The Changespell Saga

by Doranna Durgin

  “Saddlebags, Jess,” Eric said.

  “She does that sometimes,” Dayna interposed, licking a small square and pressing it onto one of the rectangular papers. “Just like all our clothes are blankets and that—” she pointed to the robe belt, “—is a girth. She might not know English, but she’s got a few words she won’t budge on.”

  Jess’s phantom tail switched in annoyance. She went through the naming routine again and then tugged at the robe on her arm. “Dayna,” she named it.

  Dayna gave her a puzzled look. “You know that’s not me. That’s a robe—or a blanket, if you have to have it your way.”

  Impatient, Jess snatched the cap from Eric’s head. “Eric.” The small stick from Dayna’s grasp. “Dayna.” The saddle and bridle. “Jess.” The saddlebags. “Carey.”

  “What—?” Dayna exploded.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Eric said, tumbling over his words so Jess understood none of them. “I think I get it. The robe belongs to you, Dayna, and so does the pen. The cap is mine—and the saddlebags belong to someone named Carey?” He directed the last at Jess, who let out a sigh of relief and finally sat. She looked him right in the eye and pointed at herself. “Carey.”

  “What!” Dayna repeated. Her voice rose considerably.

  “Easy, kiddo, now is not the time to push feminist power lingo on her. I think she’s really trying to tell us something.”

  “What, that she belongs to someone named Carey? Slavery’s out, in case you hadn’t heard.”

  “Dayna, relax, okay?” He held her gaze until she looked away and nodded, a silent language at which Jess was much more adept. Then he gave Jess his attention. “Jess...you understand us, don’t you? A little?”

  Jess tried her first nod, a gesture she’d seen many times and finally now understood.

  “The saddle and bridle are yours,” Eric said slowly, pointing at her.

  Another nod.

  “The saddlebags belong to your friend Carey.”

  She thought about that a moment. She wasn’t sure about friend, but... “Carey,” she affirmed, drawing the saddlebags closer to herself. Then she reached for the bridle. The metal pieces made the comfortable homey clatter she knew so well, and she folded her hand around the double-jointed snaffle to enclose the copper roller that had often entertained her tongue. She looked deliberately at Eric and touched her chest, where the old robe once again gapped between her breasts. “Carey.”

  Eric retrieved his cap and thoughtfully jammed it on his head, while Dayna looked first at him and then at Jess before finally exploding out of the chair. “I’m not going to encourage this. The sweats should be dry by now—I’m going to get her dressed.”

  Jess had snorted and shied at Dayna’s sudden movement, but settled quickly. Eric still listened to her, and she dismissed Dayna to give him all her attention. She studied him across the table, her thick hair unheeded where it had settled in her eyes. He was a tall man, rangy but without her own athletic build. His face was a little too spare, but she liked his eyes. They were dark, slightly up-tilted, and nothing but mild. In them were none of the rules that flickered in Dayna’s eyes. Jess had been ridden by men whose eyes reflected such self-imposed rules—but not for long. They invariably started a battle for possession of the reins and Carey never let these unyielding riders continue. Jess thought of Carey’s hands: give and take, request and thanks. She stared helplessly at Eric, knowing she just didn’t have the words to explain.

  “Jess,” Eric said, nothing more, just the name he’d given her. He’d seen the frustration and loss in her face, and that one word held his own helplessness: the inability to fix things for her. He touched the saddlebags, a curious touch nothing like her own. “If these are Carey’s, why is the bridle yours? And the saddle?”

  She stared another moment and dredged up what words she could. “Carey...feeds me.”

  “She takes care of you?” Eric said, seizing gratefully on her effort.

  “Yes.” Then she frowned and said, tentatively, “He.”

  “Is he your husband? Uh, brother? Father?” Eric tried, sinking back into their failure of communication when Jess responded to each with a slight shake of her head.

  “Were you together in the woods?”

  “Running. Yes.” She thought of that chase and scowled.

  “Where did the saddle come from?”

  “Jess.”

  “I know it’s yours. But surely you weren’t running with that thing.”

