Page 64 of Elvenbred

They kept her asleep, except for the brief period she needed to eat, take a little water, and relieve herself. The collar might force sleep, but it gave her no rest, and each waking left her wearier as though she had not slept at all. The nightmares compounded her misery. They grew worse the longer the collar was kept on her, dream after dream of failure, humiliation and death.

After her third waking, she begged them to let her rest, to escape the collar for one night. After the fifth, she kicked and screamed and had to be restrained when they took away the chamberpot and the Overseer had returned with the rod. By the seventh, she barely registered when they entered. They asked questions. She answered.

Part of her was ashamed that she had made no effort to resist, though most of her was past caring. She didn’t even make a pretense of resisting. When the questions came, she answered them. She had considered lying, but what would be the point? Triana roused herself enough each time to see that her interrogator was Haldeen, again, and then settled wearily into the routine. She was too exhausted to concentrate, and unable to do much more than answer the questions he asked. Many times he simply confused her, so he had to back up and reframe the query, sometimes to yes or no answers that she could make easily. After each session, the sleep, and the nightmares.

A dim and fading part of her knew madness lay only a short distance further down the path she trod. And at last she woke, rousing from a dream she could not recall but which had left her throat raw, presumably from screaming in her sleep, and so drained that she couldn’t even move. She heard voices, Haldeen’s and another’s, but all she could do was lie there, inert. Then a light was shown in one eye, then the other. She couldn’t respond, even when she felt hands at her throat. They left her to sleep without the collar, blessed and healing sleep.

She woke in her own time to a full bladder and used the chamberpot, the first time she had moved off her own volition, and had some control over her mind. She laughed bitterly to herself. Her stunt in the food production room had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She had most assuredly gotten Lord Haldeen’s attention. So, now instead of a room with a comfortable bed, or even a dormitory room where she worried about being knifed, she had a stone floor and a thin pallet, even less food than before, and nightmares that were worse than torture. That cold stone floor just leached the heat out of her bones even through the canvas and left her so chilled that the cold became part of her nightmares.

She heard the rasp of a key in the lock, and the heavy bolt turn. Haldeen entered. Triana propped herself up, ready for today’s interrogation.

He smiled down at her. “You stink,” he said amiably.

She said nothing. What would have been the point?

He sat at the small table he had brought, with its wobbling chair, and started his questions. Nothing new here. She could vaguely remember answering these before. Question after question about the elven lords. Who lorded it over who. Who resented whom (everybody resented everybody, but specifics in this case). Who was sleeping with whom, or who had been before she landed here. How clever were the human slaves? Why had they revolted? Who were their leaders? Why had some elves sided with the slaves? Those questions about the humans had come before and they had always puzzled her. Who cared what vermin thought? They were decent workers, and a few were worthwhile bedmates, but a real threat to the elven lords? Rubbish.

Today’s questioning came from an aside she’d apparently made in a previous session, and she struggled to understand. What were the seldom-glimpsed, but terrible things she called “dragons” and where did they come into the conflict? She knew that rumor had become fact there, that they existed, but she had never considered that they might ally with slaves.

At least she had satisfied him on one count: that they could not possibly be the things he called the Predators, that were the native monsters here. The dragons were something else. What, she didn’t know … but they were not objects of fear. Except to sheep, horses, cattle … anything big enough to make a decent meal.

It occurred to her as she answered the same question, phrased three different ways, that Kyrtian would have made much more entertaining fodder for Haldeen. Her mentally defective cousin, who fancied himself a general, might have answered Haldeen’s questions with the depth and detail that she lacked. She ground her teeth at that. Her attempt to find out what fuckery her cousin had involved himself in had indirectly resulted in her getting caught, and in landing here. At the moment, she hated him second only to Haldeen.

He reached for the rod. “I asked you a question.” She quickly put her hands up. “Please, no more nightmares.” She frantically searched her memory for he had asked her. “My lord … ummm, the gladiators that are trained can be used as a fighting force, but not easily. Success in the ring, umm, would not, should not, automatically translate into success as a unit.”

He rifled through his sheaves of paper. “Same answer as last time. Good.”

She shook her head. “Then, why did you ask?”

He smiled at her, thin-lipped and full of malice. “I have learned that subjects will say what the questioner wants to hear to avoid punishment … which may not be the truth. I have your words written down. If you lie to please me, or deceive me, then you have to remember the lie. So, if I reask the question, and then”—he did touch the control rod then, and she tensed, dreading the dreams—“I reask. Two or three times around, I am most likely to fence in a lie. Then, I can start drilling for the truth.”

