Keeping Arlen on her black-spined back turned into more of a challenge than Lady had expected—or had ever even experienced. The bareback rides with Carey and Jaime—those had been partnerships, and if a rider's unmitigated seatbones grew hard against her back after a while, the increased communication was worth it.
Arlen had the sharp seatbones, all right . . . but none of the communication, and none of the balance. He wound his fingers in her mane, letting her choose the trail and letting her choose the pace—she mostly gave him a sloppy little jog, something to which he could easily sit but which also kept them moving; she slipped into an easy canter only on the sections of trail she knew to be smooth and level. Not many of those on the shortcuts she took to reach the peacekeepers.
Ramble followed her, back and to the side, and Grunt trailed behind them both—loaded up and wearing his halter, but on his own since immediately after the first time he'd jerked Arlen off Lady's back with his slow response time.
Exhausting, trying to shove herself back under Arlen when his balance wavered. Numbing, to carry someone with so little talk between them, and so many accidental signals—the second time Arlen fell, he'd inadvertently cued Lady to canter and she'd automatically done it.
And at the same time . . . exhilarating, to be the one in charge. No gentle acquiescence to the bit, no soft response to someone else's choices . . . human choices, that Lady now understood would always put human needs above equine needs. Perhaps that was just the natural order of things. Lady—on her own—put equine needs first; as Jess she tried to balance them. Lady under saddle and under halter had always given over her choices to humans. To Carey.
That it even occurred to her to do otherwise made her want to buck and squeal and leap, too full of freedom to keep it inside.
But she didn't. She kept Arlen on her back, she dodged meltdowns in the trail, she picked her way through off-trail detours, and she headed for the peacekeepers' hold. By choice. Because to do otherwise meant Carey's death, and the desire to make her own decisions had nothing to do with her feelings of loyalty as Lady and the almost unbearable worry of the Jess sublimated inside her.
Horse scent tingled in the breeze as they approached the trail fork from Anfeald Hold; she lifted her head, hunting the source. Behind her, Ramble called out his challenge, a great deep bell of a voice with grunts of punctuation no other horse could mistake for anything but a stallion. Several horses answered, and then Lady's ears pricked to Jaime's faint and anxious call. "Arlen!"
Without thinking, Lady picked up her speed, moving into an extended trot that sent Arlen bouncing on her back; reflexively, he clamped his legs to her sides.
With the trail juncture in sight, full of milling horses, bordered by a fading meltdown, Lady broke into a startled canter, a choppy gait full of the contradictions she felt. "O-oh no," Arlen said, his teeth clicking as he bounced; he yanked on her mane, the only thing at hand. "Whoa!"
And then she caught wind of others, her equine senses geared more toward intensity of odor than finesse of identification but still she instantly thought human. In the woods around them, closing on them, but she couldn't think with Arlen thumping and bouncing and grabbing at her. With the sudden downwind rustle of brush, a figure emerged from the camouflage of leaves and dull brush almost at her feet; it was all she could do to keep from shying out from under him.
"Whoa!" Arlen cried, completely unaware of those others, clenching her barrel with his long legs and hauling on her mane. Metal gleamed dully along an astonishingly long blade, and quite abruptly Lady did just as she'd been told, tucking her butt and dropping her head so Arlen flew neatly over her withers, rolling onward and out of reach. The blade flashed down to score her shoulder and she kicked out wildly, catching only the edge of a sleeve as the blade descended again.
Ramble screamed, a stallion's challenge, and knocked her aside, knocked her down—
She wrenched herself aside, trying to avoid Arlen's sprawling figure, trying to avoid the meltdown in progress, well aware that more agents converged upon them.
Armed men and women, ready to turn the hunt into a kill.
"Arlen!" Jaime screamed, her cry of greeting turning to one of horror as the woods seemed to boil with brown-clad agents—only a handful, but how many did it take to kill a man gone head-over-heels off his horse? Lady had saved him with that very tumble, but now he lifted his head from the dirt with a dazed slowness, unable to defend himself; Lady herself hit the ground hard just behind him, legs splayed and thrashing the air as she fought to right herself. Ramble screamed again, this time with pain, and then the man he'd engaged screamed as well—but only for an instant.
"Burnin' poot!" Suliya cried from behind her, almost masking Dayna's equally emphatic curse.
