"Andre Norton & Lackey, Mercedes - Elvenbane 1 -The Elvenbane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

more others wanted to hear what was so dangerous.
It was just one more way to make the lives of elvenkind a little more
uncomfortable. The elves hated and feared the Prophecy, not the least of
which because there was a germ of truth in it.

It was not commonly known, but elves and humans were cross-fertile. The
offspring were relatively rare, even when contraceptive measures were not
being taken, but there had been halfblood children in the past. And those
children, like many hybrids, had gifts that surpassed those of their parents.

That was why the elves controlled the fertility of their slaves through
contraceptive measures in the very food they ate. Breeding was permitted
only under the eyes of the overseers.

Humans had magic of the mind; speaking mind-to-mind across vast
distances, reading the thoughts of others, seeing things at a far distance, or in
the past or future, or manipulating and moving things without the use of their
hands. Elves had magic as the dragons understood the concept, for dragons
had the magic of shape-shifting and a few other, minor abilities. Those who
became shamans tended to have the ability to read thoughts, but not to the
extent that talented humans or halfbloods could.

But the children of mixed blood had both human and elven magics, and the
human mental gifts tended to amplify their abilities as magicians.

"Wizards," the elves called the halfbloods, and attempted to use them in their
own never-ending feuds with each other. But the wizards were not helpless
creatures like the human slaves, and used their own magic to win free of
their masters.

Right then the elven lords should have welcomed the wizards into their own
ranks, Alara thought cynically. That's what I'd have done. There's nothing
like a life of luxury to make thoughts of revolution melt away like snow in the
sun.

But the elves didn't; instead, they panicked, and tried to destroy their
halfblooded offspring.

So the Wizard War began, with the wizards ranged on one side, and the
elven lords and their slave armies on the other.
The dragons entered the world before the Wizard War and the defeat and
destruction of the wizards, but for the most part were too busy with their own
establishment to pay much attention to the goings-on across the desert. Later,
they became aware of at least some of what had happened through faulty,
faltering, human word-of-mouth and through elven history, and through the
memory of those few of the Kin who did pay attention to the elves'
troubles--most notably, Father Dragon.

As a result of that War, halfbreeds were hated and feared, and if by accident
a human woman were bearing an elven lord's child, she and the child would