Lady ran the far pasture with Ramble, making no effort other than that of being a horse. No messages to deliver, no responsibilities other than that to herself and the tiny being growing within her who as of yet made few demands and offered no restrictions. Almost a year before Lady the mare would foal, and her Jess part kept her muted reaction to herself.
Ramble ran by her side, content with his herd of one, still exploring this new existence—one neither he nor Lady had ever had before. Two horses following their own rhythms, unimpeded by human rules—even if the human rules were ever in the background, an ineffable but permanent part of Lady's nature. Where Ramble had learned fewer rules and learned them badly, she woke from naps with the phantom feel of Carey's hand on her withers, his whispered good job in her ear. She flashed on her memories of his white-faced astonishment, staring at his own blood.
Then Jess would come to the fore, fretting and worrying and wanting to do. To fix. To change, and let the human side of herself somehow make things better.
But Carey was nowhere in Camolen, and Lady knew it. She left the Jess part behind by charging over the rolling hills, inciting Ramble to bucking spurts that carried them away from Anfeald.
When they visited the pasture, they had food—early grass, hay, and daily grain. When they left, no one tried to stop them. Not even the unknown humans they saw along the paths they trotted; everyone seemed too busy, too distracted, to care about two loose horses. Lady watched the couriers come and go, and knew she could be part of it if she wanted.
She didn't.
But their freedom shrank anyway. The bad spots, the ones that had killed Arlen and terrified Ramble . . . the meltdowns Lady had seen multiply during their long journey home to Anfeald . . . they'd followed her here. They'd settled in for good, and spread themselves so thickly over the land that she and Ramble were forced into ever more circuitous routes to reach their favorite places—the point of land jutting out over an old creek bed where they could look over the countryside, standing in the ever-present breeze and thus free of the spring gnats. The deep pool down in the creek itself, where Ramble shoved his head in up over his eyeballs to snort bubbles in the water and where Lady established a ritual roll, splashing and churning and rising up wickedly pleased with herself. The deer path that gave them the excuse to tuck and jump fallen trees in perfect form simply for the brief moment of flight . . .
They'd lost the pool a day or two earlier, discovering in its place a hardened dome full of twisted fish and crawdads and smelling only as dead water creatures can smell . . . an odor that kept them back a goodly distance, snorting and dancing and lowering and raising their heads in an attempt to find some focus point that made sense of it all.
And now, as Lady led Ramble in a brisk trot down the human-made trail from the gnat-free vantage point—her mind on the pleasant twitter of birds, the smell of rain in the air, and the shifting shadows of late afternoon—she rounded a canted angle of trail and nearly ran head-on into an active meltdown. She stopped short, scrabbling backwards while Ramble, unprepared, slammed into her hindquarters and then whirled to get out of the way, more alarmed at the prospect of her ire than at the meltdown he hadn't quite noticed yet.
Freed of his interference, Lady jigged a tight circle and raised her head high to give the meltdown a blasting snort, one that got Ramble's riveted attention as he realized what she already knew.
Their only way home was blocked.
It got someone else's attention as well, a crouching figure tucked in by the edge of the meltdown, one which stirred at the great fuss they'd made and turned to face them, startling Ramble so much he took off down the trail at gallop speed, leaving only the sound of his hoof falls behind him.
And Arlen said, "I'm hungry, but not that hungry."
Arlen.
ARLEN.
Lady stood stock-still and stared at him while the Jess-voice clamored in wordless excitement within her, generating such astonished delight that Lady finally broke into a series of bucking leaps, snorting with high drama, twisting and dancing in midair. Blowing hard with the sudden burst of exertion, she finally came to a standstill back before him, examining every inch of him with first one nostril and then the other, up and down the length of his body while he stood there with amusement on his face and his hands spread open so she could check those, too. In the back of her mind she was quite aware of a strange horse in the woods, calling to her and evidently tied and unable to reach her. The Jess in her knew this was Arlen . . . but still she had to examine him, blowing soft breaths at him, tickling his face as she discovered the missing mustache and his neck as she found the collar to a shirt that still faintly bore someone else's smell.
At that he laughed and gently moved her nose away. "Please," he said. "I've been alone on the road for a long time, Lady. There's only so much attention my neck can take."
