Dragon Blood

"I loved you," said Jakoven, dropping to his knees, blood dyeing his hands a glistening black. Garranon pulled his weapon free and swung again. The blood-dark blade slid through the high king's throat and the resulting spray of blood covered Garranon, dripping down his face like tears.

I ducked my head, both to examine the worst of the wounds on my forearm and to give Garranon a moment of privacy. There was such grief on his face, I didn't think that he would want anyone else to see it.

"Here," said Garranon. He ripped a strip of cloth from the bottom of his shirt and wound it around my right bicep. I hadn't noticed that one.

"We'd best go see how the rest are faring," he said.

I nodded, but couldn't help but take a last look at Jakoven's still body. I'd been in battle before, and I knew how quickly a man could go from life into death. It only took a single mistake. But it seemed almost anticlimactic to stare at the dead body of the man who'd inflicted so much damage in his life. As if his death wasn't payment enough.

I followed Garranon and caught up to him. We pushed past the tents, and I had just time enough to glimpse Tisala still on her feet when the magelight above us went out.

The hair on the back of my neck rose with the magic that swept over us like a giant wave hitting the surf. I think I even stepped back, because I bumped into Garranon.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Farsonsbane," I said. "Oreg!" I bellowed, turning about as my night vision began to come back to me and shadows turned gradually into more familiar shapes of tents and men.

No one answered me.

Garranon's night sight must have improved faster than mine, because he left my side abruptly to engage one of the shadowy figures before it could complete a strike at someone who was down.

I sprinted toward the tent where the Bane was calling to me, hungry for what I could feed it.

"Oreg?" I called as I ran.

Surely only Oreg could have gotten past Jakoven's safeguards, but he still didn't answer me. I looked for him with my magic and found him so near the Bane, I thought for a moment that the artifact's magic had misled me.

I stumbled over a body, burnt and torn, and I took a few precious seconds to examine the forehead and eye that were left. Fear that it was Oreg almost kept me from seeing Arten, Jakoven's archmage, in the shape of the brow.

A few feet farther on I found another body, unrecognizable, but the fire that still fed on his flesh was full of Oreg's familiar magic—he was one of the high king's wizards.

Jakoven's tent was dark and still, but the entrance flap was open. I tried to feel Oreg's magic, but if he were using any, it was swallowed up by the magic of the Bane.

Gods, I thought, my mind playing out various scenarios as I slowed to sneak up on the tent. Oreg got through the traps set by Jakoven and tried to break the spell that held the Bane and failed. Or he was tired and was caught by a trap Jakoven set.

I ducked beneath the flap and magelight flared in the tent. There had been so many bodies on the ground, it had never occurred to me that anyone but Oreg would be in the tent with the Bane. But Jade Eyes smiled his beautiful smile at me.

For a moment all I could see was him. My body, remembering what he'd done to it while wearing that smile, broke into a cold sweat. Then I saw Oreg's limp body on the tent floor.

Ignoring Jade Eyes, I took two steps forward and felt Oreg's neck for a pulse—sighing in relief when I felt it. I didn't like the knot that was rising on the back of his head, though. Stala always said that if you hit a man in the head hard enough to knock him out, you had a good chance of killing him.

"Welcome, Ward," whispered Jade Eyes. "I've been waiting for my opportunity to claim the Bane since I first saw it. It is appropriate that you should be here, just as you were when it first called to me."

Crouched beside Oreg, I looked up at Jade Eyes and recognized the madness in his eyes. I wondered if, like my mother, he tasted his own potions or if he was simply crazy. Either way, the slender staff topped with a dragon holding a glowing ruby in its mouth scared me sick.

The Bane's angry red magic blew my hair away from my face and came back to bit me in the shoulder. The blow was as hard as any I've taken, and it was completely unexpected, because there was no change in Jade Eyes's face or body that told me what he intended. It knocked me forward onto my arms, and one of the cuts that had closed reopened. I felt that breeze come back to taste my blood.

"Oh," he breathed. "They like you. Can you hear them? They called me and called me. I visited them every night, but I couldn't break Jakoven's protections. I came in tonight and found your wizard had done all the work for me."

"Who?" asked a voice in my head, breathy and soft I almost couldn't hear it over Jade Eye's words. "Who are you?"

Hurog, I thought.

"We know you." This time the voice was several and much stronger. I saw three dragons, though my eyes were closed. "Know us, too."

" … been working on a spell to release them," continued Jade Eyes, apparently unaware of the other conversation I found myself a part of. "Dragons are immortal. If I can release them from some of the restrictions that Farson placed upon them, they can be dragons again in truth. They will serve me as dragons served the Emperor. Alizon is right," he said intensely. "Jakoven should not be high king."

The blackness began to flow under the violent red of the gem, just as it had the first time I saw it. I realized that this part of the Bane's magic seemed black to me, not because it was evil, but because it was so dense. It slid down the staff in a slow, heavy flow and began pooling on the floor of the tent, covering my hands and lapping over Oreg's body.

This was different, separate from the red magic, and it became more different all the time. It tasted like dragon, though I hadn't realized that dragon magic had a feel to it—a commonality between the magic of Oreg, Hurog, and the Bane.

"It's almost drained now," said Jade Eyes, incorrectly, I thought.

Farsonsbane was hiding its power from him. I shivered when I realized that I understood the Bane because of the co

"Jakoven used most of the magic on Buril—after making certain that Garranon wasn't there," continued Jade Eyes, unaware of the secondary communication between the Bane and me. "Peculiar of him, don't you think? I thought he was finished with Garranon. He hasn't taken Garranon since he found me last year. But I know something that Jakoven didn't."

"What's that?" I asked, watching the blackness touch Jade Eyes's feet and wash back like the sea hitting the sand.

"That it is your tears the dragons need—they told me so. Hurog means dragon, he said. But he didn't go far enough. I looked it up. Did you know that Hurogmeten means Guardian of Dragons?" He crouched, unaware of the blackness that flowed around the tent. "Your tears will give my immortal dragons back their lives and they will serve me."

He was wrong. The Bane contained the revenants of dragons, and dead things could not be given anything but the semblance of life.

"Dragons aren't immortal," I said, touching my dragon's neck again, because I couldn't see him breathe underneath the layer of blackness that Jade Eyes couldn't perceive: He was not a Hurog. Against my fingers, Oreg's pulse beat steadily. "Dragons live a long time, longer than the dwarves. But they aren't immortal."