None of them have ever seen anything like this growing miasma in northern Siccawei's woods. None of them know what has caused it. They throw a tentative identifier spell at it, the most basic of spells that identifies only intent—benign or malignant. They don't expect it to work.
It doesn't—but the ground heaves at the offense, and a tree trunk spits out what was once a bird.
They eye each other in alarm, and Sherra steps forward to invoke the most gentle of healing spells, the most benign of magic. All seventeen of them stumble backwards in alarm as pebbles spurt up from the muddied, melted patch of woods, ducking as the missiles rain down through the trees.
The palomino snorts alarm.
There will be no more magic used here; they will bring in null wards to contain this spot while they try to understand it—although even Camolen's finest find themselves uncertain it can be understood at all. They congratulate themselves on acting so quickly, on keeping news of this strange area so confidential so they can respond to it without inciting panic.
The palomino nickers; even Sherra recognizes it as a greeting.
But they see nothing. No one.
And then they feel the magic.
It is not of their making.
Raw magic, magic without control, without signature. It brings the disturbed woods to sudden, violent life. The ground reaches for them—
Carey shifted his weight, gave his leg a subtle stretch, and leaned over the rails of the indoor ring to watch the growing frustration on Jess's face—an interesting contrast to Jaime's slightly distracted patience. She knew as well as Carey that Jess's biggest challenge as a riding student was that she expected too much of herself—expected to understand new things right away, expected to do them right the first time, expected to figure things out before she was told.
Just because her every gesture, every expression, spoke so loudly of who—and what—she was.
Because she had an insight no one else could match.
Carey knew, and Jaime knew, that there was such a thing as expecting too much, even from a riding student who had started life as a horse. But Jess hadn't yet accepted that philosophy.
Carey glanced behind him as someone entered the long, wood-sided structure; this end held what was meant to be a large viewing area separated from the riding area by wooden fence rails and a wide gate.
But Anfeald held more individual training sessions than it did schooling clinics, and inevitably the generous viewing space did double duty as storage, with hay overflow, training rails, rakes and shovels and wheelbarrows nibbling away at its edges.
Sliding the door closed he found not Arlen—only a day into Jaime's visit, and she already had them looking to every open door in sympathetic anticipation—but Suliya, her riotously curly, deep-mahogany hair spilling free from its binding. She went to rummage among the manure forks.
He hadn't failed to notice that she often turned up when Jaime gave lessons, or that she tended to lurk in his own shadow. And he suspected she thought she hid her feelings better than she did—that it didn't show when she disagreed with Jaime, or that she'd hidden her resentment at her starter position in Anfeald. Or her resentment when she saw Jess going out on a run, whether or not it had been meant for Suliya.
An odd one, all right, her expensive wardrobe and demeanor clashing with her lack of experience and her need for a job in the first place. She'd hoped for more when she'd arrived here, that much was plain.
But she'd overstated her qualifications, and the vague responses of her references hadn't revealed the exaggerations—exaggerations Carey had the feeling she actually believed. She had yet to learn just how much she had to learn; she was a young woman in the process of discovering herself—if she looked hard enough. But it was her journey, not his. Carey hoped that if she kept watching, kept dogging his heels, maybe she'd figure it out.
If not, she wouldn't last much longer. But she was good with the horses and meticulous about finishing those jobs she'd been assigned, so she'd earned some forbearance and a little more time. And Carey had no doubt she'd taken every year of lessons she laid claim to—just as he was certain she'd ignored half of what she'd been told because she felt she already knew better. Now she winced, watching as Jaime walked up to Jess and her green young mount and widened Jess's outside hand. "Give him a little more room to move into that rein," she said, audible enough in a ring that had been spelled for clinic acoustics.
"Remember how green he is—with a horse like this, on the trail, giving him this room can be the difference between a minor shy and a panicked runaway."
"You don't agree?" Carey asked Suliya, not concerned that Jaime would hear; the acoustics spell included a damper on this end of the ring. Jaime herself had often proclaimed envy, wishing for a similar system at the Dancing Equine.
Suliya started slightly, taking a few unconscious steps toward him so she could keep her voice low even though it was unnecessary. "I didn't say that—"
"Sure you did," Carey told her. "Not out loud, but you said it."
