Changespell Legacy

by Doranna Durgin

  Chapter 9

  Not far from Anfeald the City, on one of the abrupt rocky hills thrusting so boldly from the soil, snow melts off the south side and becomes firmly entrenched in the crannies of the north side—until late in the day, when the hill . . . shimmers. Dissolves. Turns to a flat puddle of stone.

  The astonished deer sunning itself on the southern hump of the hill gives a startled bleat and leaps for safety.

  Not soon enough.

  Jess stood outside Arlen's rooms, ignoring the morning bustle from the dispatch desk inside the apprentice room; there were few messages coming through now, but they'd become harder to retrieve, requiring Natt and a backup dispatcher to be on hand at all times. The last several, for all the trouble they'd taken, had been little more than "stay calm, no further developments, couriers on the way" notes.

  The couriers, upon arrival, brought large quantities of family messages traveling from precinct to precinct across Camolen, and a few crucial bits of information—which of the wizards were being chosen to fill the new Secondary Council, which services were considered nonessential, an update of known checkspells now temporarily suspended—but nothing that Jess really wanted to hear. What had happened to the Council . Or even better, it's all a terrible mistake, everyone's fine. Rather than admit she still hoped for that last, it was easier to pretend she didn't care about any of it.

  But she cared about Jaime, who waved her in to the sitting room where Jess was promptly accosted by the young male calico cat. It jumped to the arm of a chair to paw the air and demand attention, and she absently scratched her way down its back as she eyed Jaime, who sat on the couch lined up against the window. With circles under her eyes and an entirely uncharacteristic jittery presence, Jaime looked years older in just the few days since they'd seen each other.

  But she gave Jess a wry smile at the assessment she obviously knew she'd gotten, and passed a hand over her hair. "The good thing about this cut," she said, "is that no one can tell when you haven't styled it."

  "You were asleep when I got here last night. Carey said you were sick."

  Jaime rubbed the bump on her once-broken nose, the one she'd acquired not long after meeting Jess . . . and not long before meeting Arlen. "I'm okay in the mornings," she said. "It's the strangest thing . . . the last two evenings . . ." She let out a gusty breath and shook her head. "I'd say it was a migraine of the worst order, except I've never had them. It comes on, it lasts the evening, and it goes away. By then I'm not good for much, though."

  "Are you good for much now?" Jess asked, meaning it as a simple question and not realizing until after she'd spoken how the words might sound.

  But Jaime only smiled. "Not as much as usual," she admitted. "Though I'm not sure it matters. I'm nothing but a guest at the moment—people aren't exactly interested in lessons right now, and Carey's already using his horses to capacity. He doesn't need another rider."

  "No," Jess said, "but the hold needs a rider." It wasn't the right word, she knew it wasn't. But it was the right concept, and Jaime as much as Carey understood her occasional need for shortcuts and had the ability to follow them.

  Jaime did. In that instant, her already reddened eyes teared up, her cheeks flushed. Resolutely, even if in a voice that threatened to fail her, she said, "That should be Arlen. I keep thinking—" He'll be back. Even though she couldn't say the words, Jess saw the fierce hope flare briefly in her eyes. But it faded, and she said simply, "I don't even live here."

  "You care enough to leave your world to come be with him. And he loved you. That makes you important to Anfeald . . . it makes you someone they can . . ." She gestured for a futile moment, and finally said, " . . . come together around. Do things for."

  "I should have spent more time here," Jaime said, as if she hadn't been listening. She turned her head to the window beside her and closed her eyes, but not before Jess saw the self-recrimination there.

  Jess came to her, knelt by the couch. " Dayna could stay here. Dayna had no family in Ohio, no people who meant anything to her. For you, things are different." By people she meant Jaime's horses as much as her brother. "We cannot make yesterday's decisions today."

