Linton said suddenly, "That's why the dispatch is barely working. It went down because of the Council's death, but you've kept it that way. To keep the word from reaching anyone who hasn't actually seen this . . . corruption."
"Essentially," Chandrai said, releasing a faint sigh. "Although that's simplifying matters considerably. Even were we not interfering, the dispatch would hardly be up to normal operations." But her companionable moment was over, and she pressed her lips—magically tinted to the most natural of been-kissed reds—firmly together before adding, "Perhaps now you understand why I'm here—"
"No," Jaime said, cutting off the admonishment she'd seen coming. "I only know that we'd still be utterly in the dark if someone hadn't triggered illicit magic in this area, and you hadn't come to scold me about it.
And I think it's about time the other families knew at least this much—and the peacekeepers and precinct guards, while you're at it. We are not the problem here . . . but we're the ones who have to deal with it."
"You are entirely too certain of your place in this world," Chandrai said, annoyance stiffening her posture.
"Maybe," Jaime said, though it took effort to hide the fear she felt at those words. Fear of being sent back, of never finding closure for Arlen's death. Never truly convincing herself he was gone, that he wasn't waiting somewhere for someone to find and help him.
Her.
"Or maybe," Jaime added, "it operates enough like mine that I know exactly my place in this world." She gave Chandrai her most matter-of-fact look, the one that meant this is the way it is, and there's nothing you can do to change it . "Doing my damndest to keep the people I care about as safe as they can be."
She leaned back in Carey's chair, watching Chandrai try to decide how to deal with her unrepentant rebellion, well aware of Linton's impressed but alarmed regard. "Let me know," she said, "if you ever figure out what those spells were all about."
Chandrai gave her a tight smile. "Let me know," she said, "when you decide to tell us what you know."
Chapter 16
Jaime wasted no time after Chandrai left. With the day turned into evening, she knew she didn't have much time to waste . . . not if the evening ague came on her—and it hadn't missed a day yet.
She all but bolted from the office, calling back over her shoulder, "I've got to check Arlen's workroom . . . see if Natt and Cesna can tell if anything's missing—"
She didn't expect Linton to come with her; his concerns centered around the stable, and he'd only just come in from a long day of riding. But he did, and right on her heels as she headed away from the stables and into the hold proper, aiming for the stairs. "I can't believe you spoke to her like that," he said, and she couldn't decide if he was admiring or appalled. "Do you know how miserable she can make your life?"
"Other than kicking me out of the hold?" Jaime said, somewhat grimly. "I suppose she can probably blacklist me, but only unofficially. Just because she's a Council wizard doesn't mean she gets to do as she pleases."
"Guides, aren't you the calm one." He shook his head, took her arm, stopping them both at the base of the dark stairs. "If she convinces the others that you're involved in the use of a forbidden spell, you'll spend time in confinement." Jaime looked pointedly at his arm, but he didn't release her. If anything, his grip tightened slightly, even as his eyes narrowed. "Just exactly where did Carey go?"
Jaime hesitated, wondering about the laws here, and how much Linton could know before he, too, took on risk. "He's looking for answers."
After a moment, he released her, his otherwise benign features taking on a cast of distrust that the darkened stairwell only accentuated. "Answers," he repeated, and the suspicion was in his voice, too.
"Linton," Jaime said, "have you ever known Carey to back away from something that needed to be done? Even when everyone else says he's wrong?"
"I haven't known him as long as you," Linton said, but it was an admission of sorts.
"And you barely know me at all. But I've learned something about myself in these past few years . . . I'm not so different from him. We have different priorities, but somehow . . ." She thought about his comment that she could be confined for involvement with a forbidden spell. Deep down she'd known it; after her involvement in Calandre and Willand's hearings, she couldn't help but know it, even if she weren't familiar with the exact laws. She'd just avoided thinking about it so she wouldn't feel the fear she felt now.
Confined. No horses, no chance to throw herself into the kind of riding that made her soul sing. Or possibly banished from this world. No Jess, no Dayna . . .
