Elvenborn

Kelyan smiled, and she smiled back, instantly forming a con­spiracy of two against their greedy elders. 'In that case, I shall be happy to set it to you on your behalf,' he replied easily.

He bent over the collar and went immediately to work on it—

And she followed the slightest nuance of that work with an intensity that surely would have startled him, had he not been concentrating on the collar to the exclusion of all else.

She had been doubly-prepared; in case she needed to use this ploy again, she didn't want him to think it was anything other than a dream.

When he finished his magics, she thanked him prettily. 'You have done me a great good turn, Lord Kelyan,' she said, flirt­ing subtly with him in a way that would probably have had Mero wild with suppressed jealousy. 'How can I properly thank you?'

She plied him with drugged wine as she fluttered her eye­lashes at him, perfectly aware that he wouldn't actually do any­thing other than flirt back. There was a rhythm to this sort of courtship; until he had her father's tacit permission to approach her, he would only indicate gallant interest. He wouldn't want to find himself called into a challenge that he might not have the trained slaves to meet. Leasing gladiators to meet a chal­lenge was possible, but expensive, since some of them would almost certainly die in the combat. Better to be cautious.

'Performing any service for a fair lady is a privilege, not a burden,' he replied, downing the wine in a single gulp. As she

had planned; she'd doctored the wine to make its taste smoother than honey and disguise its nature. She refilled his glass, and he downed that as well. She passed him a little bowl of highly-salted, toasted bits of root— also manipulated by her magic. The more he ate, the thirstier he would become.

'Thank you,' he said after his first taste, and when she left the plate there beside his hand, he didn't object. 'I do not have the company of a lovely lady often enough that I see it as less than a reward in and of itself,' he continued, now sipping from his glass and nibbling at the snacks.

She laughed softly, producing a tinkling little sound that sur­prised her and made his eyes widen with approval.

'I do not have the company of fine young lords often enough to think it less than a treat,' she replied in the same vein. 'Tell me something of yourself.'

He was not at all loath to do so, and she continued to ply him with wine as well as conversation until his eyes drooped, his head dropped, and he collapsed limply down onto the pallet he'd been sitting on all this time. With a thought and a flick of her fingers, she banished all the illusions she had created, leav­ing him again in the felt-walled tent. When he woke the next morning, if he recalled the incident at all, it would probably be as a dream.

Then she blew out the lights, and left him in the darkness, turning the collar over triumphantly in her hands.

Now it was Kala's turn on the new project to liberate the slaves; she examined the collar and the stone, and set about making the clamshell clasp that would lock the stone away from wearer and mage. She was certain she could make such a mechanism; the trick would be to create one that was small enough to conceal, but large enough and sturdy enough to have an effective seal.

Meanwhile, dropping her guise and coming as herself, Rena attempted to engage the two Elves in conversations every day while Mero 'eavesdropped' on their minds. As she talked to them—or, as often as not, at them—she played, delicately, with her magic inside their heads.

When the Great Lords removed memories, they did so

wholesale, leaving behind a blank. She had delved into the mysterious workings of the brain as well as she could, and now she suspected their crude efforts, difficult as they were, created a mental infant. Probably afterwards their victim had to be re-taught even the simplest of things, which was why she—it was usually a rebellious girl who was so cavalierly treated— wouldn't make a reappearance for a year or more after she was subjected to the treatment. Rena wanted to be more subtle.

So while she talked and spied upon the physical workings in­side their heads, she did so on the same minute level that she worked when making the leaves and plants sweet and tasty—or just plain edible. When Mero 'saw' a memory that he knew they needed to expunge—which would be when one of the Elves actually thought about it— he signaled Rena. She would know then where it physically resided, and that, she could change. After a few days, she began doing just that. Gently, she broke the connections that made the memories, then erased them altogether with the tiniest of shocks—much, much smaller and more subtle than those that caused brainstorms. When she was done, those particular memories were gone. Ask Kelyan about them, and he would look at her blankly.

She had hoped that she would be able to remove the memo­ries sequentially, but alas, that was not possible. Memory, it seemed, was a peculiar thing. It wasn't sequential; memory chains led oddly to incidents that seemed to have nothing what­soever to do with the triggering recollection.

But one thing was absolutely certain, and that was the more she erased, the more normal Kelyan—and in particular Haldor, since he was the most withdrawn—became.

When that happened, memories were easier to trigger and thus, to remove. Rena's progress with them came in leaps and bounds, and soon they were both as active and alert as they'd been when first captured. That was promising, since it would have been the next thing to murder to drop the two of them un­conscious somewhere if Haldor was still near-catatonic, but it created a new problem.

As they regressed into the past, they no longer had the mem-

ories that told them that resistance was of no use, that escape was not possible. By having their evening food drugged, build­ing illusions, and interrogating them separately, Rena was able to convince them that she and her questions were no more than an intriguing dream. She didn't even have to convince them that they were in the midst of a dream sequence, since she was able to erase the memory of each night before she left them drugged and sleeping.

'But what are we going to do with them?' she asked Mero desperately, three days after she had begun this task, when Hal-dor had announced his intention to escape from their current captivity the next day. She dropped down beside him on the grass outside their tent, both of them staring up at the star-begemmed sky over their heads. Her hand reached for his, only to find his reaching for hers. She took comfort from the touch. 'Sooner or later, they're going to try to make a run, and that's only going to make a terrible amount of trouble.'

'Keep 'em drugged by day,' Mero advised, squeezing her hand. 'We have to figure out how to give them a new past, and I haven't worked that one out yet.' Moonlight flooded the camp, almost bright enough to read by. He shook his head at her. 'I don't know. Illusions? But that would take as much time to show them as it would for them to live it? I might be able to stick new memories right in their heads where the old ones were, but for one person to create all that—'

'Does it have to be one person?' Rena interrupted. 'What if there were several?' She flushed with the excitement of sud­denly seeing a possible solution. 'We don't have to be the ones to make the new memories! We could ask Kalamadea and Alara to come get them, and Shana and Zed and some of the other Wizards could all pitch together and do it!'

Mero shook his head. 'I don't know,' he replied dubiously. 'Wouldn't those memories get awfully confusing with so many people meddling?'

'Isn't it better for us if they are confusing?' Rena countered, feeling even more certain that this was the right way to handle the problem. 'We don't want them to have a whole picture, we

just want them to have fragments, don't we? Let them think they were drugged most of the time, or enspelled, but the more confusing their memories are, the more confused the Old Lords will be.'