“What now?” Dayna asked impatiently. “I told you we’d get to these little details sooner or later.”
“I don’t know,” Carey admitted candidly. “I’d hoped to run across some sign of Sherra’s people by now. But I don’t even know what direction to look.”
“I don’t know, either, but they’re here,” Jaime offered. “Arlen said—Arlen!”
Arlen was tipping, tipping over, and Jaime lunged for him just in time to soften his landing. “He needs something to eat,” she said with worry.
“We brought—” Dayna started, then flattened herself against the rock wall behind them, eyes wide at the re-emergence of Lady’s spirit. The small pocket in which they stood seemed suddenly like a trap as Lady fought Carey’s weight on her neck, throwing him off and into the other three, bringing them all tumbling down. Jaime helped push Carey to his feet and he dove in after the reins even as Lady was on her way up; they battled each other, and Jaime tried to protect Arlen, cringing each time Lady’s injured leg hit stone.
“She’ll ruin herself!” Jaime shouted at him, harsh and desperate—and then thinking only of the dark looming bulk of Lady as the struggle grew precariously close.
“Stop it!” Dayna screamed at them, shoved up against the rock. Eyes closed tight, hands clenched into fists at her sides, she shouted it again. “Stop it! You’re not a stupid horse, you’re Jess! You’re Jess!”
Omigod, Jaime thought, feeling the stir of magic. She knew, suddenly, what Dayna was trying to do, and she knew she should stop it, knew it was too much magic for the unwilling neophyte wizard to handle, and that Arlen, although he stirred, was not focused enough to be of help.
But the part of her that longed for Jess’s safety kept her still, crouched over Arlen, eyes riveted on Lady as she flung Carey into a tree and then had to battle the leverage he gained by taking a half-wrap of the reins around its trunk. It was a strange montage of flying hooves and whipping mane, of the thick feel of magic, of Carey’s shouted protests and equine grunts of effort and anger that suddenly turned into a human cry of fear and pain. Carey flew backwards, the empty bridle smacking him on the chest as he landed hard. Unmindful of the impact, he immediately got to his knees and crawled to the dazed creature before him: Jess, tangled in a dun horse’s gear, disoriented and bewildered, whimpering quietly in the sudden silence. Magic still swirled thick in the air, poised to strike if Dayna lost control, but it was a danger Jaime shoved far back in her mind as she watched Carey take Jess into his arms and whisper reassurance into the tangled fall of hair that covered most of her face. For that moment the world was still, letting them focus on the return of one lost. And then its dangers closed back around them, fast and furious.
One look at Dayna and Jaime’s hand clutched Arlen’s bony shoulder, shaking him a little as she directed his attention to Dayna. “Never mind the fainting, Arlen—help Dayna let go of the magic!” And then she left him, knowing that if the magic backlashed, it backlashed, and there was nothing more she could do about it. She headed for the open, and the saddles of the two horses that stood hobbled in the center of the hollow. They weren’t far, and those blankets would be much drier than the one Lady had been wearing until a moment before. Single-minded in purpose, Jaime jumped at Mark’s cry of warning, heard the twang of his bowstring, and ran, snatching the blanket up with such speed that she was halfway back to the safe area before she heard the sickening thump of deadweight meat and bone hitting the ground behind her.
“You dumb son of a bitch!” Mark hollered, half to the dead man and half to his quickly retreating friend. “Leave us alone!”
“Come out where I can see you, then,” the remaining fighter yelled back. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to keep an eye on you!”
“Go fry!” Mark fired back, a mild curse he’d picked up since his arrival in Camolen.
By then Jaime was back in the pocket, where the magic swirled its thickest but seemed, she thought, less than it had been. She handed the blanket to Carey—dropped it on him, actually, and then dropped herself to the ground as well, suddenly feeling dazed and lightheaded, and thinking in abrupt revelation that her baby brother had just killed a man. She sat with her head between her knees for the moments that the magic took to fade away, and then reached a little further inside herself, finding, somehow, the strength for practicalities. Arlen’s loud and relieved sigh was, for the moment, the only sound in the magic-shocked air.
