Carey turned for the stall, but stopped as Jess emerged from it, clothed from head to toe in winter layers—a deep green tall-neck weave under a brilliant turquoise, magic-hued sweater, the color offsetting the natural 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 time 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 nature as Lady."
"I don't understand," Suliya said, afraid that she did. She abruptly and sincerely 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—if she had been, she'd have had a quick covering comment at the ready.
Suliya didn't. For Suliya was simply too accustomed to doing as she pleased without being called on it—or caring if she was.
"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."
Carey's hands paused at the courier pouch fastener. "Braveheart—it was a mistake."
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 with her simple impulse 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. She dropped her gaze to the gleam of the cobbles. "I'll make sure it never happens again," she said, struggling with unfamiliar capitulation.
In response, Jess merely said, "Yes," and somehow managed to encompass a plethora of unsaid words.
Carey cleared his throat, taking Jess's unwavering gaze from Suliya; Suliya couldn't stop a sigh of relief.
"And how," Carey said, "was the run?"
Jess said, "You are changing the subject."
He grinned, unrepentant; he had a lean face and a long jaw, prone to intensity and sternness of expression; the grin turned it light, turned him from someone who often intimidated Suliya into the man with whom she often saw the other couriers joking. "I'm changing the subject," he agreed, his words no more repentant than his grin.
Jess lifted a shoulder, dropped it in the slightest shrug. "Siccawei was right—part of the riverbank caved in. I couldn't have made it with a rider on my back." Neither could any other horse , she meant.
Burnin' poot wrong. Suliya clamped her mouth down on the words. If she'd been the rider—and she would have been, had Jess not intervened—she was certain she could have made it. The run to Siccawei was a tough one in bad weather, but most of the couriers made more of it than it was. And in this case, the run had been to a small new sub-hold that Sherra had established to let some of her apprentices explore— carefully—the use of raw magic. Out between Siccawei Hold and Anfeald, making the run shorter than normal; easier than normal. Carey often used it as a drop-off for less time-dependent documents.
"That bad?" Carey said, flipping through the papers from the pouch. He glanced at Suliya and she pulled her thoughts from her face.
"Bad," Jess said. "Arlen should tell Sherra we can't make any more runs until a road team fixes it."
"Bad, then," Carey agreed.
"If a road team goes out there, maybe they can do something spellin' about the whole thing," Suliya said, referring to the dangerous part of the dry riverbank, where it narrowed to a rough path skirting the river.
"Some kind of bridge or something, so we don't have to go around."
Jess looked at her with honest shock. "That would take away the fun of it!"
"Fun?" Carey said, and grinned again. "Don't know that I'd call it that , Jess. Not for the rest of us. But there is a certain . . . challenge. A nice change of pace."
Suliya looked away, wishing she'd just kept silent . . . and thinking it still seemed like a good idea.
"Dayna is well," Jess said suddenly, and smiled. "She is rolling her eyes about how timid the others are."
Carey snorted. "I think they're just there to slow her down—Sherra's no dummy. Dayna doesn't have the advantage of growing up with her parents whispering the horrors of raw magic in her ears."
"Disadvantage?" Jess said, frowning.
"Advantage," Carey said firmly. "She's never been frightened away from using it." He jammed the papers back into the pouch and tucked the tangle of leather under his arm to hold the other hand out to Jess.
"C'mon. Natt and Cesna are waiting for these, as little as they'll be able to do with them until Arlen gets back from the Council gathering. And Jaime's coming early tomorrow—you wanted to make sure the housekeeper had things set to rights in Arlen's rooms, didn't you?"
Jess stood visibly straighter at the mention of Jaime's arrival, brushing hay off her sweater as though Jaime were arriving any moment. One hand found her hair; she made a face. "Groom this?"
Carey laughed. "C'mon. You might just talk me into it." His open hand still waited; he wiggled the fingers.
Jess took the hand, and bumped her hip against his in a teasing way—but gently, as if ever aware of his old injuries. Carey lifted their joined hands to Suliya by way of a parting gesture, and she stood in the middle of the aisle with her broom, watching them head for the job room, heads tipping slightly closer as Jess murmured something that made Carey laugh out loud. "Later," he said, as if he'd grown used to and easy with some of the outrageous things Jess could say.
Suliya and her burnin' broom and her bitter envy. She could have made that run, she knew it; she was rife with knowing it. She could be one of them. But she wasn't sure they'd ever give her the chance.
In a northern precinct of Camolen, frigid water lapping the edge of a lake suddenly becomes solid, and then grows tiny, brittle stalagmites that weave together and spire toward the sky. Just over the Lorakans, along an ancient trade road into Solvany, solid rock dribbles down along the side of the craggy mountain, revealing a hibernating burrowdog just long enough for melting rock above to impale and merge with it, killing it in its sleep.
