The Changespell Saga

by Doranna Durgin

  “I don’t know. Just... he’s got something he doesn’t want to tell her.”

  “You know them that well then, ay?” Suliya said, giving Dayna herself a closer look. A small woman, lightly boned, slightly built, boyish figure. From what Suliya had gathered at Second Siccawei, Dayna had strength aplenty when it came to magic—even if there was something not quite right about it, even if no one would talk to her about that.

  Dayna snorted. Small she might be, but subtle she was not. “You learn a lot about people when you go through hell with them.”

  At that, Jess cast an anxious look back at them—or maybe at the palomino, Suliya wasn’t sure—and then, surprisingly, took off down the hall that led into the hold.

  Suliya shifted the saddle to a better hold, and they went to meet Carey together.

  “Dayna,” he said, a greeting full of unspoken words that Suliya couldn’t decipher. None of the tenderness he showed with Jess, but a certain kind of respect.

  “What’s going on?” Dayna asked.

  Carey’s mouth flattened. “Jaime’s sick,” Carey said. “Yesterday evening, too. Simney can’t tell what’s going on, but says it’s not dire. But Jaime’s pretty miserable, and you know Jess...”

  Dayna nodded. “I’ll wait to see her, then.”

  “If it goes the same as last night, she’ll feel better after a while.” Carey reached for Suliya, who gave him a moment of blank-faced confusion before handing over the saddle. Carey gave Dayna a somewhat grimmer look. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “We certainly do,” Dayna said. “I take it Jess mentioned that the new Council blew off my observations about the raw magic.”

  He gave her a fleeting grin as Suliya collected their saddlebags. “Blowing off. Ohio expression?”

  “Yes. And did she mention the stallion? Why we brought him?”

  He led the way into the tack room, settling the saddle over top another on its rack and dropping the saddle blanket into a hamper; rows of empty saddle racks lined the wall, and he took the bridles from Dayna, quickly reassembled the palomino’s, and hung them up. Thigh-high equipment trunks lined each wall beneath the carefully cleaned cruppers, chest bands, courier bags, hobbles—although most of those spots were empty, too.

  Finally, he took Jess’s saddlebags from Suliya. “She said it was the only way for you to get here—something Garvin and I will deal with later.”

  Impatiently, Dayna said, “I’d have waited another day to catch a different ride, if that was the only reason. I came today with him—because he’s the only one who saw what happened to the Council. The only one who can tell us—”

  “Tell you!” Suliya said, drawing both their startled attentions her way. She shifted uneasily under that scrutiny, but Dayna quickly picked up the conversation where she’d left it.

  “If we can use a changespell...”

  Carey gave a quick shake of his head. “It’s checkspelled. You know that. You burning well ought to, after last summer!”

  She shrugged. “There’s raw magic—”

  “No!” Suliya said, more loudly than she’d meant to. She knew better than most the dangers of raw magic—she’d grown up with the development wizards at SpellForge—testing spell formulas, going over every element... lecturing her on safety, and always mentioning raw magic. How dangerous it was, how unpredictable, how horrible the consequences.

  Dayna gave her a wicked little grin; Suliya hadn’t seen that gleam in her eye before, and she wasn’t sure she liked it now.

  “What do you think I do?” she said. “What do you think Second Siccawei is all about?”

  Suliya took a step back from Dayna, shaking her head with each word. “Raw magic is a fool’s tool—and anyone who sticks around to watch is a fool, too!”

  “You two get along well together, I see,” Carey said dryly. “Ease off, Suliya. As it happens, I agree with you in this case—but there might just be more to the world than you think.”

  “You don’t think I can do it,” Dayna said to him, full of flat disappointment even as Suliya couldn’t hide her relief. “I expected more of you.”

  “I’ve got an entire hold to think about,” Carey said, and Suliya’s relief drained away as she recognized his wistfulness. “There’s too much at stake to make that decision lightly.”

  Dayna took his words in silence—a narrow-eyed kind of silence that looked nothing like acquiescence.

