Changespell Legacy

by Doranna Durgin

  Jess said in a low voice, "Nothing. He knows nothing. Leave him alone."

  The man gave her a grin of what looked like true amusement. " He's safe. All we have to do is take him back and he's a horse again; he can't talk then."

  "He can barely talk now ," Carey said. "How the hells did you even know we were here, or that we had the palomino?"

  Jess glanced at Ramble, who seemed more wary. Annoyed, even. She'd be, in his place. But he still had no idea— "Here's how it's going to go," the light man said, ignoring Carey's question. "We're taking you back to Camolen. Once the situation there is settled enough that you can't interfere, you'll be released."

  Nothing about Carey's body language made Jess believe the man, although when he spoke it was as if he wasn't concerned about the intruders in the least. As if they were in casual negotiation. "Interfere with what?"

  The light man said, "That would be telling." He glanced at his partner, whose blandly pleasant features showed impatience. "See it, Carey. You're two couriers, and we . . . we're good at what we do.

  Shieldstones can be removed. You want things to turn out well, just come along."

  "No," said Jess.

  "Carey," the light man warned.

  "He does not speak for me," Jess informed them.

  "I told you," the darker man grumbled to the lighter. "Waste of time."

  And Carey said, "But she speaks for me. We'll return on our own terms. Whoever you sent after Dayna failed—"

  We don't know that. But Jess was silent.

  "—and I'd like to be here when she gets back."

  So casual. Though his stance was anything but, and Jess found herself easing back, and Ramble snorted and— Someone moved first. She didn't see who and she couldn't even tell what, just that Carey doubled over and then he hit the stall bars, the knife falling from his hand, the light man grabbing his spellstones right through the T-shirt, yanking— Jess scooped up the knife in a desperate furor with no strategy and no skill, but still with the astonishing quickness to slash the knife down the man's arm, leaving him hissing with surprise and pain, turning from Carey with a precision movement that disarmed her even as the darker man came in with brute force and slammed her against the stall, her head hitting the bars so the world turned black and distant, but not so distant she couldn't hear Ramble roar, " Mine! "

  Something knocked her aside; she clutched at the bars and didn't go down, but wasn't on her feet . . . yet no one touched her. The world came back slowly, and even then she didn't understand what she saw. Carey, on his feet, sparring with the lighter man and taking the worst of it—but he had the knife again, and he had a grin on his face, a strange grin that Jess found frightening and reassuring at the same time though she barely had time to regard it as anything at all before she had to throw herself aside, stumbling into the stall. The empty stall.

  Ramble. Ramble who didn't understand, but knew when another stallion touched his mare. Hurt her.

  Mine . And the darker man—not as fast as his partner, not as precise—didn't know how to defend himself against a man who fought not as a man, but a horse. Going for the throat. Hammering blows to chest and sides in a strange overhand punch, quicker and stronger and driven by more feral instincts than his thinking opponent could hope to draw on. Bloodied, the man went down, and should have stayed down—for as horses did, Ramble drew back to let him admit defeat—but gave no quarter when the man bulled back to his feet, back into the fight. Ramble's grunts were of rage; the man's of pain and not a little surprise.

  And Carey held his own—a delicate balance with which Jess, climbing to her feet, was loathe to interfere. Not until a chance shift in position allowed the lighter man to see his partner's fate, and he muttered a curse, flying into action—moving quickly, so quickly Jess stood stunned as he danced around Carey in a sinuous pattern, ending up behind him to place one resounding blow to Carey's back, one so hard the very sound of it made Jess hurt and Carey drop straight to the ground.

  "Stay down!" the man snapped, and she thought it was to Carey but realized the man shouted at his partner—and his partner, listening or else at last simply unable to rise again, ceased to trigger Ramble's fury.

  She thought about going for the lighter man, and wasn't sure; she thought about yanking Ramble aside and wasn't sure, and then she heard Carey make a strange gasping noise and knew . She threw herself between Carey and the lighter man, glaring him off—but he wasn't attacking any more. He froze, looking at her, assessing her, both of them caught in an instant of hesitation to see what the other would do.

