Read Online [Hurog 01] - Dragon Bones by Patricia Briggs - Free Book Online

gown—wasethereal and beautiful. My uncle, beside her, appeared strong and stalwart, the perfect man to protect Hurog.
    My sister looked like a lady grown, nearly as tall as Mother. I did some quick calculations and realized that Mother had been married when she was Ciarra’s age. Like me, Ciarra was clad in a blue velvet gown, though her dragon was a small embroidered pattern around her neckline. Oreg had been busy.
    Waiting in my place at the open grave on the hillside opposite the keep, I had a full view of the funeral procession, and they had an equally good view of me, their new (and temporarily powerless) lord.
    I’d ridden up here on a good-natured gray gelding who looked particularly well in Hurog blue. Everyone else trudged up the hill on foot. Stala, in dress blues, led the pallbearers behind Erdrick and Beckram, who brought up the rear of the family group.
    Of us all, Stala might be the only one who really mourned my father. Her face, I noticed, was still and tearless.
    I watched, standing apart from the rest of the ceremony as the bearers lowered him carefully into the dark earth, as my father had watched his own father put to rest. Doubtless he’d felt satisfaction as the wooden box hit bottom.
    I looked across the grave at Mother, and I could tell from my uncle’s tight face that she was humming again. I had vague memories of a time when my mother had been gay and laughing and had played with me for hours building wooden-block towers while my father fought in the king’s wars.
    The Brat watched the box with the Hurogmeten in it settle into the soft earth. She flinched when my uncle set his hand upon her shoulder. I thought of my brother, who’d given up everything to leave my father.
    May the underground beast take you for what you have made of your family, I thought to the dead man. Butperhaps being Hurog was enough justification for the gods, too, for no dark beast rose from the shadows of the grave to devour my father’s body, despite my uncle’s fears.
    Dismounting, I took a handful of earth and tossed it on the grave. Stay there, I thought at the Herogmeten. Bitter waves of fruitless anger beat at my composure. If he’d been different, I might have my brother standing beside me, to help with the overwhelming task of keeping Hurog alive. I might have a mother who could bear the burden of daily chores and free me to chase bandits and reap the fields. I would not have been standing, half mad, with tears sliding down my face as the pallbearers, men of the Blue Guard, pushed dirt over my father’s grave.
    In the end, I think I was the only one who cried. Maybe I was the only one who mourned. But I did not mourn the man who lay in that grave.
    Â 
    â€œDOES MY UNCLE KNOW about you?” I asked Oreg, who was stretched out on the end of my bed. From my stool, set before the fireplace, I watched him while I sharpened my boot knife. The clothes I’d worn to my father’s funeral were hung up in the wardrobe. I wore instead the sweat-stained clothes I’d worn to training with the Blue Guard this evening. Not even the Hurogmeten’s funeral interfered with training.
    â€œNo.” Oreg closed his eyes, his face relaxed. “Your father never told anyone more than he had to.”
    I held the knife up so the light hit it better. I couldn’t see it, but I knew the knife had developed a wire edge; otherwise it would have been a lot sharper after all the time I’d worked on it. I bent down and grabbed a leather strop out of my sharpening kit and set to work.
    Oreg rolled over so he could see me better. “A man came here this evening to talk to your uncle.”
    â€œThe overseer of the field with the salt creep,” I agreed mildly, stropping the knife.
    â€œYour uncle’s wizard didn’t fare any better than old Scraggle Beard.” I’d learned that Oreg disliked Licleng, referring to him as a “self-aggrandized