  A sudden clap of sound rocked the stable; as one, they ducked, crouching close to the floor. Carey bolted for the stalls; Dayna followed on his heels, but not without an incredulous look. “Not again.”

  Suliya ran after them, but not far—she stopped to gape at the head of the long stall aisle. Snow floated down into the stalls and aisle—snow in the middle of the hold. The air bit at her lungs and nose with a singing dryness, completely at odds with the snow.

  Carey raked his gaze along the stalls and barked, “Report!”

  Suliya brushed futilely at the snow on her sleeve. Not snow. Wood shavings. Stall bedding.

  A groom staggered out of one of the stalls, cleaning fork in hand and completely covered with shavings. Klia, the niece of one of the senior riders and a cheerful girl with a middling work ethic.

  “What happened?” Carey said, meeting the young woman halfway. “Are you all right?”

  Klia swiped an ineffective hand over her short curly hair and popped one ear. “You sound a precinct away.”

  “What,” Carey said, trying for patience and almost making it, “were you doing?”

  That, the girl could answer; her face cleared with relief. “With so many horses out, I thought it would be a good day to run a drying spell.”

  Suliya nodded to herself; no matter how clean they kept the stalls, the winter brought an underlying dampness.

  “Drying spell,” Dayna repeated, mild amusement in her eyes as she gazed at remnants of the floating wood chips. “More like a recipe for sweeping practice.”

  Hurt protest showed in the girl’s face. “But I run this spell all the time. This never happened before.”

  “Does it always work correctly?” Dayna went down to the stall in question, peered inside, and shook her head. “It’s definitely dry!”

  “Always.” Klia tried again to clear her hair, and finally bent over to shake her head like a dog, sending wood shavings flying.

  “That’s not true,” Suliya said—but at Carey’s sharp look, she modified her tone. “Sometimes she has to invoke it a couple of times.”

  “Well, there you go,” Dayna said, as though the answer was self-evident. Carey lifted an expressive brow, amazingly similar to the expression Suliya would have made if she hadn’t known better. Dayna said, “Oh, come on. When it doesn’t work, it’s because she’s introduced a wrong element.”

  For her impatience, she got only blank stares. She made an exasperated sound. “People tend to make the same mistakes on the same spells. So when she’s firing blanks, it’s because she’s introduced a common mistake. Because it’s a common mistake, there’s a checkspell against it.”

  “But the Secondary Council oversees checkspell management—” Suliya protested—and then stopped. Because the Secondary Council was in chaos. They’d stopped travel; they’d shut down infrastructure spells.

  “Right,” Dayna said. “The checkspell has failed. And Carey—it won’t be the only one.”

  Carey’s hazel eyes grew darker as they narrowed; he seemed to have forgotten Klia and Suliya as he matched Dayna’s intensity. “The changespell,” he said, his voice low. “The palomino. We could find out what happened to Arlen—”

  She nodded. “It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”

  Suliya blurted, “The penalties—”

  Carey gave her a startled look—not as if he’d forgotten her, but as if he were surprised anyone considered the penalties given the stakes. “I’ll deal with the penalties,” he said. “Klia, either get a start on cleaning up this mess, or head for the infirmary. Suliya w
ill help you. And Dayna...” He gestured toward the job room, and started walking. “You found Jess when she was first changed. Talk to me.”

  “She didn’t have language at first.” Dayna kept pace with him, almost two strides to his one. “She learned damned fast, though.”

  Suliya, standing in a waning storm of wood shavings at the end of a long day, opened her mouth to ask if someone else might not help clean up the mess Klia had made.

  But...

  This is where things will be happening.

  Maybe not right away, maybe not even tonight. But sooner or later, this stable would turn into the nexus of action... would maybe even provide the crucial information to allow the new Council understand what had happened to the old.

  Suliya intended to be part of it.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter Eleven

  Not far from Anfeald the City, on one of the abrupt rocky hills thrusting so boldly from the soil, snow melts off the south side and becomes firmly entrenched in the crannies of the north side—until late in the day, when the hill... shimmers. Dissolves. Turns to a flat puddle of stone.

