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Chapter 8

Lady smelled the death long before they reached it.

Smelled it and tasted it and felt the fear of it trickle through her withers and stiffen her back. Not death precisely . . . a wrongness with death twisted in. She tensed, jigging along the path with her neck raising, very little of the Jess-self present. A better understanding of speech, without the conceptual ability to process its complexity. A memory of her goals—return to Carey. An awareness of her alter-life, and an ability to return to it when she was ready. But for now . . . she was Lady. A smart, honest horse, straightforward in thought and action and just as wary of wrongness as any other horse, just as concerned. Just as needy for her rider's support.

Suliya, feeling Lady's gaits shorten, clamped down on the reins, tightening her thighs around Lady's barrel. Lady knew better, she knew she wasn't trapped by those reins, by the unpleasant pressure on her tongue from this thick, unfamiliar bit . . . but anxiety tumbled in on top of wary tension. Ramble, his deep gold color hidden beneath a lighter winter coat, pale mane and tail floating in pampered thickness, tread close on her heels—crowding her, scenting her . . . occasionally snaking his neck as if to herd her, just as often nickering an invitation to admire his magnificence. Too preoccupied with Lady's presence to care about the inexperienced rider clinging to his saddle, and not yet caring about the wrongness they approached.

A small covey of wood grouse burst into flight from the path-side brush; already anxious, Lady startled—not nearly as much as she wanted to, ever aware of her bareback rider. Still the bit jerked in her mouth—run from it—legs clamped around her barrel—run from it—and her rider's fearful stiffness pervaded Lady—run from it! 

She didn't. Legs spraddled, head flung high . . . she didn't.

Bolting was against Carey's Rules.

After a long moment, Suliya began to breathe again, probably never supposing that Lady could tell she wasn't, and that her failure to do so frightened Lady as much as anything. Her head still flung up against the pull of the reins, Lady nevertheless relaxed a fraction.

Dayna said dryly, "Maybe we should walk the rest of the way to the damaged area."

"She knows better," Suliya said, frustration pushing the breathless tension in her voice.

"I've never," Dayna said, dismounting the palomino with a little stagger, "seen anyone pull on her mouth like that before. I don't mean the staying on part, I mean before it. And after. Don't think Jess won't remember when she changes back. Hell, that's why I'm not riding her in the first place."

"She—" Suliya said, and stopped; after a moment, the discomfort of the bit eased, and Lady, reassured by Dayna's matter-of-fact behavior, lowered her head to huff a breath at the bush where the grouse had been.

"They're gone," Dayna said, and gave her a pat on the neck. Suliya threw a leg over Lady's rump and slid down to land beside her, and Lady lowered her head far enough to give a relieved, mane-flapping shake.

But she didn't relax completely. Not with the wrongness ahead, and Dayna leading the palomino toward it.

Then Dayna, too, stopped short. "Burning hells," she said, her voice full of intricate human feeling. Surprise and fear and awe; Lady recognized them all, and her ears flicked forward and back in independent succession, listening to Dayna, listening for danger.

"What is it?" Suliya flipped the reins over Lady's head, giving them an absent tug before Lady had a chance to step out politely on her own, not noticing Lady's offended hard, round chin. Oh, yes, she would remember.

"It's outside the null wards," Dayna said. "It got through the null wards!" She stopped short, the palomino snorting wariness behind her shoulder.

"Maybe they missed a spot," Suliya said, coming up beside Dayna and the stud and at the last minute thinking to put herself between them, creating plenty of personal space for both horses. Lady, too, snorted at the ground before them, bringing her head up in an attempt to focus on it, to make sense of it; the offensive and alarming smell was stronger than ever.

"Not they," Dayna said pointedly. "I was one of two wizards who set these wards. I know damn well we had this area contained. There's no way—"

But she stopped short, and after a moment said more quietly, "I guess there is a way, whatever it is. The damage either cropped up outside the original area, or it came right through the ward. I could probably tell, if I got close enough—"

"No!" Suliya said, and Lady backed up at the volume of it, too unsettled by sights she literally couldn't comprehend and smells that meant danger to any animal on hooves.

Dayna laughed with no amusement whatsoever. "No kidding. It's not worth the risk, not when the Council wizards will see it tomorrow anyway. I say let's give this whole . . . meltdown . . . a very wide detour. The horses don't want anything to do with it, and I don't want to be on either of them when they're acting this way."

Suliya glanced at Lady's bare back, giving it a rueful pat. "Not bareback on this one. She's . . . more sensitive than other horses I've ridden."

"She warned you," Dayna said, most practical as she turned the palomino around, hunting the woods for something to stand on just so she could reach the stirrup. "Carey's a head courier with the reputation for the best training stable in Camolen, and Jaime rides the highest levels of competition at home. You might be good—it's not like I know enough to really tell—but you're not that good."

Suliya said nothing . . . but Lady knew resistant body language when she saw it.

Arlen, bedecked in a faded orange knit sweater that made him wince even though his jackets obscured it from the public eye, his hair shorn close to the nape of his neck and the short thickness of it absurdly refusing to lie flat at a forehead cowlick he'd forgotten he had, tucked his new luggage—bulging saddlebags—under his knees and tried to keep those knees from straying into the seat space of the tired-looking man opposite him.

Anything to get home.

