Twisted magic blooms to life across Camolen like frost coming up on a cold surface . . . strange, obscure morphing corners and isolated crannies, gully bottoms and tree tops. Hissing darkness, wayward odors . . . glanced at, they are dismissed. Inhaled, they are politely ignored.
A madness of reality takes note, unnoticed.
Dayna uncrumpled the dispatch Bendi had managed to pull in off the system—it was all she could do to keep up with the urgent messages, and Dayna was certain Bendi missed at least half of the ones aimed at Second Siccawei. Sometimes the Siccawei dispatch wizards fielded one for them and sent it again, giving Bendi a second chance.
But Bendi was only one person, working within a secondary hold established for retreat work. None of them were prepared to have Second Siccawei as ground zero.
Not that the others knew what ground zero even meant, or had done anything but cast her strange glances when she muttered it. But Dayna knew . . . and she knew they'd soon be overrun by Secondary Council wizards trying to determine what had happened. The ill-used paper in her hand told her as much, along with its listing of immediate restrictions on basic travel and transport services. Well enough for them—given an anchor point, most of them could free-travel. Certainly they could communicate with each other over considerable distances; their own efforts and convenience would hardly be affected.
But there were those who commuted to work via the travel booths—and some of those people provided basic services. And there were those who were isolated and depended on basic dispatch communication for their needs.
And there were those like Dayna, who'd seen ground zero the day the Council died and who now had little choice but to sit idly by and watch the Secondary Council close down Camolen in their belated search for the cause.
And then there was Dayna unlike anyone else, Dayna alone who had felt the undirected magic sweep through the area, leaving no backlash.
She already knew they wouldn't believe her. Didn't believe her. Undirected, raw magic left backlash. Always. Therefore she was wrong.
Dayna knew she wasn't.
She just didn't know what it meant. Or if she'd get a chance to find out.
Do something.
Anything.
Make it better.
Right. Stuck here in little Second Siccawei with no one listening to her and no grand ideas about how to make it better, not any of it. How could you make the death of your friends better?
So she sat cross-legged in the wide-silled first floor window of Second Siccawei, watching for Jess to arrive while crumpling the dispatch from the Secondary—no, not anymore. Just the Council, now. Or as close as Camolen had to one. Crumpling the dispatch and thinking of Sherra. Dignified Sherra, full of calm and somehow always able to share it with others. Sherra who had given Dayna so much—healing her upon her first arrival here, taking her in as apprentice when it became clear that Dayna's combination of ignorance and talent was a danger to everyone around her . . . and then allowing her to stay. On Earth, Dayna had been just another drone, working in a small hotel, a petite woman with life closing in around her.
Here, she had purpose. Here, she had a kind of power she'd never imagined on Earth. Here, she thought she'd found a semblance of control over life . . . though with Sherra's death, with Arlen's death, she now suddenly realized that control was nothing more than illusion, here or on Earth.
Sherra. Arlen. If anyone had enough power to claim control, it would have been them.
But they hadn't. They'd died.
She smoothed the paper over her knee, coming one step closer to hating the crabbed handwriting of whoever had sent it. Around her, the small hold offered unusual silence; it was a hold in mourning—and one in waiting, shackled and unable to act. Muted noise came from the kitchen . . . everything else might stop short, but the people always needed to eat.
Finally, Dayna caught a glimpse of movement at the splotchily snow-covered edges of the hold clearing. Stables were on one side of the clearing, the hold on the other, and a path leading back to the main route between Anfeald and Siccawei. Jess emerged first, in her characteristic Baltimore Orioles baseball cap—Mark had given her a new one for Christmas—her scarf flapping loosely and her winter coat unfastened almost to the waist, an indication of the exertion of the ride. Dayna didn't recognize the woman behind her, and as she slid from the window sill she craned her neck to keep a view of the yard, waiting for Carey or Jaime . . .
But there was no one else.
Dayna ran to the door, grabbing a jacket from the hook there—way too big, so not her jacket, but who cared. Hadn't they taken her seriously? They'd sent only Jess and this woman Dayna didn't know.
