Jess stood bereft, crowding in close to touch Carey—now with her shoulder, now with her thigh, and the next moment briefly connecting along the length of their bodies. If she’d been a horse, Suliya realized with a blink, Jess would have been hanging her head over Carey’s shoulder.
Strange to realize how often she had probably done just that, long before she was ever human.
Burnin’ Hells. Suliya had never seen any single one of them so obviously upset.
Jess noticed her first—somehow—twisting around to look at the doorway, nostrils slightly flared and head raised; they all looked at her after that.
Suliya raised her hand. “Ay,” she said, unable to keep a defensive note from her voice. “Summons. I thought maybe Arlen was back.”
“No,” Carey said grimly.
Natt shook his head. “It was me.”
Suliya took a step inside the room, more confident. “What’s happening?”
Carey shook his head. “Generally, that’s not for the courier to ask.” But he waved her off when she would have responded, and finally took Jess’s hand. “In this case, you’re going to find out soon enough anyway.”
Suliya took another step into the room, looking from Carey to Jaime to Natt, and at last to the dispatch wizard at the desk. The woman looked exhausted; she wouldn’t meet Suliya’s eyes.
For a moment, no one would meet her eyes.
Suliya felt the first trickle of fear.
“There’s been some kind of... incident with the Council,” Natt said. “It... appears as though they may all be dead.”
“The Council?” Suliya said, openly skeptical. But she looked at their faces again—she looked at Jaime’s face, seeing anguish and denial at the same time, and then at Carey’s—at the determination there.
“Arlen,” Carey said distinctly, watching her as though she didn’t get it, “was with the Council.”
“What are you going to do?” Suliya asked. “What do you want me to do?”
Jaime turned on her, her expression accusing. “Don’t you even care what happened?”
“Never mind,” Carey said sharply, and then closed his eyes a brief moment, softening his voice with visible effort. “It’s not like we have the answers, Jay. But we’ll get them. And you,” he said to Suliya, “are going along for the ride.”
“Along for the ride?”
“I will go to the new hold in Siccawei,” Jess said, her words thicker than usual. “Dayna has asked us all to come—but there is only me. Carey says not alone. Though I could.” She directed the last straight at Carey, no little annoyance or defiance in her voice.
“Of course you could,” Carey said impatiently. “But I don’t want anyone to go alone on that route right now.”
Jess didn’t look entirely convinced.
Neither was Suliya. “I’m not going on an actual run?” she said. “I’m just—” and she stopped herself from saying tagging along with Jess, hearing just in time the petulance of it.
Carey jerked his head at the doorway and Suliya, with a glance at Jess, left the room.
Carey followed her to the end of the hall, where the light from the stairwell window splashed against his face to spark bright green flecks in hazel eyes. Not quite angry... but looking at her as intently as anyone ever had.
She opened her mouth without words in mind, anything to forestall the imminent lecture.
He got there first. “Just listen,” he said, catching her gaze and holding it, holding it even when she would have looked away. “Listen really well. The Secondary Council is in a panic. They’ve shut down the transfer booths—they’re trying to contain whoever did this. Couriers everywhere are running double miles. You haven’t been—and you won’t be starting. Not like this.”
She blinked at him, brushing one fat mahogany corkscrew curl away from her face. “They shut down the whole burnin’ system?”
“The Council is dead, Suliya. And they died between here and Second Siccawei.” He gave her a grim smile that bordered on the predatory. “Jess is going to Second Siccawei. And no one goes out alone right now. Is that actual riding enough for you? “
Right. It was still tag-along.
But if she did well, Carey would know. She’d have the start she’d been looking for. And she could find a way to do well—she could make opportunities—
Carey looked at her with suddenly narrowed eyes. “Jess was right, wasn’t she? You did put her in the wrong stall on purpose.”
“What?” Suliya said, totally taken off guard. “Why—”
“Never mind.” He cut her off with a sharp gesture, though his lean features had hardened. “Never mind,” he said again, this time as though to convince himself. “But let that kind of thing happen on this run—even a whisper of it—and you’re through here.” He looked at her, at the dismay she was unable to conceal. “Or didn’t it ever occur to you that I count on my people in all ways—just like you can always trust Jess to take the runs no one else can manage safely?”
She hadn’t thought about it at all, actually.
She looked down at her clenched hands. She hadn’t thought about anything more than her resentment, and how unfair it was that Jess had walked in and taken away her rides. It never occurred to her that Jess had taken rides because she was taking on their risk.
Not that Suliya was the least convinced it would have been necessary, but—
“I won’t let you down,” she said.
“No,” Carey said. “Don’t.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Six
Finally, Jaime slept.
Only then did Jess leave Arlen’s rooms, barefooted and silent on the stairs. Dim late-night glows invoked by the housekeeping staff made quiet light along the way.
Like so many, Jaime wanted badly to believe that the attack hadn’t happened; that the tragedy wasn’t true... but her refusal to accept tragedy didn’t offer sleep any more than Jess’s belief in it gave her. Finally, Jess had offered her hot chocolate. Sleep-spelled hot chocolate.
