Changespell 01 Dunn Lady's Jess (27 page)

"I heard about it," Carey said, frowning at Lady, who had immediately come over to greet him, and was lipping at his outstretched hand.

"I think it was being Jess that upset her so much," Jaime said, looking away from the oh-so-horsey exchange between Carey and Lady. "And Hanni took care of it, and now I can't see Jess anywhere."

"Who in the Ninth Hell is this Jess?" Morley demanded.

Carey pulled gently on Lady's chin while she made satisfied faces. "When I went to Jaime's world, Lady came with me. Only, the magic turned her into a woman, and we called her Jess. Dun Lady's Jess."

Morley stared at him.

"And when we came back, she was Lady again. Only the Jess part of her was still there . . . ." Carey trailed off as Lady removed herself from his range and sniffed a fence post like it was the only possible reason she came to them in the first place.

"It must have confused the hell out of her," Mark said. "How could a horse deal with a woman's experiences?"

"She couldn't," Morley said firmly. "Maybe your Jess is in there somewhere, maybe not. But I still think Hanni did the right thing—unless you'd rather have lost both of them."

"No," Carey said, barely audible. He turned away from them, and looked out on the yard, which was empty of all save a goat that shouldn't have been loose. After a very long moment, he turned back to them and said, "We've got a lot to catch up on, Jaime. Let's go find a spot in the shade."

"I'm sorry, Carey," Morley offered, genuinely upset at Carey's distraught reaction. "If only I'd known about it—"

"Don't say it!" Carey turned on him fiercely, turning Morley's words into a surprised expression even as Jaime realized Morley was really saying,
if
she'd
told me about it, this could have been prevented.

"Carey—" she started, but couldn't have gotten any further even if he hadn't broken in.

"Don't even think it," he told her, just as fiercely. "There was no way you could know, just as there was no way Hanni could have suspected what she was doing. It just . . . happened this way. Maybe," he said, continuing with some difficulty, "maybe it's for the best, anyway. Jess . . . was too vital to have lived the rest of her life trapped in a horse's mind."

"You don't believe that," Jaime said, almost as fiercely as he'd interrupted her. "I know you don't. You tried for two months to convince yourself she was nothing more than a horse in a woman's body, and you couldn't. You're not going to be able to convince yourself that—that
this
," and she gestured widely at Lady, "is for the best, either!"

It was Mark who captured her outstretched hand and used it to pull her into another hug, a slow, cradling hug, resting his cheek on the top of her head. "C'mon, Jay," he said. "Let's find that shade."

When Carey, armed with three cool herbal teas, arrived back at the spreading shade tree that was a central part of Sherra's backyard, he was ready to get down to business. The part of him that had been so raw and open as he confronted Lady exorcised of Jess was now closed tightly away, leaving that cold and determined courier who was capable of risking an entire barnful of someone else's horses in order to obtain his goal. A courier who could not take the time to deal with Jess, or even with the horrifying news of his six assistant riders, every one of whom had been killed.

"Mark's told me what happened with Dayna," Jaime greeted him from the carved wooden bench on which she and her brother sat, and accepted the ceramic tumbler he offered her. Carey gave another to Mark and took the bench opposite them, no longer really interested in the past, but reluctantly accepting that Jaime would need to understand what he and Mark already knew. "I can't believe she can manipulate magic so well," she continued. "I certainly haven't the faintest idea how to go about it."

"Neither does she," Carey said wryly. "Or none of us would have spent a day sleeping off the effect of the backlash." But that was not really a response to Jaime's unspoken question, so he sighed and told her what he himself had only recently learned. "Chiara—that's Sherra's most advanced student—asked me a lot about her—what kind of person she was, what kind of habits she had. . . ."

"I told her, 'inflexible,' " Mark put in, adding a quick but fleeting grin to show it wasn't meant to be a criticism. "You know how she is about keeping her own little self-imposed schedules."

