The Wandering Dragon (Children of the Dragon Nimbus)

by Irene Radford

  Skeller, he noted, kept his hands on his harp and away from the constant offerings from the maids—potable and otherwise. Lukan had learned on their wanderings that Skeller didn’t need copious amounts of liquor—even the barely fermented stuff served here—to loosen his throat. He saved the mind- and body-numbing drink for later, when he could rest without guarding his tongue. Even then he never drank enough to spill his true feelings for Lillian, the girl he’d shared so much with, then had had to leave to give them both time to heal.

  On that issue Lukan felt only relief. Lillian and Valeria had barely reached their sixteenth birthday. Much too young to consider marriage, no matter how much love they shared.

  Skeller on the other hand was nearly twenty-four, the right age to find a wife and cease his wandering ways.

  The song ended on a flourish of rapid notes descending to the lowest pitch the harp could issue. Skeller bowed graciously and grabbed a hunk of bread and cheese as he jumped neatly to the floor beside Lukan. He’d disdained meat since . . . since he had first met and fallen in love with Lily.

  “What news, friend?” Skeller shouted over the noise of the crowd.

  Men stomped their feet and chanted “More, more, more.” “Sing us another one!” and “Don’t quit now. We’re just getting started.” A clatter of coins thrown on the table beside Skeller prompted him to bow to the audience as he scooped the small metal discs into Lukan’s pouch.

  Skeller shook his head at the patrons, but didn’t return Telynnia to her case.

  “I’ve delivered the letter. Now I need to find a boat and row over to . . . to my destiny.”

  “A little late, boy. The sun is near setting and you don’t know the river well. Best wait ’til tomorrow.”

  “Maybe . . .” Something odd at the edge of his vision demanded he look closer. A cobbled-together square table had been pushed against the far wall with four chairs—not benches, chairs—spread around the three remaining sides. Two men and two women sat there. One of the men was long and skinny with a scarred face. Upon closer examination it looked burned.

  Uh, oh. Seeing the same man three times in one day did not bode well.

  Lukan watched the women. The younger and prettier one didn’t so much sit, as . . . preside. She ate daintily, cutting her meat into small pieces, sipping a cup of wine between each bite. She chewed slowly, savoring the red, rare meat.

  Her manners made her stand out in this crowd of people who worked hard for a living and played harder at the close of day. Her long black hair with a single streak of white running from left temple to her waist arrested every gaze.

  A haze of magic surrounded her head, spreading to include each of her companions. She led, they followed. She had power and granted them a little of it.

  Except, maybe the scarred man shared her aura without giving up much of his own to Rejiia.

  Rejiia. Sorceress from the outlawed Coven. Recently restored to this gorgeous body after fifteen years imprisoned in her totem cat form.

  Lukan had seen her before. Once. On the day he and Skeller had quitted company with the twins and their companions.

  A long time ago she’d been the most feared and hated woman in all Coronnan.

  What was she doing here in the port tavern?

  “Skeller, I’ll summon Marcus in the morning, before we leave. But I need to collect my staff tonight. I have a feeling I’m going to need it sooner rather than later.”

  I knew that Master Magician Jaylor had children. Two boys, when he and his journeymen backlashed that insidious spell that turned both me and my father into our totem animals. I had forgotten that fifteen years have passed. A child of two at that time would be seventeen now. The right age for an apprentice magician to become a journeyman.

  The right age to draw magical energy from anger. The right age to be vulnerable to my manipulations. The scowling boy who just fled this miserable tavern could only be one of Jaylor’s sons grown up. He is the spitting image of his father, alike in face and form, still growing into his adult height, which will be as tall, or taller, than his father. Even his aura shouts a red and blue magical signature akin to Jaylor’s.

