Changespell Legacy (40 page)

At least they always knew just where he stood. Repeated friend-or-foe spells yielded just the same results as the first, convincing her that while he was hardly on their side, when he intended to work against them, they'd know it.

"I'm trying," she repeated, with less vehemence and more despair. "If
you'd
ever tried to deconstruct a spellstone—"

How many days had passed, and still they sat here in Ohio? Wheeler was the only one who seemed at ease with it, seemed to think it was the best course. Safest for them. He'd pitched in as they opened up the end of the barn after Ramble's departure, standing by with Carey and the hose while Mark charred the remains of his partner with a propane torch and then passed the otherwise inexplicable mess off as fire damage.

Watching them had given Dayna the cold grue; Mark's face had been pasty and tense, displaying all his awareness that the inexplicable mess itself had once been a human being. Carey had been in grim and determined mode, and Wheeler . . .

It was impossible to tell what Wheeler was feeling. They might know his intent, they might know his truthfulness . . . they never knew his feelings.

Even now, with Carey chafing to go home on one side and Suliya in a distinctly resentful mood on the other, Wheeler sat on the couch with his ankle crossed over his knee, his hands laced together over his belt, as serene as if they discussed plans for a trip into Columbus and not across worlds to their Camolen home.

Home. For she was homesick as she'd never been upon leaving her snug little house between Waldo and Marion, the musty, buttoned-up house that was still in her name but which she knew she'd soon sell.

Unlike Jaime—who had a life she loved here and a man she loved there—Dayna had no great conflict, nothing pulling her back to the life with which she'd started.

And now she wanted to go home.

She pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged in the half-open recliner, the only one of them small enough to do so without overlapping the confines of the chair, and buried her face in her hands, momentarily overwhelmed with the situation. The things she'd have to accomplish . . . the odds against her ability to do so. The people counting on her . . .

Especially the people counting on her.

"I don't understand," Carey said. Of all of them, he needed to get back to Camolen—back where Anfeald's healers understood his needs and could deal with the new problem. As Marion General's doctors had promised, he'd stopped coughing up blood; the concussive hemoptysis was healing on its own . . . but never quite all the way. Even now Carey gave his little undertone of a cough before continuing. "Why are you deconstructing Jaime's spare travel spellstone at all?"

"Bootin' good question," Suliya said, casting Dayna a resentful glance. "I've had about enough of this—you won't let me go exploring, you won't let me go home—and I
know
you've made new storage stones. Those egg things glow enough to keep me up at night."

"The fiber-optic stones. They're great—they hold a hell of a lot more magic than the crystal-cut stones,"

Dayna said, lifting her head with brief enthusiasm at that accidental find. If she thought they could get back into the New Age shop without being chased out with brooms and fire extinguishers, she'd grab up half a dozen more of the things. But then again . . . storage space wasn't the problem. She had enough stones. She had enough magic siphoned into them, and no wish to struggle through the process again.

The problem was what she'd learned as she was doing it.

The increasing static.

Her increasing concern about spelling them into unknown territory.

"Great," Carey said flatly, echoing Dayna's word. "Then we have the magic to boost the spells we came with."

"I—" Dayna looked at them all—the impatience, the sulk, and the cool distraction, and finally said it out loud. "I'm not sure it's safe to use those spells. Whatever's happening in Camolen . . . it's getting worse. It took me three sessions to fill the storage stones, and I could feel the difference each time. I really think we should try to arrive at Anfeald. And the only way I know to do that is to pick apart the spell Arlen gave Jaime that would take her there."

Suliya gave her a narrow-eyed look. "Ay," she said, "you saying we might be
stuck
here?"

Unexpectedly, Wheeler let his crossed ankle fall to the ground, leaning forward a little to join the conversation. "What's spelling in Camolen will pass."

"You
believe
," Carey said, his voice pointed.

Wheeler shrugged. "Yes. I believe."

