Fraank staggered back a few steps as if struck, still clutching the knife. With the grim determination of a martyr he regained his footing and leaped forward. “You are a traitor to your country and my queen. Die like the miserable cur you are.”
“Cease your attack or die!” Simeon screamed just before the iron knife plunged into his heart.
His armor had been set against magical attack, not a physical penetration. The armor ignited. Blood spurted. Smoke and flame and the stench of rotten Tambootie took them both into the void.
Not even a flake of ash remained of either man.
Jack flinched from the backlash of pain and death.
Rejiia absorbed it and swelled with a new source of magic. She seemed to grow and swell with dynamic power.
“Now it is your turn to die, boy.”
(His name is Yaakke!) The blue-tipped dragon’s bugling pronouncement echoed up and down the valley piercing mental and physical ears. (Grab hold of my spines, Yaakke. Shayla and the little ones are safe now. I’ll take you away from SeLenicca and the evil spawned by Simeon and this female.)
“I can’t leave. I have to finish this.” Jack poured his remaining strength into his armor.
(Another time. Your life is too important to waste on such as she.) The dragon reached out his strong forepaws and clamped Jack around the waist without touching ground.
With a massive sweep of wing and a blast of dragon fire, they lifted free of Kardia’s gravity and into the void.
My enemies have done me a favor. Simeon can never cast doubt on the rights of my son and Princess Jaranda to marry and together claim the Three Kingdoms. No one must know that Princess Jaylene’s child, the true Simeon, died at birth, replaced by Janessa’s bastard, also named Simeon. Jaylene’s link to Rossemeyer is the key to dynastic unity. That wretched piece of lace with the runic message is attached to the dragon’s wing. I must find Shayla and destroy the lace before the Commune has the opportunity to read the secret.
Shayla will most certainly fly to the Commune. Fortunately the boy told me how to find Brevelan’s clearing. If I take my sister or her children hostage, the dragon will surely give up her wing patch.
Glendon would be the best hostage. He is tied to the dragons through his father’s blood as well as his mother’s. And if I eliminate the child, then I clear the way to name myself and my son heirs to the throne and the Coraurlia—the glass dragon crown.
All sensation fled Jack’s body as darkness closed around him. Panic rode at the edge of his awareness.
(We wait in the void,) the dragon told him.
“Why?” The dragons knew the void better than any human. Maybe they wouldn’t get lost this time. Maybe.
Colored umbilicals, symbols of life forces, drifted past him. Gold and crystal, copper and blue. His own silver entwined with white. White for lace and moon-blond hair. Jack and Katrina.
As he watched, the silver umbilical of his own life took on a glow of purple. “Just like Amaranth, my colors are silver and purple. I’ve seen my own aura color!”
A rare achievement among magicians. Only those tested and found worthy by the dragons were granted that privilege. He searched the glowing umbilicals for traces of his friends.
(Come look. See the future and the past.) The colored cords of life called to him.
He resisted the temptation. He’d been lost here once before. The last time he’d indulged in glimpses he’d seen things he wasn’t meant to know.
(But you saw Katrina. You recognized her in your heart,) the dragon reminded him.
“What good will that do me? We’ve shared an adventure and both escaped. Now we must go our separate ways. Magicians aren’t meant to share their lives with a mate. Our path—my path—must be solitary.” Some of his happiness at finding his magical signature faded.
(Look again.)
A tangle of colors wrapped around Jack and a new vista opened before his eyes. The clearing. But not the clearing he had known. The house was bigger. Two boys wrestled and played in the meadow. Brevelan Sang as she stirred a hearty stew of yampion and legumes. Jaylor came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her gravid body.
Love and caring filled the clearing.
“But they’re dead!” Jack would have cried if he knew where his body existed.
(Are they?)
“The monastery was burned out. A soldier played with Jaylor’s staff.”
