Elvenborn (38 page)

"I am not," he replied into the silence, "Lashana's lover. We are friends, and she has been relying upon my experience on my father's estate to help her handle you unruly lot. Even if that were true, it would have nothing to do with this situation and it would be none of your business so long as her foster mother ap¬proves. I am offended, Caellach Gwain. I do suggest that you confine your words to the issues at hand, or I will be tempted to challenge you."

Challenge him? What on earth does he mean by that? Shana

thought, bewildered. Caellach Gwain evidently knew, though, for he turned even whiter, and stammered an apology.

"The primary issue at hand," Lorryn said, when the old wiz¬ard was done, "is a greater one than just the presence of iron within the Citadel, or the number of people who are attending to tasks other than ... housekeeping." His bland expression gave no hint as to his own feelings on the subject, and although they were no secret to Shana, from the looks on the faces of Caellach's cronies, they were not sure if he was Shana's parti¬san or not. He might be courting her, but he was also an aristo¬crat, used to the attentions of hundreds of slaves, so shouldn't he be on their side? For that matter, he might only be using her to get the power of leadership himself—she saw that in the new speculation with which Caellach regarded him.

"Caellach Gwain," Lorryn continued, turning to the old wiz¬ard, "you have voiced your opinions often enough for the ears of your friends and supporters—I must insist that you allow everyone in the Citadel to hear them."

Caellach stared at him; tried without success to stare him down. His expression remained inscrutable. "As moderator, I will not be questioning either of you. Instead, you will answer questions from everyone except me. I will see to it that there are no interruptions and that you both have a fair chance to be heard."

What? That took Shana completely by surprise, and she felt seriously shaken. What on earth was he after? Surely the Old Whiners would try to make her look a fool—

But it was too late to back out now, for either of them, as Lorryn fielded those who wanted a chance and selected one of Caellach's cronies for the first question.

"You were the one that brought the Elvenlords down on us in the first place, girl, so what've you got to say for yourself?" shouted the old man, who practically trembled with eagerness to finally have a chance to confront her in front of witnesses. "If it hadn't been for you and your pretensions of being some mythical Elvenbane, we'd still all be back in the Citadel and comfortable!"

Think! Don't react, think! "I never called myself the Elven-

bane," she retorted, throttling down panic and irritation that mingled uncomfortably, setting her insides topsy-turvy. "I never even heard of the Elvenbane until after I was brought to the Citadel. And besides, it was the dragons that made the El¬venbane up in the first place, not me!" She caught sight of Fa¬ther Dragon back in the crowd, in his halfblood-shape. "Right, Kalamadea?"

Gazes followed hers, and several of the more wary, elderly wizards who found the dragons as uncanny as Caellach did cleared away from him. Father Dragon cleared his throat mod¬estly. "Well, it was mostly my doing," he admitted. "But yes. We dragons created the legend of the Elvenbane, and we were just as surprised as the rest of you when the legend came to life." He warmed to his subject. "We believe, we dragonkin, that certain creatures are endowed at birth with great hamen-leai, which is the power to become Fate rather than to be steered by it, and I tell you all now, Lashana, even as an infant, showed such tremendous hamenleai that even if she had been raised by alicorns in the wilderness, the legend would have fit¬ted itself around her. Every dragon acknowledges that now, whether or not they count her as a friend. Where she walks, great change will follow."

That was not what Shana had hoped he would say—nothing like it, in fact—but she gamely took up where she had left off. "As for all of you still being in the Citadel, I don't think you would have lasted undetected for much longer. You were taking too many risks. Someone would have found out why goods and supplies were vanishing and where they were going, if nothing else. The Elvenlords were already starting to wonder about that even before I joined you."

"Didn't I say that was too risky?" said a wizened old scrap of a wizard, before he was hushed. Lorryn had already signaled someone else to ask a question, and Shana felt her heart sink as she surveyed the faces around her. She had felt, and sounded, weak and uncertain. She hadn't convinced anyone, and Father Dragon hadn't helped.

