The Wandering Dragon (Children of the Dragon Nimbus) (5 page)

Maria led the way, slowly, masking her own pain with dignity. When they reached the winding tower steps that led to Robb’s new prison—light and aboveground, but still a guarded cell—she paused and took a deep breath, in preparation for the abuse her twisted leg must endure to climb. But climb she must. ’Twas her responsibility as chatelaine to escort him to and from his room, as if he were an honored guest instead of a prisoner—or hostage.

Robb offered her his arm.

She shot him an offended glare.

“No offense meant, my lady. Simply a gentleman offering a lady his arm as escort.” He bowed slightly—something he hadn’t done for Lokeen.

Maria nodded and slipped her tiny hand around his forearm. Neither of them mentioned how heavily she leaned on him. But he noticed the look of gratitude in her eyes when they reached the top.

“You must rest and eat. Meat and red wine will be brought to you soon.”

“And a razor perhaps? I would like to shave.”

“We’ll see.”

Robb paused, waiting for what must come.

“His Majesty will need you to dispatch the letter.”

The blood drained out of Robb’s head, leaving him a bit dizzy and needing to lean against the wall. He knew Samlan’s powers, knew him capable of the spell. He also knew how much energy he would have to command with no ley lines or dragon magic available.

“I do not believe the dispatch spell is any more reliable than a loyal courier sent by ship,” Maria said. “Two of the six letters the previous mage dispatched were never answered.”

“W . . . who were they addressed to?”

“You do not need to know that.”

“If I knew, perhaps I could tell you if the receiver chose not to respond.”

Maria dismissed that statement with a wave of her hand. “The other one, the mage who deserted the king in the end, assured us that a response, even a negative one, would come automatically. He’d know and report to the king the answer.”

Not likely
, Robb thought. Samlan had told the king what he wanted to hear. Nothing more.

“You will not be given the chance to desert us,” Maria reminded him as she unlocked the door to his cell. When she had returned the key to the chain at her belt, her hand went automatically to a pendant hidden from view by her gown and shift. “I cannot afford to lose you. I will send someone to fetch you when the king is ready for your next bit of magic.” She smiled knowingly, willing to keep his secrets.

If he kept hers.

She knew he’d embedded magic in the letter he’d just written. How?

L
UKAN HALF-RAN FROM the palace, a sour taste in the back of his throat. He’d wanted to grab his brother in a desperate hug and just cling to him, sharing his grief, loneliness, and . . . just missing him.

The knot of anger he harbored in his gut beat back that temporary moment of weakness. The thickness of unshed tears tasted like a bitter poison.

He almost ran into the tall man he’d noticed earlier, just outside the gate. But he ran on, not caring if the stranger noted his path with his one good eye, the other badly scarred and burned.

His sister Valeria had told him of a woody root that shrieked when pulled from the ground and looked like a carved doll. When properly prepared, in tiny doses, mixed with a healing tea that countered some of the poison in the root, it would kill alien growths inside a body. When not properly prepared, or in larger doses, it killed the patient within minutes.

He imagined his emotions tasted like that acidic goo.

“I’ll only get rid of it by proving myself as a magician and as a man,” he reminded himself. He looked at the lowering sun. If he set off within the hour he could row to Sacred Isle tonight. With luck he’d have his staff by morning and be on his way to Amazonia shortly thereafter.

First things first. He needed to eat and to tell Skeller his plans. His rapid steps had already led him out of the palace and onto the first bridge toward the port. He’d studied the maps and knew the route to Sacred Isle. Presuming the flood had not washed away and altered all of the landmarks.

Should he allow himself another day to prepare for the momentous occasion of earning a staff?

Those thoughts took him most of the way to the port. The long wharf stretching out into the Bay and across a deep channel led him to the mainland spit filled with warehouses, chandler’s shops, fishnet menders, and taverns.

Lots and lots of taverns. Every other building had a sign waving in the constant sea breeze. On each he saw an overflowing beer mug.

Lukan paused to stare at the first seven that came into view. New beer wafted the enticing aromas of yeast and fermenting grains. Fresh-baked bread too. With his nose so full of welcoming scents and his stomach reminding him to eat, fully and soon, he had nothing left to sniff for the magic of Skeller’s songs.

But he heard that soaringly clear baritone rise above raucous laughter in a song with the chanting refrain of “Drink. Drink. Drink.”

A smile cleared his mind and relieved the bitterness within him. He elbowed his way through the throng of merry drinkers. Every few paces a barmaid passed him with laden trays. He exchanged a single coin (gleaned from the joint stash he and Skeller had accumulated from previous singing stints) for a mug of smooth beer liberated from one of those trays. Another coin bought him a slab of meat and half a loaf of bread. Truly satisfied with food for the first time in weeks, he washed it all down with another mug.

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 University 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.