The Broken Dragon: Children of the Dragon Nimbus #2

by Irene Radford

  No time to commiserate or wonder. Later. When all were safe Mikk would tend to that wound himself if he had to.

  “Sir, is there a way to block the cistern so it doesn’t flood with seawater?” he asked, not certain he’d chosen the right words, or even the right question.

  The general frowned as questions, brighter than the pain haze, flashed across his eyes. “Oh, shit!”

  Then Mikk saw panic in the man’s mind. He’d asked the right question. And knew he would not like the answer.

  CHAPTER 28

  GLENNDON FORCED HIMSELF to think. Hard. Very hard to do, what with the wind howling in circles above him. The rain pelted every hard surface as if it were a tightly strung drum, adding a strange and off-rhythm counterpoint. And thunder. Rolls and rolls of thunder that sounded like every dragon bugling at the same time!

  He cringed with each peal, imagining dragons fighting the wind and bellowing their discontent and pain.

  And then there were the walls of near-blinding lightning that revealed the white and frightened faces of his companions.

  What could they do but hunker down and wait out the storm. Wait for the wild clash of magics to resolve on their own.

  If only his head didn’t hurt so much.

  If only . . .

  The staff at his feet began to pulse with power. It had been inert since the storm began, as if the storm sucked all the magic from the land, the dragons, and him. What was the white dragon bone doing pulsing red in time with his heartbeat? Why was his heart returning to a normal rhythm after the excitement and fear of enduring the hours of being battered by this unnatural storm?

  He drew a deep breath and winced as his head ached with new pain. Something was changing. He didn’t need to think to know that. But why?

  And why was he so sensitive to that change?

  He had this massive, living tree sheltering them against the storm. With that much wood between him and the elements he should have a solid barrier protecting his awareness as well as his body.

  He took a deep breath, measuring the steady in, hold, out, hold. Two more to center himself and ground his magic in the Kardia. The tree hollow seemed to smooth out and curve to the shape of his spine and the back of his head. He rested easily, letting the life within the tree merge with his consciousness. Part of him dug deep with the roots, tangling with the land and the rocks, reaching deeper and deeper, anchoring against the onslaught of wind and rain, repulsing the burning lightning. This tree had learned long ago the pain and loss of becoming victim to the living fire that shot from the sky.

  Then he sent his awareness upward along the trunk, feeling the way its skin rippled as the wind threw pebbles and branches torn from other trees at it. They bounced against the resilient bark. Its own branches bent and flowed with the ceaseless and relentless wind.

  It had learned from experience, this magnificent tree. It had learned not to stand rigid and defiant, for that presented a solid wall for the wind to push against. Now it channeled the air around it. The roots too shifted a little bit here, a little bit there as water creeping up from below ate away at the dirt that held it in place.

  Rising water. Vanishing dirt.

  Glenndon brought his mind back into his own body trying to assess if their den remained safe. If this tree toppled when the water completely undermined the root system would they be safer outside or in.

  A gentle reassurance washed around him. His staff gave off a whiff of The Tambootie, its parent tree. This tree had sacrificed a branch to Glenndon for a staff. It would not let him down now. It had needs that only Glenndon could fulfill. It needed Glenndon as much as Glenndon and his companions needed the tree’s shelter.

  He checked his staff. The bone continued to pulse red, as if stained with blood, or blood red light. Or. . . .

  He shifted the staff so that the tip pointed toward the opening of the den, an opening that no longer faced the lee of the storm, but remained open to the grinding destruction that pelted them from all directions at once.

  Yet none of the rain or lightning penetrated an invisible wall across that opening. None of the water creeping up from below reached the soft nest of leaf litter, crumbling wood, and clumps of animal fur and feathers.

  The staff shot away from him toward the entrance, stopping abruptly when it reached the opening.

  Like to like, it seemed to say to him; demanding that he release it so that the bone could join its like.

