“Did she take it?” Ander said impatiently behind him.
Carey waited another beat before answering. He hadn’t expected Arlen would let him take this ride alone—but he hadn’t expected Jess’s unwelcome friend Ander to be his companion, either.
“Yes,” he said, after just long enough. “She definitely went this way.” He slapped the reins lightly against his leg. “I wish we’d been out here sooner.”
“There wouldn’t have been any point to doing this before dawn,” Ander said, though the unhappy note in his voice said he agreed. “For once, at least, we can be glad we didn’t get rain overnight.”
Carey snorted. “As bad as we need it.” He flipped the reins over his horse’s head—Lady’s dark dun half-brother, a horse once nearly ruined by Calandre—and mounted up, ignoring the pain that shot through his leg. Too stiff from the early hour—or too tired from a ride, too knotted up by the weather—it was always something these days. There was no point in paying any attention to it. He settled into the saddle and glanced behind to find Ander waiting.
Carey turned the gelding up the hill, grabbing a chunk of mane and leaving the reins loose on the rough climb. Jess’s friend Ander. Carey thought he might even like the man, under different circumstances.
But now, having seen finally them together, he begrudged Ander all the time he’d had with Jess—and he especially begrudged missing the little discoveries Jess had made about being human.
He could see them in her, each time she visited. A little more confidence in her voice, a little more surety in her choice of words. And somehow she still remained Jess, with all her little Lady-driven quirks and her deep honesty.
He’d wanted to let her discover herself apart from him—to understand what she could be. Then if she came back—to Anfeald, to Carey himself—it would be because she chose to, and not because it was the only thing she knew.
Surely that had been the right thing to do.
The gelding labored; the slope turned suddenly steeper, and rose above them with a short, almost perpendicular cut; above that, it would level out, but until then, it was time to walk. Carey kicked his feet out of the stirrups without stopping the gelding, performing the dismount without a second thought and grabbing a stirrup to let the gelding help him climb. A glance behind him told him Ander had done the same.
He’d wanted Jess to choose. He hadn’t wanted to confuse her by pushing too far, too fast. Now, hesitating at the top of the rise to remount and move out of the way for Ander, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake.
~~~~~
Lady called throughout the night, taking restless little naps and yearning for water. Morning found her dull and empty-bellied, her Jess voice worrying about colic. An odd itch nagged at her—an internal want that was building to need. By the time she heard the scrape of a sagging door against the ground, she stood listlessly in the back corner of the stall, enduring.
The barn erupted into cacophony. The others, both changed and unchanged, pacing a frenzied, yipping dance in their cages, while some merely snarled a softer and more ominous note. The black gelding nickered with hope.
Lady, as starved as she was for water, stayed in the corner of the stall. Waiting.
A man walked by, dragging something heavy. Lady didn’t know half the words he used—but she knew discontent when she heard it, and the smell of fresh blood under her nose.
And hay. Sweet, rustling hay. She couldn’t help but prick her ears. The anticipatory chorus from the end of the barn faded, exchanged for the grisly sounds of rending flesh. After a moment, the man returned and threw hay into the stall, paying no attention when he hit Lady in the face.
Water. She waited in tortured impatience while the man slopped buckets into the far cages, never getting quite close enough to be entirely effective. Then for the black horse... Lady’s nostrils twitched, widened, drew in the scent of fresh water so close—and at last the man appeared in front of her stall.
He was the enemy.
And while Lady’s earliest lessons had drilled certain Rules into her—no kicking, no biting—she also knew there was a different set of rules for the enemy.
He leaned over the low, broken door to place the water bucket in the corner. Lady let him come, ears perked, attention focused on the water.
He released the bucket handle and stood, his face expectant. “There you go. You’re the new one, the one who’s been changed before. They went to a lot of trouble for you—too much, I think. That new wizard... she’s the trouble. She’ll make us lose sight of why we’re—”
But Lady had her food; she had her water. Her ears went flat against her skull as she lunged for him, teeth bared. They snapped together, a loud, angry sound, where he’d been loafing an instant before. He staggered backward, tripping over the black’s empty water bucket. When he finally caught his balance, he stood with fists clenched. “Damned bitch-mare!”
