Changespell Legacy (43 page)

She saw a shadow approach the window, crouching down to peer between the open dark curtains; she gestured frantically at him, her arm windmilling her urgency. Immediately, the shadow retreated; Suliya ran back to the arena, right up to the struggle in the dirt.

Or not so much of a struggle, for Carey had subsided somewhat, and though she hadn't intended it, she'd come to a stop right in front of his face, close enough to see his lids half closed and his eyes glazed over in pain and shock. Blood dribbled from his mouth and soaked into the dirt beneath it, but not so copiously as that first horrifying glimpse she'd gotten.

"—remote blade," Wheeler was saying to Dayna. "Doesn't leave a mark on the outside, acts on the inside. This one was more like a vibrating burr than a blade—bigger initial shock value, and then more damage—" He suddenly cut himself off as he seemed to hear his own words, and realized to whom he said them.

Too late. As Mark pounded up behind Suliya, cursing his own intensely muttered alarm, Dayna lost control. "Oh my
God
," she said. "Do you even
think
about what you're saying? Do you even think about what you
do
? What kind of a—" But she, too, managed to cut herself short, to leave room to snap, "Get it out of him. Get it out
right now
."

Wheeler shifted, kneeling behind Carey to let his own thighs act as a bolster, keeping Carey right where he wanted him. Looking at Carey's pale face, Suliya felt a sudden sting of renewed horror.

"Ay!" She crouched down and poked him. Poked him hard, on a collarbone where she figured it would hurt but not mess with whatever Wheeler had done. Hazel eyes sparked, showing more awareness . . . smarter awareness. "Yeh," she said. "You just hang around. I still want that promotion—"

Wheeler said, "It
is
out. That mnemonic I used . . . I'm not good with spells. Or I might have realized—"

"You did this that first fight," Mark said suddenly, his posture changing from tense and startled to
looming
, and making Suliya wish he wasn't behind her. "Didn't you? And he ended up at the hospital and you didn't
say
anything."

"I thought the spell failed!" Wheeler lost his composure and started to rise; Dayna snatched his sleeve and he caught himself, stopping Carey as he threatened to roll onto his back. "I
thought
the interference had nullified it, that it ran its course with little damage. I had no idea it was waiting for an infusion of magic!"

"It doesn't matter right now," Dayna said grimly. "Look at him." For that instant, they quieted, leaving space for the harsh, liquid sound of Carey's breathing, the groan that came with every breath. The long muscles of his neck stood out in stark relief with the effort of it. But his eyes . . . his eyes were coming back to them, helped along by Suliya and her poking, definitely following the conversation.

But when he tried to add something, the effort turned into a liquid cough; he rose to his elbow to spit blood into the dirt.

"Nine one one," Mark said with some certainty, as if that should mean something to the rest of them.

To Dayna it did. "Can they treat him at that hospital?"

Wheeler said, "It's just an injury now. The magic is gone."

"We were about to leave. We could still do it. The healers—" Dayna hesitated, looking at Carey. "God, Carey, you always get yourself in such a mess. First a compost spell, now an internal eggbeater—I
swear
—" Her hands, resting on his leg, tightened briefly.

He jerked in a single cough of wry laughter.
Compost?
Suliya thought, considering him. Was that the spell Calandre had thrown at him, the one no one talked about but that had left him half a courier?

She supposed she'd want it kept quiet if someone tried to compost her like garbage, too.

Wheeler bypassed all of it for the practical. "You're the one who's so concerned over the magic's changes, maybe the healers
can't
—" He hesitated, leaving Dayna room to snap at him.

"Then we
won't
go back. We'll call an ambulance—but we've got to decide!"

Suliya had never seen such conflict on Wheeler's face as the agent said, "If he goes to your hospital, we'll have to leave him behind. SpellForge—"

Carey's eyes widened at that; he gave an ineffective push against the ground as if he might rise further, choking on words that never made it past his throat; Wheeler restrained him without even seeming to think about it. They argued about him, above him . . . while Suliya watched him.