(Many magicians passed into a new plane of existence from that monastery, over many centuries. Their staves were hung on the chapel wall in memory of their work. Magicians with the transport spell needn’t be trapped by their enemies. The Commune escaped intact, Yaakke.)
Hope blossomed inside Jack.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
(Would you have persevered to the end of your quest if you thought another magician could do it for you? Besides, you didn’t ask. You assumed.)
Jack had to think about that a minute. Would he have endured the hardships of the trek from the mine to lair, the betrayal of Lanciar, the disasters in Queen’s City?
“I think I might have, dragon. I may not have been as willing to die for the quest if I knew I had friends waiting for me. But I would have continued to the end.”
(Then you have truly grown into the rank of Master Magician.)
“Why are we lingering here? I need to warn my friends that Rejiia has the transport spell and directions to the clearing.” Friends. What a wonderful word. His heart swelled within his chest. He needed to see his old friends, walk on familiar ground, speak his own language.
(We wait so that the daughter of Krej cannot follow our trail through the void.)
“How long?”
(Time is not measured in the void by the passage of the sun. Time flows forward and back and sideways in the void.)
Sideways?
(Between dimensions.)
“Great. So how long? I want my body back.”
(You don’t want answers?)
“I don’t know what the questions are anymore.” He’d escaped alive—so far. He hadn’t planned to live beyond the magic duel with Rejiia and Simeon. Shayla had returned to Coronnan, Katrina was safe, and Simeon’s tyranny had ended. Jack . . . Yaakke’s quest was complete.
(You have accomplished much. For your self-respect and peace of mind, you had to do it alone. Dragons are not allowed to interfere in these matters. But you are not complete yet, Yaakke. You have earned a name. Yet you still know only a portion of your heritage. I am allowed to tell you the rest now that you have succeeded in your quest.)
“I’m half Rover. No matter who my father is, I can’t overcome the prejudice against Zolltarn and his clan. They are thieves and malcontents, amoral nomads. Isn’t that bad enough? Why should I want to know more?”
(What if Baamin was your father?)
“Baamin? My old master! Impossible.”
(Why is it impossible?)
“Because it is. The old sot never . . . I mean he couldn’t . . . he wouldn’t. . .”
(Perhaps he did. Kestra was ordered to seduce a powerful magician. Who more powerful than Baamin on the night before his installation as the Senior Magician of the Commune?)
“But he would have told me!”
(Not if he didn’t know.)
Sadness and joy threatened to split Jack in two. He and Baamin had been close. The old man had befriended and trusted Jack when no one else thought him smart enough to deserve a name. Of all the men he had known, Baamin was the one he would have chosen as a father.
But he had not known, had not done the things a father was meant to share with a son—the kinds of things Jaylor was doing now with his two little boys.
(Will you deny your own children the right of a father?)
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t have any children. I haven’t even . . . well, you know. Katrina’s the only woman I know and we haven’t gotten that far.”
(Yet.)
“Not likely to either.”
&nbs
p; (Time will tell.)
“Not to change the subject or anything, but while we are sharing these intimate thoughts, how come you’ve never given me your name. Dragons like names, use them all the time. But you don’t seem to have one.”
(I have a name. The time was not right to tell you.)
“When will be the right time?”
(In another life I was called Baamin.)
Chapter 39
Weakness assailed Rejiia’s limbs and mind. “How can I follow that wretched boy and his dragons? I have no magic left for the transport spell.”
There is Tambootie here in the vale, a voice whispered in the back of her mind.
“P’pa?” She looked at the tin statue resting on the grass beside her. Sometime during the battle it had tipped onto its side. Flakes of gilt paint littered the grass in a circle around the sculpture. Very little paint was left.
Set me upright. The imperious tone, without the whine Simeon had developed these last few months, told her the owner of the voice belonged only to her father.
“At last you recognize that I have some purpose.” She stared at Lord Krej without moving him. “You are now dependent upon me, Father.”
