Grunt gave him a look of utter disbelief. He fled to the back of the stall.
“Grunt,” Arlen said in disappointment. “It’s not a very big stall. Even I can see the inevitable outcome here, and I can’t put two thoughts together.” He opened the stall door; it swung out, effectively blocking the aisle to escape. No, no running. But when he went into the stall after Grunt, he looked again at the blocked aisle, and several thoughts tried very hard to rub together and come up with an idea.
Stop trying to think.
Do.
Arlen whirled the end of the lead rope in a short circle and cracked it sharply against Grunt’s haunches. Grunt quivered in astonished offense, not quite believing Arlen meant it.
“Put the halter on him and bring him here,” the man said, not quite as patiently, unable to see through the side walls.
“Trying,” Arlen said, even as he wound up for another smack.
Grunt saw it coming.
He believed.
And he bolted.
“Idiot!” the man exclaimed, high alarm building. “Whoa, whoa!”
He was a big man; Arlen looked out the stall to find him standing with his arms outstretched, enough to intimidate poor agreeable Grunt to a dancing halt.
Couldn’t have that.
Don’t try to think.
Do.
Arlen grabbed up the bucket, bowled it under Grunt’s jigging feet, and charged down the aisle with a whoop, swinging the lead rope fast enough to make it sing through the air.
Grunt danced insanely atop the bucket for the merest instant and found his purchase. As Arlen had long suspected, Grunt was not one of those nimble creatures who might have successfully avoided soft squishy things underfoot in tight spaces.
The liverykeep came charging out of the feed room, a metal scoop in one hand, a bucket in the other. “What the rootin’—”! she started, but then words apparently failed her.
Words were failing Arlen, too, who had just enough presence of mind to note that Grunt was well and truly stopped at the other end of the stall row and that perhaps whoever had prepared the vial had overestimated Arlen’s weight. He swayed over the man, he with the unfortunate iron-shod hoof print in the middle of his bleeding face, and said with much import, “He tried to take my horse.”
“Guides damn him,” the woman said, irritated, nudging the man’s foot with her own and not even eliciting a groan. “Another one to haul to the poor-healers.” She gave Arlen a narrow-eyed look. “You don’t look so good. You got a problem, get to the healers before I have to drag you, too.”
“Drugged me,” Arlen announced importantly. “So I’d be too stupid to stop him. Ha. Too stupid not to...”
She waved irritably at him. “Then get to the road inn and sleep it off. I’ll deal with the horse. Fool.” This to the badly injured man. “I’m going to have to install a friend-foe detector with that new SpellForge permaspell. Damned if that won’t cost me some shine. Hey—you hear me? Get yourself to that road-inn or—”
Arlen smiled, most beatifically, as the world spun a long, slow circle around him. “Too late,” he told her, and slowly deflated into a remarkably boneless heap, wondering how much it would hurt if they dragged him all the way to the inn.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Twenty
Carey hesitated at the screen door, looking out at the barn.
He needed to talk to Ramble. To see for himself that there was no little detail untended, no question Jess might have neglected to ask simply because she looked at the world through equine-tinted eyes. When they had so little to work with, the details mattered...
But Jess...
She hadn’t been bluffing. And short of jailing her in some manner, he couldn’t stop her from taking Ramble away. From taking herself away.
So he didn’t quite go ask those questions.
Carey leaned his forehead against the worn white paint of the screen door, feeling the unaccustomed weight of this world settle around him. On him. It brought a bone-deep fatigue he had no healer to counteract, an awareness of his own unsoundness.
He hadn’t counted in running out of time—not so quickly. But they no longer had any idea what was happening in Camolen, not with the message system failure. And Jaime’s final warning...
Carey didn’t understand why someone would come after them, but he trusted that the threat was real. And he knew the effect on magic had become profound.
The quiet days were over. As soon as Dayna finished with her spellstone hunt, they’d gather their things and go.
Try to go.
