A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [81]
All at once the life flashed in his turquoise eyes, and he grinned.
“Now that I shan’t tell you, because it’s a riddle of mine to top the one you posed me. Or perhaps we can say that—” He hesitated, listening.
Dallandra heard it, too, a thin shriek on the rising wind. Together without need for words they turned and hurled themselves into the air, he a hawk, suddenly, a red hawk from Deverry, while she changed to her usual shape of some gray and indeterminate songbird, both of them with wingspreads of fully fifteen feet across. They banked into the rising wind and rode it down, swooping over the grassy hillside to the flowered meadow where now the court screamed and ran about in confusion. In the darkening night torches guttered and sparked.
“Elessario!” The cry drifted up to them. “She’s been taken!”
The hawk screamed, a harsh cry, and changed course for the river. Dallandra followed, praying for moonlight, and as if in answer a moon began to appear on the horizon, vast and bloated, casting a sickly yellow light. Far below on the oily river she saw a shape, like a splinter of wood from their height, pushing itself upstream. Evandar stooped and plunged. More slowly in prudent circles Dallandra followed him down and saw a black barge, rowed by slaves, churning against the current. In the prow stood Alshandra, and she seemed that night some ten feet high, a warrior woman dressed in glittering armor, nocking an arrow in her bow. Screaming, the hawk plunged down and upon her before she could aim and loose. His massive claws raked her face and his beak tore at her arms as she fell to the deck, howling in rage, clubbing him with the bow.
Bound round with black chains Elessario crouched, sobbing, some feet away. Dallandra understood enough about this country by then to keep her wits. She landed on the deck and shed her bird-form like a cloak.
“Break the chains!” she snapped. “Just flex your arms, and they’ll fail right off.”
Elessario followed orders and laughed aloud when the chains turned to water and puddled at her feet. With a howl of rage Alshandra threw the hawk to one side and hauled herself to her knees. Boat, slaves, armor, night—they all vanished as suddenly as the chains. In the golden sun of a late afternoon they stood in elven form on the grassy riverbank while the chattering Host swarmed round.
“Oh, go away, all of you!” Alshandra snarled.
Laughing and calling out to one another they fled. Dallandra put an arm round Elessario’s shoulders and drew her close while Alshandra and Evandar faced each other, both dressed in court clothes, now, cloth-of-gold tunics, diadems of gold and jewels, and their cloaks, tipped in fur, seemed made of silver satin. And yet, across her cheek ran the bleeding rake of a hawk’s talon, and on his face swelled a purple bruise.
“She’s my daughter, and I shall take her wherever I want,” Alshandra said.
“Not unless she goes willingly, and the chains show she was less than willing. Where were you going to take her? Farther in?”
“That’s no affair of yours.” Alshandra turned on Dalla. “You may have my man, because I tired of him long before you came to us, but you shall not have my daughter.”
“I don’t want her for my sake. I only want her to have the life that should be hers, that should be yours, truly, as well.”
With a shimmer of light Alshandra changed her form, becoming old, wrinkled, pathetic in black rags.
“You’ll take her far away, far, far away, and never shall I see her again.”
“Come with her, then. Follow her, the way all of your people are going to do. Join us all in life.” Dallandra glanced Elessario’s way. “Do you want to go with your mother?”
“No, I want to stay with you.”
Alshandra howled, swelling up tall and strong, dressed like a hunter in her doeskin tunic and boots, the bow clasped in red-veined hands.
“Have it your way, witch! You’ll lose this battle in the end. I swear it. I’ve found some as will help me, back in that ugly little world of yours. I’ve made