Elvenblood Read Free

recently; her older brother Lorryn was the important one, the heir, the
male
. There were more unmarried females in Lord Tylar's social class than there were males; he was too proud to send her to wed a lesser lordling, and dared not look higher. And Lord Tylar, like all the rest of the Lords of the Council, had been very involved with first the rumor, then the fact, of the Elvenbane's existence—
    "Please, lady, a step to the right."
    Then had come the second Wizard War, which had occupied his attention to the exclusion of all else. So Sheyrena had been ignored, as long as she was properly dutiful, properly trained, properly behaved.
    She had found that on the whole she preferred her own company to anyone else's—except, possibly, her brother's. She hadn't made any effort to find friends or companions mostly because she had no interest in the things the others of her generation occupied themselves with. Attendance at a handful of parties had quickly taught her that she was the kind who would settle into a corner and remain there during the entire duration of the event, uncomfortable and alone, wishing she could go home.
    "—and this fold should go
so
—"
    She didn't enjoy the loss of control that came with intoxication, she didn't see what made gossip so fascinating, she was too plain to attract male attentions, unwanted or otherwise, and the games that the others seemed to find amusing just left her wondering what it was they enjoyed so much, and why something so unchallenging to the intellect should be amusing. On the whole, she would much rather be left to find a corner of a garden, read, and dream her strange thoughts.
    There had been a lot more of those strange thoughts in the last year, although they had begun the day she had first learned flower-sculpting.
    "A stitch here, I think."
    She had begun by resenting those trivial-seeming lessons that her father had ordered her to begin.
Lorryn learns how to shatter stone with his power
. I
learn flower-sculpting
.
    She would never know if her magic was the equal of Lorryn's, because no elven maiden would ever be taught anything but useless skills like flower-sculpting, water-weaving, and the like. Oh, she had heard vague rumors of a few, a very few, elven women who wielded their power like a man, but she had never met any, and she doubted that any of them would be willing to share their secrets with her. Yet before that lesson, it would never have occurred to her that she had a certain power in her own hands that no elven lord would ever suspect.
    For it was during the course of that lesson that she realized something strange, exciting, and a little frightening.
    The same skills I used to shape the flower could be used in other ways
—
stopping a heart, for instance
. Those useless lessons? If she ever needed that power, those lessons might not be so useless after all.
    "What is this? A thread? No, cut it off."
    She had not mentioned her revelation to her mother, knowing that Viridina would have been horrified. And she had not really known that the idea would work until a few days later, when she had found a bird in the garden that had flown into a window and broken its neck. Without thinking, she had moved to end the poor thing's pain—and stopped its heart.
    She had run back to her own room in horror, fleeing what she had done. But the deed remained, and the power, and the knowledge of what she had done.
    Since that moment she had not been able to look at anything the same way. She had surreptitiously experimented with her power, working with the sparrows and pigeons that flocked to the garden. At first she had only made tiny alterations in their color, or the length of their feathers. Then she grew bolder, until now her garden was full of exotic creatures with feathers of scarlet and blue, gold and green, with trailing tails and flaring crests, all of them tame to her hand. Something told her that making subtle changes with her power could be as important—and as