"Yes, and what about SpellForge?" Mark said, distinctly menacing in posture and stare considering how easily Wheeler could have put him down. "First you don't want anyone going anywhere. Now you say you can't wait. Too bad for you, buddy, that Carey's more important than what you do and don't want—"

"SpellForge," said Wheeler, unaffected by Mark's threat, raising his voice for those first few words and then dropping down to dark, dry certainty, "seems to have failed. And they haven't done what's right when it was necessary—when their failure became obvious—or the magical interference would be
improving
, not getting worse by the day."

"By the hour," Dayna interposed in a mutter, watching Wheeler with eyes narrowed, her hands a total contrast where they rested on Carey's leg by the knee, patting him in an absent but comforting way. No longer so panicked, she had taken Wheeler's cue that the worst of it was over; despite what Suliya had thought upon first seeing Carey, he had more than a few moments to live.

Though not many.

"So you—what?" Dayna asked. "Think we need to rush back and save the day? And you couldn't have said this earlier?"

"To what end? Before now, this moment, did we have a way to return?" He gave her a bitter look. "And would you have believed me if I had?"

"Yes," she said, a sharp gleam in her eye. "I'm the one feeling the changes in the magic, remember?"

"Then use the spell now! If we
can
go back, we
must
go back! No one else knows what's happening—"

"None of the other agents?" Suliya said in surprise, the only one accustomed to FreeCast ways.

Wheeler gave an impatient shake of his head. "They were never told.
I
was never told." At their simultaneous stare of response he said, "I believe I mentioned that I find out what I need to know whether or
not
I'm told."

They looked at each other a moment, a moment in which Carey actually did manage to push himself half upright, still struggling to breathe but fully intent on the conversation. Especially intent on Mark's next words, a murmur of an aside with all the threat gone from his stance, "With the magic going gonzo, if you don't leave soon, you could be stranded here forever. Dayna, it all makes a certain amount of sense . . ."

"The hell it does! I'm not making that decision without details. Not when it means leaving Carey behind."

They weren't paying attention to Carey himself, none of them were. No one but Suliya, who saw the way his eyes widened, the way his blood-rimmed lips soundlessly formed a single word.
Jess
.

Wheeler looked at Dayna and said simply, "The permalight spell came with an unexpected price."

She jerked as though in response to a physical blow. "Guides, those things are
everywhere
—" And cut herself off with a shake of her head. "It's just an environmental side effect? They'll figure it out. If it's that obvious, they'll—"

"How?" he asked. "The Council is dead. They're not supposed to be—some fool panicked and drew up raw magic when he tried to conceal his spying, and in the process killed every single wizard skilled enough to follow the casting trail to the permalight spells." He opened his mouth as if he might have something else to add, and then didn't.

"
I've
followed trails—" Dayna started, not appearing to notice his hesitation—but slumped instead of finishing. "But always a very strong spell, to a single spellcaster . . . not a diffuse effect to a multitude of sources." She glanced at Mark. "He's right. It's different. I would have said it couldn't be done."

"If SpellForge had told the new Council as they should have, the light spell would be forbidden by now.

There might not yet be a checkspell, and the Council might not have spread the news to every single household in Camolen all at once, but they'd have put a cap on the worst of it—and the interference wouldn't have escalated. Not the way it has."

"You're guessing," Dayna said. But she looked down at her hands, no longer resting on Carey's leg but fingers clenching each other. "I hate this . . . but I think it's a good guess."

"It might not matter," Wheeler said. "It might be too late already. We could go back and it could be too late to stop the destruction." He narrowed his eyes, tightly gauging Dayna's response, and after a moment added, "Do what you want. But I want to go back now. Here and now."

Dayna looked a Carey, a beseeching gaze from unusually vulnerable blue eyes. "Normally I'd go for Camolen's magic over hospital care any day, but there's no predicting—I'll come back for you, Carey, if it's at all possible, I'll come back—"

"No!" he said, forcing out the ragged but emphatic word and then paying for it with a round of coughing and spitting. He looked at Suliya, just as beseeching as Dayna had been an instant earlier.