And then she was out the door, getting a good look at Jess's face—tired from the run, grim from what she'd seen along the way . . . from whatever had gone on in Anfeald before she even left. They'd taken Dayna seriously, all right—or no one would be here at all.
Jess met her in the middle of the yard, her horse's winter coat curly wet but cool enough from the final walk in so it no longer steamed. "He needs a cooling blanket," Jess said. "Do you have someone in the barn?"
Dayna hesitated, looking at the second rider. Her horse was still steaming, and although she was flushed and tired from the run, she lacked the haunted expression underlying Jess's exotic features. Whoever she was, she didn't have a personal stake. She didn't even look like she fully understood the situation. She sat her horse awaiting some signal from Jess, her clothes beautifully made and imbued with scintillating magical color, her face a dark cinnamon-tinted tone with features that made Dayna think of Asian and African-American blood—her leftover Earth thinking coming to the fore again—and the most astonishing hair springing from behind her exquisitely knitted ear and scarf wrap.
"This is Suliya," Jess said. "New with Carey. The others couldn't come, but no one takes this route alone for now."
"No one ought to take it at all after this," Dayna said, grasping at her normal composure again. Sardonic. Maybe not what someone else would strive for, but Dayna found it a comfortable place. "We do have some people working the barn—Siccawei sent us a couple of horses and someone to organize the place, but we're not nearly up to speed for what we'll need."
"It's a small hold," Suliya observed.
"Yeah," Dayna said, giving her a second look. "A small hold that just became the center of Camolen's biggest magical goof-up since the Barrenlands blew up three hundred years ago, and with limited dispatch service available to anyone while we try to deal with the mess. Believe me, we're going to need all the couriers we can get."
Jess swung down from the horse, straightening the snug, leather-seated quilted riding pants she wore. Suliya, bedecked in similar but sleeker, tailored pants, took the hint and dismounted as well; Jess pulled her saddlebags from the horse and the smaller courier's bags from atop them, and handed over the reins to her mount as she collected Suliya's bags.
"You might want to take a look in the barn yourself," Dayna said, only just now realizing it. Jess gave her a why expression, eyebrows raised. Dayna shrugged, pulling the oversized borrowed coat more tightly around herself as the wind picked up slightly. "Trent's palomino," she said. "He survived whatever happened there."
"Not hurt?" Jess asked, arranging the saddlebags over her shoulders and taking in Dayna's confirming gesture; in another moment she glanced at Suliya and led the way.
The barn showed all the signs of descending chaos—newly arrived feed stacked in the way, debris and gear and equipment boxes clogging the short aisle. Only one stall had an occupant.
"The others are working," Dayna said. "We don't know how many will actually be back for the night, or if we'll have enough stalls—or enough teams fit to work tomorrow. We're just a small, brand-new hold . . . most of our communication has been handled by chatting to Sherra person to person, for pete's sake. The only thing the couriers handle are the long documents we want her to see."
Suliya appropriated two stalls and went to find cooling blankets, mesh-lined wool that would keep the horses warm but wick the sweat away. Jess dumped the saddlebags over the door of an empty stall and paced down the aisle to the palomino—an end stall with a reinforced wall between it and the neighboring stall. "Light?" she said to Dayna.
Light flared in the corner of the stall in response—a cool, even permalight. Jess hesitated at the stallion's door as she retrieved his halter from the hook there. "Ramble," she said after a moment. "His name is Ramble."
Of course she'd remember.
She lifted the halter from the stallion's door and slipped in the door, closing it most of but not all of the way. Dayna moved closer—cautiously, because she'd already learned the hard way that this one would bite—and got there in time to see the two exchange a greeting, the palomino a little suspicious to be greeted in such a horsey manner as Jess went to his head and exchanged breath with him, first one nostril and then the other.
He didn't let the introduction last long; he swung his head in posturing threat and pushed at her, teeth bared. Jess wheeled and kicked him in the chest. The stallion flung his head back in dramatic alarm, lunging away from her. Jess glanced up at Dayna in embarrassment. "I still forget," she said, chagrined. "I do it the horse way." She looked at the halter hanging on her arm, lifting it slightly. "The human way," she said, "for a horse as rude as this one. I don't think he grew up with mares the way he should have. They would have taught him better than this."
