The Changespell Saga Read online

  THE CHANGEPSELL SAGA:

  DUN LADY'S JESS ~ CHANGESPELL ~ CHANGESPELL LEGACY

  Doranna Durgin

  Blue Hound Visions

  Tijeras, NM

  in association with

  Book View Café Publishing Cooperative

  September 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-549-6

  Copyright © 2015 Doranna Durgin

  “Jess is a tale of wonderfully diverse and riveting characters embroiled in extraordinary events, told with a deftness and care few authors can achieve. Once you begin, you won’t be able to put it down until you know what happens—and then you’ll wish it never stopped.”

  —Diana Pharoah Francis, author of Path of Blood

  “Dun Lady’s Jess is an adventure story with heart. It’s a unique idea, imaginatively explored. The characters are charming, and humanly flawed.... Doranna Durgin offers the reader an unusual viewpoint of impressive verisimilitude.”

  —Vonda N. McIntyre, Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author of The Moon and the Sun

  Copyright & Dedication

  DUN LADY’S JESS

  Copyright © 2013 by Doranna Durgin

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-316-4

  Published by Blue Hound Visions, Tijeras NM, an affiliate of Book View Café

  October 2013

  Cover: Doranna Durgin

  Original Copyright ©1994; first published by Baen Books

  Second Edition Printed: 2007; Editor: Julie E. Czerneda

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously— and any resemblance to actual persons, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  License Notes:

  This efiction is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This efiction may not be re-sold or given to others. If you would like to share, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this efiction and it was not purchased for your use, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for helping the e-reading community to grow!

  ~~~~~

  Author Note:

  Dun Lady’s Jess: Compton Crook winner in 1995 (best first SF/F/H book of the year), and my first born novel. Always special...and yet publishers never seemed to know what to do with it. At the same time, they never really wanted to let go of it. It’s taken years of persistence and a touch of legal mediation to resolve those situations.

  Now Jess is mine again, and it means everything to me. It also means everything that I can make the book available to readers again, after so many requests and so many years of the lingering hardcopies being so expensive and hard to obtain. Thanks to epublishing options, I can also do it in a way that I retain control over the circumstances—and as you can imagine with the history of this book, that truly means everything.

  So thank you. Without readers like you, I wouldn’t be able to write these books. I appreciate your letters, emails, blog comments, and Facebook posts more than I can ever express, and I love your reviews. It’s amazing to be a part of such a large circle of friends through a mutual love of books!

  ~Doranna

  ~~~~~

  Original Dedications

  Dedicated to every single person who helped me along the way;

  For Leslie and Tusquin, who showed me how it could be;

  And especially for Holly, Sue, and Will, who were there at the start.

  With shiny bright new thanks to:

  Julie Czerneda and Lucienne Diver, both of whom understand, and to Elizabeth, who honors me with her words.

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  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Forewords

  Elizabeth Moon

  Compton Crook and Nebula Award-winning author of Command Decision and the Speed of Dark

  When I first read Doranna Durgin’s Dun Lady’s Jess, back in 1994, I was astonished and delighted. Fantasy had already given us a number of girl-and-horse models, all fairly romantic, reeking with wishful thinking. This was completely different: a serious and successful consideration of what might happen if a horse were transformed into the body of a human, while retaining the essential nature of a horse—the way a horse senses, thinks, moves.

  Few stories hinging on the transformation of human into animal or animal into human work as more than curiosities, because most writers can’t grasp enough of the animal reality. Le Guin, in the Earthsea books, explored some of the possibilities of transformation, but shape-shifting was not the point of those stories—power and the abuse of power—including the abuse of the power to escape through transformation—were. Terry Pratchett, putting a female werewolf in the police department, has handled Angua’s transformations to and from her wolf body with sensitivity. The only other horse-human transformation of comparable quality is Judith Tarr’s A Wind in Cairo, in which a dissolute young man is magically transformed into a horse to teach him a lesson.

  Dun Lady’s Jess is unique. Durgin has created a character who is utterly believable as both horse and horse-in-human-body. The setup is brilliant: the magic that causes the transformation is not in the horse, but external, and the creature that is Dun Lady’s Jess must adapt, must find an identity that works in both paradigms. Humans who encounter her, in either body, must also adapt to the reality that created her and that she represents. She cannot be, any longer, just another mare... she cannot be, ever, just another woman.