They'd grunted acknowledgment of one another upon embarking, and muttered a few polite words about the weather (sparkling clear); the roads (not as kept as a coach route should be); and the inconvenience of the service failures.

"Family expected me home two days ago," the man said, annoyed but resigned. "The Council never thinks of the inconvenience to the rest of us when it pulls something like this. Insignificant, that's us."

Fool! Arlen wanted to say. Can't you tell something horrible has happened? Is happening? Instead he rubbed a finger over the smooth and sensitive area his mustache used to cover and said, "Mmm."

"My sister is probably worried spelless," said the tidily arrayed woman sitting beside Arlen. She shifted slightly, and the coach's permalight caught the glint of her hand jewels; she fussed at one of them in a fitful gesture. "But surely she'll figure out I had to take a road coach."

And then there was Jaime, who must believe that Arlen had been in the middle of whatever conflagration had taken place—especially after so long with no word. He'd almost reached her the evening before, he was sure of it. And as careful as he'd have to be about using magic—about splashing his signature around where other sensitives could recognize it, revealing his presence before he'd figured out what had happened, what was happening, and how to respond to it—he knew he'd try again this evening. He'd try, and he'd keep on trying until he was close enough to cross the distance between them, or until she somehow recognized his far-off touch and made the hint of response of which she was able—and which would make all the difference in the world.

"How about you?" the woman asked him, her raised voice indicating it hadn't been the first time she'd tried to get his attention. "Do you have family expecting you?"

"Hmm?" he said, coming back from his thoughts. Jaime. Carey. Jess. His family. The people most associated with Arlen the wizard. He gave her a vague smile and a short, disinterested shake of his head. "No," he said. "No one."

I'm on my way, Jaime. Whatever's happening, hold on. 

On a small farm in eastern Camolen, beyond the boundaries of Sallatier Precinct and within a craggy area so sparsely populated its namesake wizard hasn't the skills to earn a place on primary or secondary councils, reality twists. A young boy hunts his family's hardy wool-producing goats . . . and eventually, he finds them.

What's left of them.

Suliya slid from Lady's warm back with a groan, shoving open the heavy stable door at Anfeald. Dayna, too, dismounted, although the doors were plenty tall enough to encompass a horse and rider without threatening the rider's head.

Dayna and the palomino were definitely ready to part ways. Even as Suliya leaned her shoulder into the door, she caught the sly movement of the stallion's lips, and managed to convey the short and weary warning of "Teeth!" before things went too far.

Bless the warmth of the stable, its cobbled aisle and big square stalls. Not indoors-warm, but out of the wind and heated with the welcoming scent of horseflesh. Suliya directed Dayna to an empty guest stall—"Just throw him in there. Pull the bridle if you can, and I'll come grab his saddle"—and hesitated before Jess's changing stall, easing the bit from the mare's mouth and giving her an automatic pat on the neck.

She'd never have thought it would take so long to get here, not even using the ride-around for both the damaged area and the mudslide along the riverbank. But then, she'd never considered just how much she relied on her stirrups to ride such terrain. It had been just as hard on the mare, she knew—not that she'd ever admit just how many times Lady had made a sudden shift of weight or speed to keep Suliya on her back. She didn't even have the energy left to note which horses were out, which couriers had returned. Carey wasn't in evidence, but she expected he'd show up quickly enough. Word spread fast when riders he'd been waiting for returned, and the wheelbarrow sitting in the aisle was indication enough that someone had already left his or her job to do just that.

She looped the borrowed bridle over her shoulder and grabbed a halter to use with the stallion; with another horse, especially a tired horse, she might unsaddle the animal loose in the stall, but obviously not even the day's ride had taken the wander out of the palomino's lips.

Dayna waited outside the stall with the bridle, holding it with a puzzled look on her face—as well she might, for she'd unbuckled it in the wrong places and now it was only a tangle of leather pieces. She accepted Lady's bridle without a word, leaving Suliya's hands as free as possible. Suliya tied the stallion short, and left him that way until she was ready to leave, the double saddlebags—hers and Jess's—piled outside the door and the saddle balancing on her hip. "We need to make sure he gets a good grooming," she said. "And we need to get an orange lock spelled in his mane as soon as possible. Can you—?"

Dayna lifted a questioning eyebrow, her face badly wind-flushed, her layered sandy hair pulling out of its tieback.

"It means he bites," Suliya said wryly, pulling the halter off and slipping out the door with no time lost.

Dayna shook her head. "Specialty spell," she said. "Probably one of those easy ones that doesn't take a wizard—you just have to know the spell. I don't."

Jess came up the aisle toward them, moving at somewhat less than her usual energetic pace, her hair in need of a brushing. She stopped next to Dayna and turned her rich brown, too-large eyes on Suliya for a long moment.

Suliya, flushing, felt the sudden urge to say, I wouldn't have pulled if you hadn't been bouncing around like a three-year-old! and somehow found the necessary restraint to not. Right or wrong, protesting would only bring the incident to Carey's attention. Then Jess released a long sigh, fluttering it slightly through her lips just as a horse might do. She said, "I know the spell," and went into the stall. She hesitated a moment an arm's length from the horse, waiting for some invisible—to Suliya—signal accepting her approach, and laid four quiet fingers on the horse's crest.

After a moment, bright orange color crept down the flaxen mane, a streak for each finger.

