Changespell Legacy (24 page)

Mark, heretofore congenial and hard to jostle from his good mood, actually looked hurt. Dayna glanced over her shoulder with the kind of disapproval Suliya had learned to ignore a long time ago, and said, "Computers do a lot more than give people access to the Internet." She turned back to the big monitor with an interest that surprised Suliya. "I hadn't yet gotten one of these when I left. It almost seems like magic, now . . ."

"From what you've said," Mark told her, apparently willing to pretend Suliya hadn't snorted at his toy, "it's a
lot
like magic. The way a programmer builds a program doesn't sound all that different from the way a wizard builds a spell."

"Huh," Dayna said, looking entirely too thoughtful. If she got lost in playing with the computer, Suliya was going to get bored, fast . . . maybe she'd wander out and see what was on the entertainment device Mark called a TV. At first she'd thought she could learn a lot about this new world by watching it, but both Mark and Dayna had laughed when they found her at it. Game shows and soap operas, they'd said, had nothing to do with the real world. That's why people watched them in the first place.

Suliya said, "I think I'll go see how Jess is doing with Ramble."

In perfect unison—and without looking at her—Mark and Dayna said, "No!"

"Poot," Suliya said, sliding into a sulk. "You two sound like you have the same brain."

She wasn't sure why they both burst out laughing. As far as she was concerned, it only proved her point.

"Jess is having enough trouble with Ramble," Mark said, so reasonably. "Not to mention that he keeps taking off his clothes."

"You can't keep blankets on some horses," Suliya told him. "Bet he's one of them."

Dayna gave her a calculating look that put Suliya right on edge. "You want something to do?" Dayna asked. "Fine. Let's see about straightening your hair."

"What?" Aghast, Suliya clapped her hands to her head. "Not
my
hair!"

Mark grinned, and Dayna gave her a wicked smile. Teasing her, even as they meant it. "For as long as we're here, yes. You stand out far too much with that mop—can't afford anyone to take notice. Or we could cut it . . ."

Suliya gave a shriek of dismay. A small shriek, considering the circumstances, but Mark winced anyway.

"Keep it down," he said. "I don't think Carey's feeling well."

"Not since we got here," Dayna said. "I don't think he knew how much help he was getting from the healers. The world travel messed him up, and there's no one here who can help. I sure can't pull off that kind of advanced healing magic."

"I gave him some ibuprofen." Mark gave an idle click of the mouse, and after a moment his machine muttered
you've got mail!
in a voice too cheery to be true.

Suliya didn't care about his mail. She glared at Dayna. "No one said anything about my hair when you talked to me about coming here, and no one's touching it now."

"No one knew we'd be here as long as it looks like we're going to be here," Dayna said. "And I was thinking you might like to get out and look around. Shop, maybe. You seem like you might enjoy shopping. Southland Mall isn't much, but it's more than you've seen so far. But you, in rural Ohio? You'll attract attention, all right."

Mark paged through several screens of text, faster than Suliya could follow; he made a snort of dismissal, got rid of the email somehow, and started the process to shut down the computer, all as he nodded agreement with Dayna. "Gotta agree, you seem like a shopping kind of gal," he said. "And Dayna's right. We don't want you looking memorable right now—and trust me, even with straight hair, you'll be plenty memorable." He glanced over his shoulder, tossing her a grin. "That's a
good
thing, Suliya."

She eyed him warily. A compliment, then. But still—!

"Besides," he added, "I thought you girls liked to play beauty salon."

Dayna looked like she wanted to hit him, but didn't. In a disgruntled way she said, "That's not very PC, you jerk."

"Ha," he said, and grinned at her, leaning back in his swivelling chair as the computer monitor went dark.

"I'm right, or you would have nailed me."

"It just so happens it's an easy spell to learn."

Suliya gave her a suspicious look. "And just how easy is it to
un
-spell?"

"Easy enough, or I wouldn't have mentioned it," Dayna said, pushing back her own sandy, boringly straight hair, cut in the currently popular multilayered Camolen style at which those in Suliya's family would have sneered. "Look, I'll just do a small little section, okay? And I'll put it back, and you can see for yourself."