  The astonished deer sunning itself on the southern hump of the hill gives a startled bleat and leaps for safety.

  Not soon enough.

  ~~~~~

  Jess stood outside Arlen’s rooms, ignoring the morning bustle from the apprentice room dispatch desk. Jaime waved her into the sitting room, where Jess was promptly accosted by the young male calico. It jumped to the arm of a chair to paw the air and demand attention, and she absently scratched her way down its back.

  With circles under her eyes and an entirely uncharacteristic jittery presence, Jaime looked years older in just the few days since they’d seen each other.

  But she gave Jess a wry smile, and passed a hand over her hair. “The good thing about this cut,” she said, “is that no one can tell when you haven’t styled it.”

  “You were asleep when I got here last night. Carey said you were sick.”

  Jaime rubbed the bump on her once-broken nose—the one she’d acquired not long after meeting Jess and not long before meeting Arlen. “I’m okay in the mornings,” she said. “But the last two evenings...” She let out a gusty breath and shook her head. “I’d say it was a migraine of the worst order, except I’ve never had them.”

  “But you are all right?”

  “It’s getting to me,” Jaime admitted. “Though I’m not sure it matters in the big picture. I’m nothing but a guest at the moment—no one needs lessons right now, and Carey’s already using his horses to capacity. He doesn’t need another rider.”

  “No,” Jess said, “but the hold needs a rider.”

  It wasn’t the right word, but Jaime understood her occasional need for verbal shortcuts. And in that instant, Jaime’s already reddened eyes teared up. Resolutely, even if in a voice that threatened to fail her, she said, “That should be Arlen. I keep thinking—” He’ll be back. Even though she couldn’t say the words, Jess saw the fierce hope flare briefly in her eyes. But it faded, and she said simply, “I don’t even live here.”

  “You care enough to leave your world to come be with him. And he loved you. That makes you important to Anfeald... it makes you someone they can...” she gestured for a futile moment, and finally said, “come together around. Do things for.”

  “I should have spent more time here,” Jaime said, as if she hadn’t been listening. She turned her head to the window and closed her eyes, but not before Jess saw the self-recrimination there.

  Jess came to her, knelt by the couch. “Dayna could stay here. Dayna had no family in Ohio, no people who meant anything to her. For you, things are different.” By people she meant Jaime’s horses as much as her brother. “We cannot make yesterday’s decisions today.”

  Jaime still didn’t look at her. She whispered, “But I miss him. I miss him more than I thought—” She stopped, took a deep breath, and looked back to Jess with overbright eyes. “I suppose he’d want the place to keep going. Eventually another wizard will be assigned to the precinct... Arlen would want it kept up until then—and kept up well.”

  Jess nodded. “He likes things to be right.” Then she frowned. “Should I say it that way? Or should I say that he liked things to be right?”

  Jaime blindly shook her head. “You say it however you like. Let’s see what’s up with Dayna, shall we? Surely we’ve had at least one furious dispatch from Second Siccawei demanding her return.”

  Rising to her feet, Jess said, “She got a private message. She threw it away.”

  “Dayna and authority,” Jaime said, following Jess out the door and leaving the calico to pace the magically imposed cat-boundary behind her. “Never a good mix.”

  ~~~~~

  Carey scrawled a last-minute assignment on the day’s job sheet. Half of the runs were already in progress; the untidy mess in the job room bespoke the strain on his riders. He set it to rights, losing himself in the details of running Anfeald stables while his mind tumbled around decisions.

  In the past, his willingness to act—his determination to act—had helped spur a small group of friends to surprising victories. Victories that those in charge had said couldn’t be won—especially not Carey’s way. Carey’s way had always started out as the wrong way.

  Starting out wrong doesn’t mean ending up wrong.

  Using a changespell was wrong for so many reasons—and not just because the Council said so. It imposed human will on unwitting animals, irrevocably changing them—and not always for the better.

  Not always what they would choose. Jess would say that to him if she knew what he was thinking, and she would be right. She often was. She’d softened him, taught him to see he couldn’t go through this life living only the strength of his goals. Taught him that sometimes the cost of those goals weren’t worth the gain.