She eyed him with her ears back, her head high and her chin lifted; when he took a step forward to retrieve the old bucket, she shook her head in warning and struck the stall door with her hoof.
“I’ll set the new wizard on you,” he said balefully. “Then you’ll see.”
But Lady, secure in the knowledge that she could have bitten him if she’d truly wanted to, shook her head again, her eyes rolling white. He muttered another curse and stomped away.
She plunged her muzzle into the bucket, halfway up her face in water and drinking greedily, the cold water sliding down her throat like a balm. The Jess-voice nagged at her—not too much, not too much!—and the water level dropped steadily. She would have downed the whole thing at once if she hadn’t had to raise her head to breathe. But when she dropped her mouth to the water again, the Jess-voice thundered in her head. No more!
Vexed, Lady bobbed her head, dragging her lips across the water and then snorting the moisture out into the stall. The Jess part was adamant, thinking bellyache.
Ears canted back in annoyance, Lady went to investigate the hay. For the moment she didn’t think about where she was or how badly she wanted to be back at Arlen’s or with Carey—or even about the nagging itch of need inside her; she just thought about the hollow ache in her stomach.
For the moment.
~~~~~
Jaime looked up from her lunch to see Carey entering Arlen’s modest second-floor dining room, Ander behind him—and then took a startled second glance at his tight face. Holdling himself together. Until now, he’d been without the pinched look chronic pain had brought to his features over the last year—lean but fit, his hair summer short but with enough length to scatter over his forehead.
Today, it only served as contrast to the loss in his eyes.
He dropped a small, brightly color bit of something on the stone table between Jaime and Arlen. “We found it on the road.”
Jaime reached over her lunch plate to pick it up, but Arlen’s quick alarm stopped her. She let her hand hover above the object while she looked more closely. Wicked metal tip.
She picked it up by the tips of the feathers that made up the bulk of it, frowning.
“I was afraid of this,” Arlen said, as Ander joined them, coming around the square little table to sit beside Jaime. “We knew they’d gotten her somehow, and they couldn’t use magic while she wore a shieldstone.”
Carey’s hand went to his chest, where his own spellstones made a small lump under his shirt. He, too, had a shieldstone—and so did Ander, Jaime supposed, just as she’d worn one when she was riding courier for Sherra.
And just as she knew from experience—they were no guarantee of safety.
“I’d hoped—” Carey started, and hesitated. He sat beside Arlen and rubbed a hand over his face, and then spoke briskly again. “I’d hoped she’d simply gotten a stone in her hoof, or pulled a muscle... but we rode through to the Peacekeepers, and there was no sign of her. Nothing but these—there were several of them—in the road.” He dropped something else on the table, then—a thin courier’s p
ouch. “We picked up the dispatch for you, as long as we were there.”
Jaime didn’t care about the dispatch. She looked at the object dangling from her fingers and said, “A dart? Is this a dart? They drugged her?”
“That’s certainly what it looks like,” Arlen said. He pushed away what remained of his lunch. At the other end of the room, a handful of wizards from the new changespell team rose from their own meal and headed out of the room. One of the boys from the kitchen quickly moved in to clean up the area.
It took Jaime a moment to realize that Dayna had peeled off from her team to come up behind Arlen; she stood a small and subtle figure at his shoulder.
Arlen held out his hand. “Let’s take a closer look.”
Dayna leaned forward. “What’s wrong with that thing?”
“You feel it too?” he murmured. He set the dart in the middle of the table, then gave Jaime a puzzlingly intense look. She felt a sudden warm flush and frowned at him, but he shook his head and she subsided, waiting, as he asked, “Do you have any more of these?”
“All of them we saw,” Ander told him, puzzled at his intensity. “We didn’t know what might help...”