Lady didn't understand, but a bubble of amusement from within told her that her Jess-self did; the amusement came out in a sneezy snort and she suddenly had the need to talk to him, to throw question after question that this self couldn't even begin to formulate, never mind convey. Something in her demeanor must have changed . . . must have alerted him. As she reached for the trigger of her change spellstone, he put a sudden hand on the strong, flat bones of her face and said with alarm, "No! Don't do that!"
She took a step back, moving out from under his hand and tossing her head in annoyance and defiance. She made her own decisions now.
"You can't use magic, not next to this," he said. "You'll drive it crazy. Even if it was through churning—and it's not, or I wouldn't have been able to trace it just now—the changespell is far too complex to trust right now." He shook his head, frustration on his face as he read annoyance in the wrinkle of her nostrils. "I'm sorry. I'll keep it simple. I know when you do turn back to Jess, you'll understand. Lady, the spell won't work. It might seem to work, but it'll go wrong. It'll hurt you. There's no telling how it'll end up."
Hurt her.
Hurt her baby.
She flattened her ears in a comment that would have crisped Arlen's hair had he heard it in human terms. And she left the spellstone alone.
It had been a close thing, close enough to leave Arlen shaken even as he rejoiced to find Lady here . . . and puzzled over the circumstances. He didn't know the orange-marked palomino with whom she traveled, didn't know why she would be out with another horse and without her courier harness. For the moment, he was simply relieved to have caught the distant look of concentration in her eye, and to have forestalled the use of the spell—for her reaction had made it clear enough she'd intended to change, all right.
If only she could. If only they could talk to one another, filling in the considerable gaps of each other's knowledge. He could tell her where he'd been, and why he'd taken so long to return . . . in essence, why he wasn't dead. He could tell her what he'd just learned, following the vague magic to its roots in an effort that had taken every bit of his skill. And she could tell him about Jaime, how the hold fared, what they knew about the Council deaths.
All the same, he was glad for the company.
Especially with the new knowledge weighing heavily upon him, the realization that the Council could have stopped this crisis had they been just a little more thorough, that they had in some small way been responsible for their own deaths, and in a large way, for the crisis gripping the land.
SpellForge.
He should have at least realized that the spell consortium was involved when he'd seen that man at the stable so many small towns and four-corner settlements ago, he should have. So carefully cultivated to blend in despite his large size, so prepared. Classic characteristics of a FreeCast agent. Usually those agents worked to protect spellmaker products during development, or to protect spellmaker wizards or even managers' families. "Your Council is like a humanitarian think tank," Jaime had once said, "and those spellmaking companies are just big computer software moguls."
"They're cutthroat," he'd agreed, but in reality knew little about them other than the spells he approved. That . . . and all the big spellmakers worked with FreeCast.
And of the spellmakers, who else but SpellForge had only recently released the biggest leap in commercial spell technology since mass-produced spellstones? A technology that had been vetted and admired by the Council, Arlen included. Technology that even Arlen had embraced, immediately installing it in his own hold for the convenience of those who struggled with daily amenity spells.
For Jaime.
And how he'd anticipated the look on her face when she discovered a light she could turn on and off as easily as the lights in her own world.
"Stupid," he muttered viciously at himself, earning a nudge from Lady. He did what he'd never done—what he'd never had a reason or chance to do. He threw an arm around her sturdy neck and took comfort in her solid presence, the reassuring touch of her muzzle curving around to whisper against his back. He'd seen Carey do the same many a time . . . though never after Lady had first become Jess.
He still didn't know just why the permalight spell distorted Camolen's magic . . . he needed his workroom, a ream of notations, and a month of quiet to figure that out. But there must have been something in the spell, some hint or clue of trouble that the Council missed. Some indication of this resulting environmental damage.
There must have been.
And now they were dead, Camolen was literally falling apart around him, and he and Lady—and Grunt—were trapped here with FreeCast agents on his trail.
He had no doubt about that last. They'd have placed agents in this area, hoping to intercept him on the way to Anfeald. And those agents would certainly be skilled enough to recognize his signature . . . the one he'd revealed when he'd grabbed the faintest tingle of a recognizable trail from the eruption now settling beside him and followed it to its source. One source, and also many . . . multiple invocations of a spell he'd barely been able to remember. A spell to which no one other than himself and the other original Council members had ever been exposed in the first place, and a trail so faint and diffuse that no one else still alive would ever be able to trace it.
No wonder SpellForge wanted him out of the way—no wonder they'd turned to FreeCast agents to get the job done.
