Changespell Legacy (6 page)

Across the hall, sounds of conversation drifted out—a brief exchange of raised voices, Carey's included.

With hesitation, she approached the apprentice room—a peek into the workroom showed her nothing, although someone
was
there . . . somewhere . . . crying.

A glance into the apprentice room stopped her short. An older woman with darker skin than hers whom she'd seen but didn't know, Arlen's older apprentice, Carey, Jess, Jaime . . . they all gathered near the dispatch desk, making the room seem small. Jaime had her arms clenched around herself so tightly it was a wonder she could breathe; her eyes were red-rimmed and haunted. Jess looked for the world like she wanted to be holding Carey's hand, but he was busy gesturing, a sheet of dispatch paper in his grip, so she did what Suliya occasionally saw of her—she crowded in close, touching Carey now with her shoulder, now with her thigh, and the next moment briefly connecting along the length of their bodies. If she'd been a horse, Suliya realized with a blink, Jess would have been hanging her head over Carey's shoulder.

Strange to realize how often she had probably done just that, and long before she was ever human.

Burnin' hells
, Suliya'd never seen any single one of them so obviously upset.

Jess noticed her first—somehow—twisting around to look at the doorway, nostrils slightly flared and head raised; they
all
looked at her after that. With the sudden feeling she wasn't supposed to be there at all, Suliya raised her hand. "Ay," she said, unable to keep a defensive note from her voice. "Summons. I thought maybe Arlen was back."

"No," Carey said grimly.

Natt shook his head. "It was me."

Suliya took a step inside the room, more confident. "What's going on?"

Carey gave a slight shake of his head. "Couriers receive assignments, not explanations." But he waved her off when she would have responded. "In this case, you're going to find out sooner than later anyway."

He seemed to notice for the first time how Jess crowded him; finally he took her hand.

Suliya took another step into the room, now flanked by a work desk on either side; she looked from Carey to Jaime to Natt, and at last to the dispatch wizard at the desk. The woman looked exhausted; she wouldn't meet Suliya's eyes.

For a moment, no one would meet her eyes.

Suliya felt the first trickle of fear.

"There's been some kind of . . . incident with the Council," Natt said. "It . . .
appears
as though they may all be dead."

"The
Council
?" Suliya said, openly skeptical because of the shock of the idea. But she looked at their faces again—she looked at Jaime, at her anguish and denial, then at Carey's determination. She'd heard about him . . . his high standards, his resolve to do what had to be done when things got grim . . . his willingness to drive himself to the limit to accomplish those same things. His own body was living proof.

He'd drive her to the limit too, she suddenly realized. And that meant this might be her chance to prove to him— "Arlen," Carey said distinctly, watching her as though she didn't get it, "was with the Council."

"What are you going to do?" Suliya asked. "What do you want me to do?"

Jaime turned on her. "Don't you even want to know what happened?"

Carey closed his eyes a brief moment, softening his reaction with visible effort. "It's not like we have the answers, Jay. But we'll get them. And
you
," he said to Suliya, "are going along for the ride."

"I don't understand." With all the high emotion in the room, Suliya thought a quietly wary answer was best. She still didn't quite grasp what had happened and raced ahead without her, although she was apparently about to be part of it. Not necessarily a bad thing.

"I am going to the new hold in Siccawei," Jess said, speaking up for the first time, her words thicker than usual. "Dayna has asked for us—"

"I can't leave," Carey said. "Not now. And Jaime needs to be here; if Arlen—well, if he tries to make contact"—
if he's somehow not dead
, unspoken words that came through loudly enough for Suliya to hear even without practice in reading him—"it'll be here."

"So it's me," Jess said. "But not alone. Though I
could
." She directed the last straight at Carey, no little annoyance or defiance in her voice.

"Of course you could," Carey said impatiently. "That's not the point. The point is, I don't want you to do it that way. I wouldn't want
anyone
to go alone on that route right now."

Jess didn't look entirely convinced.

