Dragon Nimbus Novels: Vol II, The

by Irene Radford

  “A kind of armor?” She visualized a small opening in the wall and pushed her hand against it. The wall resisted the way a feather pillow compressed under the weight of a head, shaping around it, but not splitting. She opened the image of the door. Her hand slid right through. “Oh, my!” She pulled her hand back in surprise and stared at her palm. Somehow she expected it to burn or at least tingle from the magic. Nothing. Her hand seemed perfectly normal and undamaged.

  “Do you think your voices guided you here? Perhaps your guardian spirits prepared this place for us, a place where we are safe from Rovers and witchhunters.” He took her hand in his own larger ones, examining it, kissing it, tracing the crease of her heart line across the palm.

  Bending over her hand didn’t disguise the slight stoop in his posture. The wound must still pain him.

  “We are safe from those who would betray us. I know it with the same certainty that tells me the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.” Her breathing seemed strangely uneven as his hands moved up her arm to her shoulders, then moved to cradle her face.

  “You needn’t force me to stay with you, Myrilandel. I want to be with you. This silver cord isn’t necessary.” He slowly lowered his mouth to cover hers in a long kiss.

  Heat rose from her belly to her breasts in a satisfying wave. Her knees nearly buckled with joy.

  “I thought you controlled the cord,” she said when they came up for air, still locked in each others arms.

  “Perhaps neither of us controls it. Perhaps it is a symbol of something deeper that we refused to recognize.” He kissed her again, molding her body to fit neatly against his.

  “Stay with me, Nimbulan. Please, help me make this clearing our home.”

  “If we are to stay, we must lay in some stores. There is a sack of seeds and roots underneath the bed in the hut,” Nimbulan said. “Magic has kept them in stasis, so they won’t spoil. If we’re going to be here any length of time, we’d best start planting the garden. Can you dig if I plant? I don’t think I have the strength yet to do the heaviest work.” He walked slowly back to the one-room home with the very wide bed. Last night they’d slept there, side by side, Amaranth between them or on top of one of them—as they’d slept on the trail. Nimbulan hadn’t touched her. Amaranth was too good a chaperone for that.

  Tonight the flywacket would sleep elsewhere, Myri decided.

  “I don’t know if I like it that you are a Battlemage, Nimbulan. But you intrigue me and make me feel safer than anyone has before. You must be a very special man.”

  Myri’s joyful planting song dwindled to a questioning note as a cloud dimmed the spring sun and then passed on.

  She looked to the northeast and sniffed the damp breeze. She almost tasted the warm growth and new life abundant in the forest around her. Her song returned to her lips, soaring high. A sense of rightness with the world swelled her heart and added speed to her digging.

  Nimbulan looked up from where he dropped triangles of yampion root into the freshly turned earth two rows to her left. He laughed with her and joined her song. They’d made love last night, and the three nights before. Joyous, wondrous, abandoned love, growing in intensity with each joining. She needed to sing about that, too.

  “When you stand like that with your face uplifted to the wind, you remind me of someone,” Nimbulan said. “But for the life of me, I can’t remember who.” He shook his head and resumed his planting.

  “Someone you know? My family, perhaps?” If he knew her family, she could meet them, talk to them, fill in missing pieces of her memory.

  “I must not have known her well, or I’d remember. Don’t worry about it. If it’s important, the name and the face will come to me.”

  “I’d like to find my family someday.” Someday, when exploring their love wasn’t quite so new and fragile.

  She’d dreamed of flying again last night. The sensation of wind beneath her outstretched arms felt as natural and as harmonious as singing with this man beside her. She tried to imagine the two of them soaring effortlessly across the bay on a warm current of air; the crisp bite of thin air cleansing her mind and body of old fears and urgencies.

  She hunched her shoulders and folded her elbows in memory of tilting wings to catch the next updraft. . . .

  “ ’Twas only a dream,” she sighed. “But it felt like a memory.” She pushed the shovel into the ground.

