Dragon Bones

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.

He could only be talking about the ring. "Yes," I said, rubbing it.

He gave his head a short nod, though he didn't look relieved. "Good. Are you done yet, Licleng?"

"Yes, lord," replied the wizard, spreading sand over his writings, then shaking the page and bringing it to my father.

No fool even on his deathbed, my father read the script. Then he gestured for the quill and signed his name with a bloodstained hand that shook so much his signature was mostly illegible.

"You're too young to take care of Hurog. Too soft. Too stupid," he told me. "Can't do much about the softness, though I've tried—nor the stupidity."

The stupidity is your fault, I thought, but I didn't say it. When I was twelve, he'd beaten me senseless. When I recovered, I was changed, but not entirely in the way most people thought.

After drawing a couple more pain-filled breaths, my father said, "Should have married Stala instead of Muellen, but a young man is proud." Mother made no sign that his words bothered her; she heard only what she wanted to. "The Hurogmeten can't be marrying a peasant's bastard, no matter who her father was. Can't see any child of Stala's being as soft as you. But my brother will rule Hurog until you've reached your twenty-first birthday—then Siphern's wolves deliver poor Hurog."

My father, the Hurogmeten, shoved the paper at the old wizard. The quill he crushed in a spasm of pain or spleen at the unfairness of a life that left him with his oldest son an idiot, younger son a runaway, and his daughter a mute. Too concerned with the present to worry about the future, I merely nodded my head in acknowledgment of what he'd said.

The Hurogmeten gri

Stala snorted. "And breed that temper into all of his get—though I suppose none of your get ended up with yours." I'd never been sure whether Stala disliked my father or just returned his spitefulness in kind. Certainly they'd been lovers for years, though I wasn't sure if anyone but me knew that.

The Hurogmeten made a dismissing gesture with his right hand. "Duraugh?"

My uncle came forward, intent on the space where the Brat was. I stepped in front of him, blocking his way, before he could push her into the background. At something over fourteen stone, I was a good deal less movable than she.

Uncle Duraugh raised an eyebrow before he walked to the other side of the bed, edging in front of Mother. "Yes, Fen?"

"You'll take care of Hurog."

"Of course."

"Good." My father sighed. "Duraugh, Tosten will be Ward's heir. Find him, wherever he is."

"I know where he is," I replied unwisely. But I couldn't resist the impulse. It would be the only chance I'd ever have to hint to my father that he might be wrong about me.

The Hurogmeten looked at me, surprised. He'd beaten me until I bled when my younger brother had disappeared two years ago. Then he'd decided if I'd known anything about Tosten, I'd have told him; everyone knew I was too stupid to lie well.