Changespell Legacy (13 page)

She would have headed straight for the job room, releasing jacket toggles on the way, if she hadn't heard Dayna's briefly raised voice from down the aisle. Dayna, in the stable? Over supper the night before, she'd thought she'd heard Natt murmur something about getting help with some of the hold's defense spells, along with mutters about hoping they wouldn't need the spells anyway. And she was certain Dayna had agreed.

Not that she'd expect to find her friend in the stables under anything but unusual circumstances, anyway.

Without the little bay Fahrvegnügen, Dayna was lost when it came to horses.

So Jess followed the voices to one of the foaling stalls at the end of the aisle—bigger than usual, more private, set up for easy use of surveillance and environmental spells. Unused at this time of year, they were usually bare and cold. But as she walked closer, head tipping with the curiosity of it and phantom ears flicking back and forth in search of clues, Dayna's voice rose again and she had no doubt. Dayna and . . . Carey, in a frustrated-sounding reply.

Jess hesitated outside the nearly closed sliding door, making no attempt to conceal herself as she looked through the bars comprising the upper half and too startled at what she saw to interrupt. Dayna, as she'd heard. Carey. The stall, fully bedded on one half and in the back, a pile of blankets and . . . clothes?

And the palomino stallion, standing at the end of the lead in Carey's hand and munching carelessly at a small chunk of pressed, dried hay at his feet. Had Carey been paying attention, the set of the stallion's ears would have told him to look for someone in the aisle.

He wasn't.

"It
ought
to have worked," Dayna said, anger tinging her voice. "That last one really ought to have done it. I can't believe no one's dropped the ball on it, not with things the way they are."

Carey rubbed a hand along his jaw; he had that tired look that Jess knew so well from these past few days, and something more besides. The frustration she'd heard. Worry—a
new
kind of worry. "They're all pretty recent spells," he said. "Maybe the Council wizards aren't prioritizing yet; maybe they're just handling the standard checkspells and using a timeline for the more obscure ones. Anything within a year . . . two years . . ."

Dayna's anger turned to gloom. "A system like that would make sense to start off with," she said. "Once they get a little more settled, they'll probably ease up on the more obscure variations."

"Maybe that's it, then," Carey said. "Maybe we wait."

Wait for what?
Jess moved closer, right up to the narrow slice of open door, her mouth open to ask the question, hesitating until they noticed she was there.

Dayna gestured vehemently at the horse. "
Wait?
With who knows
what
out there going dangerous, the new Council on the wrong track, and the only answers within this annoying horse?"

They wanted answers from the horse.

"Wait," Carey repeated, sounding like he didn't like it any better than she. "You had another option to consider? You've been through every variation of the spell you know, and you said it yourself—no one knows this spell better than you."

"Changespell!" Jess blurted.

The stallion whipped his head up, alarmed more by Dayna and Carey's startled reaction than by Jess's seemingly sudden presence; he'd known she was there from the start. Dayna scowled, threw up her arms, and muttered an obscenity she hadn't learned on Earth— But it was Carey to whom Jess looked. Carey, with his expression cycling from surprised to aghast to . . . guilty.

"Changespell," Jess said again, only this time she whispered it. "Carey—"

"Jess—" he interrupted, taking a step toward her, looking at the lead rope in annoyance, and handing it off to Dayna—much to Dayna's consternation. "It's all we could think of. We
had
to try—"

"No." Jess said it firmly and decisively; she shook her head once, her chin lifting. "Not this."

"You said it yourself, Jess, he
saw
what happened." Dayna would have put her hands on her hips with impatience, but she realized the stallion was eyeing her, lips twitching, and she took a wary step away from him. "He can
tell
us—"

"No." Jess stood in the door, not backing away when Carey reached it and would have come out to talk to her in the aisle. "No," she said in rising anger, "he
can not
."

Dayna said, "If he was human . . ." and let the implication stand on its own.

