"Stir up the river bottom?" she repeated, clearly uncertain about her role.
"You can hold one of the nets if you want to," Eric offered.
Carey knew that wasn't the problem. He tightened the laces of his sneakers and walked, splashing boldly, out to the middle of the river. The water came up just past his knees, well below the shorts he'd been advised to buy along with the sturdy jeans he appreciated so much, and he stood in the moderate current as casually as possible. "It feels good," he said indifferently, dipping a hand into water that was in fact a little chilly. "Good footing, too."
Eric seemed to sense what he was up to, for he followed Carey into the water and deployed his net. "Half the time all you have to do is stand here, and you get some sort of catch." But he gave Carey a questioning glance, and then looked back at Lady, who had still not committed herself to the water.
"Most horses are afraid of putting their feet somewhere they can't see," Carey told him in a low voice. "Lady's no exception. I was surprised when she agreed to come along."
"She came to be with you," Eric said, as though it were obvious, giving Lady a thoughtful look.
Carey tucked his dripping net under his arm and moved upstream. "We can do it with just the one net," he suggested. "Any time you decide to come in, Lady, we can use the help." And he proceeded, with great fanfare, to kick and shuffle his way through the sand and rock of the river bottom, stirring up great clouds of silt that sluiced through the current channels downstream. Eventually Eric held up a net full of crayfish and hellgrammites and a few flopping minnows.
"Need the bucket," he said, and Carey watched with a smile as Lady, her curiosity overcoming some of her trepidation, came into the water up to her ankles, dipped the bucket in the river, and held it out to Eric. He splashed over and jiggled the contents of the net carefully into the bucket, sloshing away without a backward glance. Lady set the bucket on one of the plentiful flat rocks and stayed in her safe part of the river.
The second time they came up with an empty net, and Eric suggested, "We need to move upstream a little bit, though . . . we could try it here with two nets."
Carey looked at his undecided companion, and his mind's eye translated what he actually saw into a horse hovering at the edge of the deeper water, one hoof pawing the air over the surface. Then he blinked and saw only Lady with her dun/black hair pulled back, her toes curled protectively around the rocks at her feet and a thin line of dusky skin peeking through where the t-shirt fell short of her cutoffs. Carey held out his hand. "C'mon, braveheart," he said, in the same voice that had wooed her into countless rivers.
She took the plunge. Scooting through the water, slipping on the rocks she traversed too quickly, she ended up right at his side, trembling a little at her own boldness.
"Hey, all right, Jess!" Eric hailed her, and she smiled uncertainly at him.
"Good job." Carey slipped an arm around her waist, offering but not forcing the support, and together they kicked up another cloud of silt. Outwardly he was matter-of-fact but inwardly he smiled and thought there was, perhaps, a little more satisfaction to convincing this free-willed creature than to bluffing one of his horses.
He wasn't surprised when, before long, Lady had soaked all of them with her enthusiasm. Once she trusted the footing, she entered into the game with abandon, and Carey knew that they'd been out there long after Eric had his quota for the nature center aquarium. If Lady noticed that he was discreetly releasing as many creatures as he kept, she pretended not to.
But it was Lady, as engrossed as she was with kicking around the Olentangy River bottom—or Old-and-dingy, as Eric called it—who noticed they had company. Although she'd ignored the occasional hiker who'd stopped to exchange a few words with Eric, who was wearing his volunteer's armband, this time she flung her head up; her nostrils flared and Carey knew she was laying her ears back. It was a warning . . . to Derrick.
Nine hells. "You must waste a lot of time keeping track of me," he said, so that Eric, who had not been tuned into Lady's signals, jerked his head up from where he bent over one of the buckets, nearly turning it over in his surprise.
"It's not that hard," Derrick said, watching them from the riverbank. "And don't forget, right now you're the only thing I've got on my mind. You and that spell, I mean."
"I figured you'd given up on us," Carey said—though he hadn't, really, despite Derrick's long absence. His gaze skipped over the trees along the river. "Where's your friend Ernie?"
