Changespell 01 Dunn Lady's Jess Read online

  At the words, the young woman stirred. With a groan she shook her face free of the odd colored, ragged hair that had covered it; she opened her eyes and reacted with a strange, frightened huff that came from deep within her chest. She pulled herself awkwardly forward, out from beneath the saddle and the lather encrusted blanket, and Eric moved forward to help her.

  She saw them for the first time. Her dark eyes widened with fright and her nostrils flared; she lurched to her feet and tried to run, but only got a few steps before she tripped, falling with a grunt.

  Eric froze, dismayed, and Dayna tugged his arm. "Let me," she whispered. "There's no telling what she's been through."

  Wordlessly, he moved back and crouched down, halving his height. Dayna took a step and said, "It's all right. We'll help you."

  The young woman scrabbled backwards, paying more attention to her own clumsiness than to either Dayna or Eric. She looked down at herself and whimpered, and her eyes were huge and terrified. She thrashed to her feet again, just long enough to run headlong into a tree, after which she fell in a tangle of long limbs and curled around herself, trembling too hard to try again.

  Dayna exchanged a dismayed glance with Eric; he shook his head. "Maybe she's on something," he said. "I'll go get help."

  "No!" Dayna said emphatically. "I'm afraid she might hurt herself, and I can't handle her alone. Wait until we get her calmed down a little, okay?"

  He looked at the still quivering huddle of woman and nodded reluctantly. Then he slipped off his loose lightweight jacket and said, "See if you can't get her covered up. She must be cold."

  Dayna took the jacket and pushed her way through the twiggy brush between the meadow and the woods. The woman didn't react to her, and Dayna glanced back uncertainly; Eric nodded encouragement.

  Another step, no reaction. Dayna quietly made her way to within a few feet of the woman, then went down on her knees and spoke quietly. "I want to help you," she said, but although she could see the dark eyes were open, they didn't seem to see her. Hesitantly, Dayna stretched out her hand.

  "Be careful," Eric whispered.

  Dayna nodded without taking her eyes from the withdrawn creature before her. Her unsteady hand brushed the naked shoulder without reaction. "I want to help you," she repeated softly. Her fingers stroked the coarsely textured hair, smoothed it in a cautious petting motion. "See, it's all right now." Was it her imagination, or had the trembling abated almost imperceptibly? "Take it easy now."

  The woman stiffened, and Dayna froze, no less flighty than she. "Easy," Dayna repeated experimentally. "Take it easy." To her astonishment, the woman, still huddled in on herself, shifted her weight to lean against Dayna, pressing close.

  "Oh, good, Dayna!" Eric encouraged, rustling in the brush behind her.

  "Stay where you are," Dayna warned, her inflection still patterned to soothe. She smoothed back the odd hair and petted and consoled the woman, using the magic word easy liberally while she tried to take stock of what she and Eric had found. Long limbed and muscled like an athlete, the woman was bruised and scratched, both Achilles' tendons scraped raw and bloody. Her body bore no signs of abuse, but she was clammy with dried sweat and exuded an odd musky odor of effort.

  Eric rustled behind them again, and Dayna bit her tongue on admonition when the woman didn't react—and when Eric seemed content, from the noises of it, to examine the saddle. "I don't get this," he said, a frown in his voice. "This blanket's soaking wet—smells like horse. Weird. I don't see any hoofprints . . . . Maybe there's something in the saddlebags . . . ."

  Dayna didn't answer. She kept up her soothing patter of reassuring nonsense and thought, perhaps, that the woman who leaned against her no longer quivered quite as much, was possibly even beginning to relax.

  After an excessively long pause, Eric reported, "Not much in here. A hammer, couple of nails, a horseshoe . . . it doesn't . . ." he trailed off into pensive silence, then picked up his thought. "These things don't look right. Like if I went into a store after them, they wouldn't look like this."

  Dayna smiled tightly. "That's useful," she said, keeping her voice low. Her charge was definitely relaxing, unbothered by her conversation. "Isn't there anything that might tell us who she is?"

