ARLEN.
The Jess voice clamored in wordless excitement, generating such astonished delight that Lady finally broke into a series of bucking leaps, twisting and dancing and snorting. Blowing hard with the sudden burst of exertion, she finally came to a standstill back before him, examining every inch of him with first one nostril and then the other, up and down the length of his body while he stood there with amusement on his face and his hands spread open so she could check those, too.
The Jess in her knew this was Arlen... but still she had to examine him, blowing soft breaths at him, tickling his face as she discovered the missing mustache and his neck as she found the collar to a shirt that still faintly bore someone else’s smell.
At that he laughed and gently moved her nose away. “Please,” he said. “I’ve been alone on the road for a long time, Lady. There’s only so much attention my neck can take.”
Lady didn’t understand, but a bubble of deep amusement told her that her Jess-self did. She suddenly had the need to talk to him, to throw question after question that this self couldn’t even begin to formulate, never mind convey.
Something in her demeanor must have changed... must have alerted him. As she reached for the trigger of her change spellstone, he put a sudden hand on the strong, flat bones of her face and said with alarm, “No! Don’t do that!”
She took a step back, tossing her head in annoyance.
She made her own decisions now.
“Not next to this,” he said, no less firm but with apology there, too. “You’ll drive it crazy. Even if it was through churning, the changespell is far too complex to risk.” He shook his head, reading annoyance in the wrinkle of her nostrils. “I’m sorry. I’ll keep it simple. Lady, the spell won’t work. It’ll go wrong. It’ll hurt you. There’s no telling how it’ll end up.”
Hurt her.
Hurt her baby.
She flattened her ears in an equine curse that would have crisped Arlen’s hair had he understood it. And she left the spellstone alone.
~~~~~
Arlen staggered with understanding, even as he rejoiced to find Lady here—even as he puzzled over her presence, didn’t know why she would be out with another horse and without her courier harness.
But mostly he staggered, pulling himself out of the trace on this active spell—here, so close to home, when he’d found his way blocked and finally taken the risk. Pulling himself away from the enormity of what he’d just learned, the source of the spell he’d located.
SpellForge.
Lady came close again, running her whiskers over his hair while Grunt nickered mournfully to her in the background. “I wish you could change,” he said. “I wish you could talk to me... tell me how things are with the hold. With Jaime. Is she still even here? If so, she’s surely trapped, just as we are.”
She nudged him—not so gently—and he could only hope she not only understood, but that she responded. Either way... he suddenly wasn’t quite so much alone.
“I think we could have stopped this, Lady.” He laid a hand on her mane, only then noticing the thick tangle of it—the unusually rough nature of her coat, and the briars in her tail. “I think we could have stopped it all. It was our job to stop it all.”
She bent her head around to rest her jaw on his shoulder, and he laughed out loud at the sweetness of it—and the bittersweet knowledge that it was all his own fault, after all.
For the spell trace ran back to SpellForge, and of all the consortiums, who else but SpellForge had recently released the biggest leap in spell technology since mass-produced spellstones? A technology that had been vetted and admired by the Council, Arlen included?
Technology that even Arlen had embraced, immediately installing it in his own hold for the convenience of those who struggled with daily amenity spells. Permalights.
For Jaime.
“Stupid,” he muttered viciously at himself, earning a nudge from Lady. He did what he’d never done—he threw an arm around her sturdy neck and took comfort in her solid presence, the reassuring touch of her muzzle whispering against his back. He’d seen Carey do the same many a time.
If never after Lady had first become Jess.
“I need my work room, a ream of notations, and a month of quiet to figure out how those permaspells created this disaster,” he told her. There must have been something in the spell he and the rest of the Council had missed, some hint or clue of trouble. There must have been.
And now the others were dead, Camolen was disintegrating around him, and he and Lady—and Grunt—were trapped here with SpellForge agents on his trail.
He had no doubt about that last. The man at the barn... in retrospect, of course he’d been from SpellForge, and probably a FreeCast specialist. They’d probably been closing in on him for days, given his obvious journey home.