"What makes you think you're better than any of the rest of us at leading?" shouted someone from the back. "Both of you!"

"I don't," Shana replied promptly, but Caellach was already swelling with self-importance and ran right over the top of her.

"I have decades of experience, not to mention intelligence and wisdom," he boasted, "which is far more than this impu¬dent little girl can claim. I do not make impetuous decisions, and I do not rush to embrace something just because it is novel and new. There is no doubt in my mind that the situation here is well on the way to becoming intolerable, between these foolish innovations in magic and dangerous liaisons with barbaric wild humans, not to mention creatures that aren't even human. The young should serve their elders, not dictate absurd rules to them! They should be thrilled to trade their service for the wis¬dom that we have gathered!" He warmed to his subject, sur¬rounded as he was by his own nodding supporters, paying no attention at all to the expressions of some of those who were farthest away. "What should we Wizards have to do with hu¬mans, anyway—except in that they, too, should be eager to serve us! We are more powerful, we are longer-lived and have the opportunity to garner far more experience than what can be learned in the few years these mayfly humans enjoy. It is clear that we are far superior in every way—and this girl, this child, thinks that we are to treat them as equals! Never! I will never tolerate treating such debased creatures, creatures who should be competing in devotion to me, as my equals!"

An actual growl arose from the humans who made up the bulk of the crowd—perhaps few of them had ever realized just how deeply Caellach's prejudices went, nor how poisonous they were. At that moment Shana realized Lorryn's tactics in al¬lowing this convocation to take place in the way it had, for he had permitted Caellach full freedom to say whatever he chose with his followers around him, and the old wizard's mouth had run away with him.

"Debased creatures, are we?" came an angry shout from one of the carters who had brought the last batch of iron ingots up from the mine. "I'd like to see you try your hand at a little hon¬est work, you soft white worm!"

"You can just fetch and carry for yourself from now on!" came another, disgusted voice, along with a chorus of similar

sentiments. Even some of the children that Caellach had cowed into obeying his demands took heart from the sentiments of their elders, and added their shrill voices to the rest.

Caellach and the others woke to their danger, but consider¬ably too late for any retraction. They gathered in a knot around Caellach and it became painfully clear to them how tiny a mi¬nority they formed, as a sea of angry faces surrounded them. Shana and her shortcomings were quite forgotten.

Lorryn allowed them enough time to really begin to frighten Caellach, before using a little touch of magic to amplify his voice so that it carried over the noise of what was fast becoming a mob.

"Friends!" he boomed. "Quiet! Please!"

Surprise silenced all the voices for the moment—just long enough for one single voice, the voice of her foster mother Alara, to be heard.

"Shana, the objections seem to be to all of the changes," Alara said, in the first reasoned voice Shana had heard in the last few moments. "And you really were the author of most of them. So what have you to say about the objections?"

"If you don't change," she said, very slowly, choosing each word as carefully as if she picked her way across a treacherous swamp. "I think you become just like the Elvenlords."

That brought true silence, in which even the sighing of the breeze in their clearing seemed loud. It was a silence that begged for an explanation and drew further words, however un¬willingly, out of her.

"They haven't changed, not since they conquered this place, and maybe not even in longer than that," she continued. "They assume that they're the proper lords of the universe and that nothing they want or think or do can be wrong—no matter how many times things happen that prove that they are wrong. When you don't change, you get brittle, and the next thing that hits you will break you."

She looked past the faces of her own friends, out to the hu¬mans, in whose eyes smoldered resentment for all Wizards now, even her. "Changing means that we can't sit in our Citadel

and think we're superior to anything just because we can do some things well. Don't you see?" She fumbled a little. "We all need each other. Oh, I can bring in a live sheep from the hills with magic, but I don't have the first idea of how to take clay and make a watertight cup, and let's face it, if I'm thirsty, I need that cup, and the person who can make it is superior to me at that moment! Don't you see?" she pleaded. "I never wanted to be a leader, but—I don't know, maybe Kalamadea is right and hamenleai has something to do with it and I just can see that we all need to change and we all need each other if we are going to survive—and maybe, if they'll learn to change a little, we even need—them—"

She gestured helplessly at Caellach and his friends, unable to put what she wanted to show them into words—the great puz¬zle that she saw in her mind that somehow had places for all of them to fit into.

