The Changespell Saga

by Doranna Durgin

  He’d helped them build a snowman this winter. With a snowhorse.

  “Yes,” Jess said to both, smoothing the bay’s sparse mane. “Arlen says... Arlen says maybe it’s for the best if we don’t. We can’t be sure what will happen.”

  “But you want to anyway,” Jaime said, her voice soft and understanding. Much more than Carey had expected, with her own decision to devote her life to her riding and not a family.

  He saw the sudden catch in Jess’s shoulders; he heard the cut-off sound she made. It took a moment for his brain to catch up with his eyes and ears, and to realize she fought unexpected emotion. By then he heard it in her voice, in those perfect acoustics; even her tight whisper reached him with clarity.

  “I see the foals,” she said. “They call to me.” It was all there in her strained voice—the longing, the doubt... the fear. Fear of success and fear of failure both. Fear of what who she was might do to her.

  Damn the acoustics, anyway.

  ~~~~~

  The sky bends around the wizards; the air turns into snowflakes of solidified gases, suffocating three of them instantly.

  No direction is safe.

  The others stand their ground, trying to mute the magic flowing around them. Ice-edged dirt shoots from the ground, slicing two of them in half; their bodies melt back into the tangle of roots and rock now roiling at their feet.

  No more are they wizards, no more are they Camolen’s finest. Now they are but terrified men and women, panicking, screaming...

  Dying.

  ~~~~~

  “I’m sorry.” Jaime put a hand on Jess’s calf where she still sat the gelding; her touch felt warm and compassionate. “I wish I could do something.”

  “You listen,” Jess said, licking a tear from her upper lip and feeling the trembling flare of her nostrils, her equine expression of emotion. She sighed and patted the gelding. “I have Carey. Maybe it is too much to ask for more.”

  “I don’t know that I believe that.” Jaime let her hand drop from Jess’s leg. “I think you just can’t stop living your life in the meanwhile.”

  “Okay,” Jess said, one of the earth colloquialisms that she’d brought with her from Ohio and had seen spread through Kymmet stables before she came back to Anfeald. “Tomorrow, I should be Lady, and you ride. Show me the things we talked about today.”

  Jaime grinned. “Only if we get to do some of the fun stuff, too. You been practicing?”

  Jess made a face. “Canter pirouettes... I need help. I need a rider to help me balance. But Carey won’t.”

  “Not yet?” Jaime glanced over her shoulder without raising her voice. “Get over it, Carey.”

  He leaned into the ring so they could hear his reply and said pleasantly, “Mind your own business.”

  ~~~~~

  The palomino hit a frenzy of panic.

  Eyes rolling, ears flattened, he coiled his powerful body and fought the lead rope. The branch cracked; the leaves trembled as though buffeted by a great wind. The distorting world closed in on him—

  —and his lead rope went right through the melting branch, freeing him to gallop as hard and fast as he could, ducking and dodging trees and more than half-blind with fear.

  To his most recent stable he ran, death flickering on his heels.

  ~~~~~

  Jaime, as dignified as Jess had ever seen her, looked over at Carey and said, “Make me.”

  “You know,” Carey said, “just because once I set off one little bad spell inside your barn doesn’t mean you get to push me around forever.”

  “Yes,” Jaime said, “it does.”

  Worry flashed through Jess —but then she caught the sly look in Carey’s eye and the humor lurking at the corner of Jaime’s mouth and she laughed out loud, swinging a leg over the gelding’s rump to dismount. “Anfeald the city has a show tonight with singers and magic-less magic, and Carey gets bored. Do you want to see it?”

  Carey slid between the rails to join them. “I said I’d go.”

  “But you don’t want to,” Jess said, most matter-of-factly.

  Whatever Carey might have said next was forever lost, as the extra-wide ring door slid open with a bang. Jess spooked one way and the gelding the other—and Carey jerked around already scowling.

  But his admonishment went unspoken at the sight of Kesna, the youngest of Arlen’s two apprentices. Her face pale, her mouth working in a hunt for words, her chin trembling.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she finally blurted, stumbling to a stop while the gelding tipped his head to snort at her.

