The Changespell Saga

by Doranna Durgin

  In sudden frustration she kicked the wall; the solid blow rang throughout the barn and tingled up through her hock. Again she kicked, and again, barely controlled violence that settled into a leg-damaging rhythm. It numbed her mind and distracted her from the unbearable.

  “Lady!” It was Morley, the head courier, back again and fumbling at the latch to her stall. Furious at the interruption, she screamed and charged the stall door; he fell back and gaped at her as she resumed kicking the wall. She was lost to herself by the time he ran out of the barn.

  Kick, beat. Kick, beat. Kick—Morley was back again, with the same woman who had tended her shoulder. “Lady,” the woman crooned, a considerate approach that only earned her the same greeting Morley had received. Only Carey could help Lady now, it had ever been only Carey—except now she couldn’t stand the thought of his touch, and it left her nothing.

  The woman did not retreat, though Lady bared her teeth and shook her head and rolled her eye. She was...humming. Lady pricked an ear despite herself, then, suddenly aware she’d been thwarted, ran to the back of the stall where she pawed the straw bedding and half-reared, fighting years of training as well as her own frantic passions.

  The humming was quite nice, actually. A stray wisp of color ran through Lady’s thoughts, startling her; it wasn’t a color her eyes could see, although...that other part of her had seen such things. She snorted, and suddenly realized that her legs trembled, and that her right hind ached, and that please, please, she just wanted it all to go away and maybe this woman would do that for her. With a deep groan she approached the stall door again, and the woman put a hand to her forehead, ever humming; the soothing blues and greens washed through her mind.

