The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

by Irene Radford

  The luxurious apartments had been mostly empty for several years. During the long decline of dragon magic, fewer and fewer men attended the University. Fewer graduated to master’s status. Now that the dragons were gone, the entire structure of the Commune was in upheaval. Jaylor sensed no one in any of the chambers now, nor could he smell any armor blocking his senses.

  Many of the older magicians who were uncomfortable with the changing nature of their spells had retired to the monasteries. The remaining masters were posted to the twelve courts as advisers and sources of instant communication with each other and the capital.

  “Could Baamin be in the palace? With Darville?” Brevelan asked.

  Jaylor wanted desperately to gather her into the circle of his arm, to draw comfort and healing from her touch. But he didn’t dare. Two of the last three spells he had thrown had split dangerously. Two rabbits, one vicious, the other more timid than usual. Two wine cups, one pure vinegar, the other fresh fruit juice.

  His third spell, transporting the greenbird, had worked. But he’d been incapacitated afterward with a seizure so strong he’d lost control of every muscle in his body.

  He’d had a seizure with the two bad spells. Milder, shorter. Just before completing the spell, his knees had begun to shake and his vision blur. Control came back to him almost as soon as the spell was complete.

  Maybe he could seek Baamin with his mind. That wasn’t really a spell, just a reaching beyond normal senses. He barely needed to establish the first level of trance for such a simple feat.

  One deep breath and his mind soared free from his body. A second deep breath and awareness surrounded him.

  Jaylor identified the occupants of each of the rooms in the University. He chose an empty one at the end of the hall that would suit him and Brevelan nicely for the duration of their stay in the capital. He already knew that Baamin’s quarters were empty. As was the library. His thoughts drifted above the stone walls of the University. As if a bird perched on the steeply pitched slate roof, he surveyed the surrounding islands of the city, seeking a familiar mind.

  Over there, on Palace Isle. Or was it Sacred Isle. A single bonfire and the movement of several armored minds caught his attention.

  “Jaylor! Jaylor, what is wrong?” Brevelan tugged anxiously at him.

  He plummeted abruptly back into his body. Disoriented by the sudden downward whoosh of his thoughts, Jaylor could not control the trembling in his hands and knees.

  “Baamin is in the palace. You will have to summon him. I can’t do it, Brevelan. Tell him to come quickly. Someone is performing a ritual on Sacred Isle.” He leaned heavily against her supporting shoulder.

  “Probably just some novice priests practicing for the solstice.” Brevelan led him down the corridor to the empty suite in the corner.

  “At this hour of the morning? The solstice is almost two moons hence.” He wanted to say more, to describe the jerky movements of seven or eight nude dancers around a single bonfire. But he hadn’t the strength of body or of will. “Light a candle. Use my glass. Summon Baamin back to the University.”

  “That will not be necessary.” A new voice halted their progress. At the end of the dark corridor floated the face of Lord Krej. For the blink of an eye his features blurred and softened with feminine touches, then hardened back into the forbidding countenance of Brevelan’s father. He seemed to drift toward them in the dim light, disembodied, until Jaylor’s vision cleared enough to see the outline of his black woolen cloak that covered him from chin to floor.

  “You could join the ritual on Sacred Isle, become one of the elite with power beyond reckoning,” Krej coaxed.

  “At what cost?” Brevelan chanted as she moved in front of Jaylor, shielding him from Krej’s compulsion with her armoring song.

  “We have no need of your bribes, Lord Krej.” Could his father-in-law heal this terrible warp in his magic? Jaylor fought the temptation to seek an end, any end, to this terrible weakness that either split his spells or spasmed his body. Concentrating on his words kept the involuntary muscle spasms at bay. But it took all of his energy. Another offer might prove too tempting to resist.

  “How did you get here?” Krej spoke sharply. “Have you traveled over a thousand miles from your mountain retreat in two weeks’ time, risking my unborn grandson? Or did you use the transport spell?”

