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

The humans, never taught to read or write, had no record of the Wizard War.
Only the Prophecy spread by the Kin kept alive any distorted echo of what
had occurred. And the Prophecy was nothing that had ever come to Serina's
ears; in this, as in many things, the concubines were sheltered from
"contamination" by lesser slaves.

Alara knew from being inside Sienna's thoughts that if she had gotten any
notion what the desert was like, she never would have fled into it. But she
knew nothing of anything so simple as weather changes, or how the sun
could punish and burn the unwary. She had escaped the manor and the
grounds, fled past the cultivated gardens and out into the area no longer
irrigated and kept verdant by Dyran's magic. She had seen the vast stretch of
sand lying under the rising moon, and had thought only that the soft sand
would be kind to her bare feet. She knew a little of tracking from Dyran's
discussions of hunts with his guests. She saw the wind scouring the sand and
realized it would hide her tracks, and she knew that on shifting sand the
hounds would be unable to find her scent. She had never thought about the
sun, and how warm it would get during the day with no shade, or where she
would find water or food. Her first day of staggering blindly over the sand
had taught her to rue her choice, but by then she was utterly lost. She had
been so sheltered that she had no notion that the sun rose every day in the
east and set in the west, and without landmarks she was helpless. A
thunderstorm the first night had given her water and revived her, clouds had
shadowed the sun and kept her going on the second day. But on this, the
third day, she was near to the end. Alara found it impossible to care very
much, except in the abstract, as a kind of indicator of what might be
happening to other women bearing halfblood children.

Alara wondered... if Serina managed so nearly to keep this child a secret,
even with a rival waiting for her to slip, it really was possible that there were
still other halfbreeds in existence. The casual rape of a fertile field-hand, a
mistake in the contraception treatments, an affair by a younger elf with a
simple servant or a breeder--there must have been a dozen ways a
conception could occur. Human traits would tend to overcome elven. .

Depending on what they looked like. That pale elven skin and white-gold
hair would give them away. You couldn't hide that in a crowd of field
hands...

Wait; she remembered something about that...

Father Dragon said something about the halfbreeds. Elves didn't brown in the
sun, but halfbreeds did; they tended to inherit their human parents' hair color,
but the elven green eyes with the oval pupils. As long as a child kept its head
down until it learned to conceal its eye color with magic... and the collars
only blocked the human magics, not the elven. For that matter, since the
halfbreeds tended to have stronger magic in the first place, they might even
be able to work around the collars' inhibitions.

There were elven women who headed their Clans... and needed heirs. She