The Changespell Saga

by Doranna Durgin

  Well. She traced her finger along the distinct wood grain of the table and decided that maybe, just maybe, she had really gotten a handle on how magic should work in this world.

  Unfortunately, that still didn’t mean she had any true place on this team. She was here to analyze the evanescent feel of a spell—be it a changespell, or the checkspell they were working so hard to develop. She wasn’t part of the actual development work. And with her reaction to raw magic, it was harder to reach that feel at all.

  Still, she’d saved them time; they were nearly finished with a checkspell that would protect herbivores. Of course, she couldn’t do any more with it until the spell was done, when she would help proof it.

  The work flow left her waiting out the gaps between their need for her.

  She closed her eyes and cast the spell to bring up the latest public news, not surprised to discover the dispatch dominated by the fires in Kymmet. They’d been contained but not extinguished, with considerable loss of crops and woodland—and there was still wild speculation about the cause, including reports of a magical, flying fire snake. Yeah, and Bigfoot lives, too. With the ground so dry, it only surprised her that that this was the first big fire.

  Hoofbeats broke through her less-than-perfect concentration, and she broke the dispatch connection. Any distraction was a welcome one, this morning—as long as it wasn’t a repeat of Willand’s little greeting.

  When she reached the porch off the kitchen, Carey had reached the hitching rail there, swinging off his horse before it even stopped as though he didn’t think twice about such a thing.

  Carey?

  He wasn’t supposed to be making this run—and Dayna saw why, too. After one easygoing stride toward the porch, he came up short. He walked the rest of the way in a much more conservative gait, and Dayna thought he’d have been limping if she wasn’t watching.

  “What’re you doing here?” she said, wrapping her arm around a porch column and leaning into it.

  “Hello to you, too,” he replied, but the grin on his face was genuine enough. “Arlen sent me, of course. He wants you to know what really happened up in Kymmet. I’ll stay overnight and take your work back tomorrow—don’t worry, no one expects your spell to be ready early.”

  What really happened in Kymmet? “It was Bigfoot?” she blurted out.

  Carey gave her a pointedly blank stare, and started again. “Arlen sent me,” he said, deliberately slow with his words. “About Kymmet. They’re trying to keep this thing quiet, and since I was already in on it because of Jess—”

  “What about Jess?” Dayna interrupted.

  This time, he stopped long enough to give her a curious and somewhat amazed look, and asked, “Haven’t you been tapping into the wizard-level dispatch? You really don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Dayna shook her head, not trusting her voice, which was sure to snap something angry simply because she felt stupid. No, she’d just been skimming the public layer of the news. It hadn’t occurred to her that the Kymmet disaster merited more—after all, the outlaw group was here in this area, somewhere between Anfeald and Sallatier, and she was right in the middle of that. No need to check wizard gossip, right?

  Apparently not.

  “Does anyone here have the slightest idea of what happened in Kymmet?” Carey asked, his incredulousness tinged with irritation.

  “We’re busy,” Dayna said archly. “So do you want to come in and tell me about it, or do you want to stand out in the heat?”

  Carey shook his head. “Yes, I’m coming in. I need to take care of the horse first.”

  “Oh, Rorke’ll do it,” Dayna said. “You look—”

  Worn out, she was going to say, but stopped herself at his sudden sharp look. “You look like there’s a lot for us to catch up on.” She invoked the simple spell that would tap Rorke on the shoulder and let him know where he was wanted.

  “Nice save,” Carey told her. “But you’re right, I’m tired. Give Rorke a call.”

  “I just did,” Dayna said, frowning; Rorke’s acknowledgments were usually swift and accurate. “Give him a minute, I guess.”

  But the minute passed, and then another, and Carey shook his head. “I’ll be back in a moment. If anybody else is free, have them join us. I don’t want to spend the rest of the day answering the same questions.” He returned to the horse and mounted up, riding down the lane to the barn while Dayna scowled and pinged Rorke again, heading off to roust the rest of the team from work. Only Teriyah pried herself away from the spell, and not without complaints at the interruption.

