

workers, he held humans in contempt that bordered on hatred. Given half an excuse, he'd kill every human on his property... 'And Shadow?' he asked quietly.

'Will stay here. And that K final, Valyn. I'm sending him to learn his proper place, with my supervisor Peleden.'

Who had a taste for pretty young boys. Ancestors! Shadow would fight back...and Peleden would enjoy it... and enjoy punishing him for it. Valyn could not hide his dismay at that news, and he burned with anger at his father's amusement at his obvious reaction.

Dyran's smile widened. 'You'd better get packed, Valyn; you'll be leaving as soon as possible. And you'd better warn your pet that if he doesn't want worse punishment than he got from me, he'd better be very obedient to whatever Peleden wants.' Dyran turned his attention back to some papers on his desk, in a clear and unmistakable dismissal of his son and heir.

Valyn rose, silently and gracefully, just as graceful as his father was, and took himself out...

Before he forgot himself and tried to strangle the old bastard.

He let the door close behind him, and hurried to his quarters, where Mero Jenner was still waiting. His 'pet,' Dyran called the boy...his assigned personal servant. His only friend in all of this house; the only person he could trust.

And, most dangerous of all to everyone involved, his halfblood cousin.

Which no one knew, except Mero, Mero's mother, and Valyn.

It was a strange set of circumstances. When Valyn was four or five, one of Dyran's concubines, Delia Jenner, had been taken off her fertility-suppressing drugs in preparation for breeding to one of Dyran's gladiators. It was a normal enough procedure; quite routine, in fact...Except that during the first week she was fertile...but still in the harem...Dyran's brother, V'kass Treves sur Hernalth, had descended upon the estate during one of Dyran's frequent absences. Treves never came while Dyran was in residence; one reason that Dyran was head of the family, and not his older brother Treves, was that Dyran was, and always had been, ambitious. Treves was not. Treves pursued pleasure the way Dyran pursued power...and when he could not find enough to amuse him on his own small property, he sometimes took advantage of his brother's wider resources. And he had been quite taken with the fragile, dark beauty of the concubine Delia; so taken that during that week, he had ordered her to his quarters every single night.

He left before his brother could return; as expected. Delia had been sent to the gladiators on schedule, and in due course had produced the first of many offspring. Nine months to the day after her first breeding.

A child as dark and fragile as she, but with faintly pointed ears, pale skin, and eyes as green as leaves.

Fortunately, the midwife was half-blind, and did not see the telltale signs of halfblood.

Somehow...and Valyn still marveled at Delia's courage and audacity...the baby's mother had managed to keep him hidden until he was eleven years old. She used a variety of ruses when the overseers came...making him cry so that his eyes were swollen shut, and combing his long hair over his ears, telling them that he had some childish ailment so that she could keep him in bed in a darkened room, feigning sleep. And later, when he was older, instructing him to keep his eyes cast down, always; to hide his ears and sit in the sun until he was as brown as a little pottery figurine. But then the day came when she could no longer put off Mero's collaring...and she had known that when the supervisors saw him, she, and he, would die.

That was when she exercised the ultimate in audacity. She smuggled herself and Mere into Valyn's chambers, and revealed the entire story to him.

Valyn had long been known to be sympathetic to the plight of his father's slaves and bondlings...he had, once he became aware of their plight, often conspired to save them from beatings and other punishments. He had even, though he did not remember it, intervened on Delia's behalf to keep her out of the grasp of a particularly brutal gladiator. Having entirely human nurses might have sensitized him early; or perhaps it had something to do with his first teachers...also human...who made him aware that they were his intellectual equals, and not merely the trainable animals his father thought them to be. Or perhaps it was simply that, rather than reveling in the pain of others as so many of his kind did, he found the very idea abhorrent. And as soon as he became old enough to exercise guile or power on the humans' behalf, he had begun doing so. He knew they were grateful, but he had not realized that they trusted him this much. The combined appeal to his chivalry and his sympathy was too much to contest. That very night, in his father's absence, he announced that he was commandeering the boy to train to serve him, and the supervisor, seeing no need to intervene in so minor a matter, agreed without a qualm. He constructed a collar himself...but instead of holding the beryl that negated the boy's growing magic, it was one that held illusions to make him look entirely human.

For the past five years, Mero had been constantly at Valyn's side, so much so that first the human slaves, and then the elven members of the household, began calling him 'Valyn's Shadow.' Now scarcely anyone recalled his real name; even Dyran knew him as 'Shadow.'

Valyn paused before opening the door to his own quarters; he was going to have to face his Shadow, and tell him that they were going to be separated, that Mero was about to be sent to someone even more sadistic than the Clan Lord. And he'd better have an alternative scheme, something that would circumvent Lord Dyran's plans, if he didn't want Mero to do something that would get him killed.

Because Mero was lying facedown on his bed in Valyn's quarters, his back a mass of welts inflicted by that same Clan Lord...and he had sworn when he was carried in that he wasn't going to take that kind of punishment a second time.

Valyn's mind raced. If only there were some way to substitute Mero for the bondling servant that would be assigned to him for this journey...there would be one, of course. There would be no way that his father would entrust his son and heir to the hands of a bondling not trained and conditioned in Dyran's household...not even though the fosterage he sent Valyn to was his own sworn man, one of his oldest allies.

But everyone here knew Shadow...

And then he had his answer. Everyone here knew Shadow. But there would be many stops along the way.

He had been ordered to take his time and to take his shelter only in the households of underlings and allies. There, in a place where no one knew Mero, there could be a substitution. Particularly if his servant became ill and he had to either turn back, or appropriate a new one...

The plan to save the situation blossomed even as he opened the door.

Dyran ended the conversation with Lord Cheynar, and dismissed the communications-spell with a gesture. The fanatical Lord's scowling face faded from the desktop, leaving behind only the reflection of Dyran's own in the shining stone. Dyran sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose with one finger, aware that he had been expending a great deal more energy in magic than he was used to doing. He felt tired and drained, and more than anything else right now, he wanted to retire to the harem for some well-earned pampering. That message completed his preparations to send his son into fosterage...and he should have been able to dismiss the boy, and the entire episode that precipitated this, from his mind.

But he couldn't. The incident unaccountably irritated him, quite beyond reason.

He dimmed the lights with a gesture, lit a soothing incense with another, and stared down at his own vague reflection. It was a pity that he could not keep a closer watch and a tighter hand on the boy. He didn't know where the boy had gotten his odd notions of how one dealt with humans, but it was not from his lord father. And it was a greater pity that the slaves he once had with wizard-powers kept breaking the coercion-spells he placed upon them. If he had one of those, still, he could look into Valyn's mind at will...change it, even. But no; that was a set of tools too dangerous to keep, despite their usefulness. He had done well to destroy them, and to instruct his agents to see that no other lord harbored such tools.

Where there were slaves with wizard-powers, there was always the possibility of another halfblood being born, and that could spell disaster. There was no way of limiting the halfbloods' power, and no real way to keep them under control. Sooner or later they could break any compulsion, any illusion.

And then, without exception, they turned on their masters.

Those same unnatural powers gave them an advantage few elves could cope with. His anger and disgust mounted at the thought of the halfbloods burning deep in his heart, destroying his normal calm. They made him physically ill even to think about. Vile creatures, creeping around inside the minds of their victims...such powers were unclean, and should be wiped from the face of the earth...