Changespell Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page A

she nodded slowly, thinking hard behind a face she was trying to keep blank. Watching her, he added more casually, "If you think we won't be able to tell . . . well, maybe we won't. But the horses will."
    He didn't add that they, in turn, would be able to tell from the horses . . . if she didn't know that, then she had more to learn than he thought.
    "I can do that," she said without hesitation, although he'd have preferred it had she taken a moment to think. "Please . . . I'd like to be on the list from now on."
    "I'll see to it," he said. He turned back to the conversation in the ring, aware of Suliya's departure with her manure fork but no longer heeding her. Suliya would work out . . . or she wouldn't.
    "Hold yourself in position even if he does drop on the outside," Jaime was saying. "He's an exceptionally shifty little guy—not of your breeding, is he?"
    Jess laughed out loud. "Only you would ask that!"
    Jaime shrugged, gave a self-deprecating grin Carey could imagine more than he could see. She looked great this visit; she'd always been the down-to-earth, cut-to-the-heart-of-the-matter member of those who had been involved in his first, unplanned trip to Ohio—the first to believe Jess in her struggle to convince Dayna, Mark, and Eric she'd been a horse, the one who shepherded Jess through the steps of learning to become human. Now Jaime looked softer, happier . . .
    And it wasn't just the haircut.
    It was Arlen, and how he'd made her welcome here, made Anfeald as much her place as his . . . given it to her. Given of himself to her.
    Too bad he couldn't get his butt back here to see her.
    Jess corrected herself, "Only you would ask that and mean it the way you do. No, he is not my younger brother, or even a nephew. Carey brought him in last fall from Shibaii. I think he's too . . . shifty . . . for courier runs, but we thought to give him another year."
    "He might grow steadier," Jaime agreed. "But I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't."
    Jess gave the chunky bay gelding a pat. "I wonder what it would be like if I did breed."
    Carey stiffened. He wanted children . . . Jess wanted children. But Jess's human body had never settled into cycles, even though she'd started to recognize when, if she shifted to her Lady self, her mare form would be in heat.
    It made for an interesting personal life. But it meant, he thought, that children would remain out of their reach. And yet . . . he knew Jess hadn't given up. And he remembered that it was her stubborn persistence that had finally given her the key to triggering the changespell from Lady form, when everyone in Camolen had told her—repeatedly—it couldn't be done.
    "Do you want to?" Jaime asked Jess in surprise—apparently forgetting about the acoustics spell she admired so much. "Does Carey want to?"
    Hell, yes . Never as a young man, full of goals and battles and a young man's selfishness. But with Jess in his life . . . with his eyes newly opened to the pride of the cook when his family grew by yet another child, at the way his own eyes strayed to the few hold children playing outside the gardens . . .
    He'd helped them build a snowman this winter. With a snowhorse.
    "Yes," Jess said to both, smoothing the bay's sparse mane. "Arlen says . . . Arlen says maybe it's for the best if we don't. We can't be sure what will happen."
    "But you want to anyway," Jaime said, her voice soft and understanding. Much more than Carey had expected, with her own decision to devote her life to her riding and not a family.
    He saw the sudden catch in Jess's shoulders; he heard the cut-off sound she made. It took a moment for his brain to catch up with his eyes and ears, and to realize she fought unexpected emotion. By then he heard it in her voice, in those perfect acoustics; even her tight whisper reached him with clarity. "Yes," she said. "I see the foals . . . they call to me." It was all there in her strained voice—the longing, the doubt . . . the fear. Fear of success and fear of