Dragon Blood-Hurog 2 (2 page)

I left Oreg in the tower and crossed the bailey to the keep. I had a while before arms practice, and whenever I had a spare minute, I worked on the keep.

Once Hurog had been made entirely of blackstone, but many of the stones had shattered when Oreg's death had destroyed the keep and its walls. Blackstone was expensive, and when we started rebuilding,
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there had been little gold to buy it with. Whatever quarry had supplied the original builder with stone was

lost to time, always supposing that he'd gotten the rock from somewhere nearby, as was customary—Oreg didn't remember one way or the other.

But Hurog had an old granite quarry, so we'd used granite instead and the result was … odd. Black pockmarked with gray made the keep much less imposing, and part of me regretted the loss of the old keep bitterly.

We'd rebuilt the inner curtain walls, except for a properly secure gatehouse. Instead we had only a primitive set of wooden gates while our blacksmith and our armorer labored mightily to supply the ironwork we needed. Most of the outside of the keep had been finished as well. Our progress had been unusually quick because of the aid of the dwarves, but I suspected that it wouldn't be completely rebuilt until my body was dust in the grave. The keep wasn't overly large by the standards of the Five Kingdoms, but neither was the workforce we had to rebuild with. The outer curtain wall was no more than a pile of rubble enclosing nearly thirty acres of land. I hadn't even had the heart to begin on it. The harvest this year had been the best in memory, aided in no little part by the disappearance of the salt

creep, which had been growing in the best of the fields since before my great-grandfather's time.
Magic,
whispered the people, and looked at me in awe.
Dragon bones
, I thought, and hoped the wheat we harvested wouldn't poison the person who ate it. It hadn't last year, or the year before. Nor, to my relief, did it seem to have any other unusual properties.

With harvest over, while others hunted for meat or sport, I worked on rebuilding the keep with whoever wanted to help. The dwarves came and went at their own whim—and there were none here now. Two days a week, I paid for a work party, but even with good harvests Hurog wasn't rich. We'd finished the roof and the inner supporting walls of the keep last winter, but it was still mostly just a shell of half-finished rooms.

From the inside, the great hall looked much as it had in my father's day, since I'd been firm on keeping the granite where it didn't show inside. The wall with the family curse written on it had taken the most time. Finding the correct stones and setting them in proper order was somewhat more taxing than the court ladies' puzzles, since each of the pieces weighed over a hundred pounds, and several stones had been smashed when Hurog fell.

My uncle thought I was foolish to work so hard on it, since the curse, which predicted Hurog's fall to the

Stygian Beast of mythology, had already been broken. My brother, Tosten, said I did it because I'd been instrumental in breaking the curse. But I hadn't realized, until I saw Oreg's face, that I'd done it to protect

him from the too-rapid changes of the past few years. When you're over a millennia old, change, even for

the better, is a hard thing. And it was he, as much as I, who had broken the curse. I touched the wall lightly with one hand and bent to pick up a grout bucket. For the past few weeks, we'd been working on the floors. One of the Blue Guard, an Avinhellish man, was the son of a mason. He'd taken one look at the cracked mess left on the floor of the great hall after the keep fell and declared

it unfixable. If I'd known then the amount of work the stupid floor was going to be, I'd have timbered it, or even just left it dirt. It took us months to get the floor level enough for our mason. I think he took covert enjoyment in giving me orders.

The main doors of the keep were awaiting hinges capable of supporting their great weight, so there was nothing to slow the boy who barreled into the great hall. He stopped in front of me and opened his mouth, but he couldn't get a word out for lack of breath.

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"Take it slow, boy," I said. We waited for a long moment and several false starts before he could speak. Meanwhile, I examined him for clues to his identity.

He was clothed rather well, even for a freeholder's son. The woolen trousers were newly dyed, and the shirt was linen—a cloth that had to be purchased, as flax didn't grow in our climate. The boy looked like

Atwater's get, tall with dark eyes that swallowed the light.

