She would have headed straight for the job room, releasing jacket toggles on the way, if she hadn't heard Dayna's briefly raised voice from down the aisle. Dayna, in the stable? Over supper the night before, she'd thought she'd heard Natt murmur something about getting help with some of the hold's defense spells, along with mutters about hoping they wouldn't need the spells anyway. And she was certain Dayna had agreed.
Not that she'd expect to find her friend in the stables under anything but unusual circumstances, anyway.
Without the little bay Fahrvegnügen, Dayna was lost when it came to horses.
So Jess followed the voices to one of the foaling stalls at the end of the aisle—bigger than usual, more private, set up for easy use of surveillance and environmental spells. Unused at this time of year, they were usually bare and cold. But as she walked closer, head tipping with the curiosity of it and phantom ears flicking back and forth in search of clues, Dayna's voice rose again and she had no doubt. Dayna and . . . Carey, in a frustrated-sounding reply.
Jess hesitated outside the nearly closed sliding door, making no attempt to conceal herself as she looked through the bars comprising the upper half and too startled at what she saw to interrupt. Dayna, as she'd heard. Carey. The stall, fully bedded on one half and in the back, a pile of blankets and . . . clothes?
And the palomino stallion, standing at the end of the lead in Carey's hand and munching carelessly at a small chunk of pressed, dried hay at his feet. Had Carey been paying attention, the set of the stallion's ears would have told him to look for someone in the aisle.
He wasn't.
"It ought to have worked," Dayna said, anger tinging her voice. "That last one really ought to have done it. I can't believe no one's dropped the ball on it, not with things the way they are."
Carey rubbed a hand along his jaw; he had that tired look that Jess knew so well from these past few days, and something more besides. The frustration she'd heard. Worry—a new kind of worry. "They're all pretty recent spells," he said. "Maybe the Council wizards aren't prioritizing yet; maybe they're just handling the standard checkspells and using a timeline for the more obscure ones. Anything within a year . . . two years . . ."
Dayna's anger turned to gloom. "A system like that would make sense to start off with," she said. "Once they get a little more settled, they'll probably ease up on the more obscure variations."
"Maybe that's it, then," Carey said. "Maybe we wait."
Wait for what? Jess moved closer, right up to the narrow slice of open door, her mouth open to ask the question, hesitating until they noticed she was there.
Dayna gestured vehemently at the horse. " Wait? With who knows what out there going dangerous, the new Council on the wrong track, and the only answers within this annoying horse?"
They wanted answers from the horse.
"Wait," Carey repeated, sounding like he didn't like it any better than she. "You had another option to consider? You've been through every variation of the spell you know, and you said it yourself—no one knows this spell better than you."
"Changespell!" Jess blurted.
The stallion whipped his head up, alarmed more by Dayna and Carey's startled reaction than by Jess's seemingly sudden presence; he'd known she was there from the start. Dayna scowled, threw up her arms, and muttered an obscenity she hadn't learned on Earth— But it was Carey to whom Jess looked. Carey, with his expression cycling from surprised to aghast to . . . guilty.
"Changespell," Jess said again, only this time she whispered it. "Carey—"
"Jess—" he interrupted, taking a step toward her, looking at the lead rope in annoyance, and handing it off to Dayna—much to Dayna's consternation. "It's all we could think of. We had to try—"
"No." Jess said it firmly and decisively; she shook her head once, her chin lifting. "Not this."
"You said it yourself, Jess, he saw what happened." Dayna would have put her hands on her hips with impatience, but she realized the stallion was eyeing her, lips twitching, and she took a wary step away from him. "He can tell us—"
"No." Jess stood in the door, not backing away when Carey reached it and would have come out to talk to her in the aisle. "No," she said in rising anger, "he can not ."
Dayna said, "If he was human . . ." and let the implication stand on its own.
