[Hurog 01] - Dragon Bones (19 page)

His posture alarmed me, so I reached down and tugged him to his feet. “I thought I ordered you all to wait.”

Hope and wonder lit his face when he looked at me. “We waited for a quarter mark, but we heard nothing. Since I can take care of myself a bit better than Penrod and the youngsters, I came ahead while the others still argued about what to do. I imagine they'll be along soon.” He drew a breath. “When I came through the trees, my lord, I smelled evil as I haven't known for centuries—blood magic. Then I heard you sing Siphern all the way from the Northlands for these people. He cleaned this vale of evil for you, my lord. My father told me that our hope was in Hurog. I did not know until now he dreamed true.”

I squirmed under his regard. Truthfully, I didn't know what I'd done to invoke it. Lighting the pyre was something Bastilla or Oreg could have done with half the effort. And . . . had he said
centuries?

“Centuries?”
I squawked.

He grinned sheepishly and rocked back on his heels. The awe was gone from his expression, but it had left his face altered in its wake. The watchful caution that was the usual aspect of his countenance had given way to a silly grin that was out of place in the presence of so much death.

“Yes, well,” he said. “My father's people tend to live a bit longer than humankind. I was sent to Hurog half a century ago to find hope for my people, the salvation of dwarvenkind.”

Salvation of dwarvenkind?
I wanted to ask. Instead, I said, “You don't look like a dwarf.”

“I take after my mother. My father is so tall—” He raised a hand to his shoulder. “—and twice my weight.”

White, steamy smoke and the smell of burning flesh billowed off the wet tinder. The smell reminded me of the mystery of what had happened here at Silverfells. I grasped onto it hard, a task to fill the emptiness Hurog's loss had left me with.

I asked, “Do you remember how big the stone dragon was?”

“A bit larger than Pansy,” he said after a moment. “It didn't look like the dragon in the Hurog coat of arms, but it didn't look like much of anything else, either. It was more like a piece of stone a good mason had started working into shape, but there weren't any chisel marks.”

“It's not here,” I said. “Or at least I couldn't find it. I also couldn't find any sign of it being moved.”

Axiel coughed and moved away from the fire. “That's odd. I suppose someone could have moved it since we were here.”

“I don't know a lot about magic,” I said focusing on the burning bodies. “What if I told you that most of the villagers were bled dry like slaughtered sheep, and I couldn't find any great dark places in the dirt where so much blood had flowed?”

Axiel frowned. “I'd say that it
was
blood magic I smelled earlier, and it would take a powerful one to consume this much blood. The king's best mage is no more powerful than Bastilla. Of all the human wizards I've seen lately, only Oreg could work the kind of magic that would require so much blood.”

Axiel thought Bastilla as powerful as the high king's mages? I knew she was better than she claimed, but I couldn't recall seeing her do anything spectacular. I opened my mouth to ask, but Pansy tossed his head and called out a greeting as the rest of our party emerged from the trees.

Oreg stopped his horse near me but didn't dismount. “Impressive,” he said looking at the fire. “You build this yourself?”

“No,” I said. “The Vorsag. Oreg, Bastilla,” I said, as the others crowded around. “The dragon stone is gone. Axiel says it was as big as Pansy, but I could find no sign of anyone dragging it off. The villagers were hung and bled out,
their bodies covered with arcane runes.” I should have waited to light the pyre, but I had been feeling more than thinking.

Oreg tilted his head, staring at the pyre with dreamy eyes as an odd half smile tugged the corners of his mouth. “I smell dragons,” he said.

“Axiel said he thought there was blood magic involved.”

“There is a taint to blood magic,” replied Bastilla. “And I don't feel it here.”

I didn't feel up to explaining about Siphern. Weariness from working magic and from the knowledge that the hole in my spirit where Hurog belonged was permanent made me want to keep it as simple as I could. “Could a mage or a group of mages drain an object of magic and use it for themselves?”

“Yes,” said Oreg at the same moment Bastilla said, “No.”

