The Broken Dragon: Children of the Dragon Nimbus #2

by Irene Radford

  “I appreciate your duty and responsibility. But you cannot go where I have to go.”

  “And where is that, Your Highness? I know this city better than you, having grown up here. I can keep you from getting lost among the tangle of islands and streets and wharves.” He waved vaguely at a tapestry depicting the Stargods descending from the skies on a cloud of silver flame to the myriad islands in the river delta that became the capital city. The pictures were more interested in reverence for the three celestial brothers than the accuracy of the map.

  “Only magicians and priests can go to Sacred Isle.” Glenndon pointed to the small island on the west end of the delta, near the middle of the River Coronnan, as depicted metaphorically in the tapestry. Legend claimed the Stargods had landed in the clearing at the center of the island, burning away the trees in a perfect circle. Later, a pond had filled in the depression left by their silver cloud. No bridges connected it to the rest of the city isles.

  “So, I can row you over and stay with the boat until you finish your errand. Whatever it is,” Frank insisted, sounding very much like his father.

  “And what precisely is your errand?” Keerkin asked. He put away his writing materials, sanding the ink on the latest scroll. He looked prepared to come with them.

  “There is a Tambootie tree that owes me a favor. Or I owe it a favor, I’m not exactly sure of the relationship of obligations . . .”

  “Then you’d best take your staff.” Keerkin pointed toward the length of Tambootie wood standing against the corner where a cloak tree met the wall beside the door.

  No one but Glenndon dared touch the piece, not even another magician. Added to the respect for the bond between a magician and his staff was the rarity of the sacred and magical Tambootie wood that had already begun to flow into a new pattern of knots and swirls representative of Glenndon’s magical signature. Glowing faintly along the top of the shaft, a fragment of dragon bone had embedded itself into the wood. It alone remained straight and true along the original wood grain.

  Glenndon’s eyes concentrated on that precious bone.

  “We need to arrive at Sacred Isle about sunset,” he whispered.

  “When else would you go there?” Keerkin asked. He knew the tradition of a journeyman spending a night alone on the island before being granted a staff by a living tree willing to give up a branch.

  “Should I bring food and water, prepared to stay all night?” Frank asked.

  “Always prepare for the worst and the worst won’t happen. But I don’t expect to remain more than an hour.”

  CHAPTER 18

  VALERIA GRATEFULLY ABSORBED the damp warmth of the evening air. For the first time in ages her joints did not ache with cold. The lack of discomfort added to her concentration as she carefully watched the copse that lined the rushing creek. For three days now she’d sensed someone, something, following close beside the line of sledges. It . . . they . . . were Rejiia and Krej. She knew them by sight now that Rejiia had tried drawing Skeller into her web of control.

  The caravan had passed beyond the open farms and grassland into more frequent clumpings of trees. Tomorrow, at about noon, the caravan would split. She and Lady Ariiell and half the sledges would take the western fork of the road inland to Lake Apor. Lillian and Lady Graciella would continue south, climbing the foothills into the rocky ridges and sheer cliffs of the Sarian Peninsula.

  Krej and Rejiia, father and daughter, sorcerers both, were always closest to Lady Ariiell’s litter, as if iron drawn to a lodestone. The lady leaked her magic. The litter was permeated with it. Valeria could smell little but Ariiell’s musky perfume tainted by rotting magic.

  That was the only way to describe it.

  Krej and Rejiia needed that rotten magic to regain their human bodies. They’d haunted Ariiell’s tower for fifteen years, waiting for her to waken into sanity enough so she could throw the spell, but not enough to question the consequences.

  Now, thanks to Valeria, Ariiell managed to stay coherent and sane more and more. Val had no doubt her charge could control her magic enough to reverse the curse.

  But was she sane enough to know what she was doing?

  Sixteen letters of apology had fluttered away. The tight knot of guilt and ugliness in Ariiell’s mind was smaller but still in need of a blanket of The Forget and an occasional memory/dream of Val flying with dragons.

  Val didn’t trust Ariiell, or Rejiia, or Skeller. The bard walked closer to Ariiell’s litter than Graciella’s these last three days since he’d brought Rejiia to camp and fed her. What was he up to? And why was he here?