  “I thought it was finished,” Dayna said, as they entered the kitchen. She hunted up a mug for Carey, filling it with the last of the tea in the cooler. She frowned at that, too, because Rorke never let it get this low without brewing more.

  “I thought so, too.” Teriyah wrinkled her nose slightly as she entered the kitchen. “But you know Hastin—he looked at the section that protects Jess from the checkspell, and decided we’d tied it in all wrong. Alsypha insists it’s fine, and they’ve got the whole thing torn apart again.”

  “Again?” Dayna said, astounded and dismayed. “Good God, Teriyah, it’s just a prototype. You don’t think the Council’s going to invoke it without going over it, do you? Someone needs to kick Hastin in the butt.”

  “I said as much,” Teriyah agreed, rubbing her hands over the sallow skin of her face; she hadn’t looked well since their arrival here. “You’d have thought the Council would have known better than to put a perfectionist in at this stage of the process. Bet anything it was a political appointment. What’s God?”

  Dayna made a face. “Something I should remember not to say around here.” Movement on the porch caught her attention and she called, “Come on in, Carey. Knock the mud off your boots.”

  “Ha ha,” Carey said, opening the door and throwing himself into one of the table’s wooden chairs. “I could do with a little mud right now, myself.”

  “You remember Teriyah?” Dayna said, without prelude. “So tell us what’s going on.”

  Carey downed the tea in one long draught, his throat bobbing. He wiped a trickle of it from his chin with the back of his wrist and slouched back in the chair. “Got you interested now, huh? Well, you ought to be. There’s a lot going on out there.”

  “Just tell us,” Dayna said, starting in on a good glower.

  Carey waved it away. “If you’ve only listened to the basic level news, you probably think the fire was natural—flared up, spread fast, and was put out. But it was actually some sort of fire construct, created with a rudimentary search spell tacked on. No one felt the magic, so you know what that means. The Council’s clamped down pretty hard on the news—even on the wizard level dispatch, you wouldn’t have heard it straight out.”

  “Then how come you know?” Dayna asked bluntly.

  “Dayna!” Teriyah said, looking at her askance.

  “It’s all right.” Carey gave Teriyah a tolerant grin. “I’m used to her.”

  Dayna made a face at him, but wasn’t to be distracted. “How come?”

  “Because,” Carey said, and his eyes grew sober fast, “the spell was after Jess. She and Ander were in the middle of the mess.”

  “Jess!” Dayna felt the clutch of it, even as she knew Jess was all right. She had to be all right. If she weren’t, he’d be with her.

  So it was Teriyah who got to the question first, even though she couldn’t finish it, her exhausted eyes a mirror for her concern. “Is she—?”

  Carey shook his head. “She’s healing. They lost both horses, and waited it out in one of those deep-cut drainage creeks. As soon as they’re fit to travel, Jess will come back to Arlen’s. It was a mistake to let her go in the first place.” Something in his expression darkened, but he cleared it away and looked up at Dayna. “Kymmet Stables has good healing wizards, so it’s nothing to worry about it.”

  “You think not?” Teriyah asked. “So far, those outlaws have
kept a low profile—at least, except for taking Jess. But a fire construct was a damn noisy thing to do, and a much greater threat than turning a few animals to people.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Carey said dryly. “The thought of being turned into a sheep isn’t very appealing, either.”

  “But that woman—Renia—said only one wizard was doing that, and that he was bucking the others to do it,” Dayna objected. “So maybe it was just one with the fire snake—” but she stopped. The thought that a single wizard could pull off a massive fire snake was hardly comforting.

  “That’s another thing,” Carey said. He rose and moved stiffly to the sink, where he drew a glass of water and handed it to Dayna; she cooled it for him and set it down in front of him. This time, he only downed half of it at once. “Renia’s dead.”s

  “She’s what?” Teriyah said.

