The Wandering Dragon (Children of the Dragon Nimbus)

by Irene Radford

  “I don’t know this city. I wasn’t invited to come with my sisters last spring to help Da and Glenndon fight the Krakatrice and the civil war,” Lukan grumbled. Another time when Da had had no use for him and had forgotten his existence. “But I’m willing to bet the inns and taverns were the first to rebuild, especially close to the port, where aid will have come from King Darville’s barons and allies across the sea. I still want to sleep rough and unhindered, but you shall find your beer there. Then tomorrow, we’ll search out a berth on the next ship headed to Amazonia, one that leaves after I complete my journeyman’s quest.”

  “And what am I to do alone while you row over to Sacred Isle? Presuming the island and its trees even survived the flood.”

  “You will sing in whatever bar we can find near the port and listen to the gossip. Listen to the sailors talk while beer loosens their tongues and learn what they know or have heard about your father’s prisoner.”

  The chant soared into a hymn, a familiar and comforting one. Skeller’s fingers drumming against his thigh took up the new rhythm, and his entire body took on a straighter and more comfortable posture. He couldn’t help lifting his magnificent voice in song, joining with those who mourned and now released their lost loved ones to the beneficence of the Stargods.

  Lukan couldn’t let go so easily. He held his grief and his grudges tightly in his heart and in his mind, despite the tug of that beautiful hymn, and the dragon flying above. But even he had to add his own voice to the triumphant ending.

  Just then, Glenndon lifted his head and scanned the ridge where Lukan crouched. The prince’s gaze settled on his half brother.

  You came, Glenndon said directly into Lukan’s mind with a sigh of relief.

  I was sent, Lukan replied.

  For the first eighteen years of his life Glenndon had never spoken aloud. His telepathic powers came more easily to him than speech, and even now, five moons after a near-miraculous healing of his throat, he still reverted to mind-speech.

  Can you meet me in the palace?

  Where in the palace? I hear it’s a big place. The twins had been there and reported convoluted passages, wings sprouting at odd angles, twisting staircases, and abandoned sections left over from generations before.

  Private parlor, ground floor. I’ll have Keerkin, my . . . friend wait for you at the main door. Mentally, Glenndon directed Lukan’s gaze to a man of middling height and neutral coloring a few years older than themselves, who stood directly to Glenndon’s right.

  Lukan nodded his head and grunted an acceptance. Glenndon wouldn’t meet him himself, he had to trust that chore to an underling. Just as Lukan was an underling to him. Everyone in Coronnan was an underling to him except the king.

  The king. The man who had seduced . . . actually loved . . . their mother before she married Master Magician Jaylor. Mama kept that brief affair secret for eighteen years. The king and Da had been best friends for decades. But the king needed a male heir and had only daughters from his queen, so he’d yanked Glenndon away from his family, and out of his silence, and made him Crown Prince. Now both Mama and Da had passed. Glenndon had his new family, the royal family. Lukan had no one. Even his companion the wandering bard would leave him as soon as they reached his home in Amazonia.

  CHAPTER 2

  MASTER MAGICIAN ROBB stuffed his aching and swollen hands inside the sleeves of his once-pristine formal robe as he paced. At dawn, damp chill permeated the walls of his small cell. By midday he’d have to shed both the robe and shirt while he sweated in desert heat. If Maigret could see him now, she’d scold him mightily for his disheveled appearance, even as she held his hands and lovingly examined every pore on his body for signs of illness.

  She’d also make him shave, two or three times, before his face was smooth enough for her standards. His captors hadn’t let him near any kind of blade.

  His gut ached from missing his wife and their two young sons. His heart skipped a beat at the thought that he might never see them again, or touch them again, or bear up to Maigret’s scoldings again . . .

  He yanked his thoughts out of that destructive loop. Again.

  His captor had preserved his health. Freedom, light, and dignity had been denied.

  Whoever kept him in this benighted cell needed him alive for some reason Robb could not fathom. Of course, it would help if he knew who held him, and why.

