With a sigh, he stuck it in the outermost pocket of his saddlebags, pried Grunt away from the faint wisps of remaining hay, and tacked him up. He paused to ask the attendant where he might find Lilton Trail, after which he waited for the lad to duck back inside and promptly headed in the opposite direction.
Walking fast.
By midday he found himself sitting on a rock and staring at darkening slate clouds with the gloomy suspicion that they would bring not snow, but cold rain. He cut a round slab of spiced trail sausage while Grunt pawed the slush to uncover slumped winter grass.
From his rock, Arlen eyed the mildly rolling landscape. Huge tracts of unclaimed land mixed with cultivated fields, still covered by traces of snow; the wavering peaks of plow furrows had emerged to trace the ground with brown lines. Bright winter birds played along the edge of the road where the brush grew thick, scolding Arlen. The road stretched before him without a single recent track.
Perfectly normal. Perfectly quiet. If you didn’t count the magic-hobbled wizard on the run and his rough-gaited horse.
Grunt eased slyly away to tease a few brush twigs into his mouth. But he stopped in mid-chew, his ears pricking sharply forward, the end of a tender branch sticking out of his mouth and forgotten. He snorted—a harsh, sharp noise with an extra huff of exhalation at the end.
Except Arlen didn’t see anything. Looking as hard as he could right where Grunt had riveted his gaze, he saw absolutely—
Oh, here now. What was that?
Just on the other side of the road, nearly hidden behind the brush... He left Grunt rustling happily within the brush and approached the heaving ground with some caution—although probably not enough.
Just exactly the sort of thing the Council had gone to look at. A disturbance. Nothing violent, just something strange enough to gather them all.
He felt nothing from the goo. No sense of magic. After a moment, the ground stopped heaving, becoming a melon-sized spot of crackling hard dirt and brush and snow, swirled and intermingled.
He wanted to enclose away, spell a pouch to carry it and study it as he traveled—but using magic was pure folly this close to the town in which he’d been attacked. Pure folly almost anywhere, until he reached his defenses at Anfeald.
Use raw magic. It leaves no signature.
The thought made him grimace. He might have cast his first true spell at the age of three, but at two he’d tickled the family dog with raw magic, causing a backlash that put him in bed for a week, left him under supervision for a year, and left his parents wary for several more.
Worst of all, the dog had never approached him again—a loss that molded Arlen’s perception of raw magic as strongly as all the years of indoctrination to follow.
Which didn’t mean he couldn’t handle it. Especially when it was the only thing left to him.
He gave the quiescent blob a little poke.
Suddenly he felt two years old again, stumbling back from what he’d done—watching the blob explode into a frenzy of activity and with no idea how to make it stop. Grunt snorted loudly from across the road and Arlen bounded over to him, jerking his lead rope loose and hauling him down the road. Grunt snorted and jigged sideways and made him work for it.
By the time Arlen looked back, the blob was quiet again... but no longer did it seem quiescent. No, now it... lurked. It lurked like so much wizard bait.
What if someone in the Council had tried raw magic in the presence of such a thing?
Not likely.
Arlen was the most adventurous of them, the most radical. If anyone had done it, it would have been him... and he hadn’t been there.
Then...
What if someone else had done so? If they’d known the consequences, waited for the Council to close in, and lobbed raw magic into the mix.
Someone allied with those who had sent the man in the stable.
Supposition. Guesswork. A Guides damned worthless exercise in flinging thought around.
Arlen turned his back on the unsettling blob and led Grunt down the road at a more sedate pace while the horse snorted wetly and let him know he was not forgiven for his unseemly behavior. All supposition.
Besides, the real question remained unanswered.
From where had the blob come in the first place?
~~~~~
Carey left Jess still sleeping, loathe to wake her on this day when he’d say goodbye. She slept hard in dawn time, only the faintest hint of a frown between her brows. He crouched beside the bed, stroking the black stripe of her bangs in her dun hair, trying without success to smooth that frown away. Braveheart. She’d always been that to him; she always would be.
