The rope wasn't a ladder, though it might have been part of one once, but it was better than nothing. After I cleared the stone formations on the ceiling of the cave, I could tell that the rope only reached two-thirds of the way to the floor. I worried about what I was going to do for the last ten feet, but I needn't have. The rope broke before I got quite that far.
As I hit the ground, I rolled as my father's arms master had drilled into me until it was second nature. Even so, I hit hard. After tumbling over once or twice, I stopped against a broken outcropping. I lay there for a moment, trying too hard to catch my breath to worry about where I was. At last my air came back in a rush, and I stumbled to my feet.
I'd rolled up against the remains of a broken column that looked to have spanned from floor to ceiling in ages past. The cavern was huge, at least twice as big as the great hall in the keep. The mouth of the tunnel I'd fallen from was along the edge of the room and relatively low. In the center of the room the ceiling was much higher, perhaps as tall as Hurog's walls, though it was hard to judge. Dwarvenstones were everywhere, brighter than the ones in the sewer, making the room actually lighter than the castle was even during the day.
There was no body crumpled on the floor. Ciarra wasn't anywhere to be seen. But she was nearby.
"Hello!" I called out. "Brat?"
A small form hurtled at me and thunked her head into my ribs. I grabbed Ciarra around the waist and swung her around twice before setting her firmly on her feet and shaking her.
"You scared me to death, Brat! What idiot notion took you that you ran into the sewers?"
Ciarra's long blond hair (lighter even than mine) hung in a muddy tangle halfway down her back. She wore tunic and trousers similar to mine, and her feet were bare. She looked pitiful, but I wasn't fooled: Pitiful wasn't repentant.
"Come on, Brat," I said with resignation, "let's find our way out of here."
Though my initial relief at finding her was overwhelming, if I couldn't find a way out, she might not be any better off than if she had died. We certainly weren't going to get out the way I came in. The dwarvenstones suggested that the room had once been in use; there had to be a better way out.
Although the room was brightly lit and must once have been fairly open, the original cave formations and the rubble where great stalactites had fallen in ages past made it difficult to tell what was inside. Maybe it had once held treasure, but there was nothing here now. The center of the cave was higher than the outer edges, and there were more stalagmites and rubble. Ciarra's feet were tough as hooves since she seldom wore shoes, but I lifted her over the worst of the rubble anyway. As I surmounted a broken pile of rock, I saw what the mess had concealed.
It had long been rumored that there was treasure hidden in Hurog from when the dwarves had come here and traded their jewels and metals. Here was treasure indeed, but one I would rather never have seen. Forgetting Ciarra momentarily, I slid down rocks and stepped closer to it.
The dragon's skull, still in an iron muzzle, was as long as I was tall. Iron manacles clasped its feet, and four more sets of manacles surrounded the delicate bones of its wings. In life whatever misborn ancestor of mine who'd committed this crime had pierced the dragon's flesh to set the iron into the wings.
"Stupid!" I snarled, though the deed was long done and those who had done it could not hear me. In the cave the sound of my voice echoed and returned to me. I blinked away the tears in my eyes.
Tenderhearted, my father called me when he was most angry. It was something that he hated worse than my stupidity. A man with a tender heart could not survive here, he said, and what was worse, those around him would die, too. I believed him. Even so, I couldn't prevent the tears, though I widened my eyes so no water spilled down my cheeks.
There were no dragons anymore. Not one. It was to see the dragons living in our mountains that the dwarves had come, bearing trade gifts for the privilege and ushering a time when Hurog had been the richest keep in the Five Kingdoms.
Hurog had held the last of dragonkind. When they were gone, the dwarves had gone, too, and the lands belonging to Hurog had begun to die as the dragons had. They'd died of sorrow, the old stories said, leaving only memories and the crest of my house to remind the world that they once were and what Hurog once was.
My family had been the protectors of dragonkind; they had died to keep their preserve safe, entrusted to that task by the first high king or, some of the old tales held, by the gods themselves. Hurogmeten in the old Shavig tongue meant guardian of dragons.
All of my life I'd clung to the glory that had been Hurog's. When I was a child, I played at being Seleg, the most famous of all Hurogmetens, and defended Hurog from seaborne invaders. When there was no one but the Brat, Tosten, and me, I would take down the battered lap harp and sing the old songs of dragons and dwarven jewels as large as horse heads.
Here, buried in the heart of Hurog, was proof that one of my ancestors had betrayed everything Hurog stood for. I caressed the skull under the black iron muzzle, kneeling as was proper before the creature the Hurogs had served throughout the ages.
