Andre Norton & Lackey, Mercedes - Elvenbane 1 -The Elvenbane

VIP免费
2024-12-06 0 0 1.61MB 481 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
The Elvenbane
By
Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey
Chapter 1
SERINA DAETH. I am—Serina Daeth. Serina clung to her name as the only
thing she was still certain of, the only thing the sun could not burn away
from her. The sun—it was high overhead now, beating down upon her,
trying to evaporate her.
Hot—she'd never been so hot. It was hard to think, hard to remember that she
must keep moving. She couldn't see her feet under the swollen ball of her
belly—she felt them, though, every step an agony. But it would be worse if
she stopped.
Her throat and mouth were so dry; there was nothing left from the dew she'd
drunk this morning, lapping it off the rocks like an animal.
I am Serina Daeth. I am—
Ah, gods, that it should come to this.
A few months ago she had been Lord Dyran's favorite. A few days ago she
had hopes of hiding her pregnancy until the damned brat was delivered. She
had planned to get rid of it, then return to the harem to give that bitch Leyda
Shaybrel exactly what she deserved. She couldn't have told Lord Dyran what
Leyda had done to her, but she could have found some way to bring her
down. Leyda had enemies; all the women of the harem had enemies. It was
just a matter of making common cause until Leyda was ousted…
But Dyran returned from Council unexpectedly, and Leyda was waiting…
I will live, I will return, and I will find a way to make her suffer—
Lord Dyran had found their rivalry amusing, and encouraged it, by
promising Leyda any number of things, but keeping Serina in the number-
one position. When Leyda failed to oust Serina as favorite, and realized that
Lord Dyran had no intention of replacing Serina, she had not given" up.
Undoubtedly she had turned to sabotage.
She must have. How else could I have conceived?
She must have substituted all of Serina's food for a month with that intended
for the elves. That had been several months ago, just before Lord Dyran went
off to Council—
The Council lasted eight months. Would that it had lasted longer! I would
have been free of this burden, and none the wiser!
Lord Dyran had left before Serina realized she was pregnant.
As soon as she knew, she had been in a panic.
To be pregnant with an elf-lord's child, a halfblood, was a death sentence
unless the lord was very lenient. And even if Dyran didn't kill her, he'd have
cast her off.
That would be as bad as death. To be given to some underling, or to the
fighters as a breeder—or worst of all, given to Leyda as a servant—
No, never, not after what she had been, all she had fought to achieve—
All she had fought to achieve… for so long, and so hard…
Serina pinned an errant strand of russet hair back in place, and surveyed her
image in her silver-rimmed mirror critically. She nodded a little, and turned
her attention to her makeup. She was in competition with the best, and that
left no room for anything other than perfection.
The current standard of beauty in Lord Dyran's harem—as set by the style of
his favorite—was for an ethereal, innocent, fresh look. Serina knew very
well what Rowenie was using as a model, even if the other girls hadn't
figured it out yet. She was trying to be as elvenlike as possible, fashioning
herself after the highbred maidens she'd seen being paraded before Lord
Dyran in hopes of a marriage alliance.
That meant pale gold hair worn loose, or garlanded with artificial flowers
made of gemstones; creamy rose-and-white complexions; wide, childlike
blue eyes; sylph-slim figures. Serina went counter, wildly counter, to that
standard. Her hair was a fiery red; her eyes so dark a violet as to be nearly
black, and seething with carefully controlled emotion. Her mother called her
figure "generous," but that was an understatement, and said nothing about the
slim waist, kept that way by years of dancing lessons, the hips that could
distract even hardened gladiators from their practice, and the high, proud
breasts that did more than distract them, to the point that her father had
forbidden her the practice ground since she was thirteen.
Serina smiled at her reflection, and examined the smile with careful
detachment. It would do. She kept the smile, and continued to examine her
own handiwork, tossing tiny brushes down on the floor beside her when she
was finished with them. The drudges would clean it all up as soon as she was
gone.
While the other girls being groomed as concubines bleached their hair,
dusted their cheeks with powder, and starved themselves to fit into the
delicate skirts and tunics Rowenie Ordone favored, Serina flaunted her
differences and learned to enhance them. She found rinses that made her hair
even more lustrous and vivid, and painted her lids with purple and violet to
bring out the color of her eyes, and brushed rose across her cheekbones. She
kept up her dancing lessons and exercised in secret, adding tone and strength
to her limbs. And she sought out the teachers of the bed-secrets, and begged
extra lessons. Sooner or later Lord Dyran would tire of pale and ethereal, of
coy and delicate, of dainty and timid. The Lord was not noted for
steadfastness. And when he tired of the cool Zephyr, Serina was determined
to catch him with Flame.