Jaime didn't waste time or breath on curses; she jammed startling heels into her mount's sides and headed across the intersection of trails to Arlen. In the next moment a blur of dark bay movement—Wheeler's horse—blocked her way, shoving her gelding aside with such force that the horse almost went down; Jaime pushed her hands forward to give rein, clutching mane and urging the horse to keep its feet as Wheeler surged ahead into the melee.
"Close up!" Dayna shouted behind her. "Close up, we can use the shield—"
Closing up was just what Jaime had in mind—but now she hesitated, confused by the action as a pack-loaded dark brown gelding trotted by with choppy, anxious steps. Lady struggled back to her feet, blood splashed on her deep sand coat, black mane and tail flying; she spotted an agent heading for Arlen and lunged for him while behind her Ramble struggled to rise, hamstrung so badly one hind leg flopped uselessly with his efforts. Wheeler jammed his horse between Arlen and yet another agent, and would have flung himself off to join the fray if something hadn't hit him in the chest and stuck there, stunning him and stopping him utterly short, a motionless figure in the middle of chaos.
But he'd given Arlen the time to get to his knees, to find Jaime and Dayna and Suliya and shout, "The shield! Get over here!"
"Close up!" Dayna repeated, running her horse into the back of Jaime's.
"But the shield lets people through—" Jaime said, bewildered, still trying to see how many of the enemy were left, if even now someone charged up behind Arlen—
No. They'd have to get through Lady first.
She drove her horse right up to Wheeler's mount, aware he was trying to say something and couldn't, that he didn't look right, and she did a flying dismount, kicking free of the stirrups and flipping out of the saddle to land on her feet, already running to Ramble. The stallion who'd been there at the start of it all, and now couldn't even rise . . . she snatched his flaxen mane and pulled. Pulled hard. "Up, up, up," she cried, giving him something to throw his head against, a counterbalance for his malfunctioning leg. Up he came, stumbling forward, stopping only when she threw her arms around his neck and told him "Whoa, whoa," in the calmest voice she could muster. Close up—
She left him by Wheeler's horse and whirled to find Lady holding off an agent who would have come up on Arlen's back—lightning-fast front leg strikes from a perfect warhorse levade, snaking neck threats, as of yet untouched by the woman with the long knife who looked determined to get past but somewhat taken aback at facing a horse determined to stop her.
Front leg strikes. Jaime blinked, realizing this was a Lady she didn't know . . . a Lady gone on the offensive, not merely defending herself or Arlen. Aggressive. Ears flattened, eyes squinting and focused and hard. Before Jaime could do so much as suggest that the woman back off, the agent lost the considerable odds against her; Lady's hoof hit her collarbone with a crack; the blade hit the ground. And Lady reached out and took that broken shoulder in her teeth to shake the woman like a rag doll and throw her aside.
Then Jaime spotted someone else beyond the woman, a man wisely breaking off his sprint to Arlen, calculating whether he could reach Arlen before Lady reached him.
Jaime knew the answer. So did Lady, who snaked her neck down and trembled with readiness.
The man took an abrupt step backward.
To Jaime's astonishment, Lady leapt for him. "Lady, no!" she cried, lunging forward as if there were something she could actually do to stop the mare.
Lady whirled, as fast, faster, than anything Jaime had ever seen. Poised for action, resenting interference, she turned on Jaime. Appalled at the trickle of fear she felt—fear of Lady—Jaime somehow knew not to order the mare around, not to tell her she was wrong.
To appeal to her as an equal.
"Please," Jaime said. "Please don't, Lady. He's backing off—" And then in desperation she blurted, "We're going to shield; we need you with us—"
Her nostrils flared to their utmost and ears still half-flattened, Lady gave Jaime a hard stare . . . a long stare. When she came out of her fighting stance she did it with such deliberation that Jaime realized it wasn't acquiescence in the least. It was decision.
She found herself shaking in the aftermath.
Lady went straight to Ramble, meeting him nose to nose across the tail of Wheeler's horse and blocking Jaime between Ramble and Wheeler. Unable to reach Arlen, Jaime stood on her tiptoes a few futile times and finally subsided. Arlen was there, somewhere beyond the quarters of Wheeler's horse and the back of Dayna's; he was safe. She shifted to call under the horse's neck. "We're all here!"
"Grunt?" Arlen called back, evoking a moment of utter, baffled silence that even the forest seemed to respect. "Grunt!" Arlen repeated impatiently. "My horse! Does someone have my horse?"
"I have a packhorse," Suliya called back from the other side of the horse-human huddle.