  Without quite realizing how it had happened, Lady found herself lying in the stall with the woman beside her. She surrendered herself to those healing forces, and felt the alien part of herself sliding away.

  ~~~~~

  Jaime was furious.

  Unfortunately, she had no one at whom to be furious—except maybe the well-meaning people who had refused to tell her what was happening with her friends and brother, and who insisted that while they recovered, they were not yet ready to see her. Even then she knew it wasn’t really their fault that they weren’t quite sure how to deal with a woman from the world without magic. And for her part, she was tired of the constant discoveries—that her bath would have indeed been a warm one if she’d only known there was a spell to trigger and how to do it, that the funny little chime in her head meant someone was looking for her and she should return to the great room to meet them, that she could have easily obtained a mouth cleansing spell instead of futilely scrubbing her morning mouth with a towel-wrapped finger. Pah. She was still spitting out lint.

  A ride, she thought, would do her good. Might do Jess—or Lady—good, too. Distract her, perhaps, and give her something on which to concentrate, for the longer hours in the Camolen day seemed solely intended to provide them both with more time to worry. And Jaime was curious to see how a horse whose alter ego was steeped in dressage theory would respond to some focused riding.

  When she arrived at the barn—fed, dressed in her clean, mended breeches, and anticipating a good conversation with Carey’s horse, she found Lady in the same paddock—but an entirely different animal. Head low, standing in the corner with the weight shifted off her stocked-up right hind, Lady gave her an indifferent glance; the ear she flicked was merely a reflex to rid herself of a fly, nothing more.

  “Jaime?”

  It was not a voice she knew. Jaime turned to the dark-complexioned man who came up behind her and lifted an eyebrow in a polite but not quite welcoming response, unwilling to be distracted from Lady. His confident step faltered.

  “Katrie said that was your name—Jaime,” he offered in an almost-question. “I’m Morley, head courier here.”

  “Yes, it’s Jaime. What’s going on with Lady?”

  “That’s why I’m here. We’re not really sure, and we had hoped you could help us.”

  “We?”

  “Hanni and I. She’s our animal handler—um, she specializes in treating animals with magic. I had to call her in for Lady last night.”

  “What happened?” Jaime tried to keep the demand out of her voice as she quickly turned back to Lady, scrutinizing the dun.

  He shook his head. “Burn me if I know. She went crazy last night after I stalled her—started kicking the wall, and then rushed me. She went after Hanni, too, but that woman’s a good handler. She got the mare sedated, but couldn’t really interpret the problem—although she treated it as best she could.”

  “Then she was doing the kicking with that back leg,” Jaime said, glancing at Morley for confirmation. “Is she still sedated, then? And what did you mean, she treated it?”

  He shook his head. “The sedation’s run its course. I wish Hanni were here—she could explain it a lot better. But she spent a lot of time with Lady and she’s sleeping.”

  “You can’t give me any idea what she did?” Jaime asked, beginning to feel alarm as she watched a horse who had given her no sign of recognition.

  “I know, generally, how they go about working on an unknown like this,” Morley said, looking less at ease with Jaime’s reaction. “It’s about finding the path of most resistance—that’s where the problem is. Then they eliminate it.”

  “Oh my God.” Sudden dread clutched her heart. “Jess!” she called sharply, stepping up on the first rail of the fence and leaning far over the top rail. “Jess!”

  Morley came up beside, his bafflement palpable.

  Jaime ignored him. “Jess! Please, Jess, come and talk to me,” she pleaded, hearing ominous echoes of Morley’s words...they eliminate it...eliminate it...

  The horse regarded her in an unremarkable way, a mare with lean but pleasing conformation and all the extras that went with being a dun, the black points on ears, muzzle and lower legs, the thick line down her back, and the faint tiger striping on the backs of her legs. It was only Lady who looked back at her, who shook her lowered head so her thick man flapped noisily against her neck, and who looked away to scratch her face against her foreleg.

  Beside herself, Jaime turned on Morley. “What have you done to her? Get Hanni back here and put her back the way she was, right now!”

  Morley took a step back, but was uncowed. “In the first place, the way she was was making her crazy. In the second place, this is Carey’s horse, not yours, and he’ll be the one to make the decisions about her.”

  “You should have thought of that last night!” Jaime accused him.

  “Carey wasn’t available and you know it. As far as I’m concerned, Hanni saved that mare’s life last night and there’ll be no more said about it.” His cordial attitude had cooled considerably.

  “You don’t understand.” Desperation set in as she groped for some way to explain it to him, words that would make him understand. She closed her eyes and made a concerted effort to slow her thoughts and choose her words. Calm and cool, Jaime, that’s your rep. Live up to it.

  But she didn’t have to.

  “Carey.” Morley interrupted her thoughts with relief in his voice.