But before long he felt a faint tickle in his chest and he stood so he wouldn’t clear his throat in Jess’s ear. He blamed that tickle for his own wakefulness, but he somehow doubted even a spell could have put him into a solid sleep. Not the night before Jess—with her honest love and her honest grief—still nonetheless felt driven to leave under circumstances that meant they might never see each other again.
Not with the magic so quirky... and with things clearly going downhill in Camolen.
He thought of Gifferd’s partner and grimaced, grabbing a T-shirt off the pile Mark had provided and slipping out the door to tug it over his head.
There was something about being the first one up in a dwelling full of people. Something special about the rare quiet time as he moved quietly about the kitchen, setting up the coffee maker for Dayna and Mark and pouring himself a cola. And something startling about the protective feeling that surged up in him, the desire to make of himself a shield against anything that might wake them on this day that promised to be so hard.
Hard on Dayna, who had to find it within herself to hold together fraying magic... with the responsibility of her friend’s life in the balance. And hard on Mark, who adored Jess like a younger sister and who had introduced her to her first Dairy Queen, her first bologna sandwich... and at her own request, her first kiss.
Hard on Jess, who’d been pushed past the breaking point with their human behavior and decisions.
And hard on him, even though he deserved every minute of it and more.
Only Gifferd—ostensibly asleep on the living room couch, although Carey wouldn’t be surprised if he’d known the moment Carey left the guest room—had little to lose with the day’s events. And Ramble, with much to lose, didn’t seem to comprehend the stakes; he knew only that Jess intended to take him home, and back to his natural form.
A cough nudged at him, so he flicked the coffeemaker on and took his cola outside with a small plate of thinly sliced turkey meat, a morning combination about which Dayna routinely made derisive noises. He went out to the neat white board fence along the back yard, and watched the sky prepare for sunrise.
He wasn’t surprised when Gifferd joined him, his arm neatly bandaged, bare to the waist in those expensive slacks which spurned wrinkles even when used as pajamas. It was obvious enough that Gifferd’s expensive clothes served as camouflage—hiding not an average body but a whipcord physique in outstanding condition. Carey hadn’t stood a chance the day before, and he hadn’t even known it.
Gifferd greeted him with a nod and stood in a remarkably companionable silence. Knuckling his chest, Carey said without rancor, “Just how the Hells hard did you hit me yesterday?”
Gifferd said, “Harder than you know. Luck ran with you on that one.”
“Yes, I felt lucky,” Carey said, desert-dry sarcasm. After another moment during which the purpled clouds brightened to orange-red and the flat Ohio horizon made way for the sun, he added, “I was a little surprised to find you still here this morning.”
“The sleeping accommodations weren’t that bad,” Gifferd said, so low-key it took Carey a moment to realize there’d been humor hidden in his words. “Look, SpellForge took a chance when they left things out. I like to fill in the gaps. I make my own decisions, when the gaps matter this much.”
Carey snorted, and had
to clear his throat. “You must fill in a lot of gaps, then.”
Gifferd only shrugged again. “It doesn’t always matter. It might not this time, either.”
“Your faith in them is stronger than mine,” Carey muttered.
“Maybe,” Gifferd said, in a voice that indicated or maybe not.
“And when you fill in the gaps, what if you decide SpellForge has the right of it? What then?” Carey set the green plastic tumbler on top of a fence post and turned to put the newly exposed disk of the sun at his back. “You’d better know right now—” But he had to stop, to work through a series of deep, rale-filled coughs that took him by surprise—but not so much that he couldn’t shoot Gifferd a look of deepest annoyance.
“Give it a few days,” Gifferd said, not unsympathetically.
“You’d better know,” Carey repeated, picking up where he’d interrupted himself, “as pathetic a threat as it must seem, you’d better not turn on my friends. If you so much as look wrong at any of us—”
“If I ultimately believe my orders were given in good faith—? No. I won’t turn on you without warning. That’s not how I work,” Gifferd said, matter-of-fact enough so Carey believed him utterly.