Such agents would be skilled enough to recognize his signature—the one he’d finally again revealed while tracing the faintest tingle of a recognizable trail from this new eruption to its source. A trail so faint and diffuse that no one else still alive would ever be able to trace it—not just to a single source, but to all of them. Each and every permalight still in use.
SpellForge would want him out of the way.
“We could have trouble,” he told Lady, resting his hand on her withers. She watched him, ears at attention. “We probably shouldn’t stay here.”
Lady’s ear flicked away from him; by the time he heard faltering hoof beats, she raised her head to nicker a welcome. The palomino came into sight, a travel-muscled creature of no great grace but inimitable strength and a hard kind of beauty.
A stallion, Arlen noted, and gave Lady a questioning glance, but as it became evident the palomino intended to stop and hover at a distance, she more or less dismissed him, giving Arlen her ears again.
“We’ve got to stop this,” he said to Lady, noting how carefully she followed his words—the obvious effort of it. Horse... but now more than horse. He held up his hand and ticked off his fingers. “The permaspells are the problem. We’ve got to gather them all up—and until we do, we need protection from their corruptive effect.” His thoughts drifting away, sketching out his options. Since the distortions happened in reaction to magic, any shield would have to include a vacuum of magic.
Something he had never actually experienced, and thus hardly knew how to reproduce.
“The details will take work,” he told her, heavy on the dry understatement. “Once we’re safe, we’ll have to heal the damage—and hope that we can. And burn it, we need to find some way to tell Jaime I’m still alive. Unless she knows?” And he looked hopefully at Lady’s fine-boned face, the gentle brown eye gazing back at him from beneath a long thick fall of forelock.
More than horse... but still horse. She nuzzled his arm, lipping at the material of his jacket in affectionate sympathy. He saw nothing of affirmation there.
Grunt whickered anxiously from the woods, rustling branches and snapping twigs in an exploration of his lead rope limits. “In a moment,” Arlen told him, raising his voice with some annoyance and never stopping to think that Grunt could hardly understand.
Not with other things on his mind—like the fact that gathering the light spells meant reaching the peacekeepers who could do it, meant going in the opposite direction from Anfeald hold.
The thought of turning away gave him a frantic, physical wrench.
Unexpectedly, Lady gave him a solid nudge. He took a step to regain his balance, and she crowded him until he took another.
Away from the wounded trail. Away from Anfeald.
Lady, at least, knew which was the right decision.
“All right,” Arlen said crossly. “I have to get Grunt before he starts bleeding from the ears. We’ll put some distance in and settle for the night. No point in being anywhere near when the FreeCast agents descend here tomorrow.”
He pulled Grunt back out of the woods. The gelding was instantly besotted with Lady, going so far as to duck his hea
d and make a foal-mouthing gesture while Lady offered no more than a polite sniff.
“Poor old Grunt,” Arlen murmured. “I appreciate you even if you are missing your manly parts.” And he started off with their odd little caravan—two horses at complete liberty, an obsequious gelding of roughest breeding, and one lanky wizard with an unusually strong road gait and the precinct’s ugliest shirt.
And every step he took away from Anfeald was a trial in determination.
“We’ll stop it,” he said, and startled them all by whirling to point a warning finger at the glob of distorted woods as his voice raised to a shout. “And then we’ll be back!”
Three pairs of equine eyes watched; three sets of ears pointed his way in concern.
Arlen snatched his jacket from atop Grunt’s pack to ward himself against the evening cold and muttered, “Well, we will.”
Stop the damage. Create protection. Return to Anfeald. Arlen walked on, retreating into his thought of shield theory. Protection.
Without it, none of them would ever make it home.
~~~~~
Carey returned Jaime’s old schoolmaster to her stall, glancing at Sabre on the way.
He’d never presume to ride Jaime’s Grand Prix dressage mount, but he’d taken to longeing the horse in exercise sessions gleaned from Jaime’s notes, hoping to keep him decently fit during this long layoff.