Instead of answering, Derrick said, "No, I never gave up on you. Ernie and I have been busy with one of his projects." Derrick casually nodded back toward the nature center parking lot. "He's back in the car—he prefers pavement under his feet, I think. Besides, I'm not here to make trouble."
Carey did not deign to respond to that one. Of course Derrick was here to make trouble—a point Derrick himself proved by leering at Lady, who was looking less gamine—and more defensively threatening—by the moment. Carey stepped slightly in front of her, a message to both her and Derrick.
"She's done better than my chestnut," Derrick said, idly snapping a twig from one of the sycamore saplings on the river's edge. "That fool didn't take well to a new body. Ran off and left me—and you—in those woods; didn't take him long to run out in front of a car. But your mare, now—she came looking for you." He fingered the fresh pinkness of the healed bite on his cheek. "Why was that, Carey?"
"Go burn," Carey said, a particularly coarse remark almost hidden in his pleasant tone of voice.
Derrick shrugged. "Doesn't matter, I suppose. Just . . . interesting. But not what I wanted to talk about."
Carey put both end poles of the seining net in one hand and put the other on his hip, a bored-looking stance. "Yeah, right. You want the spell. Well, I've learned a saying here that seems to fit just right: Get real, Derrick."
"I'm not here just to take," Derrick protested. "I've got something I know you want—and I want to trade."
Carey snorted. "For my spellstones, right? I don't believe it."
"You want to go home, don't you?" Derrick asked, sounding reasonable.
"And so do you. You're not about to just give up those stones."
"They won't work for me. Unless you were lying when you said the recall spell would take us home. It reads like an empty stone to me."
"No, I wasn't lying," Carey said, shaking his head. He was suddenly aware of the chill in the water that rushed past his legs and he waded to the shore—a less vulnerable position in any case. Now he was close enough to see that Derrick was doing well in this world. Probably armed, as Carey had been, with the gold that was fairly plentiful in their world but worth a great deal in this one. He was keeping himself clean, and his dark hair was handsomely styled. He'd even—and Carey confirmed this as Derrick tried out an affable smile on him—gotten his teeth cleaned. Probably done in the interest of blending in, it nonetheless had the effect of making him seem more benign—which Carey knew he definitely was not. "No, I wasn't lying," he repeated, although he hadn't been telling all of the truth, either. "I was hurt and drugged—do you think I could have lied to you?" It was just a small matter of not mentioning the correct spell was keyed into his new stone—not the regular onyx recall that Derrick would have tried to trigger.
"No," Derrick said, "I don't think you could have. And that leaves me with a useless path home, and without the spell. You want to go home? You give me the spell, and I'll give you your spellstones. I'll take my chances at getting home—they won't be any worse than they are now."
"You lie!" Lady said, still standing in water up to her knees, tossing her head back to once again lay back those nonexistent ears. "You would never let us go like that, and be stuck here."
Carey smiled at Derrick, but it was without humor. "Even Lady can see through this one, Derrick," he said. "I don't know what you're up to, but I'm certain it won't mean anything good for Lady and me. You keep the spellstones, I'll keep the manuscript." Maybe only in my head, but it'
s still mine.
Derrick shrugged. "I just thought it would be easier this way—for both of us. I'm willing to do it the hard way—though you might not think so much of it."
"I think you might as well settle in here, Derrick," Carey said, as though he was offering serious advice to a friend. "Don't waste the rest of your life chasing after that spell. It doesn't really matter anyway."
Derrick frowned, for the first time losing the thread of the conversation.
"It doesn't matter," Carey continued, "because life is going on in Camolen. Do you think they're all in stasis back there? Arlen's already sent another courier—I'm not the only one, you know—and I wouldn't be surprised if the checkspells are in place." Meaning none of them would get home unless Arlen, in some fashion, came looking; a recall spell based on magic that had been checked was worth no more than a recall spell in Derrick's pocket.
