"By the hour," Dayna interposed in a mutter, watching Wheeler with eyes narrowed, her hands a total contrast where they rested on Carey's leg by the knee, patting him in an absent but comforting way. No longer so panicked, she had taken Wheeler's cue that the worst of it was over; despite what Suliya had thought upon first seeing Carey, he had more than a few moments to live.
Though not many.
"So you—what?" Dayna asked. "Think we need to rush back and save the day? And you couldn't have said this earlier?"
"To what end? Before now, this moment, did we have a way to return?" He gave her a bitter look. "And would you have believed me if I had?"
"Yes," she said, a sharp gleam in her eye. "I'm the one feeling the changes in the magic, remember?"
"Then use the spell now! If we can go back, we must go back! No one else knows what's happening—"
"None of the other agents?" Suliya said in surprise, the only one accustomed to FreeCast ways.
Wheeler gave an impatient shake of his head. "They were never told. I was never told." At their simultaneous stare of response he said, "I believe I mentioned that I find out what I need to know whether or not I'm told."
They looked at each other a moment, a moment in which Carey actually did manage to push himself half upright, still struggling to breathe but fully intent on the conversation. Especially intent on Mark's next words, a murmur of an aside with all the threat gone from his stance, "With the magic going gonzo, if you don't leave soon, you could be stranded here forever. Dayna, it all makes a certain amount of sense . . ."
"The hell it does! I'm not making that decision without details. Not when it means leaving Carey behind."
They weren't paying attention to Carey himself, none of them were. No one but Suliya, who saw the way his eyes widened, the way his blood-rimmed lips soundlessly formed a single word. Jess .
Wheeler looked at Dayna and said simply, "The permalight spell came with an unexpected price."
She jerked as though in response to a physical blow. "Guides, those things are everywhere —" And cut herself off with a shake of her head. "It's just an environmental side effect? They'll figure it out. If it's that obvious, they'll—"
"How?" he asked. "The Council is dead. They're not supposed to be—some fool panicked and drew up raw magic when he tried to conceal his spying, and in the process killed every single wizard skilled enough to follow the casting trail to the permalight spells." He opened his mouth as if he might have something else to add, and then didn't.
" I've followed trails—" Dayna started, not appearing to notice his hesitation—but slumped instead of finishing. "But always a very strong spell, to a single spellcaster . . . not a diffuse effect to a multitude of sources." She glanced at Mark. "He's right. It's different. I would have said it couldn't be done."
"If SpellForge had told the new Council as they should have, the light spell would be forbidden by now.
There might not yet be a checkspell, and the Council might not have spread the news to every single household in Camolen all at once, but they'd have put a cap on the worst of it—and the interference wouldn't have escalated. Not the way it has."
"You're guessing," Dayna said. But she looked down at her hands, no longer resting on Carey's leg but fingers clenching each other. "I hate this . . . but I think it's a good guess."
"It might not matter," Wheeler said. "It might be too late already. We could go back and it could be too late to stop the destruction." He narrowed his eyes, tightly gauging Dayna's response, and after a moment added, "Do what you want. But I want to go back now. Here and now."
Dayna looked a Carey, a beseeching gaze from unusually vulnerable blue eyes. "Normally I'd go for Camolen's magic over hospital care any day, but there's no predicting—I'll come back for you, Carey, if it's at all possible, I'll come back—"
"No!" he said, forcing out the ragged but emphatic word and then paying for it with a round of coughing and spitting. He looked at Suliya, just as beseeching as Dayna had been an instant earlier.
She knew what he wanted, even through her surprise that it was she to whom he turned. She found her voice surprisingly firm. "No. He needs to go back. He has to try to make things right with Jess."
Wheeler looked at Carey and said flatly, "You could die. You could die without ever getting the chance to see her."
Carey took the most careful of breaths, spoke in the most cautious of whispers, words that were still as strong as anything he'd ever said. "Death," he said, "would be living here without ever seeing her again, and knowing I didn't even try."
Wheeler and Dayna exchanged a glance, brought Mark in on it. A silent round of decision-making, and one that burned up anger in Suliya. "Ay!" she said. "You heard him. If we go back, he goes back."
