The Changespell Saga
Page 60
—Hypatia’s Hoard
Copyright & Dedication
CHANGESPELL LEGACY
Copyright © 2013 by Doranna Durgin
ISBN: 978-1-61138-318-8
Published by Blue Hound Visions, Tijeras NM, an affiliate of Book View Café
October 2013
Cover: Doranna Durgin
Original Copyright ©2002; first published by Baen Books
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously— and any resemblance to actual persons, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
License Notes:
This efiction is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This efiction may not be re-sold or given to others. If you would like to share, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this efiction and it was not purchased for your use, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for helping the e-reading community to grow!
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Author Note:
This is, for now, the final book in the Changespell series. It started as one book, wanted to be two books... the publisher chose not to go in that direction, and I handled it how I had to at the time. Hoo, boy, did that hurt!
But now it looks as though that wasn’t necessarily the end. Thanks to epublishing options, I might just find myself writing another book for Jess. It’s nice to dream, isn’t it?
So thank you. Without readers like you, I wouldn’t be able to have those dreams or to write these books. I appreciate your letters, emails, blog comments, and Facebook posts more than I can ever express, and I love your reviews. It’s amazing to be a part of such a large circle of friends through a mutual love of books!
~Doranna
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Original Dedication
Many thanks to the suspects both usual and new: To Barbara Gompf for things Ohio, to Judith, who always catches the things no one else does, and to Jennifer for the missing scene.
You may blame this book on my agent, Lucienne Diver, who quite wickedly said, “What if—?”
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The Changespell Saga:
Barrenlands (prequel)
Dun Lady’s Jess
Changespell
Changespell Legacy
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Chapter One
Arlen meant to be home before now.
He’d wanted to be home before now.
With the Lorakan Mountains looming on the western skyline and Anfeald Precinct far, far to the east, he reckoned the time remaining until Jaime’s next visit.
He wasn’t going to make it.
From one world to another she would come, from Earth’s Ohio to Camolen’s Anfeald, and she’d find him...
Absent.
Not that anyone would be able to tell her why. Not Carey, his close friend and head courier, who thought Arlen had gone off to the special Council of Wizards in nearby Siccawei Precinct. Not his two apprentices, who thought the same.
Not the Council itself, with its renewed emphasis of confidentiality after the previous summer of rogue wizards running amok in Camolen—a summer in which the Council had also learned to take action sooner rather than later.
So here Arlen stood on the road inn porch, taking action. Quietly, clandestinely... more than a little dangerously.
Even if for the moment he found himself gazing at the moonrise over the Lorakan Mountains with an outland jacket over Jaime’s gifts of silk long underwear and an OSU sweatshirt. His breath frosted the air, riming his grey-shot mustache.
I should be home.
Contacting Anfeald through the wizard dispatch would only reveal his location to the nervous mage lure-runners he’d come here to thwart. The old border guard spells had worked against them once and—thanks to Arlen’s recent efforts—they’d soon work again.
But not until he made it home. Back to warmer Anfeald in south-central Camolen—to the winter-burnt pastures and hills, the turned-over garden fields, the familiar deep respect for his wizardry from Anfeald’s landers and the equally familiar irreverence from Carey in spite of it.
And Jaime. Commuting between worlds... rearranging her life to spend time here with him.
Like most powerful wizards, Arlen rarely pulled himself up into a saddle. Mage travel with transfer booths, town coaches, shoe leather... they all came more easily.
Even so. Come morning, he’d secure a horse and ride to the nearest transfer booth, three townlets down the road in Amses.
Jaime would be waiting. And for once, he thought, Camolen rested quietly around him.
~~~~~
Branches warp and ooze, merging into one another. Fallen leaves compress into a blanket over the earth and melt into the roots of the tree, swirling old golds and dulled crimsons into silvery bark to obscure the small den-hole there. An uneasy ground squirrel bolts for the hole.
Half the squirrel makes it home.
Rich brown fur merges into the mangled red-gold-silver earth where its life ends, following twisted eddies of matter.
Hoofbeats sound in the cold winter air. Dun mare, deep buckskin with black points, a black line down her spine, and wiser eyes than most. Alone, unhindered save for the padded leather girth and chest band holding a courier’s pouch over her withers, she prances to a stop, sampling the air with widened nostrils and the raised neck of a wary posture—alert for movement, for scent, for something on which to pin her attention. To define the wrongness she feels here... the faint scent of corruption.
After a moment, she snorts and moves on, her equine vision unable to perceive the tiny frozen patch of distortion by the side of the trail. Too still, too close for her to see out of that eye at that angle.
With a flick of her tail, Dun Lady’s Jess leaves the birth of death and destruction behind her, and never knows it was there at all.
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Chapter Two
Suliya swept the main aisle of Anfeald Stables with a stomp of boot and brisk, angry strokes. She should have been out on a courier run today, Guides-burn it, not stuck with clean-up chores. Inspecting stalls, re-wrapping bandages, mixing a warm winter mash... and sweeping the inevitable clots of icy mud and wasted hay. Half the horses still remained on the road, slowed by conditions despite seasonal maintenance spells.