She corrected a smudge of deep violet above her eye with a careful fingertip
and stood up, smoothing the soft panels of her wine-velvet gown. Let
Rowenie keep to her pale pastel silks, all flutters and lace. They made almost
anyone else look like a pale-pink lettuce, or an overblown cabbage rose. It
would not be much longer before the Lord demanded spice instead of sugar.
Serina edged the stool in front of her dressing table back with a careful foot,
so as not to tear or crease her gown. There wasn't much room in this little
cubicle; just her bed, stowage beneath it for undergarments, a hanging rack
for gowns, and her dressing table, mirror, and little stool. But it was more
room than she'd had with her mother; just a little closet hardly large enough
for her bed. And she intended to have more, soon.
She left her little cubicle, keeping to a graceful, swaying walk as though the
Lord himself were watching her. After all, who was to say that he was not?
The elven lords were all-powerful, and it might well be that the Lord would
choose to spy on the unguarded moments of his harem. Her father claimed he
did so with the gladiators.
She glanced at the tall, green-glass water clock in the center of the indoor
courtyard as she pushed aside the curtain to her cubicle to show that she was
gone. Sunlight streamed in through the frosted dome of the skylight above;
by the level in the glass delphin's tail, there was plenty of time before the
Lord made his daily visit to his concubines. In fact, most of the curtains still
hung across the doors of the little swans' cubicles, showing that the younger
concubines were either still asleep or disinclined to leave. Serina was a "little
swan," a girl in her first six months of office. In fact, she had only begun her
post as concubine a week ago. Most girls did not survive the initial six
months; most were ignored, and after a mere six weeks were sent down to
the breeders, to become the living rewards to the Lord's most successful
gladiators.
Serina's own mother was one such; and she had been lucky. Jared Daeth was
the most successful ever of Lord Dyran's hundreds of single-combat fighters.
He had won so many duels for the Lord that he had stopped counting, and
only the odds makers kept track. Ambra had been his reward on his
retirement, still unbeaten, to become a trainer, he had taken to her, and she to
him, and the Lord had indulgently agreed to allow them to pair permanently.
Most of the girls rejected by the harem-master were given to any successful
fighter who wanted a woman, and few of those men were as gentle and kind
to their women as Jared. Serina had seen some of them the morning after;
bruised and sometimes bloodied, weeping—and on one, never-discussed
occasion, dead. Often the girls were bred once a year to the best, to produce
more fighters for the Lord's stables. Once their bearing days were past—
provided that repeated child-bearing had not killed them first—they became
the drudges of the Lord's household; the laundry-women, pot-scrubbers,
cleaners and sweepers, often in service to that very harem where they had
enjoyed a brief place in the sun.
This worked in odd ways; many of the little swans, certain from the
beginning that they would never catch the Lord's eye, made their demands as
infrequent upon the drudges as possible. They chose garments only of white,
or some other color easy to clean, garments with little or no ornamentation.
They asked for nothing out of the ordinary; they cleaned their own cubicles.
Serina knew that the laundresses cursed her for her vivid scarlet, purple, and
emerald gowns, and the sweepers for the disarray in which she left her
quarters. She didn't care. At the very worst, Lord Dyran had noticed her,
she'd seen to that, running to do his bidding before the servants themselves
could react to his orders, offering to dance anytime he looked the least bored
or distracted, or dancing even when he had not called for it, anytime the
musicians played. She had seen his eyes upon her, and the eyes of some of
the other elven lords he had entertained as guests. At the very least he would
give her away to a visiting lord, should one admire her. At the best—
At the best, she would supplant Rowenie.
She would never, ever even permit herself to contemplate a future as a
breeder and drudge. That was tantamount to anticipating failure. She would
not fail.
And success would bring luxury not only to herself, but to her mother and
father. With luck, they would be allowed to become overseers at one of
Dyran's distant breeding farms, far away from the Lord's capricious whims.
She crossed the carpeted floor of the courtyard, carpet that mimicked the
grass she never saw anymore. Her bare feet made no sound in the deep pile
of the carpet. All slaves went barefoot, except those who had to work outside
the manor. When, as a child, she had asked why, her father had laughed.
"How far can you run on bare feet?" he'd asked. She'd never figured out the
point of the joke.