  Starting out wrong doesn’t mean ending up wrong.

  But people had died as a result of his actions. In the end he’d accomplished what he’d meant to—Arlen’s freedom, imprisonment of rogue wizards, safety for Camolen—but people had died.

  They would have died anyway.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe no one would have died, or fewer people, or their deaths would have been of an easier nature, or—

  He closed his eyes, closing them tightly—trying to squeeze the conflict right out of his mind.

  It didn’t work.

  A tight twinge from his leg reminded him that he, too, had paid for his decisions. On the bad days—and he did have them—he felt as if his body had been wrung out like a rag, every muscle aching, every joint creaking. On the not-so bad days his leg took over the job—aching, tiring easily, his tendons like creaky, rusted cables.

  Dayna peeked into the room, hesitating until she saw that he was alone. She entered much too casually, scrubbing her hands through her sandy shoulder-length hair. Dayna on the prowl, just as willing as Carey to do things the wrong way if she thought the alternatives were even worse.

  He said, “I’ve still got four more riders coming in,” just in case she thought they had privacy.

  She shrugged. “We can talk until then. Are we going to do this today?”

  “You mean, are we going to try?”

  She shrugged again. “There are a number of subtle variations on that spell—and I know them all. I ought to, after last summer. One or the other of them will get through.”

  “And then what?” Carey sat against the edge of the desk, legs thrust out with one ankle over the other. “How long did it take before Jess could put a meaningful sentence together? How long before we actually learn something—and will it be worth what we put that stallion through?”

  She dropped her hands to her boyish hips. “Last time I talked to you, you wanted to do this. You wanted to know what happened to Arlen—what’s happening to Camolen now.”

  “And maybe I still do.” Guides, yes. Until he did, how would he know what to do next? He shoved his hair out of his eyes, not qu
ailing before her annoyance as she’d have obviously preferred. “But I’m thinking it through.”

  “There’s a first,” she muttered, but she sat beside him at the edge of the desk. “Look... I’m not saying it’ll be easy. And it’ll take some time before Ramble can tell us anything, assuming he’s capable. But Carey—” she shifted, putting the side of her hip against the desk so she could aim a dreadfully earnest stare at him, one he could feel even if he didn’t look over to meet it. “He was there. He’s the only one alive who knows what happened. He’s Custer’s horse all over again, only the U.S. Army didn’t have the chance to ask what happened. We do. And I’m telling you, the new Council isn’t on the right track. They’re stuck hunting signatures and spells, instead of realizing this is nothing like what they’ve handled before.”

  Bemused, Carey said, “Custer’s horse?”

  Dayna waved an impatient hand. “A lone survivor in my country’s history. It’s not important. Listen up... even if you don’t think about Arlen and Sherra—”

  How could he not?

  “As long as the Council’s going off on the wrong track, we not only don’t catch the bad guys, we aren’t protected from whatever happened. It could happen to the new Council as easily as it happened to the old. So do you want to do this thing or not? If you do, then we need a place for it—a private one.”

  “I think we have to assume we’ll be caught, regardless.” But it was the least of his worries. The peacekeepers had their hands full; not every precinct had responded to the crisis with calm. Even Anfeald the City had experienced some opportunistic looting.

  “Fine, but not until we accomplish something—”

  The murmur of voices in the hall made Carey glance to doorway, and Dayna cut her words short just as Jess came through the door.

  She was dressed for stable work in a patched, drawstring-waisted tunic and tough pants. At her side, Jaime’s stretch breeches gave away her other-worldly origins, and her intention to ride.

  “Carey,” Jess said, a greeting she somehow used to encompass everything from a casual hello to the unmistakable invitation she’d given him late the evening before. “Dayna,” she added, a simpler word restricted mostly to the meaning of hello. She would have walked up to him, then, stood with him for a moment with her cheek just touching his and breathing in his scent the way she was wont to do—but she visibly checked herself and headed for the courier assignment boxes.