Changespell Legacy

by Doranna Durgin

  Their silences didn't mean anything . . . or so he told himself. Not at this distance. Arlen took a steadying breath, watched it plume out in the air before him, and gathered his reins; one had looped almost to the horse's knee, but it hadn't appeared to notice as it lowered its head to navigate the snow, its single-minded intent carrying it closer to an accustomed herd and freshly forked hay.

  Single-minded. He, too, had to be single-minded.

  Arlen shut out the cold and his fears and the dark shout of denial buried deep within him, and focused himself on his own goals. Reach Amses. Pull every bit of rank and influence to jump the travel booth line.

  Get home to Anfeald and— For good or bad, find out what the silence meant.

  "Arlen's rooms," Carey snapped, to no one in particular—and to everyone. Jess, Cesna, Jaime . . . all caught in a stasis of stunned reaction. Carey wished he felt the same, instead of this grim, overwhelming and familiar weight that settled on his shoulders. Make it happen . Whatever it was, make it happen. Fix something, deliver something, save something . . . no giving up, no matter what. Arlen would be depending on him. Carey didn't waste any more time, not in thought or regret or even consideration. "Go there. Now . Have someone else put that gelding up, Jess, and don't say anything about this. Jaime, can you make it on your own?"

  Jaime struggled to respond, her throat bobbing; she swallowed hard and then the words burst out of her.

  "Hell, yes! I need to know what Cesna's talking about. Get her up there and sedate her into a zombie if you have to, but I need to know ."

  "Sedation might not be such a bad idea at that," Carey muttered, climbing to his feet and, by dint of his grip on Cesna's arms, bringing her up with him. Hauling her up. "Pull it together, Cesna. There's more to this than spilling a few words—because if what you're saying is true, losing the Council won't be the end of it."

  If what she was saying was true. As overwrought as she was . . .

  Maybe she was wrong.

  He saw the same thought reflected on Jaime's face as she grabbed Cesna from the other side, and between the two of them they kept her on her feet between the indoor ring and the tunnel-like rear entrance of the hold itself. Carey took them up a back way, one that was spelled to stay locked for anyone besides Arlen, Carey, and—recently—Natt. Testament to her mindset, Jaime didn't question Carey about it, not when they took the first turn she probably hadn't even known was there, not when they spilled out of a stairway into Arlen's workroom.

  He'd broken all the rules to show it to either of them—but Cesna would hardly remember, Jaime could be trusted, and it was far better than revealing Cesna's state to everyone they passed. Far better than starting a panic until he could confirm what had happened . . . and what they needed to do next.

  He deposited Cesna on the stool in Arlen's workroom and glanced at Jaime— stay with her—and even as he strode from the room he heard her low, urgent voice. " Who's dead, Cesna—and how ?"

  He found Natt standing by the side of a long, box-topped desk in the corner of the apprentices' room—the dispatch desk. A grey-haired woman sat at the desk itself, her hands moving reflexively as she sorted messages still visible only in her mind. Some she'd transported, printed in the hand of the sender and on the original paper; half of those were on thick red-bordered confidential sheets, and the printing wouldn't show until the right person touched them. Auntie Pib, her name was, and she'd come to know Carey very well during the time Jess was at Kymmet—and he, her. Well enough to spot immediately that her normally chocolate skin bore an undertone of grey, and the habitual, ever-present tremble of her hands had worsened considerably.

  Natt—a chunky, round-faced man given to understated sartorial finery—turned to Carey with the gravest of expressions. "She's overloaded," he murmured. "We need to get relief here, and keep them on short rotating shifts."

  "Can you call someone?" Carey asked. With Arlen, it would have been a given; he'd handed out summons rings—like Carey's courier ring—to his crucial hold service people.

  "Yes," Natt said, embarrassment spreading over his face. "It didn't even occur—"

  "Do it," Carey said abruptly, and Natt frowned—frowned as though he hadn't expected Carey to come in and take over, Carey who was Arlen's closest friend and who had been working in this hold since he was in his early teens. But Natt's hesitation was short; it evolved into relief. Into realization . . . someone else would make the decisions.

  Carey wished he could say the same. He gave Natt a moment of concentration to make the summons—just about the time Jaime appeared in the doorway, only glancing at the crowded interior—two work desks, bookshelves lining every wall but the dispatch desk corner, and a long pastoral mural painted on the wall where a window might have gone. Jaime said, "She's useless. She just keeps repeating that the Council is dead."

  "That's all she knows," Natt said. He pulled his hands down his face, briefly stretching his features out of place. "It's all we know—we felt it happen. And we have this." He handed a scrawled, red-bordered note to Carey. "It came—to me—from Siccawei's secondary hold. They don't have a regular dispatch service there; it was probably all they could do to send this as confidential. And they're clearly not going to say anything more through dispatch at all. We need to send someone . . ."

