The Changespell Saga

by Doranna Durgin

  “I’ve been watching Jess for a couple weeks now. I’m certain she understands almost everything we say, although she’s still not talking much.”

  Fifty yards in front of them, the object of the conversation stood before Mark in obvious consternation, her eyes wide in anticipation of retribution for her reflexive kick. Jaime nodded at her. “Look at her now. A well-trained horse, will, if badly startled, kick out like that. And afterward they know they’ve done wrong, and they have the same expression she does.”

  “Horses don’t have expressions,” Dayna said, pure contrariness.

  Impatience flashed across Jaime’s face. “Body language, Dayna. You know what I mean. I see dozens of things that just keep adding up—the way she stands when she’s alarmed, the way she pays as much attention to what she hears as most people do to what they see, the way she interacts with my horses...do you know she won’t handle JayDee or Leta?” She stated the question in a way that left no doubt as to its significance in her mind, but when Dayna exchanged a glance with Eric she saw he didn’t get it, either.

  Jaime leaned forward, skewing the plastic gingham cover of the picnic table with her elbows. “Those mares are in their teens. If you were to equate Jess’s age into ‘horse years,’ she’d probably be four or five. And that puts her way down on the pecking order, as far as horses are concerned. It’s a rare filly that’ll challenge an older mare.”

  “And you think Jess is the filly,” Dayna said in dry amusement.

  “A couple days ago, Sandy was working her horse,” Jaime said instead of answering. “He was going crooked no matter which direction she took, and they were both getting pretty mad at each other. Then Jess walked right out into the ring, took Sandy’s whip, and showed her where the end tassel tickled the horse. Every time Sandy changed directions, she’d move the whip to her inside hand, and he’d go crooked that way to avoid the tickle.”

  “So you think Jess can read horses’ minds.”

  “Dayna,” Eric said, “you’re being an ass. She means that Jess has an extraordinary understanding of horse body language.”

  In the short silence that followed, they watched Mark get to his feet and reassure Jess. In a moment, she nodded happily and ran for the yard’s small outbuilding—no doubt after the soccer ball.

  “Okay, so I was being an ass,” Dayna said. “What I should have said is, what’s the point? You’re not really trying to convince us she used to be a horse, are you? Or do you think she was raised by them in the wild?”

  Jaime gnawed briefly on a cuticle, ignoring the last facetious question. “I don’t know,” she said. “Except that it all seems pretty odd to me. Jess is so simple—yet so complex. If she’s feeling sad, or angry, or happy, she lets you know about it right then—she’s amazingly straightforward. At the same time, sometimes I feel like I haven’t the slightest idea what’s going on in her head.”

  “I know what you mean,” Eric said. “I’d give anything to know who Carey is, and how they got separated.”

  “That reminds me,” Jaime said, sitting up straight. “Today a man came looking for a mare he’d lost—a mare and her tack. I thought for a minute I was going to have trouble with him. And he was looking for a dun.”

  Dayna scowled even as Eric said, “Dun Lady’s Jess!”

  “He’s staying at the LK.” Jaime looked directly at her, uncowed by that scowl. “It’d be interesting to see what else we could find out about him.”

  “If you think I’m going to use my passkey, think again,” Dayna said. “I like my job. I don’t want to lose it.”

  Jaime held her tongue while Mark trotted back and retrieved his sneakers from beside the table. Then she said, “I haven’t told Mark yet.”

  “Meaning...?” Dayna asked suspiciously.

  “He has a passkey, too. Who would you rather have poking around, him or you?”

  Startled, Dayna had immediate images of Mark in the man’s room, carelessly looking through drawers, leaving a dozen and one signs of his presence. When she looked at Jaime, it was with anger and a little bit of respect. “Don’t tell him,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  ~~~~~

  Jess offered the old border collie another scrap of hoof just to see his reaction again. Keg gingerly accepted the treat, looked around to see if anyone was poised for interception, and slunk furtively toward the big double sliding doors. As he exited he scooted abruptly aside, so Jess wasn’t surprised when Eric showed up in the doorway. She swept the last of the hoof parings and sharp, used horse shoe nails into the dust pan and dumped it into the garbage while he greeted her. He had an unusual glint in his up-tilted eyes.