He eased his finger away from the rod. She couldn’t speak to his certainty or to his consistency, but she certainly knew that she had come to hate him more than anyone she had met. She had also learned under the intense interrogations lay an essential truth … that she had learned as much from his questions as he had from her answers. She knew now what he wanted. The quickest and fastest route to conquer her people, and take over. His questions about the politics, relationships, military forces, economies, social organizations … all looking for the cracks and crevices where an outsider could insert a wedge and split it all wide open. She recalled the drawing she had seen, and suspected his wedge looked a lot like one of those metal monsters.

She knew the elven lords of her class remained, as a group, slothful and lazy … but that nothing would rouse them like a direct threat to their prerogatives. Haldeen knew from her that they were hopelessly divided, each looking to their own interests, and no small number would turn their coats the moment it might mean revenge against a rival, or would bend the knee in exchange for a piece of the pie, willing to trade in an elven lord for a Evelon elf-overlord if it meant a few more copper bits. She suspected her people would be easy meat, as long as the elves here didn’t scare them enough to put aside centuries of arguing and unify. As long as the elves here kept her people divided and focused on their selfish interests, the elven lords would be easy meat. Just divide and conquer.

Haldeen walked her over water sources, rivers, basic geography … a hazy subject for her. Haldeen didn’t bother to try to choke her into better answers. Triana obviously didn’t know. She described the lands around her own estate quite well, the general area encompassing her neighbors, and some generalities beyond that. But, she was hopeless at any kind of map or drawing.

Haldeen’s focus on maps, roads, and rivers confirmed that these elves, or at least this elf, had conquest in mind. Conquest of her world. These were, indeed, the ancient elven lords who had breached the void between her world and theirs, and then … unaccountably … had not made the crossing. She vaguely recalled tales of a panic, of constructs not working, or rebelling against their makers, of elven lords fleeing into a new world—her world—where their powers made them gods over the humans living there.

Perhaps her ancestors, the ones Haldeen called the dregs … the scrubs had been the first wave. If so, the second wave never broke upon her land.

Triana had traced out his plan from his questions. Haldeen was determined to open that way again, and finish what her ancestors had started. In large part, she didn’t really care whether he, they, or whomever succeeded. Let them come and do as they wished, so long as they extended to her the same courtesy. She really didn’t give a fat damn who ruled, so long as she kept her rank, prerogatives, and estate. Why should she care? So long as she got home.

She might have made an exception for the elven lords who had sided with the human slaves and their halfblood leader, but that was before Haldeen. Before Haldeen stepped into the picture, she would have happily seen those elven lords and their human allies wiped out of existence and memory. An aberration. Traitors to their own kind. But now, given what Haldeen wanted and her own hate … she would have kissed one of the treasonous elven lords full on the mouth, if that were the price of seeing Haldeen dead. She suspected that of all of her kind, the Elvenbane and her allies and human troops had the best chance of taking Haldeen—because he had no idea what he was going to face in them, and she had nothing she could give him to help him.

Fine sort of people we are. Like parent, like child, I suppose.

He cleared his throat, calling her back to the moment. He shuffled through his papers. “I think we’re done. You’re just repeating yourself now. Nothing new to offer. Frankly, the stench of you is getting to where it’s going to soak into the stone, so maybe it’s time to bring this farce to an end.”

“I’ve given you what you want,” she said wearily. “I’m no more use to you.” She shifted from one hip to the other, trying for a little relief. “Why won’t you let me just go home? I’m no threat.”

He looked at her, his expression no longer amused. “Trey-ana, I have declared you to be in debt forfeiture. I have given you bread from my table, clothing that could have gone to someone deserving of it, water from my wells. I have given you shelter from the monsters outside our walls. I have given you a trade where you could have earned your keep and gained honor in our society. And this was how you repaid a simple demand to contribute … just like every other member of my household does. You have assaulted my retainers, done injury to the blameless, and brought shame and disorder down upon this House. You are no better than a thieving vermin.”

He waved his hand in front of his face, making a show of waving away an odor. “When you got here, I wasn’t sure what to do with you, but there was a time when you working for me, and helping me, and earning your way back might have been an option.” He shrugged. “That was before—” He broke off, then looked at her. She could see the anger in his eyes, and had no doubt that for as much as she hated him, she had no doubt that he hated her, measure for measure.

“Go home, Triana? That’s novel. Release you into the wild … with you knowing what you know?” He stopped. His expression grew calculating. “How long have you been away, do you think?”

His question caught her off-stride. She worked out the math in her head, the different numbering systems still tripped her up. “Seven weeks … umm, seven eight-days, maybe eight.”