Changespell Legacy (11 page)

"We certainly do," Dayna said. "I take it Jess mentioned that the new Council is blowing off my observations about the . . . incident."

He gave her a fleeting grin as they headed for the tack room. "Blowing off. Expression left over from Ohio?"

"Yes. And did she mention the stallion? Why we brought him?"

He led the way into the tack room, settling the saddle over the top of another on its rack and dropping the saddle cloth into a hamper of similarly dirty horse blankets; rows of empty saddle racks lined the wall, and he took the bridle from Dayna to place it on an unassigned bridle hook on the adjoining wall.

Thigh-high equipment trunks lined each wall beneath the racks and hooks of carefully cleaned leather accouterments—cruppers, chest bands, courier bags, hobbles—although as with the saddles and bridles, most of the spots were empty, the walls bare. "Why you brought him?" Seemingly without even looking, he took Jess's saddlebags from Suliya, leaving her her own. "It was the only way for you to get here, she said—something Garvin and I will deal with later—"

Impatiently, Dayna said, "I'd have waited another day to catch a different ride, if that was the only reason. But Jess said it best—he's the only one who saw what happened to the Council. The only one who lived through it. The only one who can tell us—"

"
Tell
you!" Suliya said, drawing both their startled attentions her way. She shifted under Dayna's sky blue gaze and Carey's appraising expression, but Dayna quickly picked up the conversation where she'd left it.

"If we can use a changespell . . ."

Carey gave a quick shake of his head. "It's checkspelled. You know that. You burning well ought to, after last summer!"

She shrugged. "There's raw magic—"

"That's crazy!" Suliya said. In her mind's eye she saw the development wizards at SpellForge, testing spell formulas, going over every element; more times than she could remember, they'd given her derisive warnings about the use of raw magic. How dangerous it was, how unpredictable, how horrible the consequences.

Dayna gave her a wicked little grin; Suliya hadn't seen that gleam in her eye before, and she wasn't sure she liked it now. "What do you think I do?" she said. "What do you think Second Siccawei is all about?"

"I grew
up
wandering the halls of SpellForge," Suliya said, taking a step back from Dayna but shaking her head with each word. "Raw magic is a fool's tool—and anyone who sticks around to watch is a fool, too!"

"You two get along well together, I see," Carey said dryly. "Ease off, Suliya. As it happens, I agree with you in this case—but it just might be that there's more to the world than you know."

"You don't think I can do it," Dayna said to him. "I expected more of you, after what you've seen."

"I've got an entire hold to think about," Carey said, and Suliya realized to her horror that he was truly tempted to let Dayna try. "And what I
think
is that we have too much at stake to make the wrong decision right now."

Dayna took his words in silence, a narrow-eyed kind of silence that looked like a thoughtful marshalling of more argument.

A sudden clap of sound rocked the stable; as one, they ducked, crouching close to the floor. Carey recovered first, bolting for the stalls; Dayna muttered a nonsensical phrase that sounded like, "Good God," and then very definitely, "Does this sort of thing
always
go on, or is it only when I'm here?" and then she, too, was out the door.

Suliya followed, but at the head of the long stall aisle, stopped to gape. Snow floated in the air, more thickly over the middle section, snow from nowhere. The air bit at her lungs and nose with a singed dryness, completely at odds with the existence of snow.

Carey glanced at the falling flakes, raked his gaze along the stalls, and finally snapped, "Report!" in a voice loud enough to make it down to the big double doors and back again. Suliya brushed futilely at the snow buildup on her sleeve. Snow that didn't melt, snow that wasn't quite white—
not snow
. Wood shavings. Wood shavings that ought to have been in one of these stalls.

Halfway down the aisle, a groom staggered out of a stall, cleaning fork in hand, completely covered with shavings—but looking more bemused than alarmed or injured.

"What happened?" Carey said, meeting the young woman halfway. Klia, the niece of one of the senior riders and a cheerful girl with a middling work ethic and not much in the way of goals for her life . . . not someone Suliya could understand in the least, though she liked her well enough. "Are you all right?"

