“Nothing that shows, Pansy. Nothing that shows,” I assured him as I led him to the stables where saddle and bridle awaited us.His scars were visible, white hairs on his ribs and flanks, and ripples in the soft skin on the corners of his mouth.

He lent me his enthusiasm as we charged the mountain trails. In the last few years these wild rides had grown less frequent; my need of them lessened by the satisfaction of turning Hurog into a prosperous land once more. But Pansy’s memory was sharp and his feet didn’t hesitate as he powered up the steep, snow-covered game trail. Hurog hadreal mountains.

Standing by the broken bronze doors on the mountainside, we stared down onto Hurog. It wasn’t as impressive as it had once been. The stark black lines were softened by granite and the places where the stonework had not yet been replaced. But the air of decay that had clung to it was gone.

Pansy cocked an ear back, so I turned him around to see what he’d heard.

The dragon that stared at me was not Oreg. Its scales glittered green and black instead of purple, and it was less than half Oreg’s size.

Pansy, conditioned by long rides with Oreg, didn’t flinch when the dragon’s head darted suddenly past us so its right eye was even with mine.

“Hurogmeten,” he said in a voice that could have belonged to Tosten when he was ten.

“Dragon,” I said. Oreg had told me that he wasn’t the only dragon around here, but I’d never seen another one until now.

He tilted his head, butting my shoulder painfully with a bony ridge. Then he pulled his head back. “It sings in you,” he said. “They said it did, but I didn’t think magic could sing to a human.”

“This is Hurog,” I said. “And I am Hurogmeten.”

“Hurog,”he said after a moment, “means dragon.”

“Yes,” I agreed, smiling.

That seemed to satisfy him. After two running steps down the mountain he took awkwardly to flight.

“A fledgling,” I said to Pansy, feeling lighthearted. I hadn’t really believed Oreg when he told me that there were more dragons—no one had seen one in a very long time.

“TOSTENIS INCENSED,” ANNOUNCEDCIARRA’Svoice on the other side of my horse. “He said they almost put a rider up behind you in the saddle yesterday—and yet this morning one of the stablemen sees you taking flight up the mountain.”

I set Pansy’s brush on the rack and turned toward the open door of the stable. My sister, wrapped in winter clothes and backlit by the morning sun streaming behind her, looked like the spirit her new daughter was named after. Her pale hair looked the same as it had when she was a toddler.