"I don't want to end up stuck here because you believe
wrong
," Suliya said. She pushed herself out of the couch, quite obviously distancing herself from Wheeler, and paced the living room to frown at the black fireplace insert, even giving it a little kick. "If things are getting worse, we should try to go back
now
." She turned around to glare at Dayna. "I want to go back
now
."

"Before it's too late," Carey said, but his words didn't hold the conviction they might have. He exchanged a glance with Dayna, gauging her reaction, and then looked away. He'd seen it—she didn't know if it might already be too late.

Suliya knew them both well enough by now; she read the exchange and her sepia-toned skin flushed darker. "You burnin' well ought to have said something before things got this bad!"

Miserably, defensively, Dayna said, "I only filled the last of the stones yesterday—it's terrifying work, in case you hadn't noticed. And our friend Wheeler has made plenty of noise about taking it slow. As soon as I realized how bad it'd gotten, I started working on the deconstruction. And I wanted to have an idea of how it was going before I talked to you all!"

"I still believe you should go slow," Wheeler said. "But now . . . I won't stop you if you try to go back.

It's been long enough."

The others hardly paid any attention to him. Suliya crossed her arms and kept her glare on Dayna. "If it's so rootin' hard to deconstruct this thing, make up your own!"

Wheeler gave her a look that might have been impressed . . . or it might have been disapproving. Hard to tell. He said, "I'm really surprised your father let that mouth come out of his household."

"Burn off," Suliya told him, sparing him only the merest of glances. "I wouldn't be here if I wasn't a disappointment to him in more ways than you can count. Then again, he's turned out to be a real rootin' disappointment to me, too, so I guess we're even."

Dayna was glad for the respite of their exchange; it gave her the chance to come up with words in response to Suliya's demand instead of her initial gape-mouthed astonishment and anger, although Carey's brow was still slightly raised from his own reaction.
Make up a spell
. Right. "Suliya," she said, unable to stop the words from coming out between clenched teeth, "Arlen is Camolen's best theoretical wizard. I can cast a spell I've learned from his work, I can put it into a spellstone, but I damn sure can't come up with the same thing on my own. And raw magic—that's sure not something I want to count on for world travel. We'd probably get there—and we'd
probably
look like Wheeler's ex-partner."

"Raw magic," Wheeler said, looking distinctly uncomfortable.
A first.
But whatever was on his mind, he didn't say it.

Probably just as scared as everyone else on Camolen when it came to using the spell technique. Dayna made a little face at him, too distracted to do it right, too aware of Suliya's anger turning to true dismay and fear.

"That's it, then," Suliya said, her voice hardly more than a whisper; she sank back onto the stove. "Here's where we stay."

"Unless I'm right about the interference passing," Wheeler said.

But Carey just looked at Dayna. Full of understanding, of comprehension about the race they ran—to deconstruct the spell and reconfigure Dayna's spells to land them within Anfeald Hold before the magical static grew so bad it was foolish to try even that much. He said, "If there's anyone in this room more stubborn than I am, it's you. You'll get us there."

Dayna said, "I'm trying."

Jaime finished crosshatching an area of her Camolen map and cast a glance back at Linton, who consulted his list. "North of Kymmet," he said, standing on the other side of Carey's desk where he could keep an eye out for incoming riders in the job room. "Where the Kymmet-Dryden Road splits to loop around Dryden Lake. The whole intersection is out, and it takes in that little jut of the lake, plus seven acres south and ten east. The report is two days old."

Jaime made careful notations in erasable pencil, then picked up the red penstick and marked in the area, noting the date of the sighting along its border. "That does it for Dryden," she said, all too familiar with the hard knot of dread in her stomach. "Anyone who knows the territory can still get in or out, but the roads are gone."

Natt's voice held the slightest tremble of despair. "That does it for a lot of communities. Look west to Gioncanna—it's been surrounded for days. For all we know, it's been
engulfed
."