He lifted his head, looked at the barn. Once he’s back in Camolen, he’s a horse again.
Carey pushed the door open.
~~~~~
In the wake of Dayna’s surreptitious magic, the shop clerk’s head jerked up, pinning Dayna with an astonished stare. Rita gasped out loud and looked up from her cards. “What—”
Dayna emerged from the concentration of doubling the simple friend-or-foe spellstone and lifted her head with surprised embarrassment. Oops.
But she’d done it. She’d done it. She’d drawn on Camolen’s energy through her spellstone, and doubled it.
She just hadn’t expected anyone to feel her do it.
“What,” Rita said firmly, leaning over the counter with a deck of large cards in hand, “are you doing?”
“Uh...” Dayna said, hunting for inspiration, still caught in her flush of success and very much caught out in general, “I—”
Mark leaned back against the cash register and raised an eyebrow—suddenly, somehow, looking like the substantial and responsible one of them. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Of all the places!”
“I didn’t know anyone would feel it,” Dayna blurted, now hunting for composure.
Stupid, of course... there were plenty of people on this world who could no doubt detect and even manipulate magic, just as Dayna herself had been able. But she’d never realized her sensitivity before she’d reached Camolen, and it never occurred to her...
Of all the places. But that didn’t mean she had to explain herself. “Let me finish looking through these stones, and we can go.”
“But did it work?” Suliya asked. “Weren’t you going to—?”
In unison, Mark and Dayna snapped, “Shut up, Suliya.”
“Burnin’ poot,” Suliya muttered.
Dayna quickly picked out a sample of stones, as well as a deep blue fiber optic egg. She would have preferred hard gems for stability and capacity... but even their gold would only go so far.
Rita put the cards aside with a gesture of finality. “Where did you say you were from?”
Again in unison, Mark and Dayna said, “She didn’t.”
As they exchanged a wary glance, entirely unused to being of one mind, the shop door jangled; a fresh breeze blew through the incense-thick air.
“Need a new deck of tarot cards,” the new arrival announced—a medium-sized, duck-footed man with a shining dome and soft features.
“Your third this week,” Rita said, with a tone of discouragement that went right past him.
“The others just aren’t right,” he said. “They don’t feel right. I was doing a reading for a friend last night, you know, and we both agreed. We don’t think the—”
He’s going to say vibes, Dayna thought. She’d never heard anyone in Camolen say vibes.
“—vibes are right.”
“As they never will be, if you don’t give them a chance,” Rita said with some asperity. “Not that I’m not glad to sell you another deck—”
The door yanked open again. Dayna got only a glimpse of the tall, willowy woman who entered. Nondescript, with mousy coloring and mousy clothing. Although those clothes—
Mark cut off her view, dragging Suliya by the hand. “You almost done here?”
“Almost,” Dayna said, adding to Suliya, “Here, hold these,” even as she dumped her stones into Suliya’s hand.
“If this is your idea
of shopping, I don’t think much of it,” Suliya grumbled, and Dayna wasn’t certain she trusted that sulky expression.
“More like errands than shopping,” Mark offered, pulling out his billfold, eyeing the price sign and estimating the cost to tug out a few fives.
The Tarot-deck man edged in behind Dayna. “Wow, you must like crystals.”
Dayna made a noncommittal noise; she knew the sound of someone starting conversation so he could eventually talk about himself. And the man clearly liked crystals. He liked the feel of them. He liked their...
Vibes.
Suliya’s expression turned impish, and Dayna didn’t like it at all. “Suliya—”
Suliya announced, “They’re spellstones.”
The brat. Having her little temper tantrum because the shopping expedition hadn’t been as much about her as she’d expected.
Dayna quickly scooped up a few more stones. “This’ll do it. There’s fifteen here.”
With a clatter of keys on the old cash register, Rita rang them up, taking Mark’s money.
