Oreg nodded. "You told all of us that she cleared your head so you could think and throw Jakoven's plans to the wolves. It was a near thing, though. I talked to the guardsman who was watching so he could summon your uncle's men if they were needed. Even as it was, he said that but for your uncle's hold on Tosten, he'd have gone for the king right there and then."
"Well," I said, not wanting to think how close I had come to getting my entire family beheaded for treason. "She visited me last night and told me that Aethervon had a gift of true dreaming for me—out of gratitude for cleansing the land, I think she said. I dreamt the king was looking for a boy, my father's son out of a Hurog-bred whore. The boy's mother is dead, but the boy would be Hurog-born from both parents."
"Can you find him?" Oreg asked.
I shook my head. "I just saw the king's part in this. I need to see the boy before I can find him with magic." An increasingly familiar feeling of weakness crept over me. "Ah, gods," I whispered before my body began to try to shake itself apart.
An extremely unpleasant interval followed. Oreg held me until it was over, then efficiently removed me to the chair, burned my clothes and the sheets, and cleaned the room. He stepped out and returned—in clean clothes, as I had managed to dirty him, too—with sheets and clothes for me. He made the bed as I dressed.
"Efficient," I said, sitting stiffly on the bed.
"You think you are the only Hurog whose body rebelled from the poisons pumped through it?" he said. "If I weren't efficient after all these years, it would be a shame. Most of them even chose to indulge in vice. Go to sleep, Ward. Duraugh has to write orders for Beckram to take to Iftahar's seneschal, so we're not leaving until later this morning. I'll have a talk with Tisala about your newest foundling. As it happens, she has a lot of contacts in Estian. If there's a young Hurog out in the streets, she'll find him."
He left and I lay back in the bed, feeling even worse than I had when I awoke. As I stared at the ceiling, Tosten opened the door, his battered lap harp in one hand.
He gave me a measuring glance. "You look worse than you did yesterday. Oreg told me you needed cheering up—and I was to come and make myself useful."
I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.
"I see he was right." Tosten nodded. "You need to hear The Ballad of Hurog's Dragon, which is even now making itself popular in the taverns of Estian."
He pulled up Tisala's chair, settled himself in it, and began to play a song that purported itself to be a story a Shavig armsman was telling to a Tallvenish audience at an inn. That it was one of Tosten's own compositions was obvious to me. I knew my brother's music.
About halfway through I surged to my feet in disbelief. "He did what?"
Tosten stopped playing. "Oreg was really worried about you, Ward. It wasn't his fault. None of the horses got hurt, and he did that thing that makes people look away from him. I bet there weren't half a dozen of the men who really got a good look at him."
"And you're singing about this in the taverns? No one is supposed to know about our dragon."
"Oh," he said. "We've done something about that. It was Tisala's suggestion, actually, and I've refined upon it a bit. Listen to the rest."
The pair of Shavigmen used their tale to lure a Tallvenish nobleman (who sounded a lot like several of Jakoven's cronies) away from his fellows and out into the woods. Whereupon the Shavigmen stripped and bound him. They gathered his possessions and clothing and took them back to the inn with a note warning him to leave a certain Shavig heiress alone or they'd spread the story of his humiliation far and wide.
I sank back onto the bed with a laugh. "Catchy tune."
Tosten looked pleased. "I thought so. I've heard several other minstrels play it—or a version of it."
"No one will ever admit to believing there are dragons at Hurog after hearing that," I said.
"That was mostly the point," agreed Tosten. "Feeling better?"
"Mostly," I said. "Thanks, Tosten."
I had one more shaking fit that afternoon, though it wasn't nearly as bad. Or wouldn't have been if I hadn't been on top of Feather halfway up the steep trail to Menogue. I didn't stay on top, and for a moment I thought someone was going to force poor Feather to fall on me as they tried to move her away on the precipitous slope and she slipped.
So I recovered lying directly under Feather's belly.
"Damn," I said with feeling as I rolled carefully out from under my horse. "Good girl, that's a love. Not your fault." When I was through soothing her abused pride, I remounted with Tosten's help and didn't protest as Oreg and Tosten left their mounts for others to lead and walked on either side of me.
As Feather labored up the trail, I thought that if the king's army wanted to chase us up the steep-sided, flat-topped hill (that the flatlander Tallvenish called a mountain), he was welcome to do so. Any army that climbed up to the top wasn't going to be in fighting shape when they got there.
As the Tamerlain had told me, there were a few of Aethervon's followers camped on the site of the old ruined temple. They welcomed us as we arrived on the top as if they had expected our coming.
I slept most of rest of the day. Oreg discovered several reasons he couldn't possibly rescue Kellen until the following night. Unsaid was his conviction that I needed to rest at least another day before setting off for Hurog.
When the sun rose after the first night we spent on Menogue, I ate breakfast with the two young men and the old woman who were the new followers of Aethervon, and set out exploring. There was nothing else to do until darkness fell, and lying about gave me too much time to dwell upon the Asylum.
My feet took me toward the ruins of the old temple grounds. It was a path I'd walked before, and I could see the differences that the new priests had wrought in the landscape. Grass had been trimmed and flowers planted, but the wooden hut that served Menogue as its new temple was overshadowed still by the ruined walls that rose up to hide it from the sun. The crude wood structure paled in contrast to the ancient artisans' skillful carving. Some of the fallen blocks had been cleared away, leaving patches of raw earth where the stone had lain since they fell two centuries before. Strange how Oreg made me think of two centuries as recent.
I sat down in the shade of the old ruins and shivered. It would probably be snowing in the mountains of Shavig by now. Closing my eyes, I felt outward as Oreg had taught me at Hurog. I wanted to see if the magic here was as I remembered it. I reached out, touched the morning-cold walls of the old temple, and found what I sought.
It was ancient, this magic, and, unlike Hurog's, it held memories. I saw things for which I had no explanation, battles and great victories or defeats, but many more small memories, a man holding a black stone in his hand and flinging it to crack against the bark of a tree, a woman laughing as she ate a ripe fruit. My mouth salivated and I knew the fruit was tart and juicy. Tattoos bisected my wrists and I hated them bitterly for the symbol of thievery that they were—though part of me was certain that I'd never heard of anywhere that tattooed thieves. These were the memories of the people who tended this temple in times past and shaped the magic here with the help of Aethervon, binding the magic until it would protect His temple unless Aethervon himself restrained it—as he had when it had been overrun. It was this part of the magic of Menogue that reminded me of the oily black magic that had oozed out of Farsonsbane. It had been magic without direction, yet strong and aware.