Dayna let out a long breath that could only be acquiescence. But when Carey turned a grateful gaze to Suliya, mouthing a thank you, she didn't know whether to be relieved for what she'd done for him, or frightened of what she might have done to him.
Jaime opened bleary eyes to diffuse dawn light, instantly alarmed but taking another moment to realize why.
Natt, waking her. Natt's anxious face, looking as ungroomed as she'd ever seen him, with the light, fine shadow of his beard creating a hard line on his usually soft face and his eyes still a little gummy even by candlelight. He wore a thick, layered silk dressing gown she'd never seen, and carried the scent of a woman's perfume. The chill of the unwarded spring night surrounded them both.
"The meltdowns," Jaime said, as soon as she found her tongue, her fingers clutching the dark green linens that in this world weren't linens at all, but some other natural fiber she could never remember. "Do we have one here?"
"Grace of the guides, no," Natt said, an instant of horror crossing his face. "But something's shown up in the travel booth. There's an arrival alarm—"
"I thought we'd deactivated all unnecessary spells," Jaime said, swinging her legs out of the futon-like bed and groping beneath the bed frame for the canvas slip-ons she often wore around the hold. Like the covers weren't linen, the canvas wasn't exactly canvas, but in her mind they were close enough.
"How often do we use that one? No one thought of it."
"So who is it?" She stood, impatiently finger-combed her hair back from her face, and decided that under the circumstances—and with the addition of a sweater—her current attire of ankle-length sleep-shirt was just fine.
"It's not who . It's what . And I think you can answer that question better than any of us."
"Do I like the sound of that?" Jaime grabbed a mint from the bowl by the door on the way out, wishing for mouthwash.
Natt, holding the candle so it would light her way as well as his as they entered the dimmer areas of the hold, said, "No one's sure."
She followed too close on his heels, too impatient to do otherwise, and then surged ahead when the ground-floor travel booth came into sight. Cesna waited there with her own candle, one of the old thick stumps under severe rationing. Camolen had gone years . . . generations . . . without any significant loss of lighting ability. No rolling blackouts for them, no sudden wink-out of lights because someone somewhere hit a power pole with his car. The candles were old, stashed away in the back corners of drawers and cupboards, and precious.
Not that they offered enough light for Jaime to believe what she thought she saw in the travel booth, folded and neatly centered in the enclosed stone space.
Sabre's blanket.
With a wordless exclamation of surprise, she pushed into the booth and snatched up the fine wool cooler, a dark teal blanket banded in black with a ropy net lining, tailored to be slung loosely over a hot horse. Over Sabre, her horse—she knew it as soon as she felt the familiar material, and before her searching fingers came across the embroidered name and logo. The Dancing Equine .
"It's Dayna," she said. "Dayna and Carey. They're at the farm, and they're coming back."
"Here?" Natt scoffed. "Not according to the spells you
say they had with them, they're not. When they return, they'll end up—"
"Here," Jaime said firmly. She left the chamber, thrusting the cooler at Natt's midsection so he had no choice but to take it. "This belongs to my horse. It came from my farm. Who else do you think would send it?"
"Why send it at all?" Cesna said, a softer protest. Unlike Jaime, she'd taken time to dress, but her fine, light brown hair hung limply about her shoulders and pillow blotches still marked her young face.
"We haven't been able to talk for nearly a month," Jaime said. "Maybe longer. I've lost track, between your calendar and mine. The point is, they know we're having trouble with magic. This could be a heads-up; it could be a test. It could be both. With any luck, in a few moments we'll know."
Cesna lifted her head slightly, a listening attitude. "Yes," she said. "Here it comes."
"Guides." Natt's soft voice took on a new kind of horror. "What's that kind of magic going to do to the area?"
"It's Dayna," Cesna said, her eyes big and hollow in the obtuse light of the candle she held. "The new Council said . . . that is, she's so careless with raw magic—"
Jaime wanted to protest, to tell them Dayna was hardly careless at all—she just employed that which they would not. But it didn't matter, because the end result would be the same. When the Council's message—the final dispatch message from anyone , as it turned out—came through warning them to avoid using magic in an affected area, and to avoid raw magic under any circumstances, they'd all immediately recalled Dayna's claim to have felt raw magic before the old Council died.