Which is what made his spine chill when Gifferd added, “Not unless you try to return to Camolen before I’m ready.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Twenty-Three
Carey had brought her grapes.
Jess stared at them, sitting in a bowl on top of an upturned bucket along the outer wall of Ramble’s stall, and her throat instantly swelled shut with unexpressed emotion.
She knew it had been Carey. Only Carey, hunting a bittersweet parting gesture, would know how deeply her weakness for grapes truly ran. Big red seedless grapes... She put her fingers on her lower lip to stop the quiver there. She wasn’t about to have it seen.
Especially not by Suliya, who seemed to crave companionship this morning as much as Jess craved solitude.
“It’s just no burnin’ wonder,” Suliya said, with no apparent concern whether Jess listened.
Jess didn’t. Not truly. She fingered the duct-tape wrapped film canister Mark had more or less competently sewn into one thin new braid, one that would fall at Lady’s withers instead of just behind her ear with her spellstones. They’d written messages in a tiny computer font and rolled the folded printout into the canister, after which Carey had labeled it with Jaime’s name.
Still, Jess wished there was a way to equip her with the courier harness. It bore Anfeald’s mark on the breast collar, making it clear that Lady worked in an official capacity. Without it, she was sure to lose time evading well-meaning attempts to catch her before she was ready to be caught.
Jess pulled a big juicy grape from the bunch and popped it into her mouth, savoring it. Savoring the gift. She barely noticed that Suliya was still talking.
“I thought he just didn’t believe I could do it. Handle a position in one of the big stables, that is.” She gave Jess quite a serious look.
Sweet grape. Jess had another, and offered one to Ramble through the partially open door. He took it, and then he took her hand. Stroking it, examining it... and then just holding it.
Suliya said, “But now I think he didn’t want me around the big holds with their Council-level wizards... places I might say things about SpellForge he didn’t want heard.” She snorted. “SpellForge the wonderful, making people’s lives easier. SpellForge the innovative, providing services. What good is all that if you’ve got Gifferd-types running around behind the scenes like big bootin’ bullies?”
Jess murmured, “Your father cares what you think.”
“Ha!” Suliya said, and snorted again, flipping her hair over her shoulder with an insouciance that only made her wounded expression more obvious. “He didn’t want me talking to people like Arlen.”
“But you didn’t know anything about Gifferd-types,” Jess said, gently pulling her hand from Ramble’s, unable to follow Suliya’s logic and suspecting perhaps there wasn’t any. “You didn’t know anything about what’s happening.”
“I’ve been all through the SpellForge development area,” Suliya said, sounding very much like the haughty Suliya of old. “I wouldn’t have told secrets, of course—but there’s no telling what a top-level wizard might find significant.”
Ramble persisted, bringing Jess’s hand back into the stall, leaning his brow against the bars. “Going home?” he asked, not for the first time that morning.
“Yes,” Jess told him. “Soon.” And to Suliya, “If he is the kind of man to use Gifferd-types, he is careful enough to make certain you saw nothing of importance to his bad secrets. He cares what you think.”
“Ay!” she said, offended. “As if you’ve spent so much time in a spell corps facility to know what is and isn’t important.”
“Be rude to someone else,” Jess told her, offering another grape and moving away from the stall. After the previous day, Ramble made no attempt to leave his safe area. He spent a great deal of time making soft snorting noises at the remains of Gifferd’s partner.
Suliya offered her own hand to Ramble, who wasn’t interested. She flung herself to sit on the hay bale that would precede Jess and Ramble to Camolen. “I just don’t spell it,” she said. “It is a company that makes people’s lives easier and provides services. Why do they need someone like Gifferd?”
Jess shook her head. “I used to think I understood human things, but now I know I don’t. And that was just small human things, like friendship and how you are with one another. I have no answers about big things like companies.”
