Lorryn laughed and offered her his hand, which she took. "No magic—just politics," he told her. "Verbal self-defense. I didn't spend much time among the schemers and plotters, but I did hob-nob with some of them and, of course, I always had to be able to placate my father. I learned early how to say nothing while seeming to say everything."
She squeezed his hand. "It's still sheer genius. No matter how hard I try, I can't manage people half as well as you do."
He glanced aside at the young woman called "the Elven-bane." She didn't look like the stuff of legends; her scarlet tresses were tied up onto the top of her head in a very practical tail, which she often tossed like an impatient horse plagued with flies. Her handsome face was nothing in beauty compared to the homeliest of elven ladies, and her figure was so well-muscled that most of them would have recoiled in horror at the notion of looking like her. Today she had on a sleeveless tunic of leather and a pair of coarse slaves'-cloth trews—but to his eyes, she couldn't have looked better if she'd been enrobed in his sister Sheyrena's presentation-gown.
"I hope you aren't—bothered by me taking on all these meetings like this," he said, hesitantly. "You're supposed to be the leader, I know, but—"
"Am I jealous? Oh, Fire and Rain, get that idea out of your head this moment!" she replied with a laugh. "I never asked to be the Elvenbane, you know—and the only reason besides that stupid legend that people pay any attention to what I think is that I think quicker than they do. Handling the old goats is not a job that requires quick thinking—and you have the—" She considered for a moment, head tilted to one side. "—the 'manner born' is how I'd put it. You say things, and people do them, instead of arguing with you about it."
He thought that if she was dissembling in any way, he would be able to tell; he was getting pretty sensitive to her nuances— not that she had many, for she was a strikingly open person. No, she seemed to be happy with him taking her leadership role.
"If I could find a double to play Elvenbane for me, I'd do that in a heartbeat," she continued onwards, oblivious of his scrutiny, "And then I could just be Shana again."
"Speaking of just being Shana—oh crafty one—" he led her down a side passage that brought them out onto the top of the Citadel, into the warm air and sunshine, where they could sit and talk without being overheard.
She didn't fling herself down onto the grass as she usually did when brought outside. "Crafty one, hmm? I know what that means." She sauntered casually up the hill a little ways to a grassy knoll with a shade-tree atop it—downwind of the half-hidden entrance. Now they could speak without being overheard. Only then did she drop down into the grass in the sun, with all of the pleasure of her foster-mother dragon in basking.
"Ask away," she said, as he plopped down beside her. "I've just spent the better part of the morning talking to Keman but I need your help to reach Shadow."
Shana, freed from the responsibilities of the day-to-day running of the Citadel, was concentrating on the vastly more important project of collecting intelligence reports, by means of amplified telepathy, from Keman and some of the other people she and Lorryn had out in the greater world. Although it would not be possible to send either a human or a halfblood into the midst of Elves to spy under a spell of illusion, the halfbloods were not limited to illusion as long as they had dragons with them, for the dragons could actually shift their shape to appear like anyone or anything they liked. Shana's foster-brother Keman and his probable mate Dora were Shana's shapechanged spies among both camps of Elves.
"Your mother is not only doing well, so far as Dora can tell, she's taking over some of Lady Moth's duties on the home-fields," Shana told him, smiling at his sigh of relief. It might not be the most important piece of information, but it was the one that was most likely to relieve his mind. "Dora thinks that she's probably well over the shock of—well, you know—by now."
"I know I do her a disservice by thinking of her as being so frail," he replied, chafing one finger against another nervously, "But that's how she looks. And she's my mother—"
"You can't help being protective of your mother, I know. I feel the same way about my mother." By this, she meant not her real mother, who presumably had been an Elvenlord's concubine, but her foster-mother, who was a dragon and not much in need of anyone's protection. But Lorryn refrained from saying this.
"Is there any change in the situation there?" he asked, and Shana shook her head.
"Stalemate. The Old Lords can't break in and the Young Lords can't break out. Occasional skirmishes and feints, but nothing worth talking about. Lady Moth's no closer to getting the Young Lords to see that humans are—well—people. And until she does, they're going to be ignoring the one resource they have that might tip the scales in their favor." Shana sounded curiously indifferent to the situation, more as if it was a chess game that she was observing, rather than playing in. Lorryn wondered how she could detach herself from it so easily. He couldn't.
"Now, on the other side—there's something just come up that Keman thinks is going to give the Old Lords the advantage, and a major one at that." She tossed her head, and her "tail" switched like an impatient horse's. "They've got a new commander, and from what Keman says, he's absolutely brilliant."
There was no indifference in her voice now, and he sat up a bit straighter. "A new commander? Who? I thought that there wasn't an Old Lord in the lot that could coordinate a proper attack!"
"Keman says his name is Kyrtian. Kyrtian V'dyll Lord Pras-taran." She turned her head to look keenly into his emerald eyes with her own, the mark of their Elvenlord blood along with the pointed ears and Elven magics. "Heard of him?"
"Vaguely." And that, in and of itself, was interesting. It suggested that for some reason the High Council had elevated a nobody into a position of major importance, with no steps in between. "I think his father was supposed to be a scholar—I know there was something when I was a child about Lord Pras-taran who vanished off in the Waste Lands between here and the site of the Gate that brought us from Evelon." He waved vaguely in a southerly direction. "He keeps—kept—to himself, and his son did the same. Until now. And why, one wonders?"
"Apparently, because he's brilliant. And according to Keman, because he's got a way of training slaves to be soldiers without the untidy process of having half of them cut to ribbons in order that the rest get experience in fighting." She drammed her fingers silently on the side of her leg. "And you realize, of course, that this is not good news for us."
"No." That was clear enough; if this Kyrtian was as brilliant as Shana said, he wasn't bound by tradition—he would use what worked. Being encased in tradition like a chrysalis never meant to be opened was the only thing that kept the Old Lords from hammering their less-experienced offspring.
"A good commander with the resources of the Old Lords behind him can take the defenses of the Young Lords to pieces," she continued, turning her gaze in the direction of Elven-held lands.
"When he does that, he'll have proved himself to his masters," Lorryn agreed. "And it won't take them any time at all to break the treaty and send him after us." He felt his stomach turn over uneasily. "I don't suppose you have any good news for me, do you?" he asked plaintively.
She shook off her own somber mood. "I know what you're thinking, and you're right; until we know something about this Kyrtian, there is no point in imagining all the things he might— or might not—do. Besides, Mero and Rena are doing very well for us, and the Iron People seem to like them a great deal." "The Iron People helped us hold off the Elvenlords the last time without actually getting involved—" Lorryn mused, feeling a bit less hag-ridden at the thought of another conflict with the Elvenlords. "If they joined us this time—between them and the dragons—"