"Four streaks," Dayna said. "I take it that's pretty bad."

Jess retreated from the stall and latched the sliding door closed behind her. "It means to always watch, yes." She bent to retrieve the saddlebags, and abandoned them just as quickly, straightening to head for the cross-aisle at the back of the stable with most of her usual spring returned to her step.

"Carey," Dayna said with satisfaction, just before Carey rounded the corner.

"How'd she—" Suliya started.

"His step, I think." Dayna watched with a small, tired smile as Jess reached him, but it faded when Carey opened his arms and wrapped Jess up in a long embrace, pulling back to wipe some imagined smudge from her cheek and smooth her wayward dun hair. He had a habit of trailing his hand down the dark central stripe of it; he did it now.

"What's wrong?" Suliya asked as Dayna's expression changed. She was more used to seeing Jess as the emotive one, Jess taking Carey's hand or moving in close to him, but Dayna's concern seemed out of place.

Or maybe not. "It's just . . ." Dayna muttered, watching the two more closely, "He's not like that. I mean, something's wrong." And then she snorted, loud enough to draw Carey's brief gaze even as he and Jess exchanged quick words. "Well, obviously something's wrong. But I mean . . . something since he last saw her."

"You know them that well then, ay?" Suliya said, giving Dayna herself a closer look. A small woman, lightly boned, slightly built. Close to boyish in figure—she'd have made a good courier, if she'd had a little more strength. Though from what Suliya had gathered at Second Siccawei, Dayna had strength aplenty when it came to magic—even if there was something not quite right about it, making people acquire the same kind of expression they might when talking about one of her own bastard step-siblings.

Dayna snorted again. Small she might be, but subtle she was not. "You learn a lot about people when you go through hell with them."

At that, Jess cast an anxious look back at them—or maybe at the palomino, Suliya wasn't sure—and then, surprisingly, took off down the hall that led into the hold. Suliya and Dayna exchanged a glance, and then as Suliya shifted the saddle to a better hold, Dayna moved up to meet Carey as he came toward them.

"Dayna," he said, a greeting full of unspoken words that Suliya couldn't decipher. None of the tenderness he showed with Jess, but a certain kind of respect.

"What's happening?" Dayna asked, also bypassing normal greetings as she nodded at the spot where Jess had been.

"Jaime's sick," Carey said. "Yesterday evening, too. I think . . . well, Simney can't tell what's going on, but says it's not anything dire. But Jaime's pretty miserable, and you know Jess . . ."

Dayna nodded. "I'll wait," she said. "See if she feels better later."

"She did, last night," Carey said by way of agreement. He reached for Suliya, who gave him a moment of blank-faced confusion before handing over the saddle and collecting the saddlebags. Carey gave Dayna a somewhat grimmer look. "We've got a lot to talk about."

"We certainly do," Dayna said. "I take it Jess mentioned that the new Council is blowing off my observations about the . . . incident."

He gave her a fleeting grin as they headed for the tack room. "Blowing off. Expression left over from Ohio?"

"Yes. And did she mention the stallion? Why we brought him?"

He led the way into the tack room, settling the saddle over the top of another on its rack and dropping the saddle cloth into a hamper of similarly dirty horse blankets; rows of empty saddle racks lined the wall, and he took the bridle from Dayna to place it on an unassigned bridle hook on the adjoining wall. Thigh-high equipment trunks lined each wall beneath the racks and hooks of carefully cleaned leather accouterments—cruppers, chest bands, courier bags, hobbles—although as with the saddles and bridles, most of the spots were empty, the walls bare. "Why you brought him?" Seemingly without even looking, he took Jess's saddlebags from Suliya, leaving her her own. "It was the only way for you to get here, she said—something Garvin and I will deal with later—"

Impatiently, Dayna said, "I'd have waited another day to catch a different ride, if that was the only reason. But Jess said it best—he's the only one who saw what happened to the Council. The only one who lived through it. The only one who can tell us—"

"Tell you!" Suliya said, drawing both their startled attentions her way. She shifted under Dayna's sky blue gaze and Carey's appraising expression, but Dayna quickly picked up the conversation where she'd left it.

"If we can use a changespell . . ."

Carey gave a quick shake of his head. "It's checkspelled. You know that. You burning well ought to, after last summer!"

She shrugged. "There's raw magic—"

"That's crazy!" Suliya said. In her mind's eye she saw the development wizards at SpellForge, testing spell formulas, going over every element; more times than she could remember, they'd given her derisive warnings about the use of raw magic. How dangerous it was, how unpredictable, how horrible the consequences.

Dayna gave her a wicked little grin; Suliya hadn't seen that gleam in her eye before, and she wasn't sure she liked it now. "What do you think I do?" she said. "What do you think Second Siccawei is all about?"

"I grew up wandering the halls of SpellForge," Suliya said, taking a step back from Dayna but shaking her head with each word. "Raw magic is a fool's tool—and anyone who sticks around to watch is a fool, too!"

"You two get along well together, I see," Carey said dryly. "Ease off, Suliya. As it happens, I agree with you in this case—but it just might be that there's more to the world than you know."

"You don't think I can do it," Dayna said to him. "I expected more of you, after what you've seen."

"I've got an entire hold to think about," Carey said, and Suliya realized to her horror that he was truly tempted to let Dayna try. "And what I think is that we have too much at stake to make the wrong decision right now."

