Jaime rode the perimeter of Anfeald Hold on a young mare too green for courier work, ostensibly getting in saddle time. In truth, she was preparing herself for the day when she could no longer think of these lands as even faintly hers by association.
Mostly, she'd been too busy to consider it. Mostly still holding out hope for Arlen, unable to accept the inevitable without the neat packaging of absolutes. She'd been like that about her mother's death, too. Her mother, young and pretty and with Mark's eyes—hers, too, Mark said—and killed in a tractor accident when Jaime was four and Mark not even old enough to have clear memories of her. The adults had whisked young Jaime away, of course . . . protecting her. They protected her all through the days that followed, not even considering her presence at the viewing and the funeral.
Until well into her teens, Jaime hadn't shaken the feeling that her mother would walk through the door. Never been able to trust those vague assurances that her mother had indeed gone away. And since that time, she'd always attended the burial of every horse under her care who'd passed, of every pet she'd ever owned. Of every friend's memorial viewing. And even then, if the memorials were closed casket . . .
Not that anyone had ever come back. Not even her mother.
"You're a grown woman now, Jaime Cabot," she told herself, watching the flick of the mare's ears—overactive ears, not as relaxed as they should be considering the mare had grown up in the pasture Jaime now traversed. The muddy ground made the going slick and while the snow was slowly melting into spring, there were plenty of remaining drifts to conceal horse-eating monsters. "You're all grown up, and you need to face facts." She patted the mare, gave her a little rein, and urged her forward.
The fact was that despite today's news that the new Council would stay in Kymmet until the crisis was over—delaying new hold assignments and leaving the staff and families of the recently deceased Council wizards to run their holds as accustomed—sooner or later she would have to leave this place. Probably to return to Ohio, where the farm she loved somehow didn't offset the loss of this vital, magic place . . .
And that of the equally vital wizard who lived here.
Carey had brought her grapes. Jess stared at them, sitting in a bowl on top of an upturned bucket along the outer wall of Ramble's stall, and her throat instantly swelled shut with unexpressed emotion.
She knew it had been Carey. No one else would have done it just like this. And only Carey, hunting a bittersweet parting gesture, would know how truly grapes were her weakness. Big red seedless grapes. She put her fingers firmly on her lower lip to stop the quiver there. Emotion or equine-like anticipation, she wasn't sure, but she wasn't about to have it seen. Especially not by Suliya, who seemed to crave companionship this morning as much as Jess craved solitude.
Neither of them got their wish. Jess was hardly companionable, but Suliya didn't give up and go away; they stayed in each other's orbit and annoyed one another.
"It's just no burnin' wonder," Suliya said, with no apparent care for whether Jess was actually listening. Jess fingered the duct-tape-wrapped film cannister Mark had rigged and then more or less competently sewn into a long braid made just for the purpose, one that would fall at Lady's withers instead of just behind her ear as her spellstones did. With no one available to attach Lady's courier harness, they'd each written a short message in the smallest readable font Mark's printer could manage; he'd then rolled the resulting page to fit in the cannister. Jaime's name was printed on the outside in Carey's sparse hand, although he'd had to struggle through the language adaptions inherent in the travel spell to remember the runes; that way if Lady lost track of things in the aftermath of the travel, whoever found her would be sure to get the cannister to Jaime.
Still, Jess wished there was a way to equip her with the courier harness. It bore Anfeald's mark on the breast collar, making it clear that Lady worked in an official capacity. Without it, if anyone saw her on the road, she was sure to lose time evading their well-meaning attempts to catch her.
But Suliya was still talking, even as Jess pulled a big juicy grape from the bunch and popped it into her mouth, savoring it. Savoring the gift. Suliya said, "I thought he just didn't think I could do it. Handle a position in one of the bigger stables, that is. And that he wanted me close to home for when I failed." She gave Jess quite a serious look. "Mum comes from Wyfeld, and that's why we settled there. It's pretty out of the way. But that hardly matters, does it, when there's a travel booth in the house?"
Sweet grape. Jess had another, and offered one to Ramble through the partially open door. He took it, and then he took her hand. Stroking it, examining it . . . and then just holding it.
