Dragon Blood h-2

by Patricia Briggs

  "We'll keep her safe," said Tosten, his jaw set. My family would be a long time forgetting that the king had killed my cousin during one of his political games. Tisala had chosen wisely; no one would betray her here.

  I couldn't be certain it had been Jakoven, not until she woke; but I had to plan for it.

  "Oreg, will you ride ahead and let my aunt know what's happened here? Be discreet, but make sure she understands that we may have royal troops here soon."

  "Right," he said.

  I waited until his sprinting horse was out of sight before I turned to my brother. "You're my heir. If the king finds out I've sheltered an enemy, he's likely to declare me a traitor. I'd like you to ride to our uncle and explain to him what's happened."

  He gave me a small half-smile. "You don't have the right to protect me anymore, Ward. I'm older than you were when you took on Kariarn of Vorsag. You can quit giving me that look—Stala does it better. If it comes down to making sure Hurog stays in Hurog hands, I'll run. But it's highly unlikely that Tisala would have led them here, and there's no reason for the king to think she'd come. I've not seen her above a dozen times in the last four years. The way you stay away from court, I doubt you've seen her at all."

  Only in my dreams, I thought. I might not believe I'd made much of an impression upon her, but the reverse was certainly not true. "I would feel better with you in Iftahar with Duraugh."

  "Too bad for you," he muttered. I don't think I was supposed to hear. He cleared his throat. "I always liked Tisala—Mother spoiled me for delicate women."

  I laid Tisala facedown on the top of the table in the library because it was one of the few finished rooms in the keep that had a window to let in the light. Tosten had mumbled something about being useful elsewhere, turned on his heel, and left. He seldom stayed in the room while Oreg worked magic.

  I cut her clothing and pulled it out from under her until she lay bare. Her back had whip marks laid out so evenly that there wasn't more than a thumb's worth of skin left on her whole back. Some of them were almost healed, but in many places the scabs were broken and wept clear fluid.

  I heard an indrawn breath behind me. I turned my head and saw Oreg stare down at her back. Then he began to pace rapidly and rub his hands together, not usually a good sign.

  I sat down on a bench hoping that my own restfulness would allow him to calm.

  "Oreg," I said to catch his attention. Sometimes he had relivings that could be harrowing to all concerned. Soldiers had them, flashes of past battles that seem, for a moment, more real than the present—but Oreg could make the visions real. I'd never seen anyone but Oreg be harmed by them, but they were frightening all the same. "Tisala needs you."

  He stared at me, breathing hard, looked away for a moment, and then gave me a tired smile. "Right."

  We started by cataloging the damage. It was not pleasant, that half hour, I was glad more than once that Tisala was unconscious, both for her dignity and her pain. It was her left hand that was the worst—the initial damage, which was considerable, compounded by infection. Upon closer examination several of the broken scabs on her back were puffed up with pus. Bruises abounded on her hips and inner thighs; she'd been raped.

  Oreg growled and muttered as we continued checking her carefully. Her feet were a mess. Oreg said finally that the damage was from walking so far in ill-fitting shoes rather than a torturer's knife.

  He set her foot down and turned to the smaller table that held various herbs and salves, hot water, and bandaging. "You think Jakoven did this?" With a wave of his hand he indicated Tisala's damaged state.

  I nodded. "I can't think of any other reason she'd run all the way here."

  "She liked you." Oreg used a clean knife to open one of the putrid places on Tisala's back, sponging up the fluid that escaped with a clean wet cloth.

  "True enough," I agreed. "But I haven't seen her since I was last in Oranstone."

  I'd helped Oreg heal before, and we worked as a team. Most of what we did was ordinary stuff, clean wounds, cover with mixtures of salves and powders that Oreg hoarded, then bandage.

  But her left hand was swollen to twice its normal size and it was the source of the putrid smell. He soaked it first in hot seawater. Tisala must have really been in rough shape, because she didn't even protest. When Oreg was through, he poured alcohol over it, and again she had no reaction. He reexamined her now-clean hand.

  Healing was the most difficult of all magics to do because the mage must know as much about the body as he does about his magic. And even a little healing sucked up such power as most mages can only dream about.

  In power I was the equal of many and better than most, with such ability as four years of Oreg's tutoring could bring, but I would not have even known where to start to save the mess that remained of Tisala's left hand.

  "She might lose her fourth finger anyway," commented Oreg, shaking his head. "There's too much dead flesh."

  "She fights right-handed," I said. "Would it be better to cut it off now?"

  Oreg frowned and turned her hand this way and that. "I always hate to cut something off I can't put back on. Let me try and heal this. If it doesn't take, there will be plenty of time to cut it off later."

  He set her hand down and pulled up a three-legged stool next to the table. When he was comfortable, he took her hand up again and poured magic over it.

  Oreg had been part of Hurog since there was a Hurog to be a part of, and I was Hurog-bred sensitive to the magics imbued in the land and in him. When Oreg worked magic around me, it felt almost erotic—like a hand touching me intimately. It was disturbing, but I shrugged off the uncomfortable feeling with the ease of long practice.

  There is an art to working magic, and Oreg was very, very good at his art. His touch was focused and powerful, eerily beautiful to watch. When his power began to flicker, I rested my hands on his shoulder and gave him what I could of mine, all the while watching what he was doing to Tisala's hand.

  Flesh peeled back and burned away in bright purple flame, leaving healthy pink behind. Oreg left other bits of flesh that looked no more healthy than the flesh he'd destroyed—he must have seen things I did not.

  When he was finished at last, her hand looked more swollen and bruised than it had when we started. I hauled Oreg off to rest on the padded bench against the wall, then turned back to Tisala with clean bunting.

