The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

between us. Why do you accuse me of the king’s crimes?”
    “King Simeon did not stop the shipment that caused P’pa’s bankruptcy. You did.”
    “I stopped a foreign spy from escaping my country. A spy who had organized an assassination of my king on the day of his coronation. Would you have done less?”
    Katrina had to think about that. Hatred of the man who had caused her poverty, hunger, grief, and humiliation had focused her desire for revenge. In the first years of her slavery, little else had kept her from following her mother into the river. She needed to nurse that hatred back into life. She had nothing, was nothing without it.
    “What makes you think Simeon would have allowed your father to profit from that shipment of Tambootie seedlings if it had won through?” He mounted the step to stand beside her. In the cramped space, only a hair’s breadth separated them. His quiet words caressed her ear while the closeness of his body threatened her senses as Brunix’s lovemaking never could.
    “There is only one use for Tambootie. Simeon needed my father to market the fiber for lacemaking.”
    “Tambootie feeds dragons. Simeon has a small nimbus of dragons to supply magic to the men of his coven. The palace guard arguing with Brunix gathers dragon magic. He admitted to being part of the coven. None of that Tambootie would have been made into thread.”
    “Dragons? Where?” Fear, or was it the watchman’s nearness, sent shivers through her body.
    “Your father is protected by the dragons. My quest is to send them home so that Simeon no longer has a source of magic. Without the dragons he can’t work his evil on SeLenicca anymore. Without his magic, Queen Miranda will recover.”
     
    Jaylor opened the fragile book with tender reverence. How many times had he passed it by in the library of the new University of Magicians? He wondered if he ignored the book just as someone searching for the clearing would walk right past the proper path.
    But the crack in the clearing barrier widened daily. Brevelan still refused to move. Jaylor feared that soon an outsider would stumble into the clearing without knowing he shouldn’t be able to. An agent of the Gnostic Utilitarian cult would be as happy to find the clearing as to find the hidden University with its priceless library of magic secrets. The Council of Provinces and the coven had been trying to penetrate the Commune’s defense of secrecy for years.
    Darville knew how to find the clearing. Mikka could open the crack and snatch Glendon away. . . . Jaylor couldn’t dwell on that possibility. Fear of losing the boy paralyzed all thought.
    The library had grown during these years in exile because a few educated men feared for the safety of their private book collections during the height of the Gnul’s fanaticism. The Gnuls didn’t believe in learning to read. Since the skill to interpret the marks in books into language had been the exclusive right of magicians for many generations, the cult had decided reading was another form of magic and therefore evil.
    Rational men who could not embrace the cult but found it politically expedient not to oppose it had found ways to insure the safety of their collections of books. Secret messengers left bundles of them buried in protective wraps near abandoned Equinox Pylons—festival landmarks that had been revered in Coronnan for so long even the Gnuls would not desecrate them. Only the coven did that.
    Jaylor enjoyed quiet time in the library, meditating and planning. Physical and psychic quiet was a rarity in the clearing. Glendon and Lukan didn’t believe in quiet, unless they were asleep. Lukan screamed at everything, with delight, anger, or frustration. Glendon tended to blast minds with his telepathic shouts. Anything done quietly, to them, was work. The same task or game completed with as much noise as their two young bodies could muster, was play.
    So Jaylor sat quietly in the library and stared at this slim volume that had lain hidden in piles of books, overlooked, pushed aside and forgotten time and again.
    “A book that doesn’t want to be found might contain a spell that obscures a place,” he mused. “Like the clearing.” Since he couldn’t persevere against Brevelan and make her move, he had to find a way to heal the barrier. If this book contained the spell that had originally set the protections, he might be able to analyze it and reset it.
    Page by page he skimmed the volume. The