The others, he presumed to ride—keeping himself strong, keeping them strong... working through days of gulping ibuprofen and surreptitious coughing.
Keeping occupied.
“I’ll be back,” he told Sabre—finding himself unable, this once, to leave Dayna alone in her work in the huge indoor ring. Suliya he left cleaning stalls, fresh from her own ride on the lower level lesson horse during which she’d copied Carey’s warm-up exercises.
Maybe by the time they got back, she’d be ready to learn those things she’d thought she already knew.
Dayna stood in front of a folding chair at the far end of the arena, her lap desk set to the side. Her closed eyes held a slight squint at the corners; her mouth moved in a soundless mumble—and as ever, she looked incongruously slight compared to the power she could wield.
Gifferd leaned against the kickboard rail nearest to her—just under the ring letter H. If his arm still pained him, it wasn’t evident.
Then again, with Gifferd, who could tell?
Watchful but relaxed, he lounged in the startling combination of expensive Camolen trousers and a colorful blocky red and black cowboy shirt with pearl-front snaps, rolled at the cuffs and untucked at the waist... and he did it with such insouciance that no one would ever guess he’d found himself stranded in a strange world with those he’d intended to abduct and now suddenly depended upon.
When Dayna opened her eyes, her expression held satisfaction. “I fixed the shield,” she told Carey, as if she’d known he was waiting all along.
“What shield?” Startled, he didn’t sound nearly as appreciative as he knew he ought to, but he took her conversation as permission to approach.
“The one I’ve got up right now,” she said. “You won’t see it.” She pushed back her sandy hair, recently cut from its shaggy Camolen style to the wedge-like style she’d had when they’d first met. It suited her—short, sharp, and no-nonsense. “The problem with using magic here is that it disperses so quickly—even the storage stones tend to drain themselves. So I’ve been playing with that inverted shield spell I pulled on the lady-goon at Starland.” She glanced at Gifferd. “You would be one of the guy-goons.”
“Yes,” he said, quietly amused, as ever. “I got that.”
Carey still didn’t like Gifferd; knew the man would turn on them if he felt it necessary. But in an odd way he also fully trusted the FreeCast agent to indicate if necessary came to pass, so he didn’t go up to Dayna or take her by the arm or try to have this conversation in private. “So you’ve got a shield. And it keeps magic in...”
“But doesn’t mess with anything else,” Dayna said, back to being satisfied. “We can go in and out of it. And we can maintain the density of magic inside it—and Suliya can run out and use the bathroom at the last minute before we spell out of here, because you know she’ll forget.”
“I heard that!” Suliya shouted. A moment later a forkful of fresh manure flew from the aisle into the arena, making Carey duck but missing Dayna completely.
“Good,” Dayna said. “Maybe you’ll remember to pee before you join the rest of us this time.”
“Guides,” Suliya said, still out of sight—within a stall and working, from the varied and muffled sound of it. “Did I know we were going to a shopping place where the bathrooms would be hard to find? Did I know this place was so uncivilized? Just that one time—”
“So is that it?” Carey said. “Can we go home?”
“I’m not sure how much like home it’ll be,” Dayna said, suddenly sober. “Things feel really... wrong.” She glanced at Gifferd. “It’ll pass, you said. I hope you’re right.”
Being Gifferd, he didn’t respond with token words of reassurance. “They’ve had more than enough time,” he said. “But I wouldn’t take anything for granted. I’m not.”
She turned on him with accusation. “You were.”
He nodded, unaffected by her anger. “I was,” he agreed. “Now I’m not. Now I don’t like what I’ve been hearing about the magic, and I think we need to get back.”
“Great,” Dayna said. “Just great.”
Right. The man who’d kept them here for the sake of his employers, so sure that SpellForge would resolve its—and Camolen’s—problems—now felt just as sure that SpellForge hadn’t.
“We should have tried earlier,” she said, turning a dark look on Gifferd. “Maybe we could have helped—”
“We couldn’t have returned before you were ready,” Carey said. “We’ll deal with what’s there when we go back.”
