Patricia Briggs: Dragon Bones

He would have come up to my shoulder if I were standing, but so did many grown men. At Hurog, only my father was taller than I. The boy's hair was very dark, perhaps even black, and his eyes were light, purplish blue. The bones of his face were sharp, almost hawklike, as aristocratic as my own face was not.

He hugged himself as he stared at me. His stance reminded me of a high-bred horse ready to bolt at a loud noise or harsh word. Ciarra sat at my side, undisturbed by the strange boy, absently petting the dragon's skull as if it were the head of one of the keep's dogs. I shifted until I was between her and the stranger.

"Silver eyes," the boy said, "and a song that made many a man's heart beat faster. He should have let her alone. I told him so." His voice was breathless, shaking a bit.

I watched him, doubtlessly with the peculiar witless look on my face that drove my father thrashing mad. But I was thinking. I was in the depths of the keep, and a boy I'd never seen before was here, too. The last dragons had disappeared seven or eight generations ago, and yet this boy claimed to have spoken to the man who'd done this. I knew who he was.

The boy who was looking at me with great, wounded eyes was the family ghost. Oh, we all knew about him, though we didn't say anything to outsiders: There wasn't a one of the family who hadn't had something inexplicable happen.

If the ghost liked you, he could be helpful. My mother's maid's knitting needles were always in her bag when she looked for them, though on several occasions I'd just seen them elsewhere. If he didn't like you…well, my aunt hadn't visited again since she'd slapped the Brat.

No one I knew had ever seen him, though there were family stories about people who had. I'd expected someone more formidable, not a lad with the air of a dog that had been beaten once too often—a Hurog dog, though. If his features were more refined than mine, I could still see a similarity in the shape of the cheekbones. Except for his coloring, he looked a lot like my younger brother, Tosten, and his eyes, like Tosten's and Ciarra's, were Hurog blue. He watched me with the still alertness of an unhooded falcon, waiting for my response to his speech.

"This is desecration," I said deliberately and touched the fragile-seeming ivory bones. Magic pounded at me through my fingertips, and I hissed involuntarily.

"This is power," replied the boy in a soft voice that raised the hair on the back of my neck. "Would you have resisted the chance to harness it? You are a mage, Ward, crippled though you are. You know what the power here means. It means food for the people, wealth and power for Hurog. What would you have done if your people were starving, and the power was here for the asking?"

Caught by the force of the pulsing magic, I stared into his eyes and couldn't speak; I didn't know what answer I could make. Ciarra's hand clamped on my forearm, but I didn't look at her. In his eyes I read desperation and terror—the kind of fear that holds rabbits immobile before the fox. I'd never seen that look in a human face before.

He waited.

At last I said, "I could not have done this."

He turned away, and my fingers dropped away from the skull. I didn't know what answer he'd been searching for, but it wasn't the one I'd given him. "Glib answers from a simple man," he said, but there was more sorrow than taunt in his voice.

I said, "You wouldn't have had to tell me this was stupid." I reached over and caught the chain that led from the thick iron muzzle to an eye hook bigger than my fist screwed into the ground. "But desperate people do stupid things all the time."

I turned back to him, half expecting him to disappear or back away, but he stayed where he was, though the fear had not left his eyes. In spite of the magic he'd used on me—if it had indeed been his magic and not the dragon bones—in spite of knowing he was centuries older than I, I felt sorry for him. I knew what it was like to be afraid.

When I was younger, I used to be afraid of my father.

"I have something for you, Lord Wardwick," he said, holding out a closed hand. His fist was white knuckled, and there was tension about his mouth.

Still kneeling because I didn't want to intimidate him, I put my hand under his, and he dropped a ring into it. It was plain and worn smooth, with just a few bumps left of ornamentation, though the metal was platinum, much harder than gold. I knew it was platinum and not silver because it was my father's ring.

"I am Oreg," he said as the ring landed in my palm. "I am yours as you are Hurog's."

From his manner, I almost expected the lightning flashes that accompanied my father's wizard's more spectacular events, but I only felt the cool metal of the ring in my hand. "This is my father's."

"It is yours now," he said. "From his hand to yours."

I frowned. "Why didn't he give it to me himself?"

"That is not the way it is done," he said. Then he looked upward once, quickly. "Come, my lord, they are looking for you. If you will follow me?"

Holding the ring, I followed him to an opening in the wall that I must have missed when I was exploring the cave, Ciarra trotting at my heels. Through the opening was a narrow walkway that turned this way and that often enough so that I no longer had any idea whether we traveled north or south. The walls had, at some point, changed from rock to worked stone, though I hadn't noticed when the change occurred.

At last he stopped and pressed against a stone that looked, to my eyes, to be exactly the same as all the others. A person-wide section of wall swung open, and I found myself in my room. I stepped out of the tunnel with an exclamation of disbelief. The section of sewer I'd been in was underground, and I'd dropped down farther into the dragon bone cave. I'd swear on my grandfather's grave that the ghost's passageway had been absolutely level.

How then was it that we'd come out in my bedroom on the third floor of the keep?

The passage door closed behind Ciarra and me, and when I turned to look, Oreg was gone, leaving me with the puzzle of our route. Magic? I hadn't felt anything more than the usual currents that were ever present inside the keep.

The door to my room swung open behind me. Ciarra, with characteristic quickness, dove under the bed.

"Ward!" exclaimed Duraugh, my uncle and the twins' father, striding in without my leave. Like my father, he was a big man, though not as large as I. In his youth, he'd covered himself in glory, and the high king's gratitude gave him a Tallvenish heiress to wed and a title higher than my father, his older brother. Even though his estate, Iftahar, was larger and richer than Hurog, he still spent a great deal of time here. My father often said, "Blood will tell. Hurogs are tied to this land."

My uncle usually avoided me; I wouldn't have thought he even knew where my room was.

"Uncle Duraugh?" I asked, trying to sound composed and suitably dull-witted. Dull-witted wasn't a stretch. Words never had tripped to my tongue, and I suppose many people would have thought me stupid, even if I hadn't tried to appear so.

His eyes traveled from the top of my head to my feet and back again, taking in the muck and blood. He held his hand to his nose; I'd gotten used to the smell, myself.

"When the twins said you were in the sewers, I thought they were joking. That's a trick for someone half your age, boy. Your presence is required in the great hall at once—though I suppose you'd better change clothes."

I noticed for the first time that he was still in his hunting gear, which was stained dark with fresh blood. He'd gone with father and a hunting party this morning.

I casually slipped the ring Oreg had given me onto the third finger of my right hand and asked, "Good hunting?" as I stripped off the remains of my shirt. The blood from scraping my shoulders on the cave wall had dried, and the shirt didn't come off easily.