She already had no Arlen .
That was the thing to focus on. Doing something about that, even if it only meant finding out what had happened so she could dig her way out of the wondering. Find some sort of closure. And, if Dayna was as right as Jaime thought she was, keep it from happening to someone else.
She looked straight at Linton and said, "If I could tell Chandrai anything about that second spell, I would. Because I think someone needs to figure it out, and damn fast."
"You had no right," he said. "Either of you. You had no right to get me involved in something that could come crashing down on me. I've got a family here in the hold, a little girl—"
"Don't you get it?" Jaime said, cutting him off, her voice raised nearly to a shout. "You're not involved.
And if you want to stay that way, you'll stop questioning me right now ."
Linton stopped short, mouth still open, startled as he thought her words through.
She said, "Your best bet is to trust us. Trust Carey, because you know him. Trust me . . . because Arlen did, and Carey does."
She watched him think about it, going through hesitation, lingering at the impulse to dive in and be a part of it all—this time by choice. And then he gave the faintest of nods.
Jaime sighed with relief . . . and moved right on to other matters, figuratively sweeping the previous conversation under the rug. It never happened . How Mission Impossible could she get? "What I need is for you to talk to all the other couriers. Let them know what you saw, and if anyone else has seen anything like it, I want to know. All of us are on alert for it from now on. I want any sightings mapped and watched. If we have to, we cut our message load and spend more time scouting."
He winced. "No one'll like that." Not the landers, or the separated families, and especially not the peacekeepers and precinct guard.
"We'll play it by ear," she said, and at his puzzled expression, added, "Take it as we go. Make decisions as we get more information."
"Map it as we walk it," he said, understanding clearing his features.
"That's it." Jaime triggered the permalight in the lower stairwell and gave it a grateful glance. These days, she barely had enough concentration to maintain a glowspell the size of a firefly, not that she'd ever been any good at it.
"I'll post a meeting for tomorrow morning before the riders go out," he said. "I guess . . . it would be best if I just went back to the job room and made sure we've got all of tomorrow's outgoing accounted for."
"Everything but whatever you brought in with you." Jaime rubbed her forehead, suddenly aware that she'd had a distinct tingle of warning there for some moments, buried beneath the intensity of their conversation and the ramifications of Chandrai's visits. She fumbled for the flask by her side, barely hearing Linton's questioning comment, gulping it down just in time— The evening ague rolled over her like a storm, crashing headlong into the magically enhanced dosage.
She knew Linton caught her as she fell; she heard his bellow for Gertli.
And then she was gone until morning.
"Big bootin' whee," Suliya said, staring critically at Mark's computer monitor, her hand on the back of the chair Dayna occupied, scooted up just beside Mark's own desk chair. "Just the same as the dispatch, really."
Mark, heretofore congenial and hard to jostle from his good mood, actually looked hurt. Dayna glanced over her shoulder with the kind
of disapproval Suliya had learned to ignore a long time ago, and said, "Computers do a lot more than give people access to the Internet." She turned back to the big monitor with an interest that surprised Suliya. "I hadn't yet gotten one of these when I left. It almost seems like magic, now . . ."
"From what you've said," Mark told her, apparently willing to pretend Suliya hadn't snorted at his toy, "it's a lot like magic. The way a programmer builds a program doesn't sound all that different from the way a wizard builds a spell."
"Huh," Dayna said, looking entirely too thoughtful. If she got lost in playing with the computer, Suliya was going to get bored, fast . . . maybe she'd wander out and see what was on the entertainment device Mark called a TV. At first she'd thought she could learn a lot about this new world by watching it, but both Mark and Dayna had laughed when they found her at it. Game shows and soap operas, they'd said, had nothing to do with the real world. That's why people watched them in the first place.
Suliya said, "I think I'll go see how Jess is doing with Ramble."
In perfect unison—and without looking at her—Mark and Dayna said, "No!"
"Poot," Suliya said, sliding into a sulk. "You two sound like you have the same brain."