Even as she spoke she had the horse haltered, the chain shank of the lead threaded around the noseband. "You shouldn't need this," she said sternly to the horse, and although Dayna was no horsewoman, she could see that Jess unconsciously matched every body movement the stallion made, all the small gestures he used to claim her body space. When he bobbed his head and snorted in wet disgust, she could only assume that Jess had stood her ground. The stallion made one last halfhearted attempt to close his teeth on Jess's shoulder and she rattled the chain lightly in warning; he turned away, sulking. "Here," Jess said, handing the lead to Dayna through the barely open door. "Hold him. Has anyone checked him since he came without Sherra?"
"Trent rode him back out again," Dayna said, gingerly holding the lead. The stallion eyed her and she knew right then that it had her number. "He likes this horse—don't ask me why—so I figured the horse was okay."
But Jess ran her hands across his back and quarters and then down each leg, following the line of his sloping shoulders across his chest and up his neck. Touching as well as looking, and eventually ruffling her hands through his long pale mane. "Handsome," she said. "And strong. Too big for a courier's horse, but . . . nice."
Dayna snorted. "Says who, Jess or Lady?"
Jess gave her a sly glimmer of a look. "Both of us." But then she frowned, moving around toward the back of the horse. In another moment she'd dug out a small pocket knife, but Dayna didn't see why; she was too busy giving the horse her best evil eye as he opened his mouth in what he must have thought was a cunning manner, his lips twitching toward her hand.
"Stop it," Dayna hissed at him. "You brat." She shoved his head away and he carefully watched something in the corner of the stall a moment, but his lips twitched again, betraying his intent.
Tucking the knife away and preoccupied by whatever she'd gathered, Jess nonetheless gave him a pinch on the neck. He flared his nostrils and flattened his ears and refused to look at either of them.
"Your face is going to freeze that way," Dayna informed him.
"I . . . bit him," Jess said. "He's sulking." She came out of the stall, slid the halter off one-handed, and replaced it on the door. She held out her other hand. "Look."
"Big chunk of horsetail hair," Dayna said. "Trent won't thank you for that."
Suliya returned, alone but hauling an overwhelming armful of blankets. "Couldn't find anyone," she said loudly from the other end of the barn. "But I've got the coolers."
"Good," Jess said, and nothing else, to which Suliya frowned and went to work in the stalls. But Jess was looking at the horsehair, holding it out again to Dayna. "More than hair," she said. "Hair and . . . I think a leaf, but part of it is metal and part of it is . . ." She shook her head sharply, at a loss for words.
Dayna saw it, then. A leaf, transformed and tangled in the horsehair—no, made part of the horsehair. A simple leaf, caught in the tail of a fleeing horse and damaging only hair with its final distorted spasm. She took in a deep breath of air, let it out slowly. Very slowly.
"We saw this spot," Jess said. "We cut through the woods to go around it. This is what killed the Council, isn't it? Not this leaf, but . . . this strangeness."
"Yes," Dayna said. "But we don't know what it is, or why it happened." And they weren't likely to find out, not while those in power refused to listen to those who had been there. She frowned, and waved Jess's head-tilted response away. "Not you," she said, letting the frown turn into something more weary and more determined at the same time. "Let's talk inside, where it's warm."
"Ay," Suliya said from the other end of the barn, faint petulance in her voice as she startled Dayna with the southern Camolen colloquialism. "I could use some help down here."
Jess rolled her eyes, a very human expression Dayna hadn't seen her use before, and she had to bite her lip to keep from laughing out loud for Suliya's sake. But then Jess was just as much horse as human again, with the little toss of her head that meant irritation. She said, "Go be warm, Dayna. Suliya and I will come when the horses are settled."
"No real rush," Dayna said, still amused. "You can't start home until tomorrow, anyway."
Jess gave her a somber look. "Anfeald without Arlen," she said, "isn't really home."