  And then something eased within him; he backed up, seeming more resigned than anything and dripping blood from the cut she'd inflicted; blood from that cut sprayed across the white boards of the stalls, painted by the pattern of his own whirling movement. He gave her the slightest of nods.

  Disbelieving, distrusting, Jess risked a glance at Carey—he made a whooping noise, the sound of someone with all his breath knocked away struggling to take in that first deep gulp—and the lighter man didn't move. Didn't try to take her spellstones, didn't swoop in on Carey.

  He doesn't think he has to.

  She didn't understand it and didn't care. Ramble, uncertain now, retreated to the doorway of his stall.

  "Jess?" he asked.

  "Attaboy, Ramble," she said without looking at him. "Good job. Whoa there a moment—" She eased a hand to Carey's shoulder, to where the warmth of his exertion dampened the thick cotton T-shirt, still not sure how long she could look away from the lighter man.

  He said, "You stay down there, and we're on truce. Whoa, if you prefer it."

  She gave him a quick glare, but didn't see any sarcasm much as she searched, automatically stroking Carey's back, too aware of the movement of muscle and rib playing beneath his skin as he worked through whatever the man had done to him.

  "It didn't have to be this way," the man said.

  "Yes," Carey said, still choking for breath but levering himself up on his arms to glare, to take in how things had sorted out. "It did." The darker man down, and hurt. Ramble in the stall doorway, now looking entirely to Jess for guidance and still ready to go after anyone who entered what he considered his personal territory. The lighter man bleeding, but . . . looking like someone who'd won.

  Except that as he watched Carey recover, he frowned. The frown of a man expecting something else.

  Carey said, "We're not going with you."

  Exasperated, the man said, "My people just want you out of the way for a while. Not interfering."

  Bitterly, Jess said, "How can you think we would trust you? Our friends are dead. The Council is dead."

  His expression twitched and went oddly blank. "That was a mistake," he said. "They didn't understand what they were dealing with. None of them—my people, your people . . . wizards and their burnin' magic. Rife, all of them." He gave a disgusted shake of his head.

  His partner, crumpled up against the wall where Ramble had left him, stirred. " Just . . . kill . . . them. "

  "We can get the job done without that," the man said sharply, annoyed. "Things are under control here; they're not going anywhere. You take yourself back and have them send a replacement."

  Jess flushed with sudden anger. Things were under control. This man had not been trying to hurt them, not even after she cut him; until that last moment when he'd turned on Carey with such speed and precision, he'd only been trying to control them. To take the shieldstones and return them to Camolen as he'd said from the start.

  If he wanted to hurt them, any one of them, he could. Even Ramble.

  "Ramble," she said, "I'm safe from this man. Do you understand? Even if he touches me, he does not possess me. If you go back in the stall, I'll come sit with you in a while."

  "Yes?" he said doubtfully, looking at the man he'd hurt, and at the perfectly bland, bleeding stranger who seemed to understand what she was trying to do, for he took another step back, and Ramble's gaze left him and watched how she knelt by
Carey, still rubbing his back with absent, soothing gestures.

  Carey caught her eye, gestured minutely with his chin. Move away .

  She felt like she was tearing something inside herself . . . but to her surprise, it was a wound already opened. A tear first made when she'd found Carey in here with Ramble in the first place, only—somehow—moments ago.

  She stood. She moved away. "Yes," she told Ramble.

  He flicked his head up with the internal conflict of it, and took a step back. "Come sit," he said.

  "I will." She hesitated, not wanting to lie to him, not able to do as he wished . . . not wanting to draw him back out again by thwarting him directly. "I have to talk to this man. You can listen if you want. But we made a mess, and we have to clean it up. If you stay in there, we can clean it up faster."

  He sighed hugely, gave his own tongue a thoughtful chew or two, and backed into the stall, sliding the door closed himself.

  "Attaboy," she murmured. Beside her, Carey tried to climb to his feet, failed—and held up a hand to stay her when she would have gone back to him.

