And again of Jaime. Never giving up hope . . . What he'd done to her with his attempts to communicate, sickening her every evening as he'd pushed himself into her unskilled mind across such a distance.
Too much to encompass emotionally; intellectually he gently put it all aside and applied himself to the present. Dayna. He should have thought of it as soon as they'd connected—Dayna had lived most of her life in the absence of magic, and now she wielded it freely; she'd even recently developed a mirror spell for use in Ohio. If anyone knew how the opposing states felt . . .
But first he had to deal with that before him, a mare about to burst into changespell and lacking the human reasoning that would prevent it. Although as he eyed her—looming over where he sat on his heels at the base of the tree, its deeply furrowed bark digging into his back through the threadbare coat and the roots framing his feet—he had to admit even human reasoning wasn't always enough to overcome human emotion.
Lady pawed the ground, dangerously close to his toes; she snorted on him.
He wiped off the side of his shave-spell tender cheek and said, "You know you can't. Not until we get this meltdown situation sorted out—and I think we're on the way to doing it. If you want something to distract you, think about getting us to the peacekeepers. That's our first step. Changing here will kill you, and you'll be no closer to Carey."
She shook her head in a snakey threat, flattening her ears.
"You are," he said, "more opinionated in this form than I remember."
She pawed the ground. Damp dirt scattered across his worn buttercorn-colored boots.
"Don't be rude. Do you think I'll change my mind?" He stood abruptly and she whipped her head up to eye him from an eye held high, her nose pulled to a long, very prissy looking expression and crowding him. Unimpressed, he waved a hand at her; she shied wildly away as though expecting to be struck and he was unimpressed by that, too. "Look at me," he said, pointing at his own face. It still burned from the shave-spell, though he hadn't noticed it while spell-talking to Dayna; he forbore to actually touch his sandpapered skin. " Smell it if your eyes aren't up to the job. That little shaving trick of mine may not have triggered any meltdowns, but even a little spell like that is hardly reliable." Unconvinced but warily responsive, she eased up to him and ran her whiskers over his face, whiffing hot breath on painful skin as she took in the odor of blood and serum. "One hell of a brush burn, and I'm lucky it's only that. Never mind the meltdowns—you damn well won't be around to see them if you try to change right now."
She backed a step, snorted hard, and pawed at the ground . . . but this time he felt a difference in the movement. Not Lady being pushy . . . Lady unable to communicate. Bobbing her head at the tree, giving her nose a little flip. Frustrated.
Realization bloomed. "Talking to Dayna is a very minor spell. It takes hardly any magic at all once the connection is made . . . and if it fails, there's not much it can do to us. Besides, if you're settled down enough that I can go back and talk to her, I can get the information I need to build a shield against the meltdowns. And trust me, that's something I need to do. It's something I've been failing to do for some time now." He cocked his head at her. "Let me talk to Dayna, and then we'll head for the peacekeepers.
You think you can give a smooth enough ride to keep even me on board without a saddle?"
He couldn't tell if she'd understood; she stood quietly, suddenly looking like nothing more than the average horse—which to judge from Carey's stories, she'd never been. Always his favorite . . . always doing something about which he could brag. With perfect timing, she sidled up to him, lipping his jacket in a coquettish manner, shyly and gently rubbing her brow against his chest. He laughed. "Aren't you just the charmer. No wonder Carey— oof!"
She did it again, bumping hard against him.
"Carey," he said cautiously, following a hunch—and then warded off another shove. Then again, what other way did she have of inquiring? "He came back with Dayna," Arlen told her, waiting for another shove, knowing he'd found the right question to answer when none was forthcoming. "I gather there was some kind of fight—"
Up down, up down; her head bobbed fast enough to make her thick black mane fly. She knew that much, then.
"You know he's been hurt? A remoblade."
She knew. This time she stood quite still, watching him intently, waiting for his next words.
