The harvest this year had been the best in memory, aided in no little part by the disappearance of the salt creep, which had been growing in the best of the fields since before my great-grandfather’s time.Magic, whispered the people, and looked at me in awe.Dragon bones, I thought, and hoped the wheat we harvested wouldn’t poison the person who ate it. It hadn’t last year, or the year before. Nor, to my relief, did it seem to have any other unusual properties.

With harvest over, while others hunted for meat or sport, I worked on rebuilding the keep with whoever wanted to help. The dwarves came and went at their own whim—and there were none here now. Two days a week, I paid for a work party, but even with good harvests Hurog wasn’t rich. We’d finished the roof and the inner supporting walls of the keep last winter, but it was still mostly just a shell of half-finished rooms.

From the inside, the great hall looked much as it had in my father’s day, since I’d been firm on keeping the granite where it didn’t show inside. The wall with the family curse written on it had taken the most time. Finding the correct stones and setting them in proper order was somewhat more taxing than the court ladies’ puzzles, since each of the pieces weighed over a hundred pounds, and several stones had been smashed when Hurog fell.

My uncle thought I was foolish to work so hard on it, since the curse, which predicted Hurog’s fall to the Stygian Beast of mythology, had already been broken. My brother, Tosten, said I did it because I’d been instrumental in breaking the curse. But I hadn’t realized, until I saw Oreg’s face, that I’d done it to protect him from the too-rapid changes of the past few years. When you’re over a millennia old, change, even for the better, is a hard thing. And it was he, as much as I, who had broken the curse.

I touched the wall lightly with one hand and bent to pick up a grout bucket. For the past few weeks, we’d been working on the floors. One of the Blue Guard, an Avinhellish man, was the son of a mason. He’d taken one look at the cracked mess left on the floor of the great hall after the keep fell and declared it unfixable. If I’d known then the amount of work the stupid floor was going to be, I’d have timbered it, or even just left it dirt. It took us months to get the floor level enough for our mason. I think he took covert enjoyment in giving me orders.