“You want to go home, don’t you?” Derrick asked, sounding reasonable.
“And so do you. You’re not about to just give up those stones.”
“They won’t work for me. It reads like an empty stone to me. Maybe you were just lying about them.”
Carey shook his head. “I wasn’t lying.” He was suddenly aware of the chill in the water that rushed past his legs, and he waded to the shore—a less vulnerable position in any case. Now he was close enough to see that Derrick had done well in this world. Probably provisioned, as Carey had been, with the gold that was fairly plentiful in their world but worth a great deal in this one. He’d kept himself clean, his dark hair handsomely styled. He’d even—and Carey confirmed this as Derrick tried out an affable smile on him—gotten his teeth worked on. “No, I wasn’t lying,” he repeated, although he hadn’t been telling all of the truth, either. “I was hurt and drugged—do you think I could have lied to you?” It was just a small matter of not mentioning the correct spell was keyed into his new stone—not the regular onyx recall that Derrick would have tried to trigger.
“No,” Derrick said, “I don’t think you could have. And that leaves me with a useless path home, and without the spell. You want to go home? You give me the spell, and I’ll give you your spellstones. I’ll take my chances at getting home—they won’t be any worse than they are now.”
“You lie!” Lady said, still standing in water up to her knees, tossing her head back to once again lay back those non-existent ears. “You would never let us go like that, and be stuck here.”
Carey smiled at Derrick, but it was without humor. “Even Lady can see through this one, Derrick,” he said. “You keep the spellstones, I’ll keep the manuscript.” Maybe only in my head, but it’s still mine.
Derrick shrugged. “I just thought it would be easier this way—for both of us. I’m willing to do it the hard way—though you might not think so much of it.”
“You might as well settle in here, Derrick,” Carey said, as though he was offering serious advice to a friend. “Don’t waste the rest of your life chasing after that spell. It doesn’t really matter anyway.”
Derrick frowned, for the first time losing the thread of the conversation.
“Do you think they’re all in stasis back in Camolen?” Carey sent him a look of scorn. “Arlen’s already sent another courier and I wouldn’t be surprised if the checkspells are in place by now.” Meaning none of them would get home unless Arlen, in some fashion, came looking; a recall spell based on magic that had been checked was worth no more than a recall spell in Derrick’s pocket.
To his surprise, Derrick laughed. “You’re right, at that,” he said. “Life goes on in Camolen. But don’t forget that Calandre, too, is part of that life. There was a strike set for Arlen’s little hole in the hills—it should have gone off about the same time we ran you down.”
Carey couldn’t help his consternation, and Derrick laughed again. “We’ve had one of his recall spells for a year, now. You remember that girl who disappeared on her first run?”
Carey remembered well. The young woman had been sent on an easy run with an insignificant message. They’d put her disappearance down to accident, not ambush. But if Calandre had truly engineered her disappearance, and had one of the recall spells that would gain her access to Arlen’s little fortress.... “Those recalls go to a shielded holding room,” he said; he had the only two-layer recall that would take him within the hold if he made the extra effort to trigger it. “Magic won’t get her out of there.”
“No, but she can work magic within the room...and stone can be moved.” Derrick’s slyly pleased expression suddenly became unbearable.
Carey mustered his temper. “It could have gone either way,” he said, and kept his sudden, deep worry to himself. “Give me the spellstones and I’ll take you back with me—but the manuscript is mine.”
Derrick laughed again, well pleased with the overall effect of his negotiations despite his failures. “It was worth this little jaunt just to see you try that one out on me,” he said. “Of course the answer is no. But don’t worry—I’m sure we’ll be talking again soon enough. Until then.” He made a brief, courtly obeisance to Lady, and walked back onto the open park lawn.
Carey looked at Lady, and found her shivering in the water. Eric looked no happier. And Carey himself felt the bright sunshine had somehow dimmed.
It was certainly no longer enough to keep him warm.