And you must depend upon me to replenish your magic in time to follow the boy and the dragons.
“How?” She edged a little closer to him, not certain how she should feel toward him. “How are you speaking to me?” she amended her question.
The backlash wears thin.
“How?” she asked again. Her curiosity vied with her need to have her father acknowledge her as his equal in magic.
For many moons, I struggled against the spell. It fed upon the fight. I planned the spell to be self-renewing because I knew my intended victim would never give up. Once I realized this, the magic had no energy to feed it. Little by little it wears thin.
“How long before you are free?” Suddenly, Rejiia wasn’t certain she wanted him animate, arrogant, ordering her and everyone else to heed to his slightest wish. Besides, if he was animate again, he might try to steal the Coraurlia from her.
I cannot tell. Once we have dealt with Yaakke and the dragons, you must take me to Hanassa. My mother’s people might help us.
“Us? What if I decide to leave you here? I am a full magician, more powerful than any in the Commune. What if I don’t need you?”
You need me, child. Because I am your father and you will never be happy until we face each other and prove ourselves equals in magic and cunning.
“You are right about that, Father. I’ll eat of this stunted Tambootie and the food left behind by the dragons. Then we will confront our enemies.”
She welcomed the chill and the darkness of the void after the heat of the magic battle with Yaakke. The sensory deprivation ended the residual fatigue and the little aches and pains of her corporeal body.
We cannot linger here, Father. We must finish what I have started.
She didn’t regret Simeon’s passing. In Hanassa, she could find sufficient believers to form a ritual star again. Lanciar could be persuaded to join her. He was such a magnificent sexual partner, she’d regret losing him to another.
The fishing village with no name must be near the foothills of the Southern Mountains. She chose a spot near the decaying Equinox Pylon. P’pa had brought his entire family here the summer she turned ten. He didn’t usually tour the forgotten reaches of his provinces. She’d forgotten what brought him here—something to do with witchwomen and dragons. The steep cliff down to the gravel beach and the Dragon’s Teeth—a wicked rock formation in the cove—had stayed in her mind.
No one seemed to be active in the village yet. The fishing fleet would have left at dawn. Anyone else with sense was still abed.
The path behind the pub was easy to see. Many feet had pounded the dirt into reasonable smoothness. What was the boy’s next landmark?
A boulder split in half by a tree.
The memory had been clear and precise in his head when she tried stripping his mind. Carefully she recreated the image of the broken boulder and launched herself and the tin weasel into the void.
This landing was more graceful. Practice, she told herself. Great magic took practice.
“Step through the split boulder, don’t go around it as the path seems to indicate.”
She lifted her skirts free of the dirt and moss that brushed against her and stepped through to a new path. Eight more steps and the path ended at a creek.
Bewildered, Rejiia searched the area with all of her senses. The boy had said to wait for Brevelan, but she didn’t have time. She needed to find her way into the clearing on her own, without alarming the inhabitants.
Power tingled at the tips of her fingers, not quite entering her body. She reached out to find the source of energy. An invisible wall pushed her hand away. Finger-length by finger-length she followed the wall around, back to her starting place by the creek. Lives pulsed beyond the wall. The lives of her enemies.
She had found the Commune. And Darville. Her rival’s presence taunted her, renewing her thirst for possession of the Coraurlia. “If he dies today with only a witch child as an heir, then I can put forth my claim to the throne without opposition.” She giggled as she clenched her fist and pounded against the barrier, seeking access to the king who had stolen her crown.
Her hand and arm plunged through a hole in the barrier.
Ten dragonets landed in an awkward flurry of wings and dragging pot bellies. High-pitched squeals of distress pierced Jaylor’s ears as the young dragons all tried to rush to their mother for protection and reassurance.
The clearing just wasn’t big enough to contain them all without a talon or tail piercing the already damaged wall of the barrier.