  Had three moons passed since he’d been whisked out of a transport spell into an alien land? Or was it four? He’d meant to transport to Coronnan City. Had he made a mistake in the tricky and dangerous spell?

  Or had a rogue magician manipulated the layers of visualization and precise timing required?

  He’d thought and thought through all the permutations—he didn’t have much else to do—and drawn the conclusion that a rogue had added an extra layer of images to his own to bring him here. And he thought he knew which rogue was involved. Samlan had a lot to answer for when Robb got out of this S’murghin prison. If he didn’t go insane first.

  To ward off such dangerous thoughts, Robb paced his cell, five steps to a side. He checked the scratches on the wall he’d made to keep track of the days. Had he made one yet since the sun rose?

  He didn’t think so. His wooden spoon lay on the end of his cot ready for him. He grasped the bowl in his right hand, balanced his left against the wall and scratched hard against the dressed stones with the worn handle. A new line appeared gradually, only slightly lighter than the background. Another fraction of an inch splintered off the handle. His work showed well enough to mark another day. He counted each grouping of five, as he did every morning. One hundred thirty-six.

  Surely that couldn’t be right. When had thirty days become sixty? Then ninety? Fear broke out in cold sweat down his spine. Praying to the Stargods that he hadn’t lost his mind along with time, he counted again, each individual slash against the stone. One hundred thirty-six.

  Robb almost wept. “No, no, no,” he cried out as loudly as he could, slamming his fist against the wall. “I’ve cried enough. I’ve languished enough. I have to get out of here.” He looked around at the same four walls he’d addressed every day for the last one hundred and thirty-six days.

  “Wizard,” a small lisping voice whispered to him from the barred window in the ironbound door of his prison. Iron. Poison to magicians according to myth and legend. But it wasn’t the iron in the door that kept Robb’s magic dormant. The iron underground, massive and buried beneath ten feet of stone and dirt, hampered his powers. Only one small window near the ceiling marked the passage of light and dark. Not enough access to the air to gather dragon magic—if any dragons flew the skies of this land—and the floor too thick to tap a ley line—if any of the silvery blue streams of energy ran through here.

  “Yes?” he asked wearily. The same voice spoke every morning, making certain he lived before wasting a tray of food on a corpse.

  Robb thought it might belong to a beardless boy, perhaps a scullery maid, no one more important.

  “His Majesty needs you,” the voice said.

  Something new!

  “What can I do?”

  “Follow.” A turning key rasped within the lock, iron scratching seldom-used pins into motion.

  Robb waited obediently against the far wall, as he did any time his guards brought him food or water rather than thrusting it through a narrow slot in the door, or came to empty the chamber pot when they absolutely had to, and not before. The door opened slowly, revealing a slim female in a sturdy dress, wearing a stained apron. She carried a candle lantern out to the side, not shedding enough light to determine her age, coloring, or degree of beauty. Only a large ring of keys hanging from her belt indicated that she held some authority.

  “Follow.” She turned around, waving the lantern just enough to indicate she intended to move to the left. After checking to see if armed guards waited to run him through with sword or spear, and finding none—they were all lined up against the corridor walls, stiff
and respectful of the woman—Robb followed, shuffling his feet over the uneven stones, breathing deeply of air fresher than that in his cell. Afraid to think beyond the circle of light from the lantern. Afraid to hope for more between one step and the next.

  Lily? Where are you!

  Lily sighed as her twin, Valeria, burst into her thoughts. Just once she wished that Val would contact her just to check on Lily’s well-being and not to solve some problem at home. She had enough problems of her own on the road.

  She took her time answering her sister as she tamped down a little soil around the last of the apple tree cuttings she’d brought to plant. Six trees that wouldn’t bear fruit for five years. But it was a start at rebuilding the crops for this town on the Dubh River, a major tributary half a mile south of the mighty River Coronnan. The Dubh was still navigable up here, for small boats and flat-bottomed barges to transport produce and livestock downstream. A two-day walk inland from the Great Bay, the town had grown to a substantial size as the only gathering place for the outlying farms. The floods had drowned the crops here, but left most of the houses and barns sodden and only a little damaged. At least the livestock had found higher ground and survived. This place was better off than most. Closer to the big river, nothing remained but layers of mud and corpses.