But Dayna had been right; the man wanted to talk, not listen. “I put them around the house, you know?” he said, as if no one had said the word spellstones at all. “It makes a nice healing zone, you know? All my friends say so. That when you walk into the house, you can just feel the vi—”
“Here,” Suliya said helpfully—and not about to be ignored. “Look at this one.”
Guides. “Dammit, Suliya—”
And Suliya’s glance said it all, written right there on the perfect sepia tones of her face. The face of a spoiled young woman who’d had enough of Suliya do this and Suliya do that and especially Suliya, shut up.
As the man’s finger touched the crystal-cut agate Dayna had doubled, Suliya triggered it.
Friend or foe.
A blue aura surrounded the man, glowing far too brightly to be mistaken for any trick of the light; he looked at his own hands, astonished and utterly wordless for perhaps the first time. Blue light surrounded Rita and the sales clerk and their eyes went wide, caught between wonder and fear.
“Oh,” Suliya said, not looking at all as pleased as she should have. “Oh poot. Dayna—”
And Dayna looked where Suliya was staring. At the woman customer.
At the limn of orange light.
The woman pushed the sales clerk aside. “You made that so easy.”
Her clothes. Mousy, but passing for funky... and equally at home as casual wear in Camolen. The woman touched her tunic just below the notch of her collarbone; no doubt the series of lumps there were her spellstones. “You and your friends have a distressing habit of ignoring the rules and running off to do good.”
Mark straightened from the counter—stuffing his wallet back in his pocket and looking far more imposing than Dayna ever expected of him. Mark, grown up at last. “And the people who try to stop us have a habit of failing.”
“But why try to stop us?” Suliya blurted. “We’re only trying to find out what’s gone wrong at home—”
“What’s gone wrong is being attended. No one needs to know the details—”
“Get burnt,” Dayna snarled at her. “The Council is dead.”
Behind the counter, Rita reached for the phone. Police—that’s all they’d need. “No!” Mark told her. “Rita, don’t.”
She glared at him, but drew her hand back. “I want you all out of here, right now.”
“That,” the woman said, as her magic flared around them, “is exactly my intent.”
Strong magic. Complicated magic. Enough to take them back to Camolen or imprison them for interrogation or simply turn them to ashes on the spot. Whatever she had on those spellstones...
But only what she had on those spellstones.
And Dayna stood with all the magic of Camolen at her disposal—if she could only pause a spellstone in progress and draw on the connection.
Dangerous. Untried.
Do it.
She flashed Mark the barest warning as she invoked the friend or foe spellstone—wishing she had something more complex, something that wouldn’t be over so quickly—
She pounced.
The invoked spell, released from the stone and still connected to it, stopped in mid-process, the pressure of the magic beating within her like swelling emotion.
It would explode if she couldn’t control it. If she didn’t guide it.
She wove them a physical shield spell in an instant—and then, in sudden inspiration, she called up another shield against magic, inverted it, and placed it over the woman—trapping her magic within. She took a breath—
The magic burgeoned in an uncontrollable flood. She fought panic, siphoning it to the empty spellstones in her hand, struggling to maintain control and suddenly aware that she didn’t know how to stop—
“Dayna!” Mark shook her arm. And then snapped to the others, “Stay put! She can’t protect you if you don’t stay put.”
“Stop it!” Dayna snapped, gritting her teeth, trying to yank her arm from his grasp. “I’m—I can’t—”
“Open your eyes, dammit!”
In the background, someone whimpered. Suliya. Or the man now hiding in the clothing rack. Gasping, Dayna slowed the influx of magic long enough to grab a random fistful of stones from the display at her side—new, uncharged stones to soak up the magic while she scrambled for thought.
Only then did she open her eyes. She could see the shield around them—and clearly so did Rita. She and her friend clutched each other, staring, ramrod stiff with fear. The air wavered... a shimmer here, a coruscating glitter there.