Jaime took a step back, taking in the patchwork of red overlaying the map, seeing the results of this session . . . the steadily shrinking clear areas. The detailed map of Anfeald in the job room looked no better. Suddenly overwhelmed, she gave the pencil a flippant toss into the air; it landed on the floor and broke with a snap. "For all we know,
most
of Camolen is engulfed. None of these reports is more recent than two days, and the dispatch is useless." She hadn't even attempted to return the static-filled missive from Suliya's family, a peremptory demand for a response on their wayward daughter's status. Plenty of people were wondering about their families right now, and Jaime had no answers to offer, not even if the wording of the message had left her with an uneasy feeling that it had actually been a threat. It didn't matter; even their considerable influence couldn't overcome a magical natural disaster. "The only reason Chandrai hasn't been here to yell at me recently is because she can't
get
here."

"Jaime—"

"No." Jaime cut Natt off with a slash of her hand through the air. "That's enough. I'm not sending any more of our people out there." God, she didn't want Jess-as-Lady out there, either, running at liberty with the furthest fallow pasture as home base. But Lady knew to avoid the meltdowns . . . and from the state she'd been in when she'd delivered the notes from Ohio, the worst thing Jaime could do would be to close her in that pasture.

Besides, who knew.
That pasture
might be the very next place to be hit.

"They know not to use magic on the road," Linton started, bringing her attention back to their couriers—but subsided at the sharp shake of Jaime's head.

"
Everyone
knows not to use magic near the meltdowns by now," she said. "But they keep cropping up, and they keep growing. I don't want any of our couriers caught out there, away from home and circled by meltdowns. Everyone who's in Anfeald stays in Anfeald." She gave the two men a look—a challenge, really—to check for resistance, for signs they'd fight this turning-point decision.

There were none.

Linton's long features, recently set in perpetual grimness, looked only grimmer. And Natt—eating under the stress and plumper than he'd been even a handful of days earlier—rubbed a hand over the balding area of his head and said tentatively, "If I may suggest—"

"Please," she said, and meant it. The more ideas other people offered her, the less she had to come up with on her own.

Not that any of her own ideas had done them any good. Not really. Made things easier, in a way—kept them informed, kept them feeling like they were doing something right up until this point when it became clear that nothing they'd done or
could
do would make any difference at all—but in the end, had not a whit of effect on the end results.

He said, "We're taking for granted that because
we
know not to use magic next to a meltdown, and that
we
know only the simplest spells are reliable anymore,
everyone
does. But not everyone uses magic as often as those of us here, or couriers who routinely rely on map lights and night glows. If we're going to draw our people back, then I think we should use them within Anfeald for as long as we can. Spread the word to people who lost dispatch access and never regained it, and who might never have heard any of the warnings at all."

Linton looked at Jaime, his interest piqued. "That's a good one, Jaime. All the couriers know Anfeald well enough to have a good fallback if they find their way blocked."

Jaime knuckled her lip, and wondered in a strangely remote aside when on earth she'd picked up that habit. Natt was right. They'd made assumptions; they'd been forced to make assumptions, with all their manpower committed to carrying information on the large scale, dealing with Camolen's macrostructure.

Camolen didn't
have
a macrostructure. Not anymore.

"Good call," she said finally. "No one goes out without at least a day's worth of food and water, though.

And we'll revisit the decision twice a day." She rubbed a hand over her hair, scrubbing it into complete disarray and not caring; the edge of Carey's desk seemed to come up and meet her rump. "I don't know who we're kidding," she said. "No one knows what's happening. No one knows how to stop it. No one knows how many people have died . . . or whether we'll
all
die before this is over. We're not doing anything but keeping ourselves busy until then."

From somewhere, Natt mustered a reassuring firmness . . . or what was meant to be one. The newly habitual uncertainty in his voice diluted his own effectiveness. "We have to trust that the Council has made breakthroughs since the last time we had contact," he said. "Even now, they may be spelling a solution . . . they may have even started clearing up some of the damage. This is
their
job, not ours. We have to trust them to do it."