No doubt their riders were wind-chilled and more than ready to come in for the day, but Suliya still longed to be one of them. Only Carey made fewer runs out of Anfeald than Suliya—and he didn’t have any choice, not since Calandre had turned her magic on him a year and a half earlier.
Suliya was the last of the couriers hired to rebuild the stable after that summer, and initially she’d counted it a rare opportunity. Anfeald’s reputation was spotless, the horses impeccably bred and trained. Working here provided the opportunity to watch Jaime Cabot apply her unique Earth riding theory—and to watch others take lessons under her, a bonus earned by the top-performing couriers. Working here meant being in Arlen’s hold, and Arlen’s reputation as a man of power had risen considerably these past few years. Working here meant being one of the best.
If she ever got the chance to do anything.
Her spellcorp father hadn’t believed she could make it here. “Try one of the smaller barns,” he’d advised her. “Someplace they might tolerate your lack of discipline.”
At three years old, she’d wandered his giant SpellForge work suite unchecked. At ten, she sat in on his meetings, met her tutor’s requirements, took riding lessons, and charmed everyone she met. By sixteen, she’d been bored and jaded and knew the best way to reclaim her privileged family’s distant attention was to act out in all ways.
And at nineteen, her father overrode her mother and did what she’d never believed possible.
He kicked her out.
Not without SpellForge money in her pocket, but without
direction, without—other than her ability to ride—discernible worldly skills.
But with a goal. She’d show him he was wrong. She could find her own success, make her own way. If she ever got the chance.
If Carey ever took her seriously.
She shoved the broom over the traction-spelled cobble floors, and knew exactly why she’d gone overlooked.
Carey’s girlfriend, that was why.
Carey’s girlfriend Jess, who’d decided to move from Kymmet Stables to Anfeald, arriving shortly after Suliya herself. If it weren’t for Jess, Suliya would certainly have been moved up to a more meaningful position by now, maybe even to a junior courier. But Jess had arrived, taking on the young horses, taking on the occasional run, turning Suliya into the distant backup rider.
And leaving her sweeping the aisles.
The sound of raucous laughter echoed down the hall from the job room; four of the couriers had returned to warm themselves over exaggerations of their past exploits. Envy tugged Suliya.
They’d all been here before her, some of them since the summer Carey was hurt and everyone else had been killed. But still...
She wished she didn’t feel so left out. Or that she even knew how to join in.
At that choice moment, one of the massive front doors eased open before the rising night wind.
“Ay!” Suliya exclaimed, jumping to place her broom over the pile of sweepings—but not quickly enough. The swept hay scattered along the length of the aisle and settled back into the corners from which it had come. A lone dun mare walked into the stable—elegant even in her winter coat, ice on her whiskers and the back of her fetlocks, ice weighting the end of her tail, and a unique harness carrying a bulging courier’s pouch just behind her withers.
Carey’s girlfriend.
Suliya glared at the mare unnoticed as she ran to the door, securing it behind the slight bump in the floor. The dun—Lady, they called her, when she was her horse self—stopped in the middle of the aisle, shook vigorously, and lifted her head with perked ears to scent the air.
“He’s not here,” Suliya said brusquely, taking a hank of the dun’s mane up behind her ears and giving a slight tug. There, Lady’s spellstones clinked along their braids. With them, she could return to her human Jess form—but not here in the middle of the aisle. There was a special stall set aside for the transformation, where Jess kept a change of clothes.
Lady hesitated—but Suliya gave another tug, perhaps not as gently as she might have, and Lady followed her into the stall.
The wrong stall.
Suliya realized it immediately—they’d moved the stall only days earlier, and she’d entered the old one—the one with hay in the corner and finely shredded wood on the floor... and no clothes.
But something wicked spoke within her... something tied to resentment and envy. She slid the stall door closed and walked away.
After a moment, Lady gave a short, sharp snort of annoyed objection.
Suliya went back to her sweeping. Let Lady change to Jess; Suliya would bring the clothing when she was asked. And then maybe someone would notice that she existed at all.
She couldn’t feel the magic when Lady changed, but she heard the bedding rustle and knew it had been done. She kept a sharp ear out for that husky voice as she dumped her recaptured hay sweepings into the waste bin.
Instead, after a long, considering silence, the door slid open.
Jess stepped out into the aisle without a stitch of clothing, the courier harness dangling from one hand. Barefooted on the cold cobbles, she gave no sign of discomfort—or embarrassment—as she headed for the correct stall door. She appeared not to notice Suliya’s near-gaping consternation, nor the startled reaction of two grooms at the far end of the stalls.
She carried herself with absent dignity, and she was beautiful—long lean legs and flanks, erect carriage, masses of dark sand hair spilling down her smooth caramel back, the striking black centerline echoed in a faint dark line down her spine. Suliya was struck by the feeling that this was the first time she’d actually—truly—seen the woman. Seen that she was so human...