Suliya said, "But that wasn't it at all. It wasn't me he was worried about, not really. He didn't want me around the big holds with the top wizards . . . people who might say things about SpellForge he didn't want me to hear. SpellForge the wonderful, making people's lives easier. SpellForge the innovative, providing services. What good is all that if you've got people like Wheeler running around behind the scenes like big bootin' bullies?"
Jess murmured, "Your father cares what you think."
"Ha!" Suliya said, and snorted, flipping her hair over her shoulder with an insouciance that only made her wounded expression more obvious in contrast. "He didn't want me talking to Arlen, I'll bet. Or other wizards."
"But you didn't know anything about people like Wheeler," Jess said, gently pulling her hand from Ramble's, unable to follow Suliya's logic and suspecting perhaps there wasn't any.
"I've been all through the halls of the SpellForge development area," Suliya said, sounding very much like the haughty Suliya of old. "Who knows what I could have said that Arlen would have found significant? I recognized Wheeler in the first place, didn't I?"
Ramble persisted, bringing Jess's hand back into the stall, leaning his brow against the bars to regard her. "Going home?" he asked, not for the first time that morning.
"Yes," Jess told him. "Soon." And to Suliya, "If he is the kind of man to send people like Wheeler after people like us, he is careful enough to make certain what you saw was not important. He cares what you think."
"Ay!" she said, offended. "As if you've spent so much time in spell corps facilities to know what is and isn't important."
Jess gave her a brief frown, a flattened ear; she traded her hand for a grape and moved away from the stall. After the day before, Ramble made no attempt to leave his safe area on his own; he spent a great deal of time making soft snorting noises at the remains of Wheeler's partner.
Suliya offered her own hand to Ramble, who wasn't interested. Pretending the rejection hadn't happened, she flung herself down on the hay bale that would precede Jess and Ramble to Camolen and plopped her chin in her hands, elbows on knees. "I just don't spell it," she said. "It is a company that makes people's lives easier and provides services. Why do they need someone like Wheeler?"
Jess shook her head. "I used to think I understood human things, but now I know I don't. And that was just small human things, like friendship and how you are with one another. I have no answers about big things like companies."
Suliya gave her a funny look, wrinkling her nose; all her excessive mannerisms dropped away for this moment to show the core Suliya. "Jess," she said, "friendship is the big thing. And you have that. You have all these friends looking out for you—all the couriers at Anfeald, that guy Ander who visits from Kymmet and wants you bootin' bad, and Mark and Jaime and, I swear, everyone who meets you. I hated the way you had so many friends so soon after you got to Anfeald, and I had none. And you have Carey. The big friendship, if you trail my meaning."
Jess looked at Ramble—still leaning against the bars, regarding her with clear possessiveness. Simple. Unmistakable. "I know what you think to say," she said, "but I'm not sure you are right. Or if you are, that I can understand enough to be on the other side of those things and . . . manage."
Suliya sunk back into herself. "Some people just don't know when they have everything—"
But she broke off as one of the double doors slid aside, filling the aisle with indirect sunlight that made the overhead fluorescents pale in comparison. Dayna entered, followed by Mark, who opened the door yet further for his own larger self, and Wheeler, and . . . Carey.
Of them all, only Wheeler looked largely unaffected by recent events. The smile Dayna gave Jess came across as wan and tired, as though the efforts of the previous day had continued to drain her through the night. Mark pulled off sunglasses to reveal worry that didn't belong in those largely carefree eyes, his gaze moving from Dayna to Carey to Wheeler to Jess as if he couldn't decide which concern to settle on. And Carey . . .
She couldn't look at him long enough to know just what struck her as not-right. Then again, he didn't want her to go. Didn't want there to be consequences to the moment he'd walked out into this barn to interrogate Ramble. Or the moment before that, when he'd taken a palomino stallion and brought him to this world.
She didn't want there to be consequences, either. But there were.
"I don't understand," Suliya said, "why we don't all just go home. Right now. Why should any of us stay in this place? We came to hear what Ramble could tell us, and we have—even if it amounted to nothing. Let's go back then, okay?" She added the American colloquialism awkwardly, but pleased with it.
Oddly, Carey glanced at Wheeler, a subtle reaction that made Jess glance at the man herself. Comfortable under the scrutiny, he said, "It's not a good idea. You're safer here right now."
"But Jess is going back. And Ramble."
