Grunt wasted no time; he sucked the hard sausage into his mouth and chewed fast, as though he suspected Arlen might well go in after it; it was only after a few good hard chomps that the spice of it seemed to hit him, and he lifted his upper lip in a flehmen grimace of surprise.
But he never stopped chewing. And he took the second piece Arlen offered him, his nose twitching all the while.
"I have to give you this much credit," Arlen told him. "As a road partner, you do your share of the entertaining."
But Grunt, instantly aware of the moment he had no further chance for odd human food, went back to hunting out grass. Arlen fed himself, letting his gaze wander along the flattened landscape of north-central Camolen. Huge tracts of unclaimed land mixed with cultivated fields were still covered by traces of snow, though the peaks of the plow furrows were starting to poke through. Bright winter birds played along the edge of the road where the brush grew thick, scolding Arlen for daring to invade their sanctum. Big fat-footed hare tracks led across the field to his left, and the road stretched before him without a single recent track.
Perfectly normal. Perfectly quiet. If you didn't count the magic-hobbled wizard on the run and his rough-gaited, sausage-eating horse . . .
He hadn't ever been through this part of Camolen before. He'd been myopic, sequestered in Anfeald to push the edge of spell mastery, staying ahead of everyone else simply to protect everyone else.
Obviously, this time he'd failed. The whole Council had failed. Whatever had killed them, it was not something any one had anticipated. It may have even been related to something they'd approved—it wouldn't be the first time they missed a spell's side effect. Just before winter started, they'd approved that window-cleaning spell, unaware—as were the developers—that any building with enough sand content in its construction would become temporarily transparent as the spell was cast on its windows.
Too bad about that cheaply constructed brothel in Kymmet. "Really," he said to Grunt, not sounding convincing even to his own ears. "A shame the way they lost their entire customer list on the spot."
Grunt lifted his head to give Arlen a solemn stare, perceived that still no more sausage was forthcoming, and eased away to tease a few brush twigs into his mouth.
But he stopped in mid chew, his ears pricking sharply forward, the end of a tender branch sticking out the side of his mouth and forgotten. Arlen shoved the last of his wafer bread into his mouth, climbing to stand on his rock at the same time—even as he supposed it was probably the wisest course to hide under the rock and leave Grunt to fend for himself.
Grunt snorted—a harsh, sharp noise with an extra huff of exhalation at the end. Arlen didn't have to be Carey to understand that one. Alarm . An equine demand of who goes there .
Except Arlen didn't see anything. Looking as hard as he could right where Grunt had riveted his gaze, he saw absolutely— Oh, here now. What was that ?
Just on the other side of the road, nearly hidden behind the brush . . . he left Grunt rustling happily within the brush by his rock and approached the heaving bit of spontaneous goo with caution. This was exactly the sort of thing the Council had gone to look at—just "a disturbance"; nothing more. Nothing violent, just something strange enough to gather them all in the same spot to examine it.
He felt nothing from the goo. No sense of magic. Just what his eyes saw—although that alone was quite enough. After a moment, it stopped heaving and oozing, becoming a melon-sized spot of crackling hard ground and brush and snow, all swirled together and intermingled.
He wanted to enclose it in a spelled case and study it—but that would mean using magic, pure folly this close to the town in which he'd been attacked. Pure folly almost anywhere, until he reached his defenses at Anfeald.
Raw magic leaves no signature.
The thought made him grimace and rub his upper lip. He might have cast his first spell at the age of three, but at two he'd tickled the family dog with raw magic, causing a backlash that put him in bed for a week, left him under supervision for a year, and left his parents wary for several more. Worst of all, the dog had never approached him again—a fact that molded Arlen's perception of raw magic as strongly as all the years of indoctrination to follow.
Which didn't mean he couldn't handle it.
And, because it was the only thing left to him, he called up the smallest tendrils of raw magic and gave the quiescent blob a little poke.