  It’s also, of course, a walloping good adventure story, but at the core it’s the story of identity and transformation.

  ~~~~~

  Julie Czerneda

  Prix Aurora Award-winning author of In the Company of Others and A Turn of Light, and beloved editor

  New for this Edition: Concerning Classics

  It’s easy to find someone’s favourite books. Check the shelf. Look for those with covers starting to wear at the corners. Pull out any with spines bent so many times they’ve acquired the most delicate of wrinkles. Perhaps a bookmark peeks up. Something special, like a postcard or pressed rose or bit of ribbon. There could be an elastic, holding the pages together. Battered, but loved. Bruised, but never abandoned. Such, to me, are the classics.

  How, you ask, can a classic be marked by abuse? Aren’t classics the books we’ve read in school? The stories that have stood the test of time and social change? The sort written by people so famous (though dead) that there are statues of them looking pensive in parks? Surely, you say, those are the marks of true classics.

  To that I say ... a classic doesn’t start that way. A classic starts with a story that means something to its reader. With characters you remember years later as if meeting them for the first time on the page. With a fresh and original idea that continues to demand your attention and reward your interest. A classic, I say, starts as a favourite book. A book that you reread, time and again, for no better reason—and what could be better?—than the joy it brings you.

  Dun Lady’s Jess is such a classic. Despite all my care, my original copy is worn at the corners and the spine has wrinkles. The pages are still tight, thankfully. A postcard marks where I last left off, signed by a dear friend. When I learned this wonderful story was no longer available, I helped return it to print briefly as a trade edition (2007, no longer available) and consider that one of the greatest accomplishments of my career in publishing.

  But spines wrinkle and covers wear. Print goes out of print (almost certainly, it seems, for to-be classics). Imagine my utter delight to be able to say to you, dear readers, that here is your very own copy. Dun Lady’s Jess lives again! It will become, I’m confident, one of your favourites. A classic, by my definition. Reread it. Treasure it. Tell a
ll your friends.

  A friend recently told me, we can’t have enough classics.

  I couldn’t agree more.

  Excuse me. I need to reread one of mine. There’s a horse... and a woman... and oh, such magic...

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Introduction

  Once upon a time I had a dream.

  No, seriously. I dreamt of a man on his horse, carrying important information and running for his life. Running for their lives. They triggered a spell and ended up...

  Elsewhere. And entirely changed.

  So I wrote it, and it became another sort of dream—the one where you’re so in love with the story and characters that you want to share. Need to share. Are obsessed about sharing—!

  Jess sold to the second publisher who saw the manuscript; less than a year later the book was on the shelves. Dream come true? You betcha. And the next spring, when Jess won the Compton Crook award for the best “first book” of the year, I realized that what I’d wanted so badly—to find others who feel as I do about Jess and her world—was now a reality.

  But as all books eventually do, Jess went out of print. Dismayed readers who found books two & three of that series could do no more than haunt used bookstores in search of the first. So then I had another dream: To find a way to make this series live again. By then my craft had become more mature—the moment a writer stops growing is the moment she falters—but Jess’s story still called to me above and beyond. I still wanted it told.

  Now here I am, years later, with the chance to share this story and its people with a whole new group of readers...to share Jess’s heart.

  Because when you come right down to it, that’s what Jess has taught me. While exploring her story, how she reacts to the changes in her life and the people she encounters...while watching her grow from a baffled young woman into someone with destiny...I learned about heart. About having it, and staying true to it. That the lesson applies when it comes writing, to reading...and to life. Having heart is how we grow, how we live lives we’re proud of and happy with, and how we fill our lives with people who do the same. And if I ever forget that lesson in the detailed trappings of deadlines and assignments and bills, Jess is—thank goodness—always there to remind me.

  This release of Dun Lady’s Jess is an updated one, which is to say that I’ve been given the opportunity (nay, privilege!) to wander the manuscript, slyly smoothing off the rough edges of my early prose without changing the story one little bit. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed revisiting it!

  ~Doranna

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter One

  The odor of singed herbs filled the stone stairway, and Carey smiled to himself. He knew that once again, Arlen had immersed himself so deeply in his studies that the outside world eluded him. He reached the wizard’s chamber and hooked his hand on the heavy door frame to swing casually into the well-lit room.

  Arlen did not notice. His writing table was cleared down to seldom seen wood, and he sat staring intently at the one object gracing its surface. His hair, still full and shaggy despite some gray, fell forward to hide his features: dark, kind eyes and a long nose over a mustache which almost hid his slight overbite.

  Carey tapped the thick metal of his courier ring against the stone of the wall, introducing sound into the quiet room. Arlen’s head jerked up, then around; when he discovered Carey, his one cocked eyebrow formed an unspoken question.

  “You called, remember?” Carey tapped the ring again, which still tingled in summons. With easy familiarity, he moved into the room and pulled up the stool that sat empty before Arlen’s spell table. “You’ve been up here too long. I’ll bet you haven’t been out since you first sent me out to Sherra’s.” He reached for the sputtering simmer pot and removed the burning herbs from the frame that held it over its low mage-flame. “Losing track of your fragrance herbs...not a good sign, Arlen.”