  Her eyes flew open to the welcome sight of two figures approaching in two blessedly familiar walks—one loose-jointed, one self-assured. Jaime ran to meet them, grabbing them each for a quick hug that left Mark grinning and Carey surprised.

  “You’re all right,” she said, finding Carey untouched aside from the healing cut on his face and standing back from Mark to scrutinize him, finding pretty much what she always saw in him, right down to his mildly goofy grin. “Aren’t you?”

  “Just fine,” Mark assured her, right before his face distorted in an exaggerated twitch.

  She hit him lightly on the arm. “What happened? Where’s Dayna?”

  “Dayna needs a little more time,” Carey said, but his comment was so matter-of-fact that she felt reassured anyway. “I heard you’ve been nagging the house aids unmer
cifully—but that none of your questions have been answered. You want some of those answers now?”

  “You’d better believe it,” Jaime said emphatically. “But I think we’ve got a problem here.”

  “Why?” Carey glanced at Morley. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Jess,” Jaime said heavily.

  “That’s what she’s been calling Lady,” Morley offered, still back at the paddock fence. “As far as I’m concerned, the problem’s solved, but you can decide for yourself.”

  All three of them joined Morley at the fence and Carey spent a few moments watching the dun. “There’s her shoulder, which I’ve been told happened on the ride in.” He looked at Jaime, as if checking out her head.

  “I’m fine,” she said, which at this point was an absurd lie. “But—”

  “I’ll tell you what I told her,” Morley interrupted. “Last night your mare went into a frenzy in her stall—kicking, which is why her hock is swollen. She was wild, Carey—she came after me, and she meant it. She’d been fussing all afternoon, too, but this—well, I’ve rarely seen the like. Hanni was in for a calving and she took Lady on. Calmed her, and took care of the upset.”

  “Jess is gone, Carey,” Jaime said in heavy emphasis. “She was there before, you know she was. She knew me, and she listened to me out on the trail—not like a horse would, or even could. She even got me out of a sticky situation with some people who tried to stop me.”

  “I heard about it.” Carey frowned at Lady, who had immediately come over to greet him and was lipping at his outstretched hand.

  “I think it was being Jess that upset her so much.” Jaime looked away from the oh-so-horsey exchange between Carey and Lady. “And Hanni took care of it, and now I can’t see Jess anywhere.”

  “Who in the Ninth Hell is this Jess?” Morley demanded.

  Carey pulled gently on Lady’s chin while she made satisfied faces. “When I went to Jaime’s world, Lady came with me. Only the magic turned her into a woman, and we called her Jess. Dun Lady’s Jess.”

  Morley stared at him.

  “And when we came back, she was Lady again. Only the Jess part of her was still there....” Carey trailed off as Lady removed herself from his range and sniffed a fence post as if it was the only possible reason she came to them in the first place.

  “It must have confused the hell out of her,” Mark said. “How could a horse deal with a woman’s experiences?”

  “She couldn’t,” Morley said firmly. “Maybe your Jess is in there somewhere, maybe not. But I still think Hanni did the right thing—unless you’d rather have lost both of them.”

  “No,” Carey said, barely audible. He turned away from them and looked out on the yard, which was empty of all save a goat that shouldn’t have been loose. After a very long moment, he turned back to them. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on, Jaime. Let’s go find a spot in the shade.”

  “I’m sorry, Carey,” Morley offered, genuinely upset at Carey’s distraught reaction. “If only I’d known—”

  “Don’t say it!” Carey turned on him fiercely, stopping Morley’s words short even as Jaime realized Morley was really saying, if she’d told me about it, this could have been prevented.

  “Carey—” she started, but couldn’t have gotten any further even if he hadn’t broken in.

  “Don’t even think it,” he told her, just as fiercely. “There was no way you could know, just as there was no way Hanni could have suspected what she was doing. It just...happened this way. Maybe,” he continued with some difficulty, “maybe it’s for the best anyway. Jess...was too vital to have lived the rest of her life trapped in a horse’s mind.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Jaime said, almost as fiercely as he’d interrupted her. “I know you don’t. You tried for two months to convince yourself she was nothing more than a horse in a woman’s body, and you couldn’t do it. You’re not going to be able to convince yourself that—that this,” and she gestured widely at Lady, “is for the best, either!”

  It was Mark who captured her outstretched hand and used it to pull her into another hug, a slow, cradling hug, resting his cheek on top of her head. “C’mon, Jay,” he said. “Let’s find that shade.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Carey arrived back at the spreading shade tree that was a central part of Sherra’s back courtyard, he was armed with three cool herbal teas and ready to get down to business. The part of him that had been so raw and open as he confronted a Lady exorcized of Jess had been closed tightly away, leaving that cold and determined courier who was capable of risking an entire barn full of someone else’s horses in order to obtain his goal. A courier who could not take the time to deal with the probable loss of Jess, or even with the horrifying news that every one of his six assistant riders had been killed on the road.