Arlen said, “Give them to me,” and there was no request in his voice. Ander cast a doubtful glance at Carey and reached into the small leather pocket hanging at his belt, carefully producing two more darts.
“What’s wrong?” Jaime asked, still wary at that expression.
Arlen held up a finger that meant he wasn’t going to answer just yet. He put the three darts in a pile, and held both hands over them. After a moment, Dayna said, “Oh!”—and the darts emitted a sudden poof of smoke and collapsed into a blackened heap of ashes.
“Hey,” Ander protested. “We could have used those! We could have found out where they were made, maybe even who they were made for.”
Jaime gave him an incredulous look. “Ander, my child,” she said, “when one of Camolen’s most powerful wizards invokes magic, you can be certain he does it for a good reason.” As he looked askance at her, she added, “In other words, shut up.”
Arlen said, “Whoever used those darts set them with a tagging spell—a benign thing in of itself, to slide in under shieldstone protection. I’ll have to remove the tag from each of you.”
“A tagging spell?” Jaime said. “So someone could track us?”
“Possibly... but I doubt it. The markers weren’t easy to read, and there wasn’t time for further investigation. Unless I’m wrong—” and he looked at Ander and added dryly, “which I doubt,” before continuing, “—these tags were tied into other spells.”
Jaime had to ask, although she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “And the point... ?”
“A means to get past shieldstones. As soon as any of you removed yours—for ablutions, for spellstone maintenance, whatever—the spell tied to the tag would have hit. Whatever it was.”
A trickle of fear invaded her chest. “But I’m not even wearing—”
“It’s all right, Jay,” he said, reassuringly matter-of-fact. “I’ve shielded you—you probably even felt it. You’re safe, and I’ll get rid of that tagging spell immediately. And then,” he added, under his breath, “we’ll make you a shieldstone. I don’t know why I didn’t do it when you first got here, even if you aren’t riding courier this trip. You’ve earned that protection.”
“I... I guess I thought I was safe here,” Jaime said. She had, too. This was Arlen’s hold, the most secure place in all of Camolen—especially since its occupation the year before.
And there was Arlen, across from her, dressed in black as usual. He still looked as solid and as eminently proficient as the wizard she’d come to know and to think of as her champion, since those few days not nearly long enough ago, when they’d been trapped together in Willand’s clutches. The one time in his life he’d been reduced to fighting for his life, and she’d been caught in the middle.
There’d always been an unspoken understanding between them. He would never let anything touch her like that again.
But he wasn’t a god. He was a man. And he was in a land that didn’t even have gods to turn to, but instead had guides to whatever level of the nine Heavens and Hells awaited.
He was a man, and now he looked at her from brown eyes that knew her fears and spoke clearly of his own failure to protect her. Brown, worried eyes over his thick mustache, and capped by hair that was so much more steel gray than the dark espresso it had been this time last year.
So Jaime shook off her numbness and took a deep breath and said, “I should have asked for a shieldstone right away. It’s not like you don’t have enough to think about.” She thought about the past few moments, and realized then how lucky she was. “I did feel it,” she said, shuddering. “When you shielded me. Thank you.”
Dayna must have been thinking along the same lines. “I can’t believe you moved fast enough to protect her from the tag-spell,” she said, wonder in her voice. “Too bad we couldn’t have saved one to tag something else, so we could try to trace the secondary spell back to whoever...”
Arlen shook his head. “There was an additional spell on those darts. I have no idea what it was, but I suspect it was for me—waiting in case I did fiddle with them. No matter. I would never take such chances where Willand is involved.”
“Willand,” Jaime repeated, her voice faint.
Carey’s voice was much harder. “Willand,” he said. “Willand’s signature was on those darts?”
“Not exactly. It was someone else’s signature; someone else’s actual working. But it was the same signature of the person who helped her escape—no doubt Willand was involved. Willand...” Arlen shook his head. “She’s simply too ruthless.”