  The scent of brine alerted her to the next change in the weather. Tall trees blocked her view of the Great Bay. She blinked three times, a trick Nimbulan had taught her, and found her FarSight ready to scan north, through the forest, and over the horizon.

  Dark clouds boiled on the horizon, where the Bay met the open sea. Tonight the rains would soak their small garden and nourish the seeds and roots they planted.

  The hair on her arms and the back of her neck bristled. Her sense of safety and privacy vanished. She whipped her head back and forth, sniffing the air for the “difference.”

  “We aren’t alone,” Nimbulan whispered.

  “We must be. The barrier remains intact,” she answered.

  “Is someone coming near?” He rose slowly to his knees, still protecting the vulnerable area around his wound. He raised his left hand, palm outward, fingers slightly curled and rotated it.

  “I sense weariness and fear. One stumbles and . . . and I share pain with her. Almost too tired to feel the pain. Another helps. But he is tired, too.” Awareness of the two lives invaded her empathy.

  “They need you. Nimbulan struggled to his feet. Once upright he walked over to the nearest barrier and touched it with the flat of his palm.

  The barrier swirled into a dozen visible colors, extending outward from his hand. The trees outside the clearing seemed to lurch and right themselves slightly to the left of where they had been.

  Myri closed her eyes. The world returned to the same place as before. She opened them again and the trees continued to shift until an arch opened in the barrier, outlined by a narrow band of the swirling colors. On the other side of the barrier stood two children, a boy and a girl with identical mud-brown hair tinged with red and sprays of freckles across their noses. They both stared at Nimbulan with wide gray eyes.

  Chapter 27

  Moncriith dragged at the leash of a baying dog. The stupid creature couldn’t track its own shit, let alone an elusive witchwoman and two grubby children determined to elude their fate.

  He was close to Myrilandel. He knew it, could smell the demon magic in the air. The villagers had said she was nearby.

  Where else would those two cursed children run but to the witchwoman? She was the only one in these parts who would give shelter to the brats.

  Except possibly the Rover chieftain. He sought Myrilandel, too. Moncriith had to find the witch before the Rover whisked her into Hanassa or some other impossible place.

  “Sieur, we’ve passed that split tree with the boulder growing out of the center three times.” The sergeant assigned to Moncriith wiped his brow with his sleeve as he stared at the tree in question.

  The other soldiers huddled together behind their sergeant, shoulders tensed as if trying to make themselves invisible by reducing their size.

  “Fools! Of course we’re going in circles. The witchwoman has laid a dozen false trails. We have to branch out and look for signs of passage beyond this circle.” Moncriith pushed his own growing anxiety aside with his forceful tones. He knew the eerie feeling permeating these woods was a cloaking spell. No one would venture closer to the witch’s dwelling because of the growing sense of unease generated by her evil.

  Magretha had generated the same miasma of impending doom in the woods surrounding her house. A house where she had seduced young men with promises of great magic and never-ending sex.

  Moncriith had been naive enough to believe himself the first and only young lad to share her bed.

  Magretha had been as false as her foster daughter.

  Flushed with lust and newly awakened power, Moncriith had
believed Magretha and pledged her his love. His parents had encouraged the match, even though Magretha at thirty—a very beautiful thirty—was fifteen years older and fifteen years more experienced than Moncriith. A magician in the family, particularly one powerful enough to become a Battlemage, offered a chance for a steady income and a way out of the constant grind of hunger and hard work. The entire village hoped Moncriith would be powerful enough to protect them from the marauding armies that had plagued Coronnan for two or more generations.

  But Magretha had betrayed Moncriith. She had seduced his father and two of the village elders, as she seduced every man who crossed her path. Moncriith had discovered her lying in his father’s arms, both naked, in the throes of passion. While he stood in the woods, aghast and ashamed, the two village elders joined him, awaiting their turn with Magretha. Their lewd jokes had roused Moncriith’s youthful anger and righteous outrage. Moncriith unleashed his newfound and uncontrolled magic. He sent a firebomb into the thatch of Magretha’s sturdy home. Rain hadn’t fallen in nigh on three moons. The dry straw and aged timbers erupted in flames and smoke so fast, the inhabitants hadn’t a hope of escape.