She wasn't sure why they both burst out laughing. As far as she was concerned, it only proved her point.
"Jess is having enough trouble with Ramble," Mark said, so reasonably. "Not to mention that he keeps taking off his clothes."
"You can't keep blankets on some horses," Suliya told him. "Bet he's one of them."
Dayna gave her a calculating look that put Suliya right on edge. "You want something to do?" Dayna asked. "Fine. Let's see about straightening your hair."
"What?" Aghast, Suliya clapped her hands to her head. "Not my hair!"
Mark grinned, and Dayna gave her a wicked smile. Teasing her, even as they meant it. "For as long as we're here, yes. You stand out far too much with that mop—can't afford anyone to take notice. Or we could cut it . . ."
Suliya gave a shriek of dismay. A small shriek, considering the circumstances, but Mark winced anyway.
"Keep it down," he said. "I don't think Carey's feeling well."
"Not since we got here," Dayna said. "I don't think he knew how much help he was getting from the healers. The world travel messed him up, and there's no one here who can help. I sure can't pull off that kind of advanced healing magic."
"I gave him some ibuprofen." Mark gave an idle click of the mouse, and after a moment his machine muttered you've got mail! in a voice too cheery to be true.
Suliya didn't care about his mail. She glared at Dayna. "No one said anything about my hair when you talked to me about coming here, and no one's touching it now."
"No one knew we'd be here as long as it looks like we're going to be here," Dayna said. "And I was thinking you might like to get out and look around. Shop, maybe. You seem like you might enjoy shopping. Southland Mall isn't much, but it's more than you've seen so far. But you, in rural Ohio? You'll attract attention, all right."
Mark paged through several screens of text, faster than Suliya could follow; he made a snort of dismissal, got rid of the email somehow, and started the process to shut down the computer, all as he nodded agreement with Dayna. "Gotta agree, you seem like a shopping kind of gal," he said. "And Dayna's right. We don't want you looking memorable right now—and trust me, even with straight hair, you'll be plenty memorable." He glanced over his shoulder, tossing her a grin. "That's a good thing, Suliya."
She eyed him warily. A compliment, then. But still—!
"Besides," he added, "I thought you girls liked to play beauty salon."
Dayna looked like she wanted to hit him, but didn't. In a disgruntled way she said, "That's not very PC, you jerk."
"Ha," he said, and grinned at her, leaning back in his swivelling chair as the computer monitor went dark.
"I'm right, or you would have nailed me."
"It just so happens it's an easy spell to learn."
Suliya gave her a suspicious look. "And just how easy is it to un -spell?"
"Easy enough, or I wouldn't have mentioned it," Dayna said, pushing back her own sandy, boringly straight hair, cut in the currently popular multilayered Camolen style at which those in Suliya's family would have sneered. "Look, I'll just do a small little section, okay? And I'll put it back, and you can see for yourself."
Still wary, Suliya agreed to that much . . .
Except Dayna couldn't. Her casual concentration turned to quick consternation, and then to a flabbergasted string of curses. Suliya tried to hide her relief.
"A little spell like this should be a snap—we know the spellstones work!" Dayna said, and tried a quick series of additional spells, none of which had any effect whatsoever. She went into an angry, scowling thoughtfulness, and Suliya sneaked away to the bathroom to check her hair from all angles, making sure it was just as it had been.
She'd thought this would be an opportunity to prove herself invaluable to Carey . . . but Carey barely noticed her, and her only contribution—boring, boring, boring, for days now—was to take watch outside Ramble's stall when Jess needed a nap or a meal. She'd thought she'd have been right in there with Jess, teaching the newly made man what he needed to know in order to tell Carey and Dayna what they needed to know.
Patting her hair back into place behind a headband borrowed from Jaime's bathroom drawer, she considered that given the expression on Ramble's face when he looked at her—when he looked at any of them, other than Jess—she might be better off outside the stall.
He didn't like being human. And he certainly understood who had made him that way—the other humans. That Suliya had been dragged along to Ohio just as much as he made no difference to him at all, if anyone had even mentioned it to him.