  “That is none of your business.” Brevelan stood as tall and straight as her tiny form would allow. One hand rested on the bulge of her belly, rubbing the baby lightly in small circles. “Move aside.”

  Krej obeyed. Jaylor couldn’t be sure if he reacted to Brevelan’s compulsion or stood aside for his own reasons.

  “I will have the spell from you. You can’t hide that kind of magic long.”

  “Discover its source by yourself, as we did,” Jaylor spat. His muscles were obeying his thoughts again. He wanted to reach out with his hand and detain Krej while he questioned him more closely. How did he get into the University? What was the nature of the magic he wielded, in spite of the witchbane?

  “Don’t play innocent with me! Where did you find the spell to transport living beings?” A whiff of raw Tambootie drifted from his body.

  “In the most obvious and unlikely places,” Jaylor quipped. He and Brevelan were almost even with the door they sought. A few more steps and they would be within the armored privacy of the master’s suite.

  Krej’s addiction to Tambootie disturbed Jaylor. Need for the drug would make the lord unpredictable, violent even, in his quest for more and more of the sensation of soaring with dragons.

  Jaylor had been there. The temptation to merge his body, mind, and magic with the Tambootie grew to enormous proportions. For a long moment the urge to eat the drug was more than he could continue resisting.

  Krej’s hand drifted out from the folds of the all concealing cloak. His elegantly long fingers held a sprig of Tambootie.

  Jaylor’s hand reached involuntarily for the leaves.

  “Begone!” Brevelan screamed at her father.

  The cloaked figure vanished. Jaylor collapsed onto the stone floor, too weak to follow Krej; too shaken by the overpowering need to move any farther under his own power.

  Chapter 16

  Dawn brings an end to our ritual. The Tambootie smoke drifts away. My mind comes back to Coronnan and my duties. I must check on the princess. I have left her too long. Too often.

  But the rituals require my presence. We have not all been joined together ’round the same fire in many moons. So we meet again and again, storing up our spells and tightening the bonds that keep the coven alive. I am satiated with magic and sex.

  The power of the coven allowed me to send my rival’s image to encounter Jaylor and Brevelan. They were the source of the disturbance in the magic field tonight. I will have that spell from them. Then the coven can meet and dance our rituals ’round a Tambootie fire anytime we need to—or want to.

  Until then, I must stay close to the princess. Our long years of planning will come to naught if Darville suspects the truth. He must marry Rosie, as she is, and produce a child. A child who will rule the three kingdoms. A child whose every move is determined by me.

  The soft gray light of predawn filtered under the heavy curtains of Rosie’s room. There was not so much a lightening of the darkness, as a shift in the quality of the light. Darville watched the outlines of furniture emerge.

  His arm tightened about the woman who lay in his arms. She stirred. He pressed his damp cheek against her soft hair, lest she sees his tears upon awakening.

  If she did awake. In just moments Mikka would cease to be, and the cat who slept at his feet would emerge as Rosie.

  “I can’t watch. I’m sorry, but I can’t watch.” He closed his eyes in regret.

  “Shush, beloved. We will still be together. And I trust you to find an end to this dilemma.” Mikka lifted her face to look at him. She traced the line of his jaw with her eyes and a long fingernail, as if memorizing every inch of
him. “It’s not so bad being a cat.” The corners of her mouth lifted in an almost smile. “No responsibilities. No one notices when you enter and leave a room. People talk in front of you, as if you couldn’t hear or understand them.”

  “Don’t try to make it better, Mikka. I will find a way out for you, and quickly, because I don’t think I can bear to live without you.”

  “I knew this past night would happen the moment Brevelan dragged that icy, sodden blanket through the door of her home with the bedraggled, scruffy excuse for a wolf collapsed upon it. I knew even then, when you were a wolf and I still a cat, that we belonged together, forever.”

  They hugged again, clinging to the last moments of the darkness. “But until then, I shall be your spy. The Council does not like you and your new authoritative ways. I shall listen to their plans and report back to you.”

