Dragon Blood h-2 Page 14

  "He was stupid, unthinking, and angry at being part-blood dragon with nothing but a bit of magic to show for it," said Oreg. "He was the first born of Hurog who could not take on dragon form, and was obsessed with dragons because of it. Farson killed three dragons to make his toy, and bound their spirits to the blood gem for all eternity—I've always thought it was a variant of the spell that bound me to Hurog, but Farson wasn't as good a wizard as my father was. If I held that stone, I'd be worried about how tightly the spirits of the dragons were still bound into obedience." Oreg grinned nastily. "Maybe we won't have to worry about Jakoven long."

  "Can you get Kellen out of the Asylum?" I asked.

  Oreg nodded. "If he's not in the same section you were in, I'll be able to do it somehow. I told his man to meet us on the road near Menogue after he'd heard Kellen was out." He paused. "You know, he's going to have the same problems proving himself that you have had."

  I laughed. "No. No one has ever accused Kellen of being stupid—just insane. It's not at all the same thing. A stupid ruler is much more of a problem than an insane one."

  "We'll have to wait until you're fit to travel before we get him out," Oreg said. "That will give Beckram a chance to get Ciarra out of Iftahar."

  "He'll have to get out more than Ciarra, Oreg," I said. "You'll have to tell Duraugh and Beckram about Kellen. Hurog is under snow by now, and it'll be a difficult place to besiege until spring. Iftahar, though, will fall to Jakoven as soon as he thinks to take it—which won't be long after he finds out Kellen has flown."

  I thought a minute. "Tell them there's grain to feed a thousand people for six months at Hurog. If Duraugh thinks we need more, Beckram will have to bring it with him."

  "I'll tell them," Oreg promised. "Since we're stuck here until you can travel, they'll probably beat us to Hurog. We'll have to send a messenger to Hurog and warn Stala to expect company."

  "Right," I agreed. The thought of staying longer in Estian made my knees turn to water. I tried to hide my fear and come up with an alternative, but I had no greater trust in my abilities than Oreg did.

  "The king will wonder if we send Beckram off by himself tomorrow," I said. "If we all leave Estian tomorrow, he won't know we've sent Beckram ahead. We can camp on Menogue instead. No one goes there, so unless Jakoven sends out someone to track us, Menogue should be safe."

  Oreg's nostrils flared white even in the dim light of the room. His memories of Menogue were not fond. "What of Aethervon?"

  "It was the Tamerlain who allowed me to face Jakoven without the effects of his mages' herbs. I think Aethervon will allow us refuge. The Tamerlain told me that there are a few people there now. It sounds as if Aethervon has been recruiting for some reason."

  "Don't trust in the gods," said Oreg.

  "No," I agreed. "I don't expect him to help fight off Jakoven, but that shouldn't be necessary. Jakoven will be planning a proper vengeance—pursuing us won't be a priority until we break Kellen out."

  I yawned and Oreg shooed me back under the covers and I sent him to his own bed. I hadn't slept much since my imprisonment in the Asylum, and I was too tired to stay awake any longer.

  The dream started innocuously. I waited in a large chamber more grandiose even than the one the dwarves had devised at Hurog. My feet rested upon a deep-piled rug that covered a malachite inlaid marble floor.

  The door in front of me opened and a pale-faced Tallvenish nobleman whom I recognized vaguely from court entered and fell to one knee before me.

  "Ah," I said. "So kind of you to answer my summons promptly. You told me once of a Hurog-born whore that you frequented."

  "Yes, sire," he agreed. "She died a while back."

  There was no servility in his voice, and I decided it might be necessary to teach him better—but for now I had a use for him. "She had a child by the old Hurogmeten."

  "So she claimed, sire. The Hurogmeten certainly visited her a time or three, sire. I saw him there myself."

  "A Hurog boy bred back to Hurog should concentrate the blood," I murmured to myself before turning my attention back to my informant. "How old would the child be now?"

  The man looked blank for a moment. "I don't know, sire. He was ten, maybe, when I saw him last."

  A boy, I thought, excellent I liked boys.

