Changespell Legacy (2 page)

Carey's girlfriend, that was why.

Carey's girlfriend, who'd decided to move from Kymmet Stables to Anfeald, arriving only a moon's span after Suliya herself and yet automatically slotted as a senior rider, with authority over Suliya and almost everyone else there. If it weren't for Jess, Suliya was certain she'd have been moved up from her starter position to something more meaningful, maybe even to a junior courier. But Jess had arrived, taking on the training of the young horses, taking on the occasional run, making Suliya more of a backup rider than anything else.

And leaving her sweeping the aisles.

The sound of raucous laughter echoed down the hall from the job room at the back of the stall aisle; four of the couriers were back for the day, drinking hot tea and warming themselves over exaggerations of their past exploits. Envy tugged at Suliya, but she couldn't blame them for her situation. They'd all been here before her, some of them since the summer Carey was hurt and everyone else had been killed.

Still . . .

She wished she didn't feel so left out. Or that she even knew how to join in.

At that choice moment, one of the massive front doors eased open, making way before the rising night wind. "Ay!" Suliya exclaimed, jumping to get her broom placed over the pile of sweepings—but not quickly enough. As a dun mare walked into the stable, the swept hay scattered along the length of the aisle and settled back into the corners from which it had come. A lone dun mare, elegant even in her winter coat, ice on her whiskers and fetlocks, ice weighting the end of her tail, and a unique harness carrying a bulging courier's pouch just behind her withers.

Carey's girlfriend.

Suliya glared at the mare unnoticed as she ran to shut the door, securing it with its own weight behind the slight bump in the floor. The dun—Lady, they called her, when she was her horse self—stopped in the middle of the aisle, shook vigorously, and lifted her head with perked ears to scent the air.

"He's not here," Suliya said brusquely, taking a hank of the dun's mane up behind her ears and giving a slight tug. Lady's spellstones clinked dully there, sewn into several braids. With them, she could return to the woman Jess, but not here in the middle of the aisle. There was a special stall set aside, where Jess kept a change of clothes and which Anfeald used as a mid-aisle storage stall.

Lady hesitated—not surprisingly, since they'd moved the stall only days earlier, swapping it out with another to separate two horses who'd taken to kicking at each other. But Suliya tugged again, perhaps not as gently as she might have, and Lady followed her—right into the wrong stall.

Suliya realized it immediately. But something wicked spoke within her, something tied to her resentments and envy. She slid the stall door closed without latching it and went back to her sweeping. Let Lady change to Jess and ask for clothing—when Suliya brought it, maybe Jess would notice that Suliya existed in the first place.

After a moment, Lady sorted out the situation—wrong stall, no clothing waiting here—and gave a short, sharp snort of annoyed objection. In another moment, she changed. Suliya couldn't feel the magic—few of the couriers had that kind of sensitivity—but she heard a difference in the way the stall bedding rustled, and knew it had been done. She dumped her recaptured hay sweepings into the waste bin, listening, ready to grab up some clothes.

After a long, considering silence, the door slid open; Suliya turned to see Jess step out into the aisle without a stitch of clothing, the courier harness dangling from one hand. Barefooted on the cold cobbles, she gave no sign of discomfort—or embarrassment—as she headed for the correct door, two stalls down. She appeared not to notice Suliya's near-gaping consternation, nor the appearance and startled reaction of two grooms from a stall at the far end where they'd been releveling the floor.

She carried herself with absent dignity, and she was beautiful—long lean legs and flanks, erect carriage, masses of dark sand hair spilling down her back with a strikingly black centerline the longest section of all and echoed in a faint dark line down her spine. Suliya was struck by the feeling that this was the first time she'd actually—truly—seen the woman. Seen that she was so human . . . and so obviously not.

As Suliya stood frozen with the broom in her hands, she heard Carey's cheerfully teasing call to the two grooms—coming from within the hold, he could see nothing but their stupefied expressions. He walked around the corner into the aisle just in time to see Jess disappear into her stall. Even from the middle of the aisle, Suliya could see his eyebrows shoot up to disappear behind the uncontrolled fall of his dark blond forelock. Without hesitation, he came on.