  “How, Mikka? How can you tell me what is happening?” Darville looked closely at her beautiful face, her wide, intelligent hazel eyes, her pug nose and even teeth. He kissed each feature.

  But even now he was noticing a change. Her round eyes were beginning to slit into a vertical pupil.

  “With magic. Brevelan will kni-ooww.”

  Darville closed his eyes so he couldn’t see her shift back into her familiar cat form. Her lovely hair would shorten from a beguiling curtain to a concealing coat. Her ears would lengthen and point. Whiskers would sprout from her face.

  He couldn’t watch.

  And he couldn’t be caught here, in the bed of the princess, before the date for the wedding had been set. Last night he had almost hoped he would be caught, so he could force the marriage on a compromised Rosie.

  Now he needed to stall the wedding, even more than Rosie wanted him to. He just could not, would not, marry Rosie. Mikka would be his only bride.

  When the woman in his arms transformed into a small bundle of fur, and the cat at the end of the bed grew into a woman, Darville slid through the bed hangings nearest the wardrobe.

  “Meww?” Mica pricked her ears. Small sounds of someone moving through the outer chamber reached them.

  Silently, he gathered his discarded clothing and lantern. Mica hopped down beside him. She urged him into the wardrobe with a shove of her damp nose against his bare calf. He paused long enough to scratch behind her ear, then slipped into the massive piece of furniture.

  “Princess Rossemikka, time to get up,” Janataea cooed.

  The heavy cabinet door closed on Darville’s naked rump just as he heard the outer door open and the governess enter the room.

  Yaakke blinked his eyes in astonishment. When he had searched for a place to set himself down, he had sniffed for the greatest concentration of magic. He’d tried time and again to visualize the old familiar scullery and transport himself there, but never succeeded in moving himself more than a few inches above the ground. So, instead of seeking a specific place, he just sniffed for magic around the capital and sent himself there.

  “There” should have been the University. Where else should one find magic, other than the training ground for all respectable magicians.

  But no. “There” proved to be the central clearing of the Sacred Grove on Sacred Isle.

  The apprentice magician drew in a deep lungful of air to replenish himself after the transport. Great racking coughs sent him to his knees.

  Tambootie smoke, thick and sour, hung like a healer’s pall of herb smoke ignited over the bed of a plague victim.

  Someone had worked a great deal of magic here mere hours ago, on the night of the dark of the moon.

  Yaakke shivered in the dawn chill. He couldn’t think of any spells that were stronger at the dark of the moon rather than at the full. Unless Lord Krej had joined some evil friends here. He wasn’t convinced that the witchbane did any good at all in neutralizing that man’s magic.

  The sun rose off to Yaakke’s left, sending streaks of light through the early morning mist. Droplets of moisture glistened and danced about the grove like a myriad of fairies. Yaakke refrained from crossing himself or flapping his crossed wrists in the ancient gesture of warding.

  What danger to him were the wee motes of light? He, Yaakke, the kitchen boy who was judged too stupid to even have a name, had just completed the greatest magic spell in the history of Coronnan! Even old Nimbulan, the man who had made a pact with the dragons, three hundred years ago, hadn’t known how to transport himself.

  Exultation made him giddy as he pranced with the fairy lights. He circled the great clearing once, twice. Heel—toe—kick, step, step, turn. Kick—kick—clap. The old, old rhythm of the solstice celebration drummed in his head. He sang the words that seemed so much nonsense, but which he knew to be an incantation in the oldest of languages.

  On his third circuit, exhaustion and laboring lungs brought him to a halt beneath the largest of the sacred oaks. Above his head he espied a dangling limb, broken off by some winter storm and stripped of bark and leaves during the course of the summer. The branch appeared to be just the proper length for a magician’s staff.

  Yaakke’s eyes widened in glee. His master’s staff. Of course. The staff was being provided for him by the Stargods in recognition of his greatest feat of magic.

  With renewed energy he hoisted himself up to the first massive limb. Above him the lesser branches appeared to form almost a staircase leading him to the dangling piece he sought. Up, ever upward he climbed until he was face-to-face with his treasure.