  Jess seemed to grow a little taller where she sat, hearing his apparent understanding. “Yes!”

  Baffled, Eric said, “Running with a saddle. With Carey. We found you and the saddle—” he said, looking bemused over the whole image, “—but where’s Carey?”

  Jess lost her grasp on words, leaning forward with a tremble of intensity. In a flash of insight, Eric said, “You don’t know!”

  “Yes!” Please, please, help me find him.

  The unspoken plea was not lost on Eric. “But you want to know, don’t you,” he asked softly. “Of course you do. What’s his last name? We can call a few places, see if he’s there.”

  Jess sat back, defeated. She shook her head and looked down at the bridle in her hands.

  Eric put his chin on the heel of his hand and sighed. “No last name. That’s going to make it a lot harder. What were you running from?”

  Jess heard Dayna come up behind her and stop. She lifted her head, listening for further movement, and returned her attention to Eric when Dayna seemed content where she was. “Men,” she explained, and pantomimed the notch and release of the arrow that had hit Carey. “Jess—I—run for Carey. Until—” and she repeated the pantomime.

  “You ran for him,” Eric repeated without comprehension. “You mean you ran with him?”

  “No,” Jess said confidently. “For him.” She flung her head up, and her clean, strong features held her pride. “Fast. Strong. I,” and she touched her chest again, “run for Carey.”

  Eric shook his head again. “Sorry, Jess, I just don’t understand.”

  Jess picked up the bridle, splaying the fingers of one hand to spread the crown piece and the other to hold the bit out in front of her. “Horse,” she said, clearly, watching his face for comprehension. “Dun Lady’s Jess.”

  Eric stared, first in the bafflement of non-comprehension, then the shock of understanding. “Jess—” he protested, as Dayna cut in from behind.