  She signaled the headman to pour a pitcher of water around the cutting. He did so quite reverently. Then the entire village bowed to Lily.

  She returned the gesture of respect, then gathered her thoughts to reply to her sister. Val, I’m somewhere between the river and the Bay in a town called Lower Dubh. What’s wrong? she replied telepathically without breaking her smile and wave of farewell to the devastated farm folk. She’d done what she could to give them hope. Sometimes that was a better cure for despair than a wagonload of food.

  You aren’t here and that’s what’s wrong.

  I’m not supposed to be there. Though I wish I could stand in the middle of the Clearing and listen to the wind in the everblue tops and absorb the peace of the mountains. She took a deep breath imagining the smells of home. Her heart continued to ache. For many reasons. Loneliness the least of them.

  It’s not peaceful here at the moment.

  Lily caught an echo of childish screams of despair in the background of Val’s thoughts.

  What did Jule do this time? She asked about their youngest brother, who neared his third naming day.

  I don’t know, Val wailed. I’ve tried everything and he just screams louder.

  Lily had never heard her twin so close to crying, not even when she had worked a long and complex spell, and exhausted her physical strength almost to the point of forgetting to breathe.

  Lily waved a last farewell to the town elders and their ladies and turned her steps to the broad path that led to the next village, a day of hard walking to the west, toward the long line of mountains that nearly divided the continent and served as a barrier between Coronnan and their age-old enemy and sometimes ally, SeLennica.

  Away from the prying attention of the villagers, she listened more carefully to her twin.

  Is xhtmlhe teething? He shouldn’t be, not this late. But everyone in the family of Jaylor and Brevelan did everything backward, or sideways, or too fast. Maybe it was Jule’s turn to be behind at something.

  As Lily was behind her brothers and sisters in magical talent. Her one and only skill seemed to be talking to her twin though separated by a thousand miles or more. And understanding the souls of plants and what they needed to grow best.

  Um . . . I don’t know. What are the symptoms of teething?

  Crying a lot. Drooling a lot. Gnawing on things he’s not supposed to.

  No. Other than the crying a lot.

  Is he constipated?

  How should I know?

  Lily sighed again. She should be the one at home taking care of the younger children. Val had no empathy, training, or instincts when it came to nurturing children. She did have a magical talent that she probably thought was being wasted in her current situation.

  A journey was about learning. Val needed to learn to take care of others after a lifetime of being an invalid and cared for. Lily needed to learn . . . to live, when she should have died with the man she had murdered. Executed, she reminded herself. But it still felt as though she’d murdered the rogue magician Samlan when she’d slid a knife between his ribs.

  He’s out of nappies now so you can’t check the soiled ones. Have you taken him to the outhouse today? Lily asked.

  I don’t usually . . .

  Then ask your charges, Lady Graciella and Ariiell.

  They left for the University early this morning and haven’t come back.

  Then ask Sharl. Their six-year-old sister had more of a sense of responsibility than Val, Gracie, or Ariiell.

  Give him some red fruit and a big glass of water, Val. Then make him sit for as long as necessary. Lily closed down on the communication. Her mind and heart felt empty when the contact vanished. She’d done that too often these last few moons of wandering Coronnan. Grimly she planted her staff of plain hawthorn one step ahead of her and continued her solitary mission. “I should be the one who stayed home, Val. You’re the one who deserves a journeyman’s journey.”

  But you wouldn’t heal here at home, Val reminded her, despite Lily’s barriers.

  “We both have a lot to learn, twin. That’s why we are both placed in positions that seem so opposite to our natural ways.”