  Dayna said flatly, “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “What didn’t? Renia died from mage lure withdrawal. Arlen didn’t learn much from her, but we do know that Ernie—yeah, that Ernie, though he’s calling himself Dayton—is involved. He gathered the outlaws, offered them mage lure, and started them working on the changespell.” He shook his head. “Willand tried to kill Arlen through Renia. When that failed, we figure she went after Jess.”

  Teriyah leaned back in her chair and let out a slow breath. “Mage lure,” she said. “That certainly answers some questions.”

  Dayna barely heard her. Ernie? Mage lure? “What the hell is mage lure?”

  Teriyah looked very tired indeed. “Supposedly, just an old story—a drug that enhances a wizard’s ability. Most people have never heard of it.”

  Suddenly Dayna understood—and all too well. “That’s how the outlaws are pulling off all this super-magic!”

  Teriyah nodded. “And maybe why no one could recognize the signatures. Willand probably broke herself out of confinement, and no one could tell it was her.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dayna said slowly—thinking hard, thinking about how she’d traced Willand’s ominous message and how she hadn’t told the others because she shouldn’t have been able to. Thinking about all the little spells she’d finally mastered, believing it was because she’d eliminated her penchant for raw magic. “It enhances a wizard’s ability... oh, God.” She buried her face in her hands, and muttered through them, “Damn, damn, damn!”

  “Dayna?” Carey shifted in his chair.

  Maybe she wasn’t right. But...

  The wine. They’d been drinking stocked wine.

  Just a small glass in the evening, mostly. Mostly. Except for Rorke. Besides, Carey had said there were side effects, but everyone here was fine. Weren’t they?

  Dayna half lowered her hands to free up her eyes, looking at Teriyah’s inexplicable exhaustion. “Damn,” she repeated, turning it into a mantra. “Damndamndamn.”

  “Dayna, what?” Carey’s exasperation overcame his concern.

  But Teriyah had caught Dayna’s eye, and her jaw dropped slightly. She shook her head, understanding... not wanting to believe.

  “Rorke,” Dayna said abruptly. “I can’t find Rorke. He doesn’t answer a summons, he wasn’t in his room—”

  Carey turned in his chair, facing Dayna. He hooked his hands around the arms of her chair and pulled her closer with a jerk. “What,” he said, “are you talking about?”

  She was close enough to see the dirt smeared across his face, and the catch of it on stubble gone unshaved that morning. Close enough to read the exasperation and alarm in his clear hazel eyes.

  Close enough to watch his reaction as she said, “We’ve been drinking their wine.”

  “Guides-damn!” Carey said explosively, throwing himself back into his chair.

  “We have to tell the others,” Teriyah said, her voice low. “I... I’ve felt some changes since we got here. But they’ve been so small... and it’s not like I’ve been doing anything I find particularly difficult. This checkspell is more about detail work than it is about power. And if our signatures modified slightly over time...”

  “We didn’t have that much,” Dayna said, and knew she sounded like she was convincing herself.

  “I think you’d better find Rorke,” Carey said.

  “That wine,” Dayna said, feeling suddenly savage. She wanted to pour it out on the ground, all of it. She catapulted out of her chair and past Carey’s astonishment, straight to the closed pantry door—invoking a glowspell and jerking the door open at the same time—

  She staggered back with a strangled sound of dismay.

  “Rorke?” Teriyah said, her voice broken.

  Dayna nodded, turning away from Rorke to put her back against the door. The smell of that hard death hit her strong, now—a mixture of vomit and feces and sweat. His body was stiff and twisted, his back arched, his face distorted into a grotesque mask.

  “Side effects,” she said, her voice hardly louder than Teriyah’s. She looked at Carey and saw a reflection of her own stricken expression in his face. “I guess we don’t have to wonder anymore.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter Twenty-One

  No one had wanted Jess to ride back to Anfeald. No one.

  But Jess needed space.

  She’d been trapped with Shammel. She’d had to submit to healers, to hovering interviews, questioning wizards, and worried friends. She was tired of being on edge, of being surrounded by people who moved too fast around her.

