with the rest of us for holding him back.
"Never arrive for a fight breathless," snapped Tosten.
"If they overran your farm, we'd smell smoke by now," I reassured the boy, shooting Tosten a repressive look. "They might not have seen the farm, or your father may have driven them off or killed them. Either way we don't have to hurry. There can't be very many of them, or I'd have heard about it before they made it this far onto Hurog lands."
"Don't worry about Tosten, boy," said Oreg cheerfully. "He's as impatient as you are."
Tosten sank into silence. Oreg, in contrast, was unusually lighthearted, teasing the boy until he smiled - at which point my brother let his stallion speed past us. With a glance at me, the boy sent his mare cantering after my brother - obviously hoping I'd hurry after both of them.
"I wish you wouldn't bait Tosten," I murmured to Oreg.
Oreg just smiled, though his eyes didn't light up the way they did when he was really amused. "Your brother has had plenty of time to decide that I'm no threat to him. Time he grew up. If I choose to tweak his tail a bit - that's between him and me. He doesn't need your protection anymore, Ward."
I rolled my eyes. "You encourage him," I said.
"I frighten him," Oreg corrected, and even his mouth was serious. I must have looked unconvinced, because he shook his head and said, "I'm no threat to his relationship with you, and he knows that. It hasn't been about that for some time." Oreg smiled again, but this time it was a genuine one. "Poor lad's fighting dragons."
It was an old Shavig saying about someone who was displaying rash bravery impelled by fear. The ironic twist to Oreg's tone was because in this case it was literally true. Oreg's father had been half-dragon. Oreg could take dragon form when he wished, and considered both the human seeming and the dragon his true forms.
I weighed what Oreg had said. Tosten was the only one who knew the whole story about Oreg. As my heir and as my brother I thought I owed him that. Perhaps it would have been better if I'd stuck to half-truths.
Atwater's boy waited for us at the top of the trail, though Tosten was still ahead.
"Tosten told me it is magic that lets you see there's nothing wrong at my home. There's a lot of folks who are frightened by magic."
It sounded like a personal observation, and I looked at him sharply. He colored up, but his eyes met mine squarely.
"Most folks know you can do magic, my lord," he said firmly. "Most of us are grateful for it. Father says that they'd never have found my brother and his hunting party caught out in the blizzard if you hadn't joined in the search."
I smiled at him and he dropped in beside us. Tosten, when Oreg is not around, usually knows how to charm people into doing what he wanted them to. It came from being a bard, he claimed, but I thought it might be a bit the other way around. Charm, good voice, and clever fingers made for good bards.
As we neared Atwater's farm, the land told me death had visited here recently. Death was no stranger to Hurog - its mortal residents came to an end on a regular basis - but I had to assume that this death had something to do with my being summoned here. Whoever had died was not of the earth of Hurog, which meant it wasn't Atwater or his people. It must be the bandits.
Nevertheless, when we passed the boundary at the edge of the farm, I drew my sword. Tosten (who'd let us gradually catch up to him) and Oreg drew steel likewise. The path we'd taken approached the farmhouse, which from the rear was more of a fort than a house, but a lookout spied us riding down into the valley and let out a series of notes on his hunting horn - Atwater's own call. The tightness eased in my shoulders.
A moment later the unmistakable form of the holder, himself, came around the corner. Seeing us, he whistled an all clear, so I sheathed my sword.
The boy heaved a great sigh of relief and nudged his mare into a gallop.
When one is a grizzled old war lord or the younger son of a holder, one may gallop as much as one wishes. Since I was a young