Changespell Legacy (41 page)

Jaime bent from the waist, scooping up the broken pencil without lifting her weight from the desk. "The thing is," she said heavily, "I don't." Not without Arlen.

"It's all we have left," Linton said. "We do our best to get the people through. We do what we
can
do.

And we trust the Council to do the rest."

Jaime said, "I'll try."

L
ady ran the far pasture with Ramble, making no effort other than that of being a horse. No messages to deliver, no responsibilities other than that to herself and the tiny being growing within her who as of yet made few demands and offered no restrictions. Almost a year before Lady the mare would foal, and her Jess part kept her muted reaction to herself.

Ramble ran by her side, content with his herd of one, still exploring this new existence—one neither he nor Lady had ever had before. Two horses following their own rhythms, unimpeded by human rules—even if the human rules were ever in the background, an ineffable but permanent part of Lady's nature. Where Ramble had learned fewer rules and learned them badly, she woke from naps with the phantom feel of Carey's hand on her withers, his whispered
good job
in her ear. She flashed on her memories of his white-faced astonishment, staring at his own blood.

Then Jess would come to the fore, fretting and worrying and wanting to
do
. To
fix
. To change, and let the human side of herself somehow make things better.

But Carey was nowhere in Camolen, and Lady knew it. She left the Jess part behind by charging over the rolling hills, inciting Ramble to bucking spurts that carried them away from Anfeald.

When they visited the pasture, they had food—early grass, hay, and daily grain. When they left, no one tried to stop them. Not even the unknown humans they saw along the paths they trotted; everyone seemed too busy, too distracted, to care about two loose horses. Lady watched the couriers come and go, and knew she could be part of it if she wanted.

She didn't.

But their freedom shrank anyway. The bad spots, the ones that had killed Arlen and terrified Ramble . . . the meltdowns Lady had seen multiply during their long journey home to Anfeald . . . they'd followed her here. They'd settled in for good, and spread themselves so thickly over the land that she and Ramble were forced into ever more circuitous routes to reach their favorite places—the point of land jutting out over an old creek bed where they could look over the countryside, standing in the ever-present breeze and thus free of the spring gnats. The deep pool down in the creek itself, where Ramble shoved his head in up over his eyeballs to snort bubbles in the water and where Lady established a ritual roll, splashing and churning and rising up wickedly pleased with herself. The deer path that gave them the excuse to tuck and jump fallen trees in perfect form simply for the brief moment of flight . . .

They'd lost the pool a day or two earlier, discovering in its place a hardened dome full of twisted fish and crawdads and smelling only as dead water creatures can smell . . . an odor that kept them back a goodly distance, snorting and dancing and lowering and raising their heads in an attempt to find some focus point that made sense of it all.

And now, as Lady led Ramble in a brisk trot down the human-made trail from the gnat-free vantage point—her mind on the pleasant twitter of birds, the smell of rain in the air, and the shifting shadows of late afternoon—she rounded a canted angle of trail and nearly ran head-on into an active meltdown. She stopped short, scrabbling backwards while Ramble, unprepared, slammed into her hindquarters and then whirled to get out of the way, more alarmed at the prospect of her ire than at the meltdown he hadn't quite noticed yet.

Freed of his interference, Lady jigged a tight circle and raised her head high to give the meltdown a blasting snort, one that got Ramble's riveted attention as he realized what she already knew.

Their only way home was blocked.

It got someone else's attention as well, a crouching figure tucked in by the edge of the meltdown, one which stirred at the great fuss they'd made and turned to face them, startling Ramble so much he took off down the trail at gallop speed, leaving only the sound of his hoof falls behind him.

And Arlen said, "I'm hungry, but not
that
hungry."

Arlen.

ARLEN.