"What do you think, if
he was human
? He would have no words, he would have no knowledge of himself. He would be scared and angry. He would be of no use to you, and you have
no right
!" Behind her, Jaime's questioning hail made her flick one of those phantom ears back, but only for a moment; Dayna and Carey had all her attention.

"He might be able to tell us plenty, eventually," Carey said grimly. "We won't know until we try."

Jaime came up softly beside Jess, sliding the door open another foot and looking from face to face, taking in Dayna's stubborn expression, Carey's conflict of guilt and determination, and Jess's outright anger. "My God," she said. "Tell me this isn't what I think it is."

"It's exactly what you think it is," Dayna said. "And for darned good reason."

Jaime just looked at her a moment, a sad contrast to the anger and betrayal coursing through Jess. And then Jaime shook her head, and said, "If the reasons had been good
enough
, you wouldn't have tried to do this behind our backs."

Carey was silent, watching Jess; trying, she thought, to say something with his eyes—hazel eyes gone dark in the lighting of the stall and the tilt of his head, full of pleading words behind his determination.

She was in no mood to listen.

Dayna gave the lead shank a desperate-looking yank as the stallion lifted his head from his hay to eye her arm, chewing the fodder with twitching lips that gave away his wicked thoughts. Her voice held a hint of that same desperation. "We did it this way to avoid this kind of confrontation. It's a waste of time!"

"Only if you think you get to make decisions for the rest of us," Jaime said, placing a quiet hand on Jess's arm.

"Jaime," Carey said, his voice low. "Jess. We haven't made decisions for anyone but this horse. And yes . . . when it comes to that, I do get to make those kinds of decisions here in this stable."

This horse.

"Trent might disagree," Jaime said.

"This
horse
?" Jess said, feeling the sting of it.

"Trent might," Carey admitted. "I'll accept the consequences for that."

Jess couldn't stop it; added to the flare of her nostrils came the slight tremble of her chin. She felt it and she hated it, because it meant she suddenly wasn't so much angry as she was hurt, and angry was so much easier. She said in a low voice, "And me?"

"Ah, Jess," he said. "Braveheart, I need you to understand—we've got an enemy out there, and we don't know anything about him. Her.
Them
. We don't know what happened to Arlen, to
any
of them. This is our only chance to find out more. What choice do we have?"

"You remember seeing the other animals who changed," she said in that same low tone. "What it did to them. You know even if you change him, you may learn nothing."

He gave the briefest of nods, quelling Dayna with a look when she would have interjected with argument. Somehow this was between Carey and Jess now. "I know those things," he told her. "The risk of
not
doing this if it can help us is just too great to ignore."

She eyed him; a moment ago she would have trusted him with her life, with her heart . . . now she didn't know, and it hurt.

Then he glanced at Dayna and said quite practically, "It doesn't really matter, if we can't manage the spell."

"I'll find a way," Dayna muttered, as much to herself as anyone else. She jerked her hand back just in time. "Burning hells, Carey, take this lead rope. This horse must be carnivorous."

"No," Jess said. "He's a stallion who's spent too much time in a stall with no one bothering to teach him manners or give him things to think about besides what his nature tells him to do. He's playing with you."

"If he really wanted to bite you," Jaime added dryly, "your arm would be broken by now."

Jess gave Dayna a long, even look. "He won't be any different, as a human. Just like I was Lady, when you found me. I had Lady's manners and habits." She thought about the things that she and Lady shared, from their basic natures right down to her sly practice of stepping on the feet of fools who offended her without any awareness of their transgressions. She
still
had Lady's manners and habits. She
was
Lady.

"He'll bite, you mean," Dayna said in flat distaste.

"All that and more, I would imagine," Carey agreed. "I never said it would be easy to manage him.

Nothing like the experience you had when you took Jess in."

Dayna gave Jess a sudden narrow-eyed stare, a piercing look that made Jess shift uneasily. "You ended up in the park because Carey used the world-travel spell, and a glitch in the part that was supposed to help the traveler adapt changed you. The
first
world-travel spell, the one Arlen's refined a dozen times over; it's a whole year older than the changespell. If I can't circumvent the changespell problems . . . that's our answer!"

