Free Elvenbane by Andre Norton Page A

whisper it, and pass it onward! Remember the foretelling of the Elvenbane!”
    The girl uttered a strangled yip as Alara stood, and backed away. Alara gathered her rags around her as if they were the silken robes she had lately worn, and stared straight at the girl, her expression stern and forbidding. Since she
looked
blind, this unnerved the girl even more. “There will come a child,” Alara whispered. “One born of human mother, but fathered by the demons, possessed of magic more powerful than the elven lords! By this shall you know the child, that it shall read the very thoughts upon the wind, travel upon the wings of demons, and master all the magics of the masters ere it can stand alone! The child shall resemble a human, yet its eyes will be those of the demons; of the very green of the elf-stones. The child shall be hunted before its birth, yet shall escape the hunt. The child shall be sold, and yet never bought. The child shall win all, yet lose all.”
    Standard prophetic double-talk, she thought to herself. If the slaves had any belongings of their own, she could make a fortune in preaching. You could tell them anything as long as it sounded impressive and mysterious, and they’d believe it.
    “And in the end,” she concluded, her voice rising, “the child shall rise up against the masters and cast them into the lowest hell, there to make of
them
slaves to the demons of hell!”
    The girl stepped an involuntary pace forward, fascinated in spite of herself. Her-eyes were bright with mingled fear and excitement, and her curly hair damp with nervous sweat. Alara looked straight into her eyes, and thrust a bony finger at her.
    “Hear the words of the Prophecy!” she shrieked, as the girl jumped back. “Hear them and heed them!”
    “Jena! What’s going on down there?” a deep female voice scolded from the top of the staircase.
    Young Jena jumped again, and went pale and frightened. “N-nothing!” she called back.
    “Then who the hell are you talking to?”
    “I—uh—” The girl looked at Alara in confusion; Alara remained silent and statue-still.
    “Get your rump up here
now
, girl!”
    Jena looked helplessly at Alara, and scampered up the stairs as fast as her legs could carry her.
    But when she came back down, trembling with fear, the kitchen overseer behind her, there was no sign of a mysterious old woman. In fact, there was no sign of anyone at all.
    But there
wax
one extra wine cask, if anyone had bothered to count…
    And shortly thereafter, twenty or thirty witnesses, including two elven overseers, saw a Great Kite launch itself from the roof of the manor. It rose into a bloody sunset, wings blotting out the sun itself, screaming doom down upon the Clan of V’Larn.
    That was fun
, Alara decided,
even if the rest of the Lair would have had a fit about the shaman risking herself like that
.
    The elven lords suppressed the Prophecy and those who spread it whenever they could—but the best way to spread something is to try to outlaw it, as they found to their frustration. It was hard to do anything about it when it was being spread by old men and women who vanished into thin air—and the more they punished those who had listened to the forbidden words, the more others wanted to hear what was so dangerous.
    It was just one more way to make the lives of elvenkind a little more uncomfortable. The elves hated and feared the Prophecy, not the least of which because there was a germ of truth in it.
    It was not commonly known, but elves and humans were cross-fertile. The offspring were relatively rare, even when contraceptive measures were not being taken, but there had been halfblood children in the past. And those children, like many hybrids, had gifts that surpassed those of their parents.
    That was why the elves controlled the fertility of their slaves through contraceptive measures in the very food they ate. Breeding was permitted only under the eyes of the overseers.
    Humans had magic of the