"What do you think, if he was human ? He would have no words, he would have no knowledge of himself. He would be scared and angry. He would be of no use to you, and you have no right !" Behind her, Jaime's questioning hail made her flick one of those phantom ears back, but only for a moment; Dayna and Carey had all her attention.
"He might be able to tell us plenty, eventually," Carey said grimly. "We won't know until we try."
Jaime came up softly beside Jess, sliding the door open another foot and looking from face to face, taking in Dayna's stubborn expression, Carey's conflict of guilt and determination, and Jess's outright anger. "My God," she said. "Tell me this isn't what I think it is."
"It's exactly what you think it is," Dayna said. "And for darned good reason."
Jaime just looked at her a moment, a sad contrast to the anger and betrayal coursing through Jess. And then Jaime shook her head, and said, "If the reasons had been good enough , you wouldn't have tried to do this behind our backs."
Carey was silent, watching Jess; trying, she thought, to say something with his eyes—hazel eyes gone dark in the lighting of the stall and the tilt of his head, full of pleading words behind his determination.
She was in no mood to listen.
Dayna gave the lead shank a desperate-looking yank as the stallion lifted his head from his hay to eye her arm, chewing the fodder with twitching lips that gave away his wicked thoughts. Her voice held a hint of that same desperation. "We did it this way to avoid this kind of confrontation. It's a waste of time!"
"Only if you think you get to make decisions for the rest of us," Jaime said, placing a quiet hand on Jess's arm.
"Jaime," Carey said, his voice low. "Jess. We haven't made decisions for anyone but this horse. And yes . . . when it comes to that, I do get to make those kinds of decisions here in this stable."
This horse.
"Trent might disagree," Jaime said.
"This horse ?" Jess said, feeling the sting of it.
"Trent might," Carey admitted. "I'll accept the consequences for that."
Jess couldn't stop it; added to the flare of her nostrils came the slight tremble of her chin. She felt it and she hated it, because it meant she suddenly wasn't so much angry as she was hurt, and angry was so much easier. She said in a low voice, "And me?"
"Ah, Jess," he said. "Braveheart, I need you to understand—we've got an enemy out there, and we don't know anything about him. Her. Them . We don't know what happened to Arlen, to any of them. This is our only chance to find out more. What choice do we have?"
"You remember seeing the other animals who changed," she said in that same low tone. "What it did to them. You know even if you change him, you may learn nothing."
He gave the briefest of nods, quelling Dayna with a look when she would have interjected with argument. Somehow this was between Carey and Jess now. "I know those things," he told her. "The risk of not doing this if it can help us is just too great to ignore."
She eyed him; a moment ago she would have trusted him with her life, with her heart . . . now she didn't know, and it hurt.
Then he glanced at Dayna and said quite practically, "It doesn't really matter, if we can't manage the spell."
"I'll find a way," Dayna muttered, as much to herself as anyone else. She jerked her hand back just in time. "Burning hells, Carey, take this lead rope. This horse must be carnivorous."
"No," Jess said. "He's a stallion who's spent too much time in a stall with no one bothering to teach him manners or give him things to think about besides what his nature tells him to do. He's playing with you."
"If he really wanted to bite you," Jaime added dryly, "your arm would
be broken by now."
Jess gave Dayna a long, even look. "He won't be any different, as a human. Just like I was Lady, when you found me. I had Lady's manners and habits." She thought about the things that she and Lady shared, from their basic natures right down to her sly practice of stepping on the feet of fools who offended her without any awareness of their transgressions. She still had Lady's manners and habits. She was Lady.
"He'll bite, you mean," Dayna said in flat distaste.
"All that and more, I would imagine," Carey agreed. "I never said it would be easy to manage him.
Nothing like the experience you had when you took Jess in."
Dayna gave Jess a sudden narrow-eyed stare, a piercing look that made Jess shift uneasily. "You ended up in the park because Carey used the world-travel spell, and a glitch in the part that was supposed to help the traveler adapt changed you. The first world-travel spell, the one Arlen's refined a dozen times over; it's a whole year older than the changespell. If I can't circumvent the changespell problems . . . that's our answer!"
