Patricia Briggs - Dragon Bones

That winter was hard on the people of Hurog. It wasn't the food: My uncle had grain shipped in from Iftahar. But the Vorsag had fired as many of the people's cottages as they could find, and the shelters we'd managed to erect before winter weren't enough to keep the fury of the north wind at bay.

My uncle had tried to move me to Iftahar with my mother, Ciarra, and Tosten, but I would not go. I could not leave Hurog. Only the keep was gone: the people were still at risk.

My uncle understood. One night, after working all day harvesting wheat, I told the whole story of what Oreg was and why I'd done what I had to all of them: Duraugh, Tosten, Ciarra, Beckram, Axiel, and Stala. Axiel and his dwarven comrades left soon after that, having cleared a way to their underground river. Axiel promised to be back in the spring. Ciarra avoided me when she could, which bothered Tosten so much that I began avoiding both of them until my uncle left for Iftahar and took them with him before the first storm of winter.

I often took Pansy or Feather (returned to us from Oranstone several weeks after Hurog fell, along with the other horses we'd left behind) and ran the mountain trails at a pace that would have left Penrod shaking his head. When the snows made running impossible, I fought with Stala and whatever brave soul in the ranks of the Blue Guard would come against me. That wasn't enough, so I began excavating Hurog where the dwarves had left off, sorting the good stone from the broken. At first I did it alone, but one morning I came out to find Stala had organized a work party to help. We had the inner curtain walls rebuilt by the time the snow melted.

By spring, the people of Hurog treated me as if I were the Hurogmeten, though they all knew the title belonged to my uncle. Soon after the first robins returned from the south, my brother came back to Hurog.

I knew he was coming, not because of any messenger, but because the grasses of Hurog whispered that someone of Hurog blood had come back. Since I'd killed Oreg, I'd become even more attuned to the magic flows around Hurog. Once I'd needed them to complete me, but now I completed them.

I rode Feather out to greet him.

"You've lost weight," he said.

"You look better," I replied because it was true. The air of aloneness he'd carried like a cloak was gone.

"Mother's dead," he said. "Her maid found her wandering outside one night in a storm. She took fever and wasted away."

I nodded, but she'd died a long time ago.

"I came also to tell you that Beckram and Ciarra are engaged," he said warily.

Feather, impatient standing for no reason she could see, pawed the ground but quieted when I shifted my weight. Beckram and Ciarra? She was seventeen; mother had been younger than that when my father married her. But Beckram and Ciarra?

"Tell him I expect him to keep her out of sewers," I said after a moment.

Tosten looked away. "I tried to get Ciarra to come and tell you herself. She told me to send you her love."

I nodded my head.

"She can talk now, did you know?"

I did. "Duraugh wrote to me."

"She's afraid if she comes back to Hurog, she'll lose her voice again. But she wants you to come to their wedding this summer."

"All right," I said.

"Our uncle intends you to have Hurog. Beckram doesn't want it. Duraugh has sent a formal petition to the king."

"The king has other things to worry about," I said. Once it was clear that Kariarn was dead, Haverness's hundred had little trouble sending the Vorsag on their way. But the hundred hadn't returned to Estian when they were called upon to do so. They had retreated to their estates and were presumed to be building up armies. Jakoven might have declared it treason, except that the rest of the Five Kingdoms thought that Haverness's hundred were heroes. And heroes were difficult to prosecute.

"Don't you care?" Tosten sounded worried.

I shrugged and looked at the worn platinum ring on my finger. "Have you come to stay?"

"If you'll have me."

Feather sidestepped as I leaned toward him. "You are my brother. You are always welcome here."

To rebuild Hurog's inner buildings, I had first to clear away the rubble so I could build some sort of support over the roof of the dragon bone cave, which had collapsed in the center, killing Kariarn and his wizards and burying them under a mound of stones. My work party had been reduced by the people needed to plant the fields, leaving only Stala's Blue Guard and Tosten when we uncovered the bodies of Bastilla, Kariarn, and the rest of his wizards. Oreg had been right; they were very near to the dragon bones.

I had them buried in the mass grave we'd dug for the other bodies we'd found in the rubble. If the Vorsag wanted proof of Kariarn's death, they would have to take my word, because the bodies were identifiable only by their clothing. I carried Bastilla's body myself.

Either by Oreg's magic or some odd chance, the dragon bones were still intact. Axiel arrived soon enough to help Tosten and me excavate them all and cart them to the field with the salt creep. The three of us ground the bones into meal and then tilled it into the ground as Duraugh had done with seashells the year before. Axiel looked relieved when the last of the white powder was covered with dirt. When the field was planted, seedlings sprang up from the once-poisoned soil.

I woke early one morning in high summer knowing something had changed. I dressed hurriedly in hunting clothes and saddled Pansy myself to get on the mountain trail sooner. Sensing my urgency, Pansy ran as if the demons of Menogue were nipping his heels, slowing only when the trail became so steep that I dismounted and walked beside him. When he stopped abruptly, eyes rolling and nostrils tasting the air with sudden urgency, I stopped beside him.

"What's up?" I asked. It took a lot to frighten an animal that had been in battle as often as Pansy.

The stallion snorted at the sound of my voice and turned to rub his sweaty head against me, knocking me sideways a step. Whatever had bothered him was gone now.

I could smell something, too. It reminded me of the blacksmith's forge: heat and metal. That's why I wasn't as surprised as I might have been when we topped the final rise and got a clear view of the bronze doors.

Axiel, when I asked, had examined them and told me he didn't think they actually opened at all. He was as confounded about their purpose as I was. Oreg hadn't been around to ask.

The doors were open now, though it hadn't happened easily. The metal was blackened on the underside, as if by a terrible fire. The left-hand door lay yards away, while the right-hand door was misshapen and bent. When I touched the door nearest me, it was still warm. When I tugged on it, I couldn't budge it an inch.

I dropped Pansy's reins and cautiously approached the hole in the mountain that the doors had covered. I don't know what I expected, but an empty hole was anticlimactic. It was just a rectangular hole, barely deeper than I was tall. If I'd put a hay wagon in it, there wouldn't be room for the team to pull it. The only odd thing about it was the exactness of the flat walls and clean corners, given that it was all just packed earth. Behind me, Pansy whickered a greeting. I turned, thinking Tosten had followed me, because Pansy didn't welcome strangers. But Oreg was hardly a stranger. "Hello, Ward," he said with a self-conscious dip of his shoulders.

I swallowed. "I hope this doesn't mean I'll have to kill you again," I said.

He focused on the battered wreck of Hurog and patted Pansy absently on the forehead. "I knew you were going to be difficult about this."

He glanced at my face and then quickly back to Hurog. "You've done a lot of work. What did you do with the dragon bones?"

"Sowed them into the field that used to have a bad case of salt creep," I said.