Oreg growled and muttered as we continued checking her carefully. Her feet were a mess. Oreg said finally that the damage was from walking so far in ill-fitting shoes rather than a torturer's knife.

He set her foot down and turned to the smaller table that held various herbs and salves, hot water, and bandaging. "You think Jakoven did this?" With a wave of his hand he indicated Tisala's damaged state.

I nodded. "I can't think of any other reason she'd run all the way here."

"She liked you." Oreg used a clean knife to open one of the putrid places on Tisala's back, sponging up the fluid that escaped with a clean wet cloth.

"True enough," I agreed. "But I haven't seen her since I was last in Oranstone."

I'd helped Oreg heal before, and we worked as a team. Most of what we did was ordinary stuff, clean wounds, cover with mixtures of salves and powders that Oreg hoarded, then bandage.

But her left hand was swollen to twice its normal size and it was the source of the putrid smell. He soaked it first in hot seawater. Tisala must have really been in rough shape, because she didn't even protest. When Oreg was through, he poured alcohol over it, and again she had no reaction. He reexamined her now-clean hand.

Healing was the most difficult of all magics to do because the mage must know as much about the body as he does about his magic. And even a little healing sucked up such power as most mages can only dream about.

In power I was the equal of many and better than most, with such ability as four years of Oreg's tutoring could bring, but I would not have even known where to start to save the mess that remained of Tisala's left hand.

"She might lose her fourth finger anyway," commented Oreg, shaking his head. "There's too much dead flesh."

"She fights right-handed," I said. "Would it be better to cut it off now?"

Oreg frowned and turned her hand this way and that. "I always hate to cut something off I can't put back on. Let me try and heal this. If it doesn't take, there will be plenty of time to cut it off later."

He set her hand down and pulled up a three-legged stool next to the table. When he was comfortable, he took her hand up again and poured magic over it.

Oreg had been part of Hurog since there was a Hurog to be a part of, and I was Hurog-bred sensitive to the magics imbued in the land and in him. When Oreg worked magic around me, it felt almost erotic—like a hand touching me intimately. It was disturbing, but I shrugged off the uncomfortable feeling with the ease of long practice.

There is an art to working magic, and Oreg was very, very good at his art. His touch was focused and powerful, eerily beautiful to watch. When his power began to flicker, I rested my hands on his shoulder and gave him what I could of mine, all the while watching what he was doing to Tisala's hand.

Flesh peeled back and burned away in bright purple flame, leaving healthy pink behind. Oreg left other bits of flesh that looked no more healthy than the flesh he'd destroyed—he must have seen things I did not.

When he was finished at last, her hand looked more swollen and bruised than it had when we started. I hauled Oreg off to rest on the padded bench against the wall, then turned back to Tisala with clean bunting.

"Don't wrap that hand," Oreg said. "The air will help it heal, and she won't be doing much for a few days to get it dirty."

I looked to the wounds we hadn't dealt with yet. "I think she's got a rib that's cracked or broken," I replied. "Do I bind her ribs, or will that hurt her back?"

Oreg pushed himself off the bench, and moving like an old, old man, examined the place I showed him. "Bruised," he grunted, shuffling back to the bench. "Don't wrap it."

I left Oreg, pale and sleeping, in the library and took Tisala up to my own room to rest She looked oddly fragile in the bed built for me, I thought, smiling because she would have laughed if she'd heard anyone call her fragile.

A middle-aged man with sweat from the fire coating his bald head looked up as I came into the forge and nodded at me before turning his gaze back to the bar he was shaping.

"Good 'noon, Hurogmeten," he said. "What can I do for you?"

"Hinges," I said. "And a portcullis door to go with the gatehouse we don't have. Bars for all the windows. A thousand blades and the warriors to use them."

The armorer gave me a brief smile. "The same as usual, then." He shaped the iron with the same swift skill he showed with steel. It was a real concession on his part when he agreed to shape iron with the blacksmith. Blacksmithing was a step down from the work he'd usually been called upon to do.

"Stala said we might have a visit from the king soon," said a quiet voice from the back.

I walked around to see the blacksmith pulling shoes off a horse. He was a little younger than the armorer, with long blond hair he pulled back to keep out of his eyes.

"We might," I agreed. "But we'll not be fighting if I can help it. For one thing, the gate in the curtain wall will come down at the first hit of a battering ram. He'll be looking for the woman we brought in today, and the trick will be not to let him know she's here."

The blacksmith set the horse's leg down and tossed the old shoe into a barrel. "I had heard you'd gotten another stray." He grinned. Unlike the armorer, he liked to chat while he worked.

"Hardly a stray," I said, then reconsidered. "Well, she needs help for a bit—but she'll not be staying."

"We've gotten most of the bars for the windows done," he said, "and bolts and brackets for the doors inside the keep. Hinges, too, for that matter—but we haven't started on the hinges for the keep door yet. So far we're ahead on nails and fasteners of various kinds, but the carpenter sent his boy in to check today—so I imagine we'll be doing nails again in the near future."

The heat of the forge felt good in the cool air, so I stayed and talked a bit, helping with bellows and fetching water from the well.

Tisala's state had left me melancholy, and work was good to dispel it. When I left the forge's warmth, I wandered along the curtain wall and touched a rough-hewn granite block to remind myself of how much we'd accomplished since Hurog had fallen.

The inner curtain walls had been the first thing I'd had rebuilt after Hurog fell. And it was a good thing, too—between the death of my father and the invasion of the Vorsag, bandits from hundreds of miles around had come to see if Hurog was ripe for the plucking. The Blue Guard, under my aunt's direction, fended them off—but had there not been the curtain wall to hide my people behind, the bandits would have laid waste to the farmers who worked the land.

The wall was as tall and as solid as the one that had withstood many centuries of Shavig weather. On the bottom it was almost fifteen feet thick, good stone block on the outside, and filled with rubble (of which we had plenty). On the top it narrowed to less than nine feet across, but was still amply wide to allow the guardsmen to walk. It was a good wall, even if it looked odd with the granite stones outnumbering the blackstone.

Inside the wall, the bailey was oddly barren now that the miscellaneous small buildings my ancestors had added were gone. It had taken a great deal of work to level the bailey, since the earthen mound the keep had sat upon had settled after some of the caves beneath it had collapsed.

The new guards' quarters were built against the wall near one of the six towers, the only stone building in the bailey except for the forge. The quarters were a neat, rectangular building that took up half the ground of its predecessor with twice the usable space. There was stabling in the bailey for a few animals, but most of the horses were outside, between the inner wall and where the outer had once stood.