The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume II

pulled her hand back in surprise and stared at her palm. Somehow she expected it to burn or at least tingle from the magic. Nothing. Her hand seemed perfectly normal and undamaged.
    “Do you think your voices guided you here? Perhaps your guardian spirits prepared this place for us, a place where we are safe from Rovers and witchhunters.” He took her hand in his own larger ones, examining it, kissing it, tracing the crease of her heart line across the palm.
    Bending over her hand didn’t disguise the slight stoop in his posture. The wound must still pain him.
    “We are safe from those who would betray us. I know it with the same certainty that tells me the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.” Her breathing seemed strangely uneven as his hands moved up her arm to her shoulders, then moved to cradle her face.
    “You needn’t force me to stay with you, Myrilandel. I want to be with you. This silver cord isn’t necessary.” He slowly lowered his mouth to cover hers in a long kiss.
    Heat rose from her belly to her breasts in a satisfying wave. Her knees nearly buckled with joy.
    “I thought you controlled the cord,” she said when they came up for air, still locked in each others arms.
    “Perhaps neither of us controls it. Perhaps it is a symbol of something deeper that we refused to recognize.” He kissed her again, molding her body to fit neatly against his.
    “Stay with me, Nimbulan. Please, help me make this clearing our home.”
    “If we are to stay, we must lay in some stores. There is a sack of seeds and roots underneath the bed in the hut,” Nimbulan said. “Magic has kept them in stasis, so they won’t spoil. If we’re going to be here any length of time, we’d best start planting the garden. Can you dig if I plant? I don’t think I have the strength yet to do the heaviest work.” He walked slowly back to the one-room home with the very wide bed. Last night they’d slept there, side by side, Amaranth between them or on top of one of them—as they’d slept on the trail. Nimbulan hadn’t touched her. Amaranth was too good a chaperone for that.
    Tonight the flywacket would sleep elsewhere, Myri decided.
    “I don’t know if I like it that you are a Battlemage, Nimbulan. But you intrigue me and make me feel safer than anyone has before. You must be a very special man.”
     
    Myri’s joyful planting song dwindled to a questioning note as a cloud dimmed the spring sun and then passed on.
    She looked to the northeast and sniffed the damp breeze. She almost tasted the warm growth and new life abundant in the forest around her. Her song returned to her lips, soaring high. A sense of rightness with the world swelled her heart and added speed to her digging.
    Nimbulan looked up from where he dropped triangles of yampion root into the freshly turned earth two rows to her left. He laughed with her and joined her song. They’d made love last night, and the three nights before. Joyous, wondrous, abandoned love, growing in intensity with each joining. She needed to sing about that, too.
    “When you stand like that with your face uplifted to the wind, you remind me of someone,” Nimbulan said. “But for the life of me, I can’t remember who.” He shook his head and resumed his planting.
    “Someone you know? My family, perhaps?” If he knew her family, she could meet them, talk to them, fill in missing pieces of her memory.
    “I must not have known her well, or I’d remember. Don’t worry about it. If it’s important, the name and the face will come to me.”
    “I’d like to find my family someday.” Someday, when exploring their love wasn’t quite so new and fragile.
    She’d dreamed of flying again last night. The sensation of wind beneath her outstretched arms felt as natural and as harmonious as singing with this man beside her. She tried to imagine the two of them soaring effortlessly across the bay on a warm current of air; the crisp bite of thin air cleansing her mind and body of old fears and urgencies.
    She hunched her shoulders and folded her elbows in memory of tilting wings to catch the next updraft. . . .
    “ ’Twas only a dream,” she sighed. “But it felt like a memory.” She pushed the shovel into the ground.
    The scent of brine alerted her to the next change in the weather. Tall trees blocked her view of the Great Bay. She blinked three times, a trick Nimbulan had taught her, and found her FarSight ready to scan north, through the forest, and over the