Changespell 01 Dunn Lady's Jess (36 page)

"Clothes," Jaime said. "You need something to wear." Gruesomely, her mind latched on to the thought of the dead man, and then wouldn't let go. "I'll get something," she offered, and pulled herself to her feet, suddenly beset by all the pains her body owed her, the slashed thigh and the worn muscles and even the incredible ache from the afternoon's session with Willand. She stifled a useless groan and moved off to the distasteful task of disrobing a corpse, hoping at least some of the clothes would fit.

"Details," Dayna said, a still small figure against the lighter colored rock. "Food. The horses. And then there's the small matter of getting out of here before that guy gets reinforcements."

"Run away," Mark's voice agreed, softly but wholeheartedly.

Jaime was struggling with the man's shirt, trying to work uncooperative arms through the sleeves as she pulled it over his head; she finally realized it was the arrow that pinned the material to one of the arms, and she almost broke it off before it occurred to her that they might need all the ammunition they could get in order to make it out of the hollow, and she gave it a pull, surprised by the resistance. In the end she had to brace her feet against the limb and put her weight into it, and the arm finally let go of the arrow with a wet sound. By then Dayna was up and moving slowly among the horses, tying the black gelding, pulling off his saddle and letting it lay where it fell as she sloshed water into her hand for him. They finished their separate tasks and met in the middle of the hollow, Jaime's arms as full of clothes as Dayna's were with saddlebags, and together they stumbled back to the small sanctuary against the rock. Mark, moving quietly, met them there.

"I don't think he'll bother with us until daylight," he said. "Hell, he'll see us if we try to leave." Then his teeth flashed a brief smile against the darkness. "Hey, Jess, welcome back."

"Yes," she said.

Wordlessly, Jaime handed Mark his arrow. Then she turned to Jess, who had moved, with Carey, to the back of the pocket. "C'mon, Jess, let's see what we can do with these."

Jess dropped the blanket and stepped forward; Carey groaned and put his hand over his eyes, while Dayna said, "Jess, I thought we told you about that—"

"Oh," she said, looking down at herself. "That's right. No breasts. Well, don't look, then."

Arlen snorted, a tired but amused sound. "So this is the woman you found inside The Dun's daughter. Beguiling."

"How—" Carey started, then said, "Ah. Jaime told you. You were together long enough for that, then. You'll have to tell me what you two've been up to, Arlen."

Jaime stopped short, a cold feeling freezing her hands as they shook out the shirt for Jess. "Nothing, Carey. We had a few minutes to chat, that's all. Can you get your sore arm through this, Jess?" Carefully, she threaded the sleeves over Jess' upstretched arms and pulled the shirt, a long, unhemmed, coarsely woven garment, down into place. "No underwear, I'm afraid," she said brusquely, holding out the trousers for Jess to step into, "and though I managed to get the boots off, I don't think they'll fit. Of course, you never were much of one for footwear."

Awkward silence followed Jaime's abruptness and she filled it with activity, taking the laces of the baggy trousers from Jess' one-handed fumbling and tying them tightly over the curve of her hip. But Jaime's thoughts were far from the task, and all she cared about was what Arlen might say next.

"I've only been completely out of food for a day," Arlen said, "but it's been lean for a lot longer. Do you think we could get at some of that food? I, for one, will think better on a full stomach."

"Who wants to think?" Dayna nearly cried. "Give that black horse a minute to rest and then Mark said it best—
run away
."

"How?" Carey said, his voice ragged with honesty. "We've got three tired horses and six people, at least one of whom doesn't have the strength to even mount up. The roads will be crawling with Calandre's people—we can't outrun them or outfight them. But they're not familiar with this area—aside from that guy up there, no one knows this little place exists. Hell, he doesn't even have any idea who we are—just that we don't belong. And if he could call for reinforcements, he'd have done it by now. You'd have felt that, Dayna."

There was a long silence. "Details," Dayna said heavily. She set the saddlebags down next to Arlen, and her voice turned resolute. "Don't eat too much, you'll only throw up. Do you think we could have a fire, Carey? If we're really out of sight here?"