  Jaime still didn't look at her. She whispered, "But I miss him. I miss him more than I thought—" She stopped, took a deep breath, and looked back to Jess with overbright eyes. "He was so certain that this time he could teach me that little spell to protect leather from rain. I just can't seem to get it, but he was so sure—" Another deep breath, a long pause, and she said, "I suppose he'd want the place to keep going. Eventually another wizard will be assigned to the precinct . . . Arlen would want it in the kind of shape he could be proud of."

  Jess nodded. "He likes things to be right." Then she frowned. "Should I say it that way? Or should I say that he liked things to be right?"

  Jaime blindly shook her head. "You say it however you like. Let's see what's up with Dayna, shall we?

  Surely we've had at least one furious dispatch from Second Siccawei demanding that she return."

  Rising to her feet, Jess said, "She got a private message. She threw it away. I don't think she likes the way the new Council is looking at things."

  "Dayna and authority," Jaime said, following Jess out the door and leaving the calico to pace the magically-imposed cat boundary behind her. "Never a good mix."

  Carey scrawled a last-minute assignment on the day's job sheet, trading one of his more experienced couriers for Suliya—a short run, one that would soothe her frustration and give the other courier a much needed break—and pinned it to the job board under the permalight.

  Half of the runs were already in progress; the usually tidy job room spoke of the stress on his riders.

  Several half-filled mugs on the communal desk, someone's jotted notes on the floor—he bent to pick the paper up, leaving it on the desk where whoever dropped it might see it—losing himself in the details of running Anfeald Stables, his mind a muddle of the need to act and an unexpected wariness of doing the wrong thing.

  In the past, his willingness to act—his determination to act—had helped spur a small group of friends to surprising victories. Victories that those in charge had said couldn't be won—especially not Carey's way.

  Carey's way had always started out as the wrong way . . .

  Starting out wrong doesn't mean ending up wrong.

  Using a changespell was wrong—wrong for any number of reasons. Because the Council said so, but also because of the way it imposed human will on animals, irrevocably changing them in ways they often literally couldn't accept. And not always changing them for the better . . . Jess would say that to him if she knew what he was thinking, and she would be right. She often was. She'd softened him, taught him to see he couldn't go through this life alone, living on the strength of his goals. Taught him that sometimes the price of those goals on the people around him wasn't worth it.

  Starting out wrong doesn't mean ending up wrong.

  But people had died in the past as a result of his actions. In the end he'd gotten what he'd gone after—Arlen's freedom, imprisonment of rogue wizards, safety for Camolen—but people had died .

  They would have died anyway.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe no one would have died, or fewer people, or their deaths would have been of an easier nature, or— He closed his eyes—tightly—trying to squeeze the conflict right out of his mind.

  It didn't work.

  Practical afterthought struck him; he crossed the room to the courier boxes mounted on the wall and slipped the reassigned packet out of its current box and into Suliya's. A tight twinge from his leg reminded him that he, too, had paid for his decisions. Time to see the healer, he thought. Once every seven or ten days . . . longer than that and even Jess's massages couldn't keep him going. On the bad days—and he did have them—he felt as if his body had been wrung out like a rag head to toe, every muscle aching, every joint creaking. On the not-so-bad days his leg took over the job—aching, tiring easily, his
tendons like creaky, rusted cables.

  Dayna peeked into the room, hesitating until she saw that he was alone and then entering much too casually, scrubbing her hands through her straight, sandy, shoulder-length hair. Dayna on the prowl, just as willing as Carey to do things the wrong way if she thought the alternatives were even worse.

  He said, "I've still got four more riders coming in," just in case she thought they had privacy.

  She shrugged. "We can talk until then. Are we going to do this today?"

  "You mean, are we going to try ?"

  She shrugged again. "I'm not really worried about it. There are a number of subtle variations on that spell—and I know them all. I ought to, after last summer. One or the other of them will get through."

  "And then what?" Carey sat down on the edge of the desk, legs thrust out with one ankle over the other.

  "How long did it take before Jess could put a meaningful sentence together? How long before we actually learn something—and will it be worth what we put that stallion through?"