"She was beautiful," said a soft, tenor voice behind me.
I jerked my head up and saw a boy, a year or two younger than I. He was no one I knew, a stranger in the heart of Hurog.
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.
I took up the cloth that lay beside the ever-present bowl of clean water that sat on the nightstand.
"Damnable luck," he replied shortly. "Your father's horse threw him. The Hurogmeten's dying."
I dropped the towel I'd been holding to stare at him.
He looked at my face, which I knew must be blanched with shock, much more honest a reaction than I usually gave anyone. He turned on his heel and left, shutting the door behind him.
Ciarra slid back out in the open and wrapped her arms about me fiercely. There was no grief in her face, just concern. I don't know why she was worried about me. I hated him.
"I'm fine, Brat," I said, though I hugged her back. "Let me find your maid; you'll need cleaning, too."
Luckily, my sister's maid and keeper was mending clothes in Ciarra's room. She grimaced as I handed the Brat to her.
I ran back to my room, where I stripped the rest of the way, scrubbed quickly, and threw on the court clothes I used for formal occasions. The arms of the shirt were too short, and it was tight over my sore shoulders, but it would have to do.
When I opened my door, the Brat was waiting outside. She'd had time to scrub up, too, and was dressed in respectable clothing. It made her look her actual age of sixteen instead of twelve. It also made her look like Mother, fragile boned and beautiful. But it was my father's fierce spirit that burned in Ciarra, purified by her sweet heart.
"Shh," I said, taking, I was sure, as much comfort from the embrace as she did. "I understand. Come down with me, Brat."
She nodded and stepped back from me, wiping her eyes briskly with her sleeves. Then she took a deep breath, wrinkled her nose because she'd obviously washed better than I'd had time to, and held out her hand imperially. I smiled, despite the events doubtlessly unfolding in the great hall below us, and offered her my arm. She took it and walked at my side down the stairs with the regal air she adopted in front of strangers and people she didn't like.
They'd improved a bed before the fireplace. My mother knelt beside it, her face pale and composed, though I could see she'd been crying. My father disliked tears.
Stala, the arms master, was still dressed in hunting clothes. She held her helmet in one hand and rested the other on my mother's shoulder. Stala was my mother's half sister. She was, as my father liked to brag, the greater part of my mother's dowry and the main reason the Blue Guard kept its reputation during my father's tenure.
She'd trained in the king's army and served two terms of service before someone noticed she wasn't a man. She returned to her family home, then followed Mother to Hurog when my father offered her the post of arms master when no other warlord in the country would have looked at her twice. Her hair was silver gray, but I remembered when it had been dark chestnut like Mother's. Stala could best my father in everything but hand-to-hand wrestling.
There was sorrow on her face when she met my gaze, but her eyes were sharp with warning. When she saw she'd caught my eye, she carefully looked at my father's wizard as he frantically scribbled on a piece of sheepskin.
> I pulled the Brat with me to a place where my father could see us. His face was pale, his body more still than I'd ever seen it under the bloodstained blankets. Like Ciarra, he'd always seemed filled with boundless energy. Now the only thing alive about him was his eyes, which glared at me in futile anger, an anger that increased when he saw the silver-colored ring on my hand. I wondered if he really had given it to the family ghost to give to me or if Oreg had taken it from him.
I touched Stala's shoulder. "What happened?" Unlike everyone else in the family, Stala always spoke to me as if I weren't stupid. Partly, I suppose, because I could use a sword as well as any.
"Stygian was madder than usual," said Stala, looking up at me, her voice expressing her distaste for my father's mount. The stallion might well act wildly, but he had such power and speed I thought it was worth putting up with the rest. My aunt disagreed; she said that riding a horse like Stygian was akin to fighting with a flawed sword—it always broke when you needed it most. "He tossed the Hurogmeten onto a dead tree. None of the external wounds are serious, but it broke something inside. I'm amazed he's survived so long."
"Die at home like my father before me," grunted the Hurogmeten, staring at me.
I'd never seen him look so old. It had seemed to me that my father always appeared a score of years younger than Mother, though he was actually older. This day he looked ancient, and my mother, next to his bed, looked no older than Ciarra.
"Bad enough to leave this to an oaf," he said to me, "but still worse to die with my oaths undone. When you die, you will give to your heir what I have given you—swear it." His speech was broken but nonetheless forceful for it.
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