And let’s go back now.
He didn’t have to say it.
“Test the shield,” Dayna suggested, nodding at the nothingness between them. “If I’m right and you can come and go, I’ll just hold onto this spell while you grab up the others and we’ll go.”
Suliya drifted to the ring entrance, watching with fork in hand. Carey took those careful steps forward, not entirely sure he’d know when he passed the invisible boundary into magic. But one moment he was waiting for that first tingle of magic—
And the next something seemed to burst within him, an agony of heat exploding in his chest. “I—” he choked, gurgling that word, clutching at the front of his shirt as if he could pull off the pain.
Dayna rushed to slow his fall as his knees gave way, and by then he was coughing. Deep, wet coughs and when the blood splattered his hands, he only stared, stupefied, unable to think beyond that which somehow tore him apart from the inside.
By then Gifferd joined them, roughly hauling him away from Dayna’s magic. “I’m sorry,” he said, just as roughly. “I thought I’d botched the spell—I didn’t know it was just dormant—”
Carey tore mindlessly at his blood-soaked shirt with his blood-covered hands, bright crimson fluid streaming down his chin as Gifferd lowered him to the ground with an entirely unGifferd-like curse and the faintest hint of panic.
Cool Gifferd, upset.
Calm Gifferd, panicked.
Nothing could have scared Carey more.
~~~~~
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He’s dead, Suliya thought, not even knowing why. Just seeing the blood, astonishingly bright, hearing Carey gasp and cough and choke.
He’s dead.
She ran a few steps into the indoor ring where Dayna bent fervently over Carey, and where Gifferd knelt, trying to get Dayna’s attention and going unheeded until Dayna whipped her head up to shout, “What did you do? I know it was you, I know it!”
Suliya stopped short at that. Her fingers wrapped around the long wood handle of the stall fork, clenched tightly; she discove
red it in her grip and threw it away.
“Remoblade,” Gifferd said, answering Dayna in a single clipped word as he turned Carey on his side with efficient ease. “Quit fighting me, Carey!”
A chill ran down Suliya’s spine. Remoblade. Remote blade. So unlawful it wasn’t funny, but the checkspells interfered with surgeon’s spells and couldn’t be employed.
“Remo-what?” Dayna demanded. “I swear, Gifferd, you start talking or I’ll find some way to turn you inside out!”
“Keep him on his side,” Gifferd ordered her. Carey still fought them, flailing in agony and beyond thought—he made it almost to his knees before Gifferd carefully but capably took him down again. “He’s bleeding in his lung; we need to keep the other one clear.”
Dayna threw her weight on Carey’s hip, glimpsed Suliya, and snapped, “Get Mark. Get him now.”
Suliya ran.
She left an aisle of startled horses, heads lifted and ears pricked, in her wake, and she stopped short at the double doors to bellow at Mark’s open office window. “Mark! Mark, boot the poot out here!”
Mark’s shadow appeared briefly at the window; she gestured frantically at him, her arm windmilling urgency. Immediately, the shadow retreated, and Suliya ran back to the arena, right up to the struggle in the dirt.
Or not so much of a struggle, for Carey had subsided, his lids half closed and his eyes glazed over in pain and shock. Blood dribbled from his mouth and soaked into the dirt beneath it, but not so copiously as before.
“—Remote blade,” Gifferd was saying to Dayna. “It acts internally. This one was more like a vibrating burr than a blade—” He cut himself off as he seemed to hear his own words, and realize to whom he said them.
“Oh my God,” Dayna snapped. “What kind of a monster—?” But she, too, cut herself short, as Mark pounded into the arena to join them. “Get it out of him. Get it out right now.”
Gifferd knelt behind Carey to use his thighs as a bolster, keeping Carey on his side. “It is out. That’s the first thing I did.”
“You did this during that fight,” Mark said suddenly, his posture changing from tense and startled to looming, and making Suliya wish he wasn’t behind her. “Didn’t you? And he ended up at the hospital and you didn’t say anything.”
The Changespell Saga Page 83