He gave her the truth. "The only way to save him is to stop these meltdowns so the healers can use magic. And that means getting to the peacekeepers. Frankly, when it comes to that . . . you're of more use to me as a horse. If you'll take me there, that is. It's up to you, Lady . . . you can try to change back to Jess, die in the process, and leave Carey to die after you . . . or you can get me to the peacekeepers and help me save him."
Even with her equine comprehension, with her limited ability to follow the arguments he'd made, he was sure she understood the gist of it.
And that meant she had no choice at all.
Jaime hesitated just inside the doorway of the darkened first-floor room, her hand still trailing on the ornate metal door latch; after a moment her eyes adjusted enough to find the cot-sized bed in the back corner of the small room and to convince herself she saw a hint of Carey's dark blond hair on the pillow.
She said in a voice that couldn't begin to express her rampaging joy, "Arlen's alive, Carey."
The sheets rustled; she opened the door just a little wider so the light from the window at the end of the hall—a window no longer protected by spells, making them all grateful the weather was warming while the worst of the spring insects hadn't yet appeared—eased into the room along with her, bringing dawn to its simple furnishings without inflicting harsh light on Carey himself.
He gave the undertone of a cough she'd already come to expect from him, a throat-clearing reaching deep, trying to avoid the true cough that would come anyway.
And did.
She went and sat in the chair by the bed, hesitating to reach out to him and doing it anyway, a simple hand on his shoulder. They'd almost always been allies, but they'd never been friends. They understood one another . . . but kept it at that, intersecting mostly because of Jess and Arlen and satisfied to leave it that way.
Satisfied except for moments like this, when she wished she knew just the right words for him. Simney had been blunt enough. Without magic—more than the simple generalized healing spell they'd used to bring him out of shock— Well. Carey knew it. According to Dayna, he'd known this might happen when he chose to return rather than risk permanent exile on earth. Permanent separation from the one person he'd somehow managed to drive away, and with whom he now needed to try to make things right.
"Arlen," he said, coming up on his elbow to look at her, keeping his voice low, keeping his words short.
"Dayna felt his magic. He's not far from here. He's worked up a shield against the meltdowns." She hunted for the easiest way to sum it all up, the facts he would want to know versus those that would just fill out the story. "We've got couriers spreading the news about the permalight spells." She hesitated. "If you hadn't come back—you and Dayna and Suliya and even that goon Wheeler—we'd never have known in time. Arlen knew, but we couldn't make contact with him without Dayna—and he wouldn't have been able to complete the shield spell without her."
"I'm baggage . . . on that part," he said, the wry tone somehow coming through in his altered voice and interrupted words.
Jaime shook her head, and though she'd never before considered the matter, she felt not a trickle of doubt when she said, "You're the one who always holds everyone together. The nexus. No matter whose idea it seems to be . . . I don't know that we'd be bold enough to come up with our ideas if we didn't know you were there to charge off with them." She wrinkled her nose. "Even if we're usually just heading into trouble."
He snorted, then brought the back of his hand across his lower lip; blood looked black in the low light.
Jaime offered him a dam
p cloth from the small table at the head of the bed. "Anyway," she said, looking away as he wiped his lip and frowned at the cloth, the wood chair creaking under the shift of her weight, "we're heading for the peacekeepers. Arlen wants us backing him up—there are agents after him. I don't entirely understand it, but I gather SpellForge has some goons available through this organization called FreeCast. Like Wheeler, before you lured him to the good side of the Force. And they really don't want him reaching the peacekeepers. They think SpellForge has everything under control. I think SpellForge has its collective heads up its collective butts. And they obviously don't know Arlen isn't their only problem. So we'll make a run for the peacekeepers—at last word, there's a clean patch of woods we can cut through—and I fully intend for all of us to make it." She glanced at him. "You too, by the way.
Your job is to hang in until we get things stabilized enough that Simney can use some serious magic on you."
He nodded, but from his expression, he didn't think he was fooling anyone. Sooner or later, Simney had said, that lung's going to fill. That's assuming he doesn't just plain stress out his system before then.