Jess quite abruptly sat on the steps, put her face in her hands, and cried. Arlen. Sherra. Her friends. Her way of life.
In some ways, being a horse was so much easier.
After a while she scrubbed the hem of her thick, soft cotton shirt over her face, sighed, and continued down the stairs to her quarters with Carey.
Those quarters were a luxury, a gift of the friend she now mourned. Arlen had combined two of the courier quarters, cutting through a stone wall to connect them—a room for privacy, and a room where the couriers often gathered with Carey. Between them hung a lightweight wooden door, hand-carved with spirited running horses.
For a long moment, Jess stood in the doorway and watched Carey stare out the window stretching across the west wall. With no glass between the room and the cold winter air, the unobstructed view provided an intimacy with the rest of Anfeald. Full moonlight reflected off the snow beyond the hold, making it easy to pick out a late-arriving rider.
“I should be down there,” Carey said, without turning to look at her. “In the stable.”
“Why?”
He lifted one shoulder; it had an irritable look from behind. “It’s my job. I shouldn’t be up here sleeping while my riders are still working themselves to exhaustion.”
“They are proud to be able to ride for you,” Jess said. “And we are all tired.”
“Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be down there,” he muttered, sounding every bit as tired as she expected. “If only Calandre hadn’t tried to turn me into a garbage heap—”
“We are all tired,” Jess repeated. But Calandre hadn’t tried to turn her into a garbage heap. She hadn’t actually done it to Carey, either, but the spells were similar and when he was feeling bitter he said it that way. “None of us can do everything.”
“So sayeth the horse who learned to be a woman and then, when we all said it couldn’t be done, taught her horse self to use spellstones.”
“Just a few of them,” J
ess said.
“Just a few,” he repeated in a dry murmur, resting his forehead against the edge of the window.
“And I still do not understand so many things about being human...” It might distract him. It sometimes did.
Not this time.
“Carey,” she said, and he didn’t answer. She glanced at the bed—rumpled, unmade, and at Carey—bare-chested, light night pants tied low and crooked. He’d tried to sleep, then, and couldn’t. She gathered her thick hair and shoved it down her shirt so it wouldn’t tangle when she pulled the shirt off.
“Carey,” she said again. “I feel you being far from me, and I need you. Come back.”
He shook his head slightly, still staring out the window. Yet another rider came into view, riding a horse that stumbled and almost fell. “Somehow,” he murmured.
Not much of an answer, but one she understood anyway. Somehow, he had to make it all right.
Except this time, possibly for the first time, he didn’t think he could do it. She could see the internal war of it in every tense line of his body.
She left the shirt at the foot of the bed, and walked quietly up behind him, putting her arms around his waist and resting her chin on his shoulder. She said, “Come back to me.”
He tipped his head so it rested against hers, and they stood that way together, watching the riders come in.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Seven
Twisted magic blooms to life across Camolen like frost coming up on a cold surface... strange, obscure morphing corners and isolated crannies, gully bottoms and tree tops.
Hissing darkness, wayward odors... glanced at, they are dismissed. Inhaled, they are politely ignored.
A madness of reality takes note, unnoticed.
~~~~~
Dayna uncrumpled the dispatch Bendi had managed to pull in off the system, not quite lost in the crunch—it was all they could do to keep up with the urgent messages, never mind the rest of them.
No one had been prepared for Second Siccawei to be ground zero.
Do something!
Soon enough, they’d be overrun by the Secondary Council. The paper in her hand told her as much, along with listing the new restrictions on travel and transport services—restrictions that seemed cavalier, given how many people commuted to work, and how many of those people provided basic services. Not to mention those isolated individuals who depended on dispatch to meet their daily needs.
And then there were those few like Dayna, who lived beside ground zero and who could now only watch as the Secondary Council closed down Camolen to belatedly search for the cause.
It seemed that Dayna alone had felt the undirected raw magic sweep through the area, leaving no backlash.
She already knew no one would believe her. Undirected, raw magic left backlash. Always. Therefore she was wrong.
Dayna knew she wasn’t.
She just didn’t know what it meant. Or if she’d get a chance to find out.
Do something.
Anything.
Make it better.
Right. Stuck here in little Second Siccawei with no one listening. How could you make the death of your friends better, anyway?
So she sat cross-legged in the wide-silled first floor window of the hold, watching for Jess to arrive while crumpling and smoothing the dispatch from the Secondary—no, not any more. Just the Council, now.
Or as close as Camolen had to one.
Crumpling and smoothing the dispatch and thinking of Sherra. Dignified Sherra, full of calm and somehow always able to share it with others. Sherra who had given Dayna so much—healing her upon first arrival here, taking her in as apprentice... and then allowing her to stay once Arlen was again able to cast the world travel spell that would have taken her home.
In Ohio, Dayna had been just another drone, working in a small hotel, a petite woman with life closing in around her. Here, she had purpose. Here, she had a kind of power she’d never imagined on earth. Here, she thought she’d found a semblance of control over life.
And now with Sherra’s death, with Arlen’s death, she now suddenly realized that control was nothing more than illusion, here or on earth.
