Changespell Legacy (29 page)

She shouldn't have come.

For a moment Dayna feared she'd lost the threads of the new spell amongst it all—so much magic!

But— "
There!
" She shouted triumph as the world-travel spell engulfed the inverted shield and snatched it away, along with an entire rack of rune jewelry.

Sudden silence. Maybe it had actually been silent already, the magic roaring only in Dayna's ears . . . but now, even for her, true silence reigned. The shop's stones no longer glowed, although Dayna thought she detected a suspicious glimmer winking out from among them. The blue fiber-optic egg she held sparked with definite energy, and she quickly tucked it in her pocket.

As if she could hide what had happened here . . .

"Burnt spellin' poot guides," Suliya said, apparently not willing to leave anything out. Dazed, she looked around the store, and then at herself. Checking herself for missing parts. "
Bootin'
, Dayna!"

Mark cleared his throat. "We'll, uh, pay for the missing stuff," he said, nodding to the one empty spot on the floor next to where the woman had been standing.

"Damned right you will," Rita said, the perspicacity returning to her tone, though a pale imitation of what it had been.

"What," said the sales clerk faintly, "did you do to her?"

"Theoretically, I sent her home," Dayna said. "But . . ."
But, nothing.
That wasn't a sentence she needed to finish.
But I probably killed her in the process
wouldn't reassure anyone right now, not to mention the cold spot the possibility left in her own stomach.

Self-defense.
It had been self-defense.

She'd seen people die before. She'd been involved in causing their deaths. But nothing like . . .

Not like this. One on one. Just Dayna, just the other woman. Now gone.

Self-defense, she told herself most firmly, as Mark cast a sympathetic glance her way. An empathetic glance. He'd been the first of all of them, armed with bow and arrows . . . self-defense. It still counted as killing.

The two Starland women stared at her. From the clothing rack, the male customer stared. Even Suliya stared. "Bootin'," she said again, this time only whispering to herself. "Just plain . . . bootin'."

Self-consciously, Dayna deposited the extra stones back into their container and smoothed her cutely flowered, cap-sleeved top—straight from the junior department at Sears only a few years earlier, and how much more innocuous could one small wizard look?—with her now empty hand. The awkward man had emerged just far enough from the clothing rack to watch her, wary, eyes wide and infinitely alarmed.

She smiled at him. "Now
those
," she said, "were
vibes
."

Curled up in the corner of the worn and comfortable living room couch, Jess stared at the pages of her book, no longer seeing the words . . . but thinking about them. About how the boy and the horse, stranded, learned to trust each other. To work together for survival. And then how hard the boy fought to keep them together, refusing to compromise when it came to the horse's well-being.

So she had once assumed of Carey.

Not that she now assumed otherwise . . . she just wasn't
certain
anymore. Decisions and reactions that had once come automatically now took thought . . . now brought worry.

She closed the book, gazing at the dramatic color and composition of the cover.
Nice stallion
. Chewed on a thumbnail a moment, wondering how much longer Dayna and Suliya would be in town and how long after that until Dayna and Carey agreed it was time to go home. And then she frowned, coming into alert, her thumb forgotten at the edge of her lip.
Magic
.

Significant, flaring magic.

She felt the implications of it in the very pit of her stomach, in the cold dark spot that suddenly appeared there; the fine hairs on her arms prickled up. Dayna would use such magic only if driven to it by dire circumstances . . . and if someone else wielded it, then Jaime's warning had come none too soon.
Or
maybe not soon enough
.

"Carey?" she said, thinking him out in the kitchen, where he'd bumped around making himself something to eat and then settled, reading one of Jaime's horse magazines—she wasn't sure. Only when she lost herself in a book did she fail to track every aspect of her surroundings, and now she realized she'd truly let herself go; Carey didn't answer. After a few quick silent, barefooted steps to check the first-floor rooms, she realized he wasn't even in the house.

Not the barn.

