The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume II

seemed warranted.
    (We must trust the little ones. All of us are needed. The path opens to you at dawn,) Amaranth told them all.
     
    Nimbulan watched Myri walk up the trail. Her lovely shape was outlined by her skirt with each long, confident stride. He longed to reach out and hold her close, kiss her, love her. The slender silver umbilical that connected them grew stronger every day until he was sure he could reach out and pull her closer to him by tugging on the magical cord.
    But they had a long trek into the mountains to find the mysterious guiding voices, and the children watched every move he made with avid curiosity—when they weren’t trying to catch Amaranth and make him show off his wings.
    Nimbulan decided to question them once more rather than contemplate Myri and how she found the path that appeared behind them but never before them.
    “How did you two meet?” The similarity in hair and eye color, the position of their freckles, and the shape of their tip-tilted noses was too much coincidence for them not to have a common parent or grandparent.
    Nimbulan had met Powwell’s mother when he recruited the boy for the school. A shy woman who’d been seduced by a man displaced by the wars. She might have been beautiful if loved and allowed to bloom with joy, but years of hard work and being outcast for bearing a bastard child had etched premature worry lines into her face. Hunger had worn her to a thin shadow of the beauty of her youth. She had never taken another lover.
    Powwell’s mother had been shunned for loving a man not her husband. Rover women regarded children as wealth, regardless of the father or their marital status. The old pagan practice of random matings at Festival and measuring wealth in the number of children hadn’t died out with the teaching of the Stargods.
    The depredation of war took more lives than the sacrifice to Simurgh had in the old days, before the Stargods. Lives that could only be replaced by numerous children. Powwell and his mother should have been honored rather than cast out by family and village because she slept with a man outside of Festival or marriage.
    “Kalen’s parents brought her to the school,” Powwell said, helping the girl over a fallen log. “Her da was a merchant in Baria and lost everything when the town was sacked. They’d been on the road for months, hungry and down to their last few coins. Kalen has talent, lots of it. So they brought her to the school to have one less mouth to feed. They ended up staying to help run the school.”
    “A merchant, eh?” Was that the connection? Or had a different man seduced both women? The family resemblance was strong enough that Kalen’s father might very well have sired Powwell, too. He’d made promises and never kept them because he was already married. Or about to marry. Probably Kalen’s mother had a hefty dowry, more attractive than Powwell’s mother’s small inheritance. Did Kalen’s father have gray eyes and freckles?
    “Stuuvart traded for better food, and Ackerly offered the services of students for healing and soil replenishing. Sometimes he took money, a lot of the times he could only get cloth and parchments and stuff. And Kalen’s mother is a great cook.” Powwell looked longingly at the pack Nimbulan carried. Undoubtedly his growing body cried out for food. The lessons Nimbulan had set both children earlier to test their skills had depleted their energy reserves as well.
    Kalen hadn’t spoken more than a few words since yesterday. Nimbulan wondered what lay behind her act of wide-eyed innocence.
    “So why did you find it necessary to come searching for me, if you believed me dead.” Nimbulan turned and faced the children squarely. This was the heart of their desperate flight from the school.
    “Kalen discovered that your niche in the crypt was empty.”
    Nimbulan knelt down so that he was level with the girl. He tried to look her directly in the eye. She suddenly found a tall everblue tree fascinating and wouldn’t look at him.
    “Why were you exploring the crypt, Kalen? Surely there were better places to play,” Nimbulan asked gently.
    The girl looked at her feet and bit her lip. Powwell had the same bad habit.
    “You can trust him, Kalen,” Powwell urged.
    “I wanted a place to hide,” she whispered.
    “Hide from what?” Nimbulan asked.
    She darted a worried glance at Powwell then back to the ground. “Ackerly wanted me to do terrible things with my magic.”
    Myri