  Carey reached to steady her, and Kesna threw her arms around his neck, sobbing. With awkward uncertainty, he patted her back, looking over her head to Jaime with a plea in his eyes.

  Jaime joined them to rub a gentle circle on Kesna’s back, and Kesna’s sobs only grew in intensity. Jaime said, “Maybe we should find Natt?”

  Kesna shook her head, and said into Carey’s shoulder, “Natt’s talking to Siccawei. He’s trying to understand what happened—”

  “Kesna,” Carey said, a hint of impatience behind his concern, “what did happen?”

  She looked up at him, revealing a face Jess found to be alarmingly red with emotion. “We all felt it,” she said. “So many of them...”

  “Kesna,” Jaime said, exchanging a glance of trepidation with Carey, “what?”

  “They’re dead,” Kesna said, clenching Carey’s lightly padded jacket. “They’re all dead. “ She sobbed. “Arlen—”

  The shock of it hit Jess like a buffeting wave of air, turning everything else distant and remote. Kesna’s sobs faded away, Jaime’s shocked comprehension barely touched her; even Carey’s grim and obvious denial meant nothing.

  The apprentices felt it. They’re all dead. Arlen—

  The Council, that’s who she meant. It’s who she had to mean. The untouchable, the powerful, the core of all of Camolen’s magical protection.

  Arlen’s Council.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter Five

  Death.

  Arlen reeled on his horse in a sickening wave of weakness; he clutched the saddle pommel, fumbling the reins.

  The horse plodded onward.

  Death. A plethora of it.

  Deep tendrils of cold worked their way through his jacket layers and wrapped themselves around the heart of him. He swayed; his thoughts went grey and distant.

  But he clutched the saddle and he didn’t fall, although the horse lurched as it broke a path through the snow.

  Other travelers delayed, waiting out the morning chill—but Arlen had planned to reach the travel booth in Amses this morning, and from there to warmer Anfeald and Jaime.

  A plethora of it...

  Only with the Council did he have such close group ties, forged by years of personal communication over distance, years of arguing and working together.

  Had it been all of them?

  He loved none of them, he respected most of them, he on occasion wanted to slap some sense into all them. Eighteen Council wizards including himself, though only seven with major Precinct Holds like his own... and then there were those touchy western provinces over the Lorakans whose senior wizards kept to themselves.

  Sherra? he thought, reaching for her despite distances from which she was unlikely to respond or even hear him. Darius? Tyrla?

  Their silences didn’t mean anything... or so he told himself. Not at this distance.

  Arlen took a steadying breath, watched it plume out in the air. He gathered his reins as the horse lowered its head to navigate the snow, its single-minded intent carrying it closer to an accustomed herd and freshly forked hay.

  Single-minded. He, too, had to be single-minded.

  Arlen shut out the cold and his fears and the dark shout of denial buried deep inside, and focused on his goals. Reach the travel booth. Pull every bit of rank and influence to jump the line.