  Magretha and Moncriith’s father should have died, locked in each other’s arms at the height of their unbridled lust. But Myrilandel, no more than six at the time, had dragged Magretha from the flames, leaving Moncriith’s father to die.

  The stench of burning flesh had sickened Moncriith and brought home to his grieving mind the enormity of his crime. He’d run away to the nearest monastery, pledging the rest of his miserable life to repentance and service to the Stargods. At the gateway of the temple he’d pledged never to use again the magic that Magretha had awakened and shown him how to use.

  All priests of the Stargods must first be magicians. So Moncriith had turned to blood magic rather than draw power from the ley lines embedded in the Kardia. Most often, he used his own blood, relishing the pain and the power that pain brought him. He should have been the most powerful Battlemage of all time, continuously drawing strength from the blood and death of a battle.

  The elders of the temple had banished him on the night of his ordination as a priest. They would not sully their hallowed halls with blood.

  But they harbored demons. Only demons could make the elders turn against Moncriith and his vision of the infestation of evil into all traditional magic.

  The vision drove him to scour Coronnan free of the pestilence of the demons who used human bodies to house their spirits. Myrilandel led the demons now that Magretha had died—finally purged of her possession by holy fire.

  How else had a child so small rescued Magretha? Why else had she rescued the treacherous witch and not Moncriith’s father?

  “Master Nimbulan!” Powwell flung himself forward, hugging the magician’s knees. He wanted to wrap his arms around the older man’s waist and hug him tight, but the woman was in the way. “We’ve found you at last. Kalen said you were alive. I didn’t believe her. But she convinced me. We ran away from Master Ackerly and her father. We ran away to bring you back. They searched for us but we hid. Then Sieur Moncriith found us and fed us and kept us warm. He wanted to find you, too, but we ran away again. He wants to hurt you.”

  “Powwell? Slow down. One thing at a time.” Nimbulan eased them into the clearing, toward the little hut at the center. “How did you find me? I’ve been gone for moons.”

  “It was Kalen all the time. She knew where to look. She knew we’d find you in the east. You have to come back to the school with us. You have to make it all better.”

  Only when the heat from the central hearth in the hut engulfed Powwell did he realize how cold and wet he was. How tired he was of sleeping rough and eating rougher. How dangerous Moncriith and his preachings were. But if he was cold and tired and ready for the comfort of a real bed and hot food, Kalen must need it more.

  Dark circles beneath her eyes made her look like her face was always dirty. She didn’t smile or laugh anymore, and she certainly didn’t play magic tricks on him the way she had back at the school.

  Powwell released Nimbulan and assumed a straighter, more mature posture. He wrapped an arm around Kalen’s shivering shoulders. He had to take care of her. No one else would.

  “Come, tell me your adventures, Powwell. And you, too, Kalen. Then we’ll decide what to do with you. Your parents and Ackerly must be frantic about you.”

  “How did you know to come east?” the woman asked from the doorway. Kalen hovered there twisting her hands in her skirt as if frightened of everything.

  Kalen looked up at the woman. Determination firmed her chin and cleared her eyes of all traces of her tiredness. “They told me.”

  “They?” Nimbulan asked, exchanging a worried glance with the woman.

  “The voices in my head. They told me to come east and find you.”

  (Your family is complete. Come to us. Follow the path only Myrilandel can see.)

  A large black cat stalked into the hut, fluffing his wings for all to see.

  Powwell’s jaw dropped. A flywacket! A real, live, flywacket! Nimbulan had found a creature that lived only in legends.

  (I am Amaranth, Myrilandel’s familiar,) the flywacket announced directly into Powwell’s mind.

  “I . . . I’m Powwell. This is Kalen,” he stammered an introduction since it seemed warranted.

  (We must trust the little ones. All of us are needed. The path opens to you at dawn,) Amaranth told them all.

  Nimbulan watched Myri walk up the trail. Her lovely shape was outlined by her skirt with each long, confident stride. He longed to reach out and hold her close, kiss her, love her. The slender silver umbilical that connected them grew stronger every day until he was sure he could reach out and pull her closer to him by tugging on the magical cord.

