Lorryn shook his head violently at that. “Sir, forgive me, but you have no idea what the really powerful elven lords can do!” he exclaimed urgently. “Please, believe me, if your people come up against them directly, you might kill some of their human soldiers, but you’ll never get near one of them! Even without being able to use magic against you directly, there is plenty they can do! They can open chasms up under your feet to swallow your warriors, they can—”
Diric held up a hand, forestalling him. “You speak to one who is already convinced, young one,” he said softly. “I know this, as well as one can who has never actually seen such things with his own eyes. It is Jamal who must he convinced, and it is Jamal who never will be convinced save by a slaughter of our clan.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?” Shana asked, only too well aware of how helpless they were. “You didn’t bring the two of us here in the middle of the night to tell us that you can’t let us escape and you know Jamal is leading your people into a war they can’t win.”
Diric gave her an approving glance. “No, indeed, I did not,” he said easily. “I brought you here to include you in my—conspiracy, if you will. Or to be included in your own wish to see you free. I wish to have a trade alliance with your people. I wish to avoid a conflict with the demons. Each springs from the other—so I believe we need to begin our discussion with thoughts on how we may engineer your escape.”
For the second time in the past few moments, Shana felt faint with relief. She concentrated on the spicy scent of the incense-laden air, of the texture of the soft fabric under her hands, of her own weight resting on the cushion to steady herself.
“We’ll need to work this out in such a way that no blame falls on you, obviously,” Lorryn said, while she was still recovering.
She snapped herself out of her dizziness at that. “More importantly—if we want to throw some immediate doubt on the wisdom of Jamal’s war plans, shouldn’t we make it look as if the escape was easy for us?” she added. “Shouldn’t we make it look as if we could have gotten up and walked out of here any time we pleased, and we chose not to?”
Diric blinked, as if her words surprised him, and he nodded. “That would be a very good thing to have happen,” he replied solemnly. “A very, very good thing indeed. It would discredit Jamal’s assumptions of our superior powers; discredit anything so fundamental to the heart of his power and we might begin to weaken it”
Lorryn’s brows knitted. “Can I assume you can’t offer us much in the way of overt help?” he hazarded.
Diric nodded, which didn’t surprise Shana particularly.
“Covert help, then,” she suggested. “The key to these damned collars, for instance? They are interfering with some of our powers, and if we want to make it look as if they have no effect on us, you’d better give us a way to get rid of them so we can act.”
Diric considered that for a moment. “I do not have the key,” he said, after a moment, then smiled. “But I am a smith, after all. I believe I can either make a key, or pick the locks and jam them, so that the collars look functional but can be removed at your will. Is that sufficient?”
“That will do,” she said with satisfaction. “We’ll also need to get Lorryn to us covertly, so that he can learn to use wizard magics to their fullest. Mero and I know some tricks I’m sure he never picked up on his own.”
To her pleasure, Lorryn gave her a half-bow. “I never doubted that,” he replied. “The best I can manage is elven magic, and thought-reading. I may have some elven-learning that may prove new to you, however. I have been well schooled in those powers. I lived as Lord Tylar’s acknowledged son and heir until a few short weeks ago, after all, and I have all the training of an elven son.”
Shana felt her eyebrows shooting so high, her forehead cramped. “Now, that is a story I’d like to hear!” she exclaimed.
“And so you shall, but no more this night,” Diric interrupted. Now he yawned. “These words of yours have stilled some of my anxieties, and now my own body is demanding the rest I denied it.”
Shana tried to hold back her own yawn, and failed; when Lorryn added his, it was obvious that none of them were going to be able to work or speak with unclouded minds.
“I shall devise a meeting for you and yours, Shana, and Lorryn and his sister,” Diric promised. “And I think—I think I shall facilitate that by granting the Corn People a great honor in the morning.”
He arched a brow at Lorryn, who smiled, and asked the expected question. “And what honor will that be. Iron Priest?”
“Why, I shall invite you to be of my household and share my tent,” Diric replied. “And you, of course, will agree immediately, conscious of the enormity of the honor and the protection my rank will give you.”
“Of course,” Lorryn said, with an ironic bow. “And being as we are only Com People, not warriors, with nothing of value to Jamal, he will see this as no more than your desperate scrambling for a success to equal his taking of four green-eyed demons as prisoners.”
Diric grinned broadly, his white teeth shining in the darkness of his face. He motioned to them to rise, and did so himself. Shana heard his joints popping as he did so, and wondered, not for the first time, just how old he was. “Why, I could almost believe you to be as crafty as an Iron Priest yourself, oh wizard.”
“And I,” Lorryn said, with a chuckle that Shana echoed as they both stood to leave, “could almost believe you to be as crafty as a halfblood, oh Priest!”
Myre flew lazy circles in the sky above the encampment full of those strange, black-skinned people, and watched everything that was going on below her. It was no great task to sharpen her eyesight until an eagle would be myopic by comparison; though she flew so high that she was scarcely visible even as a dot to those below her, she could count the rings on a woman’s fingers, the number of rattles on a baby’s toy.
And after dark, there would be one more warrior prowling the pathways between the tents. It was easy enough to counterfeit the iron jewelry so long as it didn’t need to bear close inspection or the light of day.
She had learned a great deal this way. Not as much as she had in the elven trade-cities, however.
She’d been dividing her time between the wizards’ Citadel, generally disguised as a rock formation in Caellach Gwain’s favorite cavern for meeting with his band of conspirators, and the trade-cities in several guises, all of them rather clever. But the best and most entertaining spying she’d done had come when she chose another shape and another household to infiltrate: that of a male slave in the house of Rena’s would-be husband.
She stayed there longer than she would have liked—but what she learned made up for the danger.
From there she once again took wing and returned to the new Citadel of the wizards. It was easy enough to slip into the cave complex and hide herself among the rocks of the unfinished portions to eavesdrop. That, too, took longer than she wished, but was well rewarded.
She learned that Shana and Keman were not with the wizards; she learned what direction they had gone in. That was how she had found them; following their track to its logical conclusion.
And she learned firsthand that the wizards themselves were spending far too much time debating who should be in charge, and far too little time on their own defenses.
Nothing that she had learned was going to be pleasant news for her big brother, now that she had found him, but she intended to deliver that news at a particularly bad time for him…
She was watching one tent in particular, there was someone in it that she wished to have a chat with.
There. Good. As she had hoped, Jamal strode out of his tent with a stiff-legged gait that bespoke a fair amount of temper held firmly in check. When he was in a temper, he always went out hunting, and he always went alone.
As she had seen before, he paused only long enough to collect his bow and arrows from the weapons rack in its shelter at the side of the wagon, and strode out of the encampment. No one ventured to stop him; everyone knew what he was like in this state, and no one wanted him to vent that temper on anything other than a few wild beasts.