  Get home to Anfeald and—

  For good or bad, find out what the silenc
e meant.

  ~~~~~

  “Go to Arlen’s rooms,” Carey snapped, to no one in particular—and to everyone—feeling that grim, overwhelming and familiar weight settling on his shoulders. Make it happen.

  Fix something, deliver something, save something... no giving up, no matter what.

  This time, more than ever, Arlen would be depending on him. “Go to his rooms. Now. Have someone else put that gelding up, Jess, and don’t say anything about this. Jaime, can you make it on your own?”

  Jaime struggled to respond, her throat bobbing; she swallowed hard and then the words burst out of her. “Hells, yes, I can make it! I need to know what’s going on!”

  So did they all. “Come on, Kesna,” he said, pushing Kesna away. “Pull it together. If you’re right about this, losing the Council won’t be the end of it.”

  If she was right. As overwrought as she was...

  Maybe she was wrong.

  He saw the same thought reflected on Jaime’s face as she grabbed Kesna from the other side, and between them they escorted her to the tunnel-like rear entrance of the hold itself. Carey took them up a back way, one that was spelled to stay locked for anyone besides Arlen, Carey, and—recently—Natt. Testament to her mindset, Jaime didn’t question him about it—not when they took the first turn she probably hadn’t even known was there, not when they spilled out of a stairway into Arlen’s workroom.

  He’d broken all the rules to show it to either of them—but Kesna would hardly remember, Jaime could be trusted, and it was far better than trying to explain Kesna’s state to everyone they passed. Far better than starting a panic until he could confirm what had happened... and what they needed to do next.

  He deposited Kesna on the stool and gave Jaime a glance of request—stay with her—as he strode from the room.

  He found Natt at the side of a long desk in the corner of the apprentices room—the dispatch desk. Auntie Pib, grey-haired and spare, sat at the desk itself, her hands reflexively moving to sort messages still visible only in her mind.

  He’d come to know her very well during the time Jess was at gone to Kymmet.

  And he knew her well enough now to see that her normally chocolate skin bore a subtle undertone of grey, and the ever-present tremble of her aged hands had worsened considerably.

  Natt turned to Carey with the gravest of expressions on his round face; he, too, seemed unsteady on his feet, his chunky body wavering. “She’s overloaded,” he murmured. “We need to get relief, and set short rotating shifts.”

  “Can you call someone?” Carey tapped his summons ring against the desk.

  “I only learned how to use the rings not long ago. It didn’t even occur—”

  “Do it,” Carey said abruptly, and Natt frowned—as though he hadn’t expected Carey to take over, Carey who was Arlen’s closest friend and who had been working in this hold since he was in his early teens.

  But Natt’s hesitation was short; it evolved into relief. Someone else would make the decisions.

  Carey wished he could say the same.

  He allowed Natt a moment of concentration to make the summons—just about the time Jaime appeared in the doorway, only glancing at the crowded interior—desks, bookshelves, and a long pastoral mural painted on the wall where a window might have gone. “Kesna’s useless at this point. She just keeps repeating that the Council is dead.”

  “That’s all she knows,” Natt said. He pulled his hands down his face, briefly stretching his features out of place. “It’s all we know. And we have this.” He handed a scrawled, red-bordered note to Carey. “It came from Siccawei’s secondary hold. They don’t have a regular dispatch service there; it was probably all they could do to send this as confidential. And they’re clearly not going to say anything more through dispatch at all. We need to send someone...”

  He trailed off as Carey took the paper; Jaime crowded in close. The note was addressed broadly to the Secondary Council, and to the First Apprentice for each Council wizard. “Council ambushed.”

  “Send contact,” Jaime finished, perfectly able to read the script, just as she spoke Camolen’s common dialect.

  “Confidential means they’re not willing to transfer any more information through even the secure dispatch methods,” Natt told her.

  Carey glowered, albeit at no one in particular. “Or it means they don’t know anything else.”

  ~~~~~

  Dayna had felt the start of it. Less sensitive than some to the personalized effects of magic, she’d nonetheless been the first to feel the raw magic. Maybe the only.

  Outside the Council, no one outstripped her ability to detect it, and no one outstripped her ability to wield it—when she was allowed to use it in the first place.

  In truth, no one else wielded it at all.

  This raw surge had been an unshaped magic, without so much as will or intent behind it. Just a careless wave of power, one that somehow entirely lacked its classic backlash. And yet—

  Look what it had done.

  The instant she’d felt it, she’d known. She’d charged through the shock and gasps of the hold, found Trent holding his fractious palomino by an inexplicable stub of lead. The stallion Sherra had ridden out that morning.

  “Get Katrie,” Dayna told him, as if he was hers to command.

  But he’d done it without hesitation, surrounded by the grief of young wizards.

  Now Dayna sat on a little bay horse Jaime’s brother had once dubbed Fahrvergnügen and looked at the incomprehensible landscape before them, wishing.

  Wishing she hadn’t been one of the few who’d ridden out to find Sherra when the palomino stallion had returned alone to Second Siccawei.