Dayna took his words in silence, a narrow-eyed kind of silence that looked like a thoughtful marshalling of more argument.

A sudden clap of sound rocked the stable; as one, they ducked, crouching close to the floor. Carey recovered first, bolting for the stalls; Dayna muttered a nonsensical phrase that sounded like, "Good God," and then very definitely, "Does this sort of thing always go on, or is it only when I'm here?" and then she, too, was out the door.

Suliya followed, but at the head of the long stall aisle, stopped to gape. Snow floated in the air, more thickly over the middle section, snow from nowhere. The air bit at her lungs and nose with a singed dryness, completely at odds with the existence of snow.

Carey glanced at the falling flakes, raked his gaze along the stalls, and finally snapped, "Report!" in a voice loud enough to make it down to the big double doors and back again. Suliya brushed futilely at the snow buildup on her sleeve. Snow that didn't melt, snow that wasn't quite white—not snow. Wood shavings. Wood shavings that ought to have been in one of these stalls.

Halfway down the aisle, a groom staggered out of a stall, cleaning fork in hand, completely covered with shavings—but looking more bemused than alarmed or injured.

"What happened?" Carey said, meeting the young woman halfway. Klia, the niece of one of the senior riders and a cheerful girl with a middling work ethic and not much in the way of goals for her life . . . not someone Suliya could understand in the least, though she liked her well enough. "Are you all right?"

Klia swiped an ineffective hand over her short curly hair. "I'm not sure," she said, looking dazed enough that she probably wasn't sure what time of day it was, never mind what had happened a moment earlier. She stuck a finger in her ear and wiggled it, making a face. "You sound a precinct away."

"What," Carey said, trying for patience and almost making it, "were you doing?"

That, the girl could answer; her face cleared with relief. "I just finished this row of stalls, and since we've got so many horses out, I thought it would be a good day to run a drying spell on them all."

Suliya nodded to herself; no matter how clean they tried to keep the stalls, in the winter there seemed to remain an underlying dampness. The drying spells took care of that, but couldn't be done when the stall was occupied. Made sense. More initiative than the girl usually showed, in truth.

"Interesting drying spell," Dayna said, mild amusement in her eyes as the floating wood chips thinned. "More like a recipe for sweeping practice."

Hurt protest showed in the girl's face. "But I run that spell all the time. This has never happened before."

"Does it always work?" Dayna went down to the stall in question, peered inside, and shook her head. "I suppose it worked in a way, this time. It sure is dry in here. Easy to tell, too, with all the shavings out of it."

"Always." Klia tried again to clear her hair, and finally bent over to shake her head like a dog, sending wood shavings flying.

"That's not true," Suliya said, gaining Carey's sharply attentive gaze. "Sometimes she has to invoke it a couple of times before it works." She'd heard the muttering often enough; Klia was like that with all her small personal spells.

Dayna returned to them. "There's your answer," she said, as though it were self-evident. Carey lifted an expressive brow, amazingly similar to the expression Suliya felt on her own face. Dayna looked at them both—looked up at them both, by far the shortest of all three of them—and said, "Oh, come on. When it doesn't work, she's introduced a wrong element."

For her impatience, she got only blank stares, but Suliya saw a surprising gleam of humor in Carey's eye at the whole situation—one which made her think perhaps he understood after all, and was actually teasing Dayna. For one so focused, she'd expected anger, not humor, at such a mishap.

But no one had been hurt. The cleanup was simple enough—push brooms, hand brooms, perhaps a dusting spell or two, and in that moment she was struck by the potential of what his friends saw in him, what Jess saw in him . . . someone other than the head courier doing his job.

Whatever humor he'd gotten out of the situation, it vanished with Dayna's impatient next words. "She introduces a common wrong element, one there's a checkspell against because this is the result. But the Secondary Council is responsible for overseeing checkspell management, and all of a sudden they're filling the role of the Council . . . the checkspell has failed. Carey, it won't be the only one."

And Carey's hazel eyes grew darker as his eyes narrowed; he seemed to have forgotten that Klia and Suliya were there as he matched Dayna's intensity, staring back at her. "The changespell," he said, his voice low. "We could find out what happened to Arlen . . ."

She nodded. "It's worth a try, don't you think?"

Suliya blurted, "The penalties—"

Carey gave her a startled look—not as if he'd forgotten her, but as if he were surprised anyone thought the penalties mattered with the stakes at hand. "I'll deal with the penalties," he said. "Klia, if you're sure you're all right, get a start on cleaning up this mess. Suliya will help you. And Dayna . . . you were there when Jess was first changed. I want to know what to expect." He gestured at the back of the hall—no doubt meaning his small office off the job room.

"She didn't have language at first." Dayna kept pace with him, almost two strides to his one. "She learned damned fast, though."

Suliya, standing in a waning storm of wood shavings at the end of a long day, opened her mouth to ask if someone else might not help clean up the mess Klia had made, although a small inner voice reminded her that they were all tired, all overworked.

But it occurred to her that this was where things would be happening. Maybe not right away, maybe not even tonight—she had no idea of the preparations needed for what they planned. Even so, sooner or later, this stable would turn into the nexus of action . . . would maybe even provide the crucial information that allowed the new Council to understand what had happened to the old.

Suliya intended to be part of it.