"We'll let her know," Jaime said firmly. "And we'll just have to hope—" that the sudden burst of travel magic doesn't cause a meltdown on the spot, but she didn't finish the thought out loud.
She didn't need to. They all knew. And she didn't have the time, because the air inside the travel chamber rippled, an effect she'd never seen from this side of the spell. Rippled, wavered, and—somewhere between one blink and another—figures appeared within the ripples and quickly stabilized, a pond of matter recovering from disturbance, crowded into a space meant for one, maybe two . . . not four.
Four?
Those figures hardly seemed to be aware of their welcoming party—and Jaime hardly knew what to make of what she saw. Carey's down, there's a stranger — "Dayna!" she said, but Dayna only gave a sharp shake of her head, going to her knees where Carey struggled to rise, to say something—and failed.
The stranger spoke to Dayna, a few quick, hard words from a lowered head, and she came to her feet.
"We need a healer," she said, looking out at Jaime and barely acknowledging Natt and Cesna. "He should have stayed, the fool! The travel—" She scowled, targeting Cesna. "We need a healer now ."
"Go," Natt murmured to Cesna. And to Dayna, a gesture at the stranger—a stranger in Mark's bold shirt and a pair of Camolen-cut pants—and a no-nonsense question. "Who's that?"
Dayna went back to Carey, tossing the answer over her shoulder. "Name's Wheeler. Came to abduct us, changed his mind. More or less. It's a long story and Carey's—" She closed her eyes, thinking, and Jaime abruptly knew she was hunting spells, hunting for something that might help—and that if she couldn't find one, she'd be just as likely to make it up on the spot with raw magic.
"No!" she cried, getting everyone's startled attention; Suliya's wide-eyed face, Wheeler's unsettling gaze, Dayna's blink of surprise. Carey lifted his head, his eyes glazed and unfocused; for the first time Jaime saw the blood. Oh guides, that can't be good. The blood, and the gurgle, and the blue tinge of his lips, the grey of his skin barely noticeable in the candlelight.
Natt closed in on them, coming down hard on the heels of Jaime's command. "No magic," he said. "No raw magic, Dayna."
"I knew that," Dayna said, surprisingly mild. She knelt by Carey. "But—"
"Dayna," Jaime said, "We're using candles for light."
She looked, showing the shock of it; they all did. Suliya's lip trembled slightly, and then she glanced away, to Carey—and then right through him, assessing a burden Jaime couldn't see.
"Those bastards," Wheeler said. "They said they'd do the right thing."
"What bastards?" Jaime asked. "No, wait—I don't care." She entered the crowded chamber, pushing in beside Dayna and crouching for a closer look at Carey, checking his torso, looking for a wound to cause the bright frothy blood she saw. " This is what I want to know—what happened?"
"Another long story. He should have stayed , dammit—Mark would have had him to a hospital by now—"
Suliya whispered, "He had to—Jess—you know he had to—"
On sudden impulse, Jaime leaned over and said, "She's here, Carey." Not saying where, or in what form, but— "She's here. She's well. She brought me your notes, and I told the peacekeepers."
The corner of his mouth twitched. "Good job," he said, almost soundlessly. Jaime stood, dragging Dayna up with her and right out of the booth.
"Jaime—!" Dayna yanked her arm away, rubbing it, hating to have her size so used against her.
"We're in trouble here, Dayna," Jaime said, her voice low and intense, welcoming Natt and his candle into the conversation with the slightest lift of her chin. "Real trouble. I wish you'd all stayed in Ohio, if you want to know, but Carey—"
"Even if we wanted to use magic, the spells aren't reliable," Natt said, not giving Dayna any time for protest. "Cesna's getting the healer, but she's stuck with physical remedies and the vaguest of healing spells, and you know damn well it won't be good enough for this ." He gestured roughly toward the travel booth, more upset than he'd first seemed, and Jaime reminded herself that he and Carey had worked together with Arlen for some time now.