  She dropped her hands from her hair to her boyish hips; the Camolen-style tunic and trousers combinations she'd taken to wearing were always just the right colors to suit her, but they never did anything but emphasize her adolescent shape. He was beginning to understand that she liked it that way—that it somehow made her feel safer. Ironically enough, being here on Camolen had made a difference, too—given her a skill, enough power so she could relax, mellowing from blunt and abrasive to merely blunt. Blunt like now, staring at him in disbelief. "Last time I talked to you, you wanted to do this.

  You wanted to know what happened to Arlen. What's happening to Camolen now ."

  "And maybe I still do." Guides, yes. Until he did, how would he know what to do next ? He shoved his forelock out of his eyes, not quailing before her annoyance as she'd have obviously preferred. "I'm just thinking it through."

  "There's a first," she muttered, but she came to sit next to him at the edge of the desk—or would have, but she was too short and ended up leaning against it instead. "Look . . . I'm not saying it'll be easy. The easiest part is actually making the change, unless I'm totally off base about the checkspells."

  "But you don't think you are." His arms crossed again, he stared absently at his knees while he pondered her words.

  "I spent some time thinking about it last night, running through a few of the preliminary phrases. No, I don't think I'm wrong. But you're not wrong, either—it'll take some time before Ramble can tell us anything, assuming he's capable of making the transition. But Carey—" She shifted, putting the side of her hip against the desk so she could aim a dreadfully earnest stare at him, one he could feel even if he didn't look over to meet it, "Jess was right. He was there . He's the only one alive who knows what happened.

  He's Custer's horse all over again, only the U.S. Army didn't have the chance to ask what happened. We do. And I'm telling you, the new Council isn't on the right track. They're still trying to trace signatures and figure out what kind of spell was used so they can counter it and checkspell it."

  Bemused, Carey said, "Custer's horse?"

  Dayna waved an impatient hand. "The only survivor of one side of a pivotal battle in my country's history. It's not important. Listen up . . . even if you don't think about Arlen and Sherra—"

  How could he not?

  "—The thing is, as long as the Council's going off on the wrong track, we not only don't catch the bad guys, we aren't protected from whatever happened. It could happen again, any time—it could happen to the new Council as easily as it happened to the old, if someone really wants to ruin this country."

  Carey made a quick face. "Camolen's on the western end of a small continent. We may annoy some people with our isolationism, but not to that extent."

  "You're being obscure," Dayna said. "And evasive. Just make up your mind, okay? Do you want to do this or not? If you do, then we need a place for it—a private one."

  "I think we have to assume we'd get caught," Carey said; it was the least of his worries. The peacekeepers had their hands full; Anfeald might still be quiet—not yet aware of their loss—but the glut of messages going from one peacekeeper station to another was enough to tell him not every precinct had responded to the service crisis with calm. Even Anfeald the City had experienced some opportunistic looting.

  "Fine, but not until we accomplish something. That means having a place to stash whoever the palomino turns into—"

  Out of time. The murmur of voices in the hall made Carey raise his glance from knees to doorway, and Dayna cut her words short just as Jess came through the door. She was dressed for barn work in a patched, drawstring-waist tunic and tough pants worn so thin across her bottom he couldn't help but stare when the opportunity presented itself; she obviously didn't expect to ride today. At her side, Jaime wore the stretch breeches that gave away her other-worldly origins; he had no intention of sending her out on a run, but she might well have decided to work with one of the young horses for which no one else had the time.

  Jess grinned to see him there. "Carey," she said, a greeting she somehow used to encompass everything from a casual hello to the unmistakable invitation she'd given him late the evening before. "Dayna," she added, a simpler word restricted mostly to the meaning of hello . She would have walked up to him, stood with him for a moment with her cheek just touching his, breathing in his scent the way she was wont to do, but she visibly checked herself and headed for the courier boxes.

  Carey ducked his head to hide a rueful smile. They'd had a discussion or two about the need to keep close contact out of the job room, but just this once . . .

  He would have welcomed her.

  "Lady's not going out today?" she asked, poking her hand into the empty box assigned to her horse-self.