Suliya gave her a funny look, all her excessive mannerisms momentarily abandoned. “Jess,” she said, “friendship is the big thing. And you have that. You have all these friends looking out for you—all the couriers at Anfeald, that guy Ander who visits from Kymmet and wants you bootin’ bad, and Mark and Jaime—and I swear, everyone who meets you. I hated the way you had so many friends so soon after you got to Anfeald, and I had none... And you have Carey. The big friendship, if you trail my meaning.”
Jess looked at Ramble—still leaning against the bars, regarding her with clear possessiveness. Simple. Unmistakable. “I know what you think to say,” she said, “but I’m not sure you are right. Or if you are, that I can understand enough to be with those things and... manage.”
Suliya sunk back into herself. “Some people just don’t know when they have everything. You don’t want Carey? Fine. Send him my way. I know what to do with—”
But she broke off as one of the double doors slid aside, filling the aisle with indirect sunlight—and with Dayna, Mark, Gifferd, and Carey.
Only Gifferd looked largely unaffected by recent events. Dayna’s smile came across as wan and tired, as though the magic of the previous day had continued to drain her through the night. Mark pulled off sunglasses to reveal worry that didn’t belong in those largely carefree eyes. And Carey...
She couldn’t look at him long enough to understand that expression. But then, she already knew he didn’t want her to go. Didn’t want there to be consequences to the moment he’d walked out into this barn to interrogate Ramble. Or the moment before that, when he’d taken a palomino stallion and brought him to this world.
Jess didn’t want there to be consequences, either. But there were.
“I don’t understand,” Suliya said, “why we don’t all just go home. Right now. We came to hear what Ramble could tell us, and we have. Let’s go back then, okay?” She added the American colloquialism awkwardly, but pleased with it.
Oddly, Carey glanced at Gifferd, a subtle reaction that made Jess glance at the man herself. Carey said, “You’re safer here right now. For any number of reasons.”
Jess heard the subtle threat beneath those words. She didn’t think Suliya did—she certainly didn’t hesitate. “But Jess is going back. And Ramble.”
“Horses,” said Ramble unexpectedly, startling them all.
“That’s the crux of it,�
�� Gifferd agreed. “They’ll be two horses in a disrupted land. Even if SpellForge sends out a team to their arrival site—”
“They cannot catch us,” Jess said scornfully. SpellForge had not been a consideration in her decision. She was taking Ramble back to go home, not to play a role in human games.
“Maybe,” Gifferd said. “More likely, they won’t think to try.”
“They wouldn’t think to look for me, either,” Suliya said. “They don’t know I’m here. It’s Dayna and Carey they really want, I’m spellin’.”
Gifferd said nothing, but his light brown eyes glinted with mild amusement... as close to confirmation as he’d no doubt ever give.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dayna said sharply. “You all seem to think I’m some sort of walking magic shop. We need a spell, Dayna, pull off a miracle, Dayna. Well, I’m not. I’m tired, I’m making things up, and the only reason I know half this stuff in the first place is because I jumped into the deep end when I landed on Camolen. I’m not supposed to know it yet. I’m supposed to be playing with safe little spells to... to...” and she glared at Suliya, “straighten hair!”
“You keep the wrong company for that,” Carey said, not a little ruefully.
Suliya’s hand crept up to her shoulder-length curls in a protective gesture and she glared back at Dayna. “Are you saying you can’t get us back?”
“That’s right.” Dayna crossed her arms, daring Suliya to challenge her. “Can’t. Not right now. Everything I’ve got is going into this spell for Jess and Ramble, and I have no idea when I’ll feel ready to try siphoning magic into storage stones again. If you had any idea how close we came to—”
“It’s all right, Dayna,” Carey said. He cleared his throat on his raggedy voice, shooting Gifferd a baleful look that only Gifferd seemed to understand. “Jess will get what little we know to Jaime, and we’ll all take a deep breath before we go back.”
“I don’t need a deep breath,” Suliya muttered.
Gifferd looked at Jess. “I should stop you.”
The Changespell Saga Page 79