  “Tell me I did not just see that,” Keerkin said on a violent shudder. “Or hear that. Staffs are tools. They do not have minds of their own. No other magician can steal it from its master. It has to be surrendered voluntarily.” He spoke as if reassuring himself rather than informing the others.

  Glenndon chuckled, despite the danger in their predicament. He trusted the tree to protect them as long as it could, but even trees this formidable had limitations. Limitations he needed to be aware of.

  Still, the tree was Tambootie, the channel between the magic within the ley lines and the dragons. The staff was the child of this tree.

  What were they trying to tell him?

  A tree of magic. The tree could give him magic while the storm sucked the dragon magic out of him.

  Before he could move to the next thought a shaft of burning crimson light shot from the dragon bone at the top of the staff out into the chaotic wind, driving a path upward into the sodden clouds and met a bolt of lightning. Fire to fire. Magic to magic.

  The two forces met and exploded into a blinding starburst.

  Release me! it demanded.

  Glenndon held on to the base of his staff though it bucked and fought his grip. The magic within it twisted and fought his hands with heat.

  He cried out, but still he clung. Keerkin placed his hands over Glenndon’s, adding his strength and minor talent. Desperately they sought to contain the magic.

  Another pulse of light near-blinded Glenndon. He had to let go. He couldn’t. His hands felt as if they had melted and merged with the staff, never to be parted again. Together forever, for good or ill.

  Right now he felt very ill. Very ill indeed.

  And frightened.

  “Do you smell that?” Lillian shouted over the howling wind, neighing steeds, screeching flusterhens, and bleating goats. Noise all around her. The sounds of terrified creatures and humans. The odor must be especially noxious to penetrate her thoughts above the mind-consuming racket.

  Skeller wrinkled his nose and sneezed out dust. He shook his head. “Too dry to smell,” he called directly into her ear. Then he tightened his arm around her, pulling her down until she kissed her knees as they ducked for the fifth time in as many minutes to avoid flying debris. This time it looked like a fish pulled out of the dry stream, or maybe just a waterlogged branch.

  The storm had wicked all the moisture from the creek, from the air, and from the land.

  Champion, the solid sledge steed, writhed and tried to rise and bolt. Skeller soothed him with a caress and a firm word. Champion still quivered with the need to run away from this very nasty predator. Reluctantly Skeller wiggled his jerkin off from beneath the harp straps and fashioned it into a blindfold for Champion. Instantly the steed settled, though his nostrils twitched and his skin still rippled.

  Around them, the other drovers did the same for their own frightened steeds.

  “There is definitely something rotten in the air that wasn’t there before,” Lillian insisted the moment he settled back beside her, not certain if Skeller heard more than every other syllable.

  He shrugged and encouraged her to rest her head on his shoulder, his shirt cool and wet beneath her cheek. They watched the circling air another moment, crying inwardly as trees, rocks, and more animals succumbed to the sucking power of the wind. Darkness began to fall, discernible only by a shift in the density of the clouds that covered the sky from horizon to horizon.

  “Fermenting apples and a skunk getting drunk on them,” she said, trying to separate out the scents wit
hin the malodorous air. A renewed gust of wind wrapping around the continent so that it could reach the Bay and the center of the chaos brought the smell more intensely. She nearly gagged.

  It came from the west. The same direction Val had taken with Ariiell.

  “Val!” she gasped. “Val, where are you?” Lillian turned her head toward the source of the foulness. Her heart lodged in her throat. She shifted to get to her knees and send her thoughts to her twin.

  Skeller yanked her down again. “You can’t do anything now! Even if you can get to your feet without being blown over, you can’t walk into the wind. It’s too strong. You have to wait. Think and wait. You are not a steed too frightened to know what is safest!”

  Lillian blinked tears out of her eyes, as much in fear for Val as from the dust and the sharply acrid smell. “There’s magic underneath the rot.” She wasn’t sure if she said that or merely thought it. The raging wind yanked her breath out of her body faster than she could draw new dust-laden air into her lungs.