Klia swiped an ineffective hand over her short curly hair. "I'm not sure," she said, looking dazed enough that she probably wasn't sure what time of day it was, never mind what had happened a moment earlier.

She stuck a finger in her ear and wiggled it, making a face. "You sound a precinct away."

"What," Carey said, trying for patience and almost making it, "were you doing?"

That, the girl could answer; her face cleared with relief. "I just finished this row of stalls, and since we've got so many horses out, I thought it would be a good day to run a drying spell on them all."

Suliya nodded to herself; no matter how clean they tried to keep the stalls, in the winter there seemed to remain an underlying dampness. The drying spells took care of that, but couldn't be done when the stall was occupied. Made sense. More initiative than the girl usually showed, in truth.

"Interesting drying spell," Dayna said, mild amusement in her eyes as the floating wood chips thinned.

"More like a recipe for sweeping practice."

Hurt protest showed in the girl's face. "But I run that spell all the time. This has never happened before."

"Does it always work?" Dayna went down to the stall in question, peered inside, and shook her head. "I suppose it worked in a way, this time. It sure is dry in here. Easy to tell, too, with all the shavings out of it."

"Always." Klia tried again to clear her hair, and finally bent over to shake her head like a dog, sending wood shavings flying.

"That's not true," Suliya said, gaining Carey's sharply attentive gaze. "Sometimes she has to invoke it a couple of times before it works." She'd heard the muttering often enough; Klia was like that with all her small personal spells.

Dayna returned to them. "There's your answer," she said, as though it were self-evident. Carey lifted an expressive brow, amazingly similar to the expression Suliya felt on her own face. Dayna looked at them both—looked
up
at them both, by far the shortest of all three of them—and said, "Oh, come
on
. When it doesn't work, she's introduced a wrong element."

For her impatience, she got only blank stares, but Suliya saw a surprising gleam of humor in Carey's eye at the whole situation—one which made her think perhaps he understood after all, and was actually teasing Dayna. For one so focused, she'd expected anger, not humor, at such a mishap.

But no one had been hurt. The cleanup was simple enough—push brooms, hand brooms, perhaps a dusting spell or two, and in that moment she was struck by the potential of what his friends saw in him, what
Jess
saw in him . . . someone other than the head courier doing his job.

Whatever humor he'd gotten out of the situation, it vanished with Dayna's impatient next words. "She introduces a common wrong element, one there's a checkspell against because
this
is the result. But the Secondary Council is responsible for overseeing checkspell management, and all of a sudden they're filling the role of the Council . . . the checkspell has failed. Carey, it
won't be the only one
."

And Carey's hazel eyes grew darker as his eyes narrowed; he seemed to have forgotten that Klia and Suliya were there as he matched Dayna's intensity, staring back at her. "The changespell," he said, his voice low. "We could find out what happened to Arlen . . ."

She nodded. "It's worth a try, don't you think?"

Suliya blurted, "The penalties—"

Carey gave her a startled look—not as if he'd forgotten her, but as if he were surprised anyone thought the penalties mattered with the stakes at hand. "I'll deal with the penalties," he said. "Klia, if you're sure you're all right, get a start on cleaning up this mess. Suliya will help you. And Dayna . . . you were there when Jess was first changed. I want to know what to expect." He gestured at the back of the hall—no doubt meaning his small office off the job room.

"She didn't have language at first." Dayna kept pace with him, almost two strides to his one. "She learned damned fast, though."

Suliya, standing in a waning storm of wood shavings at the end of a long day, opened her mouth to ask if someone else might not help clean up the mess Klia had made, although a small inner voice reminded her that they were
all
tired, all overworked.

But it occurred to her that this was where things would be happening. Maybe not right away, maybe not even tonight—she had no idea of the preparations needed for what they planned. Even so, sooner or later, this stable would turn into the nexus of action . . . would maybe even provide the crucial information that allowed the new Council to understand what had happened to the old.

Suliya intended to be part of it.