The courtyard of the little swans gave out on a similarly carpeted, white-
walled corridor lined with the doors—real, wooden doors, not curtains—
leading to the quarters of the full-fledged concubines. Most of the doors were
still closed, as well. The concubines had their own bathing rooms, and did
hot have to use the common room shared by the little swans. Serina had
made it a point to be up, bathed, dressed, and in place well before the rest,
again on the off chance Lord Dyran might be watching. For one thing, she
enjoyed having the bathing room all to herself. She got to pick and choose
among the soaps and oils laid out, and never found herself with a shortage of
towels. For another reason—why not? She had little else to do. A single
shimmering curtain of light divided the concubines' quarters from the great
hall where Lord Dyran took his ease; a visible reminder of the elven lord's
magic power. It was completely opaque and of silvery color, over which
ever-changing rainbow hues crawled and flowed. Neither light nor sound
passed the wall of liquid iridescence, and Serina felt a tingle and a hint of
resistance as she passed fearlessly through it. Her father had told her that
these curtains could be set to stun, or even kill, but that had never happened
in his lifetime. She supposed the curtain was there to prevent intruders from
entering the harem—she couldn't imagine anyone wanting to escape it.
As usual at this hour of the morning, Serina was alone in the hall. She didn't
mind; among other things, it gave her the opportunity to prowl the place and
look for any changes that the Lord might have made overnight. He was given
to using his magical powers to effect changes without warning. The most
drastic had been the time he had caused an entire jungle of plants to spring
up overnight, seemingly rooted in the floor. Rowenie had been delighted and
the entire harem had played at being shepherdesses all day—Dyran had even
indulgently created a sheep or two. The next day, the plants were gone.
Serina blinked in surprise as she looked about. There was one very obvious
change this morning: The marble mosaic floor was no longer patterned in a
delicate, pale green with pastel flowerets. Now it was a cool, deep blue, of
lapis lazuli, with no patterns at all. The cushions placed in piles at the edge
of the room had likewise changed to deeper, vivid colors. Up on the dais at
the end of the room, the Lord's couch was still the same; thickly upholstered
in his house colors of wine-red and gold, but the favorite's cushion was now
a wine-red to match. The white, unembellished walls remained the same, but
the domed, frosted skylight above them now had a center inset of vivid
stained glass in an abstract pattern of reds, blues, violets, and emeralds.
Serina could dimly see cloud shapes moving through the clear colors, and
made out a colored pattern cast by the light through the glass on the dark
blue, gold-veined floor.
Serina fingered the textured gold of her collar as she gazed about, wondering
what this change meant. Had the Lord finally tired of pastel prettiness? Did
that mean he was ready for richer fare?
A whisper of sound alerted her to the presence of someone else in the room.
She whirled, startled, at the sound of a footstep behind her.
The Lord stood, poised on the threshold of the entrance behind the dais,
waiting for her response. He was wearing his house colors, in an elaborately
draped silken tunic, one hand on his hip, the other resting on the bejeweled
hilt of his dagger. His hawklike face seemed calm, but she could see in his
eyes that he was curious about her—or her reaction to the changes he had
made.
Serina sank immediately to the floor in a graceful curtsy, her skirts falling
around her, as if she knelt in a pool of her own heart's blood. She remained
that way, head bent, staring at the velvet softness of her skirts, as the Lord's
slow footsteps told her that he approached her.
"You may rise, my swan," came the indulgent, velvet-soft voice.
My swan! She exulted. That means he's promoted me!
She obeyed, rising as slowly and gracefully as she had bowed, her gaze
rising past the strong, athletic legs in tight leather breeches and wine-colored
suede boots; past the casually unbuttoned tunic, with gold embroidery
winking at her from the collar. She continued to raise her eyes after she stood
erect, bringing them up to meet his emerald ones in full challenge, instead of
keeping her chin modestly down as Rowenie would have done.
"So, you have a spirit with fire." Lord Dyran chuckled, his thin lips forming
a smile. "I like that. Do you wear my colors thinking to flatter me, my
swan?"
"Is that not my purpose, my lord?" she replied immediately. "Is not all I think
and do for one purpose only, and that to serve your pleasure?"
"Would you truly serve my pleasure?" He did not wait for a reply, but seized
her wrist and pulled her toward him, bringing his mouth down demandingly
on hers.
But Serina had planned for this moment from the very instant she entered the
harem. Rowenie would have shrunk away with artificial shyness; Rowenie
would struggle a little, feigning modesty. Serina did nothing of the kind. She
molded her body against his, running her hands over his body in the ways
she had been taught, returning the demands of his kiss with demands of her
own. She had no idea how he felt, but she was on fire with need, her loins
burning, when he broke away from her and put her at arm's length.