Neither was Suliya. "I'm not going on a run?" she said. "I'm just—" and she stopped herself from saying
tagging along with Jess
, hearing just in time how petulant it would sound. She didn't mean it that way . . . she'd only wanted the chance— Carey jerked his head at the doorway, his meaning clear enough; Suliya, with a glance at Jess, left the room. Carey followed her—Carey alone.

He took her to the end of the hall, with the stairs at her heels and the light from the stairwell window splashing against his face and sparking the bright green flecks in his hazel eyes. Not quite angry . . . but looking at her as intently as anyone ever had. She opened her mouth without words in mind, anything to forestall the lecture she saw coming.

He got there first. "Just listen," he said, catching her gaze and holding it, holding it even when she would have looked away. "Listen well. You may be looking for something more important, but there
is
nothing more important to me than making sure Jess makes it safely to Second Siccawei."

Trouble-ride, that look of his. She tried to turn her words around, unspoken as they'd been. "I just didn't understand why you picked someone she doesn't really know."

"Because we have a burning lot of messages going out, and they all have to get there
right now
. You know some of the routes, but you don't know any of the shortcuts. And today," he raised a meaningful eyebrow at her, "is a shortcut day."

She'd know the shortcuts if she'd had the chance to make more runs before this . . . but she didn't say it.

Honestly puzzled, she did say, "Why so many messages? Why can't Mage Dispatch handle some of it? If things are really bad, people could use the transport booths to carry messages. Those shortcuts . . . they're rough. The horses will pay for using them."

He gave her a grim little smile, one that should have warned her. "Takes a while to map it all, doesn't it?

The Secondary Council is in a panic; the first thing they did was shut down the transfer booths—they're trying to contain whoever did this. Frankly, I'm not sure they could keep the whole system running during a crisis of this magnitude. They're only prepared to replace Council members one at a time."

She blinked at him, brushing one fat mahogany corkscrew curl away from her face. "They shut down the whole burnin'
system
?"

His wry grin looked a little predatory. "Now you're hearing me. The Council is
dead
, Suliya. And they died between
here and Second Siccawei
."

Definitely predatory. As if he'd let herself follow her ambition right into a job she might have otherwise refused.
He'd drive her to the limit, too. . . .

But it might truly be the chance she'd been looking for. If she did well, Carey would know. He'd depend on her again, and she'd have the start she'd been looking for. And then she wouldn't need her family's good will at all— Carey looked at her with suddenly narrowed eyes. "Jess was right, wasn't she? You
did
put her in the wrong stall on purpose."

"What?" Suliya said, totally taken off guard. "Why—"

"Never mind." He cut her off with a sharp gesture, though his lean features had hardened. He eased a little closer; despite herself, Suliya took a step back, and therefore a step down. "Never mind that," he said again, this time as though more to convince himself than her. "You handle yourself with this run, and I'll forget it. But let that kind of thing happen on this run—even a whisper of it—and you're through here."

He looked at her, at the dismay she was unable to conceal. "Or didn't it ever occur to you that I have to be able to count on you in
all
ways, whether that means mucking out the stalls on an off day, or being someone my other couriers can trust—just like you can always trust Jess to take the runs no one else can manage safely."

She hadn't thought at all, actually. Not at the moment she'd acted. She hadn't thought about anything more than her resentment, and how unfair it was that Jess had walked in and taken away her rides. At the time—and now she did look down, down at her clenched hands and the worn stone step at her toe—the farthest thing from her mind was that Jess had taken that ride to protect her. Now it suddenly seemed obvious—Lady's assignments were often the fast, hard runs; the other couriers always seemed grateful.

And this time she'd handled the mudslide for Suliya.

Not that Suliya was the least convinced it would have been necessary, but— "I won't let you down," she said.

"No," Carey said. "Don't."

Jaime didn't believe it. Couldn't. Just as when she'd been a girl. "Your mother's dead," they'd said, and she never believed it. Had waited for years for her mother's return.

She'd been wrong, then. She wouldn't be wrong now.