She peeked back into the office, a cramped little room with what could only be a man's touch—Mark, probably—in the browns and tans of the straightforward decor. The computer overwhelmed a desk that reminded her of the one in Carey's job room office, and the desk crowded up against unadorned bookshelves of some material that looked like wood but wasn't, chock full of books with the overflow shoved in every which way. The most remarkable object in the room was a strange little frame with five perfect silver balls hanging on clear string.
Which was to say, there was very little to remark upon in the room at all, and to Suliya's mind—considering she had crossed the barrier to another world —that made the room somewhat of a cheat. The kitchen was fun, and the house boasted any number of small oddities, but she'd seen nothing to— Well, to take the curl out of her hair.
No one noticed her reappearance, or seemed to. Mark leaned back in his chair, nodded to something Dayna had said.
Dayna made a face, then seemed to find resolve. "That's that, then—I've got to hit the stores. If I can get the right kind of crystal, maybe I can invoke a spellstone, pause it, and suck up power through it to store in another stone."
"What's wrong with just using the spellstones you have?" Suliya said. "You brought plenty for all of us."
Dayna raised an eyebrow. "That's what you get for walking out of the conversation," she said, but almost immediately relented. "I'm a little concerned about how the trip over went. I think . . . Jess may be right; there's a problem with the magic. I'd like to have some extra power to feed into the stones for the way back."
Mark shook his head. "Sounds damned risky if you ask me. Pausing an invoked spellstone. Sheesh."
But when Dayna turned on him, he held up placating hands. "Yeah, yeah, I'm not the wizard around here.
Anyway, I know just the place. Kinda new, stuck off the end of Hocking Street. I'll take you."
"Me too," Suliya said quickly, and when they both looked at her skeptically—in a way her father's employees never would have dared to display even when she was a child—she added firmly, "I'm coming ."
Dayna groaned. "I hate the fact that the phrase burnin' poot comes to mind," she said, and sighed. "At least bra
id the hair, will you?"
"We won't all fit in the truck if she doesn't," Mark said, and grinned, pleased with himself.
Suliya pretended he was a servant, tilted her chin in the air, and turned on her heel to return to the bathroom and such hair management tools as she'd been allowed to bring. But inside, she didn't truly mind. Inside, she had a little girl grin. Time to explore.
Arlen's travel slowed to an unbearable rate. Too slow . He took to packing supplies on the horse and buying them whenever he could get his hands on them. He was lucky to have found new foot gear, thoroughly waterproofed, and—tucked away in the back of a secondhand store—a ripped and crudely mended set of packs to sling over his saddle in lieu of himself.
On foot, his progress slowed considerably. Slowed further by the need to settle for a day now and then—getting the horse's hooves seen to, gathering what news he could. Nothing remarkable, past that first public revelation of the Council death.
If he wanted to, he could reach out and find the travel anchor in Anfeald, the one in his personal rooms.
The rooms where he hoped Jaime still waited. If only she'd been able to hear— But she hadn't; his nightly attempts to reach her had had no effect whatsoever, making him wonder if she were indeed gone. It didn't matter. He'd go after her if she'd left. It might well make him an outcast, but he knew how to kill the checkspell long enough to do it, sanctioned or not.
But he didn't hunt for the Anfeald anchor, and he didn't try mage travel. He didn't use any magic at all—aside from a few boughten spellstones to keep his feet warm as he trudged through the slowly diminishing snowpack and those undetectable, private attempts to reach Jaime. Between his gradual movement south and the rapidly changing season, he should find his feet on solid ground soon.
Or, he thought, clambering over a downed tree limb just emerging from the snow with its dark smooth trunk shining slickly in the melt-off, he'd find his feet in mud .
He tugged the reins and the reluctant and rough-gaited horse made a big deal of stepping over the tree limb. "Grunt," Arlen said, more in encouragement than imprecation . . . for Grunt was what he'd finally named the creature.
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