  He trailed off as Carey took the paper; Jaime crowded in close. The note was addressed to the Secondary Council, and to the first apprentice for each Council wizard. "Council ambushed," he said out loud, although Jaime could read it, just as she spoke Camolen's common dialect; the world-travel spell prepared its travelers well. "Send contact," she finished.

  "Cesna's sensitive to interpersonal communication," Natt said, apology in his strained voice. "It hit her hard. I think it was probably all she could do to get to you in the first place. It's all she needed to do; I'll deal with the rest of it for now."

  "Send contact?" Jaime repeated.

  "It means they're not willing to transfer any more information through even the secure dispatch methods,"

  Natt told her.

  Carey glowered, albeit at no one in particular. "Or it means they don't know anything else."

  Dayna had felt the start of it. Less sensitive than some to magic-driven interpersonal communications, she had the dubious honor of being the first to feel the raw magic. Outside the Council, no one outstripped her ability to detect it, and no one outstripped her ability to wield it—when she was allowed to use it in the first place.

  This surge had been unshaped magic, without so much as will or intent behind it. Just a careless wave of power, one that somehow entirely lacked backlash. And yet— Look what it had done.

  She sat on a little bay horse named Fahrvegnügen—dubbed courtesy of Jaime's brother Mark and his questionable wit—and glanced at Trent, wishing she hadn't. Wishing she hadn't been one of the few who'd taken this ride to find Sherra when the palomino stallion had returned alone to Second Siccawei.

  And wishing most of all that she wasn't standing on the edge of a warped, diseased section of woods that looked like nothing more than a particularly disturbed Dali painting, a scene of carnage so beyond her imagination that she could barely comprehend it.

  She should have known things had been too quiet. Going too well. Camolen didn't have that kind of track record with her. On the surface it was a quieter, much more peaceful place than Earth, but when things went wrong with magic, they spiraled almost instantly into crisis and past the cold war stage—usually before almost anybody even knew there was trouble in the first place.

  She couldn't imagine it going much wronger than this .

  Slowly, Trent dismounted. The palomino had been his, lent to Sherra when her own horse threw a shoe on the way from Siccawei, and initially he'd blamed himself for giving her a mount more difficult than she was used to. Initially he'd thought the palomino, with its trailing lead rope, had simply pulled away from her grasp and left her afoot. Initially, he'd simply mounted up to go find her.

  A
nd then Dayna had come rushing out of the hold, having already detected the raw magic, and having brought Iri, a more advanced wizard, from her sudden faint to whisper nothing more than dead . So with Iri's wails building inside the small, two-story hold and no one currently more in charge of this small, two-story log facility than Dayna, she'd put her cold hand on the palomino's bridle to stop Trent from mounting up, and told him to wait for her. And for Katrie, one of Sherra's strongarms who'd worked with Dayna in the past and who'd come with her to this experimental little wizard's hold.

  Katrie, tall, strong, hardened Katrie, now came out of the snow-covered bushes wiping her mouth; she pulled the bota from her gear and rinsed her mouth, spitting. "Sorry," she said, swiping fingers through her short pale blonde hair; there was hardly enough of it to be in disarray, but it looked as ruffled as Dayna had ever seen it.

  "No problem," Dayna told her tightly. "I only wish I'd done the same." Instead, all the horror sat in her stomach like a cold poisoned rock. She shivered, drawing her fur-lined hat down over her ears.

  Of the wizards who'd come here, there was very little sign. The area sat quiescent, an unnatural mix of colors, heaving ground, and distorted trees. Maybe an acre of it, with a central blot of bright red that had once probably been a bird.

  A grasping hand jutted from one of the trunks, dripping skin. A scrap of someone's perfectly preserved scarf rippled in the frigid breeze, pinned by metallic leaves. Dayna thought she saw someone's bottom protruding from the ground, but couldn't tell without a closer look . . . and wasn't about to take it.

  Trent turned a circle, the fidgety palomino's reins in his hand as he searched the woods, putting his hands around his mouth to bellow, "Sher-ra!"

  Katrie and Dayna exchanged a dark glance; Katrie shook her head. She rewrapped her scarf around her ears, a combination headband and neck scarf, and shook her head again.

  "It doesn't matter," Dayna said, as Trent moved off the trail to repeat the call in a different direction. "Let him look. Just don't let him get too close to . . . that."

  "No," Katrie said, direct and immutable disobedience; she had no intention of going to Trent. "I'm staying here, with you."

  Dayna looked at her in surprise, and abruptly understood. With the others dead, she'd suddenly become more valuable to Camolen. She was the only one with a working understanding of raw magic, which somehow played a role in the tragedy before her. She was one of a very few taken for schooling within a wizard's hold, even though the circumstances were so mitigating as to make her actual aptitude meaningless—as an offworlder with a feel for forbidden raw magic, where else would she have been placed but under expert supervision? But because of that supervision, she'd learned in leaps and bounds.

