The Elvenbane
ELVENBANE: THE PROPHECY IS ABOUT TO BE FULFILLEDThere will come a child. One born of human mother but fathered by the demons, possessed of magic more powerful than the elven lords! The child shall be hunted before its birth, yet shall escape the hunt and will rise up against the masters and cast them into the lowest hell…The world is run by the elvenlords. Powerful, proud and secure in their dominion they keep legions of human slaves for work and take their pleasure in elven or human concubines. The breeding of halfbreeds is strictly forbidden. Then Serina Daeth – the favoured human concubine of elven overlord Dryan – finds herself pregnant.Forced to flee into the desert, Serina dreams – as she dies – of a midwife delivering her baby, Shana; the midwife is in fact the shapechanging dragon-shaman Alara.But Shana is no ordinary child: raised by the dragons, she is destined to become the Elvenbane.
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors' imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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First published in Great Britain by Grafton 1993
Copyright © Andre Norton, Ltd and Mercedes Lackey 1991
Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780586216873
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008219338
Version: 2016-10-24
Contents
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.
