This was supposed to be a meeting about the progress made in setting up the sheep and cattle farm below the Citadel, but Caellach had taken it over as usual. He was intent only on recreating as much of the old comfort of the first Citadel in their new home as he could manage, and he had taken the opportunity of a brief allusion to the old Citadel to air his usual grievance.
Which is, of course, that the Wizards are not treated like El-venlords of the High Council. Old fool. Hasn't he figured out yet that when one group lords it over another, the underlings are going to want to strike back?
The old man's litany of complaints was as familiar to Lorryn as the texture of the wooden table he stared at as he controlled his temper and his expression. The beginning, middle, and end of Caellach's troubles were seated in his own greed. He wanted
all the effort of the younger Wizards and the humans to go into making him as cossetted as he had been before the second Half-blood War. He didn't care that they had to be self-sufficient now, and couldn't steal magically from the Elvenlords anymore. He didn't trouble himself to think that it was far more important to see to the raising of sheep, goats and cattle, the cultivation of fields, than to scrub an old wizard's floor on a daily basis.
And he absolutely hated that the majority of the Halfbloods, voting down Caellach and his cronies, had made treaties of alliance with the Iron People and with the Trader clans, giving them the status of full equals and honored partners. These were fullblooded humans who had the status of full equals and honored partners. Though he did not dare come out and say so directly, this attitude incensed Caellach and his ilk, for to their minds, the halfblooded Wizards were clearly superior in every way to mere humans, and thus, should be treated as such.
And we should all be running and fetching for them, tending to their comfort, giving them of ourselves and the first fruits of our labors, so as to reward them for the fatiguing effort of their magics on our behalf. Lorryn, who was not only halfblooded himself, but had been brought up as an Elvenlord with all of the attendant privileges, found Caellach's attitude just as insulting and absurd as any of the highly independent Iron People or Trader clan folk did. There was nothing inherently superior about a wizard. Yes, they had magics, but so did the humans. And since they had been settled here in the new Citadel, the older wizards had not exerted themselves once for the common good—except, rarely, to teach some of the children how to use their powers.
Rather than listening to Caellach's words, Lorryn listened to the tone behind the words. He'd discovered he possessed an interesting knack for ferreting out the emotions and motives behind what people said, provided that they weren't as skilled at covering themselves as he was. He heard injured self-esteem and affront—that was expected—but he also heard fear, and that was interesting. He had not anticipated that.
I should have, though, he thought, raising his eyes and study-
ing Caellach's expression as the man shifted his eyes away from Lorryn's direct gaze. Caellach was looking a bit unkempt, now that there was no one to wait on him. His clothing, the usual long robe affected by most of the older Wizards, was a bit stained and frayed about the hem. His grey hair was brushed, but no longer hung about his shoulders in a kind of thick mantle—instead, it was held back untidily in a tail, and it seemed to Lorryn that it had gotten a bit thin at the temples. People do tend to react to new things either with interest or fear, and really, I think Caellach Gwain is too hidebound to react with interest to anything new.
Lorryn already knew that Caellach was afraid of the dragons; that was abundantly clear to anyone with half an eye. The old Wizard wouldn't set foot outside when there were dragons about in their natural form, and as for the ones shifted into half-blood or human shape—well. If they took seats on one side of the table, it was a safe bet that Caellach would place himself as far from them as physically possible while still remaining at the table.
His dislike of the Traders and the Iron People was a little more complicated, and harder to understand. Lorryn let a few of the old wizard's actual words—laden with anger and apprehension—sift in past his own thoughts. What in the world had the old man's trews in a wad?
"—and how dare they demand payment in advance, much less at all, for—"
Ah. That was enough to get the key. Lorryn had the tail of the tree-snake now. Caellach wasn't incensed that he was expected to pay in advance for the goods that the Traders brought here— he was angry that he was expected to pay at all. Possibly because Caellach's only available coin was, quite frankly, debased. He wasn't the most powerful Wizard anymore, he wasn't the most skilled, and his greed had led him to expend most of his energies on his own comforts, leaving him with little that he could use to barter for things he wanted.
"And as for those—barbarians—"
Third leg to the stool; he was incensed that the Iron People showed him no deference at all—and didn't need his magic.
Though why Caellach should think that a mob of ill-regulated cave-dwelling refugees should consider themselves more civilized than a well-regulated nomadic people was beyond Lor-ryn's imagination. But prejudice has nothing to do with logic. Perhaps it was because the Iron People were completely unimpressed by the Wizards. They didn't need Wizards to defend themselves from the Elvenlords; they had their iron ornaments and a powerful warrior class. Not to put too fine a point on it, they had actually held two Elvenlords as enslaved prisoners for the purposes of their own amusement. The most that Caellach Gwain had ever managed was to escape relatively unscathed from them.