"That's Grunt," Arlen said with relief, and then to Dayna, "Here we go, then—"
The magic flared and stuttered, so strained that even Jaime felt something amiss; she fought to get past Ramble and found herself squeezed up against Wheeler's horse, her hands almost immediately covered in something wet and slick and soaking into the bay's dark coat. Blood. Startled, she glanced up at the slumping agent, finding him lolling much closer to her face than she expected and—catching his gaze—she gasped at his stark complexion and the exquisitely wry look in his eye. Held there, she opened her mouth to say something, except nothing came out. Nothing at all, until Arlen said, "Good job!" in the background and she glanced up to find the shield had stabilized, leaving them inside a bubble with a shifting, oily sheen.
The agents—three of them now—hesitated across the wide intersection of trails, looking to one another as if one of them should be able to identify the effect . . . but no one could.
Of course not, Jaime thought, smugly proud. It was Arlen's magic in test flight and working just as it should.
At least, as far as she could tell.
"Ay!" said Suliya from the other side of Wheeler and the loaded packhorse and Dayna's horse. "Ay!" And she suddenly popped up from under the belly of the packhorse, bumping the nose of Wheeler's bay, quickly soothing the animal as it shifted away, pinning Jaime more firmly between Ramble and the bay. Suliya ended up just inside the bubble, hands on hips, staring out at the men. "Time to get bootin', you think?"
Several of the agents offered an immediate curse at the sight of her; only one of them voiced what they all knew. "Suliya?" It was a stocky woman, and she stepped forward with a long, curving knife in hand but out of guard position. Lady snorted at her; Jaime took it for displeased recognition. The woman said, "Do you know how hard your father's been looking for you?"
"I've been . . . away." Suliya smiled slightly . . . not pleasantly. "Now I'm back. And I'm telling you to go away. Unless you want to harm the daughter the SpellForge head chair has been hunting so hard?"
One of the men gestured roughly at the clump of people and horses behind her; Jaime, soothing Ramble—he trembled with pain, now, and still bled freely—eased her hip free of Wheeler's jabbing deadweight toe and turned so she could see the man's expression more clearly.
Uncertain. And . . . frightened. A big man, a capable man . . . full of muscle and strength. Frightened. With the inflexibility born of that fear, he said, "They can't stop the mangles until we stop everyone who's interfering with their efforts."
"Interfering!" From the center of the clump—and to judge by his voice, still on the ground—Arlen said, "You pliable idiots! How could I have been interfering back when your people accosted me in Payys? That's just an excuse! If they had a fix, they'd have used it already!"
"You planned to interfere," the man said stolidly. "You're here."
"Damn," Arlen muttered, low enough so Jaime could barely hear him. "He's got me pinned on that one."
Suliya, cocking one hip and crossing her arms, said, "My father's had plenty of time to fix the meltdowns. The mangles. It's our turn, now. And did I mention how my father will react if you hurt me?"
"I can burnin' well tell you how he'll react if we fail!"
"Guides," said Suliya, and threw her hands in the air. "I tried," she added over her shoulder. "All right then, here's what's spellin'. This shield protects us from the . . . er, mangles. No magic in here, none at all. We can go right through an active meltdown." She scowled at them, looking every inch the head chair's daughter despite her rumpled condition. "If you won't go away, we'll have to."
"How're you—" the man started.
"Spellstones," said the woman. "I saw him do it before. He'll toss one right into that dying mangle over there and trigger it from where he is. He can do it, he really can—"
"Actually," Arlen said, quite modestly and still totally obscured from Jaime's sight, "I have a whole handful. Twelve or so—"
"More like twenty," Dayna said.
"There's another thing," Jaime said, startling them all; she didn't think they'd even noticed her until this moment. "Anfeald couriers are already spreading the word about the permalight spells. SpellForge doesn't have any secrets anymore."
Wheeler spat blood between the horses and pushed himself upright enough that Jaime could clearly see the knife hilt emerging from his chest, quivering with every movement he made, every word he formed. "I wouldn't be here if SpellForge was running us true," he said, barely loud enough to be heard. "My partner died for their lies. You will, too."
"Wheeler," said the man flatly, the threat inherent. "I thought that was you. If you weren't already—"
"Shut up!" Suliya cried, so fiercely that Jaime made an instinctive movement to grab her arm—and realized she was still trapped behind Ramble's trembling, drooping form, one she'd duck under if she weren't afraid he might actually fall on her.