Finally, Dayna caught a glimpse of movement at the splotchy snow-covered edges of the hold clearing. First Jess, in her characteristic Baltimore Orioles baseball cap, her scarf flapping loosely and her winter coat unfastened almost to the waist. Dayna didn’t recognize the rider behind her and she waited, watching for Carey or Jaime or... someone...
But she saw no one else.
Dayna ran to the door, grabbing a jacket from the hook there. Hadn’t they taken her seriously? Only two of them, and one of them a stranger?
And then she was out the door with a good look at Jess’s face—tired from the run, shocked from what she’d seen along the way... from whatever had gone on in Anfeald before she even left.
They’d taken her seriously, all right—or no one would be here at all.
Jess met her in the middle of the yard, her horse’s winter coat curly wet but no longer steaming. “He needs a cooling blanket,” Jess said, her matter-of-fact words belying the exhaustion on her face. “Do you have someone in the barn?”
Dayna hesitated, looking at the young woman behind Jess. Although she was flushed and tired, she lacked the haunted expression underlying Jess’s exotic features.
Whoever she was, she didn’t have a personal stake. She didn’t even look like she fully understood. She sat her horse awaiting direction, her clothes beautifully made and imbued with scintillating magical color, her face a dark cinnamon-tinted tone with features that made Dayna think of Asian and African-American—and the most astonishing hair springing from behind her exquisitely knitted ear and scarf wrap.
“This is Suliya,” Jess said. “The others couldn’t come, but no one rides this route alone.”
“No one ought to take it at all after this,” Dayna said, grasping at her normal composure again. Sardonic. Maybe not what someone else would strive for, but Dayna found it a comfortable place. “We do have some people at the barn—Siccawei sent us a couple of horses and someone to organize the place, but we’re not nearly up to speed for what we’ll need.”
“It’s a small hold,” Suliya observed.
“Yeah,” Dayna said, giving her a second look. “A small hold that just became the center of Camolen’s biggest magical goof-up since the Barrenlands blew up three hundred years ago—and one with limited dispatch service. Believe me, we’ll need all the couriers we can get.”
Jess swung down from the horse, tugging her leather-seated winter riding pants into place after hours in the saddle. Suliya, bedecked in similar but personally tailored pants, took the hint and dismounted as well; Jess pulled her saddlebags from the horse and the smaller courier’s bags from atop them, and then collected Suliya’s bags as she handed over the reins of her horse. “Make sure they are well before coming in.”
“Actually, you might want to visit the barn yourself,” Dayna said, only just now realizing it.
Jess gave her a why of expression, eyebrows raised. Dayna shrugged, pulling her coat more tightly around herself as the wind picked up. “Trent’s palomino,” she said. “The only survivor from yesterday.”
“Not hurt?” Jess asked, arranging the saddlebags over her shoulders.
“Not that we can tell, but it’s complicated.” Dayna cocked her head at the barn. “Coming, then?”
Jess came.
The barn showed all the signs of descending chaos—newly arrived hay blocks stacked in the way, debris and gear and equipment boxes clogging the short aisle. Only one stall had an occupant.
“The others are working,” Dayna said. “We don’t know how many will be back for the night, or if we’ll have enough stalls—or enough horses and riders fit to work tomorrow. Most of our communication has been handled by chatting to Sherra person to person, for Pete’s sake.”
Suliya appropriated two stalls and went to find cooling blankets. Jess du
mped the saddlebags over the door of an empty stall and paced the aisle to the stallion—an end stall with reinforced walls. “Light?”
Light flared in the corner of the stall—a cool, even permalight. Jess hesitated at the stall door. “Ramble,” she said. “His name is Ramble.”
Of course she’d remember.
She lifted the halter from the stallion’s door and slipped inside, closing it most but not all of the way. The two greeted each other, a quick exchange of breath—until the palomino flattened his ears and swung his head in posturing threat, teeth bared.
In an instant, Jess wheeled and kicked him in the chest.
The stallion flung his head back in dramatic alarm, looking like nothing so much as a thespian protest of false innocence.
Jess glanced over in embarrassment. “That was my Lady-self,” she said, chagrined. “She would teach him manners.” Even as she spoke she haltered the horse, threading a padded chain around the noseband. “You shouldn’t need this,” she said sternly to the horse. “You are rude.”
Dayna was no horsewoman, but she could see that Jess unconsciously matched every body movement the stallion made, all the small gestures he used in an effort to claim her body space. When he bobbed his head and snorted in wet disgust, she could only assume that Jess had, ever so subtly, stood her ground.
Then, to her shock, Jess handed the lead to Dayna through the barely open sliding door. “Has anyone checked him since he came without Sherra?”
“Trent rode him back out again,” Dayna said, gingerly holding the lead. The stallion eyed her and she knew right then that it had her number. “He likes this horse—don’t ask me why—so I figured everything was okay.”
But Jess ran her hands across his back and quarters and then down each leg, following the line of his sloping shoulders across his chest and up his neck. Touching as well as looking, and eventually ruffling her hands through his long pale mane. “Handsome,” she said. “And strong. Too big for a courier’s horse, but... nice.”
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