  Because of her experience with conventional magic used at the highest levels and because she was gifted with an innate talent that had thrived under expert tutelage, Katrie in her stubborn loyalty had the right of it.

  Dayna was of value. If not among the vocationally oriented wizards who made up the Secondary Council and kept Camolen running, she was among the few remaining wizards with the skill and mindset to find out what happened .

  And to keep it from happening again.

  If they could.

  But for all her experience—unwanted, unasked for experience—Dayna had never taken action alone.

  Even assigned to the changespell team last summer, she'd been nothing more than a cog in someone else's wheel. No, when she got outrageous, when she made terrifying make-a-difference decisions, she'd always had her friends there as a catalyst.

  So when she got back to Second Siccawei, she sent a message out to Carey, Jess and Jaime . . . and she even wished for Mark.

  We need to talk, she said, hoping that between them, they could make some sense of this tragedy, untangle the threads that needed to be tugged and followed and eventually cut.

  But it occurred to her, too . . .

  Maybe she just didn't want to be alone.

  The tingle of the courier ring against Suliya's left forefinger came as such a surprise that she absently scratched the finger twice before realizing she'd been summoned. She left her satisfied thoughts about her forthcoming lessons—along with the tack she'd been cleaning and her certainties that she could play by the rules despite her disagreements with riding theory. That young gelding Jess had been on today, for instance . . . she mused about it on the way up the stairs. She'd have held the rein closer to his shoulder, not further out, giving him firm restriction instead of more room. But it didn't matter; she'd just do as Jaime said in lessons, and Carey would soon understand that Suliya had ambitions.

  Her confident thoughts came to a stuttering halt at the top of the stairs; she faced the long hallway—apprentice rooms off to the right, Arlen's workroom to the left, and his personal rooms at the end—for the first time since her arrival here. And she hadn't been expecting the soft sounds of crying from the workroom.

  Across the hall, sounds of conversation drifted out—a brief exchange of raised voices, Carey's included.

  With hesitation, she approached the apprentice room—a peek into the workroom showed her nothing, although someone was there . . . somewhere . . . crying.

  A glance into the apprentice room stopped her short. An older woman with darker skin than hers whom she'd seen but didn't know, Arlen's older apprentice, Carey, Jess, Jaime . . . they all gathered near the dispatch desk, making the room seem small. Jaime had her arms clenched around herself so tightly it was a wonder she could breathe; her eyes were red-rimmed and haunted. Jess looked for the world like she wanted to be holding Carey's hand, but he was busy gesturing, a sheet of dispatch paper in his grip, so she did what Suliya occasionally saw of her—she crowded in close, touching 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, and long before she was ever human.

  Burnin' hells, Suliya'd 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. With the sudden feeling she wasn't supposed to be there at all, 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 going on?"

  Carey gave a slight shake of his head. "Couriers receive assignments, not explanations." But he waved her off when she would have responded. "In this case, you're going to find out sooner than later anyway."

  He seemed to notice for the first time how Jess crowded him; finally he took her hand.

  Suliya took another step into the room, now flanked by a work desk on either side; she looked 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 because of the shock of the idea. But she looked at their faces again—she looked at Jaime, at her anguish and denial, then at Carey's determination. She'd heard about him . . . his high standards, his resolve to do what had to be done when things got grim . . . his willingness to drive himself to the limit to accomplish those same things. His own body was living proof.

  He'd drive her to the limit too, she suddenly realized. And that meant this might be her chance to prove to him— "Arlen," Carey said distinctly, watching her as though she didn't get it, "was with the Council."

  "Wh
at are you going to do?" Suliya asked. "What do you want me to do?"

  Jaime turned on her. "Don't you even want to know what happened?"

  Carey closed his eyes a brief moment, softening his reaction 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."

  "I don't understand." With all the high emotion in the room, Suliya thought a quietly wary answer was best. She still didn't quite grasp what had happened and raced ahead without her, although she was apparently about to be part of it. Not necessarily a bad thing.

  "I am going to the new hold in Siccawei," Jess said, speaking up for the first time, her words thicker than usual. "Dayna has asked for us—"

  "I can't leave," Carey said. "Not now. And Jaime needs to be here; if Arlen—well, if he tries to make contact"— if he's somehow not dead , unspoken words that came through loudly enough for Suliya to hear even without practice in reading him—"it'll be here."

  "So it's me," Jess said. "But 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. "That's not the point. The point is, I don't want you to do it that way. I wouldn'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 a run?" she said. "I'm just—" and she stopped herself from saying tagging along with Jess , hearing just in time how petulant it would sound. She didn't mean it that way . . . she'd only wanted the chance— Carey jerked his head at the doorway, his meaning clear enough; Suliya, with a glance at Jess, left the room. Carey followed her—Carey alone.

  He took her to the end of the hall, with the stairs at her heels and the light from the stairwell window splashing against his face and sparking the bright green flecks in his 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 lecture she saw coming.