  “That’s just great. I don’t think there’s anything we can do for her, Eric.” Her voice held the finality of judgment, the finality of her rules. Jess’s pride drained away, and fear took its place—for finality shone through that rejection, and meant the loss of this safe place.

  ~~~~~

  I can’t believe I let Eric talk me into this pointless little trip. Jess was probably on the loose from some institution, and the only thing they could do was return her—and return the saddle, bridle, and saddlebags from wherever they’d been stolen.

  It could do no harm, he’d argued. Dayna was less sure of that, but somehow here they stood, in the aisle of the Dancing Equine Dressage Center, waiting for Jaime Cabot to finish cooling out her horse so Jess could have a better look around.

  “I don’t know what good you think this is gonna do,” she muttered, once again to Eric, while Jess waited between them and stood very tall, drinking in the scents and sounds of the stable.

  Eric, once again, shrugged. “She says she’s a horse. This’ll give her a chance to see, well, that she can’t possibly be.”

  “If it was that easy, someone would have straightened her out long ago.”

  Another shrug. “Maybe Jaime can talk some sense into her. Anyway, she knows a lot more about horses than we do.”

  True enough. Jaime competed in the upper echelons of dressage and could swap horse jargon with the best of them. “It’s pointless,” Dayna intoned, crossing her arms. She leaned against the plank wood wall and stared sourly at Jess’s tall straight bac
k. Her choppy hair was more evident from this vantage; although the front strands fell just short of her shoulders, there were also coarse lengths that fell unevenly to the middle of her back. And though Dayna had classified the odd color as similar to dark wet sand, there seemed to be some kind of darkened stripe running through the middle of the unparted mess.

  Jaime, a short woman dwarfed by a tall young Hanoverian, led the animal to its stall at the far end of the aisle and hauled the heavy stall door closed behind it. She twitched the end of her long dark braid behind her shoulder and came to meet them, looping the lead rope around her hand. “Hey, guys, what’s up?” she asked cheerfully.

  “We found a friend who’s...interested in horses,” Eric said, casting Dayna a glance as he spoke up before she had the chance. “Jaime, this is Jess. Think she could look around?”

  “Sure,” Jaime said. “Just let me turn Silhouette into the ring first.” It took only a few minutes to turn the stalled mare loose in the indoor arena at the end of the aisle. Dayna glanced at her watch, a distinct message to Eric that she had no intention of showing up late for work because of this futile venture.

  Jaime took them on a stall-to-stall tour, telling Jess a little about each of the horses—boarders, competition horses, retirees. Jess shivered, a bundle of curiosity and intensity and movement, greeting each animal with an exchange of puffing breaths—and, for two of the horses, squeals of annoyance. Jaime’s expression changed from curious to poker-faced; when they reached the end of the aisle they left Jess leaning on the arena gate, watching Silhouette play, while Jaime led Eric and Dayna to the opposite end of the stable.

  “Who the hell is this woman?” Jaime asked bluntly. “She’s damned odd.”

  Eric offered a smile. “Dun Lady’s Jess.”

  Jaime’s hazel eyes narrowed. “That’s a horse name, not a woman’s.”

  “Exactly,” Dayna said, staring hard at Eric. “That’s the problem.”

  “Come on, you two. As long as you brought your little joke here, you might as well let me in on it.”

  “Both barrels,” Dayna warned her. “We found her at Highbanks yesterday. She was naked and scared to death; she had a saddle and bridle with her. She doesn’t know much English, or much of anything else for that matter, but she did manage to tell us that she’s a horse.”

  Jaime gave a snort of laughter, but her amusement died away when they didn’t laugh along with her. She looked at Eric for confirmation and he gave an apologetic shrug. “Well,” Jaime said, her voice too level, “she does have the coloring of a dun.”

  Dayna stood momentarily speechless, until Jaime smirked; she smacked the equestrian on the arm. “Not funny.”

  Jaime’s smile faded only slowly. “What else do you want me to say?”

  “We were sort of hoping that just being here would knock some sense back into her.” Eric looked over both women’s heads to the ring, where Jess now frolicked along with the frisky mare. As if inexorably drawn to the sight, the three silently moved down the aisle.

  Unaware of or unconcerned about their presence, Jess played chase with the leggy bay mare, a romp punctuated by abrupt pivots and change of course. Agile and quick, Jess matched the mare move for move, bluffing out her charges and squealing in mock anger when they closed on one another. Dayna’s too-small sweats and Eric’s too-big shirt did nothing to hide the fluid movement of the body beneath.

  “She’s definitely an odd one,” Jaime murmured. “As close to a horse as anyone I’ve seen.”

  “You’re not serious,” Dayna said in horror.

  “Just thinking.” Jaime nodded at the ring. “Look at her. The color and texture of her hair...she’s a dun all right, Dun Lady’s Jess. Did you see the way she greeted the other horses?”

  “Great. She’s been studying up,” Dayna said flatly. She squared off to face Eric. “Look. I want to help her as much as you do, but I don’t think there’s anything we can do. She belongs somewhere where they can take care of her. If you don’t call the police, I will. I’ve got to go to work and I can’t fool around with this any longer.”

  Jaime winced. “I can see you’ve been in complete agreement on this one.”

  Eric lowered his voice, earnest as ever. “But Dayna, she’s learning all the time! If we just give her a little longer, she’ll be able to tell us just what’s happened and who she really is.”