N
ot far from Anfeald the City, on one of the abrupt rocky hills thrusting so boldly from the soil, snow melts off the south side and becomes firmly entrenched in the crannies of the north side—until late in the day, when the hill . . . shimmers. Dissolves. Turns to a flat puddle of stone.

The astonished deer sunning itself on the southern hump of the hill gives a startled bleat and leaps for safety.

Not soon enough.

Jess stood outside Arlen's rooms, ignoring the morning bustle from the dispatch desk inside the apprentice room; there were few messages coming through now, but they'd become harder to retrieve, requiring Natt and a backup dispatcher to be on hand at all times. The last several, for all the trouble they'd taken, had been little more than "stay calm, no further developments, couriers on the way" notes.

The couriers, upon arrival, brought large quantities of family messages traveling from precinct to precinct across Camolen, and a few crucial bits of information—which of the wizards were being chosen to fill the new Secondary Council, which services were considered nonessential, an update of known checkspells now temporarily suspended—but nothing that Jess really wanted to hear.
What had happened to the
Council
. Or even better,
it's all a terrible mistake, everyone's fine.
Rather than admit she still hoped for that last, it was easier to pretend she didn't care about any of it.

But she cared about Jaime, who waved her in to the sitting room where Jess was promptly accosted by the young male calico cat. It jumped to the arm of a chair to paw the air and demand attention, and she absently scratched her way down its back as she eyed Jaime, who sat on the couch lined up against the window. With circles under her eyes and an entirely uncharacteristic jittery presence, Jaime looked years older in just the few days since they'd seen each other.

But she gave Jess a wry smile at the assessment she obviously knew she'd gotten, and passed a hand over her hair. "The good thing about this cut," she said, "is that no one can tell when you
haven't
styled it."

"You were asleep when I got here last night. Carey said you were sick."

Jaime rubbed the bump on her once-broken nose, the one she'd acquired not long after meeting Jess . . . and not long before meeting Arlen. "I'm okay in the mornings," she said. "It's the strangest thing . . . the last two evenings . . ." She let out a gusty breath and shook her head. "I'd say it was a migraine of the worst order, except I've never had them. It comes on, it lasts the evening, and it goes away. By then I'm not good for much, though."

"Are you good for much now?" Jess asked, meaning it as a simple question and not realizing until after she'd spoken how the words might sound.

But Jaime only smiled. "Not as much as usual," she admitted. "Though I'm not sure it matters. I'm nothing but a guest at the moment—people aren't exactly interested in lessons right now, and Carey's already using his horses to capacity. He doesn't need another rider."

"No," Jess said, "but the hold needs a rider." It wasn't the right word, she knew it wasn't. But it was the right concept, and Jaime as much as Carey understood her occasional need for shortcuts and had the ability to follow them.

Jaime did. In that instant, her already reddened eyes teared up, her cheeks flushed. Resolutely, even if in a voice that threatened to fail her, she said, "That should be Arlen. I keep thinking—"
He'll be back.
Even though she couldn't say the words, Jess saw the fierce hope flare briefly in her eyes. But it faded, and she said simply, "I don't even
live
here."

"You care enough to leave your world to come be with him. And he loved you. That makes you important to Anfeald . . . it makes you someone they can . . ." She gestured for a futile moment, and finally said, " . . . come together around. Do things for."

"I should have spent more time here," Jaime said, as if she hadn't been listening. She turned her head to the window beside her and closed her eyes, but not before Jess saw the self-recrimination there.

Jess came to her, knelt by the couch. "
Dayna
could stay here. Dayna had no family in Ohio, no people who meant anything to her. For you, things are different." By
people
she meant Jaime's horses as much as her brother. "We cannot make yesterday's decisions today."

Jaime still didn't look at her. She whispered, "But I miss him. I miss him more than I thought—" She stopped, took a deep breath, and looked back to Jess with overbright eyes. "He was so certain that this time he could teach me that little spell to protect leather from rain. I just can't seem to get it, but he was so sure—" Another deep breath, a long pause, and she said, "I suppose he'd want the place to keep going. Eventually another wizard will be assigned to the precinct . . . Arlen would want it in the kind of shape he could be proud of."