"You want to hit Ohio with a human version of that ?" Jaime said with a skeptical twist of face, nodding at the stallion. Bored, the horse started pawing at the bedding, digging himself a hole; Carey moved him to the side of the stall and deftly looped and tied the lead rope to the wall-mounted ring there. "Yeah, that makes a whole lotta sense."
Carey took the suggestion more seriously, but ended up frowning anyway. "Leave Anfeald?"
"I'm not exactly keen on going back, either," Dayna said. "No matter how much I miss McDonalds' fries.
But it's an alternative." She looked at Jess again, in a way that gave Jess the sudden impulse to turn around and leave. "We'd need me, to keep a solid lifeline with magic. And Carey, just because I know he'd never let anyone else run off and have all the fun. Someone has to be the boss. And . . . Jess. To handle the stallion. To help him."
Jess wished she'd followed that impulse. That she'd gone off to mix a special mash for the horses who would start returning any time now. That she'd gone upstairs to meet the silly demands of Arlen's calico.
Anywhere but here, to hear the choice Dayna had given her.
Help them do the thing she hated the very thought of by helping the stallion survive the transition to humanity. Or don't help them, and let the stallion suffer a harder, maybe impossible transition.
The anger came back.
Dayna, startled at the sudden glare Jess aimed at her, took a step back, all but bumped into the stallion, and scooted immediately forward again.
It might have turned into a standoff of glares if Natt hadn't come rushing down the aisle, his threadbare but always worn dresscoat flapping with the breeze of his movement. "Jaime! Jess—have you seen Carey?"
Jess stepped back so Carey could come out of the stall, not quite leaving him the space to do it gracefully. He glanced at her; he knew aggressive equine posture when he saw it, even passive-aggressive. "Natt," he said and, as Jess had, took in the apprentice's flustered expression. "Not again. Don't tell me—"
"Not like last time," Natt assured him quickly. "But maybe just as serious in the end.
The . . . event . . . that killed the Council, the damage . . . there's a new spot."
"That's no surprise," Dayna said, slipping easily by Jess to join the conversation outside the stall and visibly glad for the excuse to do it. "I already reported yesterday that the meltdown was spreading."
"More than spreading ," Natt said. "It's shown up somewhere else entirely. Out in Sallatier, near Lander Chesba's hold."
"An entirely new spot?" Jaime said, doubt on her face, along with the unmistakable desire for someone to tell her she was wrong.
But Natt said, "Yes. Completely unrelated. With no signs of spellwork anywhere in the vicinity."
Carey stiffened. "Was anyone hurt?"
Natt shook his head with reassuring confidence. "No. One of Chesba's couriers found it—apparently a day or so ago. It's just taken this long to spread the word."
"Then I'm right," Dayna said, not looking pleased about it. "It's not just a matter of figuring out who killed the Council. It's bigger than that, and we're all in danger until someone puts a check on whoever's behind this."
"Maybe now the new Council will be more interested in what you felt," Natt offered.
Dayna snorted. "Maybe," she said, unconvincingly. "I've already told them everything I know, anyway.
They don't need me back there."
"They do if you're the only one who can feel—" Natt started, but cut himself off at Dayna's look. Not the glare she might have given him once; even Jess was aware that her time here had changed her, given her moderation. Just an even look, and the slight shake of her head.
"I tried it their way," she said. "Let them keep trying it their way. More power to them if they open their eyes and manage to make any headway. Me . . . I'm going back to doing things my way."
Watching Jess, his back straightening with a tired kind of resolve, Carey said, "I don't think we truly have a choice any more."
But Jess didn't meet his gaze, as much as she felt the weight of it. She looked at the stallion, instead—starting to doze now, his sheath relaxed, sex organ exposed. Jess—unlike Dayna—was under no illusions about what it would be like to deal with this horse as a man. He would be earthy, unruly, and not interested in human rules. Although he was far from mean, he had too many years of displacement and coping behaviors gone uncorrected, and they would carry right over to his human form.