  “We should have called the police in the first place. They’ll probably know who she is—maybe who Carey is, if he even exists.” Dayna shook her head, her voice softening for the first time. “I know you want to help her. So do I. But—” she broke off as Eric’s up-tilted eyes widened, and turned around to find that Jess had abandoned her play, and stood well within earshot. Her eyes were wild and alarmed, and as Dayna took a step forward, hand outstretched in a gesture of reassurance, Jess whirled and sprinted away.

  In an instant, Jaime had nimbly hopped the gate to follow her, shouting behind her, “She’s not going to stop!” a warning Dayna understood only when she saw Jess crash into the gate at the opposite side of the ring. By the time she’d followed Jaime and Eric over the first gate, Jess was through the other side, the second gate swinging in her wake. “Damn,” Dayna panted under her breath, losing ground at every step. She reached the other gate in time to see Jess confront the five foot paddock fence; she gave an enormous leap and dove over it, then seemed stunned when her arms gave way on landing. She managed to untangle herself and bolt away on the run again, with nothing between her path and fields of waist-high corn, when Jaime shouted the word that changed everything.

  “Whoa!”

  Jaime’s voice rang with authority; Jess stumbled. No more than a moment’s hesitation, but still enough to allow Jaime to close on her, to stand at the paddock fence and speak softly, reassuring her with words Dayna couldn’t hear. Eventually Jess climbed back through the fence and Jaime took her hand and held it as they walked together, through the paddock and past Dayna and Eric and into the ring where Silhouette waited, exhilarated and pleased by the excitement. Bemused, Dayna followed, and Eric closed the gate behind them.

  Jaime led them into the stable office and seated herself on the short couch, pulling Jess down beside her. Eric perched on the edge of the desk and left the desk chair to Dayna.

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Jaime said firmly, “but I do know you haven’t dealt fairly with Jess.”

  Dayna felt a scowl form on her face—until she looked at Jess and recognized, with a stab of shame, the betrayal brimming in those dark eyes.

  Jaime nodded at her reaction. “If you’re going to make decisions about Jess, I think she needs to be in on the conversation, don’t you?”

  “But she doesn’t really understand,” Dayna protested feebly.

  “No?” Jaime arched an eloquently skeptical eyebrow. “She understood well enough to know you’d washed your hands of her.”

  “You’re right,” Eric said suddenly. “Jess, I’m sorry.”

  She regarded him silently, neither forgiveness or judgment on her face, only doubt.

  “Jess,” Jaime said matter-of-factly, “Dayna and Eric are concerned about you. They don’t know what’s happened to you, or why you behave differently than we do, and they’re trying to decide how to best help you.”

  Jess held her breath for a moment and let it out in a deep sigh. “Good girl,” Jaime said, and squeezed her hand.

  “Did you understand that?” Dayna asked Jess in surprise. At Jess’s nod, she added, “You didn’t understand us when we found you though, right?”

  “No,” Jess said, then hesitated, glancing at Jaime, who nodded encouragement. But instead Jess shook her head and brought her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them to look at no one, obviously not trusting them enough to try to convey her thoughts.

  Eric said softly, “You thought we would help you and we were talking about sending you away. We might be strange to you, but everything else is twice as strange, isn’t it?”
>
  Jess nodded mutely.

  “All right,” Dayna said, finally catching the mood of this forthright conversation. “There are some things we need to know. Have you been sick lately? Been in any kind of a hospital?” Jess shook her head, and her hands crept down to the bony knobs of her ankles to feel the dressings that covered her scrapes. “Have you done something wrong, or against the law?”

  A decided shake of her head.

  “Where do you come from, then?” Dayna asked in frustration. “Why is everything so strange to you?”

  Jess shook her head helplessly. “Send me away...?”

  “Jess—” Eric’s quiet voice and helpless shrug took the sting out of his words. “We don’t how else to help you.”

  “Carey,” Jess said, a heartbreaking plea.

  “I know,” Eric said.

  ~~~~~

  Late afternoon. With Dayna on her way to work, the others retired briefly to Jaime’s house to call around in search of Carey.

  “We’re calling the places where Carey might be if he was hurt, or if he went for help,” Eric explained absently, dialing the first of the emergency numbers listed on the telephone book’s inside cover. He perched atop a stool, balancing the white pages on his knee, the phone crammed between his neck and shoulder. Jess sat quietly at the kitchen half-bar while Jaime poked around in the refrigerator, eventually pulling out a plastic soda bottle. Ice, then glasses...she felt Jess’s gaze on her as she poured the drinks and pushed them across the bar.

  Jaime might have guessed that Jess’s eyes would widen at the carbonation, though perhaps the sudden giggle was less predictable. Jess checked to see that Eric’s drink behaved in the same bubbly way and tried a sip, then a swallow. She looked absolutely astonished at the belch that followed; in the background, Eric smirked, but Jaime tried to keep a straight face. “That happens,” she said. “But when it does, it’s polite to say excuse me.” In the back of her mind, she tried not to ascribe any significance to the fact that horses were incapable of belching, that Jess was certainly paying attention to the details if she knew her surprise was appropriate.