The Silent Dragon: Children of The Dragon Nimbus #1
Page 21
“These seven pages were each penned by a different magician, each assigned to a different lord as adviser and observer. They all record the same thing but break off at various points in the proceedings as arguments raged and indignation rose.” He looked around the table, catching the gaze of each man in turn. When he had the attention of one and all he turned back to the pages. “‘. . . at which point Lord Jaylor, newly appointed Senior Magician and Chancellor of the University, rose to his feet and beckoned to his comrades saying ‘Gentlemen, since we are no longer trusted here, we, like the dragons, will take ourselves elsewhere until we are invited back with assurances that our counsel is needed and wanted.’”
“What else?” Lord Laislac pressed. “I remember that day. I remember the arguments. Without the controls of dragon magic imposing honor and ethics upon magicians, any one of them could go rogue . . .”
“As my cousin Krej did with his undisclosed talent,” Darville reminded them. A cold knot settled in his belly. He’d been more a victim of Krej’s lust for power than any of these men knew. The months he’d spent in a wolf’s body still taunted him with nightmares he couldn’t escape, and the desire to return to the carefree and wild existence. “My cousin, whom you all elected regent during my father’s last illness, while I lay ill with magical backlash after Krej ensorcelled me into the body of a golden wolf . . .”
“None of us wants to go through that again,” Andrall sighed.
Darville nodded agreement, crisp and short. “The report ends there. We have no record of further proceedings, as we relied upon those twelve magicians to keep track of what we decided.”
“And now we have your son and mine to do that for us,” Jemmarc said. He puffed his chest out with pride, still relaxed, a half smile of satisfaction on his face.
“Yes, we do,” Darville agreed. “I trust them to keep accurate records. But, I know from experience that observations differ. Each man brings his own perspective to the issues.” He looked down at the pages before him, amazed at how much the wording differed from author to author. Yet they recorded much the same when it came to each firm decision or new law. The discussion, or arguments, leading up to a decision varied widely. Just the shift of a single word or punctuation placement could change the entire meaning of the statements.
“They can check each other . . .” Jemmarc dismissed the statement with a small wave of his hand.
“I suggest a third person, someone not present who will read both and reconcile any differences.” Darville tilted his head a bit toward the spyhole behind him. He wondered if Linda listened alone or with her ladies.
“Who?” Andrall asked. He too leaned back, already half in agreement.
“My daughter Princess Royale Rosselinda.”
“What?” Andrall dropped forward, hands clenching the edge of the black table. The glass surface clouded from the heat of his hands, looking like grotesque distortions of his long, slender fingers.
“If the Council thinks it necessary, we can also add your grandson Mikkette to the scribes,” Darville threw out, almost as casual as Jemmarc.
“What!” eleven lords shouted in unison.
“May I remind you, Your Grace, that Mikkette’s father is mentally deficient and his mother insane, unstable, and a sorceress of great talent? She was once a secret member of the Coven from Hanassa and SeLennica,” Laislac said coldly. His daughter.
“No need to remind me,” Darville replied bitterly. “I was nearly a victim of the Coven’s convoluted and secret plans to assassinate me and place Mikkette on the throne with his mother Ariiell, your daughter, his regent. But she would not have truly ruled. The Coven would have guided her every move.”
He let the men absorb that bit of information. “If not for the intervention of Lord Jaylor and his magicians, I would be dead and Coronnan either ruled by cruel tyrants able to put down any opposition with magic, or our beloved land would be in ashes, with every other country in Kardia Hodos banded together to remove the Coven at any cost.”
“The magicians did much for us,” Lord Stennal from Ropeura, said. “I for one miss them.”
“As do I,” Darville admitted, surprised that someone else broached the subject he truly wanted to discuss.
He reached for the cup of liquor to the left of the pages in front of him. The others drank ale. He alone seemed to need the bracing effect of beta arrack, distilled from the giant red tubers from Mikka’s homeland.
Before the cup reached his lips Glenndon’s hand slapped it away. The cup clattered against the table. The liquid sizzled and bubbled against the black glass, etching it with deadly, acidic foam.
CHAPTER 30
GLENNDON GASPED FOR AIR, fighting the bone-deep burn on his hand and arm. It ran so deep in his veins he had trouble comprehending that his hand was still part of his body.
He tried to banish the fire, but his talent failed him. This was worse than the time he’d grabbed a pot boiling over onto the hearth without padded protection.
“Glenndon, are you all right? Did the acid splash you?” King Darville’s words cut through the chaos in the Council Chamber and Glenndon’s mind. Someone to cling to. Someone he could trust.
He watched, as if from a great distance, as some lords jumped about, shouting and brandishing their fists. Others, like Lucjemm and Jemmarc, pressed themselves against the wall. Lucjemm’s eyes glazed over as if in a trance.
Sensible Andrall threw open the door and demanded guards and servants.
Fred leaped to Darville’s side, dagger and sword already unsheathed. Two quick looks about and he determined that his king still stood and appeared unharmed, so he took up a defensive stance at the doorway to make certain no one entered who didn’t belong in the Council Chamber.