Still wary, Suliya agreed to that much . . .

Except Dayna couldn't. Her casual concentration turned to quick consternation, and then to a flabbergasted string of curses. Suliya tried to hide her relief.

"A little spell like this should be a snap—we
know
the spellstones work!" Dayna said, and tried a quick series of additional spells, none of which had any effect whatsoever. She went into an angry, scowling thoughtfulness, and Suliya sneaked away to the bathroom to check her hair from all angles, making sure it was just as it had been.

She'd thought this would be an opportunity to prove herself invaluable to Carey . . . but Carey barely noticed her, and her only contribution—boring, boring, boring, for days now—was to take watch outside Ramble's stall when Jess needed a nap or a meal. She'd
thought
she'd have been right in there with Jess, teaching the newly made man what he needed to know in order to tell Carey and Dayna what
they
needed to know.

Patting her hair back into place behind a headband borrowed from Jaime's bathroom drawer, she considered that given the expression on Ramble's face when he looked at her—when he looked at any of them, other than Jess—she might be better off outside the stall.

He didn't like being human. And he certainly understood who had made him that way—the other humans. That Suliya had been dragged along to Ohio just as much as he made no difference to him at all, if anyone had even mentioned it to him.

She peeked back into the office, a cramped little room with what could only be a man's touch—Mark, probably—in the browns and tans of the straightforward decor. The computer overwhelmed a desk that reminded her of the one in Carey's job room office, and the desk crowded up against unadorned bookshelves of some material that looked like wood but wasn't, chock full of books with the overflow shoved in every which way. The most remarkable object in the room was a strange little frame with five perfect silver balls hanging on clear string.

Which was to say, there was very little to remark upon in the room at all, and to Suliya's mind—considering she had crossed the barrier to another
world
—that made the room somewhat of a cheat. The kitchen was fun, and the house boasted any number of small oddities, but she'd seen nothing to— Well, to take the curl out of her hair.

No one noticed her reappearance, or seemed to. Mark leaned back in his chair, nodded to something Dayna had said.

Dayna made a face, then seemed to find resolve. "That's that, then—I've got to hit the stores. If I can get the right kind of crystal, maybe I can invoke a spellstone, pause it, and suck up power through it to store in another stone."

"What's wrong with just using the spellstones you have?" Suliya said. "You brought plenty for all of us."

Dayna raised an eyebrow. "That's what you get for walking out of the conversation," she said, but almost immediately relented. "I'm a little concerned about how the trip over went. I think . . . Jess may be right; there's a problem with the magic. I'd like to have some extra power to feed into the stones for the way back."

Mark shook his head. "Sounds damned risky if you ask me.
Pausing
an invoked spellstone. Sheesh."

But when Dayna turned on him, he held up placating hands. "Yeah, yeah, I'm not the wizard around here.

Anyway, I know just the place. Kinda new, stuck off the end of Hocking Street. I'll take you."

"Me too," Suliya said quickly, and when they both looked at her skeptically—in a way her father's employees never would have dared to display even when she was a child—she added firmly, "I'm
coming
."

Dayna groaned. "I hate the fact that the phrase
burnin' poot
comes to mind," she said, and sighed. "At least
braid
the hair, will you?"

"We won't all fit in the truck if she doesn't," Mark said, and grinned, pleased with himself.

Suliya pretended he was a servant, tilted her chin in the air, and turned on her heel to return to the bathroom and such hair management tools as she'd been allowed to bring. But inside, she didn't truly mind. Inside, she had a little girl grin.
Time to explore.

Arlen's travel slowed to an unbearable rate.
Too slow
. He took to packing supplies on the horse and buying them whenever he could get his hands on them. He was lucky to have found new foot gear, thoroughly waterproofed, and—tucked away in the back of a secondhand store—a ripped and crudely mended set of packs to sling over his saddle in lieu of himself.

On foot, his progress slowed considerably. Slowed further by the need to settle for a day now and then—getting the horse's hooves seen to, gathering what news he could. Nothing remarkable, past that first public revelation of the Council death.

If he wanted to, he could reach out and find the travel anchor in Anfeald, the one in his personal rooms.