South of Anfeald, a road team scout heads for the unexpected mud slide by the dry riverbed and never makes it. His partner returns with a babbled story about swirling leaves, melting trees, the hind parts of a ground squirrel sticking out of solid once-dirt, and of a man lost to the astonishing explosion of a nearby bush, wood turned to sharp-edged metallic shrapnel.
She bears the wounds to back up her story. Wounds with shrapnel made of twisted metal hazel bush bark.
"He's not here ?" Jaime said, sounding every bit as unhappy as she looked, as well as slightly disoriented after her distinctly magical journey from one world to another.
" I'm here," Jess pointed out. She stood by the door of the special world transfer chamber in the lower level of Arlen's stone-carved hold. Jaime looked good to her eyes, but then Jaime always looked go
od to her eyes, even when she had an unusual haircut that made her look like she'd just gotten out of bed, short and mussed and almost certainly on purpose, since she'd never failed to groom herself before. The first glimmers of grey showed among the dark strands, silver peeking out from her bangs.
Jess had never known Jaime's age . . . the oldest of the friends she had met in her first days as a woman, all of them from the same small area on Earth. Older than Dayna, younger than Arlen—whom she'd always known, if not always as a woman. And Arlen's hair was older than the rest of him, greyed like a grey horse, starting early and heading steadily for silver-white. Jess had always thought it a shame that the wizard lacked dapples.
"And I'm glad to see you," Jaime said to Jess, running a hand through her hair, ruffling it even more. "But if you were expecting Carey and you got me , you'd be disappointed, too—"
"Teasing," Jess interrupted, and grinned.
Taken aback, Jaime just looked at her a moment. Then a smile crept in at the corners of her mouth.
"You've gotten better at that."
"Yes." Jess, her grin down to an amused twist of mouth, held out her hand to take the overnight bag hanging from Jaime's grip. "Carey says Arlen is out doing Council business, and Natt says the Council just called a rush field meeting to investigate something strange."
"They have changed from last year," Jaime said, giving up the bag and emerging from the booth. "Used to be they'd take reports and consider their actions for at least a month or two when something strange happened. Now they're actually out on a field trip?"
Jess remembered the look on Natt's rounded face when he'd relayed the news; her amusement at teasing Jaime faded altogether. "Things have not changed all that much."
Jaime caught her meaning right away. "So this is something pretty alarming." She followed Jess out into the main hall of the first floor, an asymmetrical floor plan that had never confused Jess as it did everyone else who first arrived here; her sense of direction wasn't easy to fool, and she found the several floors of the hold with their branching, seldom-square rooms fit Anfeald's nature perfectly. Carved from one of Anfeald's characteristic thin-soiled eruptions of rock with the entrance at the bottom and Arlen's private rooms built to rise just above the natural surface, the hold was solid, dependable, and just a little bit quirky. Like Arlen himself, Jess thought.
Carey waited for them by the stairs, close enough to have caught Jaime's words. "Alarming," he agreed, "but whatever's up is new enough that no one seems to know anything about it. Even news-mongering Aashara isn't spreading gossip—although she's been pretty careful about Council matters since last summer."
Jaime sighed. "I suppose it's been quiet for a while now. Too much to hope it could last forever."
Giving in to impulse, Jess petted the ruffled and deliberate disarray of Jaime's hair, a soothing gesture she remembered being on the receiving end of in her days of early training. "It is quiet. Dayna has not panicked Sherra for days now. Did you bring new pictures of Sabre? Is Mark happy bossing the barn while you're gone?"
"Happier than I thought he could be," Jaime admitted as they headed up the stairs. They were stone, like the rest of the hold, climbing with angled flights that didn't match in length or direction—also like the rest of the hold. Large windows lit the stairwell with soft skewed shadows, spelled with an invisible barrier to keep the cold out and the clumsy in. "He's really settled into the role . . . I'm not sure Dayna would recognize him. He's grown up a lot in the last year . . . and he's not that skinny guy anymore, either."
"Then you should bring pictures of him, too," Jess said wistfully. It had been a long time since she and Carey traveled to Ohio, to Jaime's barn on her family's old dairy farm property, the Dancing Equine.
World-travel spells were strictly controlled, with two layers of fail-safe checkspells erected at all times.
Jaime was the only one with dispensation to move between worlds, and had a special spell that allowed for her travel—and her travel only. Had the Council not owed her so much—and owed Arlen so much—Jess had no doubt they would have told the couple to choose a world and stick to it.
As it was, Jaime split her time in what she'd called the universe's longest commute. And Jess could well understand why she was unhappy to find Arlen gone.
"We asked the cook for that black deer venison you like so much," Carey offered as they topped the last of the stairs and headed down the hall—past the apprentice studies, past Arlen's five-walled workroom with its giant picture window overseeing the gardens and pastures of his domain—to Arlen's personal rooms.
"Quit trying to cheer me up," Jaime said. "I intend to pout for a while longer. Maybe until Arlen gets back."