But Suliya stayed within the shield on her own, coming up short at its boundary—though her back tightened at Wheeler's harsh, short laugh.
"Whatever happens to me, I dealt true," he said. "And I didn't close my eyes to SpellForge lies just because I was afraid of the head chair or FreeCast."
Lady snorted, her alarm drawing Jaime from the male agent's anger; she thought at first one of the other agents might be closing on them, creeping along the edge of the meltdown at their backs to come through a shield that was meant to keep only magic out. But the woman agent's eyes widened. "Mangle!" she said, turning on them with fury. "You didn't need to—we haven't—"
"I didn't," Arlen said, trepidation filling his voice.
Jaime jerked around to see it coming, a roil of movement like a tidal wave through the woods; without thinking, she clutched Wheeler's leg, terrified beyond thought in spite of their shield—their untried shield—
exploding trees and screaming rocks and twisted birds and the smell—
She closed her eyes and covered her head and screamed, unheard even to her own ears. Ramble staggered and went down; Wheeler's horse took a hit of some kind, jostling Jaime to her knees and making her suddenly aware there was as much danger within the shield as out if the horses panicked. She crawled blindly up against Ramble's side, using his bulk for protection—cracking her eyes open once but only for an instant, unable to bear the turmoil of warping reality and still—she knew only because she felt it in her throat—screaming. So caught up in the here and now of the horror that here meant everywhere and now meant forever.
Except eventually it stopped, or at least died away to near completion, with little roiling meltdowns still active in the main body of the destruction around them. She'd run out of scream; she crouched panting by Ramble, her face up against his golden coat; when he groaned she felt it through the skin of her cheek. Stop it, she told herself when she realized her teeth were chattering.
They didn't.
She looked anyway . . . she found they'd all gone down, all but the horses, although Lady, too, was on her knees. Dayna's horse was gone; Wheeler's stood crowded up against the edge of the bubble with Grunt and the others, crouched and quivering, ready to explode into flight at the first excuse. Wheeler himself had fallen off and lay twisted on the ground at Ramble's head, the knife jutting obscenely into the air from his chest. Suliya, her wet cheeks marked with fear, crawled toward him. Arlen raised his head, still wearing his ridiculous floppy hat; he'd thrown himself over Dayna, as if it would have done any good had the shield failed.
And behind Jaime was the woman agent, the one Lady had recognized. She'd dropped her weapon along the way, but she'd somehow made it into the bubble of safety before the meltdown rolled over them.
Still on her knees, Lady saw the woman, gave a startled huff. An offended huff. Her ears flattened; she heaved herself to all fours and as the woman looked up, as dazed as any of them, she still knew well enough to be alarmed.
"Lady, no," Suliya said, her voice full of impatience, the reprimand of human to horse; she held Wheeler's hand, and she glanced at Lady in only a peremptory way.
"Don't do that," Jaime said sharply. "None of you. I don't know what happened between you all in Ohio, but I know what I saw when she finally made it back to Anfeald. She's not the same—not as Jess or Lady."
Dayna said nothing. Dayna knew what had happened. And so did Suliya, to judge by her face.
"She may not know all of our words, she may not think like us . . . but you'd best speak to her as though she does. She's got opinions and rights. Give her the courtesy you'd give anyone else."
"It worked for me," Arlen said. "But then, I talk to Grunt the same way. Which, come to think of it, didn't work nearly as well. Poor old Grunt."
And Lady's ears had come up. She ignored the woman; she came to Jaime instead, snuffling her face, running her whiskers along Jaime's skin and in the end, lipping at her hair, her expression suddenly soft.
"You're welcome," Jaime said quietly. And then, since no one else had done it, she turned to the newcomer, finding her as still and quiet as one substantially sturdy woman could be among the enemy. "Too late," Jaime told her. "We know you're there. Now come over here and stop this horse from bleeding. I don't care if you use every item of clothing on your body—get it done."
The woman glanced out on the meltdown, and then at the perfectly normal ground beneath them . . . and then at those she had called enemy only short moments before.
She began to undress.
She removed her jacket and then the knit fiber plainshirt—as close as Camolen clothing got to the T-shirt—below, replacing the jacket over the underclothes that remained. "It's an action shirt," she said. "It's got some healing properties. Dunno if they'll work again once we get out of this shield—"
They had better. Jaime didn't know how they handled horses in Camolen who had only three legs. She glanced at Wheeler and then Arlen and then back, finding Lady had taken up a watch over the woman. Good. Out of her hands for now. But Wheeler . . .