I raised my eyebrows at them, and Bastilla finally shrugged. “I suppose it's possible. Theoretically. But the stone would still exist—just not magic.”

“Not this stone,” disagreed Oreg, still in that strange, dreamy state. “I smell dragon.”

“Could they have transformed the stone?” asked Penrod.

“That stone felt like dragon magic,” said Axiel. “Could something have transformed a dragon into the stone, and the Vorsag released it?”

A cold chill ran down the back of my neck just before the steady drizzle of rain turned to a torrential downpour.

“Kariarn has a
dragon?”
asked Tosten.

“Someone has a dragon,” said Oreg peacefully.

Part of me was chanting euphorically,
I knew there were still dragons, I knew it, I knew it,
while the rest of me tried to figure out what Kariarn would do if he controlled a dragon.

“Where do we go from here?” asked Bastilla.

Good question. I put the thought of the dragon aside for the moment. That done, the question was fairly simple to ask. I only needed one more bit of information to test out my theory about the Vorsagian attacks, and I knew where to get it.

“Axiel,” I asked, “Do you know how to get to Callis from here?”

“Callis? Yes, I think so. Why Callis?”

“Because I need information. And if anyone has information on what's been going on here, it's that old fox Haverness. Last I heard, he rules at Callis still.” Haverness's people would know if the other villages the Vorsag hit had held better artifacts than the ones that had been passed by. They would know where other likely targets would be. My father had said that Haverness knew more about what the king's troops had been doing than the king had for all the old fox tramped about court looking as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

 

THE
POURING RAIN EASED
a bit after an hour or more. For lack of a better place, we set up camp in a relatively sheltered spot under some trees. The fire smoked and sputtered, but it was good enough to cook over. It was my turn to do the cooking.

Oreg had gone hunting and produced a pair of rabbits. I had them spitted and turning over the fire when Ciarra came to sit beside me and took one of the spits, more because she wanted decent food to eat than out of any desire to help me.

“So you're not avoiding me anymore, eh?”

She grinned at me and tapped my face.

“Me? Grumpy?” When she raised her eyebrows, I said, “It rains all the time here, and we've been running around not accomplishing much for the better part of the summer.”

She shook her head at me and pointed to the sky, then to my face.

“I know it's still raining,” I said. “But now I know what we need to do.” It was true. Kariarn had a dragon and possibly more magic than the world had seen in an age, an entire village had been slaughtered, Hurog was lost, but I felt better because I knew what I was going to do. “You're turning the rabbit too fast.”

She leaned against my shoulder but didn't noticeably slow the spit. Her rabbit was perfect; mine was too pink in the middle. Not that it mattered, as hungry as we were.

We all went gathering wood after dinner except for Ciarra who, armed with a hunting horn to call us, stayed with the horses. Usually we all traveled separately, but this time Oreg came trotting by my side. He was quiet for a bit, but I could tell from the bounce in his step that he was just biding his time.

“So you decided to be a hero, again,” he said finally. I couldn't decide if there was sarcasm in his voice or not.

“Oranstone needs a hero,” I said, kicking a stone out of the path with a little more force than necessary.

“Are you going to free the dragon?”

“Oreg. Gods, there are seven of us! What do you think we can do?” And there, I thought, was the problem with my scheme to help the Oranstonian villagers. I wasn't a legendary warrior like my father; I wasn't Seleg; I had no army. It was like the story about the fly who declared war on the horse who took no notice.

“He
can't
be allowed to keep her,” he said with sudden heat. “There were no flame marks where the dragon fought. They must have it under a spell.”

A spell? My mind boggled at the thought of how much power it would take to control a dragon. “Could you break a spell strong enough to hold a dragon?” I asked.

His silence answered me. At last he said, “What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to Callis. From there, I'll send a message to the king, my uncle, and Haverness, so something is done to stop Kariarn—if anything can stop him now.”

“They'll try to kill it, Ward.” Oreg said in a low tone. He meant the dragon. “They can't afford to let him use a dragon.”

“And just tell me what else they can do.” I said, knowing he was right.

We walked a few more paces, Oreg's face turned away from me.