Simney didn't use terms like falling blood pressure or spiking heart rate or any of the medical jargon Jaime would have heard on the cable health channel at home. Then again, she didn't have to. The grey of Carey's face, even in this poor light . . . the blue of his lips. They told enough of the story, along with a struggle for breath so profound he paused between almost every word if he managed to string more than two together in the first place.
Now he took a few quick stuttering breaths and said all at once, "Tell Jess I'm sorry."
Tell her yourself would have been the standard sidekick's reaction, but Jaime was no sidekick and Carey wouldn't have asked if he hadn't needed to know she would do it. Just like Arlen. Just in case. She murmured it out loud. "Just in case."
He gave her a twisted smile. "Just tell her."
Jaime shrugged, gripped by the sudden sadness of the moment, trying to keep it from showing. "It won't hurt her to hear it twice." And then winced, because that had been a sidekick's line and it would only serve to drive home how dire things truly were.
He grinned, real humor, and said, "Bet that hurt. To say."
She scowled at him. "Get better so I can hit you."
"Good," he said, settling back down on the bed like a collapsing feather pillow, sinking in smaller and further than she thought he ought to. "Now I know . . . you're ready to go kick . . . some SpellForge butt."
"You watched too much TV while you were at my place," she told him. But he was right.
She was ready.
Chapter 28
Keeping Arlen on her black-spined back turned into more of a challenge than Lady had expected—or had ever even experienced. The bareback rides with Carey and Jaime—those had been partnerships, and if a rider's unmitigated seatbones grew hard against her back after a while, the increased communication was worth it.
Arlen had the sharp seatbones, all right . . . but none of the communication, and none of the balance. He wound his fingers in her mane, letting her choose the trail and letting her choose the pace—she mostly gave him a sloppy little jog, something to which he could easily sit but which also kept them moving; she slipped into an easy canter only on the sections of trail she knew to be smooth and level. Not many of those on the shortcuts she took to reach the peacekeepers.
Ramble followed her, back and to the side, and Grunt trailed behind them both—loaded up and wearing his halter, but on his own since immediately after the first time he'd jerked Arlen off Lady's back with his slow response time.
Exhausting, trying to shove herself back under Arlen when his balance wavered. Numbing, to carry someone with so little talk between them, and so many accidental signals—the second time Arlen fell, he'd inadvertently cued Lady to canter and she'd automatically done it.
And at the same time . . . exhilarating, to be the one in charge. No gentle acquiescence to the bit, no soft response to someone else's choices . . . human choices, that Lady now understood would always put human needs above equine needs. Perhaps that was just the natural order of things. Lady—on her own—put equine needs first; as Jess she tried to balance them. Lady under saddle and under halter had always given over her choices to humans. To Carey.
That it even occurred to her to do otherwise made her want to buck and squeal and leap, too full of freedom to keep it inside.
But she didn't. She kept Arlen on her back, she dodged meltdowns in the trail, she picked her way through off-trail detours, and she headed for the peacekeepers' hold. By choice. Because to do otherwise meant Carey's death, and the desire to make her own decisions had nothing to do with her feelings of loyalty as Lady and the almost unbearable worry of the Jess sublimated inside her.
Horse scent tingled in the breeze as they approached the trail fork from Anfeald Hold; she lifted her head, hunting the source. Behind her, Ramble called out his challenge, a great deep bell of a voice with grunts of punctuation no other horse could mistake for anything but a stallion. Several horses answered, and then Lady's ears pricked to Jaime's faint and anxious call. "Arlen!"
Without thinking, Lady picked up her speed, moving into an extended trot that sent Arlen bouncing on her back; reflexively, he clamped his legs to her sides.
With the trail juncture in sight, full of milling horses, bordered by a fading meltdown, Lady broke into a startled canter, a choppy gait full of the contradictions she felt. "O-oh no," Arlen said, his teeth clicking as he bounced; he yanked on her mane, the only thing at hand. "Whoa!"