  She’d argued for the ride. They’d argued it was dangerous and too physically taxing. She’d turned stubborn; they’d gotten frustrated with her.

  Ander had made the difference. “Shield her,” he’d said to the stable wizard. “Four days of easy travel. You can do it with less effort than sending her the mage way.”

  And he, of course, could come with her.

  It was a compromise she’d grabbed. Ander learned fast enough that she wasn’t in the mood for chatter, and if she ached far more than she expected from even the leisurely ride, she wasn’t about to admit it.

  She spent her time thinking about the changespell. Her changespell. As soon as she’d heard the new checkspell had gone into effect, she’d tested her spellstones to see if she could change to Lady.

  It did, she discovered, take a slightly different twist of effort, but was no more difficult than it had been before.

  Of course, then she’d had to find someone to change her back. It was only in the course of moving around that she realized that her equine self, with no collarbone, moved much more easily than her human.

  Lady. Lady would have given her relief—if only she could change back again on her own.

  And Ander was wrong. Her Lady-self could learn.

  Jess would accept nothing less.

  They rode into Anfeald at noon of the fourth day, under a sky that wasn’t so much overwhelmingly hot as simply resigned to being without rain.

  They were beset upon much as she’d imagined over lunch, with questions and speculation about the fire snake, while Arlen mused about the high strength but low quality of the search spell, which hadn’t managed to find her in the unexpected dimension of the ditch.

  Jess let the conversation turn to noise against her ears—Jaime and Arlen and his assistants, with Carey gone on a run—then ducked away from Ander, who had become markedly reluctant to let her go off on her own.

  She found her way to the old pasture tree to sit against the trunk, gazing out on the struggling grasses and thinking about her foalhood here. There was a certain... innocence to those days, before she’d learned the tricks of a horse who carried secrets for which others would kill.

  But even after she’d learned to shoulder other horses off narrow cliffside trails, to drop flat and lie quiet, to charge full-speed through areas with deadly footing by dint of sheer repetition... even then, she had been full of innocence compared to what she was now.

  Jaime’s footsteps approached from the lane, slowing. Jess tilted her head to the side, just enough to let Jaime know
she’d been noticed, and Jaime came on. She knelt beside Jess and sat back on her heels—silent at first, as she ran her hand through her hair to lift the soft cut of her bangs from her forehead.

  After a moment, she said, “It was hard to get a word in edgewise at lunch.”

  “Yes,” Jess agreed.

  “Dayna’s okay,” Jaime reassured her.

  Jess just looked at her, and Jaime laughed. “Okay, she’s not happy. But she’s still okay. And she’s safe—she and the others are at Siccawei. Sherra thinks that mage lure withdrawal is similar to a magical backlash—the wizards have all that magic in their systems, and suddenly don’t have any means to control it. She’s decreasing the wine bit by bit, and they’re monitored by someone who can channel the magic—raw magic—into something harmless. Everyone seems to be doing pretty well with it... but the wine supply’s going to be a little tight.”

  Jess just looked at her, and Jaime knew her well enough to understand that she’d gone into human idiom as of yet unfamiliar to Jess. “I mean that they’re going to run out of wine before they’re through needing it. But they hope things will be under control by then. Not that Dayna takes that lightly.”

  “No,” Jess said, emphatic as she thought of Dayna. “Dayna would not.”

  “I was thinking...” Jaime said, giving Jess a sidelong look, “we should visit her. Everyone here has been too busy to think about it. But if both of us pester Arlen and Natt, maybe we can get there.”

  “We could ride,” Jess offered.

  Jaime hesitated, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  Jess didn’t try to convince her. “I’ll pester,” she said. “I want to see Dayna. I want to know more about the changespell.” What she really wanted to know was if the team had found any more victims, but she thought Jaime would understand that. And...

  “I can’t change back yet,” she said without preamble. “I mean, Lady can’t change back yet. Ander doesn’t understand why I want to be able to do it all myself, but—”