“And she has Jess,” Carey said. He looked away from them all, the tension in his jaw evident, as was the difficulty of his swallow. “She has Jess.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Eleven
Lady circled the limits of her stall, damp with sweat in the afternoon heat. Thirsty. No one had tended the barn occupants today, aside from a brief visit by the two women who quickly sedated and removed one of the smaller cairndogs. They didn’t even glance at Lady’s flattened ears as they walked by with their living baggage.
The gelding made occasional overtures of friendship, and his whiskered black muzzle still appeared in the gap between boards every now and then. But Lady, irritated about so many things already, was coming to realize that it was not a gelding she wanted right now.
It was a stallion.
She hadn’t been in season since the first change to Jess—too disrupted by the changes, too seldom in her Lady form for any length of time. Now, it seemed she’d been trapped as Lady long enough for her body to take advantage—and with a vengeance.
She wanted nothing to do with the gelding, the barn, the humans, or the heat that created her thirst. She wanted out, and she wanted out now. She wanted something else, too—but she was confused by it, because the thought of stallion kept mingling with the thought of Carey.
She snapped peevishly at a big fat green fly on her side—and then went abruptly still, listening. Voices. Her ears flew forward, isolating a familiar tone.
Although familiar didn’t necessarily mean good, and she certainly wasn’t happy about this particular voice. Even less happy once he’d come inside with his companions.
She’d never seen him from this form, but she recognized him nonetheless. Small, wiry, his black hair drawn back into a tail, he stopped in front of her stall and looked at her with distinct satisfaction on his face.
Shammel.
“Too bad she was a horse when you took her,” Shammel said, crossing his arms and standing hipshot just out of reach of her teeth. “The woman could have been made to talk.”
“It’s better this way, if currently less convenient,” said a woman in the group, giving him a look of disdain. “I need to examine the way the changespell works with this form. Obviously. Or I would have changed her back by
now.”
Blonde, her ample curves gone a little angular from her time in prison, her pert features a little more gaunt than when she’d helped Calandre launch her attack against Arlen and Anfeald...
Lady suddenly recognized her, her ears gone pure flat.
Willand’s expression remained familiar enough. Calculating and cold.
“She’ll help us figure out the changespell whether she cooperates or not. But,” and here she turned to look at another member of the group, the man Lady had launched herself at earlier that day, “according to Benlan, she can’t be handled, and I need to get that shieldstone from her, as well as her other stones—there might be a changespell with them.”
“Let’s just dart her again.” This was one of those who’d taken the cairndog earlier in the day, a tall and lanky woman with pale skin and thin pale hair cut in a short cap.
Willand turned on her. “Don’t be an ass,” she snapped. “We were expecting a human, not a horse, and we don’t have a drug that’s meant for a horse. We were lucky she wasn’t killed the first time.” She turned her back on the woman and considered Lady another moment, then looked at Shammel. “But we do have you. You’re a courier—you handle her. Get me those stones.”
Shammel shook his head, but it wasn’t refusal. “She’s bluffing. She’s a well-trained mount, one of Carey’s horses—and that means something, whether you realize it or not.” He eyed Willand, returning her disdain. “Any of you can handle her. You just have to make her believe it.”
Lady retreated to the back corner of her stall. She wasn’t sure of all of their words, but she’d learned that the Jess part of her would understand them, once Lady was in human form again. So she listened, and she watched them, and she knew deep inside that she was in dire trouble.
Shammel glanced at the group, who clearly disbelieved his assessment of Lady’s training and nature, and shrugged. “Watch—and learn. I can’t come back here again like this. That groom Klia saw me at Anfeald after I was dismissed—if she ever wises up enough to mention it, they might come looking for me. I’m on my way to the north cabin.” He glanced around the dim interior of the barn and finally spotted and retrieved a decent length of rope. He tested its strength, tied a knot at the end, and let it dangle as he approached Lady’s stall.
The Changespell Saga Page 41