I shook my head. “I just saw the king’s part in this. I need to see the boy before I canfind 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 hearThe 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.”