~~~~~
Jess sat in the hay loft amidst the cutting-season overflow, her body arranged over several levels of bales. She was supposed to be tossing them down into the aisle to be stacked in the stall below her—but she hadn’t even started yet.
Not that it mattered. Jaime rode Sabre, who’d for the most part recovered from his shock, and she wouldn’t notice Jess’s inactivity for some time yet. And Jess was feeling out of sorts. Some of it, she felt, was due to the shorter days of this world compared to a Camolen day, an observation Carey had recently made. But most of it was her deep distraction with the movie she’d seen the evening before.
There were lots of things about the movie that she loved. The characters’ Aussie accents, which helped her to realize that lots of people talked differently, and that her own still-faltering syllables were nothing to be ashamed of. And the tough little mountain horse who raced, without hesitation, over terrain that reminded her of some of her own runs, and who wasn’t so different from her own deep dun color. But when the wild stallion had been intimidated and rounded up, she wasn’t sure she considered it the happy ending everybody else did. And she was mightily puzzled over the significance of pressing lips together. Kissing.
Jess rolled over on her back and wiggled against the hay, letting its scratchy roughness find all the itches between her shoulder blades. Then she lay there, and closed her eyes, and took herself back to the times of running with Arlen’s small herd of courier horses. She could pretend that had been freedom, but in reality, she’d belonged to someone. The stallion hadn’t; he’d been truly free, and magnificent, and in the end, conquered. And she thought she should feel unhappy about that, but she couldn’t quite manage it—because the part about being a horse that her mind most often strayed to, the memories she caressed and savored, were those moments she and Carey had been in such accord that she read his every thought through the mere tension in his muscles. And the stallion, wild, would never know such partnership.
A sigh; a few more wiggles for that one, hard-to-reach spot. Being owned wasn’t such a bad thing for a horse, she decided. But she wished Carey would realize she wasn’t only Dun Lady’s Jess. Not anymore.
Abruptly, she sat and hopped down off the hay, and, with a quick check to make sure Keg wasn’t in the aisle below, began shoving bales out of the loft. Ten more minutes had them stacked neatly in the stall, and she meandered out of the barn into the rising temperatures of the early summer morning. Mark’s abandoned soccer ball lay in the shade of the house, and she toed it closer, nudging it along in a desultory way as she wound through the obstacles of the picnic table and lawn chairs.
“Too warm for soccer, Jess,” Mark yawned from the back doorway. “Geeze, last night’s shift was a killer. Had all the guests for a wedding, must’ve been some kind of biker thing. They really know how to party.”
Jess, typically straightforward, asked, “What is kissing for, Mark?”
Mark blinked, did a deliberate double-take. “Whoa, Jess—yeow. You sure you don’t want to ask Jaime about that?”
“Jaime is busy,” Jess said, pushing blithely onward. “Every time we look at the TV, there are people kissing. Why?”
“Um,” Mark said. “Because...it feels good.”
“Show me.”
He put both hands over his face and drew them down slowly so his eyes peeked over his fingers, full of misgivings. “Well, Jess, that’s usually something two people do when they like each other.”
Jess frowned. “I do like you.”
She did, then, understand a little of what he was driving at. Special, in a way that she’d almost deliberately avoided considering because it was simply too much when added to everything else. “I have to understand,” she said slowly. “If Carey takes me home, there will be no more chance to learn. If I have to decide, stay or go, I want to know all the things I’m deciding about.”
Mark bit his lip, staring at her, hesitating. “All right, but...Jess, people kiss for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes just because it does feel good, but usually because they love one another. I can show you how it’s done, but...it won’t be the same.”
Jess nodded, and waited, and he closed the short distance between them, gently touched two fingers to the side of her chin, and gave her a soft but definite kiss. He drew back to look at her, and this time it was she who blinked, considering. Warm. Nice. But nothing wonderful. She drew her teeth over her bottom lip where she could still feel the contact, and gave him a quizzical look.