  He wears not the blue leather of a journeyman on journey. Time was, the blue protected them, demanded respect and aid. That time passed even before the Leaving, when all of the magicians withdrew from court, the Council, and all of the larger cities, towns and villages. For his own safety, considering the mood of the people, this boy wears worn country clothes in mud brown that won’t show dirt or stains. The people here in Coronnan City accept magic and dragons more now than they did fifteen years ago. Magicians and dragons help them with the filthy work of cleaning up after the flood—’twas a rogue magician who lost control of that storm and loosed it upon the populace, though the core of his spell was restoring magical order to the kingdom. And restore it did, not order, but me to my proper body.

  But . . . considering recent events . . . I wonder that this boy travels alone and secretively. My Geon noted his magical aura and followed him most of the day. I wonder why the boy skulks around a port tavern and claims friendship with a bard from foreign parts. Could it be . . . ?

  He is ripe. And he is mine.

  Puffy white clouds drifted across the magician-blue sky that deepened toward darkness, casting small temporary shadows on the golden wheat, nearly ready for harvest. Stunted wheat, barely hip high with tiny and nearly empty seed heads. The furrows between rows showed more weeds than spreading crops. The field looked abandoned.

  Lily sighed, resting her pack and the extra sack of seeds on the ground. She’d come to expect as much. But here, along the upper River Dubh, she thought the village in the distance—a crowded jumble of round huts that leaned and sagged at odd angles—beyond the pall of the storm and flood.

  “The Dubh is too small and too far west for the storm surge to have flooded more than a foot or two above the banks,” she mused, turning a full circle, examining the landscape more closely. The line of matted grasses and uprooted shrubs above the current river level showed exactly how high the waters had been.

  Skeller would compose a sad song about this blight on the land. But he’d add a wistful note of hope at the end. A note that his magnificent baritone would hold and swell until the audience smiled in agreement.

  A long, nearly straight ridgeline rose away from the village running east to west until it met taller hills that became the mountains. She could just make out a misty purple smudge in the distance that marked the border between Coronnan and SeLennica.

  A frisson of trouble ran up and down her spine. The land thrummed against her bare feet in an arrhythmic vibration. Something was wrong with the land and the people. Something about that ridgeline pulled and repelled her.

  She shifted her feet and planted her straight hawthorn staff into the ground to center her. She’d seen many a magician do the same. The wood felt comfortable in her grip, conforming to the shape and pressure of her hand. But the grain remained straight and true. She didn’t have enough magic to channel through the essential tool to twist it to her pattern of power. “I doubt I even have a pattern, let alone any power.”

  Still, she persisted, as she waited patiently for the nearest magnetic pole to tug at her. When the faint inclination to lean south finally found her, she cautiously turned her back to it and fixed her gaze north. Then she coaxed her eyes to see more than the obvious. A slight depression running north and south where the ridge sloped downward toward the Great Bay. The Caravan Road. And at the base of the ridge another road split from the main one. It ran past Lake Aporia and the home of Lord Laislac all the way into the mountains. Ariiell’s father had been deposed and imprisoned for his treason of importing Krakatrice eggs in order to wreak havoc in the land and make the king vulnerable to assassination and invasion by the King of Amazonia.

  Lily didn’t know if the king had appointed a new lord. She didn’t really care. Lady Ariiell, Laislac’s misused and abused daughter, was safe with Valeria at the U
niversity of Magicians. The Council of Provinces, its politics and alliances, held no interest for Lily. The health of the land and the people did. But she’d come too far south in her wandering. The circling winds had not reached much farther than here. This was the far edge of where the dry tornado had spread its funnel, nearly one hundred miles across.

  Just the other side of that ridge she and Skeller had hunkered down with a trade caravan. In the aftermath the winds had broken loose the secret crate of Krakatrice eggs from the bottom of Lady Ariiell’s litter. The huge amounts of magic in the air had prematurely hatched the black snakes. She shuddered and closed her eyes. But she couldn’t blot out the memory of a black mass wriggling and undulating across the land, consuming the blood and meat of any animal that had bolted from the storm or been blown away by it.