"Horses," said Ramble unexpectedly, startling them all as he lurked uneasily by the stall door and prodding a little grin out of Mark.
And from Wheeler as well. "That's the crux of it," he said. "They'll be two horses in a disrupted land. Even if SpellForge sends out a FreeCast team to their arrival site—"
"They cannot catch us," Jess said scornfully. SpellForge had not been a consideration in her decision. She was taking Ramble back to go home, not to play a role in human games.
"Maybe," Wheeler said. "More likely, they won't think to try."
"They wouldn't think to try for me, either," Suliya said. "They don't know I'm here. And it's Dayna and Carey they really want, I'm spellin'."
Wheeler said nothing, but his light brown eyes glinted with mild amusement . . . as close to confirmation as he'd no doubt ever give.
"It doesn't matter anyway," Dayna said. "You guys seem to think I'm some sort of walking magic shop. We need a spell, Dayna, pull off a miracle, Dayna. Well, I'm not. I'm tired, I'm making things up, and the only reason I know half this stuff in the first place is because I jumped into the deep end—without water wings—when I landed on Camolen. I'm not supposed to know it yet. I'm supposed to be playing with safe little spells to . . . to . . ." and she glared at Suliya, "straighten hair!"
"You keep the wrong company for that," Carey said, not a little ruefully.
Suliya's hand crept up to her shoulder-length curls in a protective gesture and she glared back at Dayna. "Are you saying you can't get us back?"
"That's right." Dayna crossed her arms, daring Suliya to challenge her word on it. "Can't. Not right now. Everything I've got is going into the spell for these two, and I have no idea when I'll feel ready to try siphoning magic into storage stones again. If you had any idea how close we came to—"
"It's all right, Dayna," Carey said. His voice was a little raggedy; he cleared his throat, shooting Wheeler a baleful look that only Wheeler seemed to understand. Jess certainly didn't. "Wheeler is right, I think. Best that we're not in Camolen right now. Jess will get what little we know to Jaime, and we'll all take a deep breath before we go back."
"I don't need a deep breath," Suliya muttered.
"Wheeler could probably do something about that," Carey muttered back, suppressing a cough that nonetheless made itself obvious. Jess watched Wheeler for a reaction, trying to understand . . . but the man gave no clues. No change of expression, no meaningful glances.
Instead he looked straight at Jess. "I should try to stop you."
"Why aren't you?" she asked him.
"Aside from the fact that creating another major scuffle right now will cause me more trouble than it'll save?"
"Aside from that." She, too, could use light human sarcasm when she chose . . . that she chose so rarely gave it all the more impact.
He shrugged—one-shouldered, the hand of his injured arm tucked into his waistband. He said evenly, bluntly, "Because I don't think you'll succeed. Not getting caught is a whole lot different from reaching Anfeald Hold. Especially for two horses."
She wanted to snap at him . . . but she had no answer to that. He was right. And all she could do was lay back her phantom ears, tilting her head at that certain angle and doing it unequivocally enough that both Carey and Mark reacted, shifting uneasily, and Ramble glared, not following the byplay enough to know why Jess had gone angry, but ready to respond to it.
Wheeler shrugged again. He looked like the arm hurt.
Jess felt not the slightest twinge of guilt.
They all held their breath, waiting for the hay to come back. All of them, eyes riveted to the spot where the bale had been sitting, where it had wavered and then winked away. They weren't, Jess was sure, aware of their collective reaction. But she was. Ramble was. Both of them, shifting uneasily, knowing that holding breath generally followed on the heels of hearing something potentially threatening, and when the whole herd did it at once, run for your life! often came next.
Jess couldn't blame Ramble; he hadn't had the chance to learn human habits. But she turned annoyance on herself, and she broke the moment that somehow seemed to hold them all. "It's gone," she said. "Now we'll go, too."
Dayna gave the slightest of sighs—the sound of relief, and also the sound of heavy responsibility. "I'm not sure where you'll end up, you know."
"I know." They'd talked about it the night before, briefly, before she and Carey had retreated to their privacy. Originally, the spell had dumped them out somewhere between Anfeald and Siccawei—Arlen's first attempt to bring someone back to Anfeald, off the mark. Dayna thought it might do the same, but since they were triggering it from a different location, she couldn't be sure. Dayna knew it held safeguards, that they wouldn't materialize inside a tree or rock . . . but that was all of which she was certain.