  The thoughts that accompanied my words woke me and sent me dry-heaving into the chamber pot next to the bed. I sat on the cool floor and sweat ran down my back.

  Jakoven. I'd been in Jakoven's mind. Though the scent was dissipating, I could still smell the magic that had overlaid my room when I awoke. Whose magic, I could not tell, but I decided it meant that I had dreamed true. Those thoughts could not have come out of my head, not from me.

  "They did not," said the Tamerlain from the corner of my room. "You dream true dreams sent by Aethervon. They are meant to aid you."

  Gods, I thought, Jakoven is after a child.

  "I owe you thanks for your help," I said, wiping my mouth with a cloth lying on a small table next to a basin of water. "And for the dreams, if I can get to the boy before Jakoven does."

  She purred and rolled over like a playful kitten. "No thanks are necessary. It is we who are the debtors."

  She left before I could say anything in reply, and I stared at the place where she had been. I wanted nothing more than to slink back to Hurog and hide in the snow-shielded hills until the gods called me to my rest—but I would not leave a boy to Jakoven's clutches, nor would Jakoven leave me in peace.

  It was a long time before I crawled back under the covers and tried to get more sleep.

  I was troubled again with dreams, but these were more normal nightmares born of the Asylum. I dreamed of terrifying monsters that attacked me over and over while I tried to hide in straw that fell away from my fingers. But a soft voice that reminded me of green apples and clean rain drove the beasts away and guarded me while I hid in safety.

  I dreamed of a gem that hovered in the air above me and dripped red blood on my chest. I tried to roll away, but I was restrained on the leather-covered table. The blood became a flood drowning me, and I awoke with a gasp.

  "It's safe, Ward," said Tisala's voice from the darkness of the room where I slept. She shifted uncomfortably and I made out the outline of a wooden chair set against the wall opposite my bed. "Go to sleep."

  Somehow, knowing that she was there allowed me to do just that.

  9—WARDWICK

  Survival is not a pretty business.

  I awoke in a black mood. Yesterday it had all seemed so unreal, but this morning I remembered bleakly all of the humiliations of my captivity. I didn't remember everything clearly, mostly bits and pieces, but that was enough. I remembered losing control of my body in every possible way, remembered pleading with Jade Eyes both to stop and not to stop. I felt filthy and used.

  Tisala slept backward on the chair, her arms folded over the back with her chin resting upon her forearms. I didn't want her to see me, somehow certain that what I'd done under Jade Eyes's hands would be written upon my flesh.

  Quietly I pulled on the covers until they cloaked my miserable self. If I'd had a knife at hand, I'd have slit my own throat.

  The door opened and Oreg, whose light footsteps were unmistakable, came in.

  "All right, Tisala," he said. "Time for a changing of the guard. There's a bed with your name on it on the other side of the wall."

  "Ouch," she said, and I heard the legs of the chair shift on the wooden floor. "Though mind you, anyone who falls asleep on guard-duty deserves to be stiff."

  "Go sleep," Oreg said, and I heard from his tone that he was fond of her. "I told you I slept just across the hall, you didn't need to stay here."

  "Yes, I did," she said, yawning. "He watched over me under similar circumstances."

  He waited where he was until she'd shuffled out and the door shut behind her.

  "All right, Ward," he said. "Time to wake up and face the day."

  I took a deep breath and pulled the
covers down. "Good morning," I said, trying to sound normal.

  Oreg sat on the foot of the bed. "How did you sleep?"

  I opened my mouth to lie and tell him I was well-rested when I remembered that at least one of the nightmares I'd had was important. "The Tamerlain was here—I don't know if I told you her part in all of this. Yesterday is a bit of a blur."

  Oreg nodded. "You told all of us that she cleared your head so you could think and throw Jakoven's plans to the wolves. It was a near thing, though. I talked to the guardsman who was watching so he could summon your uncle's men if they were needed. Even as it was, he said that but for your uncle's hold on Tosten, he'd have gone for the king right there and then."

  "Well," I said, not wanting to think how close I had come to getting my entire family beheaded for treason. "She visited me last night and told me that Aethervon had a gift of true dreaming for me—out of gratitude for cleansing the land, I think she said. I dreamt the king was looking for a boy, my father's son out of a Hurog-bred whore. The boy's mother is dead, but the boy would be Hurog-born from both parents."