The woman stood trapped with the furious energies of a discharged but unfulfilled spell—unable to turn back on her, unable to make its way out, and visible only through violent sparks against the second shield. “You rife little idiot,” she snarled. “What have you done?”
“What you couldn’t.” Dayna’s words came out breathlessly, and full of her own fear. “You shouldn’t have come. You should have left us alone.”
“Dayna, we need to talk to her,” Mark said, still at her side and urgent—still gripping her upper arm. Not at all sure he had her attention.
“Guides alive!” Suliya said. “Look at—the stones—”
Not just the ones Dayna touched, but the all the stones within her shield... all of them—
Glowing.
The clothes rack moaned.
Mark, at her side, at her ear, insistent. “Dayna, we need her here—”
She turned on him. “I don’t have a choice!” Not as the magic built, the raw magic with which she was so good—except it now came at her in a flood, rushing into the vacuum of this world. “I’ve got to plug it with something! Something big.”
“What? No! No!” The woman looked wildly around, her hand reaching for her spellstones—her shieldstone. “You can’t!”
She couldn’t work a direct spell on the woman... but Dayna’s inverted shield surrounded her, a bubble of insulation over which she had complete control.
“Relax,” she muttered, pulling her wavering focus back into place, biting her lower lip in effort. “With any luck this won’t hurt at all.”
The world-travel spell. She had no idea how the conflicting streams of magic would interact, or what they might do to the woman within it all. So many forces battling each other in this small earthbound shop...
She shouldn’t have come.
For a moment Dayna feared she’d lost the threads of the new spell amongst it all—so much magic! But—
“There!” She shouted in triumph as the world-travel spell engulfed the inverted shield and snatched it away.
Sudden silence. Maybe it had actually been silent already, with the magic roaring only in Dayna’s ears... but now, even for her, true silence reigned. The shop’s stones glimmered into quiescence. The blue fiber optic egg sparked with definite energy, and she quickly tucked it in her pocket.
As if she could hide what had happened here.
“
Burnt spellin’ poot Guides,” Suliya said, apparently not willing to leave anything out. Dazed, she looked around the store, and then at herself. “Bootin’, Dayna!”
Mark cleared his throat. “We’ll, uh, pay for the missing stuff,” he said, nodding to the spot next to where the woman had stood and its missing rack of rune jewelry.
“What,” said the sales clerk faintly, “did you do?”
“Theoretically, I sent her home,” Dayna said. “But...”
Never mind. But I probably killed her in the process wouldn’t reassure anyone, not to mention the cold spot it made in her own stomach.
Self-defense, she told herself most firmly, as Mark cast a sympathetic glance her way. An empathetic glance. He’d been the first of all of them, armed with bow and arrows... self-defense.
It still counted as killing.
The two women stared. From the clothing rack, the male customer stared.
“Bootin’,” Suliya said again, this time only whispering to herself. “Just plain... bootin’.”
Self-consciously, Dayna deposited the extra stones back into their container and smoothed her flowered, cap-sleeved spring top—straight from the junior department at Sears only a few years earlier, and how much more innocuous could one small wizard look? The awkward man emerged just far enough from the clothing rack to watch her—wary, eyes wide and infinitely alarmed.
She smiled sweetly at him. “Now those,” she said, “were vibes.”
~~~~~
Curled up in the corner of the worn and comfortable living room couch, Jess stared at the pages of her book, no longer seeing the words... but thinking about them. About how the boy and the black horse, stranded, learned to trust each other. To work together for survival. And then how hard the boy fought to keep them together, refusing to compromise when it came to the horse’s well-being.
So she had once assumed of Carey.
But she wasn’t certain any more. Decisions and reactions that had once come automatically now took thought... now brought worry.
She closed the book, gazing at the dramatic color and composition of the cover. Nice stallion. She chewed on a thumbnail, wondering how much longer Dayna and Suliya would be in town—and then how long after that before Dayna and Carey agreed it was time to go home.
The Changespell Saga Page 75