While Darville was distracted by his bride, Brevelan placed the first of the steaming cloths on the exposed black burns that snaked up Darville’s arm.
“Yaiyeee! What is in that demon brew!” Darville gritted his teeth. The cords of his neck went rigid.
“You don’t want to know.” Brevelan’s expression didn’t change until she turned to look at Jaylor.
Worry furrowed her brow and whitened her naturally pale skin. The spray of freckles across her nose appeared darker in contrast. Jaylor placed a supporting hand on his wife’s narrow shoulder. Fear crossed Jaylor’s face.
Yaakke couldn’t penetrate the wall of Jaylor’s thoughts. The apprentice touched the bandages as if to check them. A raw tingle traveled from the wound up through his arms. The weird sensation turned to a burn and then a pulsing jolt that tried to push his hand away or invade his entire body. He wasn’t sure which. He didn’t like the magic scent that suddenly tainted the room.
“Do what you have to, love,” Jaylor whispered to Brevelan.
“What does that mean?” Darville clung to Mikka while he fought the pain.
“There is magic in that wound, Darville. Dark and dangerous magic.” Jaylor refused to look at his friend.
Yaakke suddenly found the pattern in the rug fascinating. He’d felt death in that wound.
“We know that. Janataea’s blood was rotten with Tambootie and evil magic. Everywhere it touched me, it burned through clothes and flesh almost to the bone.” Sweat dotted Darville’s brow and his breathing became shallow.
“This is something more, my dearest friend. I’m going to have to Sing the magic out.” Brevelan clutched her hands in her lap.
Her healing talent required her to take the alien magic into her own body as well as Darville’s pain. Her healthy body would gradually absorb, then dissipate, whatever was eating away at Darville. Someday, her ability to heal just might kill her.
“I’ll lend you strength.” Jaylor sat on the floor beside Brevelan, where she knelt at Darville’s feet.
“As will I.” Mikka plopped down on Brevelan’s other side.
Yaakke dropped to his knees behind Brevelan, hands on her shoulders. The witchbane was still in her. He’d have to fuel the magic for her Song.
“No, Mikka.” Jaylor put up a hand to keep the queen beside Darville. “The Council would burn you and depose Darville if they ever found out you participated in magic.”
“I’m not the one throwing magic tonight.” Mikka planted her clenched fists on her hips and glared at Jaylor. Stubborn determination creased her brow and set her lips into a straight line. “Is lending physical strength magic?”
Jaylor didn’t answer. Queen Rossemikka had a reputation for single-minded determination. Several headstrong servants reported she had the patience to outstare and out-wait a stone statue.
“Well, is it?”
“Not by our definition. But it might be by the Council’s,” Jaylor hedged.
“He’s my husband. I will help him however I can.” Mikka plunked herself down beside Brevelan.
Yaakke placed his hands on Brevelan’s shoulders. They took a deep breath in unison. The beginning of Yaakke’s magic trance extended through his hands to include her. Jaylor and Mikka mimicked the calming exercise. Breathe in three counts, hold, breathe out. Again. A third time. The rhythm drew them all halfway to the void. Reality shifted in layers of past and present.
As usual, the ritual sent Yaakke’s mind above his body. From there he could reach below the mask of the witchbane in Brevelan’s body and tap her empathic healing ability. Her tune started low and melancholy.
Unusual. Brevelan’s healing tunes tended to be light and cheerful, replacing pain and illness with joy and life.
Except that one time last spring when Jaylor had poured his life into the spell that released Shayla, the last female dragon, from Lord Krej’s glass prison. Brevelan had called Jaylor back to life with a tune as soft and poignant as this.
Yaakke forced calm upon his mind. Panic and worry would end the spell. If Darville’s injury was as bad as the tune indicated, then Brevelan needed every fragment of help he could give.
The tune grew in volume. The melody took on a richer more complex tone. Dimly Yaakke heard Jaylor’s deep baritone seeking the harmony of the Song. The apprentice needed to add his own wavering voice in harmony an octave above Jaylor. The Song circled and wove and blended around the three voices. Mikka’s untrained alto voice joined the spell, complementing Brevelan’s piercingly sweet soprano.
