him in Council, and he doesn’t like it. But he’s been challenged before, and he never acted like he is with her. It’s almost as if he wants her, wants to possess her, and she keeps rejecting him in ways that only make him more determined to have her. Serina shivered, and did her best not to show it. Dyran had never been this obsessive about anything before. She wasn’t sure what to do about it – or even if she dared to try.
Lady Alinor laughed, laughter with a delicate hint of mockery in it. ‘Ondine, of course –’ she began.
A single, brazen gong-note split the air, silencing the chatter, and causing every head to turn towards the entrance to the sands. A pair of fighters, one bearing a mace and shield, the other, the unusual weapon of single-stick, walked side-by-side into the center of the arena. The mace-wielder, with shield colors and helm ribbons in Lord Jertain’s indigo-and-white, turned smartly to the left, to end his march below Jertain’s box. The other, with helm ribbons and armbands in Vossinor’s cinnabar-and-brown, turned at the same moment to the right, to salute Vossinor’s box.
Both elven lords acknowledged their fighters with a lifted hand. The gong sounded again. The two men turned to face each other, and waited with the patience of automata.
Dyran rose slowly, a vermilion scarf in his hand. Every eye in the arena was now on him; as host to the conflict, it was his privilege to signal the start of the duel. He smiled graciously, and dropped the square of silk.
It fluttered to the sand, ignored, as the carnage began.
In the end, even a few of the elven spectators excused themselves, and Serina found herself averting her eyes. She’d had no idea how much damage two blunt instruments could do.
But Dyran watched on; not eagerly, as Lady Alinor, who sat forward in her seat, punctuating each blow with little coos of delight – nor with bored patience, as Sandar. But with casual amusement, a little, pleased smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and a light in his eyes when he looked at Alinor that Serina could not read.
And when it was over – as it was, quickly, too quickly for many of the spectators – when all of the other elven lords had gone, he made his move. Toward Alinor. A significant touch of his hand on her arm, a few carefully chosen words – both, as if Serina were not present.
White with suppressed emotion, she pretended not to be there; pretended she was part of the furnishings. Certainly Lady Alinor took no notice of her.
The Lady stared at Dyran as if she could not believe what she had heard – then burst into mocking laughter.
‘You?’ she crowed. ‘You? I’d sooner bed a viper, my lord. My chances of survival would be much higher!’
She shook off his hand and swept out of the arena, head high, her posture saying that she knew he would not dare to challenge her. If he did, he would have to say why – and being rejected by a lady was not valid grounds for a challenge.
Dyran went as white as Serina; he stood like one of the silent pillars supporting the roof, and Serina read a rage so great in his eyes that she did not even breathe. If he remembered she was there – he would kill her.
Finally he moved. He swept out of the arena in the opposite direction that Lady Alinor had taken, heading for the slave pens.
Serina fled for the safety of her room and hid there, shivering in the darkness and praying he had forgotten her. After a long while, she heard muffled screams of agony from Dyran’s suite.
He’s forgotten me, she thought, incoherent with relief and joy. He’s forgotten me. I’m safe …
If I dared, I would shift and fly off, Alara thought in disgust. The last scene replayed in Serina’s memory had left the dragon limp and sick.
The duel was bad enough. The Kin had no idea that this was the kind of thing that went on in these duels. The sheer brutality of two thinking beings battering each other until one finally dropped over dead – moments before the other also succumbed – was something Serina took for granted. It was that, as much as the duel itself, that made Alara ill. How could she – she didn’t feel anything at all for those two men, she basically just reacted to the blood and injuries. She would have been just as nauseated seeing someone gut a chicken. Probably more. Those were her own kind, and she watched them slaughter each other to settle someone else’s quarrel without a second thought!
But then, her reaction when Dyran chose some poor, hapless victim to torture – to feel joy that the victim was someone else –
The dragon forced herself to calm down, closing her mind to the human’s for a moment, telling herself that it didn’t really matter. These weren’t the Kin; they were Outsiders. It shouldn’t matter what they did to each other or what was done to them.
Yet she was utterly disgusted by the way the woman had let herself be manipulated, geas or not. The human was intelligent, she saw what was happening, and Alara guessed that she had come very close to breaking her own geas a time or two. Yet nothing of what she saw mattered to her; only her own well-being, her luxurious life. Perhaps at one time she would have felt something – but that time had vanished with her childhood.
Even freedom didn’t matter to her. Only pleasure.
I really should just abandon her here to die, Alara thought, feeling as if she had bitten into something rotten. She didn’t owe the woman anything. She wasn’t of the Kin. She wasn’t even worth saving. Alara could almost agree with the elvenkind about these humans, how base they were, how much they really deserved to be slaves. She could at least agree with Dyran’s faction, anyway.
Alara had often discussed politics in her guise as a low-ranking elven lord, or had them discussed in her presence as a human slave. Having served as an elven page for several Council sessions, and eavesdropped in many ways and many forms on others, Alara knew considerably more about elven politics than Serina had ever learned, especially where the treatment of humans was concerned. Oddly enough, for all his cruelty, Dyran was one of the better masters. The Council faction he headed held that humans were something – slightly – more than brute beasts. He allowed his human slaves to rise as high as overseer, as he had Serina’s father. He obviously believed what his party used as their platform: that one could despise, or even pity one’s human slaves, but that there was potential there to be exploited. So long as human greed and elven magic held, humans could be allowed a bit of freedom on their leashes, and permitted to make decisions on their own. Such freedom was profitable to the master, after all – it meant that he needed fewer elven subordinates, whose loyalty might be in question, and whose interests were undeniably their own. The humans owed everything to their lords; the elves might well decide to seek greener pastures. Humans were simple in their greed; elven emotions were more complex and harder to manipulate, even for a master like Dyran.
From what Alara had gleaned, Dyran’s faction was slightly in the minority. The majority of the Council were of the other party; the party that felt that the humans were dangerous, near-rabid creatures, unpredictable and uncontrollable. That every human should be kept under guard, with the strictest kind of supervision; coerced into their duties, with that coercion aided by magic whenever possible. And that those humans that showed any signs of independent thought must be destroyed before they contaminated the rest.
Predictably enough, Dyran’s faction contained most of the younger elves, who looked upon the survivors of the Wizard War as reactionary old fools, frightened by an uprising that could never recur into watching their very shadows.
But