  The snakes had moved north, toward the center of magic. The village lay south of the hatching ground and had not been a part of the feeding frenzy.

  Or had it? She saw no signs of life stirring around the huts in the late afternoon sunshine.

  Like it or not, she had to know. She had to stay and help in any way she could.

  Tomorrow. Soon the sun would set and she’d not have enough light to trek cross-country without a trail or magelight to guide her steps. She could be of no help if she arrived wounded from a fall, or victim of a predator. Spotted saber cats still roamed these prairies. Tonight she’d make a rough camp with a fire and arrive at the tumbledown village early in the morning.

  A deep, throbbing hum irritated Souska’s inner ear. Lukan! Her journeyman called her.

  Quickly she looked around the stillroom filled with aromatic herbs and brews and potions. All of the other healer apprentices were busy with their own tasks, trying to finish before the sun fully set lest darkness and unknown qualities invaded their medicines. She crept up the long, narrow staircase against the interior wall toward the journeymen’s living quarters. Then past the bedrooms and up another stair to the apprentice dormitories. Finally the ladder to the loft attic appeared, deep in the shadows of the back corner.

  At the top, in her own private space, she poured water into a palm-sized ceramic bowl, lit the candle with a snap of her fingers, and dropped her tiny shard of glass into the bowl.

  Lukan’s face appeared almost immediately.

  Souska reached a finger to trace the curve of his cheek but he turned his face away, looking over his shoulder anxiously.

  “I have no time. Tell Mistress Maigret that Rejiia is in the city and I think she’s recruiting a new coven.”

  “What?”

  “I’m beached at Sacred Isle and I can’t work magic once I set foot out of my boat,” he hissed at her. “Memorize what I said. The Masters need to know this.” His face vanished. Her glass became inert and sank to the bottom.

  The room dimmed and darkness seemed to press tightly against her head. Without knowing what she did, how long she stared at the candle willing Lukan to come back, she knew he could not. Would not.

  Rowing to Sacred Isle at twilight and spending a night there by himself, without the comfort of a fire or food or any spells at all, he had to wait, meditating and praying until dawn. Then if the Stargods found him worthy of becoming a true journeyman, one of the trees would sacrifice a branch and drop it where he’d find it and know it for his staff.

  A spluttering sound alerted her that the candle guttered. She’d sat too long, lost in the flickers that seemed more important than anything else. Slowly she roused herself. She knew from experience that moving too quickly after one of her spells would trigger a headache that would fell her for days, making the smallest crack of light, or whispers in the rooms beneath her, send pain stabbing through her eyes. She could eat nothing during one of those headaches and vomited every potion Maigret plied her with. All she could do was wait out the pain and endure.

  As she’d endured the beating by the men of her home village who tried to force her slight magic to desert her. Ignorant people more afraid of magic than they were of the law that might hang them for murder. The journeyman magician who rescued her—not her journeyman, another anonymous one—had called down the law on her village. Because she lived, her persecutors kept their lives, but many lost the hands that had wielded the blows.

  Only Maigret knew how much damage the men had done to her. Only she knew that these lapsing spells and the headaches were a result of blows to her head. Everyone in the University knew about her nightmares. She screamed loud enough to wake the dead some nights. Less so since her journeyman had begun helping and tutoring her. Little by little, she regained control of her life and her mind.

  Not fast enough.

  She didn’t know which was worse, the headaches or the nightmares. During one, on the first night she’d spent here in the protection of the University, she’d blackened the eye of her bedmate while she thrashed, trying to protect herself from the dream memories. The next night she slept alone up here away from everyone, where her dreams would not wake or harm any of the other girls.

  Solitude suited her. Solitude made it possible for her to scry with Lukan.

  Lukan. Scry.

  She had to deliver a message. What was it now . . . ?

