The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

opening, too, with his mind. There was a shadow there his eyes couldn’t see.
    “You must stay.” The girl’s color rose and she twisted her hands in her skirt.
    “Why?”
    Her voice rose to a whine. “I . . . I was told you must stay.” She swallowed and dropped her voice to a purr that might have been seductive in a whore less desperate, less pathetic. “I can make the evening quite pleasant.”
    Jaylor squinted in the first stage of a truth spell. Shock waves rolled back on him. Echoes of his own magic reverberated against his body. He gritted his teeth until his toes stopped tingling and he could stand upright without effort.
    The girl was armored!
    Who in the village was powerful enough to throw such a strong spell? The same person who had ripped holes in his armor earlier. The person in the shadows of the cave. Was the one-eyed derelict a rogue magician?
    He whirled to face his adversary but found only sunlight flooding the doorway. The shadow was gone. Where did it go?
    The voice of his inner guidance hummed a warning. He needed to get as far away from here as possible, and quickly.
    A cloud of roiling, red-orange fog, that was trying to be green as well, erupted from the doorway of the cave. Gathering speed, the magic mist flowed over the ground. It passed the rooting pig. The animal stilled, its life frozen in time until the cloud moved away. Jaylor knew that if he were caught in the magic mist, he, too, would be imprisoned by it.
    The ground beneath him reached out and grabbed his feet. Frantically he searched his memory for a spell of release. None of the spells he’d so painstakingly memorized came to him. In desperation he tried to picture the books in the library. There was one on the back shelf that should help. In his mind he saw the book float from its shelf. The cover opened, pages turned. They were all blank.
    His body recoiled in fatigue. He’d held the delusion spell too long, then wasted more energy with his useless map.
    The cloying clay mud thickened and threatened to solidify around his worn boots like fire-case pottery.
    His brow and chest were clammy with cold sweat. He forced his mind into a meditative trance. Breathe in three counts, hold three, out three. Breathe in. His mind stilled. The fog appeared distant and unreal through his refocused eyes.
    With a dragon-sized effort he pulled one foot free, then the other, shattering the images that bound him. One foot in front of the other, he measured his paces on the muddy road to the southern mountain pass.
    One step farther away from the evil that followed him. One step farther on his quest. One step closer to his master’s cloak of deep blue wool with the silver markings of the Stargods on the collar.
    Jaylor quickened his pace.
     
    Baamin gathered his bright magician’s robes tightly around his rotund figure as he squeezed through the side door of the University to welcome the king. ’Twas the study hour. The time when the senior magician and his king took advantage of the quiet to engage in a brisk game of piquet.
    But King Darcine hadn’t been well enough to venture out of the palace for many, many moons.
    Leave it to his rather perverse king to prefer a quiet entrance through this little-used passage rather than at the wide front door. As if his arrival in a steed-drawn litter with a full military escort could be kept quiet.
    The soldiers ringed the courtyard. Baamin noticed that many of the men were developing a bit of a paunch. They didn’t have enough to do.
    “Have you heard anything about my son yet, Baamin?” The slight frame of the king trembled as he wheezed the words.
    Baamin paused to allow his friend and ruler to catch up. The pace the monarch set these days was still woefully slow. It was a miracle he’d survived the miserable winter.
    Perhaps he had some good news for King Darcine after all. “Last night I had a vision in the glass. The dragon Shayla has bred.” The ruling monarch of Coronnan was magically linked to the nimbus of dragons. In return, the people of Coronnan were pledged to plant and maintain enough Tambootie trees to feed the dragons’ needs and to provide a tithe of livestock. Shayla’s vitality should impart some strength to this ailing king.
    But the peasantry rebelled against obligations they no longer understood. Precious few of the magic trees, and fewer dragons, were left these days. It would take more than one litter of dragonets to restore Darcine’s damaged lungs and weak