He studied the two new demons; they looked back at him boldly, making no pretense but that they in turn were studying him. There were two of them, a male and a female, and he was told by his whispering acolyte that there were two more males back in the prisoners’ wagon.
Interesting that one was a female; even more interesting that they did not seem to be quite the same breed as the original two. They were darker for one thing; the skins of Haldor and Kelyan remained white as a dead fish’s belly no matter how much sun beat down upon them. They were not nearly so frail-looking, for another; their hair was of colors, and not like hanks of bleached linen fibers. The female’s, a brilliant scarlet, was clearly the envy of many of the unmated women in the gather-tent. The male’s was a proper dark color, although it hung sadly straight and did not wind tightly in proper curls.
Then again, the Corn People were said to be as pale and colorless as the corn they grew. Could these new demons be only half-demon? Could the demons have mated with Corn People to produce these creatures?
“Odd, the female’s hair,” he muttered to Haja, the acolyte. “I have never seen hair of that color.”
“They claim they are not demons at all, but creatures of another sort,” Haja replied softly. “Our demons say that this is the truth; in fact, Kelyan was quite argumentative about it, and Haldor was clearly insulted by the very notion. I do not recall them ever reacting so strongly to anything before.”
Diric raised an eyebrow. There would be no advantage that he could see for Kelyan to claim that these creatures were something other than his own kind. Interesting.
“Are they to be housed permanently with the others?” he asked, taking care that his voice did not carry beyond Haja’s ears.
“So I have been told,” the acolyte replied. “It seems logical. Two of them did not fare well, walking behind a wagon. There is no reason to kill them with exhaustion when they make such good trophies, but equally no reason to house them separately from the other two. Kelyan and Haldor have made not one successful attempt at escape, and Jamal does not think that the addition of four more demons will make escape any more likely.”
Much as he hated to admit it, Jamal was probably right. If Magic-Metal and Mind-Wall had held the demons until now, it should keep holding them.
“I believe I will speak with them myself,” he told his acolyte. ‘Tomorrow, while we are on the march. See to it.”
Haja bowed slightly. “There should be no difficulty,” he replied.
Diric smiled slightly. “And see to it that Jamal does not hear of it,” he added. “At least not until after the fact.”
Haja’s eyes widened just a trifle, and so did his smile. The acolyte had been trying to warn Diric for many moons now that Jamal was too clever, too ambitious, and Diric had apparently dismissed his warnings. In actuality, Diric had given them some thought, but he had not yet been convinced that Jamal was a real hazard.
“Yes,” he said softly, as Haja nodded imperceptibly in Jamal’s direction. “I believe that our War Chief may be harboring other thoughts—thoughts that the First Smith might not approve of. The time may be coming when actions should be taken. I will meditate upon the subject.”
Haja nodded.
“In the meantime,” Diric concluded, sitting back on his own cushions with an air of relaxation he in no way felt, “you might go a-scouting yourself, and see if there are other demons where these sprung from—or perhaps a sign of our ancient allies, the Com People. This would be Priestly business, of course. It would be better if the War Chief were not to hear of things wherein he has no lawful concern.”
“Such as the questioning of demons?” Haja asked, with a smile. “And the scouting for Corn People? After all, demons are rightly the business of the Priests, and the Corn People are only legend, which is also the business of the Priests.”
“Exactly so,” Diric told him. “Exactly so.”
Myre circled above the wooded hills, too high in the sky for anyone below to see her real shape, and fumed as she circled. No sign, not one single sign, of Lorryn and Rena—and she had only herself to blame that they had eluded her. She was the one who had suggested escaping by water.
When the boat lurched forward so unexpectedly and threw her out, she had been so stunned by the shock and the impact that she didn’t even react to save herself until it was well out of sight. Then, and only then, did the shouts and arrows of the elves on the bank awaken her to the fact that she was in a certain amount of danger, as the current carried her downstream.
She reacted immediately; she took a deep breath, dove under the water to escape the arrows falling around her, and shifted once she was there into the form of a huge whisker-fish. Once safely in a form that could breathe water rather than air, she set out in hot pursuit with great, driving thrusts of her tail.
But that boat had been much faster than any fish that ever swam. She didn’t catch up to it for more than a day, and by the time she found it, a bare hour ahead of an elven pursuit party, it was drifting and empty. There was no sign of where it might have gone ashore—if there ever had been, the rain had wiped such traces out completely.
She made a guess, then, and took to the skies. But that had not been a particularly clever move, either.
She was used to the barren, scrub-covered hills around the Lairs, not these hills with trees so thick, you could not see the ground beneath them! Why, even a dragon in his proper form could skulk for furlongs beneath these trees and never fear being spotted from above!
Still she circled, for days, hoping for a stroke of luck, the betraying smoke from a campfire, a single track of a shod foot in the mud of a stream bank. But every sign proved to be made either by lone hunters, or by more searchers sent to recapture Lorryn and his sister, and her temper frayed and snapped a dozen times over. She managed to assuage some of her rage in hunting—alicorns were particularly thick here, and it was almost as satisfactory to break their necks as it would have been to snap the neck of that fool, Lorryn—
In desperation, although she was certain that the two soft, pampered creatures could not possibly have gotten beyond the immediate vicinity of the river, she increased her range. She saw nothing, nothing whatsoever, except for a group of ragged humans making their way along the river in crude boats. Whatever they were, those humans were not wizards, and Myre doubted that either Rena or Lorryn would even have attempted contact with them.
Assuming the humans themselves permitted such contact. If they were wild humans, uncollared, then they certainly must fear the elves. Neither child was woods-wise enough to hide an approach from feral humans who were used to living in these forsaken forests. It was far more likely that these humans would evade the two runaways before Lorryn and his sister even guessed they were there.
Still, perhaps she should take a closer look at them. She circled again, noting those same humans putting in at a point along the bank. No sign of alarm there; not a chance they had encountered the fugitives.
She ground her teeth together in fruitless rage.
She might as well admit it. She had lost them. And with them had gone her chance for her own captive wizard. She had been so certain that she was in complete control of the escape that she had not anticipated that Lorryn might do something unexpected, and now, thanks to that carelessness, she had lost them.
She happened to look down at just that moment—and even to an idle eye, it was obvious that the little party of humans had suddenly and inexplicably doubled.
Now what was this?
Her rage evaporated, and she sharpened her gaze, focusing in on the group below. No—the humans had not multiplied. They had been joined by another group, much better clad—
Myre’s wingbeats faltered for a moment, as she caught sight of forms much like Shana’s. Pointed ears—but dark complexions and hair in more colors than pale blond. These were no humans—these were wizards I She had found the missing wizards!
And where the wizards were—so were the renegade dragons.
Quickly she spiraled up, until she reached a space above the clouds, so high that the air was thin and hard to breathe, and ice crystals formed on the tips of her wings.