"Sir, there's bandits, sir. Down by Da's farm. He sent me here to get you." He was covered in sweat, and once he'd gotten his message out, he had to give his all to breathing again.

"Atwater is your father?" I asked, and he nodded.

I always knew when there was trouble brewing on Hurog land. Oreg said it was because I was tied to it by blood right, and told me that several of my distant ancestors had the same tie to the land. Hurog spoke to me—when I listened.

A swift touch of magic showed me that there was no fighting near Atwater's farm now, which meant that

the bandits had been driven off. If Atwater or one of his family had been killed, I'd have known about it.

They belonged to Hurog in a way that had nothing to do with law and everything to do with blood.

"Don't fret, boy," I said. "Atwater's been fighting bandits longer than I've been alive. Let's get my horse, shall we?"

In the end there were three of us following the boy. He plainly thought we needed more; I thought we could do with less. Rides with Oreg and my brother were always more interesting than pleasant. My brother, Tosten, rode his new roan war stallion, a gift from our uncle, and came with the excuse that the animal needed exercise when he found me saddling my own horse in the stables. Tosten was never going to be as tall as I was, but the past four years had given him a man's face and a fighter's body. He looked cool, competent, and clever (as some court woman said in my hearing). Competent and clever, I agreed with. Coolness might come with age—maybe in fifty years or so. While I waited for Tosten to saddle his horse, Oreg showed up and, without a word, took out his own gelding. Except for his dark hair and half a head in height (Tosten was taller), he and Tosten looked enough alike to be twins.

"Bandits," I said in answer to Oreg's look as I mounted and lead the way out of the bailey.

"My brother spied them near our farm and Da sent me here for help." There was a hint of accusation in the boy's tone. Three people, it implied, would not be much help.

The air was chill with the coming winter. We'd taken the last of the harvest in this week. Oreg said he thought it might snow soon, but today the leaves still clung to the branches of the rowan and aspen in bright clumps that stood out against the dark greens of the pines and firs. Pansy, my stallion, snorted with

pretended fear and shied violently when a falling leaf fluttered too close. In battle, not even a heavy blow

would cause him to step to the right or left without my request, but outside of serious work, Pansy loved

to play.

The shortest path to Atwater's farm skirted the edge of the mountains where the land was too rocky to
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plow. The farm was isolated in a hanging valley away from the other cultivated fields of Hurog. That isolation had lured bandits into thinking it was a target before, but none of them had ever managed to take anything from Atwater. I didn't think that was going to change today. The turf was still soft enough that the steady trot I'd set was unlikely to cause the horses much stress. People were another matter entirely.

"We need to hurry," said the boy for the third time. I'd had a gentle mare found for him, but I needn't have. He sat her bareback (his choice) and was impatient with the rest of us for holding him back.

"Never arrive for a fight breathless," snapped Tosten.

"If they overran your farm, we'd smell smoke by now," I reassured the boy, shooting Tosten a repressive

look. "They might not have seen the farm, or your father may have driven them off or killed them. Either

way we don't have to hurry. There can't be very many of them, or I'd have heard about it before they made it this far onto Hurog lands."

"Don't worry about Tosten, boy," said Oreg cheerfully. "He's as impatient as you are." Tosten sank into silence. Oreg, in contrast, was unusually lighthearted, teasing the boy until he smiled—at which point my brother let his stallion speed past us. With a glance at me, the boy sent his mare cantering after my brother—obviously hoping I'd hurry after both of them.

"I wish you wouldn't bait Tosten," I murmured to Oreg.

Oreg just smiled, though his eyes didn't light up the way they did when he was really amused. "Your brother has had plenty of time to decide that I'm no threat to him. Time he grew up. If I choose to tweak his tail a bit—that's between him and me. He doesn't need your protection anymore, Ward." I rolled my eyes. "You encourage him," I said.

"I frighten him," Oreg corrected, and even his mouth was serious. I must have looked unconvinced, because he shook his head and said, "I'm no threat to his relationship with you, and he knows that. It hasn't been about that for some time." Oreg smiled again, but this time it was a genuine one. "Poor lad's fighting dragons."