  "Well, there's a packet of papers, but it's sealed."

  "Open it," Dayna suggested.

  Eric hesitated, then said, "I don't think I can do it without tearing them up. Besides, it looks pretty official, and it's got someone's name on it."

  "What's the name?" Dayna said, rolling her eyes. She had no patience for dragging answers out of Eric, a process imposed on her any time he was in deep thought.

  After another hesitation, he said, "I don't know. It's in a strange script. I suppose it might not be a name at all." After more rustling during which she supposed he was replacing the packet, he sighed heavily and said, "This just doesn't make any sense. How is she?"

  "Better, I think. Maybe good enough so you can leave us, go get some help."

  "I've been thinking about that," he told her.

  Uh-oh. "Eric, this isn't one of your orphaned bunnies to take home and raise," she said, almost sharply. "Something's happened to this woman, and it ought to be reported."

  He crawled up beside her and looked into the woman's face. The large dark eyes were only half open, and they noted him without alarm or any apparent care for her nudity in his presence. He took his jacket from where it lay next to Dayna and carefully offered it to her.

  Her eyes did open all the way, then, and she drew back from Dayna, only enough to support herself independently. She cocked her head and leaned forward and sniffed the jacket.

  Another incredulous glance flashed between Dayna and Eric. "Weird," he whispered, as she drew back again, cocked her head the other way, and brought the other side of her face up to the material. Apparently satisfied, she gave a small huff and sat awkwardly back on her haunches. She took no notice of her completely exposed breasts, but Eric couldn't be so blasé. Pinking slightly on his high, tightly drawn cheekbones, he slowly settled the jacket over her shoulders. She made no move to thread her arms into the sleeves and, after a moment, Dayna took her unresisting hand and guided it into the garment. Eric, on her other side, did the same, then fastened the zipper for her. It was an exercise in slow motion that seemed to bother the woman less than it bothered the two of them. She ducked her head down to rub her nose on the inside of her wrist and regarded them patiently, waiting for whatever they might choose to do next.

  "Dayna . . . if we call the police, what's going to happen to her?"

  "She'll get help," Dayna answered promptly.

  "What, they'll put her in some state hospital? Lose her in the system?"

  "And what do you propose to do, take care of her for the rest of her life? She obviously can't take care of herself."

  "You don't know that. I think she deserves a chance to get over whatever shock she's had. Putting her into an impersonal system won't give her that chance," Eric said, a familiar stubborn note creeping into his voice.

  "So you just want to walk her out of here, stuff her into your car, and take her home for a few days," Dayna said with sarcasm, hoping it would ram the absurdity through his stubbornness.

  He was taken aback only for a moment. "I want to help her, Dayna. Don't you?"

  Dayna gave an exasperated sigh. "And what if we take her home and three days later we discover the police have been looking for her, and that her family's frantic, and that we've done more harm than good?"

  Eric rubbed his nose and said frankly, "I know there's a good chance this isn't the right thing to do. But I think it's about even with the chance that taking her to some authority is exactly the wrong thing to do."

  Dayna said nothing, lost in the surprise that he was anywhere near being practical.

  "How about this," Eric suggested. "Twenty-four hours of TLC. If she doesn't straighten out by then, well," he shrugged, "I guess we can call the police."

  "Right,"
Dayna grumbled. "And explain to them why we didn't call earlier."

  "Dayna—"

  "All right," she interrupted him, looking at the trusting woman before her. There was something about the quality of that trust, especially in contrast with her earlier extreme fear, that made her feel just as Eric did—made her want to take the poor creature home and give her tea and a soft blanket to curl up with. Her mind replaced the tea and blanket with harsh sterile sheets and hospital food, and she knew she'd lost completely. "We'll take her to my place, not yours."

  * * *

  Lady was reluctant to move again. That her fall had ended in a gentle thump on fairly soft ground was not so hard to accept; it was almost insignificant beside the other things that flooded her senses. Merely opening her eyes had invited an assault of things outside her experience: colors that hadn't existed, a field of view that was all wrong, and an ability to focus without moving her head to sight in on an object.