For a moment, Suliya held out the hope that he'd aimed himself for Jess . . . but a few strides told her otherwise. Slightly uneven strides, another leftover from the summer that had torn through these stables, but otherwise the perfect image of a courier rider. Tall enough and substantial enough to hold the strength for rough, long rides, lean enough to keep unnecessary weight off the horses' backs. And experienced enough to run Anfeald Stables in spite of his relative youth—Morley, head of the Siccawei Stables, was nearly fifty. Carey struck Suliya as a hard thirty.

Suliya, at just under twenty, intended to be running her own stable by his age as well. Or earlier.

But as he approached, she winced inside; thinking of his reputation, the things that had gained him this post several years earlier. Uncompromising standards. An eye for detail. And the willingness to do what had to be done, no matter what it was, to accomplish the job before him—be it delivering a message or saving Arlen's life.

He wasn't likely to offer quarter to the lowliest of his couriers.

Then again, she'd only made a mistake.

"What," he said, bemused as he nodded at Jess's stall, "was that all about?"

Poot! Fess up. Fess up
now
.
"I must have put Lady in the wrong stall. We just changed them—"

He gave her a look, one that expressed his protective annoyance—but he didn't berate her for leaving Jess to walk naked from one stall to another. Then again, he knew Jess best. Maybe
he
would have anticipated her decision to stroll from one stall to the other. Suliya certainly hadn't.

Carey turned for the stall, but stopped as Jess emerged from it, clothed from head to toe in winter layers—a deep green tall-neck weave under a brilliant turquoise, magic-hued sweater, the color offsetting the natural permanently tanned shade of her skin to perfection. Her hair was still wind-tossed, her cheeks still flushed, and the courier harness now settled over her shoulder like a natural extension of her clothes.

She stopped once to wriggle a foot more comfortably into its ankle boot; she often fussed with her shoes, and just as often went barefoot within the warmth of the hold itself.

"What happened to that famous horse's memory of yours?" Carey said, his voice teasing as he held out a hand for the harness. "And how was the run?"

Jess shrugged the harness off her shoulder and handed it to him. "This is my first time since the stalls changed," she said, glancing at Suliya with larger-than-normal walnut brown eyes. More perceptive than normal, too, it seemed to Suliya at that moment. She tossed her head in a minute gesture, one Suliya had seen often in the mares at paddock. "You," she said, "will not take advantage of my nature as Lady."

"I don't understand," Suliya said, afraid that she did. She abruptly and sincerely regretted the wicked impulse that had allowed her to close the wrong stall door and walk away, for she wasn't accustomed to any of it—the envy, the bitterness, the impulses—if she had been, she'd have had a quick covering comment at the ready.

Suliya didn't. For Suliya was simply too accustomed to doing as she pleased without being called on it—or caring if she was.

"You
do
understand," Jess said. Despite almost two years of human experience, she still handled the junction of vowel and consonant with an awkwardness of tongue—never quite stumbling over the words, but often giving the impression she might. "Going to the stall may have been a mistake. Closing the door wasn't. If I had been human, I could have hesitated at the stall without breaking rules. I could have refused to go in. I could have pushed my way out before you closed the door. When I am a horse, Carey's people trust me to do none of those things. And I trust them to treat me honestly." Her eye flashed annoyance. "If you cannot do that, you will not handle me as Lady again."

Carey's hands paused at the courier pouch fastener. "Braveheart—it was a mistake."

Jess didn't reply . . . but she didn't remove her gaze from Suliya's.

It wasn't a gaze Suliya could hold, not when she realized she'd done more with her simple impulse than put a woman in the position of asking for her clothes. She'd broken a trust. And from a horse's point of view, trust was everything. She dropped her gaze to the gleam of the cobbles. "I'll make sure it never happens again," she said, struggling with unfamiliar capitulation.

In response, Jess merely said, "Yes," and somehow managed to encompass a plethora of unsaid words.

Carey cleared his throat, taking Jess's unwavering gaze from Suliya; Suliya couldn't stop a sigh of relief.

"And how," Carey said, "was the run?"

Jess said, "You are changing the subject."