It was an old Shavig saying about someone who was displaying rash bravery impelled by fear. The ironic

twist to Oreg's tone was because in this case it was literally true. Oreg's father had been half-dragon. Oreg could take dragon form when he wished, and considered both the human seeming and the dragon his true forms.

I weighed what Oreg had said. Tosten was the only one who knew the whole story about Oreg. As my heir and as my brother I thought I owed him that. Perhaps it would have been better if I'd stuck to half-truths.

Atwater's boy waited for us at the top of the trail, though Tosten was still ahead.

"Tosten told me it is magic that lets you see there's nothing wrong at my home. There's a lot of folks who

are frightened by magic."

It sounded like a personal observation, and I looked at him sharply. He colored up, but his eyes met
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mine squarely.

"Most folks know you can do magic, my lord," he said firmly. "Most of us are grateful for it. Father says

that they'd never have found my brother and his hunting party caught out in the blizzard if you hadn't joined in the search."

I smiled at him and he dropped in beside us. Tosten, when Oreg is not around, usually knows how to charm people into doing what he wanted them to. It came from being a bard, he claimed, but I thought it

might be a bit the other way around. Charm, good voice, and clever fingers made for good bards. As we neared Atwater's farm, the land told me death had visited here recently. Death was no stranger to Hurog—its mortal residents came to an end on a regular basis—but I had to assume that this death had something to do with my being summoned here. Whoever had died was not of the earth of Hurog, which

meant it wasn't Atwater or his people. It must be the bandits.

Nevertheless, when we passed the boundary at the edge of the farm, I drew my sword. Tosten (who'd let us gradually catch up to him) and Oreg drew steel likewise. The path we'd taken approached the farmhouse, which from the rear was more of a fort than a house, but a lookout spied us riding down into

the valley and let out a series of notes on his hunting horn—Atwater's own call. The tightness eased in my

shoulders.

A moment later the unmistakable form of the holder, himself, came around the corner. Seeing us, he whistled an all clear, so I sheathed my sword.

The boy heaved a great sigh of relief and nudged his mare into a gallop. When one is a grizzled old war lord or the younger son of a holder, one may gallop as much as one wishes. Since I was a young lord who was trying to live down various reputations, I slowed my horse to

a walk.

Mounted on my father's old war stallion, walking was sometimes adventurous. Pansy knew better, but I let him snort and huff and generally announce to everyone watching that he was dangerous and would be

much faster than that little mare if I would just let him go.

Atwater nodded at me when we got close enough to talk. "Thank ye, my lord, for coming. But the problem of bandits has been dealt with. I've the bodies if you'd like to look at 'em." Atwater was a mountain of a man, approaching my height and build. His pale blond hair fading unnoticeably to gray was braided in old Shavig style—unusual now, but not worth commenting about. His beard, however, was a magnificent thing. Fiery-red, it covered his face and a fair bit of chest A little barbaric by proper Kingdom standards, but my Hurog folk were beginning to exhibit a pride in our Shavig heritage.

Like many of the older men at Hurog, Atwater had fought to put down the rebellion in Oranstone at my father's side. Sometime during the campaign, Atwater had conceived a dislike for the previous Hurogmeten. I hadn't been fond of my father for my own reasons, but even I had to admit there weren't many men who could fight as well as he had. Most of the men who fought under him wouldn't hear a word against him. I don't know what my father had done to Atwater, but it had taken me the better part of two years to make him see that I was not the man my father had been. Tosten, Oreg, and I followed Atwater and his son around the building into the chaos of children and
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relatives who helped him farm and protect the land. At the center of the fervor were three dead men, covered decently for the sake of the children.

I dismounted, handed my reins to Oreg, whose gelding Pansy tolerated, and pulled the blankets aside to look at the dead men's faces. I took care to keep the blankets arranged so the children couldn't peek. I'd seen one of them before, but it took me a moment to remember where.