Changespell Legacy Read Online Free PDF

failure both . . . and what fear of what she was might do to her.
    Damn the acoustics, anyway.
    The sky bends around them, the air turns into snowflakes of solidified gases, suffocating three of them instantly. No direction is safe; the others stand their ground, trying to mute the magic flowing around them. Ice-edged dirt shoots from the ground, slicing two of them in half; their bodies melt back into the tangle of roots and rock now roiling at their feet.
    No more are they wizards, no more are they Camolen's finest. Now they are but terrified men and women, panicking, screaming . . .
    Dying.
    "I'm sorry," Jaime said, putting a hand on Jess's calf where it rested against the gelding. "I wish I could do something."
    "You listen," Jess said, licking a tear from her upper lip and feeling the trembling flare of her nostrils, her equine expression of emotion. She sighed and patted the gelding. "I am glad enough to have Carey.
    Maybe it is too much to ask for more."
    "I don't know that I believe that." Jaime let her hand drop from Jess's leg, her attention wandering inward while she hunted words. Finally she shrugged and said, "I think you just can't stop living your life in the meanwhile."
    "Okay," Jess said, one of the colloquialisms that she'd brought with her from Ohio and had seen spread through Kymmet before she came here. "Tomorrow, I should be Lady, and you ride. Show me the things we talked about today."
    Jaime grinned. "Only if we get to do some of the fun stuff, too. You been practicing?"
    Jess made a face. "Canter pirouettes . . . I need help. I need a rider to help me balance. But Carey won't."
    "Not yet?" Jaime glanced over her shoulder without raising her voice. "Get over it, Carey."
    He leaned into the ring so they could hear his reply and said pleasantly, "Mind your own trail."
    The palomino hits a frenzy of panic. Eyes rolling, ears flattened, he coils his powerful body and fights the lead rope. The branch cracks; the leaves tremble as though buffeted by a great wind. The distorting world closes in on him— —and his lead rope goes through the melting branch, freeing him to gallop as hard and fast as he can, spurning the path for a direct route between trees, ducking and dodging and more than half blind with fear. To his last stable he runs, death flickering on his heels.
    Jaime, as dignified as Jess had ever seen her, looked over at Carey and said, "Make me."
    "You know," Carey said, "just because once I set off one little bad spell inside your barn doesn't mean you get to boot me around forever."
    "Yes," Jaime said, "it does."
    Jess felt a flash of worry—but then she caught the sly look in Carey's eye and the humor lurking at the corner of Jaime's mouth and she laughed out loud instead, swinging a leg over the gelding's rump to dismount. The extra-wide ring door slid open with a bang that startled both Jess and the gelding; he jumped one way and she, looking after her toes, jumped the other. Carey jerked around with a frown at the ready—everyone in Anfeald knew better than to slam doors in the horse areas, or to leave them open when they'd been found closed— But his admonishment went unspoken, and Jess knew why as soon as she saw the expression on Cesna's face. Grim and shocked, with her mouth working in a hunt for words, her chin trembling . . . Cesna was the youngest of Arlen's two apprentices, an often impulsive girl still in her late teens who had been born to the scholar's life. She carried her weight in her hips and her feelings on her face, and Jess had never seen her so beside herself. "I've been looking for you," she finally blurted, stumbling to a stop before them while the gelding tilted his head to snort at her jerky, alarming movement.
    Carey put a hand on Cesna's shoulder, kneading slightly—a gesture Jess had never seen him make with anyone but her, and one that was Cesna's undoing. She threw her arms around Carey's neck and sobbed, leaving him as startled as any of them. With awkward