The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

they had brought so low. The morning sunlight didn’t reflect off the dull iron of the knife blade in Fraank’s hand.
    “You are bastard-born, an incestuous adulterer, and a traitor to your own kind, Simeon,” Jack taunted, keeping the sorcerer’s attention away from Fraank. “Even if you kill me, the coven will destroy you. You will have gained nothing.”
    Fraank staggered to his feet two paces behind the king. Jack had to distract the madman for two more paces.
    “You betrayed the ship full of Tambootie,” Simeon growled. “You were responsible for the economic disaster that followed. If the ship had won through, SeLenicca would have thriving exports once more. Food and jobs would be plentiful. The people would love me so much they’d welcome Queen Miranda’s death so that I could rule!”
    “Idiot!” Rejiia admonished. Her breathing was ragged and the strength had drained from her shoulders. “Stop talking and throw the s’murghing spell.”
    Simeon’s armor flared a warning. If Fraank plunged his knife through the magic shielding, he’d die in an instant of blinding fire.
    Jack flashed a warning to Katrina’s father, his friend.
    I’m a dead man already. The lung rot has worked into my bones and my heart. Let me kill this thing before I die.
    Fraank raised the knife above his head.
    Simeon whirled to face the new threat. With a flick of his wrist he dismissed the knife and its wielder. “No mundane can dare attack a magician, a king, a priest of Simurgh!”
    Fraank staggered back a few steps as if struck, still clutching the knife. With the grim determination of a martyr he regained his footing and leaped forward. “You are a traitor to your country and my queen. Die like the miserable cur you are.”
    “Cease your attack or die!” Simeon screamed just before the iron knife plunged into his heart.
    His armor had been set against magical attack, not a physical penetration. The armor ignited. Blood spurted. Smoke and flame and the stench of rotten Tambootie took them both into the void.
    Not even a flake of ash remained of either man.
    Jack flinched from the backlash of pain and death.
    Rejiia absorbed it and swelled with a new source of magic. She seemed to grow and swell with dynamic power.
    “Now it is your turn to die, boy.”
    (His name is Yaakke!) The blue-tipped dragon’s bugling pronouncement echoed up and down the valley piercing mental and physical ears. (Grab hold of my spines, Yaakke. Shayla and the little ones are safe now. I’ll take you away from SeLenicca and the evil spawned by Simeon and this female.)
    “I can’t leave. I have to finish this.” Jack poured his remaining strength into his armor.
    (Another time. Your life is too important to waste on such as she.) The dragon reached out his strong forepaws and clamped Jack around the waist without touching ground.
    With a massive sweep of wing and a blast of dragon fire, they lifted free of Kardia’s gravity and into the void.
     
    My enemies have done me a favor. Simeon can never cast doubt on the rights of my son and Princess Jaranda to marry and together claim the Three Kingdoms. No one must know that Princess Jaylene’s child, the true Simeon, died at birth, replaced by Janessa’s bastard, also named Simeon. Jaylene’s link to Rossemeyer is the key to dynastic unity. That wretched piece of lace with the runic message is attached to the dragon’s wing. I must find Shayla and destroy the lace before the Commune has the opportunity to read the secret.
    Shayla will most certainly fly to the Commune. Fortunately the boy told me how to find Brevelan’s clearing. If I take my sister or her children hostage, the dragon will surely give up her wing patch.
    Glendon would be the best hostage. He is tied to the dragons through his father’s blood as well as his mother’s. And if I eliminate the child, then I clear the way to name myself and my son heirs to the throne and the Coraurlia—the glass dragon crown.
     
    All sensation fled Jack’s body as darkness closed around him. Panic rode at the edge of his awareness.
    (We wait in the void,) the dragon told him.
    “Why?” The dragons knew the void better than any human. Maybe they wouldn’t get lost this time. Maybe.
    Colored umbilicals, symbols of life forces, drifted past him. Gold and crystal, copper and blue. His own silver entwined with white. White for lace and moon-blond hair. Jack and Katrina.
    As he watched, the silver umbilical of his own life took on a