“Didn’t make your hair stand on end, huh,” he said. “I’m not surprised. It’s different when—”
“Do it again,” she said abruptly, and, at his raised eyebrows, added a contrite, “Please.”
“Again,” he repeated, and sighed, but didn’t offer any argument. Instead he simply kissed her, tasting slightly of bacon and coffee, lingering, giving her the chance to respond. And she found that she did, that there was some small stirring deep within her, and that there was more pleasure when she kissed him back. She began to understand the point to it, and when Mark stepped back to look at her, she just stared at him, touching her mouth and thinking that a horse’s mouth wouldn’t do that.
He grinned, and opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it closed along with his eyes as the grin turned into a grimace. Jess only then heard the footsteps she should have noticed long ago, should have swiveled her ears to catch, and to know it was Carey. She suddenly felt as discomfited as Mark looked, although she wasn’t sure why. She turned to face Carey as he stopped by the lawn chairs, his hazel eyes dark with anger.
“What in Nine Hells do you think you’re doing?” he snapped, the anger in those eyes turned on Mark, a few unconscious steps taking him all the way up to Jess in a protective posture. “You might as well take advantage of a child—”
“I asked him,” Jess interrupted, and had to repeat herself to be sure he’d taken it in. “I asked him. I wanted to know.”
He stared dumbfounded, and, stumbling over the words as though she’d somehow lost her tenuous knack of shaping them, she said, “I see people kiss in the TV stories. I saw you kiss women, in the empty stall next to mine. I wanted to know, Carey—why does that make you mad?”
Mark cleared his throat, filling in the gap of Carey’s flabbergasted silence. “I told her,” he explained quietly, “that it was something for people who had special feelings for each other. But there’s nothing wrong with getting her first kiss from a friend, Carey. Lighten up. Better that she asks and knows about it before someone does try to take advantage of her.”
“You could have asked me,” Carey told her, the storm of anger fading to puzzled hurt.
“I—” she started, stopped short by the utter inability to voice that she couldn’t have asked him, because that would make it matter too much. And then he had her by both arms, a possessive grip that drew them close, and when he kissed her there was no time for analyzing the feel of having him close—she simply was, centered on the pressure of his lips and the fire that made her heart thud almost painfully in her chest. He released her mouth, gave her lips one last gentle nibble nothing like the ardent touch he’d just relinquished, and stared directly into her dark, widened eyes.
“Is that what you wanted to know?” he asked, a rough, low question.
“Yes,” she whispered. And he stepped back, deliberately released her arms, gave Mark a hard stare, and left them there.
She watched him go, barely feeling the pat Mark gave her arm. Through the haze of her emotions, she heard him say, “It’s all right, Jess,” but it wasn’t—for she suddenly knew that if she followed her newly discovered, very human heart, it would take her to Camolen with Carey—where she would lose it to an equine form.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Ten
“My, you certainly do devour these books,” the young librarian said, smiling at Jess. “You haven’t been reading very long, if I remember right.”
“Not long,” Jess agreed, fingering the spine of The Magician’s Nephew. She could still feel Carey’s embrace, still lose herself in all those feelings—all the anguish of knowing the choices she faced if he found a way to take them home. The inner tumult drove her to ride into town with Mark, where he dropped her off at the library. There she could lose herself in the next installment of the Narnia series, leaving reality behind for what seemed like a familiar world.
After all, she saw nothing strange with traveling between worlds and talking to animals.
She retrieved her library card from the woman and smiled her thanks, then took her treasure to the comfortable stuffed chairs in the reading section to linger as long as she could, wrapped up in the adventures of Digory and Polly.
At nine o’clock, one of the librarians apologetically ushered her to the door and locked it behind her. Jaime wouldn’t be here until after her last lesson, another 45 minutes. Jess stood in the slight chill of the night air, a warm day gone drizzly, and heaved a sigh for the loss of her refuge. There was nothing to keep her mind away from the changed nature of her need to be with Carey, the odd sweet twist she had never felt before. Perhaps because it was nothing a horse could feel. What was the point, then, in returning with him, if she would only lose the very feeling which drove her to be with him?