Jaime lifted her head and discovered that the late evening light had finished slipping away, completely shadowing Carey’s eyes; she could gain no clues from them. “How is she?” she asked, taking a quick look around to see that Dayna and Arlen sat quietly against the rock wall behind them, and finding the flash of Mark’s wristwatch in the moonlight out in the center of the hollow. The black gelding had joined the two tied horses and waited with his head hanging, the reins trailing, for someone to care for him.
“All right, I think,” Carey responded. “Confused. Worn out and shook up, like the rest of us. I don’t know about that leg—arm—yet.”
The dark huddle of blanket stirred, and with characteristic candidness, Jess said, “My arm hurts and I’m sitting on a stone. But I don’t want Carey to stop holding me.”
Carey gave a short laugh, one that was tinged with emotion—the disbelieving relief of a man who can’t really comprehend he’s gotten something he wanted so very badly. “Jess, braveheart, I’ve got a stone under my butt as well. If I promise you can spend the entire night in these tired arms, can we move?”
Jaime didn’t hear a reply, but there must have been one; Carey kissed the disheveled hair that covered Jess’s forehead and slowly unkinked his body to stand, carefully helping Jess to her feet and tucking the blanket around her when it threatened to slide off her shoulders.
“Clothes,” Jaime said. “You need something to wear.” Gruesomely, her mind latched on to the thought of the dead man, and then wouldn’t let go. “I’ll get something,” she offered, and pulled herself to her feet, suddenly beset by all the pains her body owed her, the slashed thigh and the worn muscles and even the incredible ache from the afternoon’s session with Willand. She stifled a useless groan and moved off to the distasteful task of disrobing a body, hoping at least some of the clothes would fit.
“Details,” Dayna said, a still small figure against the lighter colored rock. “Food. The horses. And then there’s the small matter of getting out of here before that guy gets reinforcements.”
“Run away,” Mark’s voice agreed, softly but wholeheartedly.
Jaime struggled with the man’s shirt, trying to work uncooperative arms through the sleeves as she pulled it over his head; she finally realized the arrow pinned the material to one of the arms, and she almost broke it off before it occurred to her that they might need all the ammunition they could get in order to make it out of the hollow. She gave it a pull, surprised by the resistance.
In the end she had to brace her feet against the limb and put her weight against it, and the arm finally let go of the arrow with a wet sound. By then Dayna was up and moving slowly among the horses, tying the black gelding, pulling off his saddle and letting it lay where it fell as she sloshed water into her hand for him. They finished their separate tasks and met in the middle of the hollow, Jaime’s arms as full of clothes as Dayna’s were with saddlebags, and together they stumbled back to the small sanctuary against the rock. Mark, moving quietly, met them there.
“I don’t think he’ll bother with us until daylight,” he said. “Hell, he’ll see us if we try to leave—what else does he have to care about?” Then his teeth flashed a brief smile against the darkness. “Hey, Jess, welcome back.”
“Yes,” she said.
Wordlessly, Jaime handed Mark his arrow. Then she turned to Jess, who had moved, with Carey, to the back of the pocket. “C’mon, Jess, let’s see what we can do with these.”
Jess dropped the blanket and stepped forward; Carey groaned and put his hand over his eyes
, while Dayna said, “Jess, I thought we told you—”
“Oh,” she said, looking down at herself. “That’s right. No breasts. Well, don’t look, then.”
Arlen snorted, a tired but amused sound. “So this is the woman you found inside The Dun’s daughter. Beguiling.”
“How—” Carey started, then said, “Ah. Jaime told you. You were together long enough for that, then. You’ll have to tell me what you two’ve been up to, Arlen.”