To his surprise, Derrick laughed. "You're right, at that," he said. "Life goes on in Camolen. But don't forget that Calandre, too, is part of that life. There was a strike set for Arlen's little hole in the hills—it should have gone off about the same time we ran you down."
This time it was Carey who frowned, and Derrick who offered enlightenment.
"We've had one of his recall spells for a year, now," he said. "You remember that girl who disappeared on her first run?"
Carey remembered well. The young woman had been sent on an easy run, with an insignificant message. They'd put her disappearance down to accident, not ambush. But if Calandre had truly engineered her disappearance and had one of the recall spells that would gain her access to Arlen's little fortress . . . "Those recalls go to a shielded holding room," he said; only he had a two-layer recall that would take him within the hold, if he made the extra effort to trigger it. "Magic won't get her out of there."
"No, but she can work magic within the room . . . and stone can be moved." Derrick's expression was slyly pleased, and almost unbearable.
Carey mustered his temper and shrugged. "It could have gone either way," he said, and kept his sudden, deep worry to himself. "Give me the spellstones and I'll take you back with me—but the manuscript is mine."
Derrick laughed again, apparently well pleased with the overall effect of his negotiations, despite his failures. "It was worth the trip just to see you try that one out on me," he said. "Of course the answer is no. But don't worry—I'm sure we'll be talking again soon enough. Until then." He made a brief, courtly obeisance to Lady, and walked back onto the open park lawn.
Carey looked at Lady, and found her shivering in the water. Eric looked no happier and he himself felt the bright sunshine had somehow dimmed. It was certainly no longer enough to keep him warm.
* * *
Jess sat in the hayloft amidst the cutting-season hay shed overflow, her body arranged over several levels of bales. She was supposed to be tossing them down into the aisle, several days' worth that would be stacked in the stall below her—but she hadn't even started the task yet. Not that it mattered. Jaime was riding Sabre, who'd for the most part recovered from his shock, and she wouldn't notice Jess' inactivity for some time yet. And Jess was feeling out of sorts. Some of it, she felt, was due to the shorter days of this world compared to a Camolen day, an observation Carey had recently made. But most of it was her deep distraction with the movie she'd seen the evening before.
There were lots of things about the movie that she loved. The characters' Aussie accents, which helped her to realize that lots of people talked differently, and that her own still-faltering syllables were nothing to be ashamed of. And the tough little mountain horse who raced, without hesitation, over terrain that reminded her of some of her own runs, and who wasn't so different from her own deep dun color. But when the wild stallion had been intimidated and rounded up, she wasn't sure she considered it the happy ending everybody else did. And she was mightily puzzled over the significance of pressing faces together. Kissing, Jaime told her.
Jess rolled over on her back and wiggled against the hay, letting its scratchy roughness find all the itches between her shoulder blades. Then she lay there, closed her eyes, and took herself back to the times of running with Arlen's small breeding and working herd of courier horses. She could pretend that was freedom, but in reality, she'd belonged to someone. The stallion hadn't; he'd been free and magnificent and, in the end, conquered. And she thought she should feel unhappy about that, but she couldn't quite manage it—because the part about being a horse that her mind most often strayed to, the memories she unconsciously caressed and savored, were those moments she and Carey had worked together, had been in such accord that she read his every thought through the mere tension in his muscles. And the stallion, wild, would never know such partnership.
A sigh; a few more wiggles for that one, hard to reach spot. Being owned wasn't such a bad thing for a horse, she decided. But she wished Carey would realize she wasn't just Dun Lady's Jess anymore.
Abruptly, she sat up and hopped down off the hay and, with a quick check to make sure Keg wasn't lying in the aisle below, began shoving bales out of the loft. Ten more minutes had them stacked neatly in the stall, and she meandered out of the barn into the rising temperatures of the early summer morning. Mark's abandoned soccer ball lay in the shade of the house, and she toed it closer, nudging it along in a desultory way as she wound through the obstacles of the picnic table and lawn chairs.
"Too warm for soccer, Jess," Mark yawned from the back doorway. "Geeze, last night's shift was a killer. Had all the guests for a wedding, must've been some kind of biker thing. They really know how to party."