He grinned, unrepentant; he had a lean face and a long jaw, prone to intensity and sternness of expression; the grin turned it light, turned him from someone who often intimidated Suliya into the man with whom she often saw the other couriers joking. "I'm changing the subject," he agreed, his words no more repentant than his grin.

Jess lifted a shoulder, dropped it in the slightest shrug. "Siccawei was right—part of the riverbank caved in. I couldn't have made it with a rider on my back."
Neither could any other horse
, she meant.

Burnin' poot wrong.
Suliya clamped her mouth down on the words. If
she'd
been the rider—and she would have been, had Jess not intervened—she was certain she could have made it. The run to Siccawei was a tough one in bad weather, but most of the couriers made more of it than it was. And in this case, the run had been to a small new sub-hold that Sherra had established to let some of her apprentices explore—
carefully
—the use of raw magic. Out between Siccawei Hold and Anfeald, making the run shorter than normal; easier than normal. Carey often used it as a drop-off for less time-dependent documents.

"That bad?" Carey said, flipping through the papers from the pouch. He glanced at Suliya and she pulled her thoughts from her face.

"Bad," Jess said. "Arlen should tell Sherra we can't make any more runs until a road team fixes it."

"Bad, then," Carey agreed.

"If a road team goes out there, maybe they can do something spellin' about the whole thing," Suliya said, referring to the dangerous part of the dry riverbank, where it narrowed to a rough path skirting the river.

"Some kind of bridge or something, so we don't have to go around."

Jess looked at her with honest shock. "That would take away the fun of it!"

"Fun?" Carey said, and grinned again. "Don't know that I'd call it
that
, Jess. Not for the rest of us. But there is a certain . . . challenge. A nice change of pace."

Suliya looked away, wishing she'd just kept silent . . . and thinking it still seemed like a good idea.

"Dayna is well," Jess said suddenly, and smiled. "She is rolling her eyes about how timid the others are."

Carey snorted. "I think they're just there to slow her down—Sherra's no dummy. Dayna doesn't have the advantage of growing up with her parents whispering the horrors of raw magic in her ears."

"Disadvantage?" Jess said, frowning.

"Advantage," Carey said firmly. "She's never been frightened away from using it." He jammed the papers back into the pouch and tucked the tangle of leather under his arm to hold the other hand out to Jess.

"C'mon. Natt and Cesna are waiting for these, as little as they'll be able to do with them until Arlen gets back from the Council gathering. And Jaime's coming early tomorrow—you wanted to make sure the housekeeper had things set to rights in Arlen's rooms, didn't you?"

Jess stood visibly straighter at the mention of Jaime's arrival, brushing hay off her sweater as though Jaime were arriving any moment. One hand found her hair; she made a face. "Groom this?"

Carey laughed. "C'mon. You might just talk me into it." His open hand still waited; he wiggled the fingers.

Jess took the hand, and bumped her hip against his in a teasing way—but gently, as if ever aware of his old injuries. Carey lifted their joined hands to Suliya by way of a parting gesture, and she stood in the middle of the aisle with her broom, watching them head for the job room, heads tipping slightly closer as Jess murmured something that made Carey laugh out loud. "Later," he said, as if he'd grown used to and easy with some of the outrageous things Jess could say.

Suliya and her burnin' broom and her bitter envy. She could have made that run, she knew it; she was rife with knowing it. She could be one of them. But she wasn't sure they'd ever give her the chance.

In a northern precinct of Camolen, frigid water lapping the edge of a lake suddenly becomes solid, and then grows tiny, brittle stalagmites that weave together and spire toward the sky. Just over the Lorakans, along an ancient trade road into Solvany, solid rock dribbles down along the side of the craggy mountain, revealing a hibernating burrowdog just long enough for melting rock above to impale and merge with it, killing it in its sleep.

South of Anfeald, a road team scout heads for the unexpected mud slide by the dry riverbed and never makes it. His partner returns with a babbled story about swirling leaves, melting trees, the hind parts of a ground squirrel sticking out of solid once-dirt, and of a man lost to the astonishing explosion of a nearby bush, wood turned to sharp-edged metallic shrapnel.