Dragon Bones

The doors were open now, though it hadn't happened easily. The metal was blackened on the underside, as if by a terrible fire. The left-hand door lay yards away, while the right-hand door was misshapen and bent. When I touched the door nearest me, it was still warm. When I tugged on it, I couldn't budge it an inch.

I dropped Pansy's reins and cautiously approached the hole in the mountain that the doors had covered. I don't know what I expected, but an empty hole was anticlimactic. It was just a rectangular hole, barely deeper than I was tall. If I'd put a hay wagon in it, there wouldn't be room for the team to pull it. The only odd thing about it was the exactness of the flat walls and clean corners, given that it was all just packed earth. Behind me, Pansy whickered a greeting. I turned, thinking Tosten had followed me, because Pansy didn't welcome strangers. But Oreg was hardly a stranger. "Hello, Ward," he said with a self-conscious dip of his shoulders.

I swallowed. "I hope this doesn't mean I'll have to kill you again," I said.

He focused on the battered wreck of Hurog and patted Pansy absently on the forehead. "I knew you were going to be difficult about this."

He glanced at my face and then quickly back to Hurog. "You've done a lot of work. What did you do with the dragon bones?"

"Sowed them into the field that used to have a bad case of salt creep," I said.

He smiled. "So I don't have to eat them?"

"I thought that was a bad thing," I said. There was something else someone had said about eating dragon bones, but I couldn't remember what it was.

Oreg bent down and grabbed a rock. He took two steps and threw it. We both watched it bounce down the mountain until it rolled out of sight in a patch of bramble. "Not if you're a dragon," he said. When he saw my face, he said, almost frantically, "I didn't know I wouldn't die. You have to believe me. I wouldn't have hurt you like that for nothing. I would have told you. Dragons don't age, but you can kill them, and I was only a quarter-blood. I thought his spell had required my death to bind my soul to stone."

My tongue was slow. I couldn't ask any of the things I wanted to. What I managed was, "The emperors of old, it is said, were served by a dragon." Kariarn had told me that.

"My father," agreed Oreg. "Dragons can take on human shape. My grandmother was young and foolish and fell in love with a human. My father belonged to neither world and chose to serve the emperors as a mage." He spoke too rapidly, anxious to please.

"What was in the hole?" I asked.

"Me," he said. "I was. I didn't know that he'd saved my body there."

I sat down and buried my chin in my hands, hoping, I suppose, to come up with a single thing to say, to feel.

"You've lost weight," he said after a while, and I remembered that Tosten had said the same.

"Yes. Well, I thought I'd killed you." I discovered that I didn't mind him feeling guilty. It assuaged the deep pit of rage I felt. A pit that trembled beneath another, larger emotion.

"Tell me what I can do," he said, sounding close to tears himself. He closed the distance between us and fell to his knees.

"What took you so long?" I asked, not looking at him.

"I was dead," he said. "Or near enough to make no difference. I don't know how long it's been, a year? Two? Not much longer, or you would have changed more. It took that long for me to awaken. My body had been lying there for…well since before the last emperor died, tens of centuries. Magic is powerful but not always instantaneous."

"If your father forced you to wear that body, which I killed, how is it that you look as you do now?" I asked.

He gave a half laugh. "Because the body he made took its semblance from me. Dragons can shift their shape. How do you think my father was conceived?"

I'd been angry at him for a lot longer than the past few minutes. For the first time in a nearly a year, I felt the rage slide away, out of reach.

"It's been a little less than a year," I said, answering his earlier question.

He must have read something in my voice, because he took up a more casual pose, relaxing on the mountainside. "I am surprised, really. I'd have thought it would take much longer."

"You're not a slave to this anymore, are you?" I asked, flashing the worn silver-colored ring.

He shook his head. "No."

There were things I wanted to say, but I was too much my father's son to be comfortable with most of them. So I asked for more information, just to hear his voice and know I hadn't made this all up.

"Are you the last of them, now?" I asked.

"There are other dragons, Ward, though they've always been rare. Now that the poison is gone from the magic, I expect some of them will return."

"You can do something for me," I said abruptly. "I've always wondered what a dragon looks like."

He gri

We'd both forgotten about Pansy, who stiffened and pulled until his reins just barely stayed where I'd dropped them. By the time I'd calmed him down, there was a dragon in Hurog once more.

He was easily twice as large as the stone dragon, and much more fantastical. His narrow muzzle was deep midnight blue as were his feet and sharp talons. Above the muzzle and its businesslike teeth, the scales lightened to violet, a lighter shade than his Hurog blue eyes, altered only in shape, which glittered against the darkness of his face. His wings, half folded, were edged in gold and black; the scaled skin co

Like Pansy, I was frozen, but by his beauty, not by fear.

"I've never seen so many shades of purple," I said, and, gods deliver me, he preened, flexing the spikes that ran along his spine and spreading his wings to full extension.

The sudden movement was almost too much for Pansy, and he whistled a shrill challenge as he rose on his hind legs. Instantly, the dragon closed his wings and folded gently back into the Oreg I'd known.

"Sorry," he said. "I forgot I'd scare the horse."

Worriedly, Pansy huffed and snorted, making certain that the horse eater had gone and wouldn't bother his people.

"Siphern's oath, Oreg," I breathed, "that was the most glorious sight I've ever seen."

He hugged himself nervously. "Does that mean I can stay here?"

Bone deep, a feeling of great contentment fell over me, washing away the conflicting rage and joy I'd been torn between.

"You're my brother," I said, as I had to Tosten. "You'll always have a home here."

As we walked down the mountain trails, I asked, "Oreg, how is it that your human form looks so much like Tosten and most of the rest of the Hurogs I know?"

He gri