  “Computers?” she asked, with no notion of what a computer really was—aside from the fact that one sat in Jaime’s office, looking sort of like a television—except that Eric usually spent the day dealing with them and should be there now.

  “Took off work today,” he said. “And I just talked to Jaime—she had the whole day scheduled for the farrier, so she—and you—have the afternoon free. She muttered something about catching up on her record keeping, but you—well, you can come with me, if you want.”

  Her curiosity was immediately piqued; her scalp shifted in the slight way that would have swiveled her ears forward, had they still been proper ears. “Where?”

  His face registered satisfaction. “Shopping. For books. I think, and Jaime agrees, that it’s important that you learn to read. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t really understand what’s happened to you, or how it’ll turn out in the long run—but any way it goes, you’ll be better off if you can read.”

  Jess’s memory supplied her, unbidden, an image of Jaime staring at the morning sheaf of paper-that-smudged. And then, of Carey, looking at one of the black-scribbled things that always came with them on a run. Was that “read”? What did it do? “Read?”

  “Read,” Eric repeated, looking off to the side for an instant of thought. That meant an explanation, for Eric often looked at nothing right before he made something clear to her. Of course, just as often, he looked at nothing for no apparent reason at all. If Dayna caught him at it, she called it day dreaming.

  “Reading,” Eric said, “is a way of listening to someone talk with your eyes.”

  “Ears,” Jess scoffed.

  “No. Look.” Eric drew her over to the board over the grain bin, the green slate-like rectangle that Jess had gotten quite used to without understanding its purpose. He took one of the white sticks that always sat in the tray at the bottom of the board, and brandished it with a flourish. He drew angular lines on the board and said, “That means ‘Eric.’” More lines. “And that means Jess. J-E-S-S. Your mouth makes sounds when you talk, and these symbols represent those sounds. So if I stopped by to see you, and you weren’t here, I could write—that’s what it’s called, writing—a message to you on this board. And you could come along hours later, and read it. Like, sorry I missed you. I’ll call you tonight. So you would wait for my call.”

  “Those symbols talk to you?” Jess said, so amazed by the concept she couldn’t be sure she truly understood. To talk to someone who wasn’t even close! “What do those—” she leaned over the grain bin to sweep her long-fingered hand just above the white marks that had already been there—“say?”

  Without hesitation, Eric said, “JayDee, one scoop. Windy, one and a half scoops. Silhouette, one scoop.”

  “Their feed!” Jess pounced on the realization with delight. She’d had to memorize the feeding directions. “It tells me how to feed the horses!”

  “Right,” Eric nodded. “You’ll find lots of books that tell you how to do different things. And if someone tells you something and you aren’t sure if it’s true, sometimes you can read something that lets you know for sure.”

  “I want to read,” Jess said with conviction. “Show me, Eric.”

  He looked at her, brow lifted in a mixture of surprise and approval. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sound so assertive. I didn’t k
now that was hiding inside you, you sly thing.”

  He’d gone back to words she didn’t entirely understand, but she knew well enough how she felt. When she didn’t feel strongly about a thing, she was readily willing to acquiesce to someone else’s wishes. But when she wasn’t concerned for her safety or confused, when she wanted...

  It wasn’t for nothing that the other horses in her pasture conceded to her the best shade tree. She looked at Eric with a confident smile. “I want to read things.”

  He laughed, and nodded, moving to wipe away the words he’d written.

  “No,” she said quickly, a hand on his arm. She took the chalk from his unresisting fingers and laboriously copied the as-of-yet meaningless symbols below his examples. “Jess,” she announced.