Arlen accepted a fine glass goblet from his host and raised it in a gesture of appreciation he was too distracted to truly feel—too full of frustration, chafing to find himself still here at all.
Guides dammit, anyway. Jaime. Anfeald. The Council. He still had no idea what had happened. What was happening—without him.
Instead, he waited out his second day in Amses, long enough to find this small family restaurant tucked away at the edge of the town's residential area. Beautifully presented tables, privacy, and personal service—all a stiff contrast to his first meal in the town, and all of which he noted in only the most absent way. Amses was a mining town—small, family mines delving not only for silver, but for the rarer specialty spellstone material, the ones that could hold the most complex of spells.
Ironically, Arlen the wizard had done quite a bit of business with some of these mines. But Arlen the traveler didn't purport to know anything about them—for Arlen, uncertain of events, had gone as incognito as an eccentric wizard could get.
Probably not far enough. And it was nothing with which he'd had any experience.
He abruptly realized that his host—and chef—still hovered by the table. "It was a truly excellent meal," he told the man, someone who obviously knew how to fling a number of spells himself—although in an establishment of this quality, he no doubt had his own spellcook to handle the details of preserving food, heating cooking tops, and sanitizing the dishes. "Only the ability to digest it in my own house this evening could possibly improve the experience."
An understatement of the most severe nature.
The server, a young man whose resemblance to the chef left no doubt about family ties, gave him a sympathetic look. "We have several business travelers caught here in Amses until the travel system is working again."
"I haven't been able to get any news at all," Arlen said, lacing it with the amount of complaint he thought appropriate for a businessman who was used to the best. Burning hells, he was a wizard used to the best; there couldn't be much difference. "No public dispatch at all, and the news pedestals are empty. Have you heard anything about how long things will be down?" He took a sip of the wine—definitely a good vintage—and glanced from his small, round table to see that no one else was paying attention to the conversation. It was simply his turn to speak with the chef.
"Nothing," the young man said. "No word about what's happened, either. It had to have been pretty big, to have affected all of Camolen—"
The chef cleared his throat. "Plenty of warnings not to panic being distributed," he said. "No good can come of panic. We've enough service wizards to keep Amses going for a few days. The break from dispatch news might even do us all a little good."
"Sit back and enjoy the sunsets while you can," Arlen suggested, trying not to think of the fact that the break from dispatch news had been caused by the deaths of people he cared about. I should have been there, should have tried to stop it—
And then you'd be dead, too.
"Exactly," the chef said, entirely unaware of Arlen's inner struggle. "I hope your meal here has helped to make your stay pleasant whether you intended to be here or not."
"It's gone a long way," Arlen said, meaning it. "If you could direct me to an equally pleasant overnighter, I'd be grateful."
That, they were glad to do, although the chef returned to his kitchen and left the younger man doling out directions. Arlen paid for the meal with Anfeald scrip—all he had, and worth a remark from the server.
He'd hardly been prepared to keep himself inconspicuous. And, arriving in his newly assigned rooms at the recommended establishment, he thought again that doing so was his only course of action. Until he found out what happened to the Council. Until he found out why he was the only one left. For while he hadn't been able to confirm anything—hadn't been able to reach anyone at all, either on the Council or the Secondary Council—there was a deep part of him that knew the others were dead—all of them. And of anyone in Camolen, he knew only a tragedy of that magnitude would provoke the service shutdown he was witnessing.
Do something.
Anything.
Make it better.
He was a senior wizard. The only surviving wizard. If anyone could do something, it was him.
But not from here. Not without more information. Not without something to act against.
Meanwhile, if the other Council members had been killed, then he, too, was a likely target. No one knew he was here . . . but if someone were looking for him . . .
He tossed his bags on the bed, a solid creation of beautifully worked stripewood head and footboard, and peered out one of the room's two windows; the overnighter held only four customer rooms, and this one looked out onto the property's vast back lot. Snow-covered arbors, walkways, and benches hinted of summertime beauty. For now, it lay abandoned, and offered him the privacy he wanted. As did most overnighters, this one offered breakfast; it would be midday before he needed to venture forth. Enough time, he hoped, to get over the surprise of arriving to a non-functional travel booth and finding his travel time expanded from a day to—
He didn't even know. He'd never traveled a distance such as this without the benefit of wizardry. Coach travel would probably be the most efficient . . . perhaps interspersed with rental horses to cross coach lines and make himself less predictable.