  Wishing she wasn’t standing on the edge of a warped, diseased section of woods that looked like nothing more than a particularly disturbed Dali painting, a scene of carnage so beyond her imagination that she could barely comprehend it.

  Wishing.

  Katrie, tall, strong hardened Katrie, came out of the snow-covered bushes wiping her mouth; she pulled the bota from her gear and rinsed her mouth, spitting. “Sorry,” she said, swiping fingers through short, pale blonde hair.

  “No problem,” Dayna told her tightly. “I only wish I’d done the same.” Instead, all the horror sat in her stomach like a cold poisoned rock. She shivered, drawing her fur-lined hat down over her ears.

  Of the wizards who’d come here, there remained little sign.

  The area sat quiescent in an unnatural mix of colors, heaving ground, and distorted trees—maybe an acre of it, with a central blot of bright red that had once probably been a bird.

  A grasping hand jutted from one of the trunks, dripping skin. A scrap of someone’s perfectly preserved scarf rippled in the frigid breeze, pinned by metallic leaves. Dayna thought she saw someone’s bottom protruding from the ground, but couldn’t tell without a closer look... and wasn’t about to take it.

  Trent turned a tight circle on the fidgety palomino as he searched the woods, finally resorting to a bellow. “Sher-ra!”

  Katrie and Dayna exchanged a dark glance; Katrie shook her head, rewrapping her scarf around her ears.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dayna said, as Trent moved off the trail to repeat the call. “Let him look. Just don’t let him get too close to... that.”

  “No,” Katrie said, direct and immutable disobedience. “I’m staying here, with you.”

  Dayna looked at her in surprise, and suddenly understood. With the others dead, she’d suddenly become more valuable.

  She was the only one with a working understanding of raw magic, which somehow played a role in the tragedy before her.

  She was one of a very few taken in for personal schooling, even though she felt it had nothing to do with her aptitude—as an offworlder with a feel for forbidden raw magic, where else would she have been placed but under expert supervision?

  But because of that supervision, she’d learned in leaps and bounds; she’d thrived under that expert tutelag
e. And that meant she was among the few remaining wizards with the skill and mindset to find out what happened.

  And to keep it from happening again.

  If they could.

  But for all her experience—unwanted, unasked for experience—Dayna had always been a cog in someone else’s wheel. When she got outrageous, when she made terrifying make-a-difference decisions, she’d always been with the catalyst of her friends.

  So when she got back to Second Siccawei, she sent a message out to Carey, Jess and Jaime... and she even wished for Jaime’s annoyingly irreverent brother Mark.

  We need to talk, she said, hoping that between them, they could make some sense of this tragedy, untangle the threads that needed to be tugged and followed and eventually cut.

  But it occurred to her, too...

  Maybe she just didn’t want to be alone.

  ~~~~~

  The tingle of the courier ring against Suliya’s left forefinger came as such a surprise that she absently scratched the finger twice before realizing she’d been summoned.

  She headed for the stairs, leaving her musings behind with the tack she’d been cleaning—her certainties that she could play by the rules Carey set, even though she did disagree with Jaime sometimes.

  That young gelding today, for instance... she’d have held the rein closer to his shoulder, not further out, giving him firm restriction instead of more room. Let him learn to listen.

  Her confident thoughts came to a stuttering halt at the top of the stairs, where she faced the long hallway—apprentice rooms off to the right, Arlen’s workroom to the left, and his personal rooms at the end—for the first time since her arrival.

  She hadn’t been expecting the soft sounds of crying from the workroom.

  Across the hall, sounds of conversation drifted out—a brief exchange of raised voices, Carey’s included. A peek into the workroom showed her nothing, although someone was there... somewhere... crying.

  A glance into the apprentice room stopped her short. The older, dark-skinned woman sat at her desk, crowded by Arlen’s older apprentice—and Carey, Jess, and Jaime. Jaime’s arms were clenched so tightly around herself it was a wonder she could breathe; her eyes looked red-rimmed and haunted, her face pale.