The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

well as to survive in the high desert. The exercises of mind and body felt good after the restrictions imposed upon her by Uncle Rumbelly.
    This wasn’t the first time she’d slipped away from supervision for a lesson in the healing arts. An hour here, an afternoon there. She was never absent long enough for anyone to miss her.
    However, there were some lessons that couldn’t be learned during those stolen hours in the back of Erda’s colorfully draped market stall.
    On her last afternoon of luxurious freedom, Mikka ran down a hill to show Erda her latest discovery, a rare blossom consisting of long pink filaments that could be fermented into a poultice to clean out infected wounds. Her enthusiasm overtook her feet and she stumbled and rolled to the edge of their primitive camp.
    She fetched up against the boots of the frowning captain of the guard. Erda was bound and gagged. The grimly silent captain threw Mikka onto the back of his own steed. He didn’t dare bind the hands of a royale, but his speed and rough handling kept her from throwing herself off the mount. They raced back to the castle in record time. The Stargods only knew if her teacher would survive the dungeons, where the other guards would take her.
    “Never has there been such a scandal in this family!” Lord Rumbellesth bellowed from his thronelike chair.
    Mikka faced her raging uncle without a word, head high and chin thrust forward in affirmation of the rightness of her actions.
    “No daughter of mine will ever debase herself with foreign lore and peasant herbs and remedies.”
    Uncle Rumbelly grimaced in pain and swilled a huge mouthful of beta’arack.
    “Since I am certainly no daughter of yours, then I shall continue to prepare myself for my life as Princess Royale of Rossemeyer.” Disgust for her mother’s brother overcame her dignified silence. “I choose to set an example for our people. We must have healers of our own and not be dependent upon foreign magicians.”
    Just then, two guards led a badly bruised and humiliated Erda into the audience hall. Mikka sped to the side of her longtime friend and teacher. A heavily armed courtier grabbed her around the waist and hauled her back to face her uncle.
    “If word of your disgraceful behavior leaks out, your chances of a successful marriage are ruined,” Uncle Rumbelly spat.
    “Listen to your uncle, dear. He knows best,” Dowager Queen Sousyam echoed her brother’s sentiments.
    “If he,” Mikka indicated her loathsome uncle, “were to produce a candidate worth marrying, I might have reason to listen to him.” She refused to dwell on her current predicament. This wasn’t the first time she’d been hauled before Uncle Rumbelly for discipline. Nor would this be the last, even if she married one of his sniveling princelings.
    “You are a princess and must set an example for your ladies. How can you do that dressed as a boy, exposing your limbs, and with dirt all over you?” Rumbelly reminded them all of her inappropriate behavior.
    Queen Sousyam shuddered delicately and wrung her hands.
    “What is exposed? My hair and ankles are covered!” Mikka protested.
    As the mother of three children, Queen Sousyam was entitled to fully expose her skinny, jiggling breasts. Mikka’s gowns were cut a little higher, as befitted a virgin, but still low enough to display her potential.
    “My brother’s cast-off clothes cover more of me than the gown you wear, Mother. These trews are so full, you can’t possibly discern the shape of my legs.”
    “How dare you mention your anatomy in such a blatant manner?” Rumbelly took another swig of his liquor.
    The Queen Dowager looked close to fainting.
    Mikka’s mother was a mouse, without a thought of her own. Tradition had been pounded into her since . . . oh, forever. Well, Mikka was not going to bow to tradition. It was up to her to stand up for the rights of herself and her brothers in the face of their power-hungry uncle. Why, Uncle Rumbelly wasn’t even a royale. Just the younger brother of the Queen Dowager.
    “Mayhap it is time to set a new kind of example for the women of Rossemeyer.” Mikka turned to confront the gathered courtiers, rather than her uncle. “We are a land of warriors. Our mercenaries bring much needed gold and trade to our impoverished shores. But he restricts our campaigns to ‘safe’ little wars because we lack healers of our own for battlefield injuries and illness, and we dare not trust foreign healers who