And so obviously not.
As Suliya stood frozen with the broom in her hands, she heard Carey’s cheerfully teasing call to the two stupefied grooms—and he cleared the corner into the aisle just in time to see Jess disappear into her stall. Even at this distance, Suliya could see his eyebrows shoot up behind the uncontrolled fall of his dark blond hair. Without hesitation, he came on.
For a moment, Suliya held out the hope that he’d aimed for Jess... but a few strides told her otherwise. Slightly uneven strides, another leftover from the summer that had torn through these stables—but otherwise the perfect image of a courier rider. Tall enough and substantial enough to withstand rough, long rides; lean enough to keep unnecessary weight off the horses’ backs. Old enough to run these stables with an experienced hand, and young enough to make his own traditions.
Suliya thought him to be a hard thirty—and she, at just under twenty, intended to be running her own stable by his age as well.
Or earlier.
But as he approached, she winced inside, thinking of his reputation—uncompromising standards. An eye for detail. And the willingness to do what had to be done, no matter what it was, to accomplish the job—be it delivering a message or saving Arlen’s life.
He wasn’t likely to offer quarter to the lowliest of his couriers.
Then again, she’d only made a mistake. Nothing more.
“What,” he said, nodding his head at Jess’s stall, “was that all about?”
Poot! Fess up. Fess up now.
But instead she said, “I must have put Lady in the wrong stall. We just changed them—”
He gave her a look, one that expressed his protective annoyance—but he didn’t berate her about leaving Jess to walk naked from one stall to another. Then again, he knew Jess best. Maybe he would have anticipated her decision to stroll from one stall to the other. Suliya certainly hadn’t.
Jess emerged from the stall, clothed from head to toe in winter layers—a deep green underlayer beneath brilliant turquoise, the color offsetting the permanently tanned shade of her skin to perfection. Her hair was still wind-tossed, her cheeks still flushed, and the courier harness now settled over her shoulder like a natural extension of her clothes. She stopped once to wriggle a foot more comfortably into its ankle boot; she often fussed with her shoes, and just as often went barefoot within the warmth of the hold itself.
“What happened to that famous horse’s memory of yours?” Carey said, his voice teasing as he held out a hand for the harness. “And how was the run?”
Jess shrugged the harness off her shoulder and handed it to him. “This is my first change since the stalls changed,” she said, glancing at Suliya with larger than normal walnut brown eyes. More perceptive than normal, too, it seemed to Suliya at that moment. She tossed her head in a minute gesture, one Suliya had seen often in the mares at paddock.
“You,” she said, “will not take advantage of my good nature as Lady.”
“I don’t understand,” Suliya said, afraid that she did. She abruptly regretted the wicked impulse that had allowed her to close the wrong stall door and walk away, for she wasn’t accustomed to any of it—the envy, the bitterness, the impulses... she didn’t know how to manage it.
“You do understand,” Jess said. Despite almost two years of human experience, she still handled the junction of vowel and consonant with an awkwardness of tongue—never quite stumbling over the words, but often giving the impression she might. “Going to the stall may have been a mistake. Closing the door wasn’t. If I had been human, I could have hesitated at the stall without breaking rules. I could have refused to go in. I could have pushed my way out before you closed the door. When I am a horse, Carey’s people trust me to do none of those things. And I trust them to treat me honestly.” Her eye flashed annoyance. “If you cannot do that, you will not handle me as Lady again.”
Jess didn’t reply... but she didn’t remove her gaze from Suliya’s.
It wasn’t a gaze Suliya could hold, not when she realized she’d done more than put a woman in the position of asking for her clothes. She’d broken a trust.
And from a horse’s point of view, trust was everything.
Suliya dropped her gaze to the gleam of the cobbles. “I’ll make sure it never happens again,” she said, struggling with unfamiliar capitulation.
Jess merely said, “Yes,” and somehow managed to encompass a plethora of unsaid words. Most of all, Suliya heard the threat to her position here. Surely not... not over such a small thing.
A small thing like trust...
Carey cleared his throat, capturing Jess’s unwavering gaze from Suliya. “And how,” Carey said, “was the run?”
Jess said, “You are changing the subject.”
He grinned, unrepentant; he had a lean face, prone to intensity and sternness of expression; the grin turned changed it entirely. “I’m changing the subject,” he agreed, his words no more repentant than his expression.
Jess thought about it a moment, and lifted a shoulder in an eloquent shrug. “Siccawei was right—part of the river bank caved in. I couldn’t have made it with a rider.” Neither could any other horse, she meant.
Burnin’ poot wrong. Suliya clamped her mouth down on the words. If she’d been the rider, she could have made it. The run to Siccawei was a tough one in bad weather, but most of the couriers made too much of it.
“That bad?” Carey said, flipping through the papers from the pouch. He glanced at Suliya and she suddenly realized that she didn’t really belong in this conversation any more—but she couldn’t quite bring herself to walk away.
Jess said, “Arlen should tell Sherra we can’t make any more runs until a road team fixes it.”