Please, not the barn. Not doing the one thing she'd told him she wouldn't allow.
Couldn't
allow, not for Ramble's sake.

She fled the house, ignoring the ring of the telephone behind her, and ran straight into the barn, where— Where seeing Carey at Ramble's stall stopped her as surely as if she'd run into a wall. And hit her just as hard.

He glanced up at her. It was no consolation at all that he looked miserable, that he actually leaned against the stall bars with his back to Ramble, not trying to communicate at all. Having tried, and failed, given up—and leaving the path of it written on his face.

Jess forced herself to walk down the aisle, all the way to Ramble's stall. She glanced inside to find Ramble sitting cross-legged, facing the corner so stiff-backed he actually trembled a little. Angry stallion.

Offended.

Carey wouldn't meet her gaze.

In a voice as stiff and trembling as Ramble's back, Jess said, "Was it worth it?"

Carey shook his head. "I don't know. I don't think so. But I don't think I could have not tried, either."

He gave her a helpless look. "None of it makes any sense. Not the death of the Council, not the way Camolen's services collapsed so thoroughly, not Jaime's warning . . .
Guides
, how can Arlen be dead?

Dead, just like that, with no one knowing why, and no one but a horse knowing
how
? My world is falling apart around me, and if I try hard enough, I'm supposed to be able to fix it. That's the way it always works . . .
if I try hard enough
." His voice cracked on the last words; he gave a despairing, sardonic cough of a laugh that might just as well have been a sob, and rubbed circles over his eyes with the flats of his fingers.

As if when he looked at her again, he might possibly see something different. Someone who was receptive to his self-deprecating little semblance of a smile.

Her heart broke for him.

It broke for herself, too.

In a low but remarkably even voice she said, "My world is falling apart around me, too, but as long as I could depend on you—
trust you
—I was all right. Now . . . all the rules have changed at once. Nothing is the same, not the world, not the people in it. Not you."

"Jess . . ."

She gave a sharp shake of her head. "I have only my own rules now. Only my own self to trust, and to make decisions. I will get my things, and then Ramble and I are going home. You should come back too.

I don't think it's safe here anymore. But I think you'll do as you want, and not what matters to anyone else."

"Not what I
want
—" For a brief moment, he looked aghast. "Not what I
wanted
—I
had to try
. To fix—" He stopped, gave a short shake of his head. "It doesn't matter right now. What happens
next
matters. I'm not going to try to stop you from taking him."

"You should come too." She tipped her head at the house. "Get your things. Get everyone's things—be ready. Didn't you feel the magic?"

"Magic?" he said, looking suddenly haggard.
Giving up.
She'd never seen that in him. Never. "I should have . . . I must have been . . . distracted."

With Ramble.
She didn't say it. She said, "From town. Maybe Dayna . . . maybe someone else. And Jaime said—"

"Just what the hells is going on?" he said, interrupting with utter frustration. "When is this going to start to make sense?"

"When it is too late," Jess said before she could stop herself . . . maybe because in her mind, it was already too late. Lives and patterns that could have—
should
have—withstood the changes were stretched out of shape, distorted past ever returning to what they'd been.

It wasn't something she'd ever comprehended as being possible. Rules were rules. You lived your life by them; she'd been trained and grown up by them, and respected them. She thought she'd learned the new human rules, and she'd been living by those, too.

Now she was learning that sometimes humans discarded all their rules, all their understandings between one another, and left even the most important people in their lives floundering. Not true to anyone, not even themselves.

Carey only looked at her, complete in his misery, and no longer attempted to explain himself. Finally, for once, accepting a thing as not possible. "Maybe," he said, after a heavy moment, "it's time to go—"

Jess lifted her head, drawn by the faint change in motor sound of an approaching vehicle. A downshift. A car preparing to turn.

Whatever Carey had done, he hadn't lost his ability to read her. "Not Mark's?" he asked in a low voice.

She gave the slightest shake of her head, listening hard.