"It'll make it harder to move around out there," Carey said readily, but he was looking at Jaime, and even without seeing his face clearly she knew he hadn't been sidetracked. He would make his request of Arlen again, now that he recognized Jaime's evasiveness; eventually, he would learn about the torture . . . but maybe by then Jaime would be ready to handle talking about it. Maybe.

"I, for one, could use a cheerful little fire," Mark said. "We can always put it out if we feel like taking a walk. Anyone got a match?"

Carey snorted. "Magic, Mark. Even I know this one."

"You sure can call up a lot of spells for a courier who doesn't know anything about magic," Mark said.

"It's not calling up the magic that's so hard," Arlen said. "It's controlling it."

"Amen," Dayna said wearily. "Make us a fire, Carey, and let's eat."

The others slept, except for Mark, who was doing his best to keep watch, although even the still slightly befuddled Jess could see that he was hardly less fatigued than the others. The blue-cast moon had set and the hollow had settled into a darkness deep enough to hide everything but the darker bits of blackness that were the horses against rock. Jess thought about the moon, and how tonight was the first time she'd seen it with eyes that had appreciated the subtleties of color in the icy light it cast.

But as usual, the thoughts she was trying to follow to conclusion—thoughts that would decipher events since her return to the equine shape she had both treasured and feared, that would make sense of Eric's death, that would fit together the pieces of where they were and where they were trying to get—were disrupted into irrecoverable fragments by the pain in her arm.

She remembered the first step when she'd known it was wrong, way back on the stairs. And then all she could remember was the running, and the strength and speed that were hers—and that she'd refused to give up when the leg gave out here in the hollow. She knew it had been dangerous to fight like she had, but she also still felt a deep little piece of that fight left in her, an anger at events that were none of her doing.

She hadn't thanked Dayna for bringing her back, not only from her first and natural form, but from the dark corner of her mind where the human part of her had been coaxed into hiding. She remembered being soothed into that corner, and then all her memories were of a distinctly equine cast, and she shuddered to think that perhaps this Jess part of her could have been lost forever.

"You're awake?" Carey asked softly, one arm moving up to touch her where she lay curled up against his chest.

"Did Jaime ever tell you about Ruffian?" Jess said by way of reply, not moving, still savoring the feel of human touch against human senses—no, of
Carey's
touch—and not willing to pull away to look up at him. She could feel the frown of his body language.

"No," he said. "A horse?"

"A great runner. She hurt her leg, just like me. And she didn't want to quit. . . ."

"Like you," Carey supplied.

"And they killed her," Jess said finally. "Because she was only hurting herself. She was making it worse." She waited a long moment, her mind filled with the effort of that struggle, and the human hindsight that told her she had, indeed, only worsened her injury. Then she said hesitantly, "Would you have—"

"No!" Carey recoiled from her, and grabbed her upper arms, pulling her upright, his face only inches from hers, while she stared at him with widened eyes. "No, Jess, never! You're not just some racehorse. You're not just Lady anymore. Don't ever doubt that, just because I was too stupid to see it when I first . . . met you."

Something about the way he looked at her, the intensity in his voice, satisfied that deep longing within her that had started in Marion, Ohio, and lay cocooned within Lady ever since. "Damn straight," she whispered. She settled back down against his shoulder, and it seemed ever so natural to nuzzle his neck in an equine flirt, nipping gently at the angle of his jaw. He shivered as he closed his arm around her, holding her tightly against him. Very tight. And for the moment, whatever else was happening around them, Jess found she was completely content.

Satisfaction brought her sleep, but she was drawn back into awareness by a sound so slight it woke no one else. Puzzled, she listened, searching the breeze in the trees for the other noise that hadn't quite belonged to the sounds of the night. There, by the horses, a definite snuffle. Protecting her arm, Jess slid away from Carey and moved hesitantly into the darkness. She stopped with her hand on the rump of the little bay and said, "Jaime."

A short muffled laugh, no humor in it. "How'd you know it was me?"

"Who else would come to the horses?" Jess asked simply. She hitched at the pants that were bagged around her hips again, and moved to where Jaime sat at the horses' heads, by the small cluster of trees that served as pickets. "Jaime, why are you crying? Are you scared?"

"No," Jaime said. "Well, I
am
scared, but . . . no."

