The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

opened slowly. P’pa stood there, a deep scowl on his face. Defeat seemed to drag his shoulders down, shortening, reducing him to a haggard old man.
    “What is it, P’pa?” Katrina looked up at her parent, frightened and insecure. She kept Hilza’s weary body cradled within her arms, face buried in her lap.
    “Is your mother home?” P’pa looked around the room, peering into shadows He seemed to fear what he might find.
    “No” Katrina answered.
    “Good.” Was that relief in his tone and the raising of his shoulders?
    A tall, hooded stranger appeared behind P’pa, pushing to gain access to the room. “Almost as cold in here as it is outside, Merchant Kaantille.” The thin man rubbed his long-fingered hands together, not with cold, but with some kind of eagerness.
    Katrina had seen those hands before. “Take the blasted patterns and be gone!” P’pa bellowed impatiently.
    “Patterns? P’pa, you didn’t!” Katrina darted across the room to her lace pillow, heedless of Hilza. She clutched the velvet bolster with its cache of patterns to her chest, letting the bobbins tangle. Pins that held her latest lace into the pattern pressed through her clothes, pricking her skin.
    “I’m sorry, Katey. I had no choice.” P’pa looked at the floor.
    “Give me the pillow with the patterns, girl.” The thin man stepped closer, hands reaching for her treasure. His hood fell back revealing the dark-eyed owner of the first lace factory she and M’ma had approached. The man M’ma had insulted.
    “No. I don’t care how much money you paid him. The pillow and patterns are mine. My dowry. He can’t sell it.” She swung around so her back was to the stranger. She hated the gleeful revenge that burned in his brown eyes.
    “Give him the pillow, Katrina. Give it up or watch your sister die of the lung rot and the rest of us starve or freeze to death,” P’pa ordered. His voice was as weak and reluctant as his steps.
    He was right. The patterns contained within the pillow with its engraved bone bobbins were the most precious things left in the house. Even the glass window in the workroom had been sold, the opening covered with scrap wood. M’ma’s pillow and patterns had remained at the palace when she was dismissed and could not be retrieved.
    “I can’t, P’pa. If I give this up, I have no future.” Katrina dropped to her knees, her legs suddenly too weak to hold her upright.
    “If you don’t, we’ll all starve, Katey.” P’pa pried her fingers up and yanked the bolster out of her arms. He thrust it at the eager stranger.
    A single bobbin broke loose from the tangle of fine cotton threads. Katrina caught it within the folds of her skirt. The men wouldn’t notice one bobbin missing. Not one lonely little bone bobbin out of forty pairs.
    “Take it and be gone. I don’t want to ever see your face gain.” P’pa ushered the stranger toward the door.
    The man shoved a fat purse into P’pa’s still outstretched hand. It slipped through his fingers and dropped to the floor with a clank that echoed around the silent room.
    Katrina glanced at the bobbin still clutched in her skirt. “Tattia Kaantille” the engraved letters spelled in a spiral around the slender piece of bone. She traced the letters from bottom to top. Something sharp caught on the threads of her skirt. The glass bead on the bangle had shattered in the fall.

Chapter 9
     
    R ejiia listened through the night for magic on the wind. Not long after midnight, she sensed a spell of braided magic winding its way through the encampment like a ghost of stray mist, questing but not disturbing.
    Red and blue. The Senior Magician was scouting the army with that spell. She had watched Jaylor work magic in the capital often enough to know his signature colors.
    Silently she crept from her bed behind a heavy screen in the largest pavilion. Marnak the Younger, her husband, snored on a cot on the other side of the screen. A year of marriage and he still hadn’t found the courage to join her in bed. A shiver of loathing coursed through her as her nightrail brushed against his cot.
    She thought she might have more respect for him if he’d raped her on their wedding night, as her father had advised. But now? The weak little lordling was still dependent upon and submissive to his father. Rejiia would rather sleep with the sergeant who patrolled the nobles’ section of the encampment than with her lawful husband.
    Outside the tent, she sniffed for