But on the whole, he'd rather just get it over with so that he wouldn't have to dwell on it.
"That's fine," she replied quickly, getting to her feet with that grace he admired so much and was so much a part of her. "Come along; I've converted your old nursery to a harem; it was the most secure suite in the manor and the only one not in use."
"It had to be the most secure, didn't it?" he chuckled, opening the door for her. "Not only did you have to worry about some¬thing getting in at me, you had to worry about me getting out!"
"And a mischievous escape-artist you were, too," she re¬torted. "Well, I can tell you that I am very proud of Tenebrinth, and you will be, too, when you see these women. With all of the upheavals, the slave-trade has been very much disrupted—"
"Which I will not shed tears over," he responded, with a hint of a frown.
"Nevertheless, it has made his task harder." The look she gave back to him was one of reproach. "Many of the slave-markets have been closed down, and others have only the most meager of selection. On the other hand, if it hadn't been so dis¬rupted, I doubt we would have found three women so perfectly suited to our purposes. I doubt that even the great Lord Kyn-dreth will wonder why your harem is so small, once he sees these girls."
"Oh?" Now his curiosity was piqued.
She nodded, her hair falling in a graceful curve across her brow as she did so. She pushed it back with an impatient hand. "Firstly, I very much doubt that anyone other than their trainer and former owner have ever seen them, which makes it much easier to carry off the fiction that you would have owned them yourself for several years. Secondly, if the trade were not so disrupted, I doubt if we would have been able to get them at all; they'd have been snapped up before they reached the greater markets."
Now he was surprised. "Are they that attractive, then?" he asked, his curiosity more than piqued.
"They are not precisely great beauties, although they are quite handsome—well, make that judgment for yourself." By this time they had reached the door—and now guarded—of his former nursery. The guards stepped aside, faces as expression¬less as statues, and Lady Lydiell opened the door, gesturing to him to go in ahead.
He did so, feeling the faint tingle of a second "door" as he crossed the threshold that would prevent the women from crossing it until it was taken down. That was usual enough in harems to keep them out of the Lady's Bower; it was necessary here, to keep them from wandering and seeing things they shouldn't.
The three women had clearly been told to await him, for they were standing in poses that were a little too contrived to be nat¬ural. That was when he understood what his mother had meant.
There could not possibly have been three women more strik¬ingly different. The first, tall, with pale gold hair and vivid blue eyes, had an angular face and a figure as slender and willowy as any Elven lady, and a far-away expression as if she lived en¬tirely in a cloud of dreams. She had posed herself beside a giant vase of flowers, musing on a single enormous lily-blossom, her frilled and lacy gown echoing the pastel colors of the blooms. The second, a brunette with brown eyes full of passion, full lips, and a sensuous body, fairly radiated promises; she lounged against a pillar in a way that thrust her bosom forward—strain¬ing the silk of her scarlet, form-fitting wrap—and allowed her to watch him with a provocative, flirtatious, sideways glance. The third had a tumble of flaming curls and merry green eyes, a dancer's body of strength and agility clothed in a simple blue tunic that left her legs bare, and the expression of a completely innocent child; she looked up from the kitten she was playing with to smile at him with a face full of laughter. It seemed that in these three, all the variety of an entire harem was encom¬passed. And only a statue could have failed to respond to the silent invitations each of them sent to him in her own way.
"You see?" Lady Lydiell said quietly, as the three sank to the ground in deep curtsies. He glanced at her, and saw that she had a glint of mischief in her own eyes. "Well, dearest, is it safe to leave you alone with them?"
He couldn't help it; he flushed—but he covered it with a half-mocking bow. "You're going to have to if I'm to give them convincing memories," he told her, causing her to blush. It was with a bit of satisfaction that he bowed her out, and turned to face his new "acquisitions."
He was trying to think of something to say when they de¬scended on him as a body and made speech irrelevant, at least for that moment, and the many that followed.
Sergeant Gel followed Lord Tenebrinth into the
He had never been inside the
He began to wonder if he would ever reach the top, when fi¬nally one of the rooms showed signs of occupation—as did the next after that—and then the platform slowed and came to a stop at the topmost level.
Lydiell's office, at the top of the tower, had a dizzying and unrestricted view that he, as a military commander, could see was of incalculable value for the chatelaine of the manor—or the commander of its defenses. The office walls were all win¬dow, and he wondered as he stepped gingerly off the platform what a storm would be like up here.
Lydiell greeted him with a smile, which made his apprehen¬sion vanish. She even rose; that was an unexpected honor, and he bowed as deeply as he could without looking ridiculous. The Lady did not like groveling; none of her clan did.
"Sergeant Gel, please, make yourself easy," she said, as she gestured with that grace only the Elvenlords possessed towards an unoccupied chair. "This is not an official summons—rather, it is a personal one. I have a desire to consult you."
Tenebrinth evidently took this as the signal to depart; he stepped back on the little platform and discreetly dropped back to the next level, leaving them alone.
Gel took his seat and examined the Lady's face, and swiftly understood why she wanted to see him. "Kyrtian?" he asked, wasting no words.
She nodded, and took her place behind her desk, clasping her hands on the surface before her. "I had hoped," she said, hesi-
tantly, as if she was voicing thoughts long held in secret, "that I could keep Kyrtian isolated from the politics of the Great Lords and the Council. Unfortunately, it seems that the times conspire against my hopes."
"It does look like he's going to get tangled up whether he likes it or not," Gel said cautiously, his eyes never leaving her face, unnerving as it was to look her straight in the eyes. "My Lady, I don't mind telling you that I don't like the idea any bet¬ter than you do."
