Elvenborn

the desperate attempt of the defeated to escape rather than surrender, not the valiant and bold move of those who were in search of a new world to conquer. That was one fact that those who ruled here now preferred to forget and bury in the past.

Of the survivors that remained after the Crossing, none were still alive at the present day. Elvenlords lived long, provided no accident, illness, inherited weakness, or murder disposed of them before the normal span of four or five centuries, but they were hardly immortal. Kyrtian's paternal great-grandfather had been one of the longest- lived survivors, as (he now learned) had Lyon Lord Kyndreth's great-grandsire; most other Elvenlords in these days were yet a further generation down the line from the original inhabitants of the new land.

He turned the page to trace his mother's line, rather than his father's. Odd, he thought, as he noted something that had never seemed important before. I'm literally the first male any woman of her line has produced since Evelon—

'That is why there was no great objection when I wedded your father,' said Lydiell, behind him, as if she had the human gift of reading thoughts. He was too used to her uncanny ability to do this with him to be startled; he simply turned and smiled at her as she stepped forward another pace and placed her hand affectionately on his shoulder.

'No one—least of all Aelmarkin—ever thought I would pro­duce a male heir,' she said quietly. 'That was why there was no objection raised to the marriage, and why Aelmarkin is so in­tent on dispossessing you of your inheritance now. He assumed that the ripe plum of our estate would drop into his lap without any effort on his part—or that he could somehow connive or force me to wed my presumed daughter to him.' Lydiell smiled down at her son, whose birth had spoiled Aelmarkin's plans.

'But he's really a cousin in name only,' Kyrtian objected, tracing back Aelmarkin's line. 'His people haven't been di­rectly related to ours since Evelon itself! It was our great-

grandfathers who were cousins, and there's been no closer mar­riage since then.'

'But if you trace carefully, he's the only other male heir to the Clan,' Lydiell pointed out. 'That's as much your great­grandfather's and grandfather's fault as anything else. Once they had a single, living child, the need to protect what we had built here took precedence over trying to sire any more chil­dren. They each had one male heir by one marriage and no fur­ther children; no daughters to wed outside the Clan, no second sons to secure alliances. Granted, they were exceptionally long-lived, and that's what saved us, but I was the first bride to come from a family not bound in any way to your Clan, and if your father was still with us, by now you would have at least a younger sister or brother, because I would have personally seen to it, rather than accepted the edict that there was no need for further children.'

Now Kyrtian noted something else that had somehow es­caped his attention. His ageless mother was nearer in age to his grandfather than his father! She saw his eyes resting on the birth-date under her name, and chuckled richly.

'I wondered when you would uncover that!' she said. 'Yes, I'll admit it; I robbed the cradle! When your grandmother— wiser or more pragmatic than her husband—knew that she would not survive your father's birth, she had enough time to handpick a successor. She turned to our family, who had been her friends; she wanted my sister, but the family had already wed her off, so she chose me! But she had reckoned without your grandfather's love and devotion; he refused to take another wife, especially one as barely-nubile as I was. Still, for the sake of my friendship with her, I visited often and long, trying to amuse your grandfather and possibly even persuade him in time that I was fascinating and desirable! I wish you had seen me, still barely past my presentation fete, slinking around here as if I was a hardened seductress!'

Since Kyrtian couldn't imagine his mother slinking around like a seductress at any age, he spluttered a little and reddened.

'Well, when seduction failed, I thought I would win him by showing him what a devoted mother I could be to his son,' she

continued. 'There was one little wrinkle in that plan; by the time I thought of it, your father was hardly of an age to need mothering! But I persisted in cultivating him, only to find that his son and I were mutually falling head over heels in love as soon as he was old enough to think of such things! Your grand-sire was much amused, and so was my sister, Moth.'

'Moth,' of course, was V'tern Morthena Lady Arada, nearly a full century Lydiell's senior, and the only surviving relict of Lord Arada's tiny Clan. She held a small estate granted her by her late husband in her own right, with no inconvenient cousins to pester her.

Kyrtian sighed. When he looked at the Great Book, in the complicated web of intermarriages and second and third mar­riages, his family stood all alone, like a single strand of silk off to one side of the greater pattern.

'I have not told you this before, but Aelmarkin tried to force a marriage on me when your father first disappeared,' she con­tinued, as calmly as if it had happened to someone else. 'That was when Moth came to my rescue; she dug up an obscure law preventing a man from marrying the widow of his cousin if she already had a male heir. She visited each of the Great Lords herself and pointed out to each one of them—with examples— how that law would protect their own sons from certain of their opponents if anything happened to the lord himself. Needless to say, they upheld the law to a man, and Aelmarkin had to slink away with his tail between his legs.'

'No wonder he hates you,' Kyrtian replied, enlightened.

She sniffed delicately. 'Personally, I prefer not to waste an emotion as empowering as hatred on that worm. It was obvious from the start what his plans were when he came slinking around here, oozing false sympathy and groomed and jewel-bedecked to within an inch of his life. Even if I had been the foolish woman he thought I was, I would quickly have seen that such an alliance would mean your death. No matter what my personal feelings were on the subject, I would never have placed you or our people in the hands of the odious Aelmarkin!'

'Thank you for that!' Kyrtian laughed.

'And sometime you might thank your aunt for devising the

means to protect us both,' she replied cheerfully, with a light squeeze of her hand on his shoulder.

'Well, however much you play at modesty, I think that you would have found the solution just as quickly as Lady Moth if you hadn't had her help,' he told her. 'You are two out of the same mold, as clever as you are beautiful, and far more intelli­gent than any mere males.'

'I only needed to be clever enough to take advantage of our isolation,' she said, with a laugh at his attempt to compliment her. 'After all, we are out back of beyond of nowhere, and I doubt that anyone other than Aelmarkin would even consider wanting our estate for that reason;' Her tone turned scornful. 'And frankly, I think if Aelmarkin knew how much work it is to keep this estate so profitable, he'd quickly change his mind about wanting it.'

'I only wish that were true,' Kyrtian sighed. 'It's only a lot of work because of the way we treat our human friends; if this estate were run on the same lines as any other, the profits would probably be much higher. At least,' he amended, 'That's what Tenebrinth told me once.'

'That's beside the point,' Lydiell said resolutely. 'The point now is to make sure we get the most out of Lord Lyon's visit, without making any blunders and without sacrificing any of our independence. You go off and consult with Gel over dinner; I'll do the same with Tenebrinth. We're going to want to please Lyon without dazzling him, charm him without making it look as if we have anything he really wants other than your knowl­edge and expertise. And you and Gel ought to put your heads together to see if you can think of anything else he might want out of you in particular.'

Kyrtian closed the Great Book with a determined snap. 'You're perfectly right, as usual,' he said. 'I'll go change into something less ostentatious and find Gel, and we'll get down to business.'

But in spite of the excitement of the moment, there was one thing he had realized as he walked off in search of Gel. With all of the conversation about marriages and alliances, for the first