"Oh," Jess said, disappointed. She led the way into Arlen's common room, a welcoming place of layered rugs over stone floor, bookshelves, and a sitting area that often disappeared under his various needlework projects. She left Jaime's bag by the end of an overstuffed couch and sighed. "Maybe I should go work on my reading, then."
Carey laughed out loud, and Jaime said gently, "That's one of those things people say when they don't want you to quit doing something, Jess. I am sad that Arlen's not here . . . dammit, I'm annoyed, too—but it doesn't mean I don't want to spend time with you. How about we try a lesson, after dinner? Is that new covered ring still heated?"
"Natt's keeping it warm for us," Carey said, even as Jess said, "Yes!" in response to both questions.
"Good," Jaime said. "I hope you planned for an early dinner . . . Ohio timing doesn't quite match up, as usual. I'm starved, and now that you've teased me with that venison—"
"No tease," Carey said, helping himself to the rocking chair by the window and stretching his bad leg out with a wince that made Jess frown—though she'd learned to hide it, to keep such faces on the inside.
Winters were hard on him, and she knew it by the grateful way he accepted warm packs and liniment rubs in the evening—but this was not evening, and it was not private. So she looked away, and thus managed to catch the astonished delight on Jaime's face as she peered into the room that had once been a guest room and now held some of Jaime's things from Ohio—her custom-made, adjustable-width dressage saddle, which she forbore to keep in the tack room while she was gone; a full wardrobe that didn't fit in a bedroom closet Arlen had never made for two; a collection of books by Camolen's riding masters, past and present . . .
"There's a light in here!" Jaime said. "It almost looks like a fluorescent bulb!"
Carey absently kneaded his thigh. "I can't speak for that, but I can tell you you're one of the few in the hold to have one of SpellForge's permalights."
"Permalights," Jaime mused. "Someone on Earth could have come up with that name."
"Invoke the thing, and it stays lit, even when the wizard walks away, falls asleep, whatever. Thousands of starter spells in the same stone, too—right there at the base of it."
"Wow," Jaime said. "All those hours I put into learning how to keep a glow going when I wasn't really giving it my full attention." She looked back to give Carey a wry look. "Or maybe I should say, trying to learn how."
"Oh, the old-school wizards are scandalized." Carey pushed the calico cat from his lap, guiding the demanding creature toward Jess where it repeatedly bumped its head against her leg. She sat cross-legged on the thick carpets and tugged gently at its tail until it stood foolishly on its head, purring.
Carey snorted at them both and turned his attention back to Jaime. "They think allowing such a thing will ruin the next generation of wizards—that children won't learn the proper discipline to hold glowspells, and that they'll learn them late in the first place. Using glowspells has always been the first indication of a child's talent."
"Hmm," Jaime said. "Well, they may have a point. Now the parent can trigger the spell and walk away.
But you know, even with parents plunking kids down in front of televisions, the kids who enjoy reading still start before anyone thinks they can."
"Pretty much a summary of the opposing arguments I've heard, minus all the blustering," Carey said. "In any event, Arlen thought you'd like it."
"He would have liked to see your face when you noticed it," Jess said. "But I saw, and I'll tell him."
"I wouldn't worry about it," Jaime said. "I'm sure I can find a way to express my appreciation when I see him." She left the guest room, tossed her bag inside the bedroom, and said, "One nice thing about spell travel . . . no need to freshen up. Now, what about that dinner?"
Carey pushed himself up from the rocker as Jess stood in one smooth motion, not bothering to uncross her legs until she was up. She followed them from the room, but couldn't help a glance back over her shoulder. The hold seemed empty without Arlen; she would be just as glad as Jaime when he came back.
Chapter 3
South of Anfeald, midway between Siccawei's new sub-hold and the dry riverbed, the ground heaves like thick molasses going into a boil—and then settles, as solid as it has ever been. Sherra stands off to the side, looking for signs of the exploding hazel bush. It has melted into something else.
Tied at a distance, her palomino mount rattles air through its nose; it is as wary as she, and cannot seem to decide whether to watch before or behind itself. It lifts its head to call to the empty woods, a stallion's cry.
"Hush," Sherra says absently, thinking it anxious. She knows only as much of horses as she must, and in this place she has other things on her mind. Keeping an eye on the quiescent earth, she gathers her concentration for the spell that will tag this spot for the Council wizards, allowing them to accomplish the tricky business of transporting without a formally established booth.
The horse calls out again, craning his head against the halter lead; this time he sounds less demanding, more welcoming—a lower call, more musical. Sherra ignores him, finishing her spell, unaware of the subtle creep of earth before her.
Almost immediately the Council begins to arrive. Seventeen of them altogether, the very best of Camolen's best . . . everyone but Arlen, who is too far away to accomplish free transport. The wizards who oversee all of Camolen's magic, policing their own, protecting everyone else.
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