The Wandering Dragon (Children of the Dragon Nimbus) by Irene Radford Read Free Book Online Page B

woman in all Coronnan.
    What was she doing here in the port tavern?
    “Skeller, I’ll summon Marcus in the morning, before we leave. But I need to collect my staff tonight. I have a feeling I’m going to need it sooner rather than later.”

    I knew that Master Magician Jaylor had children. Two boys, when he and his journeymen backlashed that insidious spell that turned both me and my father into our totem animals. I had forgotten that fifteen years have passed. A child of two at that time would be seventeen now. The right age for an apprentice magician to become a journeyman.
    The right age to draw magical energy from anger. The right age to be vulnerable to my manipulations. The scowling boy who just fled this miserable tavern could only be one of Jaylor’s sons grown up. He is the spitting image of his father, alike in face and form, still growing into his adult height, which will be as tall, or taller, than his father. Even his aura shouts a red and blue magical signature akin to Jaylor’s.
    He wears not the blue leather of a journeyman on journey. Time was, the blue protected them, demanded respect and aid. That time passed even before the Leaving, when all of the magicians withdrew from court, the Council, and all of the larger cities, towns and villages. For his own safety, considering the mood of the people, this boy wears worn country clothes in mud brown that won’t show dirt or stains. The people here in Coronnan City accept magic and dragons more now than they did fifteen years ago. Magicians and dragons help them with the filthy work of cleaning up after the flood—’twas a rogue magician who lost control of that storm and loosed it upon the populace, though the core of his spell was restoring magical order to the kingdom. And restore it did, not order, but me to my proper body.
    But . . . considering recent events . . . I wonder that this boy travels alone and secretively. My Geon noted his magical aura and followed him most of the day. I wonder why the boy skulks around a port tavern and claims friendship with a bard from foreign parts. Could it be . . . ?
    He is ripe. And he is mine.

    Puffy white clouds drifted across the magician-blue sky that deepened toward darkness, casting small temporary shadows on the golden wheat, nearly ready for harvest. Stunted wheat, barely hip high with tiny and nearly empty seed heads. The furrows between rows showed more weeds than spreading crops. The field looked abandoned.
    Lily sighed, resting her pack and the extra sack of seeds on the ground. She’d come to expect as much. But here, along the upper River Dubh, she thought the village in the distance—a crowded jumble of round huts that leaned and sagged at odd angles—beyond the pall of the storm and flood.
    “The Dubh is too small and too far west for the storm surge to have flooded more than a foot or two above the banks,” she mused, turning a full circle, examining the landscape more closely. The line of matted grasses and uprooted shrubs above the current river level showed exactly how high the waters had been.
    Skeller would compose a sad song about this blight on the land. But he’d add a wistful note of hope at the end. A note that his magnificent baritone would hold and swell until the audience smiled in agreement.
    A long, nearly straight ridgeline rose away from the village running east to west until it met taller hills that became the mountains. She could just make out a misty purple smudge in the distance that marked the border between Coronnan and SeLennica.
    A frisson of trouble ran up and down her spine. The land thrummed against her bare feet in an arrhythmic vibration. Something was wrong with the land and the people. Something about that ridgeline pulled and repelled her.
    She shifted her feet and planted her straight hawthorn staff into the ground to center her. She’d seen many a magician do the same. The wood felt comfortable in her grip, conforming to the shape and pressure