“Well, Elvenbane, how does the business of being a hero set with you?”
Shana released the hawk’s mind, turned away from the hawk itself, and frowned at the great dragon Kalamadea, who was currently shifted into the form of a crinkle-faced old halfblood wizard. In this form, he had the bright green eyes and pointed ears of a presumed elven parent, but the coarser features, weathered skin, and gray hair that would have come from a human mother. “Father Dragon, I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she said, crossly. “I don’t like it.”
“Why not?” Kalamadea replied, sitting down beside her, on the ridge of rock that crowned this hillside. “It suits you—or you suit it.”
“What? Hero or ‘Elvenbane’? I don’t like either of them,” she replied, turning her gaze back toward the sky, searching for that hawk again. “I don’t like being called Elvenbane because I don’t want people to—to look at me as if I was some sort of icon of destiny. I’m me, plain, ordinary, Lashana, and I can’t help it if some people seem to think I match a crazy legend that you dragons made up in the first place! There are plenty of people who could be made to fit that particular legend, anyway! Why not call Shadow the Elvenbane? Or Zed, or even Denelor?”
“But you are the only one who actually instigated and led a revolt against the elven masters, to the betterment of at least a few fully human slaves,” Kalamadea replied roguishly, tugging a lock of her long hair playfully. “And the only one who brought the dragons to help her!”
“Oh, please” she groaned, giving up the search. “If I hadn’t done something, you would have found a way to interfere again, and you would have led the others to help the wizards, somehow. You know you would have!”
“Would I?” was Kalamadea’s only reply. “But I am no hero, Shana.”
“And neither am I,” she said stubbornly. Then, with a heavy sigh, added, “And I’m no leader either. I wish I was. I wish I’d been trained for this, handling people. I hate to have to put all my trust in Parth Agon after the way he tried to use me, but at least he knows how to make people do what he wants them to do. People are used to thinking of him as the Senior Wizard anyway; often as not, they just obey him without thinking twice about it. They don’t listen to me. Oh, they say I’m their leader, but I can’t even get them to see sense when it’s right in front of their noses. Look how I managed to find them the best site in the whole world, a huge cave complex, above a river in a rich valley, and still they have to argue about building the new Citadel here! And that Caellach Gwain is not helping matters at all.”
“You do better than you think you do—” Kalamadea began, when he stopped in midsentence. Shana followed his gaze, catching sight of a dragon—in full, impressive draconic form—and his halfblood rider, kiting up the slope of the hill below where they sat, riding a rising thermal just above tree-top level. “Ah,” he said, squinting into the bright sunlight. “Your foster brother and your young friend, I think. There must be word from the rest of the wizards.”
A good guess, since the dragon was smallish by draconic standards, and bright blue, and the rider no larger than Shana herself. They glided up the slope swiftly, and, with a thunder of wings and a wind that blew bits of grass into the air, landed beside Kalamadea and Shana in the clearing along the top of the ridge.
The slight, dark-haired rider tumbled off of the blue dragon’s back quickly enough—dragon-riding, as Shana knew well from experience, was far from comfortable—and joined the two of them as the dragon shifted shape into wizard-form to take up less space. Shana averted her eyes while Keman took his new shape, that of a short, brown-haired, muscular young halfblood; the peculiar rippling and changing that accompanied the transformation always made her stomach queasy if she watched too closely.
“I have good news and bad news,” Mero announced, as he got within easy conversational distance, close enough for the emerald eyes and barely pointed ears that marked him as a halfblood to be clearly visible. “The good news is that even Caellach has finally accepted the caves as the best site for the new Citadel; Keman found a spring at the back of the complex, and brought the water up through the floor. With a constant source of fresh water right in the heart of our holding, there’s no reason to look anywhere else for a home.”
“And the bad news?” Shana asked, knowing from the tiny quirk of Shadow’s mouth as he tossed his long hair out of his eyes that it was likely to be more humorous than truly “bad.”
“The bad news is that the only place he could bring it up into was that group of caves you wanted for your own lair,” Mero told her, the quirk turning into a grin that displayed a strong set of fine, white teeth. “Sorry about that; it’s now all underwater. Very cold water, I might add.”
She groaned, but only halfheartedly. The complex of caves she and the other three had found here was vast enough that there were plenty of other choices for everyone, and still the caves would not be more than a tenth occupied, dragons, wizards, former human slaves, and all. And even though it was a great deal closer to the elves than Shana really liked, it was well outside the borders of any lands the elves actually held under control.
If it hadn’t been for the dragons, though, the caves would have been a very poor choice for a new home. Wizards though the halfbloods were, they could not bring water where there was none, nor could they shape rock with anything other than physical tools and their hands. Their magics were of illusion, of attack and defense, of the ability to move objects or people, and very occasionally, of the ability to create something. If they had been searching for a new home without the dragons, they would have had to build everything on their own, and unmodified caves made for damp and often hazardous dwellings. And everyone agreed that the new Citadel should have an internal water source, for obvious reasons.
After centuries of living in the comfort of the Citadel the first wizards built, they were not prepared to use either their hands or tools, 1 expect, Shana reflected, and not for the first rime. Before she turned their world upside down, the wizards had lived a life of relative luxury and indolence. Anything they needed, they had used their magic to steal from the elves. The Citadel was already built, and built to last—they had not even bothered to keep it repaired, and when something happened to make one room or suite of rooms uninhabitable, the wizard in question simply moved. There were dozens, hundreds, of rooms unused and unoccupied since the Wizard War. For those tedious little chores of cooking and cleaning, there were always the apprentices, halfblooded children spirited away by wizard-agents before they could be discovered and killed by their fathers and masters. That was the price of becoming a wizard: to pay for one’s apprenticeship by being the servant of an acknowledged wizard until the rest of the brotherhood accepted that you had mastered your powers. There were always plenty of apprentices; Denelor, Shana’s own master, hadn’t lifted a finger to clean his own quarters, even, for decades.
It hadn’t always been that way; when the wizards first banded together, there had only been the “experienced” and the “inexperienced”—there were no apprentices in service to masters. They had all worked side by side to create the Citadel in the first place, and then to engineer the revolt against the elven lords and free themselves and the human slaves.
Well, I certainly took can of that. Shana could not help but feel a certain grim satisfaction; for all that she really liked old Denelor, she had not much cared for playing servant to him, and there were plenty of other wizards who had taken shameless advantage of their situation. Now they would all be working side by side again, like it or not. The few humans—former slaves—that were with them now were mostly children, and even the hardest-hearted wizard would not put a child to that kind of work. Only an elven lord would be that cruel, to force little ones less than ten years old into the hard manual labor of an adult.
No, the caves would have been fit only for use as temporary shelter at best, if it hadn’t been for the dragons.
The dragons not only could shape rock with their magic, they enjoyed it. Keman had appointed himself to the search for water as soon as one of the older wizards had objected to that lack; the others would mold and shape the place to the liking of each individual and to their own uses now. The wizards themselves could devote their efforts to finding supplies of food, to furnishing their own quarters, and to working out a way to acquire the things they used to steal from the elves. In a few months, they would have a new headquarters that was better than the old Citadel. Certainly it would be more defensible.