  "Don't wrap that hand," Oreg said. "The air will help it heal, and she won't be doing much for a few days to get it dirty."

  I looked to the wounds we hadn't dealt with yet. "I think she's got a rib that's cracked or broken," I replied. "Do I bind her ribs, or will that hurt her back?"

  Oreg pushed himself off the bench, and moving like an old, old man, examined the place I showed him. "Bruised," he grunted, shuffling back to the bench. "Don't wrap it."

  I left Oreg, pale and sleeping, in the library and took Tisala up to my own room to rest She looked oddly fragile in the bed built for me, I thought, smiling because she would have laughed if she'd heard anyone call her fragile.

  A middle-aged man with sweat from the fire coating his bald head looked up as I came into the forge and nodded at me before turning his gaze back to the bar he was shaping.

  "Good 'noon, Hurogmeten," he said. "What can I do for you?"

  "Hinges," I said. "And a portcullis door to go with the gatehouse we don't have. Bars for all the windows. A thousand blades and the warriors to use them."

  The armorer gave me a brief smile. "The same as usual, then." He shaped the iron with the same swift skill he showed with steel. It was a real concession on his part when he agreed to shape iron with the blacksmith. Blacksmithing was a step down from the work he'd usually been called upon to do.

  "Stala said we might have a visit from the king soon," said a quiet voice from the back.

  I walked around to see the blacksmith pulling shoes off a horse. He was a little younger than the armorer, with long blond hair he pulled back to keep out of his eyes.<
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  "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.

  3—WARDWICK

  Rejecting properly sent invitations is impolite and can cause lasting harm to one's future.

  After I finished eating I ventured up to check on my guest. One of the maidservants had told me she'd brought soup and bread up but Tisala had been sleeping.

  The Lord's Chamber at Hurog would show well against any room I'd ever seen, including the royal chambers at Estian. It had been a gift from the dwarves who'd snuck in while I was away at Iftahar working out some business with my uncle.

  The wood trim was some exotic southern hardwood, full of swirls and rich color. The dwarves had taken advantage of the complex grain and carved fantastical shapes in odd places. The walls were layered in plaster drawn into soft patterns gleaming with powdered gemstone. High above, skylights let in slits of sunshine through narrow strips of thick, clear crystal. It was luxury I still could not accustom myself to—and it was distinctly odd in the spare style of Hurog keep.

  "You live well for a poor northern barbarian," commented Tisala hoarsely.

  Her eyes had been closed when I came into the room, but she was awake now.

  I waved an arm at the whole room and said, "A gift from the dwarves."

  She grinned suddenly. "Save a race from extinction once, and have to live with it forever. I killed a couple of bandits and passed out—I didn't expect to wake up in luxury. It's certainly not what I expected from Hurog." The grin disappeared as quickly as it had come—it must have hurt the purple bruise that had bloomed on the right side of her face since I'd last seen her.

  "One of my people found you," I said. "We brought you here this morning. I believe there's some soup and bread around somewhere if you're hungry."

  Ignoring my offer of food, she looked at her unbandaged left hand, which looked significantly better than the last time I'd seen it, and her face registered astonishment. "Just this morning?"

  "Oreg is a good healer," I said. "You came to the right place—your hand had gone septic. Anyone else would have had it off."

  She was silent for a moment, flexing her fingers slowly. Still watching it, she said, "I'm so sorry to show up here like this, but I couldn't think of anywhere else I could go."

  "My home is your home," I said, meaning it.

  "He'll look for me," she said, "because he thinks I am the key to two things he wants very much."

  "Jakoven?" I asked.

  She nodded, and met my eyes. "He thinks I know the names of the nobles who are giving aid to Alizon."

  "Do you?" I asked.

  "Not all, but enough to hurt a lot of people who are doing nothing but protecting a man from unlawful, unjustified prosecution—unlawful at least until J
akoven officially declares Alizon a traitor."

  The king's half brother had disappeared almost a year ago, about the same time the royal armies descended unexpectedly on his estates. Alizon had escaped with little more than the clothes he was wearing—and a large number of allies who were willing to hide him. The king had pressed no charges, saying he preferred to wait until his half brother could defend himself.

  Tisala sat up, her face tightened in pain but her chin rose to stifle any hint of sympathy. "I needed a place to hide until I recovered. I'm sorry I've put you at risk—but I don't think he'd ever consider looking for me here."

  "King Jakoven doesn't like me much anyway, nor I him, for that matter," I said wryly. "You are welcome here as long as you like, and know that you are not hurting my standing with the high king."

  "I didn't come empty-handed," she said. "The second thing Jakoven wants from me is the means to convict your cousin Beckram of being a traitor." She flexed her hand again and continued, "It seemed to be a matter of some importance."

  I noticed that she didn't say Beckram wasn't involved.

  I turned away and stared at a dragon carved into the mantelpiece. According to my uncle, who was seldom wrong when it came to matters of court affairs, King Jakoven was angry about his half brother's growing support, but he didn't appear to take it as a serious threat to the throne. A view I thought, regretfully, that was fully justified.

  "How did you escape?" I asked. "Torturer's victims are usually carefully guarded."

  "I wasn't held in the castle," she said. "Jakoven had me secreted away in the basement of a building in town."

  Jakoven always played games, intrigues within intrigues. Some things, though, made sense—of course he'd secreted her someplace other than the castle. He'd lose a lot of support if it became known he'd tortured Tisala—a woman of high birth. "Correct me if I'm wrong," said Tisala thoughtfully. "But Jakoven's murdered several of the queen's other lovers. And he was trying to kill Beckram and got Beckram's twin instead four years ago. It would be easier for Jakoven to have Beckram killed than to pin a charge of treason on him."