“I didn’t know you could do that with anything other than plants,” he said in surprise.
She shrugged. “Neither did I until just a moment ago.”
He felt his eyebrows rising. With every day that passed, she offered yet another surprise. Now she was trying her magic on something that was no longer alive—and making it work. What would she be able to do in a month?
Enough, perhaps, for them to win free of these people?
It could be. After all that they had been through so far, he was not willing to put any limitations on her potential abilities anymore.
He managed to muster up the energy to work the spell of tongues on Rena after a short nap, before anyone looked in on them. That was just as well, for immediately after they broke their fast, another young Priest arrived to bring them to the Chief Priest for another round of intense questioning. This time he concentrated as much of his attention on Rena as he did on Lorryn, pretty much dividing his questions equally between the two of them.
Not that this proved to make things any easier, at least for Lorryn. He was constantly worrying that Rena would say something wrong—not that he would know what was wrong or right! But the Priest—who finally introduced himself, belatedly, as “Diric”—was far more intent on learning what she knew about the wizards than about anything else.
Finally, after hours and hours of this interrogation, Diric dismissed them into the cool of the early evening. “Do not speak to anyone else, particularly not the prisoners,” he cautioned sternly. “Be polite to any of my folk who speak to you, but answer to questions only that Diric has not given you leave to speak. Otherwise you may go about the camp and observe whatever you choose.”
He did not insult their intelligence by ordering them not to try to escape; that was obvious. It was equally obvious, at least to Lorryn, that any attempt to use magic against the Iron People would be as futile as his own attempts at reading their thoughts. Obviously if magic could have gotten anyone free around here, neither the two elves nor the four wizards would still be captives.
He and Rena wandered about the camp, simply observing things, for the rest of the evening. No one stopped them or gave them orders to go elsewhere, and people seemed quite willing to talk to them and answer their questions. Lorryn found himself fascinated in spite of their obvious danger; he had never seen anyone who lived as these people did.
Their entire way of life revolved around their cattle. Fully half their food came from the cattle themselves; what Lorryn had thought was wool felt that made the tents proved to come from the carefully husbanded winter hair the cattle shed in the spring. While they might call themselves the “Iron People,” they could with justification have referred to themselves as the “Leather People”; Lorryn had never seen anyone use leather in so many ways and for so many purposes. Often what he had taken for woven fabric turned out to be supple leather, thin and fluid as any woven goods, and cleverly dyed and embroidered to resemble cloth.
They had cloth as well, but Rena learned by asking a woman who was busy redyeing a faded shirt over a pot on the fire that it was all obtained by trade. “We have had no trade, and no new cloth, for many moons,” the woman said sadly, stirring the dye-pot with a stick. “We are not poor, but we must husband our cloth as if we were the poorest Clan among the People! It is a sad thing.”
They walked on through the warm evening breeze, the sharp scent of the dye following them.
Their next campfire proved to belong to some of the warriors—and there was a single woman among them, a woman who wore virtually the same garments and armor as a man, and who was treated exactly as another man. There he learned what the “Man-Hearted Women” were that Diric had obliquely referred to, for she was one of them—women who took vows to forgo marriage and children in order to join the warriors’ society. There were not many of them, and it was often difficult to pick them out from the young men, so hardened were they by their intense training. The term seemed to refer, not to their courage, but to the fact that their hearts chose a way otherwise reserved for men.
Were there such things as “Woman-Hearted Men”? When he asked that question, the answer was a matter-of-fact “Of course—but I doubt you could tell them from maidens.”
He also learned that the smiths were as honored among these people as the warriors—although there had been no metal for the smiths to forge for some time, a fact that made all the people restless and a bit uneasy. Their god was the First Smith, after all, who had given to humans fire and the knowledge of metalcraft. To be unable to worship this god by working in metal was unsettling to everyone in the encampment. So the Iron People were suffering many deprivations besides that of new cloth.
Although women could be smiths as readily as men, there were again differences in what they wrought, based on their sex. Men tended to concentrate on arms and armor—women on the iron jewelry that both sexes wore. Men’s jewelry was utilitarian and based on armor—wrist cuffs, torques, headbands, belts, and ankle cuffs. Women’s jewelry, however, though also of iron, was the most amazing stuff Lorryn had ever seen. As delicate as black lace, the filigree-work done by the women smiths would have attracted the envy of any elven crafter. It was sophisticated and lovely, and it would not have been at all difficult to start a fad for the jewelry among not only the elven ladies, but among their lords as well.
The sound of distant music caught both his attention and Rena’s; they followed their ears to the tent where the music originated, and that was where they discovered why the Iron People had kept a pair of elven captives in the first place.
After the initial shock wore off, and the initial feeling of smug self-satisfaction at the fate of two who would in another time and place have been his enemies, he was reduced to feeling an odd sort of pity for them. Both of them were hardly more than caricatures of what they must have been when they’d first been captured. Neither could survive in his own society anymore, even if they somehow won free. It was impossible to feel anything but pity for them.
But as he and Rena returned to the relative security of their own tent, he wondered how long he would have for the luxury of pity for anyone but himself.
For Keman, the arrival of the new humans that their captors called “the Corn People” was only the second surprise of the day. The first was something he had not even told Kalamadea about, because he was not certain what it meant, nor what he was going to do about it.
One of the pack-beasts, oxen trained to carry enormous loads on their backs, had a dragon-shadow.
Back in the long-ago time before he and Shana had any notion that elves or humans existed, Shana had showed him how he could look for a dragon shape-shifted into something else by a kind of “shadow” it had, a wisp of form that showed its true nature. The more of its mass a dragon had shifted into the Out, the stronger the “shadow” would be, although as far as he knew, only he, his mother, Alara, and Shana knew how to spot those shadows. You had to know what you were looking for, then be looking at the right time to see it. It wasn’t like breaking an illusion, which only needed disbelief.
He was rather fascinated with the variety of livestock the Iron People had bred for their uses, taking the place of beef and milk cattle, horses, donkeys, and grels. He had taken to watching the herds, idly trying to spot something new. This morning he had been looking over the pack-beasts, a variety of short-horned, broad-backed cattle with stout legs and placid tempers, when one of them caught his attention, perhaps because it moved just a little differently from the rest.
That was when he spotted the other difference; a dragon-shadow.
Certain that he was somehow mistaken—or that the circumstances of their captivity were doing something to his mind—he watched that particular animal all morning, right up until Shana called him after her session with Diric for their little meeting.
He returned to that herd, looking for it, as soon as the meeting was over. It was still there, and it still had a dragon-shadow.
He sat down to watch it while the afternoon sun crawled across the sky and headed for the horizon, oblivious to the heat, to the flies that came to drink his sweat and went away disappointed. He watched it from the best vantage points he could manage, moving with the herd until he was certain it did not act like the others.