But evidently, although there was some puzzlement out there, she got part of her point across. The resentment and anger had faded, and although there were grimaces at the thought of including Caellach and his ilk back into the fold, there seemed to be acceptance of the idea, too.

Then came the thing she hadn't expected—

"It's hard on an old man, all this changing," said one of Cael-lach's cronies plaintively. "It's hard, girl. You go along with your life all even, then suddenly it's all upset—but—"

He took a deep breath, and shuffled across the space be¬tween Caellach's crowd and the rest of the convocation. He looked up at her, and heaved a sigh. "I hate all of this uncom-fortableness and having to do without," he continued, half in complaint, half in resignation, "but I'd rather stand with you than against you. Just don't ask too much all at once of an old, tired man, will you?"

She got down off her slice of tree-trunk and offered her hand. He took it, and that was the beginning of the end. In ones and twos, the rest of Caellach's followers came over to her side, al¬though most of them just tried to blend back into the crowd and didn't actually come to stand with her. It didn't matter; they'd

abandoned Caellach. Even if they didn't entirely agree with her, even if they were still going to argue and grumble, they'd abandoned their leader and they had opened themselves up to the possibility of change.

It was enough. For now, it was enough.

21

Rena took her place on the carpet next to Mero in Diric's tent. The flaps were rolled knee-high, and scrims of loosely woven linen kept bugs out while allowing a breeze to flow through. It was dinnertime, a meal much en¬livened these days by the addition of vegetables supplied by trading and the gardens that the Corn People were growing, as well as by the changed herbs provided by Rena herself. Dinner, shared with Diric and Kala, was a more-than-pleasant meal, now that the first lot of crude iron ingots had arrived from the Citadel. Once again, Diric's star was in the ascendant, so far as his people were concerned; and he had lost that worried frown. Kala was just as pleased and far more open about it. After all, the Iron People now had everything they needed—iron, good grazing and water, and even the remains of their old allies, the Corn People, to settle in somewhere nearby and commence the farming that they would not or could not do.

Rena and Mero were reaping the benefits as well; as the rep¬resentatives of the Wizards, everyone with a forge wanted to know what they knew about possible future production, and there were no few folks who wanted to see if they could some¬how ease to the head of the queue waiting for the next ship¬ment. The Trader clans were a little discomfited to find that they were no longer the only source of iron, but they'd gotten over it, particularly now that the women among the Iron People had be¬gun to experiment with faceting the fool's gold and polishing

yet another form of mineral with a high iron content that the Traders had brought in. Both made fine "gems" for setting, the new "oil-iron" in particular having a lovely liquid-black sheen to it that looked wonderful in blackened-iron filigree. So now the women had more material for their tiny jewelry workshops than they'd ever had before and the new materials had brought on a spate of creativity that had even the men intrigued and hovering over the women's work, trying to reckon how they could coax their mates, mothers, sisters, and friends to produce some of the new work for them. Diric already sported leather arm-guards inlaid with iron settings that held large oil-iron cabochons, courtesy of Kala's hands, and she was working on a matching collar as well. He was setting something of a fashion, much to Rena's silent amusement and Kala's open glee.

It seemed an auspicious time for Rena to see about some¬thing she had been planning for a while.

Kala brought in plates of flatbread, broiled meat, thinly sliced vegetables, and bowls of soured cream. The Iron People could now enjoy one of their favorite meals—flatbread rolled around spiced meat strips and vegetables, garnished with dol¬lops of cream. Rena and Mero had come to enjoy these as much as their hosts, and Mero quickly made himself a roll as soon as Kala set the platters on the carpet before them.