Suliya flushed; not even her sepia skin could obscure her deepened complexion. She flushed often and easily, and Carey had learned to take it as a sign of those moments when she thought she was right about something but didn't feel she could say so. Frustration more than embarrassment.
"You've never taken a lesson with Jaime, have you?"
"No," Suliya said, glancing first at Jess and Jaime, and then at the packed dirt floor. "I haven't been here long enough to earn them."
Carey gave her a mildly surprised look. "Who told you that?"
"I—" she said, looking startled, then having to think about it. "I assumed I just wasn't allowed yet—"
Mildly—more mildly than he felt—he said, "All the information and sign-up is on the job room wall, next to the assignments."
"I—" she said again, and even bundled as she was in scarf, thick feather-stuffed jacket and bulky gloves, Carey could see the difference in her posture. "May I, then?"
"Maybe not this time," he said. "She's scheduled in. But I'll put you on the list for next time she visits.
There's a catch, though—"
Suspicion shuttered her dark brown eyes. Carey swallowed his annoyance and said, "Relax. You just have to listen to her. Do what she says, whether you agree with it or not." He knew from experience . . . sometimes the pieces of riding theory didn't make sense until you had a certain number of them in hand. "Make an honest effort. If you have differences, you can consider them later on. Right now, you do it her way." It was a test of sorts, and he let it show in his voice, even as she nodded slowly, thinking hard behind a face she was trying to keep blank. Watching her, he added more casually, "If you think we won't be able to tell . . . well, maybe we won't. But the horses will."
He didn't add that they, in turn, would be able to tell from the horses . . . if she didn't know that, then she had more to learn than he thought.
"I can do that," she said without hesitation, although he'd have preferred it had she taken a moment to think. "Please . . . I'd like to be on the list from now on."
"I'll see to it," he said. He turned back to the conversation in the ring, aware of Suliya's departure with her manure fork but no longer heeding her. Suliya would work out . . . or she wouldn't.
"Hold yourself in position even if he does drop on the outside," Jaime was saying. "He's an exceptionally shifty little guy—not of your breeding, is he?"
Jess laughed out loud. "Only you would ask that!"
Jaime shrugged, gave a self-deprecating grin Carey could imagine more than he could see. She looked great this visit; she'd always been the down-to-earth, cut-to-the-heart-of-the-matter member of those who had been involved in his first, unplanned trip to Ohio—the first to believe Jess in her struggle to convince Dayna, Mark, and Eric she'd been a horse, the one who shepherded Jess through the steps of learning to become human. Now Jaime looked softer, happier . . .
And it wasn't just the haircut.
It
was Arlen, and how he'd made her welcome here, made Anfeald as much her place as his . . . given it to her. Given of himself to her.
Too bad he couldn't get his butt back here to see her.
Jess corrected herself, "Only you would ask that and mean it the way you do. No, he is not my younger brother, or even a nephew. Carey brought him in last fall from Shibaii. I think he's too . . . shifty . . . for courier runs, but we thought to give him another year."
"He might grow steadier," Jaime agreed. "But I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't."
Jess gave the chunky bay gelding a pat. "I wonder what it would be like if I did breed."
Carey stiffened. He wanted children . . . Jess wanted children. But Jess's human body had never settled into cycles, even though she'd started to recognize when, if she shifted to her Lady self, her mare form would be in heat.
It made for an interesting personal life. But it meant, he thought, that children would remain out of their reach. And yet . . . he knew Jess hadn't given up. And he remembered that it was her stubborn persistence that had finally given her the key to triggering the changespell from Lady form, when everyone in Camolen had told her—repeatedly—it couldn't be done.
"Do you want to?" Jaime asked Jess in surprise—apparently forgetting about the acoustics spell she admired so much. "Does Carey want to?"
Hell, yes. Never as a young man, full of goals and battles and a young man's selfishness. But with Jess in his life . . . with his eyes newly opened to the pride of the cook when his family grew by yet another child, at the way his own eyes strayed to the few hold children playing outside the gardens . . .
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. "Yes," she said. "I see the foals . . . 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 . . . and what fear of what she was might do to her.
Damn the acoustics, anyway.
The sky bends around them, 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 said, putting a hand on Jess's calf where it rested against the gelding. "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 am glad enough to 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, her attention wandering inward while she hunted words. Finally she shrugged and said, "I think you just can't stop living your life in the meanwhile."