J
ess came down from Arlen's rooms, barefooted and silent on the stairs; dim late-night glows invoked by the housekeeping staff made quiet light in the corners.

She heard no one else. They'd all retreated, like Jaime, to their nighttime quarters. To their families and friends, to huddle and worry and bolster each others' belief that it really wasn't true after all.

Jess believed it. And Jaime didn't, not truly—and didn't
want
to—so she threw herself into the chore of keeping the practical aspects of the hold functioning even though the housekeepers—wizards and physical workers alike—were long used to functioning on their own. It was thanks to Stenna, the evening maintenance warder, that Jaime was finally asleep; it was she who had mildly spelled Jaime's spiced wine, a thoughtfulness she was well prepared to offer after years of evening rounds to discover overexcited or fretful staff children and their frustrated families. "It only works if you're already truly tired," she'd told Jess when Jess had reacted with alarm at the thought of spelling children to sleep on a whim, and since Jaime had been exhausted . . .

Now, finally, she slept.

While Jess, wide awake, thought of tomorrow's ride and what she might find at the end of it, fully aware that she'd be responsible for reporting every nuance to Carey and Jaime. And Natt and Cesna, of course, but despite her casual fondness for them, it was not they whom she worried about.

Arlen.

She quite abruptly sat on the steps and cried.

In some ways, being a horse was so much easier.

After a while she stopped, and a while after that she scrubbed the hem of her thick, soft, cotton shirt over her face, sighed, and continued down the stairs.

Their rooms—hers and Carey's—were a luxury, a gift of the friend she now mourned. He'd given her the room next to Carey's and then cut a door into the stone wall, adding a lightweight wooden door carved with relief images of running horses. Hand-carved, too, and not done with easier copying magic.

Jess's room held her things from Ohio and from Kymmet—her photos, her horse show ribbons, an old pair of Carey's saddlebags that had given her such comfort when she had been newly human and hunting for the man she had depended on as a horse . . . Carey's things were slowly migrating over from what now served as their bedroom, and it was there that she found him. For a long moment she stood in the doorway between the rooms and watched him staring out the big window that made his such a nice room to have in this hill-held structure.

With no glass between the room and the cold winter air, the unobstructed view had an intimacy that Jess never felt looking out of a window in Ohio. Full moonlight reflected off the snow beyond the hold, making it easy to pick out a late-arriving rider.

"I should be down there," Carey said. "In the stable."

"Why?"

He lifted one shoulder; it had an irritable look from behind. "It's my job. I shouldn't be up here about to climb into bed while my riders are still working themselves to exhaustion."

"They are proud to ride for you," Jess said. "And we are all tired." They would be more tired before this was over; a year and a half of living through crises as a human had taught her that much.

Come to think of it, things had been little different when she was a horse. But then, at least, she had not fully understood what was at stake.

"Doesn't mean I shouldn't be down there," he muttered, sounding every bit as tired as she expected. "If only Calandre hadn't tried to turn me into a garbage heap—"

"We are
all
tired," Jess repeated. Calandre hadn't actually tried to turn him into a garbage heap, but the spells were similar and when he was feeling bitter he said it that way. "You cannot do everything, Carey.

None of us can."

"So sayeth the horse who learned to be a woman and then, when we all said it couldn't be done, taught her horse-self to use spellstones."

"Just a few of them," Jess said.

"Just a few," he repeated in a dry murmur, resting his forehead against the edge of the window.

"And I still do not understand so many things about being human . . ." It might distract him. It sometimes did.

Not this time.

"Carey," she said, and he didn't answer. She glanced at the bed—rumpled, unmade—and at Carey—bare-chested, light sleeping pants tied at his hips. He'd tried to sleep, then, and couldn't. Too bad Jess hadn't brought Stenna here to work her sleep spell on Carey. She gathered her thick hair and shoved it down her shirt so it wouldn't tangle when she pulled off the shirt. "Carey," she said again. "I feel you being far from me, and I need you. Come back."