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Framed

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Chapter 8

Lady smelled the death long before they reached it.

Smelled it and tasted it and felt the fear of it trickle through her withers and stiffen her back. Not death precisely . . . a wrongness with death twisted in. She tensed, jigging along the path with her neck raising, very little of the Jess-self present. A better understanding of speech, without the conceptual ability to process its complexity. A memory of her goals—return to Carey. An awareness of her alter-life, and an ability to return to it when she was ready. But for now . . . she was Lady. A smart, honest horse, straightforward in thought and action and just as wary of wrongness as any other horse, just as concerned. Just as needy for her rider's support.

Suliya, feeling Lady's gaits shorten, clamped down on the reins, tightening her thighs around Lady's barrel. Lady knew better, she knew she wasn't trapped by those reins, by the unpleasant pressure on her tongue from this thick, unfamiliar bit . . . but anxiety tumbled in on top of wary tension. Ramble, his deep gold color hidden beneath a lighter winter coat, pale mane and tail floating in pampered thickness, tread close on her heels—crowding her, scenting her . . . occasionally snaking his neck as if to herd her, just as often nickering an invitation to admire his magnificence. Too preoccupied with Lady's presence to care about the inexperienced rider clinging to his saddle, and not yet caring about the wrongness they approached.

A small covey of wood grouse burst into flight from the path-side brush; already anxious, Lady startled—not nearly as much as she wanted to, ever aware of her bareback rider. Still the bit jerked in her mouth—run from it—legs clamped around her barrel—run from it—and her rider's fearful stiffness pervaded Lady—run from it! 

She didn't. Legs spraddled, head flung high . . . she didn't.

Bolting was against Carey's Rules.

After a long moment, Suliya began to breathe again, probably never supposing that Lady could tell she wasn't, and that her failure to do so frightened Lady as much as anything. Her head still flung up against the pull of the reins, Lady nevertheless relaxed a fraction.

Dayna said dryly, "Maybe we should walk the rest of the way to the damaged area."

"She knows better," Suliya said, frustration pushing the breathless tension in her voice.

"I've never," Dayna said, dismounting the palomino with a little stagger, "seen anyone pull on her mouth like that before. I don't mean the staying on part, I mean before it. And after. Don't think Jess won't remember when she changes back. Hell, that's why I'm not riding her in the first place."

"She—" Suliya said, and stopped; after a moment, the discomfort of the bit eased, and Lady, reassured by Dayna's matter-of-fact behavior, lowered her head to huff a breath at the bush where the grouse had been.

"They're gone," Dayna said, and gave her a pat on the neck. Suliya threw a leg over Lady's rump and slid down to land beside her, and Lady lowered her head far enough to give a relieved, mane-flapping shake.

But she didn't relax completely. Not with the wrongness ahead, and Dayna leading the palomino toward it.

Then Dayna, too, stopped short. "Burning hells," she said, her voice full of intricate human feeling. Surprise and fear and awe; Lady recognized them all, and her ears flicked forward and back in independent succession, listening to Dayna, listening for danger.

"What is it?" Suliya flipped the reins over Lady's head, giving them an absent tug before Lady had a chance to step out politely on her own, not noticing Lady's offended hard, round chin. Oh, yes, she would remember.

"It's outside the null wards," Dayna said. "It got through the null wards!" She stopped short, the palomino snorting wariness behind her shoulder.

"Maybe they missed a spot," Suliya said, coming up beside Dayna and the stud and at the last minute thinking to put herself between them, creating plenty of personal space for both horses. Lady, too, snorted at the ground before them, bringing her head up in an attempt to focus on it, to make sense of it; the offensive and alarming smell was stronger than ever.

"Not they," Dayna said pointedly. "I was one of two wizards who set these wards. I know damn well we had this area contained. There's no way—"

But she stopped short, and after a moment said more quietly, "I guess there is a way, whatever it is. The damage either cropped up outside the original area, or it came right through the ward. I could probably tell, if I got close enough—"

"No!" Suliya said, and Lady backed up at the volume of it, too unsettled by sights she literally couldn't comprehend and smells that meant danger to any animal on hooves.

Dayna laughed with no amusement whatsoever. "No kidding. It's not worth the risk, not when the Council wizards will see it tomorrow anyway. I say let's give this whole . . . meltdown . . . a very wide detour. The horses don't want anything to do with it, and I don't want to be on either of them when they're acting this way."

Suliya glanced at Lady's bare back, giving it a rueful pat. "Not bareback on this one. She's . . . more sensitive than other horses I've ridden."

"She warned you," Dayna said, most practical as she turned the palomino around, hunting the woods for something to stand on just so she could reach the stirrup. "Carey's a head courier with the reputation for the best training stable in Camolen, and Jaime rides the highest levels of competition at home. You might be good—it's not like I know enough to really tell—but you're not that good."

Suliya said nothing . . . but Lady knew resistant body language when she saw it.

Arlen, bedecked in a faded orange knit sweater that made him wince even though his jackets obscured it from the public eye, his hair shorn close to the nape of his neck and the short thickness of it absurdly refusing to lie flat at a forehead cowlick he'd forgotten he had, tucked his new luggage—bulging saddlebags—under his knees and tried to keep those knees from straying into the seat space of the tired-looking man opposite him.

Anything to get home.

