“Different how?” He perched on the edge of the only stool in the tower. We’d furnished it sparsely so that there would be less to burn when my magic went awry. The tower was one of six on the wall surrounding the keep proper, so there was only stone nearby. The scorched bits of rock on the tower wall proved the wisdom of Oreg’s choice of classroom. Almost four years of work and I still had occasional, and spectacular, miscalculations.

“Do you remember Menogue?” I asked. The hill with Aethervon’s temple stood deserted outside of Estian—deserted by people, that is. We’d had a vivid demonstration that Aethervon hadnot left the holy temple when his priests had died a few centuries ago.

“Yes.”

“The magic here at Hurog isn’t as focused as that was, but I sometimes feel as if there’s some intelligence behind it.” I looked at him. “Something that might break your shielding when I called for it. It’s gotten stronger the past few months, ever since you taught me how to separate my magic from Hurog’s.”

Oreg’s eyebrows pulled together. “Interesting. Has the connection between you and the land altered?”

I shook my head. “Not that I’ve noticed.”

ILEFTOREG IN THE TOWER AND CROSSED THE BAILEY TOthe keep. I had a while before arms practice, and whenever I had a spare minute, I worked on the keep.

Once Hurog had been made entirely of blackstone, but many of the stones had shattered when Oreg’s death had destroyed the keep and its walls. Blackstone was expensive, and when we started rebuilding, there had been little gold to buy it with. Whatever quarry had supplied the original builder with stone was lost to time, always supposing that he’d gotten the rock from somewhere nearby, as was customary—Oreg didn’t remember one way or the other.

But Hurog had an old granite quarry, so we’d used granite instead and the result was . . . odd. Black pockmarked with gray made the keep much less imposing, and part of me regretted the loss of the old keep bitterly.

We’d rebuilt the inner curtain walls, except for a properly secure gatehouse. Instead we had only a primitive set of wooden gates while our blacksmith and our armorer labored mightily to supply the ironwork we needed. Most of the outside of the keep had been finished as well. Our progress had been unusually quick because of the aid of the dwarves, but I suspected that it wouldn’t be completely rebuilt until my body was dust in the grave. The keep wasn’t overly large by the standards of the Five Kingdoms, but neither was the workforce we had to rebuild with. The outer curtain wall was no more than a pile of rubble enclosing nearly thirty acres of land. I hadn’t even had the heart to begin on it.