Except if she didn’t, she would be stuck with it and stuck without him, and she had a hunch it would be a hundred times worse than the pain she’d felt when they’d first separated on this world.
There was only a scuff of warning, enough time for her to straighten in alarm, raising her head to cast futilely for scent in the slight breeze. And then a man grabbed her arm from behind, a tight grip that did less to stop her wild defensive reaction than the cold, hard feel of metal at her neck and the biting, newly familiar scent of gunpowder.
“It’s been a long wait,” Derrick said in her ear, “but I think my luck has changed.”
~~~~~
“You leave Carey alone!” Jess demanded, sitting on a torn, dusty couch in an old house behind something Derrick had called the whyemceeay.
Derrick exchanged an amused glance with Ernie. “It’s you that we’ve got,” he said.
“To try to get him,” she insisted. She was angry and hard put to sit still, but she also far too aware of the gun Derrick now held casually in his lap. At the same time, she had the strangest feeling that although Derrick was not one who could be trusted, she was, in some strange way, safe here—as long as she followed their rules. They’d made it plain enough that the current rule was sit still.
“No,” Derrick corrected. “To get the spell.”
She frowned at him, trying to figure out this bizarre human game, finally shaking her head in exasperation.
“You really were his horse, weren’t you,” Derrick mused, another turn of mood Jess couldn’t quite follow. He left the gun on the seat of his shabby chair and approached her, leaning over her, one hand reaching out to control the tilt of her head—though he hesitated at the warning that flashed in her dark eyes.
“Be professional, Derrick,” Ernie said, bored amusement in his voice. “This is business, not playtime.”
Derrick shot him a dark look. “I’m not paying you to preach. If you believed what I’ve told you, you’d be a lot more interested in this woman.”
“I’m interested in the money you’ve promised me,” Ernie said, bitingly candid. “Although I admit you’ve p
rovided a little amusement as well. And here I thought my little retreat from the Columbus heat was going to be boring.”
Derrick didn’t bother to answer; he might not even have been listening as he stared thoughtfully at Jess. Then, watching for her reaction, he said, “I’ll call your master in a few minutes. I think he’ll trade the spell for you, don’t you?”
Would he? For a woman he considered to still be a horse? Jess shook her head, feeling stubborn and glad that the true answer was one that could confound him—which it did.
“No?” Derrick said in surprise. “I saw the way he looked at you at the park. Very protective, he is. He’ll understand that there’s no point in holding on to the spell when he can’t get it back to Camolen, anyway.”
“Neither can you,” Jess pointed out, perplexed and a little suspicious that this obvious fact had escaped him.
“Can’t I?” Derrick asked, his expression turning truly smug and making an otherwise attractive face momentarily detestable. “Just because I’m adept with the physical aspects of my role, little mare, doesn’t mean I don’t have other skills. It’s true I could never come up with this spell on my own, but I think I can eventually use it to return home—although, as I told Carey, Calandre will have accomplished her goals through other means by that time.”
“If you can not make the spell yourself, you will never get home,” Jess said, willing to do almost anything to wipe that look off his face. She well remembered it, through different eyes, from the moment when Derrick had stood in his stirrups and released an arrow at Carey. “The spell is gone.”
He laughed. “You have learned a lot from your time here. Nice try, but I don’t believe you.”
She wanted to kick him. “Carey tried to use it and it blew up!”
His amusement died away, his eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, it blew up?” Then, as the greater significance hit him, he grabbed her shoulders and asked, “You mean he accessed magic from this world?”
She was too startled, too angry, to do anything but fight his touch. She instantly kicked out at him, and would have squirmed from his grasp if he hadn’t snatched the hair at the back of her head with an iron grip, forcing her head back, forcing her to stare at him.
The Changespell Saga Page 15