"I want to make it better," Jess said, thinking that in all the difficult times she'd spent with Jaime, the only tears she'd seen had been quiet and few. This, however, seemed to have been quite a sincere cry.

"Oh, Jess," Jaime said, with a sigh that signaled her shaking head, "I wish you could." After a pause, she asked, "How's your arm? I think that you—Lady—blew something in your knee, so it must be your wrist, now."

Even Jess could recognize an evasion that bald. "It hurts like hell, I think Carey would say. Won't you talk to me?"

"Talking isn't going to make this go away," Jaime said bitterly. "I was just thinking. About Eric, for one."

Jess tried once again to make sense of the jumbled memories that surrounded the return to Camolen, and the change from Jess to Lady. "I know . . . he is dead. Not why."

"He's dead because Derrick's slick friend is trigger-happy," Jaime said, more bitterness. "And . . . because of who he was. Do you remember going for that slimeball? Right before Carey invoked the stone?"

"No," Jess said, shaking her head in the darkness. "I remember fighting Derrick. I remember . . . killing him."

"After that, that guy Ernie had us in a pretty bad spot. And things got confusing, everybody was moving, and Eric pulled you back out of the way when Ernie would have shot you. And," she swallowed audibly, "Ernie shot
him
. Damn, I wish I'd let Carey shoot that bastard. I wish Carey had let Dayna kill him with the magic—even if it
had
backlashed on us all!"

Jess was stunned. "Eric was killed because he helped me?"

"Eric was killed," Jaime corrected her fiercely, "because Ernie is an egg-sucking son of a bitch who probably pisses in his own Cheerios every morning."

Jess blinked.

"It's funny," Jaime continued unprompted. "There's been so much that's happened since that night. We thought we'd lost you, for one thing. And I've been so worried about what's happening at home. I mean, surely one of my boarders realized we'd gone missing before the horses missed too many meals. Surely . . ."

"Yes," Jess said firmly.

"And up until now, I've handled it all just fine. Which is to say I haven't handled it at all, but sometimes you've got to put that kind of stuff aside, until there's a better time to deal with it."

Jess allowed, "I have a hard time doing that."

"But suddenly I can't get away from it. I was so happy to see you, and then suddenly I was so sad about everything else . . . I just . . . couldn't . . . ."

Jess found Jaime's hand in the darkness, but it pulled out of her grasp.

"No," Jaime said, fighting for control. "If you comfort me I'll lose it. I'll wake everyone up, and then they'll want explanations and Arlen will tell them—" she cut herself off, leaving palpable, empty silence between them.

"Tell them
what
," Jess asked, suddenly aware that this unspoken thing was the key. "Jaime, I will yell so loud everyone here will come running."

"Jess—"

"No."

There was a big sigh from the darkness, the sound of Jaime shifting position on the hard ground. One of the horses lowered its head to whuff softly at Jess' head, and then at the still damp clamminess of the dead man's blood on her shirt, but Jess ignored it. And waited.

"Something happened to me today," Jaime said, finally, reluctantly, her voice very far away even though it came from a spot not two feet from Jess' ears. "Willand—that's the blonde-haired wizard that was at the cabin I chased you away from—"

"I remember."

"Willand didn't treat me very well. She . . . she hurt me. She was trying to force Arlen into giving up the spell. She hurt me a lot."

Jess couldn't think of anything to say. The concept of such behavior had never occurred to her, but with understanding came a cold, cold anger. "Sometimes you—everyone, I mean—treat me like I have to be protected," she said. "Like you think I won't understand the answers to the questions I ask, and that you have to watch out for me. But the next time I see Willand, it will not be me who needs protection."

A hesitation, and Jaime said, "I believe you, Jess. But it won't help me if you turn into another Eric: good-hearted and dead. Nothing can help, I think, except maybe time."

They sat for a moment in the darkness, while Jess thought about this woman who was her friend, and with whom she'd shared all her human hours—and many more under saddle. "I liked it when you taught me dressage," she said suddenly. "I wish . . . I wish this part of me had been there, too. Someday, Jaime, will you teach me more? If the Lady part of me and the Jess part of me are ever in the same place at the same time?"