They'd grunted acknowledgment of one another upon embarking, and muttered a few polite words about the weather (sparkling clear); the roads (not as kept as a coach route should be); and the inconvenience of the service failures.

"Family expected me home two days ago," the man said, annoyed but resigned. "The Council never thinks of the inconvenience to the rest of us when it pulls something like this. Insignificant, that's us."

Fool! Arlen wanted to say. Can't you tell something horrible has happened? Is happening? Instead he rubbed a finger over the smooth and sensitive area his mustache used to cover and said, "Mmm."

"My sister is probably worried spelless," said the tidily arrayed woman sitting beside Arlen. She shifted slightly, and the coach's permalight caught the glint of her hand jewels; she fussed at one of them in a fitful gesture. "But surely she'll figure out I had to take a road coach."

And then there was Jaime, who must believe that Arlen had been in the middle of whatever conflagration had taken place—especially after so long with no word. He'd almost reached her the evening before, he was sure of it. And as careful as he'd have to be about using magic—about splashing his signature around where other sensitives could recognize it, revealing his presence before he'd figured out what had happened, what was happening, and how to respond to it—he knew he'd try again this evening. He'd try, and he'd keep on trying until he was close enough to cross the distance between them, or until she somehow recognized his far-off touch and made the hint of response of which she was able—and which would make all the difference in the world.

"How about you?" the woman asked him, her raised voice indicating it hadn't been the first time she'd tried to get his attention. "Do you have family expecting you?"

"Hmm?" he said, coming back from his thoughts. Jaime. Carey. Jess. His family. The people most associated with Arlen the wizard. He gave her a vague smile and a short, disinterested shake of his head. "No," he said. "No one."

I'm on my way, Jaime. Whatever's happening, hold on. 

On a small farm in eastern Camolen, beyond the boundaries of Sallatier Precinct and within a craggy area so sparsely populated its namesake wizard hasn't the skills to earn a place on primary or secondary councils, reality twists. A young boy hunts his family's hardy wool-producing goats . . . and eventually, he finds them.

What's left of them.

Suliya slid from Lady's warm back with a groan, shoving open the heavy stable door at Anfeald. Dayna, too, dismounted, although the doors were plenty tall enough to encompass a horse and rider without threatening the rider's head.

Dayna and the palomino were definitely ready to part ways. Even as Suliya leaned her shoulder into the door, she caught the sly movement of the stallion's lips, and managed to convey the short and weary warning of "Teeth!" before things went too far.

Bless the warmth of the stable, its cobbled aisle and big square stalls. Not indoors-warm, but out of the wind and heated with the welcoming scent of horseflesh. Suliya directed Dayna to an empty guest stall—"Just throw him in there. Pull the bridle if you can, and I'll come grab his saddle"—and hesitated before Jess's changing stall, easing the bit from the mare's mouth and giving her an automatic pat on the neck.

She'd never have thought it would take so long to get here, not even using the ride-around for both the damaged area and the mudslide along the riverbank. But then, she'd never considered just how much she relied on her stirrups to ride such terrain. It had been just as hard on the mare, she knew—not that she'd ever admit just how many times Lady had made a sudden shift of weight or speed to keep Suliya on her back. She didn't even have the energy left to note which horses were out, which couriers had returned. Carey wasn't in evidence, but she expected he'd show up quickly enough. Word spread fast when riders he'd been waiting for returned, and the wheelbarrow sitting in the aisle was indication enough that someone had already left his or her job to do just that.

She looped the borrowed bridle over her shoulder and grabbed a halter to use with the stallion; with another horse, especially a tired horse, she might unsaddle the animal loose in the stall, but obviously not even the day's ride had taken the wander out of the palomino's lips.

Dayna waited outside the stall with the bridle, holding it with a puzzled look on her face—as well she might, for she'd unbuckled it in the wrong places and now it was only a tangle of leather pieces. She accepted Lady's bridle without a word, leaving Suliya's hands as free as possible. Suliya tied the stallion short, and left him that way until she was ready to leave, the double saddlebags—hers and Jess's—piled outside the door and the saddle balancing on her hip. "We need to make sure he gets a good grooming," she said. "And we need to get an orange lock spelled in his mane as soon as possible. Can you—?"

Dayna lifted a questioning eyebrow, her face badly wind-flushed, her layered sandy hair pulling out of its tieback.

"It means he bites," Suliya said wryly, pulling the halter off and slipping out the door with no time lost.

Dayna shook her head. "Specialty spell," she said. "Probably one of those easy ones that doesn't take a wizard—you just have to know the spell. I don't."

Jess came up the aisle toward them, moving at somewhat less than her usual energetic pace, her hair in need of a brushing. She stopped next to Dayna and turned her rich brown, too-large eyes on Suliya for a long moment.

Suliya, flushing, felt the sudden urge to say, I wouldn't have pulled if you hadn't been bouncing around like a three-year-old! and somehow found the necessary restraint to not. Right or wrong, protesting would only bring the incident to Carey's attention. Then Jess released a long sigh, fluttering it slightly through her lips just as a horse might do. She said, "I know the spell," and went into the stall. She hesitated a moment an arm's length from the horse, waiting for some invisible—to Suliya—signal accepting her approach, and laid four quiet fingers on the horse's crest.

After a moment, bright orange color crept down the flaxen mane, a streak for each finger.