  “Look out, world,” Eric said, and laughed again.

  ~~~~~

  The first book buying turned out to be an adventure. Jess could hardly believe it when they went into a store with volume after volume lining the walls, crammed into the aisles—even filling a table just outside the store’s entrance. She found herself wildly curious—maybe this world was as confusing for others as it was for her, and everybody needed directions. The explanation that most of the books were stories, just like the television, didn’t particularly convince her otherwise.

  “These people know everything in the books already?” she asked Eric of the sales staff. Then she decided her own answer. “Yes. Or they wouldn’t be in charge.”

  Eric shook his head, unable to hide his amusement—both at Jess’s notion and the reaction of the cashier. He told the woman, “We’re looking for a good first reader.”

  “I’m going to read,” Jess announced.

  “Good for you,” the woman responded, regaining her composure. “Let me show you some of the books our other adult learners seem to enjoy.”

  Within a very short time, Eric’s arms were full. He had an adult text called Reading for Tomorrow, and a variety of young adult books. Jess particularly liked the looks of several books about an orphan named Anne, whom she fancied might have felt the same as she, arriving at Green Gables unexpected and not particularly wanted. Then she wandered into one of the aisles and found an entire row of books about horses.

  “Oh, no. Uh-uh,” Eric said, shaking his head before she even looked at him to ask. He shifted his load of books to the crook of one overworked arm and took her hand. “You get through these, and I’ll take you in to get a library card. You don’t have to pay for those books!” He glanced at his watch, bringing her hand up within his as he twisted his wrist. “Besides, we’re out of time. We’ve got another stop to make.”

  She sensed he would say no more, and didn’t ask. She was content enough to trail along, thinking about getting books about horses and seeing just how close they were to being right.

  Eric dumped the bag of books into the cargo area of his hatchback and drove further into the small town of Marion, where the roads narrowed and offered a confusing array of one-way streets. Jess clung to her well-developed sense of direction, comforted by the fact that she could always find her way back to Jaime’s if she had to. Eric parked in a graveled town lot and led her down the street to a building he called the courthouse. Jess knew it was an important place just by the look of it—steepled, ornate, and based on big slabs of cut white rock.

  “What?” she asked Eric, after they’d stood there a moment.

  Eric glanced at his watch. “Just about the right time. Jess, do you remember that man we saw on television the first day you were at Jaime’s?”

  “Roy Rogers,” Jess supplied, although she had a flashing memory of a chestnut-headed man eluding those who chased him.

  “Well, yes, but I mean the other man. The one who reminded me of you.”

  “The chestnut,” Jess allowed reluctantly. Something about that scene had been hard to face.

  “Right. Today, he has to be at this building for an important meeting. I can’t help but think you two are connected somehow—you both show up in almost the same spot, almost the same time, and you had a lot in common.”

  She wanted to deny this, as it made no sense to her—why should she be connected to a man she’d never seen, in this place she didn’t belong? But she, too, had seen familiarity in his athletic movement, in the very wildness of his demeanor. She thought again of the chestnut horse that had carried Derrick.

  Eric looked down at her, the only one of her friends who was tall enough to do so. “I didn’t bring you here to upset you, Jess. Do you want to leave?”

  “He will be here?”

  “Any minute. It was on the back page of the paper this morning, so I thought, why not? He has to go to the courthouse. They’re having a hearing to decide whether he can take care of himself, or if the state needs to be his conservator.”

  Jess made a rude noise at that last gobbledygook, and Eric looked abashed.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “When someone can’t look after himself, the court asks the state to take care of him.”

  “Then he has to do what...the state...says,” Jess surmised. After all, Carey took care of her, and she followed his rules, listened to his Words.

  “Right. They’ll give him a place to live, food to eat, that sort of thing.”

  “Rules.”

  Eric grinned wryly. “Plenty of ‘em.”

  Jess just looked at him, thinking of all the rules she’d encountered here. How to behave—no playing in delightful fountains. How to dress—the shirt part must always be closed, the feet isolated from the messages of the ground. She had the feeling the rules of the state would be stricter, so tight it was impossible not to fight them. At least Carey, with all his Words, sometimes let her choose the path they took; his hands were careful and light on the reins. With the Words at his disposal, he nevertheless asked her, gave her decisions and freedom. Didn’t he?

  Suddenly she couldn’t remember all that clearly. At the time what had seemed like requests came through in her new human thoughts as orders, pure and simple. She had seen Jaime ride, day after day. She isn’t allowed to have opinions, Jaime would say, when Silhouette wasn’t pleased to channel her energy into a collected, balanced frame instead of rushing unchecked around the arena.

  With utter relief, she spotted the chestnut. “There,” Jess said, pointing at the trio of people approaching from the sidewalk. One was a middle-aged woman, brisk-strided, confident. The second was a police officer, and he loosely held the arm of the third, the reason Jess was there. The man was cleaner, dressed in clothes that didn’t quite fit him, and clearly uneasy. Jess read it immediately in his widened eyes, the tilt of his head and the flare of his nostrils. His steps were light on the ground, his body poised to move in any direction.

  Incredibly, his companions seemed not to notice his unease—or surely they would have made those that followed them, those with the black chunky objects held before their eyes, move back. In sympathy, Jess took a step forward. She wanted to be able to tell this man that it was all right, that even though this place was strange and hard, the people were trying to take care of him. She didn’t feel Eric’s hand on her arm as she lifted her head and stood tall, a call of reassurance hesitating in her chest.

  He saw her, saw in her the same familiarity she’d seen in him. He called to her, an odd throaty cry strangled by his human voice.

  “Here, now,” the officer said, not unkindly, as his formerly loose grip clamped tightly down.

  Some horses will obligingly accept a lead rope tossed over a fence, while a securely tied knot sends them into a rage. With lightening speed and amazing ease, the man jerked his arm free, his leg flashing out in a kick that took the officer in the side of the knee. The man’s cry of agony didn’t quite cover the sound of popping ligament and cartilage.

  “No!” Jess cried in fear, knowing there was no turning back from that transgression. She ran a few hesitant steps forward, her gaze never losing the man’s even when Eric’s ready arms closed about her like a cage, ge
ntle but unyielding. The man gave a snort in sudden decision—she was one of them—and bolted away from the downed officer and the lady who no longer seemed quite so brisk or confident.

  He ran directly into the street, in front of drivers who had no warning and no chance to react, where he hit the grill and then the hood of a diminutive foreign pick-up truck. The thud of impact was inordinately loud in Jess’s ears, blocking out all other sounds—including her own screams. The chestnut rolled to a stop against the curb and lay limply, without any sign of the vitality that had so recently pervaded his every action.

  And Jess screamed again and again, until Eric turned her around and his restraining arms became comfort, pulling her into his chest where she hid her face as he walked them back to the car.