Thanks to Suliya, Wheeler wasn't quite as twisted as he had been, but he was just as dying. Again he caught Jaime's eye; again she found herself snared there, unable to look away until he did, and when he did, she followed his gaze. Out to the unsettled meltdown that surrounded them—and then back to her.
She followed his thought just as easily. No magic in here, in the shield . . . but they couldn't afford to drop it, and it would be suicide to take him out of it and attempt a spell in the middle of the biggest meltdown she'd ever seen.
There was nothing they could do for him.
"I'm sorry," Jaime said.
"Me too," he said, barely getting the words out; she moved closer, shoulder to shoulder with Suliya, who still held his hand.
She said fiercely, "I'll make sure my father knows it was you who saved Arlen."
Faint as it was, his grin held dark amusement. "All I could ask for," he said, not much in the way of sound behind his words.
Jaime closed her eyes a moment, overwhelmed, and when she opened them, Wheeler's sharply perceptive gaze had gone distant and still. Suliya placed his hand on his chest, but continued to stroke his hair, confusion laced into her somber expression. He'd been her enemy, her father's tool . . . and he'd ended up a hero.
Nothing Jaime could do.
But there, finally getting up to his knees, still wearing that hat, was Arlen. Someone she wanted in her hands, and badly. Someone she'd never quite believed to be dead even if events and circumstances and the people around her had hammered her with the fact over and over and over again. "Arlen," she said, and he gave her a grin. Somewhat chagrined, a little embarrassed, and a lot more little boy delight than she'd seen in a long time.
At that she couldn't stop herself. "Arlen!" she said, and launched herself behind Suliya's back with such zeal that they both tumbled back to the ground, where she kissed him with enough enthusiasm that Dayna eventually started clapping, her droll tone somehow coming through in the calculated timing of the clap . . . clap . . . clap.
"Shut up!" Jaime said, tearing herself away for just an instant. "I'm not through!"
"She's not through," Arlen said with mock irritation.
"But—what happened to your face?" Jaime asked, suddenly aware of his reddened skin. "And where's your mustache? And where'd you get that hat?"
Arlen propped himself up on his elbows, giving Dayna a sorrowful look. "You let her get distracted. I'll remember that."
"I'll never be distracted," Jaime said. "You came back. Every time someone walked through the workroom door, I expected it to be you. Every time I heard a footstep in the hall, I thought it would be you. I knew—"
"And you were right." He pulled her in for a satisfied kiss, but she pulled right back away.
"You don't understand." She shook her head, put a hand over the empty spot that had lurked inside her since she'd started her very first vigil for someone who could never come back. An empty spot . . . empty no more. "You came back."
"I'll show you what I understand," he said.
After a moment, Dayna started clapping again, and when they both turned to glare at her, she said, "Ahem. Meltdowns? Light spells? Peacekeepers?"
"We can't all make it to the peacekeepers," Suliya said, still staring down at Wheeler. "Not Ramble . . . and we're missing your horse."
With utmost reluctance, Jaime put a few more inches between Arlen and herself. She said, "You're right. We need to get Ramble back to the hold—and whoever goes to handle him will need a wizard along for the shielding."
"Look!" Dayna said, pointing at the ground. She moved the shield boundary a few inches, out onto warped ground with arrow-sharp crystals extruding sideways from what might have been rock. Within the shield, the crystals crumbled into the finest dust, a confectioner's powder of metallic earth. "Reclamation!"
"That's a start," Jaime said, smiling at Dayna's excitement.
"I'll go back," Suliya said abruptly.
They all looked at her, all but Arlen, who'd taken to gazing at the destruction around them. The peacekeeper run was the glory mission, not taking wounded heros home.
She shrugged. "Arlen should be with the peacekeeper group. If I go with him, then Jaime's got to take Ramble with Dayna. Doesn't seem too bootin' right, does it? Splitting you two up again so soon. Don't suppose I'd impress anyone if I insisted on that."
Jaime gave her an uncontrollably big grin. "No," she said, reaching out for Arlen's hand.
But the glance he gave her was distracted, and an instant later he was looking out at the meltdown again. "I keep seeing what it looked like, when it rolled over us," he said. "The last thing the rest of the Council—"
"Don't think of it," she said fiercely.
He gave her a look of mild surprise. "I'll always think of it."