  Arlen leaned back in his chair and raised another eyebrow, offended this time. “I called, all right, but it wasn’t to subject myself to a lecture.”

  “You need one,” Carey replied, unperturbed. “If you hadn’t kept me so busy running between wizards lately, I’d have made sure you remembered to take care of yourself.”

  “That’s the problem exactly,” Arlen said. “That’s why I called. I’ve got another run for you—but this time we need to talk.”

  Carey abandoned the stool and wandered to one of the four unshuttered windows of the hold’s uppermost room. Built along a hillside, the dwelling abandoned any pretense at symmetrical architecture and instead insinuated itself into the nooks and crannies of the steep rocky ground. The result was this five-walled room, of which no wall equaled the length of another. A good place for the creative pursuits of a wizard, Carey had decided long ago. He hung over the window sill to get an unfettered look at the hilly fields and pastures of the area, while the brisk spring air made a pleasant counterpoint to the sunshine on his face. “So talk.”

  “Carey,” Arlen said firmly, “I recognize the habits of your profession don’t encourage inactivity. But do you think you could be still for just a few moments, and apply your entire concentration to what I have to say?”

  Surprised but unstung by the wizard’s admonition, Carey returned to the stool and shook his hair—dark blond instead of gray, but just as shaggy as Arlen’s—out of his eyes. “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.” And then, seeing the smudges of fatigue around Arlen’s eyes and fully recognizing their somber expression, he was indeed truly alert to what his friend and employer had to say.

  “I’ve found something new, Carey, something none of us have suspected even existed.”

  None of us—wizards, he meant. Carey nodded. “That explains why you’ve been sending everything through me instead of popping it around.” Magical missives could be intercepted, but a lone rider was most difficult to detect—except through the mundane means of trackers and guesswork. “How dangerous is it?”

  Arlen nodded, absently smoothing a frayed spot on his shirt. “Dangerous all the way around—but wondrous, as well. There are other worlds, Carey. Other dimensions. Other peoples...people who, I might add, don’t seem to have any notion we exist.”

  “Then what’s the danger?” Carey frowned.

  “At this point, the danger is to them.”

  Carey shook his head once to show he wasn’t following, and Arlen’s expression grew intense.

  “You know we have checkspells in place to prevent the unauthorized use of dangerous magics. What you may not realize is that the most inherently dangerous moment in the life of any hazardous new spell is the time between when it is discovered and the time the checkspell is in place. There’s more than one person in this land who would use this particular knowledge for their own gain—and those other worlds can’t know how to deal with a magic they may not possess.”

  Carey gave a skeptical snort. “I doubt they’re as helpless as all that. Besides, what’s to gain?”

  “Entire worlds.” Arlen said with certainty. “As far as I’ve been able to determine, once a traveler is spelled to one of these worlds, there remains only the thread of a connection between the two places. That gives the person in question all the magic they care to draw on—even in the worlds without magic—with none of the inconveniences of the Council’s restraint.” Arlen leaned forward, his dark eyes sparking with intensity. “Think past the everyday magics of night glows and cleansing spells, Carey. Think about those things that are used only when one of us without scruples manages to circumvent a checkspell, and how quickly they gain power. The bloody times in Camolen’s history.”

  The skepticism faded; Carey stared at the wizard with widened eyes. “Damn.”

  Arlen leaned back, taking a deep breath that he released slowly through his long, straight nose. “There’s more. These others have developed devices that accomplish some of the same things we can do with magic, including weapons that will work as well in our w
orld as theirs. We’ve got to get this under control before one of the less conscientious among us figures out what we’ve got and how to use it. I hope your horses are well rested, Carey, because you’re going to be busy.”

  Carey shrugged sturdy shoulders set atop a wiry frame. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “True enough.” Arlen reached behind to scoop the lone object from the top of his writing desk and held it out to Carey, who rose only long enough to take it. He settled back on the stool and studied the small blue crystal for a moment before glancing back up at Arlen. “It’s protection,” Arlen said.

  “Spellstone?” Carey asked. “Protection from what?” He reached into the neck of his tunic and brought out a heavy silver chain upon which hung several colorful spellstones, and compared the new one to its fellows.

  “We’ve been careful, but—” Arlen shook his head, his lips thinning in annoyance. “Word is out, I’m afraid. At the very least, Calandre knows of the new spell—Calandre, and whoever else she’s told. She’s been too good for too long. You’re bound to be a target, Carey.”

  Carey set the small crystal carefully on the table, thinking about Arlen’s former student. A woman his own age, Calandre had arrived with an enormous amount of talent and not a whit of patience. Her barely scrupulous magical shortcuts had kept her off the Wizard’s Council year after year, and as her frustration grew, so did her rationalized, barely sanctioned methods. For several years she had been in her own hold—obtained from an aging wizard under questionable circumstances—and had not bothered to interact with the Council save for response to the occasional summons. To all appearances, she was operating within the Council guidelines, but.... “What about the shieldstone?” he asked.

  “Still holds,” Arlen assured him. “As long as you wear the stone, the only magic that affects you will be the spells you release yourself. But you know as well as I that there are other ways.”