"And you were the one person she could never get to pay the least bit of attention to them," Jaime said. "Oil and water, that's you two. But I think I understand what you're getting at . . . she's got a lot of self-discipline. What we might see as inflexibility can also be called . . ." and she wrinkled her nose in quick thought, "an ability to channel her energies in an orderly way."

Carey blinked. Damn good thinking there. "Right," he said. "But without the schooling, she put us all in a lot of danger. Of course she got the worst of it, and she was in pretty bad shape to begin with. But she'll probably be out and about before this evening."

"I think you're making light of the whole thing," Jaime said evenly. "Sherra was with you for an awfully long time, and went straight off to rest. But she took care of my head injury and didn't seem the least bit fazed."

"An . . .
overdose
of magic like that, pure magical energy . . . it disrupts the entire body," Carey said, and allowed himself a brief smile as he added, using the benefit of his time in front of the Cabot television set, "sort of like a phaser on heavy stun. It was damn hard work for her to take three of us and put us to rights again, and I won't lie to you—for Dayna it was a close thing. But she really is all right, and there's no point in dwelling on it."

"Okay," Jaime said, letting go of the topic if not the worry that settled between her brows. "Then tell me what's going on here. Did you find out anything about Arlen? And what about the checkspell—do they have one yet?"

It was then he recognized something of himself in her. No one on this world would be interested in restoring three people to Marion, Ohio, until the local crisis had passed. She had herself set on that goal, just as he had aimed himself at returning here, and right now that meant putting aside her feelings about Eric, Jess and all the strangeness that surrounded her. He glanced at Mark and wondered what was hidden behind the face that seemed to be interested in studying the bits of herbs still floating in the tea.

"No," he said, finally answering Jaime's question. "I dictated the spell to Chiara, but until then, no one here but Arlen had a complete version of it."

"Then he's still alive."

"As far as anybody knows." Carey's hand drifted to the spellstones that rested on his chest. "There's a lot of supposition going on."

"Why don't you just tell us everything you've learned?" Jaime suggested firmly. "Just start at the beginning and give us the whole thing."

Carey shook his head, not in dissent, but rather at the uselessness of it all. "And then what? You think you're going to step in and solve all our problems?"

She stared at him a moment and said, icily, "I deserve better than that, Carey. We're here because you fell into a park in Ohio, and because we took you into our lives. We rate an explanation, dammit! The only thing that's going to make all this bearable is if we know, somehow, that in the end it was all worth it."

Remorse nudged at the walls he had set in place, the tunnel-vision walls he had just seen echoed in Jaime. His quick response was self-protective, an effort to leave the walls standing. "All
right
, all right." He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, trying to organize all that he had learned just recently himself. Mark, too, had heard some of it, but for the most part had been preoccupied with Dayna's condition while Carey had been busy grilling Chiara.

"All right," he started again. "About the same time Derrick went after me, Calandre used a stolen recall spell to get into Arlen's stronghold. He would have been warned, though, that the person who showed up in his recall room was unauthorized—he must have been, or he wouldn't have been able to blast a warning to Sherra. Calandre cut him off, of course, but at least we know he probably had time to erect the security walls—uh, magic walls of force that would keep her out of his private quarters. So it's possible he's simply waiting out the siege—and she's got a surplus of armed men holding the grounds to keep away any chance of rescue—not to mention the forces that are wandering around, indiscriminately making trouble in her name."

"He has food and water to last all this time?"

Carey's inward frown was bigger than the one he let show. "Water, yes, since it's spring and rainy, and he can collect it. Food . . . I doubt it."

"And magic can't create something from nothing, can it," Jaime said. "Or, at least, you were always saying about Jess that magic couldn't change the essential nature of what she was."

But I was wrong about Jess.
"Magic affects things. It reveals things. It doesn't create them, or change nonliving matter into living matter."

"All of which is a roundabout way to say that Jay is right," Mark said dryly, looking up from his tea. "Which also means that Arlen's probably pretty hungry by now."

"And he's not going to be able to keep the security walls up forever," Carey muttered. "Not once he weakens." He flopped back against the bench, his head tilted back so he looked up at the fluffy white clouds above them.
Damn, damn, damn. This gets worse and worse.
Jaime and Mark were quiet, giving him his thoughts.