"We didn't know," Dayna said, her voice as low as Jaime's, the words coming out with difficulty. "We knew it was bad, but—"
"We've got a lot to catch up on," Jaime said. "I just wish I could send you right back, but there's no way.
For all I know that last shout of magic gave us a meltdown outside the front door, or even within the hold. We just can't . His only chance is to stop the meltdowns, and no one even knows what's causing them."
Dayna gave them a grimly triumphant little smile. " We do."
Lady browsed beside Ramble and Grunt, three horses moving slowly deeper into the woods with the leftover drizzle from the dawn rain dampening their coats and the giant splashes from disturbed branches soaking through to the skin. Ramble tolerated the gelding, disdainful, having been warned off more than once by Lady and leaving Grunt delighted to have friends and delighted to browse untied, as unknowingly fettered to his companions as to any tree.
Lady kept them close to where Arlen chewed—and chewed—some tough trail fruit leather. To judge by his expression, he enjoyed it no more than he enjoyed the rain; his shapeless floppy hat still drooped over his eyes, leaving her only a view of his bristly jaw. No more depilatory spells, and he'd run out of safety-spelled razor blades—or so he'd told her as he made brief and brisk toilet that morning, apparently in quite the habit of talking to anything that might perk an ear.
He was not meant for being on the trail, not as Lady was or even Lady-as-Jess. It had not suited him, for though he'd grown tougher, handling Grunt's saddle and pack equipment with ease, walking the uncertain footing with practiced resignation, judging trails and shortcuts and skirting small blots of destruction with efficient skill, he'd also lost weight, going from lean to thin in a way that showed even under his layers of clothing. Unlike Carey, who'd always found a meditative peace on the trails, Arlen wore a constant expression of longing, as though his mind were ever elsewhere. And though he maintained a cheerful dialogue with the horses, keeping his touch gentle and attentive when they interacted, Lady could well feel his underlying discontent.
If she'd been human, she might have rationalized it as the circumstances—the damage and danger all around them. But she was equine, so she simply recognized it for what it was.
Homesickness. Longing. A cer
tain conflict of purpose with needs.
Things she felt herself. Felt and couldn't understand and dismissed . . . or tried to.
At that she realized she'd moved too deeply into the woods, with a tiny spot of corruption to the left of her and a larger spot just ahead, still as difficult to focus on as any of them had ever been. She snorted gently and reversed course, a deliberately thoughtful move that ever set her apart from other horses.
Lady, once touched by Jess, had never again been only a horse. No matter how desperately she'd tried, no matter how she'd depended on her time with Ramble to take her there.
And Lady, more than only a horse, knew well that the new scent of approaching strangers meant no good for Arlen. They were still out of sight but closing, separated slightly in course. They meant to box him in — She called to him, strident and loud enough to startle Grunt and Ramble—both of whom knew of the strangers, neither of whom attached significance to their presence; they started slightly, rustling, and she glanced back with her ears flat, unable to hush them to silence.
Arlen hastily rewrapped what was left of his breakfast and shoved it into his coat pocket, glancing first at Lady—she called again, making sure he knew it was no coincidence—and then at the woods and trail.
He seemed to consider his gear, as though he wondered how fast he could slap it on Grunt's back and be away from here—but in the end he backed up against a tree in a posture that Lady well recognized.
He was taking a stand.
She'd fought beside Carey and Jaime, but never Arlen. She eased closer, watching him, her neck raised and arched, her prancing steps infused with the intent of a war mare ready to protect her own.
He stopped her with a gesture, and although her legs resented it, she made herself wait, backed by Ramble—ready to protect her if not Arlen—and Grunt, who watched them all with an innocent curiosity, moist greens drooping from the corner of his mouth. Lady bobbed her head, the only thing left for her to do, impatience in stark contrast to Arlen's quiet readiness.
The agents closing in on them cast aside their stealth. Two came from the woods and one from the trail, all reminding Lady of peacekeepers in their movement and attitude, even though one of the men carried a barrel stomach under his barrel chest and the other had plenty of grey in his hair and lines in his face. The woman, too, was stocky, filling out her muddy-colored lightweight jacket to the seams. All of them confident.
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