  Then she'd tried to move. Nothing worked right, her balance was gone, her sense of self was skewed. The sight of the two strangers had driven away the last remnants of sanity, merely because they, too, were unknowns. She was sinking deep into shock when a quiet voice had used one of her Words. One of Carey's Words. Easy, the voice had said, and then gentle hands had petted her, had let her lean and seek the safety of touch. Once she'd trusted the strangers, had believed the Word that meant they would take care of things for her, the unusual blanket was almost of no consequence. She was used to people who handled her hooves and body, and she was used to complying with their wishes.

  But she didn't want to move again. Her body wasn't right yet. She listened to the man and woman quietly argue and became aware it wasn't only her body that was different. Words, words that she'd heard over and over but never assigned any significance to, suddenly fell into patterns. They still had no meaning for her, but she was suddenly aware that they could. She flared her nostrils in irritation and tried to understand what had changed, and what had been different before. She became suddenly confused about what she had—or hadn't—been able to comprehend before, and she whimpered, a noise that startled her just as much as her strange new vision.

  "Easy," the woman said, and even that was enough to make her wonder how she could still discern this person as a woman, when her sense of smell had diminished so. But the deeply ingrained habit of response to her Words was so strong that, even so, she felt herself relax. Relax, and go along with it, and these people would make everything right again.

  "Come with us," the man suggested, and almost against her will, she moved forward, for come triggered another response. She moved awkwardly, not sure what to do about the extra length in her hind legs until the man suddenly took her by the front legs and pulled her up to a rear.

  Rearing was forbidden. But . . .

  It felt completely natural. They encouraged her, they told her it was good. Haltingly, she walked the few steps to the meadow, then the yards to the hard dirt path. The man walked behind them, the saddle braced against his hip, Carey's saddlebags slung over the worn leather seat. The woman had the blanket, and before they'd gone far, she gingerly shook it out and offered to drape the cleanest side around Lady's shoulders. The man's strange blanket came only just below her hips, and Lady was glad to have something else against the chill. Almost by accident, she discovered she could hold the blanket in place with what should have been her front hooves.

  Getting into the small metal stall proved to be a little awkward, and when it began to move she froze with fear. But by now the woman was more assured in handling her, and quickly soothed her, even as Lady herself realized she wasn't being hurt and perhaps there was nothing to fear after all.

  Once she reached that point, she was able to recognize that the man was controlling the movements of the stall, and that there were many more similar stalls moving all around them. She heaved a big sigh for the perplexity of it all and retreated to her inner world, leaving large unblinking eyes behind. From there she listened to the conversation between the man and woman and let her body sway with the movement of their travel.

  When they stopped, she focused her eyes and found them sitting before a barn, one of many in a long line of barns. A barn meant food and rest and she willingly followed them into it. Inside, it looked like no barn she'd ever been in, and she spent a long time checking it, approaching its clutter carefully and sniffing with a nose that no longer provided her the information that she needed. She let the blanket drop and discovered that her odd new hooves were sensitive to texture and shape—almost as sensitive as her muzzle should have been. With a variety of snorts and investigative huffing, Lady satisfied her natural curiosity.

  After offering her a soft baggy covering for her lower half, the man and woman followed her at a distance, and let her explore. When her curiosity was slaked, the man flopped down on a soft low structure and heaved a big sigh of fatigue. That was a language she could understand and sympathize with. "Dayna," he said, and added something she couldn't understand.

  Dayna. That had to be the woman's name; she certainly responded to it. And the man, she was almost sure, was called Eric. Knowing their names, she felt safer, but the knowledge wasn't enough to make her feel as secure as Carey could. She wanted Carey here, wanted him badly, and her throat began an unaccustomed ache.

  Dayna said the only thing that could have distracted her. "Are you hungry?"

  Lady's whole body straightened in attention. She knew all the variations of words that had to do with food, and she went right up to Dayna and watched her with expectant eyes.