"We could have trouble," he told Lady, standing back to rest his hand on her withers. She curled her neck around to look at him, ears at attention. "Maybe not now . . . it's getting a little late, and even these people won't want to navigate the woods in the dark. Too easy to stumble onto one of these bits of nastiness."
Except he heard hoofbeats—
But hesitant ones. Faltering ones. When Lady raised her head to nicker a welcome, he knew her companion had returned; in a moment the palomino came into sight, a travel-muscled creature of no great grace but inimitable strength and a hard kind of beauty. A stallion, Arlen noted, and gave Lady a questioning glance—but as it became evident the palomino intended to stop and hover at the edge of true contact, she more or less dismissed him, leaving him only one ear's worth of attention with the other ear back on Arlen.
Then again, what did Arlen know about horses and their relationships? As long as the stallion didn't cause him any trouble—Arlen had trouble enough already—then he could be ignored. There were plenty of other things to occupy him now that he'd gained some idea of the forces tearing Camolen apart.
"We've got to stop it," he said to Lady, a little unnerved by the way she truly seemed to follow the conversation. Horse . . . but now more than horse. He held up his hand and ticked off his fingers. "We've got to stop it; we've got to get those spelled lights in peacekeeper hands. Until then, we need some kind of protection from it, for everyone." He hesitated there, his thoughts drifting away long enough to sketch the basic protection spell premise—since the distortions happened in reaction to magic, creating intrinsically magical damage, any shield would have to create a vacuum of magic. Something he had never actually experienced, and thus something he hardly knew how to reproduce. He shook his head, short and sharp, and left the details for later. "We've got to heal what's been done. And, burn it, we need to find some way through to Anfeald so I can tell Jaime I'm still alive. Unless she knows?" And he looked hopefully at Lady's fine-boned face, the soft brown eye gazing back at him from beneath a long thick fall of forelock.
More than horse . . . but still horse. She didn't perform tricks, use her hoof to scratch runes in the mucky ground, or otherwise answer his question. But she looked at him with understanding and nuzzled his arm, lipping at the material of his jacket in affectionate sympathy.
"We've got to stop it," he muttered yet again, as Grunt whickered anxiously from the woods, rustling branches and snapping twigs in exploration of his lead rope limits. Feeling left out. "In a moment," Arlen told him, raising his voice with some annoyance and never stopping to think that Grunt could hardly understand. Not with other things on his mind, like the sudden realization that stopping the damage meant stopping the light spells meant reaching the peacekeepers meant going in the opposite direction from Anfeald Hold altogether. Anfeald, the goal he'd held fixed in his mind for so long, the one thing that had kept him putting one cold mud-covered foot in front of the other. The thought of turning away gave him a physical wrench, a frantic twisting within.
Unexpectedly, Lady gave him a solid nudge; he took a step to regain his balance, and she crowded him until he took another. Away from the wounded trail. Away from Anfeald.
Lady, at least, knew which was the right decision.
"All right," Arlen said crossly. Besides, maybe if he backtracked to the peacekeepers, he could find an open trail to Anfeald from there. "I have to get Grunt before he starts bleeding from the ears. We'll put some distance in before we settle in for the night. No point in being anywhere near when the FreeCast agents descend here tomorrow."
He pulled Grunt back out of the woods, watching as the gelding became instantly besotted with Lady, going so far as to duck his head and make a foal-mouthing gesture at her while Lady gave the gelding no more than a polite sniff. "Poor old Grunt," Arlen murmured. "I appreciate you even if you are missing your manly parts."
But he had no real thought behind his words, and no real appreciation of their odd little caravan—two horses at complete liberty, one of which kept his distance and the other of which led the way, followed by an obsequious gelding of roughest breeding and his person-by-default, a lanky wizard with an unusually developed road gait and the precinct's ugliest shirt, its tattered condition and impending doom a mercy. His thoughts—and his heart—were at Anfeald, making every step he took in the opposite direction a trial in determination. "We'll stop it," he said, and startled them all by suddenly whirling around to walk backward, pointing a warning finger at the glob of distorted woods as his voice raised to a shout, "and then we'll be back!"
Three pairs of equine eyes riveted to his strange behavior; three sets of ears pointed his way in concern. Arlen tugged his ugly orange tunic back into place, then snatched his jacket from atop Grunt's pack to ward himself against the evening cold, all the while pretending he didn't feel foolish under the scrutiny and muttering to himself, "Well, we will."
