Elvenborn

The sun shining down on the top of the highest tower of the lady-keep imparted a drowsy warmth to Lady Moth's back that she was thoroughly enjoying. She had always liked the gentle heat of the sun; her late husband had once scornfully accused her of being half-lizard for the way she en­joyed basking in the garden. But even if it had been the dead of winter, she would have been up here, for this was the only place on the entire estate that gave an unrestricted view down into the valley below. And what she watched through the eyepiece of her bit of antique equipment was fascinating indeed. There was no breeze to stir the silken, silvery-blue folds of her dress, or disturb the simple, straight fall of her hair, nor to make breezes wave distant branches between her and the interesting scene so far away in the valley. She felt sorry for the tiny little figures that she knew by their drab tunics were human slaves. First one brightly-colored creature in scarlet paraded them out and set them to work in the kitchen-garden. Then a second appeared, clad in a violent blue, far too soon for them to have accom­plished much, and marched them off to drill with weapons.

Then a third emerged from the stables, this one in bronze satin, and ran them off into the farm-fields. What those poor bewil­dered slaves must be thinking now, she could not even begin to guess.

'Lady Morthena?' said a diffident voice from behind the El-ven lady. 'What are you doing?'

Lady Moth took her eye away from the eyepiece of the old-fashioned, gold-and-bronze telescope, and turned to smile at her most recent guest.

'I am using an old device, my dear,' she said to the younger woman in a kindly voice, knowing that Lady Viridina would never have seen such a thing as a telescope. 'In fact, it dates quite back to Evelon—or at least, the lenses in it do. It is called a telescope, and although I normally use it to examine stars, at the moment I am using it to spy upon our neighbors.' She pat­ted the long cylinder of bronze, with ornate curlicues chased into the metal and inlaid with gold wire, for it was a very old friend and long-time companion.

Lady Viridina's pale brow wrinkled with puzzlement, with a faint frown on a face that was attenuated by long illness. 'Why are you bothering to do that?' she wondered. 'They already tell you everything, don't they?'

'That, my dear, is what I am ascertaining for myself.' Lady Moth put her eye back to the eyepiece, and continued to make mental notes on the movements of the Young Lords' slaves out­side the Great House. 'In point of fact, I rather doubt that they are telling me everything. For instance, there seems to be some disagreement down there about just who is in charge of what. Just during the time I have been sitting here, I have seen one hapless group of slaves herded from one uncompleted task to another by three different Young Lords.' She chuckled, and her laughter was echoed faintly by her companion, who patted the knot of long, silver hair at the back of her head self-consciously. 'That is what comes with age, Viridina; suspicion. I stopped tak­ing things at face value a very, very long time ago.'

'So did I—but the difference between us, I think, is that you found other ways of finding out what you needed to know, and I didn't even try,' Viridina said ruefully, twisting her hands in

the fine silk of her flowing and many-layered violet gown. 'If I had, perhaps—'

She didn't finish the sentence, but Lady Moth was not about to allow her to sink into self-recrimination. 'If you had, I doubt that it would have materially changed anything. You and I were firmly under the thumbs of our unlamented Lords, and no knowledge or even foreknowledge would have allowed us to change what happened to us. Knowledge is not always power.' She smiled again. 'If it was, fond as I am of my Tower, it would be Lady Moth who ruled the manor down there, and not that rabble of Young Lords.'

Lady Moth had known very well that there was going to be a slave revolt when the Young Lords staged their own revolution against their elders. Her own slaves had told her. She had al­ready taken herself out of her disagreeable husband's home; she had made a bargain with him—if he gave her the lady-keep, which had been the Dowager-House attached to his estate, she would make no trouble for him when he filed a divorcement with the Council. He had his eye on a very young Elven girl— his tastes had begun to run to the barely-pubescent in the past few years—and he was heartily tired of the wife who could not or would not take him as seriously as he thought he should be taken.

'I wish you had managed to take the Manor,' Lady Viridina sighed wistfully. 'I hate to think what damage those careless boys are wreaking to your beautiful home.'

Lady Moth only shrugged. 'I have an equally beautiful home here—and much more manageable,' she pointed out. 'It's probably just as well that I didn't try.'

For her part, she had been so heartily tired of her lord that— given that she would not be required to remarry and could have an establishment, however small, of her own—she was pre­pared to allow him to say whatever he pleased about her in or­der to obtain his freedom. She suspected that he would claim she was pleasuring herself with human slaves—but as it fell out, he never got the chance, so her reputation survived intact.

'May I look?' Viridina finally asked, allowing her curiosity to

overcome her reticence. Moth just laughed, showed her how to focus the instrument, and rose so that Dina could take her seat.

Moth's husband had not even lived to encounter the revolt, though without a doubt, if he had, he and his son would have been on opposite sides of the conflict. Her son, who had sud­denly become as conservative as his father once he was in the ruling seat, had managed to be slaughtered almost immediately, and her daughter had fled after an abortive attempt to rule the manor herself had failed miserably. Lady Moth, as was the tradi­tion in her family, had always treated her slaves with considera­tion and respect, entirely as if they were servants, not slaves, and as if they were free to leave her service if they chose to. She had taken all her slaves with her to the Tower, every slave for which she could concoct even the remotest excuse to have with her— a fact which probably would have provided ample fodder for her husband's accusations. Once there, she had deactivated the elfstones in all of their collars, making them merely decorative shams, and told them frankly that they now were free to go or stay. They all, to a man and woman, chose to stay. When the re­volt was at the breaking-point, her slaves had told her. They had fortified the place, she had armed those who knew how to use weapons. Together, they had outfaced rebellious ex-slaves and Young Lords. In fact, her burly young guards called her 'little mother,' and took as much care of her as if she had truly given birth to them—unlike her