  CHAPTER 6

  LUKAN SAT WITH his back against a sturdy tree. He didn’t know what kind of tree. He didn’t even know if he’d found the central clearing around a pond where the Stargods had first landed on their silver cloud of fire. He smelled water. He sensed open space. The tree’s roots offered an almost comfortable seat and the trunk cradled his back nicely.

  Neither stars nor moon offered light through the thick cloud cover. So far, the rain held off. He expected it to release a heavy downpour near dawn.

  “I should expect better than a cold and uncomfortable return to the port?” he asked himself. “I bet Glenndon had an easier time on this island than I will.”

  An almost chuckle whispered through the tree canopy. “Lily could understand you,” he called up to the rustling leaves. “I haven’t her affinity with dirt and growing things.”

  Another whisper, equally amused.

  “Did Glenndon have a . . . an adventure while he was here?” he asked, to hear the sound of his own voice rather than endure any more silent meditation. Sitting still on the ground had never been easy for him.

  Another whisper stirred in his mind. Along with a shiver of unease.

  Had the tree said “Up”?

  That was easy. He’d always gone up when troubled or needing to think. Up a tree, up on the roof, climb up a cliff to a plateau, just so long as he put distance between himself and the ground and got closer to the air where dragons flew. Glenndon sought the hot spring pool at the bottom of the small cascade where he’d bathe and play with Indigo, a juvenile dragon. Lukan just went up, wherever was convenient.

  This tree seemed to offer him sanctuary.

  So he stood from his cross-legged seat and stretched tall with both hands. Not too far above his head, he found a study branch—oak, he thought, from the texture of the bark and size of the leaves—and pulled himself up by the strength of his arms.

  When he got a leg over the branch he paused to rotate his shoulders and figure out what to do next. There were more stout branches within easy reach. His instincts told him to keep going up. He scooched around until he had his balance and stretched one arm up. Grasp, center himself, swing a leg over. Three times he moved higher by almost his height each time.

  Just as his fingers brushed the bark on a fourth branch, the wind blew the wood beyond him.

  Rest here, the wind, or the tree, or whatever else, suggested.

  Legend claimed that sometimes the Stargods or the dragons spoke to the journeyman candidate here on Sacred Isle.

  “Rest?” But not sleep. This was a vigil, a time to keep watch through the night, to think, and contemplate. If he slept he’d probably fall out of the tree.

  A chuckle of agreement the next time the breeze rustled in the leaves overhead.

  “I’v
e done this before,” he told his tree as he locked his ankles around each other beneath the branch. “Three years ago when a fox raided Mama’s flusterhen coop every night for a week. None of us could catch the predator. So Glenndon and I took turns staying awake and watching. Glenndon fell asleep. I climbed an everblue and stayed awake. I caught the fox and took it far away from the Clearing. Da told me to kill it. But I knew Mama would feel the death and be sad for days. So I gave the fox a good mental shake with magic and told him next time Da would kill him and take his carcass to the University for the cooks to make a meal of him. He never came back.”

  Lukan settled his back against the wide tree trunk and clasped some narrow side branches. Ah, much more comfortable than on the ground. Mostly because he was up.

  Up was all that mattered right now.

  He watched tiny pinpoints of light peek through the shifting cloud layer. A north breeze sent them scurrying toward the nearest magnetic pole, way far to the south.

  Memories of Mama and her empathic touch with animals and people made him smile. The sadness of losing her faded a little. He had so many good memories of her, including endless arguments about eating meat. So he and Da and Glenndon, and sometimes Valeria, took many meals at the University, where meat was plentiful. The cooks understood that throwing magic, even with the aid of a ley line or gathering of dragon magic, cost a body more energy than it could hold. Magicians ate a lot to fuel their bodies. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a fat magician. They always burned more than they could possibly consume.

  His mind flicked to Skeller, his companion during their wandering away from home, away from Skeller’s love for Lily, and away from Lukan’s anger toward Da. An anger that here in this tree Lukan was having a hard time remembering where it came from and why he’d nurtured it so long.