The rooms where he hoped Jaime still waited.
If only she'd been able to hear—
But she hadn't; his nightly attempts to reach her had had no effect whatsoever, making him wonder if she were indeed gone. It didn't matter. He'd go after her if she'd left. It might well make him an outcast, but he knew how to kill the checkspell long enough to do it, sanctioned or not.

But he didn't hunt for the Anfeald anchor, and he didn't try mage travel. He didn't use any magic at all—aside from a few boughten spellstones to keep his feet warm as he trudged through the slowly diminishing snowpack and those undetectable, private attempts to reach Jaime. Between his gradual movement south and the rapidly changing season, he should find his feet on solid ground soon.

Or, he thought, clambering over a downed tree limb just emerging from the snow with its dark smooth trunk shining slickly in the melt-off, he'd find his feet in
mud
.

He tugged the reins and the reluctant and rough-gaited horse made a big deal of stepping over the tree limb. "Grunt," Arlen said, more in encouragement than imprecation . . . for Grunt was what he'd finally named the creature.

He had no idea how many days—weeks—it would take him to reach Anfeald. He only knew he was determined to do it, and determined to stay out of trouble while he was at it—even if, as the only remaining member of an ambushed Council, he had a target of intent tattooed on his skin so deeply that he could all but feel the itch of it between his shoulder blades.

Even if despite the clues he'd gathered at the distorted, dangerous area his coach had nearly blundered through, he didn't yet know any more about the situation than the average man on the street.

Well. Perhaps not quite
that
little. And before he reached Anfeald, he intended to know more. "Come
on
, Grunt," he muttered in exasperation, reminded once more why he'd never taken to traveling on horseback when Grunt's wandering mind and random decision to stop in the middle of the road nearly yanked Arlen's shoulder out of place. "Quit fooling around and pretend to be heroic. Things will go a lot easier for both of us, I assure you."

Mostly, he thought, easier for me.

Then again, there wasn't going to be anything easy about this journey, about what waited for him at the end of it . . . about Camolen's recovery.

No matter what.

Jess leaned her forehead against the bars of Ramble's stall—his closed, locked stall—and breathed a sigh of relief.

She hadn't wanted the others here for this.

She hadn't told them she intended to ask him today. When they visited, hovering, trying to discern if he were ready for some real communication, she slid back into the easy work, the beginning work. The things Ramble understood but was bored with, so never did very eagerly no matter what.

And they trusted her. They expected her to let them know when he was ready to talk to them. Jess had moved through the morning in a strange haze of duplicity, knowing her own intent, knowing they expected to be told . . . and not telling. Not even Carey.

Never had she deliberately hidden anything from them before. From
any
one. She was by nature the most honest of horses, in her evasions and refusals as much as her willingness to try. She knew it had been one of Carey's favorite things about her as his top courier mount.

But he no longer rode Lady—not for courier jobs, not for pleasure. Some hidden piece of him had never accepted the horse part of her once he'd taken to the woman part of her.

It was that hidden piece of him that she no longer trusted. Certainly not to do right by Ramble, a horse already done immeasurable wrong. Carey
knew
it was wrong, he
knew
it—and he let it happen because Ramble was a horse. A tool. A member of a species to which Carey had devoted his life's work, becoming one of the best . . . but still an animal to be used, when all was said and done.

So she protected Ramble from him—from them
all
—and from the intensity of their questions. They'd push him. They'd upset him. They'd confuse him.

She wouldn't.

But somehow in the process she felt forced to betray her own honest nature.

She gave her forehead an unthinking scratch against the bars, horselike even in that, leaving her bangs in disarray. The rest of her thick, mane-textured hair felt tight against her head; Suliya, bored that morning, had sat Jess down for what she called girl-talk, weaving a complex braid while she was at it. "You hair's perfect for braiding," she said. "It'll hold anything!" She'd gone on to chatter endlessly about some of her early riding experiences, so that Jess decided the whole session was better described as
girl-listen
; she had the feeling Suliya was trying to communicate in some complex subtext, but that habit was one of the human things at which Jess had never become good.