She should know.
Chapter 10
Arlen shifted, hunting for a more comfortable position in the front corner seat of the long-bodied coach.
Only the second full day of coach travel, and already—despite the well-padded seats and coach stabilizing spells—he was beginning to rue his bony posterior, an anatomical feature that until now had always seemed perfectly adequate. Until now, with another small town behind him and yet another batch of passengers in this modestly but comfortably appointed coach.
He hadn't become used to the exposed skin between his nose and upper lip, or to sitting through hours of travel, unable even to refine his spellwork lest someone recognize his signature . . . but Arlen had already perfected the evasive smile and nod procedure. The businessman with dubious taste in clothing and not much to say, but amiable whenever he said it. Never offering any indication of his desperate need to reach home, or the privileged knowledge that drove him there.
He'd had no luck reaching Jaime, uncovered no information regarding whatever disaster had befallen the Council—and, in fact, his fellow travelers still seemed to lack any awareness a disaster had occurred at all. Most of them crabbed about the service disruptions in a good-natured way; a few were rude and intemperate. None appeared to realize that the problem went far, far beyond their inconvenience.
Arlen's first attempt to eavesdrop on the wizard dispatch had met with a blocking shield of profound strength. He'd had no doubt he could bypass it . . . but not without revealing his presence in the process.
So he remained as ignorant as the rest of the populace—or nearly so—and sat here in this coach—eight passengers on a side, drawn by a six-horse hitch in a comfort-and safety-spelled coach body with the driver in a separate, enclosed compartment in the front with a door between the sections—exchanging the occasional murmur of conversation, reading a book on the history of needlework techniques and patterns . . . and determined to vary the strain on his anatomy by renting out a horse for the next leg of the journey. A fast horse.
The coach jolted, instantly grabbing his attention—the way these long-bodied road coaches were spelled, the passengers shouldn't have been able to feel the biggest of road holes. Another jolt, and he heard the driver's curse right through the door against which he sat; the other passengers lifted their heads from their reading or their naps, showing the alarm that Arlen was trying to hide. Fifteen other people, all of them trying to get home after being stranded on unexpectedly one-way trave
l booth trips, suddenly more intimate with each other than ever intended as they jostled back and forth, grabbing seat arms and muttering apologies.
A third jolt and the long coach suddenly slewed around, trying to make a turn for which it was never meant; the driver shouted to his horses, panic in his voice, and the wheels lifted beneath Arlen, tossing him upward to the accompaniment of screams— As swift as that, he ran through a quick spell to bleed inertia, sending the energy opposite to the coach's slewing motion. As swift as that, the coach settled back to the ground and came to a halt, jerking slightly as the horses hit the end of the suddenly motionless harness.
Men and women looked around, dazed, untangling themselves from each other and their belongings, and as their hushed conversation changed from inquiries about each others' conditions to the first demands of "What the burning hells was that ?" the driver called back for them to stay calm and stay in the coach.
Arlen was already calm, but he had no intention of staying in the coach. He dropped his book on his saddlebags—he hadn't even lost his place—and slid the door open just wide enough to exit as unobtrusively as possible, knowing the others would soon follow suit regardless. Skipping the step-up to hop straight to the ground, he glanced back over the road—a main coach road, packed dirt heavily maintained by a conglomeration of coach service wizards—and found the cause of the initial jolts.
Misshapen, discolored areas potted the road like deformed cow patties, gleaming with a sheen he'd never seen in nature. No coach was designed to navigate such obstacles; no coach service wizard would have allowed the obstacles—whatever they were—to remain, not for an instant. They were enough to cause what would have happened here had he not— Used magic. Flung his signature around for the world to perceive.
Small magic. Someone would have to be looking for him, or be very nearby, to have detected it at all.
Changespell Legacy Page 10
