Free The Forging of the Dragon (Wizard and Dragon Book 1) by Robert Don Hughes Page A

with laughter at his own lack of self-control. Dark came up gasping and spluttering and waded out immediately. He was grinning; when Seagryn couldn’t stop cackling, Dark laughed along with him.
    “How did you know?” Seagryn asked when he finally contained his mirth. “I’ve never told anyone that story, and she’s the only other person who knew!”
    Dark shrugged and wiped his face. “You’re going to tell me. Sometime next week.”
    Seagryn shook his head in amazement, then sighed. “Very well then. I confess that I cannot alter the future. And since you’ve showed me abundantly that while you can’t either, you do know it. Why don’t you lead us to wherever we are about to travel next?”
    Dark nodded thoughtfully as he wrung the water from his full sleeves. “These times always make me uncomfortable.”
    “What times?”
    “When I make — suggestions. Well. Shall we pack up our tent and go join the Conspiracy?”
    Seagryn’s smile faded, then returned with a little less enthusiasm. “After hearing Quirl mod Kit’s lengthy diatribe against it, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
    “I understand.” Dark nodded, peeling a wet curl from his forehead and squeezing the water out of it. “But you also learned you can’t trust what a Marwandian tells you.”
    “Can I trust what you tell me?”
    Dark focused his eyes past his forelock and on Seagryn. “I thought I’d already proved —”
    “To be in my best interests?” Seagryn expanded.
    “Oh. Well. Aren’t you going to have to judge that for yourself? After the fact?”
    “You can’t judge it for me before it happens?” the new wizard asked.
    Dark’s brown eyes were large and liquid. He answered with utter sincerity, “I wouldn’t dare.”
    Seagryn nodded and turned back to the tent to begin taking it down. “You can tell me one thing,” he said as he knelt to pull up a peg.
    “What’s that?” Dark asked, scrambling around to the other side to help.
    “Is the Conspiracy evil?”
    Dark stopped and stood straight up. “It didn’t start out to be.”
    “But it is now?”
    “Not entirely. We have time to save it ...”
    “Is it worth saving?”
    Dark’s expression turned thoughtful. He blinked twice, then looked back at Seagryn. “I think it’s the world’s best hope.”
    Seagryn shrugged. “In any case, it’s already fixed. You already know we join it.”
    The boy seemed saddened by this comment. “Only because we choose to —”
    Seagryn finished bundling the tent, passing a few coins he’d found inside it to Dark. “Whatever.” He brushed the dirt from his clerical garb and looked back up at the boy. “You do influence the future, you know. Your — gift. It does have an impact on events.”
    Dark swallowed. “That’s a part of the burden ...”
    Seagryn nodded and looked at the bundle he held in his hand. He thought in quick succession of burdens, then packhorses, and then of what a tugolith might be able to carry. This led him to the realization that he knew now how to control his ability to take on that enormous shape. He held the bundle behind his back and — as he had the day before, in willing the fire to appear — visualized what he wanted to have happen. He thought of himself as a tugolith and he became one. “Care to ride?” his altervoice rumbled, and Dark grinned up at him with excitement.
    “Of course!” he shouted, and he clambered up behind Seagryn’s ears and sat astride the horn. While in some ways Dark seemed ancient, in others he was still just a boy. Then again, Seagryn reminded himself, weren’t most men so? They set out, moving south at Dark’s direction.
    The first night they camped in a forest of lofty trees unlike any Seagryn had ever seen. The trunks were as big around as castle towers, and the branches made a gray-green canopy that blocked out the heat of the sun. Seagryn breathed air filtered by millions of pine needles and found it incredibly fresh. They moved on at dawn the