  She was certain his attention to Lily was just a distraction, a disguise for his actual purpose. A dalliance that would wound Lily to the core when he dismissed her without a backward glance. And he would.

  Val had dreamed it.

  But he’d given up eating meat and turned his back when Cook slaughtered flusterhens or a goat to feed the caravan. Was that only part of the disguise?

  Today, the cat and the weasel matched pace with the plodding steeds. They kept enough distance to remain invisible to the casual eye. Or small enough to hide in the trees and shrubs alongside the road. Val couldn’t smell the stalkers. But she knew they were there. If they used magic, Ariiell’s scent masked it.

  Skeller walked on the opposite side of the caravan, away from Rejiia. He plucked his harp and sang easy marching songs to keep the caravan on pace and on schedule, but not so fast as to exhaust them all. He must have experience with caravans to know so many lively—but not too lively—tunes.

  Valeria felt hemmed in, suffocated by the stalking animals on one side and Skeller on the other. She cherished the first few moments after stopping for the day as her rare chance to be alone, or to soak up Lily’s comforting presence; opportunities to escape the confines of her enemies.

  She narrowed her eyes against the glare of sun creeping beneath smoke-colored clouds to the west. Then she dredged a small amount of talent up from the Kardia through her feet and legs into her vision. The leafy fronds of a saber fern became transparent to her sight. Thick groundcover parted, revealing the softly churned dirt beneath. And nothing else. The two shadows that had drawn her to this clump of greenery had vanished. Even if the creatures she sought cloaked themselves in look-the-other-way-you-can’t-see-me spells, which she had mastered long before anyone thought to teach them to her, she would see a distortion, or something.

  Annoyed at herself she slapped her thigh to shake loose her concentration before she fell into a trance and thus became oblivious to all else around her. The sound of her palm striking flesh irritated her ears and made her cringe away from the strange light just before sunset. The light and air should be soft not glaring, sulfurous, and harsh.

  A faint rustle among the ferns taunted her. Like someone shook the individual fronds in a different direction, just to mock her inability to find them.

  Deliberately, she shrugged her shoulders back into balance and set her chin level as she walked, not trudged, through the thick air. She needed fresh, cool water to soothe Lady Ariiell’s furrowed brow. She’d cried most of the day, seized with yet another piece of her guilt.

  Val knew that they would compose a seventeenth letter this evening. One more step toward the lady’s journey toward sanity. One more piece of armor against Rejiia and Krej.

  “I really should summon Lukan again, make him listen so that he knows what I know,” she sighed as she scooped water from the creek to refresh her face and sweating neck. “Krej and Rejiia are still neutralized by their animal bodies. A journey is about learning to cope with difficulty and strangeness without help. We have a bit of time. If Lukan would just come out of his self-absorbed anger long enough to listen and help me plan.”

  As she thought that, her breathing became more labored, as if she battled a lung infection that filled her body with liquid illness.

  They were far enough from the Great Bay’s influence that the air no longer smelled of salt, and it should dry
during the long days of early summer. Not today. The air was heavy and damp. She could almost see tiny droplets suspended in the air. The weight of it sat on and in her chest like . . . like it did after a long magic session hiding Lillian’s inability to throw even simple spells, and her strength ran out long before she’d finished and grounded the spell.

  She needed to talk to Lily, find out if the air felt unusual to her too, or if it was a return of Val’s childhood illnesses. She’d tried, really tried, to keep her magic to the minimum so she didn’t exhaust herself. But she had to do more and more to keep The Forget in place over Ariiell’s eroding knot of guilt. The ugliness had to seep out bit by bit. All at once would send Ariiell back into her semitrance of incoherence. Or to suicide.

  Val missed Lillian, her strength and comfort, the constant presence of her mind, her understanding. Her physical strength. Knowing her twin would soon be separated from her by hundreds of miles made Val’s lungs catch and her heart beat too rapidly.

  “Val?” Lillian whispered excitedly from nearby as if Valeria had conjured her.