On the other side of the paneling behind Darville’s demi-throne, feminine screams and the rustling of elegant dresses retreated.
But the king, the potential victim of a painful death from poison, thought only of Glenndon. His son.
His heir, Glenndon reminded himself. He cares only about stabilizing his kingdom with a male heir.
The tension in Darville’s fingers as he clutched at Glenndon’s shoulders, and the anxious gaze he flicked over him, from the bright red patch on Glenndon’s hand to his eyes and back to the acid burn on the back of his hand, told him there was more in the king’s concern.
A glimmer of warmth and a sense of belonging overrode the pain of the burn, the fear from the attack, and . . . and . . .
“Are you in pain?” Darville demanded.
Some. Glenndon couldn’t manage more. A lot more than some. He didn’t know how to describe how the fire used his veins as a river to travel from one end of his body to the other.
He had to think, had to concentrate lest the fire take his mind. Forever.
General Marcelle and three senior officers barged into the room. They immediately shepherded out most of the shouting lords while the general examined the still-foaming acid etching into the glass. It crept toward the Coraurlia resting benignly in the center.
Glenndon pointed at the endangered crown.
Darville deftly grabbed it by one protrusion and lifted it clear of danger, while still keeping his other hand firmly on Glenndon’s upper arm.
“What happened? How did you know the cup was poisoned?” Jemmarc demanded, now that the chaos subsided.
Color, Glenndon replied.
The lord and the general continued to look to him for an answer.
“What was wrong with the color?” Darville asked.
Glenndon looked to him with concern that the king now acknowledged mind speech between them. Darville seemed too distracted to care.
“Cup too red,” Glenndon forced himself to say out loud. The effort took his mind away from the pain. For a moment. “Gold when servant brought it.”
“Almost half an hour,” Linda answered, squeezing through the back door. “I watched the servants set up the room before the lords arrived. And I did not see him touch the cup. He was preoccupied with the records.”
“Long enough for the acid to slowly burn through the gold,” Darville mused.
Glenndon pulled his arm away from the king’s grip to suck on the burn. Linda stopped him, holding his wrist. “Acid,” she said. “It will burn you from the inside out as well as the outside in.”
Her grip seemed to contain the fiery pain to his hand, keep his weakening knees from folding. He sniffed the red splotch. At the same time he nodded to Linda, bending over the table to sniff the now diminishing acid.
“Records?” Glenndon asked. He turned hastily to see if any of the parchment pages were in the path of the acid. Somehow he knew the records were more important than just written words. Darville had not reported everything he had read in them.
When Glenndon and Lucjemm had pulled them out of the archives, a sneezing Lucjemm had been more interested in dragging them both out of the room (while holding Linda’s hand quite possessively) to get away from the dust than in reading what they’d found.
“Glenndon, can you tell anything about the cup, who brought it, who may have touched it, the nature of the poison?” Darville asked. He placed his hand on Glenndon’s shoulder again. His concern and anxiety leaked through his need for touch.
Glenndon reverted to his usual shrug. Fighting the blackness that crept around the edges of his vision, he bent over the table and brought his inner sight forward.
Instantly a black aura appeared around the edge of the golden cup. Not true gold, he decided as bits of gilt flaked away from a base metal inside the bowl. He pointed to the deterioration and looked to the king with his questions.
“It should be all gold,” Darville confirmed. “Very expensive and reserved for the family. Gold should be less vulnerable to the acid . . .”
Glenndon caught a memory from his father: a tin weasel with flaking gilt paint, the form Lord Krej had reverted to when his rogue spell backlashed from the Coraurlia.
“No accident then,” General Marcelle said.
“You expected acid dropped into my drink to be an accident?” Darville scoffed.
“Miner’s acid,” Glenndon ground out through clenched teeth. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold out against the pain.
Both Linda and her father gasped at that.
“Fast acting on tin.” Jemmarc paused to gulp. “But much slower on gold. This took planning to substitute the cup for a real one ahead of time. The cups are easily had on Market Isle, cheap replicas of the royal dinnerware. I suspect someone distracted the servants bringing a tray of cups here.” He pointed to the silver cups placed in front of each chair. “And substituted the already-prepared poison cup for the real one.”
“Whoever did this expected me to drink soon after I entered the room with the Coraurlia—it only protects me from magical attack—and not wait until I’d presented the primary business of the day,” Darville added.
Glenndon began humming in the back of his throat, an agitated and angry tune. He needed to speak his warning and knew he couldn’t utter anything so complicated without the assistance of music. The music also helped keep him conscious.
“I smell fear,” he sang to the tune of a funeral hymn he’d heard in the village, clearer than he could have spoken. “Fear doubled by doubt. Trebled by a wish to please. Fear directed by another’s anger.”
“A director and the directed,” General Marcelle surmised. He seemed to have the clearest head.
“A woman’s fear. Her hand moving at the behest of another.”