And then she caught wind of others , her equine senses geared more toward intensity of odor than finesse of identification but still she instantly thought human . In the woods around them, closing on them, but she couldn't think with Arlen thumping and bouncing and grabbing at her. With the sudden downwind rustle of brush, a figure emerged from the camouflage of leaves and dull brush almost at her feet; it was all she could do to keep from shying out from under him.
"Whoa!" Arlen cried, completely unaware of those others , clenching her barrel with his long legs and hauling on her mane. Metal gleamed dully along an astonishingly long blade, and quite abruptly Lady did just as she'd been told, tucking her butt and dropping her head so Arlen flew neatly over her withers, rolling onward and out of reach. The blade flashed down to score her shoulder and she kicked out wildly, catching only the edge of a sleeve as the blade descended again.
Ramble screamed, a stallion's challenge, and knocked her aside, knocked her down — She wrenched herself aside, trying to avoid Arlen's sprawling figure, trying to avoid the meltdown in progress, well aware that more agents converged upon them.
Armed men and women, ready to turn the hunt into a kill.
"Arlen!" Jaime screamed, her cry of greeting turning to one of horror as the woods seemed to boil with brown-clad agents—only a handful, but how many did it take to kill a man gone head-over-heels off his horse? Lady had saved him with that very tumble, but now he lifted his head from the dirt with a dazed slowness, unable to defend himself; Lady herself hit the ground hard just behind him, legs splayed and thrashing the air as she fought to right herself. Ramble screamed again, this time with pain, and then the man he'd engaged screamed as well—but only for an instant.
"Burnin' poot!" Suliya cried from behind her, almost masking Dayna's equally emphatic curse.
Jaime didn't waste time or breath on curses; she jammed startling heels into her mount's sides and headed across the intersection of trails to Arlen. In the next moment a blur of dark bay movement— Wheeler's horse—blocked her way, shoving her gelding aside with such force that the horse almost went down; Jaime pushed her hands forward to give rein, clutching mane and urging the horse to keep its feet as Wheeler surged ahead into the melee.
"Close up!" Dayna shouted behind her. "Close up, we can use the shield—"
Closing up was just what Jaime had in mind—but now she hesitated, confused by the action
as a pack-loaded dark brown gelding trotted by with choppy, anxious steps. Lady struggled back to her feet, blood splashed on her deep sand coat, black mane and tail flying; she spotted an agent heading for Arlen and lunged for him while behind her Ramble struggled to rise, hamstrung so badly one hind leg flopped uselessly with his efforts. Wheeler jammed his horse between Arlen and yet another agent, and would have flung himself off to join the fray if something hadn't hit him in the chest and stuck there, stunning him and stopping him utterly short, a motionless figure in the middle of chaos.
But he'd given Arlen the time to get to his knees, to find Jaime and Dayna and Suliya and shout, "The shield! Get over here!"
"Close up!" Dayna repeated, running her horse into the back of Jaime's.
"But the shield lets people through —" Jaime said, bewildered, still trying to see how many of the enemy were left, if even now someone charged up behind Arlen— No. They'd have to get through Lady first.
She drove her horse right up to Wheeler's mount, aware he was trying to say something and couldn't, that he didn't look right, and she did a flying dismount, kicking free of the stirrups and flipping out of the saddle to land on her feet, already running to Ramble. The stallion who'd been there at the start of it all, and now couldn't even rise . . . she snatched his flaxen mane and pulled. Pulled hard. "Up, up, up ," she cried, giving him something to throw his head against, a counterbalance for his malfunctioning leg. Up he came, stumbling forward, stopping only when she threw her arms around his neck and told him "Whoa, whoa," in the calmest voice she could muster. Close up— She left him by Wheeler's horse and whirled to find Lady holding off an agent who would have come up on Arlen's back—lightning-fast front leg strikes from a perfect warhorse levade, snaking neck threats, as of yet untouched by the woman with the long knife who looked determined to get past but somewhat taken aback at facing a horse determined to stop her.
Changespell Legacy Page 35