Jaime stopped short, a cold feeling freezing her hands as they shook out the shirt for Jess. “Nothing, Carey. We had a few minutes to chat, that’s all. Can you get your sore arm through this, Jess?” Carefully she threaded the sleeves over Jess’s upstretched arms and pulled the shirt—a long, unhemmed, coarsely woven garment—down into place. “No underwear, I’m afraid,” she said brusquely, holding out the trousers for Jess to step into, “And though I managed to get the boots off, I don’t think they’ll fit. Of course, you never were much of one for footwear.”
Awkward silence followed Jaime’s abruptness and she filled it with activity, taking the laces of the baggy trousers from Jess’s one-handed fumbling and tying them tightly over the curve of her hip. But Jaime’s thoughts were far from the task, and all she cared about was what Arlen might say next.
“I’ve only been completely out of food for a day,” Arlen said, “but it’s been lean for a lot longer. Do you think we could get at some of that food? I, for one, will think better on a full stomach.”
“Who wants to think?” Dayna cried. “Give that black horse a minute to rest and then Mark said it best—run away.”
“How?” Carey said, his voice ragged with honesty. “We’ve got three tired horses and six people, at least one of whom doesn’t have the strength to even mount up. The roads will be crawling with Calandre’s people—we can’t outrun them or outfight them. But they’re not familiar with this area—aside from that guy up there, no one knows this little place exists. Hell, he doesn’t even have any idea who we are—just that we don’t belong. And if he could call for reinforcements, he’d have done it by now. You’d have felt that, Dayna.”
There was a long silence. “Details,” Dayna said heavily. She set the saddlebags down next to Arlen, and her voice turned resolute. “Don’t eat too much, you’ll only throw up. Do you think we could have a fire, Carey? If we’re really out of sight?”
“It’ll make it harder to move around out there,” Carey said readily, but he still looked at Jaime. Even without clearly seeing his face she knew he hadn’t been sidetracked. He would no doubt make his request of Arlen again later; eventually, he would learn about the torture. Maybe by then Jaime would be ready to talk about it.
Maybe.
“I, for one, could use a cheerful little fire,” Mark said. “We can always put it out if we feel like taking a walk. Anyone got a match?”
Carey snorted. “Magic, Mark. Even I know this one.”
“You sure can call up a lot of spells for a courier who doesn’t know anything about magic,” Mark said.
“It’s not calling up the magic that’s so hard,” Arlen said. “It’s controlling it.”
“Amen,” Dayna said wearily. “Make us a fire, Carey, and let’s eat.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Twenty
Jess stared into the night, sleepless. Exhausted and sleepless.
The others slept—except for Mark, who did his best to keep watch although even the still slightly befuddled Jess could see that he was hardly less fatigued than the others. The blue-cast moon had set and the hollow settled into a darkness deep enough to hide everything but the darker bits of blackness of the horses against rock.
Jess thought about that moon, about how tonight was the first time she’d seen it with eyes that could appreciate the subtleties of its icy light. But such thoughts were shattered into irrevocable fragments—again—by the pain in her arm. Try as she might, she’d been unable to decipher the events since her return here to Camolen, to the equine shape she had both treasured and feared. She tried to make sense of Eric’s death and couldn’t; she tried to fit together the pieces of where they were and where they were trying to get...and couldn’t. Hard enough without shards of pain fragmenting her thoughts; impossible with them.
She remembered the first wrong step, way back on the stairs. And then all she could remember was the running, and the strength and speed that were hers—and that she’d refused to give up when the leg gave out here in the hollow. She knew it had been dangerous to fight like she had, but she still felt a deep little piece of that fight left in her, an anger at events that were none of her doing.
She hadn’t thanked Dayna for bringing her back—not only from her natural form, but from the dark corner of her mind where the human part of her had been coaxed into hiding. She remembered being soothed into that corner, and she shuddered to think that this Jess part of her could have been lost forever.