Suddenly he was two years old again, stumbling backward from what he'd done, watching the blob explode into a frenzy of activity and knowing he had utterly no idea how to stop it. Grunt snorted loudly from across the road and Arlen bounded over to him, jerking his lead rope loose and hauling him down the road with Grunt snorting and jigging sideways at every step.
By the time Arlen looked back, the blob was quiet again . . . but no longer did it seem quiescent. No, now it . . . lurked, like so much wizard bait.
What if someone in the Council had thrown raw magic around?
Not likely. He was the most adventurous of them, the most radical. If anyone had done it, it would have been him . . . as he'd so neatly just proven.
Then . . .
What if someone else had done so.
Someone allied with the same people who had sent the man in the stable.
Maybe, maybe not. Supposition . Arlen turned his back on the unsettling blob and led Grunt down the road at a more sedate pace while the horse snorted wetly and let him know he was not forgiven for his unseemly behavior. All supposition .
And the real question remained unanswered.
From where had the blob come in the first place?
Carey left Jess still sleeping, loathe to wake her on this day when he'd find himself saying good-bye. She slept hard in dawn time, only the faintest hint of a frown between her brows to indicate her disquiet. He crouched by the bed a moment, stroking the black stripe of her bangs in her dun hair, trying without success to smooth that frown away. Braveheart . She'd always been that to him; she always would be.
But before long he felt a faint tickle in his chest and he stood so he wouldn't clear his throat in Jess's ear.
He blamed that tickle for keeping his sleep light, but he somehow doubted even a spell could have put him into a solid sleep. Not the night before Jess, still so obviously connected to him, nonetheless felt driven to leave under circumstances when they both knew they might never see each other again.
Not with the magic so quirky . . . and with things clearly going off-trail in Camolen.
He thought of Wheeler's dead partner and grimaced to himself in the dim light of the guest room. He thought of Wheeler, and the grimace turned to an outright scowl. They should all go back—except with Dayna's repeatedly expressed need to tweak the magic for such a large group, and the admittedly faint possibility of prying more information from Wheeler—not a man who would follow them tamely to Camolen for their convenience if he chose otherwise.
So Jess would go back alone. Or not alone enough, depending on how he thought of Ramble.
Carey grabbed the top T-shirt off the pile Mark had provided him and, slipping out the door, tugged it over his head as he walked blindly down the hallway. There was always something about being the first one up in a dwelling full of people. Something special about the rare quiet time as he momentarily put his thoughts aside and moved about the kitchen, setting up the coffee maker for Dayna and Mark and pouring himself a cola. And something startling about the protective feeling that surged up in him, the desire to make himself a shield from anything that might wake them on this day that promised to be so hard.
Hard on Dayna, who had to find it within herself to hold together fraying magic . . . with the responsibility of her friend's life in the balance. And hard on Mark, who adored Jess like a younger sister and who had introduced her to her first Dairy Queen, her first bologna sandwich . . . and at her own request, her first kiss.
Hard on Jess, who'd been pushed past the breaking point with their human behavio
r and decisions.
And hard on him, even though he deserved every minute of it and more.
Only Wheeler—ostensibly asleep on the living room couch, although Carey wouldn't be surprised if he'd woken the moment Carey left the guest room—had little to lose with the day's events. And Ramble, with much to lose, didn't seem to comprehend the stakes; he knew only that Jess intended to take him home, and back to his natural form.
A cough nudged at him, so he flicked the coffee maker on and took his cola outside with a small plateful of thinly sliced turkey meat, a morning combination at which Dayna routinely made derisive noises. He went out to the back perimeter of the yard, by the neat, white board horse fencing on which he balanced his plate; there he watched the sky prepare for sunrise.
He wasn't surprised when Wheeler joined him, his arm neatly bandaged in lieu of the medical treatment he needed but which would draw the attention of the authorities, and bare to the waist in those expensive slacks which spurned wrinkles despite being used as sleepwear. Thus exposed, it became obvious that Wheeler's expensive clothes had served as camouflage, hiding not an average, plain body but a whipcord physique in outstanding condition. Carey tipped the soda to his mouth to hide the dark humor of the revelation. He hadn't stood a chance the day before, and he hadn't even known it.
