Dragon Blood (Hurog #2)(61)

Hurog wanted me home. It should have frightened me more, but how can a man be afraid of his own home?

Feather and I walked somberly through the gates. The guards on duty welcomed me formally - with a little touch of awe that told me they thought I'd been the one to fling the gates open with magic. I let them keep thinking it.

A few questions ascertained that my cousin and his wife had arrived from Iftahar only this morning. Ciarra was resting comfortably with her new daughter in one of the lower storage rooms where a temporary bed had been erected. I dismounted and began giving orders, the fatigue of the journey held at bay by the euphoria of being home. I sent a runner with orders for the keep. Kellen and his man would share my room. I gave Tisala the room next to it, the only other finished room on that floor. Garranon, Oreg, Tosten, and I would share the library. My uncle would join my aunt in their customary room.

I sent another man to gather grooms to take care of the spent horses that were just beginning to filter through the gates.

"So is it war?" asked Stala after threading her way through the confusion to my side.

I hugged her once, tightly. "Not immediately," I said. "But yes."

"With all of Shavig behind us, we will still lose," she said, teacher to student, not as if it bothered her. "But we can make him hurt."

I shook my head. "We might do better than that. I don't know if Beckram told you - I come bringing a royal guest to Hurog. We've rescued Kellen out of the Asylum so that Alizon can put him on the throne."

She drew in a breath, then laughed. "That does change things, doesn't it."

"Maybe not enough," I answered.

"We'll make it be enough," she said. "Now give me that horse; I'll see she's taken care of. You go in and get warm."

I spent the night on a pallet in the library with Oreg, Tosten, Garranon, and a wary street rat with Hurog eyes. I was going to have to find something for Tychis to do, something that would make him feel like one of us.

I was still thinking about it when I fell into a (thankfully) dreamless sleep. I awoke at first light, feeling like myself for the first time in a long while. I breathed in Hurog air and felt the familiar currents of magic that flowed through me, filling the terrible emptiness I'd felt away from Hurog and cleaning away the lingering effects of the potions Jakoven's mages had fed me.

I stepped around my sleeping comrades and snuck out of the library without awaking anyone.

There was a council to call and rooms that needed to be prepared. But first I needed to ride.

The big paddock had four horses in it. A moon-colored mare with gentle eyes, two chestnut matrons whose years of foaling showed in their widened rib cages and loose-jointed stance, and a mud-dark, big-boned stallion who bugled and charged when I whistled at him.

"Miss me, Pansy?" I asked, opening the gate and haltering him. He shoved me with his convex nose and ran his fluttering nostrils over me as if to check for damage.

"Nothing that shows, Pansy. Nothing that shows," I assured him as I led him to the stables where saddle and bridle awaited us. His scars were visible, white hairs on his ribs and flanks, and ripples in the soft skin on the corners of his mouth.

He lent me his enthusiasm as we charged the mountain trails. In the last few years these wild rides had grown less frequent; my need of them lessened by the satisfaction of turning Hurog into a prosperous land once more. But Pansy's memory was sharp and his feet didn't hesitate as he powered up the steep, snow-covered game trail. Hurog had real mountains.

Standing by the broken bronze doors on the mountainside, we stared down onto Hurog. It wasn't as impressive as it had once been. The stark black lines were softened by granite and the places where the stonework had not yet been replaced. But the air of decay that had clung to it was gone.

Pansy cocked an ear back, so I turned him around to see what he'd heard.

The dragon that stared at me was not Oreg. Its scales guttered green and black instead of purple, and it was less than half Oreg's size.

Pansy, conditioned by long rides with Oreg, didn't flinch when the dragon's head darted suddenly past us so its right eye was even with mine.

"Hurogmeten," he said in a voice that could have belonged to Tosten when he was ten.

"Dragon," I said. Oreg had told me that he wasn't the only dragon around here, but I'd never seen another one until now.

He tilted his head, butting my shoulder painfully with a bony ridge. Then he pulled his head back. "It sings in you," he said. "They said it did, but I didn't think magic could sing to a human."

"This is Hurog," I said. "And I am Hurogmeten."

"Hurog," he said after a moment, "means dragon."

"Yes," I agreed, smiling.

That seemed to satisfy him. After two running steps down the mountain he took awkwardly to flight.

"A fledgling," I said to Pansy, feeling lighthearted. I hadn't really believed Oreg when he told me that there were more dragons - no one had seen one in a very long time.

"Tosten is incensed," announced Ciarra's voice on the other side of my horse. "He said they almost put a rider up behind you in the saddle yesterday - and yet this morning one of the stablemen sees you taking flight up the mountain."

I set Pansy's brush on the rack and turned toward the open door of the stable. My sister, wrapped in winter clothes and backlit by the morning sun streaming behind her, looked like the spirit her new daughter was named after. Her pale hair looked the same as it had when she was a toddler.