"I'm not certain you realize just how tangled he's likely to get," Lydiell replied, a faint frown-line creasing her ageless brow. Gel couldn't for the life of him read those odd emerald eyes the Elvenlords all had, but at least she wasn't trying to hide her facial expressions. "Lord Kyndreth is not going to be content merely to learn a few tricks with magic to help train hu¬mans—when he realizes just how extensive Kyrtian's knowl¬edge and practical experience of military matters is, he is going to want my son to exercise his talents in the service of the Old Lords. He will certainly want Kyrtian to command a force against the Young Lords, and possibly keep him on after the Young Lords are crushed, to move against the Wizards and the wild humans."
Gel swore under his breath, angry at himself for not thinking of that himself. And it was far too late to try to talk Kyrtian out of abandoning the full-scale maneuvers he had planned. The boy was determined to prove to Lord Kyndreth that this was the only way to train fighters, and nothing would do but to show him how easy it was to hold the spells needed on entire armies.
Lady Lydiell sighed. "Your face tells me that my fears are likely to be realized. Oh, why couldn't he have been an artist or a musician, or obsessed with—with—oh, horticulture or some¬thing equally frivolous?"
"At least he isn't bent on being the dead opposite of his fa¬ther, my Lady," Gel replied grimly. "You'd not like him as a fop, or a lazy layabout. Or worse, falling in with—"
He hesitated; after all, he was a human, and Lydiell was El-ven. Blood was blood—
But Lydiell surprised him with a bitter smile and a light an-
swer. "Falling in with the pampered perverts that most of my kind are. You don't need to spare my feelings, Gel; we cannot afford to be less than honest with each other if we are going to be able to keep Kyrtian out of the pitfalls lying before him."
Ah, cowflops. Why do I have to feel like it's me that's his fa¬ther? I'd rest easier at night. He might be only a few actual years older than Kyrtian, but in real terms, he might just as well have been the Elvenlord's father. By the standards of his race, Kyrtian was the equivalent of a stripling, although by human reckoning he was in his late thirties. In knowledge and general responsibility, he was certainly that—but in the unconscious things that characterized an adolescent, he was very much Gel's junior. His boundless energy, his enthusiasm, his tendency to act rather than sitting back and waiting for events to come to him—those were the characteristics of the young, and made Gel feel very old.
The strength, speed, and endurance of youth were also his, and might be for the next century or two, which made Gel feel even older. He'd noticed of late, much to his chagrin, that he was slowing down, losing some of his edge; in fact, he and that man of Lord Kyndreth's had talked about that. Kaeth wasn't getting any younger either, and if he ever had to actually foil a fellow-assassin, that could be fatal if he didn't take steps to compensate.
We 'II both just have to be sneakier to make up for what we 're losing, he reminded himself. Youth and enthusiasm are no match for experience and treachery.
"I hate to admit this, my lady," he said, feeling ashamed that he had not anticipated this situation, "but I've kept him as igno¬rant as you have of the way things are—" he waved his hand vaguely at the windows "—out there. And I did it for pretty much the same reasons as you, I figure. Why throw something at him that he couldn't change and would only worry about?"
Ah, all those old lessons came back to him now, of being taken off the estate as Tenebrinth's page, so he could see just how the other Elvenlords really acted and thought. Tenebrinth had collared him, of course, and if he'd done something even slightly stupid—which, even as a child he hadn't been likely
to—the Elvenlord could have quickly controlled him. And in a peculiar way, that, too, had been part of the lessons in just how fragile and precious the life humans led here was.
Lydiell nodded. "And at this point, if we try to tell him that Lord Kyndreth is no more to be trusted than Aelmarkin, he would only make the wrong decisions. He'd try to put Kyndreth off, or—or something. And now that he's aroused Kyndreth's interest, he can't do that without arousing suspicion as well."
"Damn all politics anyway," Gel said sourly. "Kyndreth is going to use him, make a tool out of him, and give him nothing but fine words and empty praise for his troubles—"
"Yes—but—" Lydiell began.
Gel waited, but she didn't complete the thought. He spoke into the heavy silence. "But it might not be bad for him; so long as he's valuable to Kyndreth, he's not going to be wasted. And as long as he's valuable, Kyndreth will see that we're left alone, no matter how peculiar some things around here may look to him."
Lydiell nodded, and Gel felt a certain relief that she agreed with him. There was selfishness in his motivation, and he knew that; as long as Kyrtian was not only alive and well but under the open protection of someone like Lord Kyndreth, Gel and the other humans on the estate would be perfectly safe. Ael¬markin wouldn't dare try to interfere or continue in his at¬tempts to gain control of the manor and lands.
As for the humans living elsewhere—humans that Kyrtian would be very concerned about if he knew how bad things could be on other estates—Gel found it difficult to worry about the well-being of people he didn't know. The sufferings of hu¬man slaves on other estates were just stories to him, and al¬though he believed them in the abstract, he just couldn't make himself care when people he knew needed his whole concentra¬tion and concern.
He couldn't really believe in anything he hadn't seen with his own eyes, not deep down where it counted.
Those are all old stories, anyway, and it makes no sense these days that the Elvenlords would wantonly waste or mar their own possessions. With wild humans on the border, drag-
ons in the sky, the Wizards threatening to start the war up again and their own children in armed revolt, they can't afford the sort of goings-on they did in the past. Slavery—-yes, there was no doubt that the Elvenlords were harsh masters, and kept their humans under complete control. It was a terrible thing that hu¬mans elsewhere had every action controlled by someone else, that they could make not even the smallest decision about their own lives. But starvation, torture, abuse—why? There's no rea¬son to do any of those things; a starved, abused, or injured slave works less, and is worth less, than a healthy one who is punished only when he deserves it.