Wheeler greeted him with nothing more than a nod, and stood in a silence remarkably companionable given the events between them. Knuckling his chest, Carey said without rancor, "Just how the hells hard did you hit me yesterday?"
Wheeler said, "Harder than you know. Luck ran with you on that one."
"Yeah, I felt lucky," Carey said mildly but with ultimate sarcasm. After another moment during which the purpled clouds brightened to orange-red and the flat Ohio horizon made way for the sun, he added, "I was a little surprised to find you were still here this morning."
"The sleeping accommodations weren't that bad," Wheeler said, so low key it took Carey a moment to realize there'd been humor hidden in his words. But without prompting, Wheeler added, "There are things happening here . . . more than I've been told. I'm sure my employers—" he glanced at Carey, seemed to recall there was no point in being coy about that particular point any longer, and backtracked to say, "I'm sure FreeCast and SpellForge had a reason for failing to provide me with complete information. But that doesn't mean I won't try to fill in the gaps—or that they don't know it. The chance they took is whether the missing information is significant enough to change the way I see things."
Carey snorted, cleared his throat, and said, "Isn't it always? When people in power leave out the details?"
Wheeler gave a short shake of his head. "Not necessarily. Sometimes they just don't think it matters.
Sometimes they just don't have the time. It's not always a matter of hiding things . . . just of dismissing them or losing track of them."
"Your faith in them is stronger than mine," Carey muttered.
"Maybe," Wheeler said, in a voice that indicated or maybe not .
"And when you find the details— if you do—and if they lead you to believe your orders were right, what then?" Carey set the green plastic soda glass on top of a fence post and turned to put the newly exposed disk of the sun at his back, not caring that Wheeler had to squint at him. "You'd better know right now—" But he had to stop, to work through a series of deep, rale-filled coughs that took him by surprise. "Damn," he said, shooting Wheeler a look of deepest annoyance.
"Give it a few days," Wheeler said, not unsympathetically.
"You'd better know," Carey repeated, picking up where he'd interrupted himself, "as pathetic a threat as it must sound right now, that you'd better not turn on my friends. All your working ethics be damned, if you so much as look wrong at any of us—"
"If I ultimately believe my orders were given in good faith? No. I won't turn on you. That's not my style,"
Wheeler said, utterly believable simply because he didn't bother to turn on the intensity. Matter of fact.
Which is what made Carey's spine chill when Wheeler added, "Not unless you try to return to Camolen before I'm ready."
Chapter 21
Jaime rode the perimeter of Anfeald Hold on a young mare too green for courier work, ostensibly getting in saddle time. In truth, she was preparing herself for the day when she could no longer think of these lands as even faintly hers by association.
Mostly, she'd been too busy to consider it. Mostly still holding out hope for Arlen, unable to accept the inevitable without the neat packaging of absolutes. She'd been like that about her mother's death, too.
Her mother, young and pretty and with Mark's eyes—hers, too, Mark said—and killed in a tractor accident when Jaime was four and Mark not even old enough to have clear memories of her. The adults had whisked young Jaime away, of course . . . protecting her. They protected her all through the days that followed, not even considering her presence at the viewing and the funeral.
Until well into her teens, Jaime hadn't shaken the feeling that her mother would walk through the door.
Never been able to trust those vague assurances that her mother had indeed gone away . And since that time, she'd always attended the burial of every horse under her care who'd passed, of every pet she'd ever owned. Of every friend's memorial viewing. And even then, if the memorials were closed casket . . .
Not that anyone had ever come back. Not even her mother.
