Dragon Blood-Hurog 2 Read Online Free PDF

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."
    Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html 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