Elvenbane Read Online Free PDF Page A

strong chin and earnest dark eyes, and young enough that he might not be so hardened a beast as some of the gladiators. In general, the guards were more personable than the duelists, though they were just as well rewarded, and just as proud of their status. There were weeks, months, when Dyran was away, that time sat heavy on her hands, and the nights, especially, seemed to take forever to pass. No elven lord took his concubines with him when he traveled; that would be insulting the hospitality of his host. No matter how indispensable Serina
thought
she had made herself, in the end, it seemed, she could be done without…
    Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to find herself a handsome young stud and have herself assigned to him, to gracefully slip into retirement… Perhaps if she pleased Dyran enough, when he tired of her, he would permit her to have a mate of her own choosing. A youngster like that, perhaps, fresh enough to be pliant to
her
wishes—
    Demons! What was she thinking? Fool! That was a certain way to be supplanted!
    She strengthened her resolve never to even think of being replaced. It would be better to die than become a breeder.
    And as she schooled her expression into that sensuous smile Dyran liked, she swore that she would keep Dyran’s interest, no matter what it took.
    A stumble over something hidden in the sand brought her to her hands and knees, and brought an end to her drift into memory. Memory that was kinder than reality…
    She tried, and failed, to get to her feet, as the sun punished her unprotected back.
    It would be easy to give up; to lie in the sand and wait for death. She wondered why she had ever thought death preferable to disgrace and displacement. Death was no easy slide into sleep—it was the parched pain of a dry throat and mouth, a need for water driving out all thoughts, the agony of burned and blistered skin.
    I
will not die. I will not! I am Serina Daeth, and I will live and have revenge
!
    So she began to crawl, with the same mindless determination with which she had continued to walk. Somewhere out here, there must be shelter, water. She would find both. Someone must live out here. She would buy their aid, with whatever it took.
    But it was so hot. .

Chapter 2
    NOTHING VEILED THE brilliance of the sky, a clear and flawless turquoise bowl inverted over the undulating dunes of the desert, and the sun blazed in the east in solitary glory. Alamarana closed her inner eyelids against the white glare of sun-on-sand below her, spread her wings until her muscles strained, and spiraled in an ever-lower circle in the thermal she had chosen. Her destination, the ruin of a long-abandoned dragon-lair complex, was hardly more than a flaw in the silver-gilt sand beneath her scarlet-and-gold wings, but the pool beside it was visible at any height, reflecting the sky above like an unwinking cerulean eye.
    She corrected her course with tiny changes in the web of her wings as she drifted a little away from her goal. Months ago she would have folded her wings tight to her body and plummeted down on the ruins from above, ending her dive in a glorious, sand-scattering backwash of braking wing-beats. Not today. Not while she still carried the little one; no recklessness when she would be risking two, not one, with her aerobatics.
    She tilted her wings, spilled air, dropped a little, spilled air again. The spring-fed pool beckoned with a promise of serenity; she was tired, wing and shoulder muscles aching with the strain of so much flying, and glad this stop marked the end of her journey. Already she had spent her appointed times on Father Dragon’s mountaintop, in the surf beneath the cliffs that stood sentry on the Northern Sea, and deep within the redolent tree-trunk “halls” of the endless cedars of Taheavala Forest. Thus she had joined with air, water, and earth—and this final station on her pilgrimage represented a melding with the element of fire. Not for all dragons, this pilgrimage of the