The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume II

that no one could use her for their own gain. Her parents had sold her talent for food and shelter. Ackerly, Nimbulan’s former assistant, had tried to sell her talent for gold that he kept himself. She had pleaded with him to forget his plans to help Myri. She was jealous of the baby, thought Myri had deserted and betrayed her by having another child, as she thought her mother had betrayed her for staying in Coronnan City with Kalen’s brothers and sisters.
    “She wanted to be in control of herself and everyone around her.” Powwell didn’t realize he’d spoken until her heard his own words. “I thought it merely a childish dream. No one has that kind of power over people.”
    “Yaassima did,” Yaala said in her deep voice, so husky he could never tell if she verged on tears or not.
    “Kalen and Televarn would make quite a pair.” Nimbulan shook his head sadly. “With his ambition and her plots, they could have ruled all of Kardia Hodos in time.”
    “If either of them lives,” Powwell added. He didn’t think Kalen was dead. But where could she be and still live? Their bonds had been close before they had been kidnapped with Myri. After that she had changed, and the closeness, the whispered confidences in the slave pen, the shared tears, holding each other to keep out the cold and the terror, were all a sham. On her part. “I love her. I would have taken care of her. I wanted to marry her as soon as she was old enough.”
    “You do realize, Powwell, that Kalen was your half-sister? The physical resemblance between you is too strong to be coincidence,” Nimbulan said.
    “She wasn’t!” Powwell screamed. “She couldn’t be. I won’t believe it.”
    “I doubt that Stuuvaart sired her,” Nimbulan continued. “He has no trace of magic in him, neither does Guillia or your mother. I believe a magician seduced both women and then abandoned them. Not an uncommon occurrence in the war years.”
    Powwell took a deep breath and released it. Stuuvart, the self-serving steward at the School for Magicians, was the last man he wanted to acknowledge as his long-lost father. But who? He didn’t want to think about it. Was afraid to believe it.
    “The physical resemblance between you and Kalen is too remarkable,” Myri reinforced her husband’s statement. “Your speech patterns and gestures are also too similar. It is right that you should love each other and be friends, but you can never be intimate with her, never make her your wife.”
    “You have no proof that Stuuvart isn’t her father.”
    “When we get back to the School, I will find a way to prove it to you, Powwell,” Nimbulan said, resuming his trek eastward, toward Coronnan. “Now would be a good time for the dragons to return.”
    “That won’t stop me from finding a way to go to Kalen.”
    “Somehow, I don’t think your sister will appreciate your efforts, any more than my brother will welcome my return to Coronnan,” Myri mumbled.

Chapter 33
     
    S hayla! Myri called into the vastness of open sky.
    Her mind and her heart remained empty of the dragon’s presence. She huddled closer to Nimbulan and the small fire they allowed themselves while she nursed her baby and they all ate of the dry journey rations. The absence of the dragons left a chill deeper in her heart than the winter wind that whipped through the pass.
    “I can’t hear Shayla at all!” Myri tried again to summon a dragon—any dragon. “This is as bad as when I was in Hanassa. I can’t hear the dragons.” All her life she had listened to the voices in the back of her head, guiding her through life when no one else cared for or trusted her.
    She understood they would not go near Hanassa in any way, even to reassure one of their own trapped within the boundaries of the volcanic crater. Their vows of separation from the stronghold of the renegade dragon, Hanassa, who had taken human form, had lasted for centuries. Dragon memory was long.
    She wondered briefly if Old Lyman who had been, in his previous existence, the last purple-tipped dragon before Amaranth and herself, had known Hanassa.
    This emptiness was something more than the dragon’s avoidance of Hanassa. The dragons roamed free over this land. Shayla had been calmly munching on a stunted Tambootie tree when Myri and the others emerged through the dragongate. Almost as if she expected Myri to emerge there and wanted to make sure her daughter was safe.
    Now Shayla shunned her call for help and