Dragon Blood (Hurog #2)(9)

"We might," I agreed. "But we'll not be fighting if I can help it. For one thing, the gate in the curtain wall will come down at the first hit of a battering ram. He'll be looking for the woman we brought in today, and the trick will be not to let him know she's here."

The blacksmith set the horse's leg down and tossed the old shoe into a barrel. "I had heard you'd gotten another stray." He grinned. Unlike the armorer, he liked to chat while he worked.

"Hardly a stray," I said, then reconsidered. "Well, she needs help for a bit - but she'll not be staying."

"We've gotten most of the bars for the windows done," he said, "and bolts and brackets for the doors inside the keep. Hinges, too, for that matter - but we haven't started on the hinges for the keep door yet. So far we're ahead on nails and fasteners of various kinds, but the carpenter sent his boy in to check today - so I imagine we'll be doing nails again in the near future."

The heat of the forge felt good in the cool air, so I stayed and talked a bit, helping with bellows and fetching water from the well.

Tisala's state had left me melancholy, and work was good to dispel it. When I left the forge's warmth, I wandered along the curtain wall and touched a rough-hewn granite block to remind myself of how much we'd accomplished since Hurog had fallen.

The inner curtain walls had been the first thing I'd had rebuilt after Hurog fell. And it was a good thing, too - between the death of my father and the invasion of the Vorsag, bandits from hundreds of miles around had come to see if Hurog was ripe for the plucking. The Blue Guard, under my aunt's direction, fended them off - but had there not been the curtain wall to hide my people behind, the bandits would have laid waste to the farmers who worked the land.

The wall was as tall and as solid as the one that had withstood many centuries of Shavig weather. On the bottom it was almost fifteen feet thick, good stone block on the outside, and filled with rubble (of which we had plenty). On the top it narrowed to less than nine feet across, but was still amply wide to allow the guardsmen to walk. It was a good wall, even if it looked odd with the granite stones outnumbering the blackstone.

Inside the wall, the bailey was oddly barren now that the miscellaneous small buildings my ancestors had added were gone. It had taken a great deal of work to level the bailey, since the earthen mound the keep had sat upon had settled after some of the caves beneath it had collapsed.

The new guards' quarters were built against the wall near one of the six towers, the only stone building in the bailey except for the forge. The quarters were a neat, rectangular building that took up half the ground of its predecessor with twice the usable space. There was stabling in the bailey for a few animals, but most of the horses were outside, between the inner wall and where the outer had once stood.

I sighed, thinking of the outer walls, and decided to continue to work on the floor of the main hall - something that might be finished before I died of old age. Tosten was working alone on the floor and I joined him. Tiling was mucky and nasty, and the lime in the grout found its painful way into every little cut.

"Why did you rebuild Hurog so large?" Tosten asked, fitting a tile into the pattern we'd decided upon. "It doesn't need to be this big anymore. Hurog isn't rich and this seems pretentious. We could have had a hall half this size, two stories instead of three, and half the bedrooms."

I could have argued the large. It only felt big because he and I and Oreg were the only Hurogs left to live in it. My sister, Ciarra, had married our cousin Beckram and lived at Iftahar, my uncle's estate. Iftahar's keep rang with the sounds of children and seemed much smaller than it actually was.

I said, "There is little expense involved - the granite is ours and only needs quarrying. I'd be paying the Guard anyway, they might as well do something for it."

Tosten snickered, "I'd like to hear you say that in front of Stala."

I widened my eyes and dulled the expression on my face. "Do I look stupid to you?"

"No one," he said, fitting a tile against the grout he'd laid down, "is as stupid as that."

I laughed and looked around at the keep. "It's not that large; you could fit our keep into the king's palace at Estian a dozen times over. The trade with the dwarves isn't much yet, but Axiel tells me that the mysterious illness that had afflicted his people is over. There are dwarven children now, after so many years, and soon there'll be more time to spare for the making of luxury goods for trade."

Tosten nodded. "Good for him. I haven't talked to him since he came here last winter and helped finish your room."

"Neither have I," I said, "but Oreg visits him now and again."

"How is Tisala?"

"The only thing we're still worried about is her left hand, but she'll live even if Oreg doesn't manage to save it."

He nodded again and turned his attention to the floor. After a little while he began humming a ballad. When he began singing, I joined in, too. After a bit we began to attract a group of children, so we hammed it up a little. Tosten found a song with male and female roles. He took the male in a high squeaky voice, and I sang the female in bass. We entertained the children and worked on the floor until it was time for dinner. Even Tosten was hoarse, but the cook brought in hot-mulled cider and kissed his cheek in gratitude for keeping the children at bay while their mothers cooked and cleaned.