A sparkle of black-and-purple lights announced the arrival of a magician by transport. “How dare you snatch me from my morning meal!” Zolltarn, king of the Rovers, bellowed before his body was fully formed. The tall man with silver streaks within his blacker-than-black hair raised a clenched fist and shook it at a vanishing shadow in the air.
“I summoned you the day before yesterday,” Jaylor informed his colleague.
“And I was preparing to come. But a dragon snatched me from the privacy of my tent while I was still eating!”
(You will be needed today, not next week when you would have arrived if left to your own schedule,) a dragon voice announced.
There were so many dragon bodies in the clearing Jaylor couldn’t tell which one had spoken. But the voice sounded familiar. Maybe Seannin, the green-tip he’d ridden once.
The reek of Tambootie smoke dragged Jaylor’s attention away from Zolltarn, the frightened young woman, and the crush of dragon bodies. Green flames licked the edges of the small hole Glendon had made in the barrier. Jaylor’s armor snapped into place without conscious thought. This was the stench of evil he had been reared to guard against. This was the signal that all of Coronnan faced danger from rogue magicians.
Zolltarn crouched defensively, his knife at the ready, as well as a spell in his open palm.
The hole burned bigger; oily smoke poured through it.
“Brevelan, summon the rest of the Commune. Darville, where is your sword?” As he asked, Jaylor remembered the sight of Darville’s long battle sword in its plain leather scabbard propped upright beside the cottage door. He transported it to the king’s hand. Fred and Margit had spent last night in the dormitory, an hour away. Not much help unless he wasted energy on a transport.
“Boys, into the cottage!” Brevelan commanded. No one, especially not small boys, disobeyed that tone of voice.
(I must flee. I cannot stand against her.) Shayla gathered her remaining energies.
“Her?” Darville and Jaylor asked at the same time.
(Rejiia. Daughter of Krej, mistress of Simeon, witch of Hanassa.)
“And mother of the next king of Coronnan!” The figure of a tall, slender woman, dressed in elegant black appeared in the flaming arch. Every sleek dark hair in place. She ex
uded calm confidence.
Overconfident, Jaylor reminded himself. Her father and her aunt had been defeated by their lack of wariness.
“Her!” Zolltarn spat. “She has been stripping SeLenicca of gold and power, and men of talent.”
A shimmering sparkle of light rolled and gathered beside Rejiia. The tin weasel that was Lord Krej materialized at her feet. The statue’s mouth opened a fraction and drooled venom.
“My father must watch the final destruction of his enemies,” she announced. “But Zolltarn I will only maim until he reveals the reversal of the spell that holds Lord Krej captive.” With her words she wove her hands in a complicated pattern. A dark green, almost black, lightning probe surrounded her.
“Stargods, she’s going to burn the rest of the barrier.” Jaylor ran to stop her as the stench of burning Tambootie choked him. Three dragonets blocked his passage.
Rejiia laughed at his clumsy and useless progress. “You’ll not stop me, University man. Dragon magic is nothing compared to the powers I control.”
But she stood between two of the six ley lines that met at the center of the clearing. Jaylor nudged a purple-tipped dragon out of his way with a knee and planted his feet at the join. Zolltarn joined him. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, united in purpose. The magic welled up in Jaylor, eager to be woven into the fabric of the Gaia.
One small blond head appeared among the milling dragon backs, between Jaylor and his target.
“Glendon, into the house!” he ordered. Curiosity touched Jaylor’s mind. The boy knew no fear.
“Glendon, come to me. I will show you what makes the barrier and what destroys it,” Rejiia coaxed.
Jaylor used the magic filling him to throw a wall between Glendon and the witch. The spell hit a shiny metallic surface and bounced back to him. He ducked the backlash and prepared a new protection for Glendon.
Zolltarn threw the next spell. It, too, backlashed.
“Give it up, Rejiia,” a new voice commanded. A strong and assured baritone voice with hints of familiarity in it thundered around the clearing.
The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I Page 102
