Excerpt: Elvenbane (The Halfblood Chronicles #1)

Blurb

From Grand Masters Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton — the landmark dragon-and-rebellion saga, revised, illustrated, and complete at last.

The elves rule a world where humans are property. The one thing they fear is a child who is not fully human.

For a thousand years the immortal elven lords have bred, collared, drugged, and discarded their human slaves at a whim. They fear revolt — but they fear something else far more: a halfblood child born with gifts no slave should possess. The elves have a name for such children. Wizards.

They hunt them, execute them, erase them, because prophecy whispers that one of them will rise as the Elvenbane.

When Serina Daeth is cast into the desert for carrying her master’s child, she dies giving birth beneath a merciless sun. Her daughter should have died with her. Instead the infant is found by Alara, a dragon shaman who saves the strange little creature on impulse and carries her home to the hidden lairs of the Kin.

Raised among dragons, named Shana, taught to believe she is one of them, the child grows into a girl with impossible gifts, dangerous questions, and a destiny no one fully understands. To the elves she is an abomination. To the dragons she may be a tool, a threat, or the key to remaking the world. And as Shana uncovers the truth of her birth, she is drawn toward a legacy of magic, vengeance, and freedom that could shatter elven rule forever.

Before a world can be freed, one girl must learn what she truly is — and why so many would kill to keep her from becoming it.

An epic of dragon-raised wizards, immortal tyrants, and a long-prophesied rebellion, in the tradition of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern. Elvenbane opens the complete four-book Halfblood Chronicles: newly revised and illustrated, and finished at last with the long-awaited finale.

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PRAISE FOR THE SERIES

“One of the season’s liveliest and, most appealing fantasy epics.”—Publishers Weekly

“A brisk, glittering yarn that packs as much action, suspense, and twisting of conventions into one novel as many writers invest in whole trilogies.”—Amazing Stories

“I came to this book with no expectations, other than to enjoy a book co-written by Mercedes Lackey. To say that I enjoyed it, is to say that a trip to the moon was a mere jaunt.”—Goodreads User Review

“A splendid blend of the talents of two excellent storytellers!”—Anne McCaffrey

“The first half of this book is a perfect case study in how ‘telling’ versus ‘showing’ can be wildly entertaining. The authors took a lot of time to build this world… and I found myself devouring the pages.”—Niki Hawkes, The Obsessive Bookseller

“A very entertaining premise.”—Tim Scheidler, Fantasy Literature

“An intense fantasy that does not leave out the darkside…acknowledging that only a realm showing both bad and good can truly be fully developed.”—ThriftBooks User Review

“An entertaining adventure.”—Kirkus ReviewsPRAISE FOR MERCEDES LACKEY:

“If you are in need of some literary chocolate when you’re having a bad day, look no further than the works of Mercedes Lackey. Try at least one of her books and I’ll bet you, like with any good chocolate, you’ll want more!”—Fantasy Literature

“She has been called one of the ‘most prolific science fiction and fantasy writers of all time.”—Locus MagazinePRAISE FOR ANDRE NORTON:

“She is a superb story-teller with a narrative pace all her own… Norton slowly unfolds a succession of images that first intrigue and finally engulf the reader.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A titan in the world of fantasy novels”—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

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EXCERPT

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 childbearing
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.