"You want to hit Ohio with a human version of
that
?" Jaime said with a skeptical twist of face, nodding at the stallion. Bored, the horse started pawing at the bedding, digging himself a hole; Carey moved him to the side of the stall and deftly looped and tied the lead rope to the wall-mounted ring there. "Yeah, that makes a
whole
lotta sense."

Carey took the suggestion more seriously, but ended up frowning anyway. "Leave Anfeald?"

"I'm not exactly keen on going back, either," Dayna said. "No matter
how
much I miss McDonalds' fries.

But it's an alternative." She looked at Jess again, in a way that gave Jess the sudden impulse to turn around and leave. "We'd need me, to keep a solid lifeline with magic. And Carey, just because I know he'd never let anyone else run off and have all the fun. Someone has to be the boss. And . . . Jess. To handle the stallion. To help him."

Jess wished she'd followed that impulse. That she'd gone off to mix a special mash for the horses who would start returning any time now. That she'd gone upstairs to meet the silly demands of Arlen's calico.

Anywhere but here, to hear the choice Dayna had given her.

Help them do the thing she hated the very thought of by helping the stallion survive the transition to humanity. Or don't help them, and let the stallion suffer a harder, maybe impossible transition.

The anger came back.

Dayna, startled at the sudden glare Jess aimed at her, took a step back, all but bumped into the stallion, and scooted immediately forward again.

It might have turned into a standoff of glares if Natt hadn't come rushing down the aisle, his threadbare but always worn dresscoat flapping with the breeze of his movement. "Jaime! Jess—have you seen Carey?"

Jess stepped back so Carey could come out of the stall, not quite leaving him the space to do it gracefully. He glanced at her; he knew aggressive equine posture when he saw it, even passive-aggressive. "Natt," he said and, as Jess had, took in the apprentice's flustered expression. "Not again. Don't tell me—"

"Not like last time," Natt assured him quickly. "But maybe just as serious in the end.

The . . . event . . . that killed the Council, the damage . . . there's a new spot."

"That's no surprise," Dayna said, slipping easily by Jess to join the conversation outside the stall and visibly glad for the excuse to do it. "I already reported yesterday that the meltdown was spreading."

"More than
spreading
," Natt said. "It's shown up somewhere else entirely. Out in Sallatier, near Lander Chesba's hold."

"An entirely new spot?" Jaime said, doubt on her face, along with the unmistakable desire for someone to tell her she was wrong.

But Natt said, "Yes. Completely unrelated. With no signs of spellwork anywhere in the vicinity."

Carey stiffened. "Was anyone hurt?"

Natt shook his head with reassuring confidence. "No. One of Chesba's couriers found it—apparently a day or so ago. It's just taken this long to spread the word."

"Then I'm right," Dayna said, not looking pleased about it. "It's not just a matter of figuring out who killed the Council. It's bigger than that, and we're
all
in danger until someone puts a check on whoever's behind this."

"Maybe now the new Council will be more interested in what you felt," Natt offered.

Dayna snorted. "Maybe," she said, unconvincingly. "I've already told them everything I know, anyway.

They don't need me back there."

"They do if you're the only one who can feel—" Natt started, but cut himself off at Dayna's look. Not the glare she might have given him once; even Jess was aware that her time here had changed her, given her moderation. Just an even look, and the slight shake of her head.

"I tried it their way," she said. "Let
them
keep trying it their way. More power to them if they open their eyes and manage to make any headway. Me . . . I'm going back to doing things my way."

Watching Jess, his back straightening with a tired kind of resolve, Carey said, "I don't think we truly have a choice any more."

But Jess didn't meet his gaze, as much as she felt the weight of it. She looked at the stallion, instead—starting to doze now, his sheath relaxed, sex organ exposed. Jess—unlike Dayna—was under no illusions about what it would be like to deal with this horse as a man. He would be earthy, unruly, and not interested in human rules. Although he was far from mean, he had too many years of displacement and coping behaviors gone uncorrected, and they would carry right over to his human form.