  "Can you find him?" Oreg asked.

  I shook my head. "I just saw the king's part in this. I need to see the boy before I can find him with magic." An increasingly familiar feeling of weakness crept over me. "Ah, gods," I whispered before my body began to try to shake itself apart.

  An extremely unpleasant interval followed. Oreg held me until it was over, then efficiently removed me to the chair, burned my clothes and the sheets, and cleaned the room. He stepped out and returned—in clean clothes, as I had managed to dirty him, too—with sheets and clothes for me. He made the bed as I dressed.

  "Efficient," I said, sitting stiffly on the bed.

  "You think you are the only Hurog whose body rebelled from the poisons pumped through it?" he said. "If I weren't efficient after all these years, it would be a shame. Most of them even chose to indulge in vice. Go to sleep, Ward. Duraugh has to write orders for Beckram to take to Iftahar's seneschal, so we're not leaving until later this morning. I'll have a talk with Tisala about your newest foundling. As it happens, she has a lot of contacts in Estian. If there's a young Hurog out in the streets, she'll find him."

  He left and I lay back in the bed, feeling even worse than I had when I awoke. As I stared at the ceiling, Tosten opened the door, his battered lap harp in one hand.

  He gave me a measuring glance. "You look worse than you did yesterday. Oreg told me you needed cheering up—and I was to come and make myself useful."

  I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.

  "I see he was right." Tosten nodded. "You need to hear The Ballad of Hurog's Dragon, which is even now making itself popular in the taverns of Estian."

  He pulled up Tisala's chair, settled himself in it, and began to play a song that purported itself to be a story a Shavig armsman was telling to a Tallvenish audience at an inn. That it was one of Tosten's own compositions was obvious to me. I knew my brother's music.

  About halfway through I surged to my feet in disbelief. "He did what?"

  Tosten stopped playing. "Oreg was really worried about you, Ward. It wasn't his fault. None of the horses got hurt, and he did that thing that makes people look away from him. I bet there weren't half a dozen of the men who really got a good look at him."

  "And you're singing about this in the taverns? No one is supposed to know about our dragon."

  "Oh," he said. "We've done something about that. It was Tisala's suggestion, actually, and I've refined upon it a bit. Listen to the rest."

  The pair of Shavigmen used their tale to lure a Tallvenish nobleman (who sounded a lot like several of Jakoven's cronies) away from his fellows and out into the woods. Whereupon the Shavigmen stripped and bound him. They gathered his possessions and clothing and took them back to the inn with a note warning him to leave a certain Shavig heiress alone or they'd spread the story of his humiliation far and wide.

  I sank back onto the bed with a laugh. "Catchy tune."

  Tosten looked pleased. "I thought so. I've heard several other minstrels play it—or a version of it."

  "No one will ever admit to believing there are dragons at Hurog after hearing that," I said.

  "That was mostly the point," agreed Tosten. "Feeling better?"

  "Mostly," I said. "Thanks, Tosten."

  I had one more shaking fit that afternoon, though it wasn't nearly as bad. Or wouldn't have been if I hadn't been on top of Feather halfway up the steep trail to Menogue. I didn't stay on top, and for a moment I thought someone was going to force poor Feather to fall on me as they tried to move her away on the precipitous slope and she slipped.

  So I recovered lying directly under Feather's belly.

  "Damn," I said with feeling as I rolled carefully out from under my horse. "Good girl, that's a love. Not your fault." When I was through soothing her abused pride, I remounted with Tosten's help and didn't protest as Oreg and Tosten left their mounts for others to lead and walked on either side of me.

  As Feather labored up the trail, I thought that if the king's army wanted to chase us up the steep-sided, flat-topped hill (that the flatlander Tallvenish called a mountain), he was welcome to do so. Any army that climbed up to the top wasn't going to be in fighting shape when they got there.

  As the Tamerlain had told me, there were a few of Aethervon's followers camped on the site of the old ruined temple. They welcomed us as we arrived on the top as if they had expected our coming.