  "I'll get there," he muttered. "Just knocked the wind out of me, that's all."

  "Should have done more than that," the man said, without any particular heat behind it. He moved to the end of the barn, sliding closed the barn door Jess had left ajar, latching it, and then grabbing some of the baling twine Mark habitually looped around the bars of the hay stall to secure the inner handles. "You can open it," he told them, eyeing them as he tied a final knot, "but not before I reach you. So save us all some trouble and sit still a moment."

  Carey gave a short laugh and threw himself into a fit of coughing, through which he said, "I'm the one who hasn't managed to get up yet, remember?"

  "Or maybe you just haven't bothered." But the man didn't dwell on it; he shrugged out of his shortcoat as he walked down the aisle, passing between Carey and Jess with no apparent concern even as he took a quick look at his bleeding arm. The look he gave Jess was one of appraisal—almost, she thought, of approval. "Took me by surprise with that one. You're quick. But it won't happen again." Approval, but . . . warning. He completed the rip she'd made in his shirt sleeve and held the arm out to her. "Tie that off, will you?"

  Numbly, she did.

  No longer bleeding quite so freely, he crouched by his partner, fished around at the darker man's neck, and pulled out a chain of spellstones, quickly sorting through them to find the one he wanted before lifting the injured man's unresisting hand and pressing the stone into it, closing dark fingers around it. "I'm getting out of range," he said. "Trigger the burning thing, get yourself back. Have them send Lubri out. Not Mohi, you hear? You've seen where brute force is going to get us."

  "Go root yourself," his partner said, not bothering to insert any malice, although Jess wasn't sure he had the energy to do so anyway. When the man stepped back—ending up between Carey and Jess and not, Jess thought, by any accident—his partner triggered the stone, sending a wash of magic over the aisle.

  The air rippled, a gentle current turned violent, and cleared.

  "Reinforcements on the way." The man took another step or two back, so he could look at both Carey and Jess at the same time. "I understand your concerns, but I was told if you come back with me, you'll be safe, and released once you can no longer interfere."

  "Dead people don't interfere," Carey said dryly. He no longer tried to rise, but sat back on his heels, looking better—as if it were a decision to stay down, and not a necessity. Still clearing his throat with a strange and puzzled expression, a flush came high on his cheeks to replace the utter paleness of shock.

  Jess looked at the man from beneath a lowered brow and said, "What did you do to him?"

  "I—"

  A sudden blast of magic took the conversation away, surprising the remaining intruder as much as Jess and Carey— not reinforcements then—and he even pulled Carey to his feet, all of them moving back, squinting, trying to understand what they saw. "What?" Ramble demanded from the stall. " What? "

  And then the magic faded and Jess did understand. She understood all too well. Although her memories from the site of the Council's death were from her equine eyes—colors severely washed out, focus entirely different—she had no trouble recognizing the same effect. Here. In the aisle of Jaime's barn.

  What had once been the man's partner was now a lump of skin, jagged bloody bones, pulped and strangely extruded muscles mingled and entwined with what might have been painted flagstone.

  And the smell . . .

  Jess hadn't known there would be a smell when the magic-gone-awry was fresh. Not this smell . . . not so much of it.

  Ramble made a choking noise and fled to the corner of the stall. Carey turned his head away, muttering a single faint curse. But the man walked a few steps closer, eyeing that which had been his partner. He even leaned down, broke off a piece of the unnaturally brittle flagstone, and studied the paint a moment before flicking the stone away to shatter against the wall.

  When he faced them again, he dusted the touch of the stone off against his pants, for the first time favoring the arm Jess had cut. "My name is Wheeler," he said with a strange finality. "I think we're going to get to know each other a lot better than we expected."

  Chapter 19

  Arlen. She'd felt him earlier in the day . . . Jaime was sure of it.

  Sure of it, or wishful thinking?

  Total denial, Jaime told herself with finality. Stuck in limbo too long, no proof of his death other than a melted landscape where he might have been standing . . . too many other things going on to accept the grief.