  ~~~~~

  “What were you thinking?” Jaime’s voice, strident and demanding, easily made it past the door of Jess’s room to her sensitive ears. Eric’s reply came low, but still audible.

  “Jaime, we know so little about her, I didn’t think we could afford to pass up the chance for answers. Tell me you didn’t see a similarity between those two.”

  “Oh, it was there all right. Was,” she repeated. “I understand your motives, Eric. But such an uncontrolled situation!”

  It was easy for Jess to visualize her friend shaking her head in dismay. Jaime was a strong woman, with strong opinions.

  But Eric, for all his mild and amiable moments, had strength of his own, a quiet strength. It came through in his answer, the voice of a man unshaken by another’s doubts. “We wouldn’t have gotten in to see him without answering a lot of questions. And then maybe it would have been Jess on her way into that courtroom, facing conservatorship.”

  Jess let her attention wander away from the eavesdropping, which had been more of an attempt to keep away unwelcome images than a desire to listen in. Though she’d calmed a little by the time Eric pulled into the Dancing, she was shaken and shaking, and Jaime had listened to only a few words before guiding Jess into the den. There, sitting together on the couch, she held Jess until the shaking stopped. Afterward she offered her cinnamon apple tea and the comfort of her favorite barn kitten. Only later did it occur to Jess that the strict no-cats-in-the-house rule had been deliberately broken.