“Despicable, to use a frail woman such,” Jemmarc spat. “Lucjemm.” He looked around for his son, only to find the young man had joined the exodus elsewhere. “S’murghit, where is the boy? I need him to seek out the servants and question them.”
“We’ll see to it,” Marcelle growled. He gestured to one of his officers to follow through. Another officer lifted the dissolving cup with the point of his dagger and exited with it.
“Now, young man,” Marcelle rounded on Glenndon, “what else do you ‘smell’ in this room?”
Glenndon backed up, seeking a retreat.
“You needn’t fear me, boy. Unlike some I could name,” he glared out the door toward the jumbled mass of lordly tunics huddled together. “But I could use all of your talents in this.”
“Later,” King Darville intervened. “He’s too pale. His eyes are glazing over. Linda, take your brother to your mother. Have her, and her alone, treat that burn,” the king barked.
Glenndon shook his head. “No bother.”
“Yes, bother. I need you well and alert. At the moment I don’t trust anyone but my immediate family. The queen knows healing herbs and who she trusts to pick them.” He glared at Glenndon, saying more with his eyes than his words.
But Glenndon could interpret the true meaning. He needed to discover who would do such a despicable thing. And why. And then Glenndon needed to put a stop to that person’s actions.
To save his father.
My plan worked. Exactly as I imagined it. But Glenndon is smarter than I believed. He hides his magic well, cloaks his talent in logic and silence. He knows more than he lets others know.
I can work with that. I can give him false information and let him draw incorrect conclusions. He trusts me.
And while he leads his father and General Marcelle astray, I will be free to direct my minions to lay my traps. Before the summer has passed, Coronnan will be looking for a new king. One who has never been tainted by magic. Someone they trust.
Me.
My lovely calls to me. She watched the day’s proceedings through my eyes. She tells me in my sleep what I must do. Now I do it with glee, and determination to succeed.
CHAPTER 31
LINDA SHOVED her shoulder beneath Glenndon’s arm and took his weight. She sagged a bit, finding him heavier and more dependent upon her than she expected.
Lucjemm had reappeared and he jumped to Glenndon’s other side, draping the uninjured arm over his shoulders and an arm around his friend’s waist. Together they helped each other half-carry a stumbling and wavering Glenndon out of the Council Chamber.
The distance to M’ma’s suite was thankfully short. Linda ran up and down the stairs a dozen times a day without a second thought. Now it seemed to take an hour or more to step up one riser, haul Glenndon level with them, then repeat the process. By the time they reached the top of the long formal staircase all three of them were gasping for breath and dripping sweat. Linda found her free arm bracing against Glenndon’s waist, just above where Lucjemm held him. His hand brushed Linda’s several times, unapologetically. Each time he smiled at her around Glenndon’s back, a bit hesitant and timid, but clearly taking advantage of their proximity to remind her of that first kiss in the archives. His eyes sparkled clearly with each reminder.
She blushed in memory. His name had been one of those put forth as a possible husband for her. The idea wasn’t totally repulsive. He certainly didn’t think so, judging by his grin in response to her reddened cheeks.
That only made her flush deeper.
Then at last they approached M’ma’s suite. Lady Anya threw open the door before they could knock. The handle slammed against the wall and bounced. The lady had to push it back to keep it from slamming into the beleaguered trio.
“There is more to that wound than just miner’s acid,” M’ma said from across the room. She reclined on her lounge, reading official-looking dispatches, as she did every afternoon while Linda and her sisters were sent off to lessons with specialized tutors.
Glenndon looked pale and a bit shaky, but seemed to distance himself from the pain.
“I can smell the addition, but can’t quite define it,” M’ma said quietly. Too quietly. Like no one but Linda should hear.
Who did she hide the truth from? They were all family and trusted retainers here in M’ma’s private sitting room.
Then Linda’s eyes lighted upon Lucjemm, where he stood aside from the feminine task of mixing and applying healing herbs.
“Magic,” Glenndon croaked. The effort of speaking cost him another shade or two of color in his face. His skin now rivaled the lace on Linda’s petticoat.
“But why? Why would a magician wish to assassinate the king? He’s pushing the Council to restore them to court!” Lucjemm protested, moving three paces closer, still out of the way of Lady Anya as she scurried back and forth to the stillroom for different combinations of healing potions.
Images and ideas flashed from Glenndon’s mind to Linda’s. At least he could still think clearly while he fought the pain. He just didn’t have enough energy left over to fight his throat for speech.
“Someone wishes to discredit the magicians and have them banned from Coronnan for all time,” Linda reported. “They meant for the poison to be discovered before P’pa drank it. The Coraurlia would have negated the magic . . . but left him vulnerable to the acid . . .”
Glenndon flashed her one of his rare smiles (though he smiled more now than when he first arrived). He was willing to allow her the credit for the idea.
M’ma nodded in agreement. “If there was magic in the cup that mixed with the acid, the Coraurlia would have negated it, glowing in the process to show it worked.”
“If he’d been wearing it!” Linda gasped. “Everyone on the Council knows how he hates wearing it. It’s heavy and gives him a headache.”