  Lukan mingled with the crush of people trying to cross a bridge from the mainland over to the maze of islands that made up Coronnan City—five square miles of city with hundreds of islands and connecting bridges, many of them so badly damaged that people had to take longer, convoluted routes to get home. Had everyone still alive in the city trekked out to Battle Mound for the funeral and now returned all at the same time? All these people trying cross at once strained the raw wood of the newly built bridge. He eyed the hinges and latches at either end, freshly crafted but based on the old design, so that in case of invasion, or flood, the bridge could be collapsed as people retreated inward.

  He guessed the city had emptied gradually over the course of the day. They’d all lost loved ones. They needed to see the mass grave, sing the songs, pray the prayers, and mourn. Now they could put aside crippling emotions and begin to rebuild in earnest. A determination to survive had pulled them through the disaster, and now it kept the throng moving forward, despite the crowding.

  Skeller kept lagging behind, searching faces and postures and patches of newly cut lumber on every single building they passed. Many spaces between houses and shops lay empty, the gaps where buildings ripped from their foundations and now floating out to sea once stood. As crowded as this bridge was, he doubted enough people remained in the city to fill in all of those empty lots.

  Those blank places brought home to him, more than the sight of the mass grave and the somber sounds of chants and hymns, just how much the storm, and the mage that had conjured it, had stolen from the heart of Coronnan.

  “Thank the Stargods Lily managed to kill the S’murgin rogue,” he muttered to himself. The fact that his sister had wielded the knife and not Skeller, as they’d planned or at least expected, was a gaping wound between them. Sweet, gentle, Lily, who couldn’t bear to eat meat because she felt the death of the animal sacrificed to become food, had executed a man when no one else had had the nerve.

  Her empathic talent had exploded outward and engulfed Skeller. He’d shared the moment of death with Samlan as deeply as Lily had.

  The fact that the rogue magician was expecting a magical attack and Lily had very little, if any, magic, meant that she’d met no resistance. Lukan didn’t think he could have managed the deed, and Skeller had hesitated a moment too long. Lily and only Lily had stopped Samlan before he wreaked any more damage on Coronnan.

  Both she and Skeller nursed deep guilt and bruised minds.

  “Skeller, keep up.” Lukan stopped mid-span to wait for his companion. Th
e tide of people surged around him, mostly silent, shooting him resentful glances but not protesting. They moved more like a stunned herd than people impatient to go about their business. Maybe they’d lost the drive for impatience. They lived. They had the work of survival to do. That was enough.

  Except for one. A tall, lanky man hovered at the other end of the bridge. Not hesitant. Waiting. He kept his back to Lukan.

  Lukan tamped down his suspicions. No one knew he was coming this way. The man couldn’t be waiting for him.

  “Sorry. This is all so fascinating, so different from my last visit,” Skeller said, still craning his neck to take in everything. As usual, his fingers drummed against his thigh as his mind composed a new song. This one was livelier than the dirge about the funeral. This one was about cherishing life and building something new, fresh, and special, out of the ruins of the old.

  Lukan had learned to read Skeller during the moons of their travels together. He could almost hear the melody and lyrics as they formed in the bard’s mind.

  “Well, I’m going ahead to the palace. I’ll meet you at whatever inn you find down on the docks.” Lukan started to turn away to join the surge of people flowing inward.

  “Wait! How will you know which inn?” Skeller claimed Lukan’s arm to delay him.

  “I’ll know by the number of sailors crowding around to hear you sing. I’ll know by the bawdy chorus they take up in celebration of whatever songs you dredge out of that copious memory of yours.”

  With that Lukan joined the throng and pressed forward. Inward toward the largest and highest of the islands, where the tallest of tall buildings had stood strong against the flood. His nose wanted him to divert toward a deep concentration of magic—the old University of Magicians. Master Marcus would be there, ready to officially give Lukan his right to claim a staff and begin his journey.

  Lukan wasn’t ready to face the man who had reluctantly taken Jaylor’s place as Chancellor of the Universities, Senior Magician of the Circle, and counselor to the king. “I’ll deliver this S’murghin letter to Glenndon, then be free of family obligations, free to live my own life away from the shadow of older, more powerful, better respected magicians that I can’t live up to.”