Elvenborn

Oh yes. Now he had it. Kyrtian would not leave that forest as he had entered it. When he came out, it would either be as a prisoner, or in a shroud.

For the first time that day, he smiled, and the slave walking patiently and invisibly behind him to supply whatever the mas­ter needed shuddered at the sight of that smile.

Caellach Gwain paced the uneven stone floor of his miserable excuse for a room, brow furrowed, a banked fire of anger in his gut that hadn't diminished in the least in the time since that wretched girl had debated him in front of the entire population of the Citadel. How had he let himself get drawn into that? A disaster, a total disaster; and he still couldn't see where it had all gone so horribly wrong. He'd only told everyone exactly the truth!

At the time, it had seemed like a stroke of the purest luck; the brat had no experience at making speeches, and she didn't know how to exude the confident authority that he certainly could. And over and above all of that, he had been the one in the right! Miserable creature! How had she managed it? How,

when he had spoken nothing that was not true, had she man­aged to turn virtually everyone in the Citadel against him? By the time he realized that every word he spoke was turning more people away from him, it had been too late.

He kicked a shoe out of his path with a savage wish that it was the rear end of one of his so-called 'friends' who had de­serted him like the cowards that they were. As a consequence of that debate, he had been left utterly, completely without ser­vants. No one would lift a finger to so much as keep him from tripping over an obstacle.

Even the humans, even the human children, ignored any command he gave them. If he wanted to eat, rather than enjoy­ing a meal in quiet dignity in his room alone, he had to trudge up to the cavern used as a common dining hall, sit down at one of the common benches wherever he could find a place, and serve himself from a common pot. There could not possibly be anything more degrading than that—a regular punishment, thrice daily. How he hated it! He didn't know what was worse; having to starve himself until the last moment and content him­self with whatever the rest had left him so that he could sit at a bench alone, or braving the crowd to get something edible, but having to bear the snickers and the way people ostentatiously spread themselves out so as to leave no room at their tables for him. At least they were still permitting him to eat. There were a growing number of loud remarks every time he appeared that there should be a rule in the new Citadel about having to do some work if you wanted to eat.

Ingrates! He'd show them! If they forbade him meals, he'd go back to the old ways, and steal his own food by magic from the Elvenlords' stores, and to the Netherworld with Lashana's stupid treaty! That would show them!

At least he'd have something decent then; real cheese, real bread, ham and sausage. Hah. If he even filched food from the kitchens, he could have anything he liked!

He thought sourly of his last meal; harshly-flavored goat-cheese, stringy mutton and not much of it, some nasty mess of wild greens, and bread made with coarsely-ground flour, heavy and dark. If they wanted him 'punished,' die quality of the food

around here was punishment enough. How he longed for the good things filched from the Elvenlords, the delicately-smoked meats, the fine cheeses, sweet butter and clotted cream, the cakes made with proper flour and sweetened with white sugar! His mouth watered at the mere thought of them.

He glared at the fire in his 'fireplace'—fortunately for him, he had secured this room before his current disgrace, so at least it had a fireplace: If you wanted to call a mere alcove in the rock wall with an open-topped shaft punched up to the surface with draconic rock-magic a 'fireplace.' When it rained up above, water dripped down into the fire, and when the wind blew wrong, it drove the smoke back down into his room. Right now it was raining, and drops sizzled and spat in the flames, threatening to put them out. If he wanted a fire, he now had to gather the wood himself, and if he didn't want the plaguey thing clogged with ash, he had to sweep it out and dispose of the ashes himself.

At least he was putting some things over on them all. He knew very well when firewood was delivered to other rooms; he just helped himself when the occupants were out. And as for the ashes, well, he didn't sweep them any farther away than the hall, and serve them all right. They could either sweep them up themselves or trample them everywhere; he didn't care.

It had finally come down to this; a job he'd spent most of the day on until the anger in his heart started to interfere with his scrying spell. Spying with his own magic on the Wizardling children teaching his former cronies the magics that they used to transport themselves without harm and magnify their own powers, so that he could learn to use those magics without hav­ing to humiliate himself further. And he had to have those les­sons, because he had no choice; if he wanted something, he had to obtain it himself, and he didn't have the power he needed, alone.

And every day, new humiliations were piled atop the old. No one appeared to clean his quarters, and he, he, had to either do it himself, or find something one of the wretched children wanted and use it to bribe the little beast to do the work! And, of course, what they wanted was never some useless trinket of

his own or something he could just go and appropriate from the stores, oh no—it was always something difficult, and usually something he had to use his own powers to fetch from the old Citadel! It made him so angry he could hardly think for hours afterwards. He longed for the days when he could drop some­thing on the floor in the supreme confidence that whatever it was would be whisked off immediately to be discarded, put away, or cleaned as the case might be.

And it was all the fault of that overweening female.

She was up to something, too. No good, of course; that went without saying. He could tell that there was something in the air, something clandestine going on; from the way she acted, from the way that lover of hers acted. He'd felt the transporta­tion spell being triggered more times than it should have been of late, now that he knew how to recognize it. A noisy magic, that; nothing subtle about it, and oh so typical of a female, to use something that only drew attention to the caster. He knew how to use it himself now, of course, no thanks to anyone's ef­fort but his own. He'd gone back to the Old Citadel in person, to rummage through not only his own quarters, but the rooms of as many other people as he could before he grew too tired and hungry to stay there any longer. After all, if you didn't know or remember what was in a particular place, you couldn't bring it back by magic unless you did some fairly painstaking scrying. He'd piled what he wanted in his room when he could, and he'd made plenty of notes on what he couldn't pick up that he wanted in other rooms. He was getting more possessions to­gether now, besides the armload of things he'd brought back with him.

So he knew quite enough about the transportation spell to recognize it, and there was no doubt in his mind that it was be­ing used a great deal by Lashana herself of late. And for what? There was no need to use it to bring living things here anymore, now that they had flocks of sheep and goats and even cattle— you could bring anything you wanted here quietly, with the old magics that the Wizards had always used before, to steal what they wanted right out from beneath the noses of the Elvenlords.

In fact—that peculiar discordant feeling in the back of his

skull signaled that someone within the Citadel had used that particular magic again. It had to be Lashana. And in no way could it be for anyone's good except that selfish brat's.

But no one, no one would believe a single word he said against her. Not their dear Elvenbane, the person who had brought them the dragons (treacherous, sneaky beasts, whose minds could shift as easily as their shapes), the Trader clans (untrustworthy, wild human barbarians), and the Iron People (folly to put faith in any people who were not only wild human barbarians, but who had their own defenses against the