The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

fighting the panic Brunix’s words evoked. Finally her vision cleared and her pulse ceased pounding behind her eyes.
    Then she saw an expensive, velvet lace pillow resting on a stand beside her chair. Dangling from one of her grandmother’s patterns were a hundred or more slender, bone bobbins with bright bangles on the ends.
    She peered closer, still bent over the chair. Her eyes focused on the bobbins while she gathered her thoughts and courage. She picked out a bobbin with a spiraled inscription and a familiar blue bead at the center of the bangle. “K-A- . . .” the next letters wound away from her. “. . . I-N . . .” And above those letters “A-A . . .” was visible. She didn’t need to twist the slender spindle to know that this bobbin along with the pattern was part of her dowry, sold to buy food and medicine for Hilza.
    Food and medicine purchased too late to save her little sister.
    Anger at King Simeon, who had brought her family low and still pursued her, replaced her fear. Hot hatred filled her veins and eased the pain in her lungs.
    “Why does the sorcerer-king persecute you, Katrina Kaantille? I know he wants your body as much as I do, but there must be more. He has access to many women. What makes you so special?” Brunix took the cloak from her shoulders and hung it on a tall rack alongside his own.
    “I don’t know. He picked me out of the crowd as if he were looking for me.” She closed her eyes against the sight of her own bobbins gracing this man’s pillow.
    “Perhaps he is anxious to retrieve something he considers his own. What passed between you the night you chose slavery to me, an outland half-breed, rather than joining his ritual?” His voice sounded devoid of emotion, as if he calculated possibilities and advantages with the same scrutiny he weighed imported goods taken in trade for exported lace.
    Katrina kept her eyes closed to help control the pain memory of that night still brought her. “I have done him no hurt, yet he pursues me and threatens me for a crime I have not committed. He shot the bolt of blue light into the queen’s steed, not I. How could I? He’s the only magician in SeLenicca!”
    “Perhaps he hunts you because you did refuse him. How many women in SeLenicca would sacrifice much to become the king’s mistress?”
    “Or be sacrificed to him?” she added.
    Criminals and outlanders were routinely burned at the stake as part of the king’s rituals. So far he had not publicly sacrificed one of the queen’s citizens.
    “I heard he likes his toys young and virginal, dismissed as soon as they become boring.” Brunix paced a circle around her and the lace pillow. “Marriages are discreetly arranged for the girls he ravishes. Those girls he rapes without guilt. But you . . . you he demands must come willingly to him. My contract with him forbids me to force you. As if he didn’t know that rape is a most heinous crime among my mother’s people. But I am supposed to . . . never mind. He has broken that contract.” He fingered the lace still draped around her shoulders. Gently he removed it and hung it beneath the cloaks.
    “He told me that if I survived his Equinox ritual, my power would be released and I would be worthy to bear him a son. But I must come to his altar willingly. He hoped the humiliation of being your slave would drive me back to him. Willingly.”
    “The black-gowned goddess!” he hissed. “She carries a child, conceived near the Autumnal Equinox. And she wears the aura of one with much power. Was she willing? Eager perhaps?”
    Crashing footsteps on the wooden walkway, loud shouts, and angry questions brought Katrina upright. Her balance shifted to her toes, as she made ready to flee again.
    “I can save you,” Brunix stood between her and the door, the only exit from the room. Another man had offered her the same thing. He’d asked for her mother’s shawl in repayment.
    “What will it cost me?” She sought frantically for a window, another door, a place to hide.
    “You know my price. Come to my bed of your own free will. ”
    The door buckled on its hinges from the fierce pounding on the painted planks.
    Katrina bit her lip. There was no way out.
    She nodded, too frightened to speak.
    Brunix reached behind him to unlatch the door. Six broad-shouldered men wearing the gray uniforms of the palace guard filled the narrow hallway.
    “In the name of His Majesty, King Simeon the First, I place you, Katrina Kaantille, under