  I slept most of rest of the day. Oreg discovered several reasons he couldn't possibly rescue Kellen until the following night. Unsaid was his conviction that I needed to rest at least another day before setting off for Hurog.

  When the sun rose after the first night we spent on Menogue, I ate breakfast with the two young men and the old woman who were the new followers of Aethervon, and set out exploring. There was nothing else to do until darkness fell, and lying about gave me too much time to dwell upon the Asylum.

  My feet took me toward the ruins of the old temple grounds. It was a path I'd walked before, and I could see the differences that the new priests had wrought in the landscape. Grass had been trimmed and flowers planted, but the wooden hut that served Menogue as its new temple was overshadowed still by the ruined walls that rose up to hide it from the sun. The crude wood structure paled in contrast to the ancient artisans' skillful carving. Some of the fallen blocks had been cleared away, leaving patches of raw earth where the stone had lain since they fell two centuries before. Strange how Oreg made me think of two centuries as recent.

  I sat down in the shade of the old ruins and shivered. It would probably be snowing in the mountains of Shavig by now. Closing my eyes, I felt outward as Oreg had taught me at Hurog. I wanted to see if the magic here was as I remembered it. I reached out, touched the morning-cold walls of the old temple, and found what I sought.

  It was ancient, this magic, and, unlike Hurog's, it held memories. I saw things for which I had no explanation, battles and great victories or defeats, but many more small memories, a man holding a black stone in his hand and flinging it to crack against the bark of a tree, a woman laughing as she ate a ripe fruit. My mouth salivated and I knew the fruit was tart and juicy. Tattoos bisected my wrists and I hated them bitterly for the symbol of thievery that they were—though part of me was certain that I'd never heard of anywhere that tattooed thieves. These were the memories of the people who tended this temple in times past and shaped the magic here with the help of Aethervon, binding the magic until it would protect His temple unless Aethervon himself restrained it—as he had when it had been overrun. It was this part of the magic of Menogue that reminded me of the oily black magic that had oozed out of Farsonsbane. It had been magic without direction, yet strong and aware.

  I pulled my hand away from the wall and realized that the shadow I'd sat in was gone—as was the darkness the Asylum had laid upon me. For the first time since I left Hurog, I felt at peace.

  "Oreg was by a whil
e ago," Tisala said. She was reclining on one of the massive stones that had formed the arch of the dome. Close enough to keep watch, I thought, but not so close that she'd disturb me. "He said you were 'daydreaming, and to get him if you didn't wake up by noon." She glanced at the sun straight over our heads. "He also told me to ask you if you learned anything."

  I nodded my head slowly. "I learned that sitting still all morning is not a good idea—give me a hand, would you?"

  She grinned and came over to pull me to my feet. I let her work at it a while before I stood, groaning as my joints protested.

  "Getting old," she pronounced with a shake of her head. "I could hear your back pop."

  I laughed, and it felt good. Kissing her felt better. When I pulled back, her eyes were dark and her breathing quick.

  I bent back down until my forehead rested against her hair, warm from the sun, and sweet-smelling. When I stepped back, she stared at me fiercely, as a falcon measures its prey.

  "I am older than you," she said. "I am too tall, too strong, too used to having my own way. I am Oranstonian, born and bred to secretly despise Northlanders as much as we fear the Vorsag. I am scarred and plain. My nose is too big."

  I waited, but that seemed to be all she had to say. "My father tried to kill me off and on until he died—that makes a person old before his time. I am taller than you, stronger, and used to getting my own way. But the trees are taller yet, and in strengths that surpass that of thew and bone, we are well-matched, I think. I'm Shavig born and bred, which makes me arrogant enough to laugh when Oranstonians try to make fun of my big horses and yellow hair. I'll match you scar for scar with some left over." I hesitated for effect, fighting to hide my exultant feelings because if I laughed I wouldn't get said the things I needed to. "So, let's see" — I ran a finger lightly over her lips—"that leaves only your last two complaints. Tisala, don't you know that there is such beauty in you that leaves men trembling? It is not the beauty of a flower in the king's gardens, but that of a tigress with sharp fangs and—"