showing up, over and over again. No matter how carefully they studied their slaves’ pedigrees, no matter how many children they destroyed as soon as the ability manifested, the powers kept recurring.
Some children were hidden, of course, kept out of the way of overseers until they learned to conceal their gift—and once collared, of course, the situation was moot. Another problem: despite careful pairing, some supposed “fathers” were no? the real sires of “their” children. Human fertility had baffled the elves since they had taken this world for their own; and human inheritance baffled them still further. Elven magic was inherited in simple ways; two strong mages produced powerful children, a strong mage mated to a weaker produced something in between, and two weak mages (like Goris, Dorion, or Goris’s unfortunate daughter) produced weak mages.
Never
did a mating produce a stronger mage than the strongest of the pairing.
Never
did a strong pair produce a weak child, only to have the power reappear in the next generation. Power simply could not be passed that way.
But that sort of inheritance pattern occurred all the time in humans, and the elves were utterly bewildered by it.
So the elf-stone-studded collars always carried two stones, as Serina’s had (and apparently sometimes a third to make sure the human wanted to wear it)—and one of those stones nullified human mind-magic if kept in physical contact with the human. Every human slave wore one from the time he or she was taken from the parents; they were fitted with collars as soon as they were placed in training, from the simple “This is a hoe” that began for the dullest of the slaves at age six or eight, to the complicated training of the concubines and fighters. The simplest were made of leather with a metal clasp, with the owner’s brand burned into the leather and the stones embedded in the clasp itself; those were the collars Alara had seen. She’d never even glimpsed anything like Serina’s gold, begemmed piece of fantasy jewelry; that was why she had nearly been tricked into seizing it.
As Serina’s memories had confirmed, the elves controlled the fertility of their human concubines with fanatic strictness. What Serina did not know was the reason why. Elves were not only cross-fertile with humans, they were more fertile with humans than with their own kind. Nowhere near as fertile as humans were alone, but there had been enough elven-human crossbreeds to make a formidable force in the Wizard War.
All
the elven factions destroyed the offspring, should a slip occur, as soon as the pregnancy or resulting child was discovered.
The halfblood wizards had come very close to destroying their former masters, closer than the elves cared to admit, even in the chronicles of the times. When she was researching the war at Father Dragon’s urging, Alara herself had been forced to read between the lines to discover how much damage had actually been done, by finding the rolls of the dead, and the account of destruction of property as noted in the surveys at the end of the war. Entire elven Clans had been wiped out; many, many of the strongest mages had learned too late that the human mind-magic not only combined well with elven powers, but could even increase the sorcerous strength of the wielder, from doubling it, to
squaring
it.
If it hadn’t been for a schism that developed within the ranks of the wizards, the elves would be the slaves, the hunted. She wondered what position the full-humans would have had in that society. And would the halfbloods have kept
any
elves around to ensure that
their
kind continued? The elves surely wondered about that before the conflict was over. That factional fight on the verge of victory was the
only
thing that saved them. With luck like that, maybe they had a reason to think of themselves as children of the gods—
Serina moaned and Alara turned her attention outward, watching the human woman speculatively. The
Some children were hidden, of course, kept out of the way of overseers until they learned to conceal their gift—and once collared, of course, the situation was moot. Another problem: despite careful pairing, some supposed “fathers” were no? the real sires of “their” children. Human fertility had baffled the elves since they had taken this world for their own; and human inheritance baffled them still further. Elven magic was inherited in simple ways; two strong mages produced powerful children, a strong mage mated to a weaker produced something in between, and two weak mages (like Goris, Dorion, or Goris’s unfortunate daughter) produced weak mages.
Never
did a mating produce a stronger mage than the strongest of the pairing.
Never
did a strong pair produce a weak child, only to have the power reappear in the next generation. Power simply could not be passed that way.
But that sort of inheritance pattern occurred all the time in humans, and the elves were utterly bewildered by it.
So the elf-stone-studded collars always carried two stones, as Serina’s had (and apparently sometimes a third to make sure the human wanted to wear it)—and one of those stones nullified human mind-magic if kept in physical contact with the human. Every human slave wore one from the time he or she was taken from the parents; they were fitted with collars as soon as they were placed in training, from the simple “This is a hoe” that began for the dullest of the slaves at age six or eight, to the complicated training of the concubines and fighters. The simplest were made of leather with a metal clasp, with the owner’s brand burned into the leather and the stones embedded in the clasp itself; those were the collars Alara had seen. She’d never even glimpsed anything like Serina’s gold, begemmed piece of fantasy jewelry; that was why she had nearly been tricked into seizing it.
As Serina’s memories had confirmed, the elves controlled the fertility of their human concubines with fanatic strictness. What Serina did not know was the reason why. Elves were not only cross-fertile with humans, they were more fertile with humans than with their own kind. Nowhere near as fertile as humans were alone, but there had been enough elven-human crossbreeds to make a formidable force in the Wizard War.
All
the elven factions destroyed the offspring, should a slip occur, as soon as the pregnancy or resulting child was discovered.
The halfblood wizards had come very close to destroying their former masters, closer than the elves cared to admit, even in the chronicles of the times. When she was researching the war at Father Dragon’s urging, Alara herself had been forced to read between the lines to discover how much damage had actually been done, by finding the rolls of the dead, and the account of destruction of property as noted in the surveys at the end of the war. Entire elven Clans had been wiped out; many, many of the strongest mages had learned too late that the human mind-magic not only combined well with elven powers, but could even increase the sorcerous strength of the wielder, from doubling it, to
squaring
it.
If it hadn’t been for a schism that developed within the ranks of the wizards, the elves would be the slaves, the hunted. She wondered what position the full-humans would have had in that society. And would the halfbloods have kept
any
elves around to ensure that
their
kind continued? The elves surely wondered about that before the conflict was over. That factional fight on the verge of victory was the
only
thing that saved them. With luck like that, maybe they had a reason to think of themselves as children of the gods—
Serina moaned and Alara turned her attention outward, watching the human woman speculatively. The
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