  Magic. Rot. Her mind jerked back to the dreadful battle in the middle of the University courtyard. Jaylor and Glenndon had joined their magic and their staffs to control the geyser of pure energy shooting up from the Well of Life. Val was still in her flywacket form in order to heal, while a large black snake with six leathery wings along her spine advanced with her cohort of mates, killing all that stood in her path. She aimed for anyone with magical talent to feed upon their blood. Queen Rossemikka and Princess Rosselinda looked particularly enticing with their dragon-blessed royal blood and magical talents.

  Lillian and Val had done their best to help two elderly magicians uproot the iron pole sunk into the Well. The iron poisoned the magic in the raw energy and drove it into eruption.

  But those snakes? Krakatrice. Enemies of dragons. They thrived in arid climes and actively worked to build dirt dams that channeled rivers away from their territory, turning vast acres into sere desert. A thousand years after their destruction by the Stargods, the Big Continent was just recovering fertility beyond the damp coastline.

  Last spring the matriarch Krakatrice—not fully matured but still nearly ten feet long and as thick as a twenty-year-old tree—had smelled like the air that assailed Lillian from every direction at once.

  “Stargods! Those damnable snakes are invading Coronnan. Who would dare?”

  Surely Skeller must have heard about them in the lore of his homeland.

  “What?” Skeller demanded. He grabbed her by both shoulders, digging his fingers into her flesh with frightful urgency. “What about snakes?”

  “Krakatrice,” she breathed. “They smell just like that.” She pointed west, toward where her silent sister had traveled.

  “Great Mother. He wouldn’t dare.” Skeller dropped his head, resting his chin on his chest.

  Lillian reached to smooth his tangled hair, darkened by sweat. It wasn’t long enough to pull back into a proper queue, not that the wind wouldn’t rip it free of any restraints. Her own braids and stray strands whipped into her mouth and eyes anytime she tried to peer around the solid bulk of Champion.

  “Who? Who wouldn’t dare?” Instinctively she knew she needed this information and had to pass it on to Da. But how could she do that with Valeria so far away and unable to penetrate the magic that permeated the dust clouds? And Lukan? Where was her brother when she most needed him? He’d been silent for days, neither sending nor receiving calls from his sisters.

  Never mind, she’d find a way. When the storm was over. For even a Krakatrice could not move through this unnatural storm. Unless they were the source of the storm, creating a desert here as they had done across the ocean.

  “My father’s chief adviser, a magician from Coronnan. He seeks to destroy your king and his magicians. I don’t know why, only that he advises the King of Amazonia with subtle smirks and prods to break the alliance and build his army for invasion,” Skeller confessed. “They have offered a bounty for any dormant eggs found in the desert. They are using the snakes to subdue their enemies—make them cower in terror before an invading army.”

  “Your . . . your father is a king?” Lillian gulped, barely hearing anything other than that.

  Skeller nodded.

  “And you’re a prince?” Her daydreams of finding a future with him withered into dust as dry as the stuff pelting them. The untalented daughter of a magician and a woods witch could never aspire to linking with a foreign prince. He had other, higher-born ladies awaiting him. Eagerly.

  “Not really. In Amazonia—actually all of Mabastion—men aren’t supposed to rule, except through their wives. Father usurped the throne from Mother when she passed. I have no sisters. He’ll have to give up the throne to my cousins sooner or later. But until then he rules in his own perverse way, and now he listens to a magician bent on revenge. We don’t have much use for magicians. Early queens banished them to solitary towers and never listened to them. And . . . and King Lokeen plots to marry a highborn woman who will give him a daughter so that he can continue as her regent.”

  “Samlan,” Lillian said flatly.

  “Who?”

  “A rogue magician who defied my father in a circle of magicians and left with a small cohort of masters and journeymen. We didn’t know where he went. Now I know. I have to tell my Da.” She looked around again, anxious to find a bowl and a flame to join with her tiny shard of glass. But there was no water left anywhere and the wind would extinguish any form of fire in a heartbeat, if she could manage to light one.