  “Mark’s told me what happened with Dayna.” Jaime greeted him from the carved wooden bench on which she and her brother sat, and accepted the ceramic tumbler he offered her. Carey gave another to Mark and took the bench opposite them, no longer really interested in the immediate past, but reluctantly accepting that Jaime needed to understand what he and Mark already knew. “I can’t believe she can manipulate magic so well,” she continued. “I haven’t the faintest idea how to go about it, myself.”

  “Neither does she,” Carey said wryly. “Or none of us would have spent a day sleeping off the effect of the backlash.” But that was not really a response to Jaime’s unspoken question, so he sighed and told her what he himself had only recently learned. “Chiara—that’s Sherra’s most advanced student—asked me a lot about her—what kind of person she was, what kind of habits she had...”

  “I told her inflexible,” Mark put in, adding a quick but fleeting grin to show it wasn’t meant to be a criticism. “You know how she is about keeping her own little self-imposed schedules.”

  “And you were the one person she could never get to pay the least bit of attention to them,” Jaime said. “Oil and water, that’s you two. But I think I understand what you’re getting at...she’s got a lot of self-discipline. What we might see as inflexibility can also be called...” and she wrinkled her nose in quick thought, “an ability to channel her energies in an orderly way.”

  Carey blinked. Damn good thinking there. “Right,” he said. “But without the schooling, she put us all in a lot of danger. Of course she got the worst of it—but she’ll probably be out and about before this evening.”

  “I think you’re making light of the whole thing,” Jaime said evenly. “Sherra was with you for an awful long time, and went straight off to rest. But she took care of my head injury and didn’t seem the least bit fazed.”

  “An...overdose of magic like that, pure magical energy...it disrupts the entire body.” Carey allowed himself a brief smile as he added, using the benefit of his time in front of the Cabot television set, “Sort of like a phaser on heavy stun. It was damn hard work for her to take three of us and put us to rights again, and I won’t lie to you—for Dayna it was a close thing. But she really is all right, and there’s no point in dwelling on it.”

  “Okay,” Jaime said, letting go of the topic if not the worry that settled between her brows. “Then tell me what’s going on here. Did you learn anything about Arlen? And what about the checkspell—do they have one yet?”

  It was then he recognized something of himself in her. For she wanted to go home...but no one on this world would be interested in restoring three people to Marion, Ohio, until the local crisis had passed. She had herself set on that goal, and right now that meant putting aside her feelings about Eric, Jess, and all the strangeness that surrounded her. He glanced at Mark, and wondered what was hidden behind that laid-back expression. Mark, too, wanted to go home...but with Jaime taking the lead, he kept his own counsel.

  “No checkspell,” Carey said, finally answering Jaime’s question. “I dictated the spell to Chiara, but until then, no one but Arlen had a complete ver
sion of it.”

  “Then he’s still alive.”

  “As far as anybody knows.” Carey’s hand drifted to the spellstones that rested on his chest. “There’s a lot of supposition going on.”

  Jaime shifted in impatience. “Just start at the beginning and give us the whole thing.”

  Carey shook his head, not in dissent, but rather at the uselessness of it all. “And then what? You think you’re going to step right up and solve all our problems?”

  She stared at him a moment, her warm features gone cold. “We’re here because we took you into our lives. We rate an explanation, dammit! The only thing that’s going to make all this bearable is if we know, somehow, that in the end it was all worth it.”

  Remorse nudged at the walls he had set in place, the tunnel-vision walls he had just seen echoed in Jaime. His quick response came as self-protective, an effort to leave the walls standing. “All right, all right.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, trying to organize recently learned updates. Mark might have heard some of it, if he hadn’t been preoccupied with Dayna’s condition while Carey grilled Chiara.

  “All right,” he started again. “About the same time Derrick went after me, Calandre used a stolen recall spell to get into Arlen’s stronghold. He had just enough time to blast a warning to Sherra. Calandre cut him off, of course, but at least we know he probably had time to erect the security spell wall to keep her out of his private quarters. So it’s possible he’s simply waiting out the siege. She’s got a surplus of armed men holding the grounds to keep away any chance of rescue—not to mention the forces that are wandering around making trouble in her name.”

  “He has enough food and water? All this time?”

  Carey’s inward frown was bigger than the one he let reach his face. “Water, yes, since it’s spring and rainy, and he can collect it. Food...I doubt it.”

  “And magic can’t create something from nothing, can it,” Jaime said. “Or, at least, you were always saying about Jess that magic couldn’t change the essential nature of what she was.”