  He shook his head. "Thought I'd hold you back in case something comes up. Everything else today is pretty routine, as much as there is of it."

  "Suliya is going out," she observed, nowhere near a criticism.

  "Do I know her?" Jaime said. "Pretty young woman, not as dark as Auntie Pib? Hasn't taken any lessons yet?"

  "That's her," Dayna said, and then, a more personal aside, "You doing okay, Jaime?"

  Jaime took a quick breath, like someone had slapped her, and Dayna immediately said, "Never mind.

  Not here."

  "No," Jaime said. "Not here."

  But Jess had ignored this exchange, her attention on Carey and her expression . . . concerned. Hesitant.

  Hunting for words. He broke his own rules and took her hand. She said, "Suliya . . ." frowned, and then glanced at Dayna. Carey didn't understand why, not at first.

  Dayna snorted and filled him in, brusque where Jess was trying to learn tact. "She's hardly on the same level as the rest of your riders."

  Carey ran a thumb absently along Jess's long fingers. "She rode Lady yesterday, didn't she?"

  "Yes," Jess said, watching his face, making sure he understood. "I would not let her do so again."

  "Not to worry, Jess," he said. "I never would have put her on Lady in the first place. She's going out on old Bristen today, on the pasture-side run to the little peacekeeper station."

  Her anxiety eased away. "You do know."

  He grinned at her. "I know."

  "She could be good . . ."

  He rubbed at the corner of his mouth, trying to keep the grin from getting bigger. "I know that, too."

  "Good." And for Jess, that was enough—to know he knew. She trusted him in this, as she trusted him in everything.

  If she found out about the changespell . . . when she found out . . .

  Best by far to have it a done deal before she learned of it. A done deal, and a successful one. And even so . . .

  He gave her hand a gentle squeeze and she smiled at him, unaware there was anything behind the gesture besides the spontaneous expression of his feeling for her.

  Somehow that made it worse.

  Despite the pall hanging over the st
able the day after Jess returned from Second Siccawei, Jess found solace in the indoor ring, introducing and refining basic ground manners in the youngsters and pretending not to notice the unusual quiet—so many riders out, Carey preoccupied, Jaime vacillating between hope and despair. . . .

  She and Jaime laughed fondly over the yearlings' indignant expressions, their astonishment that anyone should require them to do anything but bumble around as they wished, regardless of whose heels they stepped on and whose space they invaded. Quivering noses, flared nostrils, and hard, offended, little chins ruled the day. And then when each of them was through, Jess scratched their shoulders and along their thick manes until their lips quivered with delight instead of righteous offense. She spent extra time with the dark dun yearling she would have recognized as her brother even without the pedigree she'd read in Carey's office, and tried not to wonder what her own progeny would be like.

  Or what they'd be like if . . .

  No point in ifs . Not now, when there was so much else to think about anyway. Jess put her forehead to her brother's for a moment, raising his curiosity; his winter-furry ears perked forward to the utmost. And then she gave him a purely human kiss on the nose and said to Jaime, "The last one."

  Jaime's smile immediately faded. "Let's go see if there's any news, then. And I want to talk to Simney, see if there's anything she can do for these . . . events I'm having in the evening."

  "You think it will come back tonight?" Jess fastened the toggle flap of her coat, preparing to lead the yearling back into the crisp day and to his paddock behind the hold-hill.

  Jaime said fervently, "I sure as hell hope not. But if it does, I'd like to be ready. Even if it means putting me straight to sleep for the night." She shook her head at the thought of it. "Go put that kiddo back in the paddock; I'll wait for you in the job room, where it's nice and warm."

  Jess stuck her tongue out in a recently acquired gesture that seemed to span both worlds and led the yearling outside, tromping across the crusty ground—snow made rough and hard by cycles of melting and freezing under use—to the closest paddock where the young horses had a small herd of their own, overseen by a retired mare who made sure they kept their equine manners. Cold bit at the threadbare seat of her pants, and she ran back to the small rear entrance of the stables in a slippy-slidey rush.