  “If your Samlan was banished a few months ago, he can’t be Lokeen’s adviser. That magician has been in and out for years. He’ll stay a week, or a month, then disappear, and come back again just when we think he’s gone for good.”

  “A few months ago he moved to Amazonia permanently?” Lily asked. “Could Samlan have been working against Da all those years, and not just recently?”

  A long silence grew between them as the truth registered in her mind.

  “We can’t just sit here. We have to do something,” she finally insisted, gnawing at her lower lip as she discarded plan after plan.

  “We can only wait. Later . . . Great Mother . . .” He blanched.

  The putrid smell of the Krakatrice took on the added flavor of burning flesh. A slithering line of black approached from the west and south along the ridgeline.

  CHAPTER 29

  LUKAN WAITED OUTSIDE the changing room until all the apprentices had left, chatting excitedly, their pale blue robes swishing as they walked rapidly toward the courtyard.

  They all seemed so young. And naïve.

  Well, they were young. Younger than he. All of them.

  When the last of them scurried after the pack, a boy of about twelve, holding the skirts of his too-long robe bunched into both hands (boys always grew into their uniforms, usually within a few months of arriving), Lukan sidled into the long, low room, lined with racks for hanging robes wrinkle-free. Three robes per apprentice—two sturdy but roughly woven ones for everyday, since one of them was usually in the laundry, and a formal one of finer weave and brighter color—took up a lot of space. Neat bronze plaques with names etched onto them marked the area reserved for each apprentice.

  Lukan had started using this changing room, along with the other students who lived in attached dormitories, two years ago. Having his robes hanging with the others, rather than in his attic bedroom in the cabin, made him feel like he belonged here.

  Today he wasn’t certain where he belonged. Mama was ill. He needed to be with her. But Marcus, his master, had called every apprentice, journeyman, and master in residence to the courtyard, in formal robes for an important working. Girls along with boys. That meant ley line magic, since girls couldn’t gather dragon magic. Or both. He wasn’t certain.

  Perhaps he didn’t belong at the University at all. But Mama needed him here.

  Da certainly didn’t.

  “I can do this,” a faint, feminine voice whispered.

  Lukan fro
ze, one hand stretched to grab the fine cloth of his robe—it was getting too short and narrow in the shoulders for him. He’d have to petition for a new one soon.

  If he stayed here beyond Mama getting well.

  Cautiously he peered around his rack to find the lingerer.

  Souska sat on the floor, nervously picking loose stitches from the hem of her robe.

  “Of course you can do this,” Lukan said gently, not certain when concern for the girl had overridden his constant anger.

  She looked up at him with frightened eyes. “No, I can’t.” A tear leaked out of the corner of one blue-green eye.

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked, crossing his legs and lowering himself to the floor in front of her in one slow movement.

  “I . . . I can read and write, and mix potions and ointments. I can wash and cook, but I can’t really work magic,” she cried.

  “Can’t you? Why were you sent here then?”

  “Because . . . because I sing while I cook and wash clothes and tend the garden, and my stews are always more savory, my bread lighter, my clothes cleaner, and my yampions bigger than anyone else’s,” she said quietly, almost afraid to admit it.

  “That’s what my mother does,” Lukan reassured her on a chuckle.

  “Lady Brevelan?” She turned those blue-green eyes up to him in amazement. The film of tears across them made her looker younger, and more innocent than she should be at this age.

  “Yes. Lady Brevelan, my mother. That’s the only kind of magic I’ve ever seen her throw. Kitchen magic. She’s a woods witch, according to University records.”

  “But she’s so much more! I’ve learned more about healing magic from her than from Mistress Maigret, even though she only comes to our classes once a week rather than every day.”

  “Yes, Mama is much, much more than a woods witch. You can be too. You’ll have something to add to the spell, or they wouldn’t have called you away from Mama’s side. Who is with Mama by the way?”

  “Two of the newest girls who really have no talent, but their villages wanted to get rid of them,” she said sadly, dropping her chin and those lustrous eyes once more.