"How badly do you want to keep your two Elvenlords, Diric? They don't look very healthy to me," Rena asked, as Diric reached for a piece of flatbread.
He didn't even pause in his motion. "They haven't been a lot of use for some time," he admitted, laying a paper-thin slice of cucun-pod and some of Rena's sweetened and tenderized grasses on the flatbread, following it with strips of meat and a dollop of soured cream. "Out of respect for your wishes they haven't been entertaining us, but I don't think they would now even if we tried to force them into it with beatings. I think they're going mad, actually. Their keeper can barely get them to eat and drink; I'm told all they do is stare at whatever they're pointed at."
"I think they've gone mad," Rena replied, relieved to hear the matter-of-fact tone in his voice. "You can still get Kelyan to
talk if you try hard enough, but Haldor—your keepers are hav¬ing to feed him by hand. I want them, if you don't."
"Tell me what you want to do with them, first," Diric replied cautiously.
Rena took a deep breath and looked to Mero, who gave her an encouraging smile. She looked back into Diric's sable-brown eyes, and told herself what a fundamentally reasonable man he was. "I want—I want to try something. I want to see if my magics can change people's memories. There have been ru¬mors, oh forever, that some of the Old Lords can do that, and I should think that since women's magics among my people are used delicately, it should be easier for a woman to do that than a man. Since Kelyan and his friend are already mad, I can't hurt them further, and I may be able to help them." She steeled her¬self. "If I can—help them, that is—there are several things I want to do with them. The first thing is to find out how the elf-stones of the slaves' controlling collars are made and how the slaves are controlled by them."
"Shana's got this idea that would take less iron than the jew¬elry," Mero put in helpfully, his green eyes alight with enthusi¬asm for his friend's plans. "Sort of a clamshell arrangement to close around the beryl like this—" he demonstrated with his two hands snapping together "—and cut it off from magic get¬ting out or in. Those would be easy to get in to the slaves in sackfuls, and if everyone who was ready to escape all snapped their iron-clamshells over their stones at once, they could make a njn for it. The Elvenlords wouldn't be able to pursue any sin¬gle individual or track him either, and by the time someone with enough magic to cast levin-bolts was summoned, the slaves would be long gone."
"But we have to know how the elf-stones work so we can see if the plan would work," Rena continued, as Diric set down his half-eaten flatbread and leaned forward, intrigued by the idea. "I never learned how, and I don't think Lorryn ever did, either, but Kelyan probably did. So I want to see if I can get him to show me. If I can't trick him into doing it, maybe Mero can get the memory straight out of his mind. Once we know how to make the elf-stones, we can test the clamshells."
"But that is not all you plan, I gather?" Diric asked, with heavy eyebrows raised. He looked more than intrigued now, he looked enthusiastic.
"Um—no." She decided to go ahead and tell him her entire plan while he still was open to it. "I want to wipe away every trace in their minds of being captured, of the Iron People, and replace it with something else."
"What else?" Diric wanted to know. "Why?"
"I thought—" she faltered for a moment, then went on. "I thought I'd construct some new memories—illusions really— out of the way Lorryn and I wandered around in the wilderness. Or maybe Mero can help me put things in their minds, when I've blanked out the old memories. And once I knew that they weren't going to remember anything about the Iron People or the Wizards or dragons or anything, I'd put them to sleep and get Keman or one of the other dragons to drop them somewhere near enough to an estate for them to find their way back." She bit her lip and waited for the inevitable reaction.
"You mean that you intend to free them?" Diric's eyebrows had crawled all the way up to the top of his forehead. "You think we should let them go to join the rest of our enemies?"
"Well, we can't kill them!" she said, a little desperately.
For a moment she feared that Diric would respond with, "And why can't we?" But he regarded her thoughtfully, pulling on his lower lip, and said nothing for a very long time.
"If that was your plan," he replied, pitching his voice low, "it seems a waste of a perfectly good resource for deception that we can further use against the Demons that you call Elvenlords. Rather than giving the prisoners memories of wandering about in the wilderness, why not give them memories that are com¬pletely erroneous?"