  Both Dayna and Eric laughed, and then, when they were seated around a round platform and Lady tried to suck up the liquid offered her in a stupidly long cylinder and it went up her nose, they laughed again; after clearing her nose, she felt a strange bubbling in her chest and it turned irrepressible and came out in a funny little laugh of her own.

  And then she stopped short, and dropped the liquid, and froze in fear, hardly noticing as the drink dribbled over the edge of the platform and onto the soft material that now covered her strong dusky legs. It was that laugh, coming from her own changed body, that suddenly allowed her to understand.

  She had turned into one of Carey's kind. With trembling fingers, she felt for her long, refined muzzle and discovered only a flat face with a ridiculously small nose. There were none of the sensitive whiskers she relied on so much. Unable to believe or accept, she reached for Dayna, but the smaller woman stiffened, for the first time showing signs of her own fear.

  Eric's gentle word relaxed her and Dayna allowed Lady to touch her face, while one hand almost frantically compared the feel of her own. And then the ache came back to her throat, and she whimpered and, suddenly, she was crying, not knowing what it was, but only that she couldn't help herself.

  * * *

  When Lady woke, it was dark and she was on a soft bed, and even as she realized it, she knew the ability to recognize this structure as a bed, as much a bed as her own straw-strewn stall, was not a concept her equine self could have handled. But she was through crying for now, and her current concentration was on something much more urgent, for her bladder was as full as it ever got. She stood and moved quietly out of the room.

  In the midst of her tears of the evening before, they had tried to lure her up the stepped hill to further depths of the barn, but she'd have none of it. As far as she knew, they were up there now, asleep. She walked through the food area to the back door, which posed no problems to a clever horse who'd been able to outwit many a latch with only her lips, and who now had hands, even if she didn't know that's what they were called. Following the instinct to avoid soiling her own space, she went outside and fumbled with the soft material around her lean hips, heaving a sigh of relief when she could finally crouch and relieve herself. Then she crept back to the warmth inside, suddenly aware of the soreness from the efforts of her run, and crawled back into the bed.

  After that she slept lightly, in the manner of her
kind. Her mind raced with unaccustomed notions, and the throat ache crept up on her almost unawares. This time her response to it was anger, an emotion she was well acquainted with. She was angry to be here, and angry at whatever had caused it to happen. She wanted to find Carey and go home. By morning she knew she must learn to communicate with Dayna and Eric; she'd even practiced quiet words with her newly flexible mouth and lips. For a horse that was a large chunk of thinking and when Dayna ventured down from the upper level, Lady was as tired as she'd been the day before.

  She got out of her bed with an involuntary groan, finding that the last quiet hours of the night had tied her abused muscles into knots. The scrapes on her lower legs were stuck to the soft material and every motion tugged at them. Reacting to the prickle as to fly bites, she stomped one leg several quick times, then repeated it with the other, freeing the scabs. Dayna frowned at her but Lady was through, having accomplished her goal. Soon, she was sure, Dayna or Eric would treat the wounds, as Carey would have in their place.

  She followed Dayna into the food area, attuned to her growling stomach. As puny as it was, her nose picked up the scent of apple, and she found a bowl of fruit she hadn't noticed the evening before. As Dayna went about the arcane business of preparing food Lady didn't recognize, she helped herself to an apple and, mindful of her changed chewing apparatus, carefully nibbled at it.

  Yesterday Dayna had seldom spoken directly to her, other than her efforts to comfort. Now she kept up a running patter, and often looked at Lady, looking for a response. Lady gave her the only one she had. "Dayna," she said proudly, if awkwardly.

  Dayna dropped the implement she was using to mix eggs and looked at her with widened eyes. "Dayna?"

  Lady thought it had been quite clear, so she repeated herself with some impatience. "Dayna."

  Eric chose that moment to wander in and, unlike Dayna, he was clearly slow to wake up. While Dayna was in a new blanket, a fuzzy shapeless thing with a girth, Eric still wore what he had had on the day before. His hair was a mess and even as he wandered to the big box with the cold air, he gave a huge yawn. Dayna tugged at his arm and spoke quickly, almost sharply; Eric turned to give Lady an interested appraisal.