The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

After midnight. The jailers were drowsy, the torches in the corridor sputtered and burned low.
    The only things keeping the manor awake tonight was the irregular trembling of the Kardia beneath them. Something strange was happening in Queen’s City.
    Jack’s time sense remained true and his alignment with the pole and all directions seemed intact. He had access to magic, just no strength to throw it. Rejiia’s probe had failed in one sense: she’d viewed information but she hadn’t stripped his mind as she threatened. And she’d had to renew her spell twice with Tambootie.
    If only he were back at the factory and that little puddle of reactivated ley lines. Lines that grew beneath Katrina’s workstation—the place where she sang as she worked in the dark of night.
    His memory called up scenes in villages between the mine and the capital. Women singing as they went about their daily chores. Songs of joy, of love, of nurturing.
    In those villages the ley lines had glowed with life, like newly planted fields of wheat. There had been a few areas where the magic was stronger, where there were supposed to be villages—groups of homes and people visible to Corby, but not to Jack. Could the women have Sung a kind of armor around their homes?
    Brevelan Sang all of the time and her clearing had the best protection of any place he’d encountered. Except the time he’d visited there on his way to and from meeting the blue-tipped dragon. The barriers had been down then. Because she was dead? He prayed that merely her prolonged absence had opened the clearing to him.
    Men protected their families with brute strength. Women were more subtle, and perhaps stronger, in their forms of protection. Nurturing and strengthening from within.
    “ Sing something, Katrina.”
    “What?”
    “At the factory, you created a pool of magic beneath your workstation. You Sang the magic into life. That’s the power Simeon sensed within you. But you awakened it by yourself. Please Sing. ” He levered himself to a half-sitting position, balanced on his right elbow, the side that didn’t hurt quite so badly.
    “I have no magic,” Katrina protested. But she leaned forward, almost eagerly, to listen closer to him.
    “You are a woman. Therefore you have the strongest magic of all, even if you can’t throw it in specific spells. Sing me a lullaby. A healing lullaby.”
    Just then the foundations rumbled for the tenth time since Jack had been captured. The sense of a series of small collapses in the land filled him with a new anxiety. They hadn’t much time before the burned-out ley lines gave way to the pressures of the abandoned and exploited surface.
    All is quiet, all is still,
Sleep, my child, and fear not ill,
Wintry winds blow chill and drear,
Lullaby, my baby dear.
     
    Katrina’s thin voice whispered into the darkness. She nearly choked on the last line. “The last time I sang this lullaby was to my sister Hilza.”
    “The one who died?”
    She nodded. Then she lifted her tear streaked face and sang again, stronger, surer.
    Let thy little eyelids close,
Like the petals of the rose;
When the morning sun shall glow,
They shall into blossom blow,
When the morning sun shall glow.
     
     
    Then the little flowers I’ll prize
Then I’ll kiss those little eyes.
And thy mother will not care,
If ’tis spring or winter drear,
And thy mother will not care,
If ’tis spring or winter drear.
    Jack concentrated on the air surrounding Katrina. He didn’t need magic to read an aura.
    Healing green shimmered around her in increasing layers. Palest green of new willow shoots accompanied the first lines of her Song. Then a darker green of grass marked with dew at sunrise grew between the willow and the white afterimage surrounding her like a halo.
    When she began the second verse, the white burst into yellow and the next layer, the color of mature ivy, climbed from the stone floor into the glowing colors.
    Katrina came to the end of her melody and the colors dimmed but did not disperse.
    “Again,” Jack coaxed, awed at the controlled power contained within this woman who knew only the magic instinctive to her gender.
    The dark-eyed Rover came over the hill
down through the valley on May-day.
He whistled and he sang ’til the city rang
and he sought the heart of a lady
     
    Katrina’s aura renewed itself with the first five notes of this slow and mournful tune. The layers deepened and Jack’s magic reached out to embrace