“Seleg
didn't need an army to kill a dragon.”

I came to a full stop. “What do you mean?”

“If one Hurogmeten killed a dragon, why shouldn't you?”

I scarcely noticed the sarcasm as a cold knot settled in my stomach.
“Seleg
chained the dragon?” My hero killed the dragon in the cave?

Protect those weaker than yourself,
he'd written.
Be kind when the opportunity is given.
Ideas that no one else in my father's home would have said aloud for fear of being laughed at. Seleg set forth the ideals I'd tried to follow. But it was impossible to disbelieve Oreg's truth.

“And killed her so he'd have the power to defeat the invading fleet. He was scared. Frightened he'd lose Hurog.” There was something wrong with Oreg's voice, but I didn't pay attention to it.

It hurt to breathe. If Seleg'd killed the dragon, he'd also had Oreg beaten for protesting it. I'd seen the beating myself in the great hall the day Garranon had come to Hurog. How could I feel betrayed by a man dead for centuries?

“Oreg . . .” I stopped when I saw his eyes, glowing with an uncanny lavender light. Despite the ring I wore and the disparity in our sizes, I backed away.

“Did killing the dragon make your life easier?” he whispered to me. “Do you hear her scream every night like I do?”

“Oreg, I haven't killed any dragons.” Chills crept up my back, and I stepped another pace away.

He laughed like the autumn wind in a field of corn. “I warned you what would happen. Your children's children's children will pay the price for what you have done.”

Oreg's episodes weren't insanity. Warrior's dreams, Stala called them, battle visions. Sudden visions of past battles so strong that they overwhelmed the present, terrifying when they hit an armed man but doubly so when that man was also a wizard. A wizard of Oreg's power made the dream real enough to bleed.

“Oreg,” I said. “It wasn't me.”

A soldier in his lifetime could amass a lot of horror and shame; how much more numerous were the memories Oreg had. He'd told me once that he tried not to remember things.

Oreg stared at me, breathing heavily as he fought the vision off.

“It's done with, Oreg,” I said. “The dragon died a long time ago.”

“Ward?”

“Yes.” The terror in his eyes hurt me. Was he afraid of his memories? Or was he afraid of me? I turned away and began walking. “We need to hunt for wood.”

After a moment, I heard his footsteps following me.

“Sorry,” he said. “You look like him, you know. He was a big man, too. And filled with magic—like you've been since Menogue.”

I shrugged.

We gathered wood for a bit. There wasn't much to be had that hadn't rotted in the damp. The woods looked as if they'd been gleaned already. We were too near Silverfells.

“After I killed that boy on the Oranstone border, I pretended to be my father,” I said abruptly. “He was good at killing.” I needed to talk to someone. Bastilla was a better listener, but Oreg had known my father.

“Not like your father,” Oreg said, as if convincing himself. “You've never been like him.”

I thought about the swift easing of my knife into the boy's neck, the way I couldn't lend words of comfort to my brother when he mourned the loss of his innocence; and I knew Oreg was wrong.

“When my father died, do you know why I really didn't want to drop my role as an idiot?” I asked.

“No.” His reply was too easy. He'd increased the distance between us, oh so casually, reacting to my body language, I thought, and I tried to loosen up.

“At the time, I thought it was mostly embarrassment. But that wasn't it entirely. You see, I'd played an idiot so long, there wasn't anyone else to be. When I left Hurog, I tried being that mercenary, but it wasn't right. So I picked Seleg.”

He was quiet for a long time. I didn't look back for him, just paced forward, away from camp. We'd been talking too much to find any game, but given any luck, Tosten or Axiel would bring something back.

“You do Seleg very well for a man who didn't know him.” His voice was tentative. “He wasn't all bad—not until he grew old and frightened.” The gap between us closed. “He wasn't as smart as you are, nor as kind. Just be yourself, Ward.” We marched through the muck side by side now.

There isn't any me, Oreg,
I thought. Just bits of my father, a stupid mercenary who charmed everyone he met except my aunt, and an ancestor who left too many journals for me to read.