He pushed himself away from the stall as tires crunched on the gravel driveway; two doors opened, then closed, and the vehicle moved away. "Charter coach," he said, a guess that nonetheless sounded confident. And grim. In this world, only those without cars used charters . . . older people.

Or those from out of town.

Even those from other worlds.

Think they followed you, Jaime had written. Be careful.

Touching a hand to his chest where his spellstones made a small lump under one of Mark's least garish Tshirts, Carey asked, "Do you have your shieldstone?"

"And Ramble's." In no-nonsense economy of movement, she went to Ramble's stall, shooting open both latches and yanking the door aside. "Ramble," she said, "I know you have anger. But this is danger, and I'm here to protect you. Will you wear the stones?"

He turned around just far enough to scowl at her. Like his clothing, the stones were something to take
off
; Jess had taken to carrying them herself.

She said, "They will protect you, too. From magic."

In a startlingly abrupt movement, he rose to his feet, shoved himself across the stall, and stopped before her, lowering his head slightly. She looped the stones around his neck, tucking them under his shirt so they touched skin, and the instant she finished, he whirled away and returned to his corner, his lips twitching in
want to bite
and his hard jaw made harder with tension.

Jess left him there, went to stand on tiptoe to peer out the wire-protected stall window. Two men hesitated before the barn; one wore what looked like new jeans, and the other a pair of fine cloth trousers, pleated, cut up the front to allow for ankle boots, and with a subtle shimmer Jess well recognized. Expensive cloth, spell-protected from tearing.

Camolen cloth. It went with their shortcoats, with the casual collarless shirts they wore beneath. In Camolen, unremarkable clothing in unremarkable colors, just as the men themselves were hardly likely to catch anyone's eye. Attractive but not striking, average in height and shape. One the color of light tea, the other of Carey's coloring. Nothing special.

If they hadn't been from another world.

"They are here for us," she said in a low voice as the men exchanged quick words, gesturing between house and barn, eventually deciding to stick together and to head for the barn first. "They're coming.

They aren't big . . . but they could be strong." One touched his chest; the other dipped a hand into his pocket. "I think they must have magic."

"Maybe," Carey said, returning from the direction of the hay stall. "Depends on how prepared they are.

We'd hoped Dayna could draw on magic from here—they may have done the same."

She turned from the window to find him standing in the open stall door, his back to it. Ready. He'd grabbed the dull old hunting knife Mark used to cut the hay twine and it hung from his hand, unobtrusive, half obscured . . . but like him, ready.

Run. They ought to run. Any sane horse would know it.

But not with Ramble . . . Ramble, who wouldn't understand, who would be as much of a problem as the men who'd come for them.

Jess watched out the window until the men entered the door in the middle of the length of the barn, the door that came through the tack room and that no one from the house ever bothered to use. Only visitors and owners. Then she moved to the middle of the stall, where she could still see beyond Carey but was closer to the door—feeling trapped, but not willing to leave Ramble—Ramble, who could comprehend none of this, who still sat in the corner with his back to the world. Alone.

Carey's fingers clenched and uncurled around the handle of the knife as they heard the men enter the aisle, unable to see them past the hay-bale barrier. Maybe the men would be as fooled as the horse owners who had been trooping in and out during the evenings, perfectly willing to accept that Mark had received a hay shipment big enough to fill the entire end of the aisle, never realizing the hay bales were only stacked two deep and Ramble lived in the stall beyond.

Maybe . . .

Jess found she'd stopped breathing to listen, and forced herself to take in a deep and surprisingly shaky breath. Ramble heard it, turned to look at her, his mouth open— "Shh," she said, barely making sound behind it, lifting a hand to stay him where he was—surprised to find that shaking, too.
Not now, Ramble, oh not now—

But Ramble didn't have to give them away. Not with the voices coming close to the hay bales and one man saying, "There's another stall beyond here; I saw it outside. And there's plenty of light showing in the window. I'll be burnt if those hay bales are stacked all the way through."

Carey's fingers clenched then relaxed around the knife, his posture stiff.