Lady stood stock-still and stared at him while the Jess-voice clamored in wordless excitement within her, generating such astonished delight that Lady finally broke into a series of bucking leaps, snorting with high drama, twisting and dancing in midair. Blowing hard with the sudden burst of exertion, she finally came to a standstill back before him, examining every inch of him with first one nostril and then the other, up and down the length of his body while he stood there with amusement on his face and his hands spread open so she could check those, too. In the back of her mind she was quite aware of a strange horse in the woods, calling to her and evidently tied and unable to reach her. The Jess in her
knew
this was Arlen . . . but still she had to examine him, blowing soft breaths at him, tickling his face as she discovered the missing mustache and his neck as she found the collar to a shirt that still faintly bore someone else's smell.

At that he laughed and gently moved her nose away. "Please," he said. "I've been alone on the road for a long time, Lady. There's only so much attention my neck can take."

Lady didn't understand, but a bubble of amusement from within told her that her Jess-self did; the amusement came out in a sneezy snort and she suddenly had the need to talk to him, to throw question after question that this self couldn't even begin to formulate, never mind convey. Something in her demeanor must have changed . . . must have alerted him. As she reached for the trigger of her change spellstone, he put a sudden hand on the strong, flat bones of her face and said with alarm, "No! Don't do that!"

She took a step back, moving out from under his hand and tossing her head in annoyance and defiance.

She made her own decisions now.

"You can't use magic, not next to
this
," he said. "You'll drive it crazy. Even if it was through churning—and it's not, or I wouldn't have been able to trace it just now—the changespell is far too complex to trust right now." He shook his head, frustration on his face as he read annoyance in the wrinkle of her nostrils. "I'm sorry. I'll keep it simple. I know when you do turn back to Jess, you'll understand. Lady, the spell won't work. It might seem to work, but it'll go wrong. It'll hurt you. There's no telling
how
it'll end up."

Hurt her.

Hurt her baby.

She flattened her ears in a comment that would have crisped Arlen's hair had he heard it in human terms.

And she left the spellstone alone.

It had been a close thing, close enough to leave Arlen shaken even as he rejoiced to find Lady here . . . and puzzled over the circumstances. He didn't know the orange-marked palomino with whom she traveled, didn't know why she would be out with another horse and without her courier harness. For the moment, he was simply relieved to have caught the distant look of concentration in her eye, and to have forestalled the use of the spell—for her reaction had made it clear enough she'd intended to change, all right.

If only she could. If only they could talk to one another, filling in the considerable gaps of each other's knowledge. He could tell her where he'd been, and why he'd taken so long to return . . . in essence, why he wasn't dead. He could tell her what he'd just learned, following the vague magic to its roots in an effort that had taken every bit of his skill. And she could tell him about Jaime, how the hold fared, what they knew about the Council deaths.

All the same, he was glad for the company.

Especially with the new knowledge weighing heavily upon him, the realization that the Council could have stopped this crisis had they been just a little more thorough, that they had in some small way been responsible for their own deaths, and in a large way, for the crisis gripping the land.

SpellForge.

He should have at least realized that the spell consortium was involved when he'd seen that man at the stable so many small towns and four-corner settlements ago, he
should
have. So carefully cultivated to blend in despite his large size, so prepared. Classic characteristics of a FreeCast agent. Usually those agents worked to protect spellmaker products during development, or to protect spellmaker wizards or even managers' families. "Your Council is like a humanitarian think tank," Jaime had once said, "and those spellmaking companies are just big computer software moguls."

"They're cutthroat," he'd agreed, but in reality knew little about them other than the spells he approved.

That . . . and all the big spellmakers worked with FreeCast.

And of the spellmakers, who else but SpellForge had only recently released the biggest leap in commercial spell technology since mass-produced spellstones? A technology that had been vetted and admired by the Council, Arlen included. Technology that even Arlen had embraced, immediately installing it in his own hold for the convenience of those who struggled with daily amenity spells.

For Jaime.

And how he'd anticipated the look on her face when she discovered a light she could turn on and off as easily as the lights in her own world.