  Arlen.

  The hope hurt.

  Here it was well into evening, and she felt fine. No hint of the evening ague, long past any time she'd grown to expect it.

  Although she had her dosing vial on hand. Close on hand.

  Arlen, do it again. Touch me. Make me certain.

  The hope . . . was a wonderful pain.

  Jaime dropped the courier report she hadn't been looking at onto Carey's desk, letting it settle atop the others. Meltdown central, that's what they should call this place. Here where she mapped courier reports of the burgeoning dangers of the landscape. Not just Anfeald, either—not since word quickly spread about her undertaking, and now Camolen's couriers passed along sightings from their own precincts along with their message loads in a strange underground movement to deal with the dangers.

  She wondered if the new Council even knew of the project, or understood the need for it—or if they were so tied up in the abstract hunt for answers that they'd lost track of the need for a practical response.

  One thing Camolen sorely lacked, given its otherwise sophisticated nature: disaster site teams. No Red Cross on this side of the world-travel spell.

  Jaime glanced up at the country map newly tacked up on the wall—the precincts of Camolen, from westmost Therand and Solvany to a few remote, sparsely populated eastern precincts whose precinct wizards didn't even make it onto the Council. She took no comfort in the fact that those territories remained unsullied by the red pencil she'd used to mark sightings; very little information came in and out, and the rugged mountains blocking them from neighboring lands outside Camolen—Jaime didn't even know their names—made for plenty of territory where meltdowns would go unnoticed. Therand and Solvany, too, were all but cut off from the rest of Camolen. Without travel booths, the Lorakan mountain range reduced travel to whatever managed to come through the two mountain passes.

  This time of year, that wasn't much.

  It didn't matter. There was enough red splotted over the main of Camolen to indicate how quickly the meltdowns were spreading. The more detailed map of Anfeald hung beside the job board, where the couriers could check their routes for danger spots.

  And still none of them had any idea what was going on. She'd heard murmurings among the couriers, warnings to avoid invoking magic near one of the meltdowns—that magic seemed to irritate them and enlarge th
em. Thinking back to what Linton had said, it made sense . . . he'd had his narrow call after invoking a light.

  Whatever else he'd wanted to say to her that evening had been lost . . . as well as her intent to have Arlen's workroom thoroughly inspected, although that task had since been done, with maddeningly nebulous results. Yes, the apprentices thought things had been disturbed. No, they couldn't be sure . . . right now, things were disturbed as a matter of course.

  Jaime gave a gurgle of frustration and turned back to her paperwork. She'd already made assignments for the next day and put them aside for Linton to refine; now she'd moved on to what she considered optional in this triage situation. Topmost on the pile of Camolen's thicker, slightly textured paper sat a pale blue trifold addressed to Carey with a logo of magically stamped gold and bright turquoise.

  SpellForgeIndustries . One of Camolen's biggest commercial spellmaking companies.

  Say what?

  She fumbled with the seal, a general delivery seal that nonetheless required her to trigger it before it would release.

  Jaime Cabot, not meant for magic. Consort of a wizard.

  Maybe. If she'd been right about what she'd heard. Felt. Touched.

  Arlen.

  Finally the wax softened under her fingertips, and she was able to peel it off, wondering how long it would be before SpellForge came up with a reuseable sealer spell as she balled it up and tossed it in the low, square receptacle beside the desk.

  The paper spilled open, releasing a smaller packet even as it rebounded to its original flat shape. She hadn't even known such spelled paper existed. Fancy . The embossed lettering at the top identified it as being from the desk of an executive at SpellForge; the exact nature of the man's position escaped her.

  Board member, she would have guessed.

  I regret to bother you in this time of need and confusion, but find it necessary to make contact over a purely personal matter. Understanding that my estranged daughter may well have chosen not to inform Anfeald of her family affiliation, I ask you to keep this missive in closest confidence—for which reason it will disintegrate for your convenience, once you trigger the spell embedded at the bottom of the page.