"We'll return. We'll recover. We'll eat. And we'll find Anfeald from wherever we are."
"You sound so certain," Mark said, a wistful note in his voice as he absently raised an arm to wipe the sweat off his cheek against the sleeve—the spring day, creeping past noon, had gone warm and humid, and the normally airy barn gave them no relief, not with hay bales blocking the airflow down the aisle.
"I am," Jess responded, aware of her own surprise. "For the first time in a while." She crossed her arms to grab the hem of her crop-top shirt, and Ramble took it as his cue, tugging at his own clothes in undisguised eagerness to be rid of them.
"This is where you leave," Carey said abruptly to Wheeler, even as Mark said, "Whoa, wait a minute Jess—give me a chance to say good-bye while you've still got some clothes on."
Jess tossed her head in mild irritation. "It doesn't matter."
But to them it did, and she knew it. And she did want to say good-bye to Mark. They hadn't spoken much about it, hadn't said I might never see you again, but they both knew it, just as Mark knew he might not see his own sister again. When he reached for Jess he did it in typical Mark fashion; arms open wide, he wrapped a big hug around her and lifted her right off her feet in spite of the fact they were nearly of the same height. "There," he said, and set her down to give her a kiss on the cheek. "That should last me until next time." But when he stepped back to look at her he faltered, and took her in for another, gentler embrace. "Okay," he said in her ear. "I admit it. There's never enough Jess until the next time."
"Never enough Mark," she said, knowing well enough why he jammed his sunglasses back on the moment he broke away. Men. She would teach him to cry, sometime. The next time, if there was one. He took another step back and turned on his heel, grabbing Wheeler's good arm with none of the careful physical respect they'd given the SpellForge agent up to that point, literally dragging him the first few surprised steps out of the barn.
But Wheeler followed the rest of the way without resistance, only one backward glance at Carey and then Jess. After that, Dayna pinned Suliya with an unwavering, sky-eyed gaze, until Suliya belatedly threw her hands up and left, giving Ramble a reluctant glance as she closed the door behind her.
Ramble by then was out of his clothes, the spellstones sitting on top of the haphazard pile of material while he hovered in the stall doorway, waiting for permission to leave.
If nothing else, he was returning to Camolen with better manners than when he left.
Jess held out her hand and he came to her, though her eyes never left Carey. They'd said their good-byes the night before. The day before, when Carey had made his choices. And possibly long days before that, when he'd determined to bring Ramble here in the first place. She wasn't sure, and she could see from his expression as he moved up beside Dayna that neither was he. "We'll make it back," he said. "Soon. I'll see you in Anfeald."
Anfeald. Home to her, whether she was horse or human. She wanted to say he might be safer if he stayed here, with SpellForge agents after him and magic gone awry in Camolen. But he'd take it the wrong way, the way she didn't mean it, so she stayed silent, watching him. Hoping he could read her as well as ever, barring those times he refused to listen at all. That he could see she wasn't leaving him, but that she was returning to something else.
"Soon," was all she could say, and she could barely get it out at all. Quickly, unable to bear it any longer, she stripped off her clothes, threw them out of the spell area, and stood in the aisle with Ramble's warm broad hand in hers.
"Here goes," Dayna said. "See you on the other side, Jess."
"Thank you," Jess told her, removing her gaze from Carey just long enough to catch Dayna's eye, to make the words mean more than just two simple syllables.
Dayna nodded, closing her eyes to concentrate, her storage stones clenched in one hand and the magic rising around her. Rising around Jess and Ramble, percolating right through them. And Carey lifted his head, his eyes full of purpose, opening his mouth to call something, an offering. "Braveheart," he said, but—startled—bent over for a sudden fit of harsh, deep coughing.
When he straightened the magic had her, slower than a spellstone as Dayna pulled it together but just as strong, percolating up through her skin and bone and muscle with Ramble's scared and tightening grip on her hand the only counterpoint. When Carey straightened—
He stared at the bright red blood covering his palm, put fingers to the blood at his lips, lifted them to stare in disbelief. Looked over his hand to meet her eyes, a moment of shock and significance passing between them.
The magic took her away.