"Four streaks," Dayna said. "I take it that's pretty bad."

Jess retreated from the stall and latched the sliding door closed behind her. "It means to always watch, yes." She bent to retrieve the saddlebags, and abandoned them just as quickly, straightening to head for the cross-aisle at the back of the stable with most of her usual spring returned to her step.

"Carey," Dayna said with satisfaction, just before Carey rounded the corner.

"How'd she—" Suliya started.

"His step, I think." Dayna watched with a small, tired smile as Jess reached him, but it faded when Carey opened his arms and wrapped Jess up in a long embrace, pulling back to wipe some imagined smudge from her cheek and smooth her wayward dun hair. He had a habit of trailing his hand down the dark central stripe of it; he did it now.

"What's wrong?" Suliya asked as Dayna's expression changed. She was more used to seeing Jess as the emotive one, Jess taking Carey's hand or moving in close to him, but Dayna's concern seemed out of place.

Or maybe not. "It's just . . ." Dayna muttered, watching the two more closely, "He's not like that. I mean, something's wrong." And then she snorted, loud enough to draw Carey's brief gaze even as he and Jess exchanged quick words. "Well, obviously something's wrong. But I mean . . . something since he last saw her."

"You know them that well then, ay?" Suliya said, giving Dayna herself a closer look. A small woman, lightly boned, slightly built. Close to boyish in figure—she'd have made a good courier, if she'd had a little more strength. Though from what Suliya had gathered at Second Siccawei, Dayna had strength aplenty when it came to magic—even if there was something not quite right about it, making people acquire the same kind of expression they might when talking about one of her own bastard step-siblings.

Dayna snorted again. Small she might be, but subtle she was not. "You learn a lot about people when you go through hell with them."

At that, Jess cast an anxious look back at them—or maybe at the palomino, Suliya wasn't sure—and then, surprisingly, took off down the hall that led into the hold. Suliya and Dayna exchanged a glance, and then as Suliya shifted the saddle to a better hold, Dayna moved up to meet Carey as he came toward them.

"Dayna," he said, a greeting full of unspoken words that Suliya couldn't decipher. None of the tenderness he showed with Jess, but a certain kind of respect.

"What's happening?" Dayna asked, also bypassing normal greetings as she nodded at the spot where Jess had been.

"Jaime's sick," Carey said. "Yesterday evening, too. I think . . . well, Simney can't tell what's going on, but says it's not anything dire. But Jaime's pretty miserable, and you know Jess . . ."

Dayna nodded. "I'll wait," she said. "See if she feels better later."

"She did, last night," Carey said by way of agreement. He reached for Suliya, who gave him a moment of blank-faced confusion before handing over the saddle and collecting the saddlebags. Carey gave Dayna a somewhat grimmer look. "We've got a lot to talk about."

"We certainly do," Dayna said. "I take it Jess mentioned that the new Council is blowing off my observations about the . . . incident."

He gave her a fleeting grin as they headed for the tack room. "Blowing off. Expression left over from Ohio?"

"Yes. And did she mention the stallion? Why we brought him?"

He led the way into the tack room, settling the saddle over the top of another on its rack and dropping the saddle cloth into a hamper of similarly dirty horse blankets; rows of empty saddle racks lined the wall, and he took the bridle from Dayna to place it on an unassigned bridle hook on the adjoining wall. Thigh-high equipment trunks lined each wall beneath the racks and hooks of carefully cleaned leather accouterments—cruppers, chest bands, courier bags, hobbles—although as with the saddles and bridles, most of the spots were empty, the walls bare. "Why you brought him?" Seemingly without even looking, he took Jess's saddlebags from Suliya, leaving her her own. "It was the only way for you to get here, she said—something Garvin and I will deal with later—"

Impatiently, Dayna said, "I'd have waited another day to catch a different ride, if that was the only reason. But Jess said it best—he's the only one who saw what happened to the Council. The only one who lived through it. The only one who can tell us—"

"Tell you!" Suliya said, drawing both their startled attentions her way. She shifted under Dayna's sky blue gaze and Carey's appraising expression, but Dayna quickly picked up the conversation where she'd left it.

"If we can use a changespell . . ."

Carey gave a quick shake of his head. "It's checkspelled. You know that. You burning well ought to, after last summer!"

She shrugged. "There's raw magic—"

"That's crazy!" Suliya said. In her mind's eye she saw the development wizards at SpellForge, testing spell formulas, going over every element; more times than she could remember, they'd given her derisive warnings about the use of raw magic. How dangerous it was, how unpredictable, how horrible the consequences.

Dayna gave her a wicked little grin; Suliya hadn't seen that gleam in her eye before, and she wasn't sure she liked it now. "What do you think I do?" she said. "What do you think Second Siccawei is all about?"

"I grew up wandering the halls of SpellForge," Suliya said, taking a step back from Dayna but shaking her head with each word. "Raw magic is a fool's tool—and anyone who sticks around to watch is a fool, too!"

"You two get along well together, I see," Carey said dryly. "Ease off, Suliya. As it happens, I agree with you in this case—but it just might be that there's more to the world than you know."

"You don't think I can do it," Dayna said to him. "I expected more of you, after what you've seen."

"I've got an entire hold to think about," Carey said, and Suliya realized to her horror that he was truly tempted to let Dayna try. "And what I think is that we have too much at stake to make the wrong decision right now."

