Jade Eyes snapped his fingers impatiently. “It must need blood, too,” he said.

He rolled me flat on my back and drew his knife. He bent and cut the stained bandage from my waist, ripping the fabric off and setting the wound bleeding again. He took the staff and shoved the Bane into my wound.

I felt the icy touch of the gem, felt it feed on me. It sent slivers of agony arcing through my bones, and warm writhing pleasure through my muscles until I couldn’t tell which was which.

“Up, Ward, damn it. If you lay like a lump because you’ve taken a bruise, you’ll end up with a slit throat.”The memory of my aunt’s voice seemed tied into the mist feathering my cheeks with an icy touch that brought some clearness to my head.

With the force of will that had been toughened by my father and my aunt for different purposes, I reached up and gripped the staff with both hands and ripped it out of Jade Eyes’s hands.

He must have been using magic on the Bane as well as my blood, because his body convulsed when he lost contact with the staff. He fell, momentarily unconscious, half on top of Oreg.

I pulled the Bane from my flesh, and it was harder than it should have been to do that. Using the staff to aid me, I struggled to my feet, my head hitting the pole that held that section of the tent roof rigid. Then I realized that Jade Eyes must have set a command upon the staff before releasing it.

He’d wanted me dead so no other would have a claim upon the Bane, and the red tide of magic, bloated from my blood, flooded my body in an attempt to carry out Jade Eyes’s directive.

I knew the form of several binding spells. Oreg had taught most of them to me.

“If you don’t know them,”he’d said,“you can’t break them.”

I could see the bindings on the gem when I focused on it. The ties that held the Bane to follow Jade Eyes’s command faded under my thrust of magic but not quickly enough. A red tide of pain sliced through me and breathing became difficult.

Hurog blood had given the Bane to Jade Eyes’s control. I’d rested the fingers of my right hand on the bloody lump rising on the back of Oreg’s head. True dragon’s blood, or nearer to it than mine.