“You’re awake?” Carey asked softly, one arm moving up to touch her where she lay curled up against his chest.
“Did Jaime ever tell you about Ruffian?” Jess said by way of reply, not moving, still savoring the feel of human touch against human senses—no, of Carey’s touch—and not willing to pull away to look up at him. She could feel the frown of his body language.
“No,” he said. “A horse?”
“A great runner. She hurt her leg, just like me. And she didn’t want to quit...”
“Like you,” Carey supplied.
“And they killed her,” Jess said finally. “Because she was only hurting herself. She was making it worse.” She waited a long moment, her mind filled with the effort of that struggle, and the human hindsight that told her she had, indeed, only worsened her injury. Then she said hesitantly, “Would you have—”
“No!” Carey recoiled from her, and grabbed her upper arms, pulling her upright, his face only inches from hers while she stared at him with widened eyes. “No, Jess, never! You’re not just some racehorse. You’re not just Lady anymore. Don’t ever doubt that, just because I was too stupid to see it when I first...met you.”
Something about the way he looked at her, the intensity in his voice, satisfied that deep longing that had started in Marion, Ohio and lay cocooned within Lady ever since. “Damn straight,” she whispered. She settled back down against his shoulder, and it seemed ever so natural to nuzzle his neck in an equine flirt, nipping gently at the angle of his jaw. He shivered as he closed his arm around her, holding her tightly against him. Very tight. And for the moment, whatever else was happening around them, Jess found she was completely content.
Satisfaction brought her sleep, but she was drawn back into awareness by a sound so slight it woke no one else. Puzzled, she listened, searching the breeze in the trees for the other noise that hadn’t quite belonged to the sounds of the night. There, by the horses, a definite snuffle. Protecting her arm, Jess slid away from Carey and moved hesitantly into the darkness. She stopped with her hand on the rump of the little bay and said, “Jaime.”
A short muffled laugh, no humor in it. “How’d you know it was me?”
“Who else would come to the horses?” Jess asked simply. She hitched at the pants that were bagged around her hips again, and moved to where Jaime sat at the horses’ heads, by the small cluster of trees that served as pickets. “Jaime, why are you crying? Are you scared?”
“No,” Jaime said. “Well, I am scared, but...no.”
“I want to make it better,” Jess said, thinking that in all the difficult times she’d spent with Jaime, the only tears she’d seen had been quiet and few. Not like this at all.
“Oh, Jess,” Jaime said, with a sigh that signaled her shaking head. “I wish you could.” After a pause, she asked, “How’s your arm? I think that you—Lady—blew something in your knee, so it must be your wrist, now.”
Even Jess could recognize an evasion that bald. “It hurts. Won’t you talk to me?”
“Talking isn’t going to make this go awa
y,” Jaime said bitterly, but she relented enough to add, “I was just thinking. About Eric, for one.”
Jess tried once again to make sense of the jumbled memories that surround the return to Camolen, and the change from Jess to Lady. “I know...he is dead. Not why.”
“He’s dead because Derrick’s slick friend is trigger-happy,” Jaime said, more bitterness. “And...because of who he was. Do you remember going for that slimeball? Right before Carey invoked the stone?”
“No,” Jess said, shaking her head in the darkness. “I remember fighting Derrick. I remember...killing him.”
“After that, that guy Ernie had us in a pretty bad spot. And things got confusing, everybody was moving, and Eric pulled you back out of the way when Ernie would have shot you. And,” she swallowed audibly, “Ernie shot him. Damn, I wish I’d let Carey shoot that bastard. I wish Carey had let Dayna kill him with the magic—even if it had backlashed on us all!”
Jess was stunned. “Eric was killed because he helped me?”
“Eric was killed,” Jaime corrected her fiercely, “because Ernie is an egg-sucking son-of-a-bitch who probably pisses in his own Cheerios every morning.”
The Changespell Saga Page 28