  She stood up from her crouch among tall miggenberry bushes bordered by saber ferns at the creek side. As she focused on her sister she felt Lily droop from excited happiness to more sober reality.

  Something had happened. Something Lily thought wonderful. Something to do with the bard probably.

  Lily kept her thoughts close inside her, unwilling to share just now.

  “Val, do you see them?”

  That was what had sobered Lily so suddenly. “Just a glimpse, barely an understanding of what I saw.” Valeria said on a whisper. As her sister drew closer they wrapped arms around each other’s shoulders and stared in comfortable silence at the joyful plunge of water over and around rocks and stumps in its eager rush toward a larger river, and on into the Bay.

  “I tried to tell Skeller the danger of befriending them,” Lily said. “We talked. We kis . . . we found metaphors I think he understood, but I don’t think he truly accepts magic yet. He wants to control everything with his own hands, without magic.”

  Val knew without being told that the bard rejected the tale as just another legend to make into a song. He’d probably kissed Lily to distract her from the subject.

  I sense them, close, closer than before. Val touched Lily’s mind with images of rustling branches and bouncing fern fronds. Better to keep her sister from thinking about the bard. Whispers of a dark shadow creeping beside them, or a paler shadow slithering in the wake of something leading it.

  Me too. Nothing definite.

  We separate tomorrow. Who will they follow? Val asked, already knowing the answer.

  You, I think. Skellar says the steeds can smell rotten magic under Ariiell’s litter. Besides, Lady Graciella interests no one but her husband. She is but a pale ghost of herself with only a little plant magic.

  Lady Ariiell had a great talent at one time. I see it writhing in her mind every time I chip a fragment from the ugly knot of her memories, or refresh the blanket of Forget. But The Forget seems to cover her access to magic as well as block memories too awful to keep her sane.

  “Have you seen her memories?” Lily asked. Her curiosity overrode her caution and she spoke with her voice instead of her mind.

  Not fully. Just hints of fire, flashing knives, naked dancing, and pain. Pain so great she had to draw on every scrap of magical reserves to make it stop.

  The Coven? Lily reverted to the privacy of silent communication when speaking the forbidden name of the old enemy of both Coronnan and University magicians.

  Val nodded, unable to fully confirm her suspicions.

  “What do we do? I won’t be close enough to help you if you get into trouble,” Lily gripped Val’s shoulder more tightly. “I won’t have you to block the thorns in the air as a storm builds in the ocean waiting to crash into Coronnan.”

  So, that was what made Valeria’s skin crawl. Lily might not be able to throw a spell, but her magic was born of the Kardia and growing things. Weather affected crops and the patterns of browsers, so she was sensitive to changes in the air as well, knowing the source and the timing without knowing how she knew.

  “I’m stronger now,” Val said, leaning into her twin’s warmth; the other half of her.

  “You have more color in your face, but you are still too skinny,” Lily admonished.

  “And you are fair to blooming. I suspect the attention of the foreign bard has something to do with that.” Val couldn’t help nearly spitting the word “foreign.”

  “He’s nice. Funny. Interesting. Except that he doesn’t like magic. He’s read a lot and seen so many places we never thought of. Did you know he’s actually been to the Big Continent? They call it Mabastion.”

  That would explain the clipped accent and the lack of knowledge about dragons, the refusal of magic. Even if the people of Coronnan didn’t appreciate or trust the dragons, they were schooled in dragon lore.

  “Lily, stop and think. Why would a bard from . . . from over there be traveling through Coronnan?”

  “Broadening his experiences, gathering new songs to take home. . . .”

  “Spying for his lord? Or is he running away from something . . . like he’s a criminal?” Val could go on and on about bad reasons for him following this caravan and becoming vulnerable to Rejiia. “Maybe he’s the one following Lady Ariiell. Maybe he works for the Coven.” She whispered the last word, afraid. Da said the Coven was broken, no longer able to work their evil magic.

  But some of the members had escaped. Like Rejiia and Krej. And . . . wasn’t there a soldier who joined the Rovers?