Colored mists danced around the room in rhythm with the Song. The music lifted higher, enticing the poison out of Darville’s body, urging the blackness to dissipate into the colored fog.
Darville dropped his head against the back of the chair. Gradually the lines of pain etched around his eyes and down his cheeks eased and flowed away.
Brevelan brought the Song to a glorious high note and lingered there. Jaylor took his harmony to a complementary fifth an octave below her. Mikka found the third.
Communal magic, fueled by dragons, must feel like this. Unity, companionship, binding them all together.
Yaakke opened his mouth to silence. The large room in a stone palace faded and shimmered. Different walls, older, unhewn bones of the Kardia curved around a cave. Cold dampness. Loneliness and pain.
He fought the vision and shook it from his mind. Reality was here in Coronnan City. He needed his concentration and strength here to heal the king.
Darville opened his eyes in wonder, then screwed up his face in agony. His scream caught Brevelan’s shriek as they all collapsed in utter failure.
“Shayla!” Darville and Brevelan breathed together.
Yaakke forced himself to rouse from the exhaustion of strong magic. Shayla was lonely and hurt in her self-imposed exile from Coronnan. Had his vision shown him where the dragon hid?
“Did you see the dragon in your vision?” Jaylor asked wearily.
“She’s hurt, trapped by an injured wing, and she can’t fly,” Darville panted. The pain seemed to return with double intensity.
“We’ve stabilized your wound with this spell. But I can’t heal you, Darville, or Shayla. This wound is more than Janataea’s poisoned blood. Your body is tied to the health of the dragons. The Coraurlia and the dragon blessing compound the link of your royal blood to the dragon nimbus. As long as Shayla ails, you will, too.” Tears flowed down Brevelan’s face. “I should have tried this yesterday, when I was in full control of my talent, before the dragons sealed your ties to them.”
“Then why aren’t you hurt, too, Brevelan? Your blood is almost as royal as mine. Shayla is linked to you.”
“My link with Shayla was severed, Darville.” Brevelan hung her head in regret.
“If Shayla is hurt that badly, then I’d best go find her.” Jaylor stood, his hand already reaching for his staff.
“No!” Brevelan and Darville commanded in unison.
“I’m Senior Magician. ’Tis my duty to go,” Jaylor protested.
“And you are the only one who can hold the remnants of the Commune together. You have to stay in Coronnan, Jaylor.” Darville leaned back in the chair, cradling his injured arm against his body.
“A Commune that is now outlawed by your Council.”
“All the more reason for you to stay. You have the strength of will and body to fight the Council. Our government is an intricate balance among twelve lords and the monarch, with the magicians as neutral advisers. That balance has been destroyed. Dragon magic allows magicians to join and amplify their powers by orders of magnitude to overcome any solitary rogue magician who won’t obey the ethics of the Commune or laws of the land. Those restrictions have been shattered by the absence of dragons. Only you can hold the Commmune together and advise me until the balance is restored. Send someone else. I need you here, Jaylor, even if your counsel is given in secret.”
“Who else could I send? My class of journeymen never returned from their quests. The Master M
agicians agreed to my elevation to Senior because they are all too old or unfamiliar with solitary magic to guide the Commune. There is no one else. I have to go.” Jaylor tapped his staff against the floor with each word for emphasis.
“Excuse my presumption, sir,” Yaakke interrupted. He forced politeness into his words to mask his excitement. “You have an apprentice, sir. You could give me this quest, now, like you said a few weeks ago. ’Tis my quest when I’m ready . . . when I’ve proved I’m reliable.”
“Reliable and trained,” Jaylor countered. “And of an age to undergo the trial by Tambootie smoke.”
Yaakke refused to be disappointed. Somehow he had to make Jaylor see that he was meant to take this quest. Tonight. Before he left for his appointment with a dragon. Maybe if he told them about the smuggler now . . .
“Excuse me, Your Grace.” Fred slipped into the room unannounced through a mere crack in the doorway.
Darville sat up straight and alert. “Yes?” Only a dire emergency would bring the king’s bodyguard into his private quarters unsummoned.
