the Kin appeared. By then, the elves had firmly imposed their order on the world about them, with the elves as undisputed masters and the humans as subject slaves.
And that, of course, was a situation creating fertile ground for mischief …
She was drifting again. She became annoyed at herself. She had managed the other three shifts easily enough. She had been able to keep her mind on her element. What was wrong with her now?
She started to stretch; remembered, again, that she couldn’t and decided irritably that the problem was the simple one of boredom. As the eagle, she had learned entirely new things about flying and wind and air-currents; feathers behaved in a manner altogether unlike membranous wings. As the delphin, she’d had a whole new world to explore; it had been very hard to leave that form and journey onwards. Even as the cedar, there had been a forest full of life around her, and she had been able to move, at least to a limited extent.
Here, in the desert, there was nothing but herself and the magical energies of the spring.
Maybe if she did something instead of sitting there – like a – a stone!
Alara had not seen even fifty of this world’s summers – as the Kin of her Lair went, she was very young. Some said too young, especially for the position of shaman. Some said too headstrong, too contrary, never mind that the shaman was supposed to be the dissenting voice.
She broke custom too often for comfort. She broke it in taking the rank so young; she broke it whenever it seemed to her that ‘custom’ was just an excuse for not wanting to change. They listened to her, but they thought she was reckless, headstrong. And maybe they were right. But maybe she was right, and the Kin were letting this soft world lure them into a long dream in the sun.
At least they still listened to her.
So far. She wondered how far she could push them. They couldn’t unmake her, but they could ignore her.
If the others knew of her forays into elven lands, though, they’d have been outraged. Not that taking elven form and brewing trouble wasn’t a standard game for the Kin – tricks of that kind were fine if you were an ordinary dragon.
But that a shaman would so risk herself would have horrified the rest of the Lair.
That was part of the problem right there; the Kin were only taking acceptable risks. Ever since Shoro had been hurt, no one wanted to take high risks anymore.
That was why no one had come here in so long; they didn’t want to risk being seen, however unlikely that was. And they didn’t want to risk playing with energy this powerful; it might lash back at them.
Which was why no one else wanted to be FireRunner, except another shaman. Father Dragon said that the Kin used to compete for the privilege, but now, if there was no shaman, there was no Thunder Dance, and that was the end of it. Was it laziness, or something else? Why, in the past year, there couldn’t have been more than a half-dozen of the Kin among the elvenkind, and those were mostly quiet spying trips! It was almost as if the others were afraid to go –
She certainly enjoyed her forays among the elves.
The last expedition had gone particularly well. V’larn Lord Rathekrel Treyn-Tael was not a patient soul –
And Alara had exploited that impatience, weaving a web of trouble for him with the dexterity of an orb-spider …
Why was it that flowers never smelled so sweet as when they were dying?
Alara reached out to the bouquet of white blooms on the dressing table, and caressed the stem of a wilting lily, reviving it with a touch. Once again, she glanced up at the mirror above the flower arrangement; once again, she could find no flaw in her disguise. From the white-gold hair, to the narrow, clawlike feet, she was the very epitome of highly bred elvenkind. Her hair cascaded down her back to the base of her spine; her wide, slanted eyes glowed the preferred blue-green. Her face could have been carved from the finest marble, with high cheekbones, broad brow, thin nose, generous mouth and determined chin. She spread out her hands before her; strange, to see long, slender, talonless fingers instead of five claws, and equally strange to see pale skin, translucent as fine porcelain, instead of rainbow scales, with the iridescence overlaying a deep red-gold.
And stranger still to walk upright, balancing on two legs. She felt as if she were always about to fall.
She had chosen to be female this time; simulating a male could be awkward, especially with some of the assumptions the elven lords made about guests. Once she had even been offered the services of a concubine, and had escaped the situation only because she had not planned to spend the night.
She would not even know how to go about mating as a male dragon, much less one of them!
There was another advantage, one which made the current jest possible. Being in female form – most lissome and, as elves reckoned, desirable female form – she could create a situation built on pressures and assumptions that not even the cleverest of elves could anticipate.
She knew from her study of him that Rathekrel was very susceptible to certain pressures. Although he was nothing short of a trading genius, there his expertise ended. He was hot-tempered, inclined to indulge that temper, and had a long history of making disastrous mistakes where the females of his kind were concerned.
Alara had decided to help him make another.
She turned away from the silver-framed mirror, and back towards the important decision of choosing a gown.
She considered, then discarded as too girlish, a high-necked autumn-rose brocade. A sable satin piece, displaying as much bosom as the previous gown concealed, was too obvious. Finally she settled on a flowing robe of shimmer-silk in emerald green, with sleeves that swept the floor, a bodice that clung to her like a second skin before flaring out into a full skirt and train that could have concealed an army of midgets. Although the neckline was high and demure, the cut and tight fit of the garment above the waistline left nothing to the imagination.
She summoned the maids and waited passively while they gowned, coifed, and bejeweled her at her direction. The human slaves had gentle, deft hands, and they worked in complete silence; it was easy to imagine that she was surrounded by invisible sprites of the air instead of a bevy of young girls in the uniform household tunic of white banded with silver.
Rathekrel’s manor was not the largest she had ever visited, but it was by no means the smallest. Containing twenty-five guest suites alone, it was staffed by hundreds of human slaves, and supported a good hundred subordinate elves. The chamber in which she sat was plushly appointed, and one of three that made up the suite of rooms – lavish dressing room, sitting room, and bedroom, all decorated chastely in the house-trademark white-and-silver, with a private bath sculpted to simulate a hot spring sunk in snowbanks, an illusion broken only by the silver spigots in the form of fish, and mounds of plush, frost-white towels beside it.
In fact, most of the house was done in white-and-silver. The decor made Alara cold and uncomfortable. And she recognized it as a subtle means for Rathekrel to overwhelm his guests, no matter what reason had brought them here.
She was willing to bet that Rathekrel’s chambers didn’t look as if he were holding court in a glacier.
Even the furniture was just slightly uncomfortable. The style was slim, unadorned, austere. The padding on the seat-cushions was a shade too thin. The lack of