Dayna took his words in silence, a narrow-eyed kind of silence that looked like a thoughtful marshalling of more argument.

A sudden clap of sound rocked the stable; as one, they ducked, crouching close to the floor. Carey recovered first, bolting for the stalls; Dayna muttered a nonsensical phrase that sounded like, "Good God," and then very definitely, "Does this sort of thing always go on, or is it only when I'm here?" and then she, too, was out the door.

Suliya followed, but at the head of the long stall aisle, stopped to gape. Snow floated in the air, more thickly over the middle section, snow from nowhere. The air bit at her lungs and nose with a singed dryness, completely at odds with the existence of snow.

Carey glanced at the falling flakes, raked his gaze along the stalls, and finally snapped, "Report!" in a voice loud enough to make it down to the big double doors and back again. Suliya brushed futilely at the snow buildup on her sleeve. Snow that didn't melt, snow that wasn't quite white—not snow. Wood shavings. Wood shavings that ought to have been in one of these stalls.

Halfway down the aisle, a groom staggered out of a stall, cleaning fork in hand, completely covered with shavings—but looking more bemused than alarmed or injured.

"What happened?" Carey said, meeting the young woman halfway. Klia, the niece of one of the senior riders and a cheerful girl with a middling work ethic and not much in the way of goals for her life . . . not someone Suliya could understand in the least, though she liked her well enough. "Are you all right?"

Klia swiped an ineffective hand over her short curly hair. "I'm not sure," she said, looking dazed enough that she probably wasn't sure what time of day it was, never mind what had happened a moment earlier. She stuck a finger in her ear and wiggled it, making a face. "You sound a precinct away."

"What," Carey said, trying for patience and almost making it, "were you doing?"

That, the girl could answer; her face cleared with relief. "I just finished this row of stalls, and since we've got so many horses out, I thought it would be a good day to run a drying spell on them all."

Suliya nodded to herself; no matter how clean they tried to keep the stalls, in the winter there seemed to remain an underlying dampness. The drying spells took care of that, but couldn't be done when the stall was occupied. Made sense. More initiative than the girl usually showed, in truth.

"Interesting drying spell," Dayna said, mild amusement in her eyes as the floating wood chips thinned. "More like a recipe for sweeping practice."

Hurt protest showed in the girl's face. "But I run that spell all the time. This has never happened before."

"Does it always work?" Dayna went down to the stall in question, peered inside, and shook her head. "I suppose it worked in a way, this time. It sure is dry in here. Easy to tell, too, with all the shavings out of it."

"Always." Klia tried again to clear her hair, and finally bent over to shake her head like a dog, sending wood shavings flying.

"That's not true," Suliya said, gaining Carey's sharply attentive gaze. "Sometimes she has to invoke it a couple of times before it works." She'd heard the muttering often enough; Klia was like that with all her small personal spells.

Dayna returned to them. "There's your answer," she said, as though it were self-evident. Carey lifted an expressive brow, amazingly similar to the expression Suliya felt on her own face. Dayna looked at them both—looked up at them both, by far the shortest of all three of them—and said, "Oh, come on. When it doesn't work, she's introduced a wrong element."

For her impatience, she got only blank stares, but Suliya saw a surprising gleam of humor in Carey's eye at the whole situation—one which made her think perhaps he understood after all, and was actually teasing Dayna. For one so focused, she'd expected anger, not humor, at such a mishap.

But no one had been hurt. The cleanup was simple enough—push brooms, hand brooms, perhaps a dusting spell or two, and in that moment she was struck by the potential of what his friends saw in him, what Jess saw in him . . . someone other than the head courier doing his job.

Whatever humor he'd gotten out of the situation, it vanished with Dayna's impatient next words. "She introduces a common wrong element, one there's a checkspell against because this is the result. But the Secondary Council is responsible for overseeing checkspell management, and all of a sudden they're filling the role of the Council . . . the checkspell has failed. Carey, it won't be the only one."

And Carey's hazel eyes grew darker as his eyes narrowed; he seemed to have forgotten that Klia and Suliya were there as he matched Dayna's intensity, staring back at her. "The changespell," he said, his voice low. "We could find out what happened to Arlen . . ."

She nodded. "It's worth a try, don't you think?"

Suliya blurted, "The penalties—"

Carey gave her a startled look—not as if he'd forgotten her, but as if he were surprised anyone thought the penalties mattered with the stakes at hand. "I'll deal with the penalties," he said. "Klia, if you're sure you're all right, get a start on cleaning up this mess. Suliya will help you. And Dayna . . . you were there when Jess was first changed. I want to know what to expect." He gestured at the back of the hall—no doubt meaning his small office off the job room.

"She didn't have language at first." Dayna kept pace with him, almost two strides to his one. "She learned damned fast, though."

Suliya, standing in a waning storm of wood shavings at the end of a long day, opened her mouth to ask if someone else might not help clean up the mess Klia had made, although a small inner voice reminded her that they were all tired, all overworked.

But it occurred to her that this was where things would be happening. Maybe not right away, maybe not even tonight—she had no idea of the preparations needed for what they planned. Even so, sooner or later, this stable would turn into the nexus of action . . . would maybe even provide the crucial information that allowed the new Council to understand what had happened to the old.

Suliya intended to be part of it.

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