“There’s a ruckus in the dungeons, sir. Someone has stolen Lord Krej.”
Chapter 5
Child’s play. The telltales Jaylor left around Krej’s dungeon cell evaporated too easily. I wasted precious minutes looking for additional traps that weren’t there. I watched him set the spells and knew some of their secrets. When I ran out of time, I took a chance and levitated the statue that is now Krej through my escape route.
Would that the spell enchanting Krej dissolved as readily. At least a member of the coven now has possession of his entrapped spirit. He will be kept safe by the one person who can guard him best while we research the nature of the spell.
“Every one of Jaylor’s spells has been released.” Yaakke announced as he examined the outside of Krej’s now empty dungeon cell. “Whoever sprang the magic traps either did it before the coronation or while the witchbane was spreading around the Grand Court,” he continued as he sniffed with his magic senses.
“Shayla is hurt so that I won’t heal, there’s been an assassination attempt, and now someone has liberated my enemy!” Darville paced the dungeon corridor, anger simmering just below the surface of his kingly posture. “This coronation day is not turning out particularly joyous.”
Yaakke looked around for anything Jaylor’s sharp eyes might have missed. He’d placed several balls of the shadowless witchlight in and around the cell to make sure no clue remained hidden. Krej’s cell was empty; there was no straw on the stone floor, no bedding on the cot. Not even a chamber pot or bucket in the corner. Ensorcelled into a tin statue, Krej wouldn’t have needed any of those bleak comforts.
Krej had been alive when his own spell to capture Darville into a sculpture had been backlashed by the Coraurlia, trapping the rogue magician in his own evil.
Had the magic reached Darville as intended, the king would have assumed the figure of a golden wolf—the image dictated by his aura. The tin weasel reflected Krej’s personality.
“Who did this, Yaakke?” Jaylor asked. He searched for minute traces of evidence with his master’s glass, a rare piece of magnifying glass, as large as a man’s hand, framed in gold. Jaylor could use the precious instrument to direct spells, as well as enlarge cramped print and seek clues.
“Don’t know.” Yaakke breathed deeply and allowed his eyes to cross in the first stage of a trance. “Something’s wrong. The little bits of magic left over are really weird, but I can’t say why.” The cell next to this one smelled equally strange, too, as if the thief had lingered there but hadn’t thrown any spells within the room. The grisly statue of Krej’s mother, Lady Janessa, was still there. She’d been dead when Krej and his sister Janataea had ensorcelled her into an onyx statue of a harpy. She couldn’t be revived and was useless to the coven. Krej still lived within his tin prison. He might revive if they could figure a way to break his own backlashed spell.
“Well, if we can’t tell who and how let’s look at where,” Darville ceased his restless pacing a moment. “Where could the thief expect to take Lord Krej when he’s been transformed into a statue of a weasel?”
“Somewhere close,” Jaylor pronounced. “The statue might be the size of a real weasel, but it contains Krej’s full weight and mass. That much dead weight concentrated in a small form would challenge a very strong man.”
“A strong magician could transport him,” Yaakke interjected. That’s what he would do.
“If the magician who sprang the traps doesn’t have the secret of transporting a living being unharmed, I don’t think he’d risk damaging Krej.” Jaylor finger-combed his beard; a familiar gesture when he was deep in thought. “But he might try levitation. That’s how Krej got Shayla back to his castle last spring after he’d turned her into glass.”
Yaakke thought back to the magic probe he had dodged this morning. He hadn’t revealed the secret of the transport spell to the smuggler from SeLenicca. Nor the queen’s dual personality. He was sure of it. But maybe . . .
A blush crept up from his toes to his hairline. In all the rush and excitement he’d forgotten to relate important information. A smuggler. A ship to SeLenicca. Were all the mishaps connected?
“Does this corridor lead to the tunnels and maybe access to the river or another part of the city?”
“It does,” Darville said. Traces of suspicion crossed his eyes. “But only if you know the tunnels exist, how to get out, and which walls hide doors.”
Jaylor and Darville looked at each other for a long moment. If Jaylor’s magic weren’t dormant, Yaakke would swear they were talking mind-to-mind.