Stop the damage. Create protection. Return to Anfeald . . . in that order.
With a hand on Lady's withers as they walked, Arlen retreated into his thoughts. Shield theories. Protection.
Without it, he didn't think he—or anyone else—would ever make it home.
Carey returned Jaime's old schoolmaster mount, JayDee, to her stall, glancing at Sabre's expectant look on the way by. He'd never presume to ride Jaime's Grand Prix dressage mount—no one rode Sabre but Jaime, and Carey's less theoretical, more intuitive style of riding would make him a poor match for any upper-level dressage horse—but he'd taken to longeing the horse in a variety of careful exercise programs gleaned from Jaime's books, hoping to keep him decently fit during this long and unplanned layoff.
JayDee he presumed to ride, keeping himself fit—working through the bad days of gulping ibuprofen and surreptitious coughing—and more to the point, occupied. Out of Dayna's way, she who would not be nagged. Just as well; from the constant expression of worry she'd taken to wearing, she nagged herself enough for all of them. Even so, as he encountered her at work—first in the solitude of the little office room and more recently in the middle of the airy indoor ring, a lap desk and lawn chair as her furnishings and plenty of space for experimental magics—he invariably fought the urge to question her. How much longer, that's all he wanted to know. Simple enough, wasn't it?
How much longer.
"I'll be back," he told Sabre, who'd been returned to the stall that had so recently housed Ramble. Finding himself unable, this once, to leave Dayna alone. Suliya he left cleaning stalls, fresh from her own ride on the lower-level lesson horse during which she'd copied the warm-up exercises Carey employed.
More power to her. Maybe by the time they got back, she'd truly be ready to learn those things she'd thought she already knew.
Dayna stood in front of the chair, the wood-topped lap desk set carefully to the side on a square of plywood that kept the arena dirt from crawling into her papers. Her closed eyes held a slight squint at the corners; her mouth moved in a soundless mumble—and as ever, she looked incongruously slight compared to the power she could wield . . . was wielding.
Wheeler leaned against the kickboard rail nearest to her—just under the ring letter H. If his arm still pained him, it wasn't evident. Then again, with Wheeler, who could tell? Watchful but relaxed, he lounged in the startling combination of his expensive Camolen trousers and one of Mark's colorful country-themed shirts, a thing of blocky red-and-black color and pearl-front snaps, rolled at the cuffs and untucked at the waist . . . and he did it with such insouciance that no one would ever guess he was stranded in a strange world and watching someone he'd intended to abduct and now suddenly depended upon.
Carey, well versed in the folly of interrupting an uncertain wizard in mid-spell, stopped at the entrance to the indoor ring and waited. Within a few moments Dayna's concentration was replaced by satisfaction, and she opened her eyes. She spotted him immediately. "Couldn't be good any longer, huh?" she asked, but not without understanding.
He shrugged, and then had to ask. "How's it going?"
"I fixed the shield," she said, her satisfaction foremost again.
"What shield?" Startled, he didn't sound nearly as appreciative as he knew he ought to be; he caught a glimpse of Wheeler's faint amusement as Dayna wrinkled her nose at him. Undeterred by any of it, he headed out into the ring.
"The one I've got up around me right now," she said, with perfect timing; her smile said she knew it.
That stopped him, feeling a little foolish but not so foolish as if he'd run right into it and bounced off. A quick scan showed no sign of it; he frowned. What was she up to?
"You won't see it." She pushed back her sandy hair, recently trimmed from its shaggy Camolen cut to the wedge-like style she'd had when they'd first met. It suited her—short, sharp, and no-nonsense. "The problem with using magic here is that it disperses so quickly—quickly enough that I figure at least half of the storage stones went to waste when I sent Jess out. So I've been playing with that inverted shield spell I pulled on the goon-lady at Starland." She glanced at Wheeler. "You would be the goon-guy," she informed him. "One of them, anyway."
"Yes," he said, amusement intact. "I understood that."
"The remaining goon-guy," she said, in case he hadn't gotten that. Threats, Dayna-style . . . but Carey wasn't sure how much she meant it anymore. If anything, Wheeler's friend-foe spell tests were now more friend than foe, and he certainly seemed to consider that Dayna and Carey had been stalled here long enough to let his employers do . . .
Whatever it was they'd intended to do. For good or for bad.