  A wave of uneasy awe made his hand hesitate. What if the staff were intended for someone else and he had merely stumbled upon it prematurely.

  Never! There were no more journeyman candidates at the University. The staff was meant for him. He reached out and closed his hand around the smooth straight grain. The wood vibrated and tingled in recognition of his touch. Ever so subtly, it molded to his grasp.

  Yaakke channeled a thought down the staff. A magic cloud of red, green, blue, purple, yellow, and every color imaginable in between, blossomed from the end of his focus. A casual step from the security of the tree brought him onto the cloud. Another thought and he fell clumsily, arms flailing wildly until his right arm, with the staff still clutched tightly in that hand, caught on a lower branch. He dangled awkwardly above the beckoning grove, sore and embarrassed.

  “Thank you, Stargods, for the rescue!” he whispered to the appropriate powers.

  Silence greeted him. More than just the silence of the forest. It was the utter absence of sound known only to the privileged few who attained a direct encounter with the Stargods.

  The magnitude of his actions hit his head and shoulders. Fatigue weighed him down. He wouldn’t admit any degree of tiredness in front of Brevelan, but here, in the face of the Stargods, who knew everything, he succumbed to the total lack of energy. In the past twelve hours he had performed more great magic than most masters achieved in a lifetime.

  He needed sleep and food.

  He needed to climb down.

  “Now I will go out into this world and do great deeds to save my people from destruction, just as You saved us from a plague a thousand years ago,” he promised, as he fumbled for hand- and footholds.

  But first a nap. Then he had to get off the island. No bridges gave access to Sacred Isle and he was much too tired for another transport just yet.

  Rosie stretched and yawned. For the first time in weeks she felt truly refreshed and comfortable. Her night’s rest had been filled with wonderful dreams of warmth and security. If only she could remember the details.

  “How did you sleep, my princess?” Janataea cooed from the window where she threw open the draperies with sharp thrusts. A serving maid hovered at the door with a basin of hot water for washing. The maid was different from the woman who had served her yesterday. She seemed to be absorbing every detail of the room with avid curiosity.

  Janataea pursed her lips in disapproval of the maid’s scrutiny. The governess had evicted more than one of the constantly changing servants who gossiped too long
and too frequently about the women from Rossemeyer. Janataea liked her privacy.

  “I slept very well, Janataea.” Rosie stretched again and realized she was naked. She didn’t remember taking off her sleeping shift, now a rumpled mass up by the pillow, nor did she remember scooting to the foot of the bed. Her nose wrinkled as she tried to figure out why she might have done such a thing.

  Strange odors came to her. Someone had been in her room last night! Fearfully, she searched the room for other signs of intrusion. The wardrobe door was firmly closed. A maid always slept in the anteroom to discourage entry from the hallway.

  Who could have been in this room. She sniffed more carefully. Male. Sweating, rutting male!

  Anger raised the hair on the back of her neck. How dare he? For it could only be Darville who had come to her through the secret tunnels. Did he think he could compromise her into an early marriage?

  Not if she had anything to say about it.

  “Prince Darville awaits you in the small solar, Your Highness. He has ordered smoked fish for your breakfast,” Janataea commented, as she sorted through the gowns in the wardrobe.

  “No.” Rosie drew the sleeping shift over her head before accepting the wash water from the maid. Normally she would have ordered her from the room while she bathed and dressed. Not today. Today she wanted the woman to gossip.

  “No? You don’t want smoked fish for breakfast? Perhaps you would prefer a freshly broiled river trout.” Janataea continued to search for the perfect gown.

  Rosie narrowed her eyes to look carefully at her governess. Janataea looked more energetic than usual. Her skin glowed with sensual awareness. She looked younger than the thirty-two years she claimed. But she’d been thirty-two two years ago as well.

  “I mean, no, I will not break my fast with the prince.”

  Janataea turned and scowled at Rosie. Rosie returned her stare with determination.