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Vossinor's box.
Both elven lords acknowledged their fighters with a lifted hand. The
gong sounded again. The two men turned to face each other, and waited with the
patience of automata.
Dyran rose slowly, a vermilion scarf in his hand. Every eye in the
area was now onhim; as host to the conflict, it was his privilege to signal
the start of the duel. He smiled graciously, and dropped the square of silk.
It fluttered to the sand, ignored, as the carnage began.
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In the end, even a few of the elven spectators excused themselves,
and Serina found herself averting her eyes. She'd had no idea how much damage
two blunt instruments could do.
But Dyran watched on; not eagerly, as Lady Alinor, who sat forward in
her seat, punctuating each blow with little coos of delight nor with bored
patience, as Sandar. But with casual amusement, a little, pleased smile
playing at the corners of his mouth, and a light in his eyes when he looked at
Alinor that Serina could not read.
And when it was over as it was, quickly, too quickly for many of the
spectators when all of the other elven lords had gone, he madehis move. Toward
Alinor. A significant touch of his hand on her arm, a few carefully chosen
words both, as if Serina were not present.
White with suppressed emotion, she pretended not to be there;
pretended she was part of the furnishings. Certainly Lady Alinor took no
notice of her.
The Lady stared at Dyran as if she could not believe what she had
heard then burst into mocking laughter.
"You?" she crowed. "You? I'd sooner bed a viper, my lord. My chances
of survival would be much higher!"
She shook off his hand and swept out of the arena, head high, her
posture saying that she knew he would not dare to challenge her. If he did, he
would have to saywhy and being rejected by a lady was not valid grounds for a
challenge.
Dyran went as white as Serina; he stood like one of the silent
pillars supporting the roof, and Serina read a rage so great in his eyes that
she did not even breathe. If he remembered she was there he would kill her.
Finally he moved. He swept out of the arena in the opposite direction
that Lady Alinor had taken, heading for the slave pens.
Serina fled for the safety of her room and hid there, shivering in
the darkness and praying he had forgotten her. After a long while, she heard
muffled screams of agony from Dyran's suite.
He's forgotten me, she thought, incoherent with relief and joy.He's
forgotten me. I'm safe &
If I dared, I would shift and fly off, Alara thought in disgust. The
last scene replayed in Serina's memory had left the dragon limp and sick.
The duel was bad enough. The Kin had no idea thatthis was the kind of
thing that went on in these duels. The sheer brutality of two thinking beings
battering each other until one finally dropped over dead momentsbefore the
other also succumbed was something Serina took for granted. It was that, as
much as the duel itself, that made Alara ill.How could she she didn't feel
anything at all for those two men, she basically just reacted to the blood and
injuries. She would have been just as nauseated seeing someone gut a chicken.
Probably more. Those were herown kind,and she watched them slaughter each
other to settle someone else's quarrel without a second thought !
But then, her reaction when Dyran chose some poor, hapless victim to
torture to feeljoy that the victim was someone else
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The dragon forced herself to calm down, closing her mind to the
human's for a moment, telling herself that it didn't really matter. These
weren't the Kin; they were Outsiders. It shouldn't matter what they did. to
each other or what was done to them.
Yet she was utterly disgusted by the way the woman had let herself be
manipulated, geas or not. The human was intelligent, shesaw what was
happening, and Alara guessed that she had come very close to breaking her own
geas a time or two. Yet nothing of what she saw mattered to her, only her own
well-being, her luxurious life. Perhaps at one time she would have
feltsomething but that time had vanished with her childhood.
Evenfreedom didn't matter to her. Only pleasure.
Ireally should just abandon her here to die , Alara thought, feeling
as if she had bitten into something rotten. She didn't owe the woman anything.
She wasn't of the Kin. She wasn't even worth saving. Alara could almost agree
with the elvenkind about these humans, how base they were, how much they
really deserved to be slaves. She could at least agree with Dyran's faction,
anyway.
Alara had often discussed politics in her guise as a low-ranking
elven lord, or had them discussed in her presence as a human slave. Having
served as an elven page for several Council sessions, and eavesdropped in many
ways and many forms on others, Alara knew considerably more about elven
politics than Serina had ever learned, especially where the treatment of
humans was concerned. Oddly enough, for all his cruelty, Dyran was one of the
better masters. The Council faction he headed held that humans were
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