  But they had a long trek into the mountains to find the mysterious guiding voices, and the children watched every move he made with avid curiosity—when they weren’t trying to catch Amaranth and make him show off his wings.

  Nimbulan decided to question them once more rather than contemplate Myri and how she found the path that appeared behind them but never before them.

  “How did you two meet?” The similarity in hair and eye color, the position of their freckles, and the shape of their tip-tilted noses was too much coincidence for them not to have a common parent or grandparent.

  Nimbulan had met Powwell’s mother when he recruited the boy for the school. A shy woman who’d been seduced by a man displaced by the wars. She might have been beautiful if loved and allowed to bloom with joy, but years of hard work and being outcast for bearing a bastard child had etched premature worry lines into her face. Hunger had worn her to a thin shadow of the beauty of her youth. She had never taken another lover.

  Powwell’s mother had been shunned for loving a man not her husband. Rover women regarded children as wealth, regardless of the father or their marital status. The old pagan practice of random matings at Festival and measuring wealth in the number of children hadn’t died out with the teaching of the Stargods.

  The depredation of war took more lives than the sacrifice to Simurgh had in the old days, before the Stargods. Lives that could only be replaced by numerous children. Powwell and his mother should have been honored rather than cast out by family and village because she slept with a man outside of Festival or marriage.

  “Kalen’s parents brought her to the school,” Powwell said, helping the girl over a fallen log. “Her da was a merchant in Baria and lost everything when the town was sacked. They’d been on the road for months, hungry and down to their last few coins. Kalen has talent, lots of it. So they brought her to the school to have one less mouth to feed. They ended up staying to help run the school.”

  “A merchant, eh?” Was that the connection? Or had a different man seduced both women? The family resemblance was strong enough that Kalen’s father might very well have sired Powwell, too. He’d made promises and never kept them because he was already married. Or about t
o marry. Probably Kalen’s mother had a hefty dowry, more attractive than Powwell’s mother’s small inheritance. Did Kalen’s father have gray eyes and freckles?

  “Stuuvart traded for better food, and Ackerly offered the services of students for healing and soil replenishing. Sometimes he took money, a lot of the times he could only get cloth and parchments and stuff. And Kalen’s mother is a great cook.” Powwell looked longingly at the pack Nimbulan carried. Undoubtedly his growing body cried out for food. The lessons Nimbulan had set both children earlier to test their skills had depleted their energy reserves as well.

  Kalen hadn’t spoken more than a few words since yesterday. Nimbulan wondered what lay behind her act of wide-eyed innocence.

  “So why did you find it necessary to come searching for me, if you believed me dead.” Nimbulan turned and faced the children squarely. This was the heart of their desperate flight from the school.

  “Kalen discovered that your niche in the crypt was empty.”

  Nimbulan knelt down so that he was level with the girl. He tried to look her directly in the eye. She suddenly found a tall everblue tree fascinating and wouldn’t look at him.

  “Why were you exploring the crypt, Kalen? Surely there were better places to play,” Nimbulan asked gently.

  The girl looked at her feet and bit her lip. Powwell had the same bad habit.

  “You can trust him, Kalen,” Powwell urged.

  “I wanted a place to hide,” she whispered.

  “Hide from what?” Nimbulan asked.

  She darted a worried glance at Powwell then back to the ground. “Ackerly wanted me to do terrible things with my magic.”

  Myri joined them and held the child close against her side. “If she doesn’t want to talk about it, don’t push it. When she’s comfortable enough with us to talk, she will. Don’t upset her.” She glared at Nimbulan.

  Nimbulan returned Myri’s stare with love. He recognized the blooming of her maternal instincts and wished they could have children of their own. Children with her pale blond hair and beautifully expressive eyes. They showed hints of purple now, blue when she was sated with sex, fiery green when she healed. He longed for children he could teach to carry on the legacy of honorable magic, neutral in the realm of politics. The lack of his own children became a deep and empty ache.