Yaakke looked down the dark length of the nearly empty prison carved out of bedrock. He squinted his eyes for traces of magic. Patches of red-and-black mist glowed in the shape of footprints.
“Who’s red and black?” Yaakke asked Jaylor while following the faint traces of a magician’s path. Magic tended to take on the color of the magician’s personality. No two alike, though shades of a color might be similar.
“Red and black?” Jaylor looked surprised.
“Maybe not black. Something very dark. And the red is bright, like blood.” The footprints were small, the stride short. Traces of delusion faded in and out, altering the shape and length of the telltales. Who was this magician?
“The assassin in the Grand Court was short!” Yaakke exclaimed. “And his beard was cut square, like he was from SeLenicca. There’s a smuggler’s ship going to SeLenicca tonight!”
“What? Tell me everything you know, Yaakke,” Jaylor ordered. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“You wouldn’t listen and then we got caught up with the healing and I forgot.” Yaakke’s mind and mouth closed with a firm snap. Survival depended upon keen observation and keeping his secrets. He hadn’t really forgotten to relate this information. Long habits of silence had pushed the incidents to the back of his mind. Ten years as the smallest and weakest kitchen drudge had taught him that.
“This is too important for you to hide behind big innocent eyes and silence.” Jaylor grasped Yaakke’s chin and forced him to look directly at him.
Yaakke saw anxiety and authority in Jaylor’s gaze. He also saw a potential for violence within this big man. But none of his anger and aggression was directed toward Yaakke.
“Tell me what you know, Yaakke,” Jaylor pleaded.
Yaakke filled his lungs and forced himself to trust his master. Never, in the months they’d been together, had Jaylor raised a hand to him. Not once had he given Yaakke reason to doubt his intentions.
“Yes, sir.” Carefully, Yaakke related his morning’s adventure, including his first suspicion that Margit the pasty seller had thrown a defensive spell at the beginning of the argument, finishing with an assurance that he hadn’t leaked the transport spell to a foreigner nor revealed the queen’s potential for magic.
What if he had revealed that information without knowing it?
“Where is that damned crow now
?” Jaylor asked.
Yaakke fell silent once more. One of the shadows in Janessa’s cell looked suspiciously like a bird sleeping with its head under one wing. If Corby followed him, everything the jackdaw did was special. For years, all he’d owned were his secrets. He had to keep Corby to himself a while longer.
“More important, how were the smugglers planning to get through the mudflats to the Bay proper?” King Darville resumed pacing the dank corridor, more restless than Yaakke had ever seen him. He nodded to the hovering Fred to send troops to investigate any ship leaving the Great Bay tonight.
“Only Bay Pilots know the ever-changing channels, and they are the most arrogantly close-mouthed demon spawn I’ve ever encountered!” The king yanked the golden queue restraint from his hair and shook the mane free. Once more he appeared the barely tamed wolf. The theft of Krej had challenged Darville’s kingship and done more to invigorate him than all of Brevelan’s healing spells.
“Can we assume that the theft of Lord Krej is related to the abortive assassination attempt?” Darville pressed.
Sounds of merriment from the banqueting hall drifted down into the higher levels of the dungeon as Fred opened the door a crack and slipped back to watch over Darville. He nodded that his errand was complete.
“I can’t afford to absent myself from the festivities much longer, Jaylor. Can you find other clues, anything?”
“Sir,” Yaakke interrupted. “Whoever stole Krej was strong enough to throw a delusion over the assassin and armor another man who was headed for the smuggler’s ship. That’s a lot of magic to throw and clear the cell, too.”
Soberly silent, the three of them turned their attention back to the slim pieces of evidence. Jaylor placed a few threads of black cloth on a pewter tray alongside some flakes of gilt. “When was Krej last checked?”
“There is supposed to be a regular check of every cell by the guards at least once an hour. Every cell, not just these two.” Darville extended his pacing to bypass half a dozen unoccupied cells. A coronation pardon had emptied most of them. Only two foreign spies and a few of Krej’s steadfast followers remained.
The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I Page 69