Jess, typically straightforward, asked, "What is kissing for, Mark?"
Mark blinked, did a deliberate double take. "Whoa, Jess—you hit me broadside with that one. You sure you don't want to ask Jaime about this?"
"Jaime is busy," Jess said, pushing blithely onward. "Every time we look at the TV, there are people kissing. Why?"
"Um, because it feels good," Mark said, stumbling only a little.
"Show me."
He put both hands over his face and drew them down slowly, so that his eyes peeked over his fingers, full of misgivings. "Well, Jess, that's usually something two people do when they like each other."
Jess frowned. "I do like you."
"In a special way. You know, love, getting married, having a family—two kids and a dog, the whole works."
She did, then, understand a little of what he was driving at. Special, in a way that she'd almost deliberately avoided dealing with, because it was simply too much when added to the other things she'd had to assimilate. "I have to understand," she said slowly. "If Carey takes me home, there will be no more chance to learn. If I have to decide, stay or go, I want to know all the things I'm deciding about."
Mark bit his lip, staring at her, hesitating. "All right, but . . . Jess, people kiss for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes just because it does feel good, but usually because they love one another. I can show you how it's done, but . . . it won't be the same."
Jess nodded, and waited, and he closed the short distance between them, gently touched two fingers to the side of her chin, and gave her a soft but definite kiss. He drew back to look at her, and this time it was she who blinked, considering. Warm. Nice. But nothing wonderful. She drew her teeth over her bottom lip where she could still feel the contact, and gave him a quizzical look.
"Didn't make your hair stand on end, huh," he said. "I'm not surprised. It's different when—"
"Do it again," she said abruptly and, at his raised eyebrows, added a contrite, "Please."
"Again," he repeated, and sighed, but didn't offer any argument. Instead he simply kissed her, tasting slightly of bacon and coffee, lingering, giving her the chance to respond. And she found that she did, that there was some small stirring deep within her, and that there was more pleasure when she kissed him back. She began to understand the point to it, and when Mark stepped back to look at her, she just stared at him, touching her
mouth, and thinking that a horse's mouth wouldn't do that.
He grinned and opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it closed along with his eyes as the grin turned into a grimace. Jess only then heard the footsteps she should have noticed long ago, should have swiveled her ears to catch, and to know it was Carey. She suddenly felt as discomfited as Mark looked, although she wasn't sure why, and she turned to face Carey as he stopped by the lawn chairs, his hazel eyes dark with anger.
"What in nine hells do you think you're doing?" he snapped, the anger in those eyes turned on Mark, a few unconscious steps taking him all the way up to Jess in a protective posture. "You might as well take advantage of a child—"
"I asked him," Jess interrupted, and had to repeat herself to be sure he'd heard, and taken it in. "I asked him. I wanted to know."
He stared dumbfounded. Stumbling over the words as though she'd somehow lost her tenuous knack of shaping them, she said, "I see people kiss in the TV stories. I saw you kiss women, in the empty stall next to mine. I wanted to know, Carey—why does that make you mad?"
Mark cleared his throat, filling in the gap of Carey's flabbergasted silence. "I told her," he explained quietly, "that it was something for people who had special feelings for each other. But there's nothing wrong with getting her first kiss from a friend, Carey. Lighten up. Better that she asks and knows about it before someone does try to take advantage of her."
"You could have asked me," Carey told her, the storm of anger fading to puzzled hurt.
"I—" she started, stopped short by the utter inability to voice that she couldn't have asked him, because that would make it matter too much. And then he had her by both arms, a possessive grip that drew them close, and when he kissed her there was no time for analyzing the feel of having him close—she simply was, centered on the pressure of his lips and the fire that made her heart thud almost painfully in her chest. He released her mouth, gave her lips one last gentle nibble nothing like the ardent touch he'd just relinquished, and stared directly into her dark, widened eyes.
Changespell 01 Dunn Lady's Jess Page 14