"Stupid," he muttered viciously at himself, earning a nudge from Lady. He did what he'd never done—what he'd never had a reason or chance to do. He threw an arm around her sturdy neck and took comfort in her solid presence, the reassuring touch of her muzzle curving around to whisper against his back. He'd seen Carey do the same many a time . . . though never after Lady had first become Jess.

He still didn't know just why the permalight spell distorted Camolen's magic . . . he needed his workroom, a ream of notations, and a month of quiet to figure that out. But there must have been something in the spell, some hint or clue of trouble that the Council missed. Some indication of this resulting environmental damage.

There
must
have been.

And now they were dead, Camolen was literally falling apart around him, and he and Lady—and Grunt—were trapped here with FreeCast agents on his trail.

He had no doubt about that last. They'd have placed agents in this area, hoping to intercept him on the way to Anfeald. And those agents would certainly be skilled enough to recognize his signature . . . the one he'd revealed when he'd grabbed the faintest tingle of a recognizable trail from the eruption now settling beside him and followed it to its source. One source, and also many . . . multiple invocations of a spell he'd barely been able to remember. A spell to which no one other than himself and the other original Council members had ever been exposed in the first place, and a trail so faint and diffuse that no one else still alive would ever be able to trace it.

No wonder SpellForge wanted him out of the way—no wonder they'd turned to FreeCast agents to get the job done.

"We could have trouble," he told Lady, standing back to rest his hand on her withers. She curled her neck around to look at him, ears at attention. "Maybe not now . . . it's getting a little late, and even these people won't want to navigate the woods in the dark. Too easy to stumble onto one of these bits of nastiness."

Except he heard hoofbeats— But hesitant ones. Faltering ones. When Lady raised her head to nicker a welcome, he knew her companion had returned; in a moment the palomino came into sight, a travel-muscled creature of no great grace but inimitable strength and a hard kind of beauty. A stallion, Arlen noted, and gave Lady a questioning glance—but as it became evident the palomino intended to stop and hover at the edge of true contact, she more or less dismissed him, leaving him only one ear's worth of attention with the other ear back on Arlen.

Then again, what did Arlen know about horses and their relationships? As long as the stallion didn't cause him any trouble—Arlen had trouble enough already—then he could be ignored. There were plenty of other things to occupy him now that he'd gained some idea of the forces tearing Camolen apart.

"We've got to stop it," he said to Lady, a little unnerved by the way she truly seemed to follow the conversation. Horse . . . but now more than horse. He held up his hand and ticked off his fingers. "We've got to stop it; we've got to get those spelled lights in peacekeeper hands. Until then, we need some kind of protection from it, for everyone." He hesitated there, his thoughts drifting away long enough to sketch the basic protection spell premise—since the distortions happened in reaction to magic, creating intrinsically magical damage, any shield would have to create a vacuum of magic. Something he had never actually experienced, and thus something he hardly knew how to reproduce. He shook his head, short and sharp, and left the details for later. "We've got to heal what's been done. And, burn it, we need to find some way through to Anfeald so I can tell Jaime I'm still alive. Unless she knows?" And he looked hopefully at Lady's fine-boned face, the soft brown eye gazing back at him from beneath a long thick fall of forelock.

More than horse . . . but still horse. She didn't perform tricks, use her hoof to scratch runes in the mucky ground, or otherwise answer his question. But she looked at him with understanding and nuzzled his arm, lipping at the material of his jacket in affectionate sympathy.

"We've got to stop it," he muttered yet again, as Grunt whickered anxiously from the woods, rustling branches and snapping twigs in exploration of his lead rope limits. Feeling left out. "In a moment," Arlen told him, raising his voice with some annoyance and never stopping to think that Grunt could hardly understand. Not with other things on his mind, like the sudden realization that stopping the damage meant stopping the light spells meant reaching the peacekeepers meant going in the opposite direction from Anfeald Hold altogether. Anfeald, the goal he'd held fixed in his mind for so long, the one thing that had kept him putting one cold mud-covered foot in front of the other. The thought of turning away gave him a physical wrench, a frantic twisting within.