"Such as—?" Rena asked, her heart lifting. He was going to let her do this! Finally she was going to be able to do something that would help poor Kelyan and Haldor, but maybe help out Shanaas well!
"Oh—I think we can work out something. Make them think that they were held captive by the Wizards, more Wizards than the Elvenlords have any notion exist." Diric grinned in that sud-
den way that made him look like a boy full of mischief. "And in their minds we can locate their prison in some impregnable fortress somewhere in the opposite direction from the real Citadel." He winked wickedly. "For that matter, concoct a set of Wizards that have never even heard of our set! Make the Demons think that they have an enemy that until that moment they had known nothing about! Make them waste time and war¬riors trying to find this new set of Wizards!"
Mero uttered a whoop of laughter. "Ancestors! What an idea! It'll have them scrambling to guard their rear, it'll have them fighting over which set of Wizards are the most dangerous, and best of all, it will buy us more time to get stronger!"
"Exactly so." Diric picked up his forgotten meal, and waved his free hand at Rena. "If that is your plan, child, take them and welcome. They are nothing but a burden now, and if you can succeed in your plan, you will convert them to an asset."
He said nothing about what would happen to them if she couldn't wipe their memories clean, but she decided that she would deal with that if the occasion arose. She thanked the Iron Priest and turned to her own untouched meal with a good appetite.
Diric had something he wanted to discuss with Mero after dinner, and Rena decided that she might as well tackle the first part of her plan straight off. Not being a halfblood was some¬thing of a handicap, as she couldn't read the minds of the two Elvenlords directly—so what she planned to do was to try and coax the information out of them using words, illusion, her own sex, and gentle prodding. She'd had the Traders bring her an old, deactivated collar from one of the escaped slaves working with Shana; she brought this with her as she entered their tent.
"Kelyan?" she called; she'd put on die illusion of one of the fine gossamer gowns she'd worn in her old life, and as Kelyan roused from his apathetic trance and slowly raised dull eyes to look at her, she created a second illusion, that they were in a typical room that one would find in an Elven manor. She used as her model one of the rooms in which her father would infor¬mally entertain guests, but kept the place shrouded in shadows.
Kelyan looked terrible; his emerald eyes were clouded, his
pale hair hung lank and brittle, the only time he changed his clothing was when his keepers stripped him of the soiled cloth¬ing. Rena wasn't sure what had triggered this dive into insanity— perhaps he'd just snapped when he'd first seen Keman in dragon-form, or perhaps he had just given up when it became obvious that even though the Wizards had been accepted as al¬lies, there was no way that two Elvenlords were going to be re¬leased. But his current confusion, and the way in which he drifted in and out of a world of his own making, would help her. She hoped that in his current mental state he would either be¬lieve that he was back among his own people, or was dreaming; either would serve her equally well. It was unlikely that he would recognize the Rena he knew in the Elven lady-guise she had just created for herself; she'd even done herself up in High-Fete fashion with exaggerated cosmetics.
His eyes brightened as he took in her and her surroundings; there still wasn't a great deal of sanity in them, but there was more sense. To reinforce the illusion she had created, she hid Kelyan's companion in captivity in the shadows so that he wouldn't see Haldor's motionless form and have his illusion broken. He didn't seem to notice or care.
"My lady—?" his head tilted inquiringly, showing that he re¬ally didn't recognize her.
"Sheyrena," she supplied. "Welcome to my fete, Lord Kelyan."
"My Lady Sheyrena." He nodded his head. "Do I know you?"
Good. He doesn 't remember or recognize me, or something deep in his mind doesn't want to. He'd much rather live in dreams than in the world he's in now.
"I am the daughter of a friend of your mother's," she replied, aping as best she could her own mother's manner when with a guest. "Thank you for coming with your mother to my little en¬tertainment. I wondered if I could impose upon your good na¬ture for a trifling task?"
"I am at your command," he responded, with a hand over his heart and a slight bow.