Although recently, Carey had seen the faintest hint of anxiety in Wheeler . . . a doubt, and an increased attentiveness to Dayna's efforts. Never a nag . . . never getting in the way . . .
But the man wanted to go home. Was ready to go home.
Carey didn't like Wheeler; knew he'd turn on them if necessary. But in an odd way he also fully trusted the FreeCast agent to indicate if necessary came to pass. Enough so he didn't add to Dayna's not-so-subtle threats. He said, "So you've got a shield, something we can't see. And it keeps magic in . . ."
"But doesn't mess with anything else," Dayna said, back to being satisfied. "We can go in and out, we can maintain a certain density of magic, and Suliya can run back and use the bathroom at the last minute before we spell out of here, because you know she'll forget."
"I heard that!" Suliya shouted. A moment later a forkful of fresh manure flew from the aisle into the arena, making Carey duck but missing Dayna completely.
"Good," Dayna said, deadpan enough so Carey knew she was teasing. "Maybe you'll remember to pee before you join the rest of us this time."
"Guides," Suliya said, still out of sight—within a stall and working, from the varied and muffled sound of it. "Did I know we were going to a shopping place where the bathrooms would be hard to find? Did I know this place was so uncivilized? Just that one time—"
"So is that it?" Carey said, deciding to ignore their byplay . . . especially since he hadn't taken a hit from the contents of Suliya's badly aimed fork. "The shield, the travel spell . . . you have what we need? We can go home?"
"I'm not sure how much like home it'll be," Dayna said, suddenly sober. "I've made contact a few times through the spellstones Ramble left behind, and things feel really . . . wrong." She glanced at Wheeler. "It'll pass, you said. I hope you're right."
Being Wheeler, he didn't respond with token words of reassurance. "They've had more than enough time," he said. "I wouldn't take anything for granted. I'm not."
She turned on him with accusation. "You were."
He nodded, unaffected by her anger, by the sudden sharp look Carey turned on him. "I was," he agreed. "Now I'm not. Now . . . now I don't like the sound of what you've told me about the magic, and I think we need to get back."
"Great," Dayna said. "Just great."
Right. The man who'd kept them here for the sake of his once-removed employers, so sure that SpellForge would resolve its—and Camolen's—problems—now felt just as sure that SpellForge hadn't. Meaning that perhaps Carey and Dayna could have done some good—
Except—
"We couldn't have returned before you were ready, anyway," Carey said, realizing it anew. "What's there when we go back . . . is what's there when we go back." And let's go back now. Just as soon as they could haul Mark from the farm's financial work over which he struggled to say his farewells, just as soon as they could make themselves ready . . .
Carey was ready now.
"Try it," Dayna suggested, nodding at the nothingness between them. "If it works like I think it will, I'll just hold onto this spell and we'll go."
Carey gave her a doubtful glance, thinking for an instant that he would indeed run right into and then bounce off the shield, much to Dayna's not-so-innocent amusement. But a glance at her face—just a trace of worry, but more excitement than anything—convinced him otherwise. As Suliya drifted to the edge of the aisle, watching with fork in hand, Carey took careful steps forward, not entirely sure he'd know when he passed the invisible boundary into magic.
One moment he was waiting for that first tingle of magic . . . and the next something seemed to burst within him, an agony of heat exploding in his chest—so he could barely see Dayna's alarm, so when he started to say I'm in trouble all he got out was a dazed, "I—" as something inside him gurgled the words and he clutched at the front of his shirt, pulling it as if that would pull off the pain. Dayna rushed in to grab at him, trying to slow his descent as his knees gave way, and by then he was coughing. Deep, wet coughs and when the blood splattered his hands, he only stared, stupefied, unable to think beyond that which somehow tore him apart from the inside.
By then Wheeler joined them and not only kept Carey upright but snapped a few nonsense words over him, roughly hauling him away from Dayna's magic. "I'm sorry," he said, just as roughly. "I thought I'd botched the spell—I didn't know it was just dormant—"
Carey couldn't hear him; Carey couldn't spare the thought to hear any of them, to see any of them. He tore mindlessly at his blood-soaked shirt with his blood-covered hands, clawing at his own chest, bright crimson fluid streaming down his chin as Wheeler finally lowered him to the ground with an entirely unWheeler-like curse and the faintest hint of panic.
Cool Wheeler, upset.
Calm Wheeler, panicked.
Nothing could have scared Carey more.