He looked as cool and calculating as before; he shook back his long, white-
gold hair over his shoulder as he released her, and smiled a little as he rubbed
his square chin with a long, graceful hand. "My -Lord Ethanor admired
Rowenie at dinner last night," he said, after a long moment. "I gave her to
him."
It took Serina a few heartbeats for his words to sink in. When the meaning of
them penetrated, she stared at him, not daring to speak, but afire with wild
surmise.
"Such diligence as yours in my service should be rewarded," he continued,
when he saw that she understood him. Then he held out his hand. "Come, my
swan. I would like you to see your new quarters. Then—after a suitable
interval—we shall reveal your new status to the rest of the flock. Hmm?"
She shivered with excitement and anticipation. And a little dread. Lord
Dyran's tastes were said to be somewhat exotic…
But she was trained for that, and a life of luxury and power awaited in return
for what he demanded. He would not damage anything so valuable as the
concubine who alleviated his boredom.
And he was waiting for her reply. "After a suitable interval," she said,
placing her hand in his. "Of course, my lord."
For one short moment, she relived her triumph; then she was back, her body
still placing one foot in front of the other, like a mind-controlled slave.
Every bit of exposed skin burned with a torment that had passed beyond pain
long ago. It was so hard to think… So hard to remember who and what she
was, and why she should keep fighting to stay alive.
I am Serina Daeth, daughter of—daughter of—Jared Daeth. Trainer of
gladiators to Lord Dyran—
Little Serina perched on the edge of a bench high above the arena, up in the
shadows where the lesser elves sat when the Lord entertained. The arena
itself was not very large; it probably didn't seat more than four or five
hundred, and the floor, covered with soft sand, could not hold a combat
involving more than four men. This was strictly a dueling arena, meant for
challenge-combat and not much else. It was a sign of Lord Dyran's wealth
that he maintained his own arena. It was also a sign of the number of
challenges he played host to; either his own, or those arranged for others.
Like the other rooms of the manor, it was lit by day by a large, frosted-glass
skylight. The seats immediately surrounding the combat area were covered
in leather padding; those up here were simple wooden benches. Nevertheless,
humans never took these seats when there was a real combat underway.
But the combat in the arena today was strictly for practice, though it was
performed at full speed, and with real, edged weapons. Good weapons, too,
straight from the Lord's forges.
Jared had taken his daughter to see the forges today, as a part of her
education in the reality of being bound to Lord Dyran, and she had been
suitably impressed with the fires, the heat, the smoke, and the huge, brawny
men and women who worked there. Most valuable of all of Lord Dyran's
slaves, the forge-workers received attention and reward even above a
successful duelist.
"We have a good lord," Jared had said in his stolid way. "Good work is
rewarded. The Lord could ignore us, or treat us like cattle; many lords do.
Just you remember that, girl. All benefit and all reward come from Lord
Dyran."
The iron from which steel blades were made had to be pure; it was smelted
ten times to remove any contaminants before it underwent the final process
of smelting with charcoal and air to make it into true steel. Then, when it had
undergone that transmutation, the smiths took it and made it into the
weapons for which Lord Dyran was famed. No few of the elven lords came
to Lord Dyran for their weapons, or so Jared told his daughter.
For the fighters of the elven lords' armies, they made fine swords, spear- and
axe-heads, and tiny, razor-sharp arrowheads that could not be pulled from a
wound, only cut out. For the duelists, however, the gladiators and other
fighters, the weaponry was far different—weapons meant to wound rather
than kill. Chain-flails, maces, short, broad knives, metal-barbed whips,
tridents—all meant to prolong combat, all requiring great skill in the
handling.
The two fighters in the arena now, practicing under her father's careful eye,
were armed with gladiatorial weapons. One had a trident, the other, a chain-
flail; both were also armed with knives.
The exchange seemed to be an even one; the red-haired giant with the chain-
flail managed to stay out of reach of the trident points, while the swarthy
man with the trident avoided having his pole fouled by the chains of the flail.
Serina watched them with wide eyes, remembering that she had seen one of
摘要：

TheElvenbaneByAndreNortonandMercedesLackeyChapter1SERINADAETH.Iam—SerinaDaeth.Serinaclungtohernameastheonlythingshewasstillcertainof,theonlythingthesuncouldnotburnawayfromher.Thesun—itwashighoverheadnow,beatingdownuponher,tryingtoevaporateher.Hot—she'dneverbeensohot.Itwashardtothink,hardtorememberth...

展开>> 收起<<
Andre Norton & Lackey, Mercedes - Elvenbane 1 -The Elvenbane.pdf

共481页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：481 页 大小：1.61MB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-06

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 481
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注