"I've got a way to get to him," Carey said finally, abruptly. "It's foolhardy, and it'll probably get us both killed, but I do have a way."

"How can you get in there if Calandre can't?" Mark asked reasonably.

"Because I've got the only recall that can also be triggered to his private quarters." But you had to know it was there. You had to know how to use it. Carey fingered the stones again, remembering the day he'd been taught the extra nudge of triggering that would take him to Arlen's quarters instead of the stable receiving room—when Arlen had chosen him as head courier.
I'm not a healer, Carey,
he'd confessed,
but you're going to risk your life for me on a fairly regular basis. If something should happen . . . well, you use this. I'll do all I can for you.
He'd even used it once before, the day he lost Lady's half-brother. What had he been carrying? Something for Calandre, before she got so ambitious. It hadn't even been all that important, but some burning little wizardlet had thought it would be the key to his own success. Arlen had played the healer well enough on that day.

"Carey?" Jaime prompted. "I think you've wandered off without us."

"Sorry," Carey said absently, thinking about the guns stowed beneath his bed. "Nothing important. Just wondering how long it'll take me to get this rescue launched."

"Absolutely not," Sherra said. Her hand, poised over a platter of sliced venison, withdrew and momentarily tightened into a fist beside her plate. But if she was torn over her decision, there was no other sign. Carey's responsive bristling was anything but subordinate, and Jaime wondered if they were going to get into a brawl over lunch. Sherra's husband, Trent, eyed them watchfully from a few seats down.

After a moment, when Carey's attitude made it obvious he had every intention of charging off on his own despite her verdict, Sherra collected herself and said, "Our first priority—the same as Arlen's first priority, were he here to tell us—is to find a checkspell."

"That doesn't have anything to do with me," Carey said, not a whit less determined. "You do your job, and I'll do mine. I work for Arlen, if you'll remember."

"It has everything to do with you." Sherra sighed, and reached for the meat she had abandoned, bringing the conversation back down to a less confrontational mode. Jaime found herself relaxing a little, and lifted the tumbler of the herbal tea for which she was beginning to acquire a taste. Her eyes never left Carey and Sherra, who sat opposite one another at the long table—although in her peripheral vision, Mark continued his meal without slacking.
He always could eat through anything.

Carey was shaking his head. "Don't stop there, Sherra, not if you're trying to get me to change my mind."

"I'm thinking," she snapped. "I have to say this just right to have any chance at getting through your thick skull."

Jaime coughed, covering laughter, and avoided Carey's gaze as it turned suspiciously on her.

"I'm missing something here," Mark said. "Carey told me about your Wizard's Council and the precinct justice sessions. Why didn't anyone in Erowah manage to warn you guys about Calandre?"

"I've wondered the same thing." Jaime looked over her tumbler and caught Sherra's gaze, raising her eyebrow. "No one
noticed
she was amassing manpower? Magic power?"

"I watched your television news," Carey said. "Plenty of little governmental overthrows going on. Calandre stays secluded from the rest of the precinct. Making alliances with other, lesser wizards wouldn't be all that difficult to accomplish quietly, as long as she didn't make waves in other ways. And she hasn't recently—until now." He glared at Sherra and came down hard on his next words. "And I want to know what you're going to do about it."

All right," Sherra nodded, apparently having arrived at her strategy. "Given: we're going to need all of the high-caliber wizards at work on a checkspell, and we cannot afford to be distracted. After all, there is a time limit here—as soon as Arlen can no longer keep up his security, Calandre's people will be on him. He's not going to have any resistance left, and she
will
get the spell from him." She nodded to herself, her thick hair stirring with the motion, her eyes on her internal scenario. Then she looked back at Carey and said simply, "Anyway, given that, we cannot afford to have you stirring Calandre up."

"Why?" Mark asked, somehow managing to time an empty mouth with the right moment to insert the question.

"Why?" she repeated, eyebrows raised in surprise. "Carey can tell you that one, if he
thinks
about it."