"I have taken a new body-slave, a little girl who has not yet been fitted with a collar," she lied glibly. "As you know, my fa-
ther will not return from his meetings with the Council for sev¬eral days, and I wondered—could you—help me with clearing and setting this so that I can use it on the child?" she held out the collar, and he took it from her fingers.
And frowned, slightly. "This is hardly a fit collar for the neck of a lady's slave," he pointed out.
She pouted. "It is the only one I could find that has not been set and placed on the neck of a living slave, and I don't want to wait for someone to construct one for me," she said with just a hint of petulance. "Besides, I've taken a particular fancy to this one child. She's quite pretty, and I don't want Father to decide to give her to someone. If she's sealed to me, he shan't be able to."
Kelyan smiled, and she smiled back, instantly forming a con¬spiracy of two against their greedy elders. "In that case, I shall be happy to set it to you on your behalf," he replied easily.
He bent over the collar and went immediately to work on it—
And she followed the slightest nuance of that work with an intensity that surely would have startled him, had he not been concentrating on the collar to the exclusion of all else.
She had been doubly-prepared; in case she needed to use this ploy again, she didn't want him to think it was anything other than a dream.
When he finished his magics, she thanked him prettily. "You have done me a great good turn, Lord Kelyan," she said, flirt¬ing subtly with him in a way that would probably have had Mero wild with suppressed jealousy. "How can I properly thank you?"
She plied him with drugged wine as she fluttered her eye¬lashes at him, perfectly aware that he wouldn't actually do any¬thing other than flirt back. There was a rhythm to this sort of courtship; until he had her father's tacit permission to approach her, he would only indicate gallant interest. He wouldn't want to find himself called into a challenge that he might not have the trained slaves to meet. Leasing gladiators to meet a chal¬lenge was possible, but expensive, since some of them would almost certainly die in the combat. Better to be cautious.
"Performing any service for a fair lady is a privilege, not a burden," he replied, downing the wine in a single gulp. As she
had planned; she'd doctored the wine to make its taste smoother than honey and disguise its nature. She refilled his glass, and he downed that as well. She passed him a little bowl of highly-salted, toasted bits of root—also manipulated by her magic. The more he ate, the thirstier he would become.
"Thank you," he said after his first taste, and when she left the plate there beside his hand, he didn't object. "I do not have the company of a lovely lady often enough that I see it as less than a reward in and of itself," he continued, now sipping from his glass and nibbling at the snacks.
She laughed softly, producing a tinkling little sound that sur¬prised her and made his eyes widen with approval.
"I do not have the company of fine young lords often enough to think it less than a treat," she replied in the same vein. "Tell me something of yourself."
He was not at all loath to do so, and she continued to ply him with wine as well as conversation until his eyes drooped, his head dropped, and he collapsed limply down onto the pallet he'd been sitting on all this time. With a thought and a flick of her fingers, she banished all the illusions she had created, leav¬ing him again in the felt-walled tent. When he woke the next morning, if he recalled the incident at all, it would probably be as a dream.
Then she blew out the lights, and left him in the darkness, turning the collar over triumphantly in her hands.
Now it was Kala's turn on the new project to liberate the slaves; she examined the collar and the stone, and set about making the clamshell clasp that would lock the stone away from wearer and mage. She was certain she could make such a mechanism; the trick would be to create one that was small enough to conceal, but large enough and sturdy enough to have an effective seal.
Meanwhile, dropping her guise and coming as herself, Rena attempted to engage the two Elves in conversations every day while Mero "eavesdropped" on their minds. As she talked to them—or, as often as not, at them—she played, delicately, with her magic inside their heads.
When the Great Lords removed memories, they did so
wholesale, leaving behind a blank. She had delved into the mysterious workings of the brain as well as she could, and now she suspected their crude efforts, difficult as they were, created a mental infant. Probably afterwards their victim had to be re-taught even the simplest of things, which was why she—it was usually a rebellious girl who was so cavalierly treated— wouldn't make a reappearance for a year or more after she was subjected to the treatment. Rena wanted to be more subtle.