He glanced into the bathroom—all of the usual fixtures there, along with soap and towels and a discreet basket of potpourri, all of which he'd paid extra for; the other rooms in the oversized house shared a common bath. Along the wall next to the bathroom was a full-length mirror set into a burnished metal frame with a local-artist look to it. Here, he hesitated, realizing for the first time the extent of his folly.
The man he looked at was Arlen the wizard. Who else wore such a thing as a university sweatshirt given to him by his lover? Beyond such eccentric items, his wardrobe held habitual dark blues and blacks, fine materials magicked so as never to fade, their sheen never dulled by pilling or fuzz.
Dump it all at a secondhand store and take up new clothes in trade.
There was nothing he could do about his height . . . taller than most was taller than most, on horseback or trying to fold his legs inside a coach. But his hair was as distinctive as the rest of him—full and shaggy and never much attended.
Cut it. Dye the steel grey to a darker color.
The mustache. He ran a finger across the brushy abundance of it, watching himself do it in the mirror. He'd had this mustache all his adult life, and he couldn't imagine anyone would immediately recognize him without it—especially once the pale skin beneath it colored up a little.
Shave the mustache.
Nothing he could do about the overbite . . . something that should have been attended to in his youth and had not. But it wasn't a bad one, not bad at all—not enough so people would remember him just because of it . . .
At least, he didn't think so. He hadn't had a good look at it since the mustache first grew in.
"The problem is," he told his reflection, "you are so blatantly . . . you."
Arlen the wizard. Mild until circumstances called for otherwise, good with a needle, full of hidden humor. Easy enough to say he was usually absorbed in work. Of late, often absorbed in Jaime.
Jaime.
She was here, now, and had been. Who knows what she thought of his absence. The general impression he'd left was that he'd gone off on Council business—
She'd think him dead.
Jaime. She was the one person he might manage to contact. She had no skill with magic, but she had what everyone in the Council lacked . . . his love. She had his intimate trust. And of late, she did indeed respond to casual direct communication within the hold, the kind of magic that held only a whisper of a signature, closer to raw magic than anything else a wizard might do.
He took a deep breath, still watching himself in the mirror. The mustache removal could wait, he decided. It was evening, and quiet; a time Jaime often used to read. She'd be the most receptive now. Then the mustache, and tomorrow the clothes. "Good-bye, you," he told his image, and turned away from it. Tomorrow he would become someone else.
Tonight, he reached for Jaime. And tomorrow night, and the night after . . . until he was close enough to touch her.
Carey rubbed his fingers across both eyes, trying and failing to wipe out the gritty feel of fatigue at the end of a day that wasn't even over yet. Lowering himself onto Arlen's couch next to Jaime's suddenly and miserably curled-up form, he hunted for words—Are you all right? Do you feel any better? Can I do anything?—and couldn't find any to which the answers weren't resoundingly obvious. No, no, and no.
He settled for resting a hand on her arm, but even that made her wince. He sat back against the far-too-comfortable pillow softening the arm of the couch and took a deep breath, trying to put things in perspective, trying not to worry too much about this one more thing. It was a winter illness, probably; everyone got them.
Except there wasn't anything going around right now.
Just plain grief and stress, then, giving her a sick headache that the hold's healer hadn't yet been able to touch.
Except she'd never reacted this way to grief and stress before . . . and the guides knew they'd seen each other through plenty of it.
Arlen dead, the Council gone, Camolen shut down, his couriers riding way too many miles a day, his horses starting to show the strain, and the ache of missing Jess after only a day so strong he felt it in his very bones . . .
Do something.
Anything.
Make it better.
Arlen had always counted on him to fill that role, to be the one who acted when acting became necessary.
But this time, he didn't know what to fight for. He didn't know how to win, or what it meant accomplishing . . . or if given their losses, it was even possible to win at all.