The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume III: Volume III

blotting the half-formed tears.
    “I don’t remember P’pa. ’Cept he was big. He filled the doorway when he came to watch me at night. He thought I was asleep. He wouldn’t have come if he knew I was awake.” Jaranda flung her arms around her mother’s neck and hugged her tightly, nearly strangling her.
    “We don’t want P’pa. He scared me. I like Zebbie better.”
    “Yes, I like Zebbiah, too, Jaranda,” she choked out, fighting the pressure on her throat from the little girl’s enthusiasm. She stood up and gently held her daughter’s hands.
    She turned to find the dark-eyed man watching her.
    “You remember something.” His usually expressive eyes took on a hooded look, and he refused to meet her gaze.
    “Where is my husband, Zebbiah? Why did he not come for us in the palace when everyone deserted me?”
    “Many men died in the war.” He bent to fuss with the harness on his pack beast.
    “Dead?” A huge weight seemed to lift from her chest. “I’m a widow.” She had to restrain herself from jumping in glee. “I guess the marriage was not happy,” she whispered to herself. Jaranda renewed her stranglehold, on her knees this time.
    “Serves you right.” A bulky man, managing the sledge behind her spat into the dirt. “Can’t trust outlanders. Especially those with dark eyes. Brown or blue as dark as midnight, don’t matter, they’s all signs of outlanders,” he sneered. “Best you don’t remember the man what give you a child with outland hair. Best you take her and your dark-eyed lover out of SeLenicca. We don’t need no outlanders tainting our blood or telling us what to do.”
    “And yet you travel outland. By the looks of the goods on your sledge, you intend to stay there a long time.” She raised an eyebrow at him in irony at his hypocrisy.
    “Prejudice has to be learned, Lady,” Zebbiah said quietly.
    “And I have forgotten my prejudices along with my name.”
    “Common enough name,” the bulky man snarled again.
    “Do you know my name, traveler?”
    He turned his back on her, refusing to answer.
    “Somehow I thought he’d say that. But I’ll remember eventually. I’ve started to remember. The rest will come.” She brushed Jaranda’s dress free of dust. “Let’s get started. The day is too beautiful to waste on the past and regrets and prejudices.” She whistled to the pack beast. It brayed in an obnoxious imitation of an agreement and plodded along behind her. The other steed riders and sledge drivers followed her lead.
    “Your M . . . Your Ladyship, get back in line,” the caravan leader snarled, pushing ahead of her. But he kept marching, no longer finding excuses to delay.
    “Excuse me, do you happen to know my name?” she asked the leader, assuming a place just behind his left shoulder.
    “That ain’t your place in line, Lady. Get back with your outland lover.”
    “Why did I know you’d be as evasive as the others?”

    Jack stood on a promontory overlooking the vale where Margit and Katrina made camp. Even after three days, he struggled to reconcile the double nature of his vision. The massive spell to separate the queen from her cat had sapped his energies to a dangerously low point.
    Amaranth balanced easily on his shoulder. Corby used to perch in much the same spot. Amaranth was heavier, but more willing to please and become an extension of Jack’s magic and personality. A friend. His rich fur brushed Jack’s face and they both leaned into the caress, needing each other.
    Jack had cried the morning he could not wake Corby, but he’d accepted the loss. Corby had been his only—if somewhat reluctant—friend for a long time; much longer than jackdaws normally lived. Corby deserved his rest. Hopefully, he’d pass peacefully into his next existence, into a life without the wild adventures reserved for a magician’s familiar.
    Amaranth chattered his teeth in anxious anticipation of the coming adventures.
    “They’ve come a long way in so short a time,” Jack mused as he stroked Amaranth’s fur. He’d stalked the two women for three days, not daring to approach closer lest Katrina reject him. He’d also husbanded his strength. That last spell had drained him of more energy than usual. More often than not, he was so tired he saw double.
    “We’re very near the border with SeLenicca. I don’t like them camping without a bubble of armor.”
    But if Katrina would Sing as she had Sung in SeLenicca, she might create her own spell of