"You're a grown woman now, Jaime Cabot," she told herself, watching the flick of the mare's ears—overactive ears, not as relaxed as they should be considering the mare had grown up in the pasture Jaime now traversed. The muddy ground made the going slick and while the snow was slowly melting into spring, there were plenty of remaining drifts to conceal horse-eating monsters. "You're all grown up, and you need to face facts." She patted the mare, gave her a little rein, and urged her forward.
The fact was that despite today's news that the new Council would stay in Kymmet until the crisis was over—delaying new hold assignments and leaving the staff and families of the recently deceased Council wizards to run their holds as accustomed—sooner or later she would have to leave this place. Probably to return to Ohio, where the farm she loved somehow didn't offset the loss of this vital, magic place . . .
And that of the equally vital wizard who lived here.
Carey had brought her grapes. Jess stared at them, sitting in a bowl on top of an upturned bucket along the outer wall of Ramble's stall, and her throat instantly swelled shut with unexpressed emotion.
She knew it had been Carey. No one else would have done it just like this. And only Carey, hunting a bittersweet parting gesture, would know how truly grapes were her weakness. Big red seedless grapes.
She put her fingers firmly on her lower lip to stop the quiver there. Emotion or equine-like anticipation, she wasn't sure, but she wasn't about to have it seen. Especially not by Suliya, who seemed to crave companionship this morning as much as Jess craved solitude.
Neither of them got their wish. Jess was hardly companionable, but Suliya didn't give up and go away; they stayed in each other's orbit and annoyed one another.
"It's just no burnin' wonder," Suliya said, with no apparent care for whether Jess was actually listening.
Jess fingered the duct-tape-wrapped film cannister Mark had rigged and then more or less competently sewn into a long braid made just for the purpose, one that would fall at Lady's withers instead of just behind her ear as her spellstones did. With no one available to attach Lady's courier harness, they'd each written a short message in the smallest readable font Mark's printer could manage; he'd then rolled the resulting page to fit in the cannister. Jaime's name was printed on the outside in Carey's sparse hand, although he'd had to struggle through the language adaptions inherent in the travel spell to remember the runes; that way if Lady lost track of things in the aftermath of the travel, whoever found her would be sure to get the cannister to Jaime.
Still, Jess wished there was a way to equip her wi
th the courier harness. It bore Anfeald's mark on the breast collar, making it clear that Lady worked in an official capacity. Without it, if anyone saw her on the road, she was sure to lose time evading their well-meaning attempts to catch her.
But Suliya was still talking, even as Jess pulled a big juicy grape from the bunch and popped it into her mouth, savoring it. Savoring the gift. Suliya said, "I thought he just didn't think I could do it. Handle a position in one of the bigger stables, that is. And that he wanted me close to home for when I failed." She gave Jess quite a serious look. "Mum comes from Wyfeld, and that's why we settled there. It's pretty out of the way. But that hardly matters, does it, when there's a travel booth in the house?"
Sweet grape. Jess had another, and offered one to Ramble through the partially open door. He took it, and then he took her hand. Stroking it, examining it . . . and then just holding it.
Suliya said, "But that wasn't it at all. It wasn't me he was worried about, not really. He didn't want me around the big holds with the top wizards . . . people who might say things about SpellForge he didn't want me to hear. SpellForge the wonderful , making people's lives easier. SpellForge the innovative , providing services. What good is all that if you've got people like Wheeler running around behind the scenes like big bootin' bullies?"
Jess murmured, "Your father cares what you think."
"Ha!" Suliya said, and snorted, flipping her hair over her shoulder with an insouciance that only made her wounded expression more obvious in contrast. "He didn't want me talking to Arlen, I'll bet. Or other wizards."
"But you didn't know anything about people like Wheeler," Jess said, gently pulling her hand from Ramble's, unable to follow Suliya's logic and suspecting perhaps there wasn't any.
"I've been all through the halls of the SpellForge development area," Suliya said, sounding very much like the haughty Suliya of old. "Who knows what I could have said that Arlen would have found significant? I recognized Wheeler in the first place, didn't I?"
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