"Okay," Jess said, one of the colloquialisms that she'd brought with her from Ohio and had seen spread through Kymmet before she came here. "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 trail."
The palomino hits a frenzy of panic. Eyes rolling, ears flattened, he coils his powerful body and fights the lead rope. The branch cracks; the leaves tremble as though buffeted by a great wind. The distorting world closes in on him— —and his lead rope goes through the melting branch, freeing him to gallop as hard and fast as he can, spurning the path for a direct route between trees, ducking and dodging and more than half blind with fear. To his last stable he runs, 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 boot me around forever."
"Yes," Jaime said, "it does."
Jess felt a flash of worry—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 instead, swinging a leg over the gelding's rump to dismount. The extra-wide ring door slid open with a bang that startled both Jess and the gelding; he jumped one way and she, looking after her toes, jumped the other. Carey jerked around with a frown at the ready—everyone in Anfeald knew better than to slam doors in the horse areas, or to leave them open when they'd been found closed— But his admonishment went unspoken, and Jess knew why as soon as she saw the expression on Cesna's face. Grim and shocked, with her mouth working in a hunt for words, her chin trembling . . . Cesna was the youngest of Arlen's two apprentices, an often impulsive girl still in her late teens who had been born to the scholar's life. She carried her weight in her hips and her feelings on her face, and Jess had never seen her so beside herself. "I've been looking for you," she finally blurted, stumbling to a stop before them while the gelding tilted his head to snort at her jerky, alarming movement.
Carey put a hand on Cesna's shoulder, kneading slightly—a gesture Jess had never seen him make with anyone but her, and one that was Cesna's undoing. She threw her arms around Carey's neck and sobbed, leaving him as startled as any of them. With awkward uncertainty, he patted her back, looking over her head to Jaime with a plea in his eyes.
Jaime, mystified along with her concern, came alongside Cesna to rub a gentle circle on her back; Jess soothed the gelding with a pat, and then gave a slight jiggle of the reins to tell him he still had to mind his manners—along with her toes. She said nothing; she had seen Cesna upset before, but this time . . . this time, a strange, unfamiliar clenching in her stomach told her this was not the same. This was more. This was . . . profound.
After a moment during which Cesna's sobs only grew in intensity, Jaime said, "Maybe we should find Natt?"
Cesna shook her head emphatically enough that Carey had to withdraw or take a hit to his jaw, and then she said into his shoulder, "Natt's talking to Siccawei. He's trying to find out what happened—"
"Cesna," Carey said, a hint of frustration, of needing to know behind his concern for her, "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 . . . all the apprentices felt it."
"Cesna," Jaime said, exchanging a glance of trepidation with Carey, " what?"
"They're dead," Cesna said, clenching Carey's lightly padded jacket; it wasn't enough to keep her from sliding to her knees, and he went down with her, gripping both arms in an attempt to slow them. "They're all dead ."
The shock of it hit Jess like a buffeting wave of air, making everything else distant and remote. Cesna's sobs faded away; Jaime's stunned comprehension barely touched her. Even Carey's grim and obvious denial meant nothing to her. The apprentices felt it . They're all dead. The Council, that's who she meant. I
t's who she had to mean. The untouchable, the powerful, the core of all of Camolen's magical protection. The Council.
The Council and Arlen .
Chapter 4
Death.
Arlen reeled on his horse. He could not feel the form of death nor the details in the sickening wave of weakness that swept over him; he clutched the saddle pommel, fumbling the reins.
The horse plodded onward. It felt not death or weakness, only the desire to reach the next home barn of the livery ring.
Death. Arlen found himself shaking, as if a myriad cold tendrils 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; the horse kept moving, lurching slightly with each step as it broke a path through the snow.
Everyone else knew enough to wait out the morning chill before heading the short distance between one settlement and another . . . but Arlen had planned to reach the travel booth in Amses this morning, and from there to warmer Anfeald and Jaime— The Council.
Only with the Council did he have such close ties, forged by years of personal communication over distance, years of arguing and working together.
Death . . .
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 one or two of them. Eighteen Council wizards including himself, seven with 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, reaching despite this distance from which she was unlikely to respond or even hear him unless expecting him. Darius? Tyrla? Even less likely to respond, without the history of casual chatting he had with his close neighbor Sherra.
And respond, no one did.
Changespell Legacy Page 3