She knew what he wanted, even through her surprise that it was she to whom he turned. She found her voice surprisingly firm. "No. He needs to go back. He has to try to make things right with Jess."

Wheeler looked at Carey and said flatly, "You could die. You could die without ever getting the chance to see her."

Carey took the most careful of breaths, spoke in the most cautious of whispers, words that were still as strong as anything he'd ever said. "Death," he said, "would be living
here
without ever seeing her again, and knowing I didn't even try."

Wheeler and Dayna exchanged a glance, brought Mark in on it. A silent round of decision-making, and one that burned up anger in Suliya. "Ay!" she said. "You heard him. If we go back,
he
goes back."

Dayna let out a long breath that could only be acquiescence. But when Carey turned a grateful gaze to Suliya, mouthing a thank you, she didn't know whether to be relieved for what she'd done for him, or frightened of what she might have done
to
him.

Jaime opened bleary eyes to diffuse dawn light, instantly alarmed but taking another moment to realize why.

Natt, waking her. Natt's anxious face, looking as ungroomed as she'd ever seen him, with the light, fine shadow of his beard creating a hard line on his usually soft face and his eyes still a little gummy even by candlelight. He wore a thick, layered silk dressing gown she'd never seen, and carried the scent of a woman's perfume. The chill of the unwarded spring night surrounded them both.

"The meltdowns," Jaime said, as soon as she found her tongue, her fingers clutching the dark green linens that in this world weren't linens at all, but some other natural fiber she could never remember. "Do we have one here?"

"Grace of the guides, no," Natt said, an instant of horror crossing his face. "But something's shown up in the travel booth. There's an arrival alarm—"

"I thought we'd deactivated all unnecessary spells," Jaime said, swinging her legs out of the futon-like bed and groping beneath the bed frame for the canvas slip-ons she often wore around the hold. Like the covers weren't linen, the canvas wasn't exactly canvas, but in her mind they were close enough.

"How often do we use that one? No one thought of it."

"So who is it?" She stood, impatiently finger-combed her hair back from her face, and decided that under the circumstances—and with the addition of a sweater—her current attire of ankle-length sleep-shirt was just fine.

"It's not
who
. It's
what
. And I think you can answer that question better than any of us."

"Do I like the sound of that?" Jaime grabbed a mint from the bowl by the door on the way out, wishing for mouthwash.

Natt, holding the candle so it would light her way as well as his as they entered the dimmer areas of the hold, said, "No one's sure."

She followed too close on his heels, too impatient to do otherwise, and then surged ahead when the ground-floor travel booth came into sight. Cesna waited there with her own candle, one of the old thick stumps under severe rationing. Camolen had gone years . . .
generations
. . . without any significant loss of lighting ability. No rolling blackouts for them, no sudden wink-out of lights because someone somewhere hit a power pole with his car. The candles were old, stashed away in the back corners of drawers and cupboards, and precious.

Not that they offered enough light for Jaime to believe what she thought she saw in the travel booth, folded and neatly centered in the enclosed stone space.

Sabre's blanket.

With a wordless exclamation of surprise, she pushed into the booth and snatched up the fine wool cooler, a dark teal blanket banded in black with a ropy net lining, tailored to be slung loosely over a hot horse. Over Sabre,
her
horse—she knew it as soon as she felt the familiar material, and before her searching fingers came across the embroidered name and logo.
The Dancing Equine
.

"It's Dayna," she said. "Dayna and Carey. They're at the farm, and they're coming back."

"Here?" Natt scoffed. "Not according to the spells you say they had with them, they're not. When they return, they'll end up—"

"Here," Jaime said firmly. She left the chamber, thrusting the cooler at Natt's midsection so he had no choice but to take it. "This belongs to my horse. It came from my farm. Who else do you think would send it?"

"Why send it at all?" Cesna said, a softer protest. Unlike Jaime, she'd taken time to dress, but her fine, light brown hair hung limply about her shoulders and pillow blotches still marked her young face.