That had been a near thing, too. Caellach and his cronies either did not realize, or would not admit, that it wasn't the El-venbane's fault entirely that the old Citadel and its dwellers had been discovered. The Wizards had been dancing on the edge of a knife for a very long time, what with their pilferings from the Elvenlords and all. So far as the Elves were concerned, there was only one kind of good halfblood—a dead one. Halfbloods weren't even supposed to exist, and most of the Elvenlords were utterly devoted to making certain that they didn't. Lashana's actions had only triggered the avalanche of Elven retribution, not caused it.
And if it hadn't been for her quick thinking, and her draconic friends, the wizards wouldn't have survived it.
What was more, they weren't out of the woods yet. As long as the halfblooded wizards lived, the Elvenlords would try to eliminated them, treaty or no treaty. If Caellach Gwain and his circle thought any differently, they were deluding themselves.
Not that there was anything new in the notion of Caellach Gwain deluding himself....
Finally, Caellach ran out of things to say, and sat down. Lor-ryn had very quickly figured out that allowing the old Wizard to rant and whine, while unpleasant to listen to, generally had the salubrious effect of making him silent for the rest of any meeting of which he was a part. "Thank you, Caellach; your experience is, as always, apparent to all of us," he said, graciously. Caellach began to preen. "Your observations are continuously
fascinating." He ignored the grimace that one of the younger halfbloods made at him from behind the shelter of one hand, and the spasms that crossed several other faces in an effort to keep from bursting out into laughter. "Now—I'd like to put the matter of the proposed upper pasture for the goats to a vote. All in favor?"
Even Caellach raised his hand, seduced, no doubt, into thinking that the goats would look after themselves, and not require shepherds, now that they had some of the huge cattle-dogs raised by the Iron People at their disposal. Lorryn made certain that there were no dissenters, and nodded. "Good. We're all agreed. Halfden, would you see about finding some volunteers for the job and getting them to me to be interviewed?" He needed humans for this task, preferably children with the ability to speak mind-to-mind, so that they could call for help if they saw anything, or if there was something out there that neither they nor the dogs could handle.
More of the servants that Caellach Gwain thinks are his personal property.
Halfden, one of the older ex-slaves, nodded, and Lorryn called the meeting to a close.
But like it or not, he wasn't quite done with Caellach—at least so far as Caellach was concerned.
"I really need to talk with you about the quality of my quarters, Lorryn," the wizard said, grabbing him by the elbow before he could make his escape. Lorryn leveled a blank gaze at him.
"My good sir," he said, with the kind of polite tone in which a specious warmth and charm were mixed with utter calm, "if you think you are being slighted, I invite you to come and inspect my quarters—or Shana's for that matter. I think you will find that they are by no means superior to yours. In fact, given that neither of us chose our rooms until everyone else had gotten their pick, you'll find them far inferior to yours."
"Yes, but—" Caellach protested-—although weakly, since he had been in the little nook of a cave that Lorryn used, and knew that it was scarcely larger than the closet in his own suite of linked cavelets.
"I know that it is trying to you to be in such primitive sur-
roundings, after having to abandon such a wonderful and comfortable place as your old home," Lorryn said, now interjecting a soothing note into his voice. "Who could know better than I? Do think what I left behind; I was the only male heir to a powerful lord! But you will soon find this life as exhilarating as I do if you regard it as an opportunity rather than a loss! Think of it! You now have the chance to design your very own quarters in precisely the way you'd most like them—rather than be forced to endure inconveniences and awkwardnesses that countless generations of wizards before you created! With a little effort, you can, for the first time, have everything perfect!"
"Yes—but—" Caellach faltered.
"There, you see?" Lorryn slapped him lightly on the back. "That seems better already, doesn't it? I knew I could rely on you!"
And with that, he strolled away, leaving Caellach to go over the conversation in his mind and try to determine what could possibly have gone wrong.
As he rounded a corner, someone jumped at him from the shadows. Instinctively he sidestepped and drew his hidden dagger, with a defensive magic meant deflect a levin-bolt already in place.
"You're getting better," Shana laughed, leaning against the rock wall with her arms crossed over her chest, looking quite as if she had not been catapulting herself across the hallway from a natural niche just at the level of his head a moment before.
"I should hope so," he retorted. "You certainly give me enough practice. Were you listening in on the meeting?"
"I was—and you are a genius. And some sort of mage that I haven't quite figured out." She tilted her head to the side, quizzically. "How you manage Caellach—and how you manage to not strangle Caellach—is quite beyond me."
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."