down into the desert. She guessed the hungry young cub had picked up the child’s psionic cry as she had, and responded to it instinctively. She changed shape once again, this time assuming the form of a full-grown tigone, and she directed a basic, animal-level psionic thought at the young cub.
“Mine. Move away.”
She sensed sudden apprehension in the tigone cub, and the thought that came back at her was both challenging and surprising. “No. Not prey. Friend. Protect.” The young cub bared its fangs in warning.
Lyra was completely unprepared for such a response. Not only was the cub not interested in the child as food, but it was fully prepared to take on a full-grown tigone to protect it. Lyra reverted to her humanoid form.
“Easy, now,” she said to the cub aloud, reinforcing her tone with soothing thoughts. “I have come to help your friend.”
Warily, the cub allowed her to approach, but remained poised to attack if she made the slightest hostile move toward the motionless child. This, too, surprised Lyra. Ordinarily, she had no difficulty in using her psionic skills to control beasts, but even as she exercised her domination over the young cub, it refused to submit completely to her will, intent above everything else on protecting the child.
Slowly, keeping a wary eye on the cub, Lyra crouched beside the small body of the child and gently turned it onto its back. And she was confronted with yet another surprise. “What have we here?” she said.
The child, at first glance, looked human. It was male, only five or six years old, and yet, as she turned him over, she saw the pointed ears and the sharply defined features—high cheekbones, angular jawline tapering down to a slightly pointed chin, a narrow and well-shaped nose over a wide, thin-lipped mouth… All these things indicated that the child was an elf, and yet he did not possess the long and extremely thin, exaggerated frame of an elf. His limbs were proportioned as a human’s, not an elf’s. The legs and arms were too short, and the ears, though delicately pointed, were too small. They were the same size as human ears, except that they had points.
The boy also had some of the features of a halfling—the deeply sunken eyes, the thick and almost manelike hair that cascaded to his shoulders, the delicately arched eyebrows. Halflings, too, had pointed ears, but the child was too large to be a halfling. And yet, he possessed the physical traits of both halflings and elves.
A half-breed, Lyra thought with astonishment. But elves and halflings were natural enemies. And it was unheard of for an elf to mate with halfling, although she supposed there was no reason why it should not be possible. Clearly, it was, for she was looking down at the result of just such a mating. And that explained what the child was doing alone in the desert. Lyra felt a tightness in her stomach. He had been cast out. The result of a forbidden union, he had doubtless, up to this point, been hidden and protected by his mother, but as he grew, it became obvious what he was, and the poor thing had been taken out into the desert and left to die.
However, the child clearly possessed a strong will, for, unaided and without food or water, he had almost succeeded in reaching the foothills of the Ringing Mountains. Not only that, but he was gifted with incredible psionic talent. Young and untutored as he was, he had nevertheless been able to project his anguished mental cry of rage and despair to reach her at the very summit of the Dragon’s Tooth. Few adult psionicists she knew, even those who had studied the discipline for years, could hope to match such a feat. She had to save him. He was not yet dead, but he was unconscious and very, very weak. That last mental shout had been his mind, pushed to its final extremity, howling out fury and frustration at having come within sight of his goal and yet failing to attain it.
“Never fear, little one,” she said. “You shall not die.”
She scooped out a bowl in the desert sand and shut her eyes, reaching deep within herself to summon up the necessary stored energy for a spell to create water. As she concentrated, water slowly bubbled forth in the depression she had scooped out. She dipped her fingers into it and sprinkled a few drops on the boy’s lips. His