  They could be recruiting new members, waiting to come to full strength with thirteen. Were they following Ariiell, trying to bring her back within their circle? Needing numbers, as much as talent for their perverted form of magic—though no one had ever told her the form of their magic that made it evil.

  Ariiell’s memories had given her ideas. Pain was a large part of their rituals, inflicting it and receiving it.

  “Don’t trust the bard, Lily,” Val admonished her twin. “Don’t trust anyone. Lady Graciella seems like a good candidate to be tempted by the power the Coven offers.”

  “Her magic is trifling,” Lily dismissed the idea. “She knows how to bring out the magic intrinsic to plants but not much more.”

  “Ariiell said her magic was minor, hardly worth noting until The Simeon needed her placement in a noble household for political reasons. He brought it out, made her use it at full strength.” Was that the reason for the torture Ariiell needed to forget? She needed to be suffering so much she had to either will herself to die, or force her magic to surge to the surface in order to make it stop.

  Val grew cold at the thought.

  Lily held her tighter, feeding her warmth and strength. And love. No one had ever given Ariiell love, except perhaps Mardoll, the idiot son of Lord Andrall and his wife Lynetta, the king’s aunt. He’d loved Ariiell and given her a child, even if he didn’t know what he was doing. That child, Mikette, was now at court, a potential heir to the throne, along with Glenndon. What kind of talent did he have? No one had ever said. Few had seen him before his recent arrival at the palace.

  “She needs me so much,” Val said quietly, thinking of Ariiell. “She needs me to protect her, to help her remain sane, and to comfort her. All her life she’s been used or locked away in a tower. That’s all she knows. This imperative summons from her father sounds like another opportunity to use her again.” Maybe she should summon Lord Laislac’s magician and find out.

  “Graciella is the same,” Lily admitted. “Her stepmother is Lord Jemmarc’s sister. They arranged the marriage, without consulting Graciella. Jemmarc needs a son that no one can question the legitimacy of. His sister wants political power and is willing to use her stepdaughter any way she can. I think they threw her into the household with no preparation, no instructions, nothing but her wispy beauty and a marginal talent. She’s said some things that make me think s
he was used by Jemmarc’s son, Lucjemm. Possibly raped by him with threats of death. A horrible death. Maybe to become food for his hideous pet Krakatrice.”

  Val shuddered at the secondhand images in Lillian’s mind. Secondhand they made her choke with fear. How bad were they in reality? As bad as Ariiell’s time with the Coven?

  “Don’t let her go the same route as Ariiell,” Val begged. “Help her find her own way, her own strength. Don’t let the Coven recruit her!”

  “The same to you, Val.”

  “I’ll miss you, Lily. I miss you already, but there is no way we can stay together until we know both our ladies are safe. We are the only ones they can trust.”

  A large clump of ferns between her and the creek waved and wiggled as something burrowed into their deep and hidden center.

  A gray shadow watched them. The strange evening light gilded the long, thin silhouette.

  Lillian noticed the movement as well. Without a word they shifted their grip on each other from shoulder to hand and ran back to the safety of the caravan.

  Better to know and see who eavesdropped on their last conversation together than wonder who listened from the darkness of the forest.

  Tonight they would break the rules of journey and summon Da. They had to.

  The young prince is up to something. My spies tell me through my glass that he has left the palace with his bodyguard and his clerk. He carries his staff. A staff he has not earned. In the unified new order I will bring to fruition, he will be stripped of his powers and his tools for his crime of arrogance. I may have to have him killed if he stands in my way much longer. My apprentice is in place, ready and willing to slip a knife into the prince’s heart when he least expects it. I will not tolerate a magician on the throne of Coronnan. On any throne among my territories.

  Magicians advise a king. We rule through a mind-blind mouthpiece. The dragons and the Stargods made it so.

  And Glenndon’s sisters! Those two brats thwart me at every turn. They trust only themselves and say nothing to my spy. They close their dreams to all but each other. They even reach out and surround their ladies’ dreams with a barricade that I cannot penetrate. Graciella and Ariiell cannot remember their dreams in the morning. Neither can they relate the substance to me. I need their dreams to bring all my plans together.