Shana came running up with a collar in both hands; Kala followed at a slow and wary walk, with her pouch of tools at her side. The Priest’s wife paid no attention to Myre—all of her attention was on Keman. She was afraid; he knew that by the sweat on her forehead and the trembling of her hands. But she approached him even though she was afraid, proving that she was as brave as any person, two-legger or dragon, that he had ever seen.
“Put the collar around her neck, Shana,” he ordered aloud, forming his words in the tongue of the Iron People so that everyone could understand it. “Lock it there.”
She did so; he dropped Myre like the distasteful object she was and backed away a pace. Before Myre could even think to try to make a break for it, Shana seized her and wrestled her to the ground, sitting on her to keep her there.
Keman shifted again, concentrating not only on taking his halfblood form, but on healing the wounds that Myre had caused at the same time. It made the shift harder, but that didn’t matter; the freedom from pain as he took the final form made him faint with relief.
If anything, Kala’s eyes were even wider as she stared at him in his wizard-form.
“You could break the locks on our collars to keep them open, Kala,” he said, softly, so that only she could hear. “Can you jam them so that they can never open again, as well?”
She nodded, slowly; then, while Myre cursed and tried to throw Shana off, she turned and walked to Shana’s side. Motioning Shana aside to hold Myre’s legs, Kala solved the entire problem by sitting on Myre’s back and holding her head by the hair. Kala was not a light person; Myre’s face reflected that, as she suddenly turned very, very red.
“You will hold still, creature,” Kala said, slowly, and carefully, shaking the hair she held so that Myre winced. “Demon or monster, it matters not to me, for while you are in the form of a woman, and wear the collar, you will remain in the form of a woman, and there is no woman born I cannot deal with. If you do not hold still, I will not be responsible for what happens as I work. Some of my tools are very sharp.”
Myre froze, not daring to move a single muscle.
That was all that Kala needed, and she released her grip on Myre’s hair. Within moments, she had inserted one of her probes into the lock of the collar—jammed it into the mechanism, and snapped the tip off flush with the surface of the collar. Only then did she stand up, and allow Myre to clamber slowly and clumsily to her feet.
“No one will ever open that collar again,” Kala said quietly. “You will remove it only when you may find someone willing to cut it from your neck. That, too, will not be easy. You will not be able to remove it with magic, and it is tempered to resist the most determined cutter.”
“And while you’re wearing it, foolish one, you will find you are unable to shift, or to work any but the smallest of magics.” That was Kalamadea, coming up from the rear of the crowd. “I would not try, were I you. I am told that the effects are most unfortunate.”
The crowd parted suddenly; Diric marched up the middle of the empty space, followed by four of the Man-Hearted Women who had Jamal surrounded. He was not in chains, but from his demeanor he might as well have been. His shoulders were hunched, and he would not look at anything but the ground.
But Keman saw the fury in his eyes, though he tried to hide it. He was defeated, but he would never forget this defeat, and if he ever got a chance at revenge, it would be terrible.
All the reason never to give him a chance, then.
“While you did battle in the air, my champion,” Diric said to Keman, gravely, “I did battle on my own on the ground.”
He raised his voice. “Hear, oh my people, of the foolishness and the pride of your War Chief, who would risk your lives and the lives of your families that he might achieve a fleeting glory for himself!”
He began a highly edited version of everything that had happened since the wizards had been captured; Keman didn’t pay too much attention to his speech once he realized what the gist of it was going to be. Instead, he watched Myre, who, despite the warning, had evidently tried something a little more potent than anything he or Kalamadea had attempted while wearing their collars. She stifled a cry of pain, blanched a dead white, and the skin beneath the collar reddened and blistered.
He could have felt sorry for her, if he hadn’t still been so angry with her.
Lorryn was staring at her, though, with his mouth hanging wide open.
“What’s the matter?” Keman asked softly. “Why are you staring at my sister?”
“That—that’s my sister’s maid, the one that helped us escape,” he managed to stammer as he continued to stare. “But—wasn’t she a dragon a little bit ago?”
“She’s also my sister, and she’s been trying to kill Shana and anyone who was a friend of Shana since before the Wizard War,” Keman replied grimly. As Lorryn turned toward him, eyes wide with a thousand questions in them, he just shook his head. A great deal was becoming clear now, but it would all have to wait. “I’ll explain it all later; we have more important things to handle right now than her.”
He ground his teeth together, as Diric’s oration wound to its close, with the declaration that Jamal would be branded with the mark of a traitor and cast out from the Clan. “Right now,” he continued, “we have a war to prevent. If we still can!”
By the time night fell, Rena’s head was reeling; this was too much to take in, all at once! Her maid, her friend—or so she had thought—was really a dragon? That much she could accept, somehow, for Myre had known an awful lot about the dragons, more than she should have even if she were an agent of the wizards. But to discover that she was a bad dragon, one who’d meant mischief, not good, by helping them escape—
It shook her, and it hurt her. She’d had so few friends, and she’d thought that Myre was one of them, despite the differences between them. Hadn’t she gone out of her way to be kind to the girl? Hadn’t she told Myre all of her secrets? The stories and romances all talked about the pain of betrayal; well, now she knew what they meant! How could she trust anyone after this? For that matter, whom could she trust after this?
That was her initial reaction, as she tried to take in all of the changes and make some sense of them. But as the moments flew past and her mind began to work again, she had to admit to herself that in the larger scheme of things—her own hurt was a very little incident in light of the things that Myre had revealed. She had not heard the “voice in the mind” that her brother described, but Kalamadea, Shana,
Lorryn, Mero, and (oddly enough) Diric all had. The danger to the wizards in their new home was not on the horizon—yet—but it most certainly would be soon!
“You are free to go as soon as you want,” Diric was saying; once again, they were in his tent, but this time for comfort rather than secrecy. Jamal was already beginning his exile—Diric had not thought it a good idea to leave him within the Clan where he might manage access to Myre. A new War Chief had been appointed with Diric’s full approval. Myre languished in the prison tent with the two elves, for Keman had reckoned that leaving her in Diric’s custody was better than letting her wander around on her own. With the collar locked around her neck, she would certainly never be able to shift again. She might be able to escape, but where would she go? In her human form, that of the slave from Lord Tylar’s estates, she would be pathetically vulnerable. Without being able to work magic to defend herself, there were a hundred deaths she could meet with out in the wilderness; all of them unpleasant.
So for the moment at least, Myre was no longer a threat to anyone. Later? Well, Rena was not so sure. If it had been up to her, Myre would be locked away for the rest of her life in a very deep, dark place, with food and water lowered to her on a rope.
“You have won us as allies, according to all our traditions,” Diric continued, speaking mostly to Shana and Lorryn. “You defeated Jamal’s champion in the view of everyone in the Clan. I do not know what we can do to aid you—but if there is anything we can offer, you have but to ask!”