Read Changespell Legacy for Free Online Page A

frowned—frowned as though he hadn't expected Carey to come in and take over, Carey who was Arlen's closest friend and who had been working in this hold since he was in his early teens. But Natt's hesitation was short; it evolved into relief. Into realization . . . someone else would make the decisions .
    Carey wished he could say the same. He gave Natt a moment of concentration to make the summons—just about the time Jaime appeared in the doorway, only glancing at the crowded interior—two work desks, bookshelves lining every wall but the dispatch desk corner, and a long pastoral mural painted on the wall where a window might have gone. Jaime said, "She's useless. She just keeps repeating that the Council is dead."
    "That's all she knows," Natt said. He pulled his hands down his face, briefly stretching his features out of place. "It's all we know—we felt it happen. And we have this." He handed a scrawled, red-bordered note to Carey. "It came—to me—from Siccawei's secondary hold. They don't have a regular dispatch service there; it was probably all they could do to send this as confidential. And they're clearly not going to say anything more through dispatch at all. We need to send someone . . ."
    He trailed off as Carey took the paper; Jaime crowded in close. The note was addressed to the Secondary Council, and to the first apprentice for each Council wizard. "Council ambushed," he said out loud, although Jaime could read it, just as she spoke Camolen's common dialect; the world-travel spell prepared its travelers well. "Send contact," she finished.
    "Cesna's sensitive to interpersonal communication," Natt said, apology in his strained voice. "It hit her hard. I think it was probably all she could do to get to you in the first place. It's all she needed to do; I'll deal with the rest of it for now."
    "Send contact?" Jaime repeated.
    "It means they're not willing to transfer any more information through even the secure dispatch methods,"
    Natt told her.
    Carey glowered, albeit at no one in particular. "Or it means they don't know anything else."
    Dayna had felt the start of it. Less sensitive than some to magic-driven interpersonal communications, she had the dubious honor of being the first to feel the raw magic. Outside the Council, no one outstripped her ability to detect it, and no one outstripped her ability to wield it—when she was allowed to use it in the first place.
    This surge had been unshaped magic, without so much as will or intent behind it. Just a careless wave of power, one that somehow entirely lacked backlash. And yet— Look what it had done.
    She sat on a little bay horse named Fahrvegnügen—dubbed courtesy of Jaime's brother Mark and his questionable wit—and glanced at Trent, wishing she hadn't. Wishing she hadn't been one of the few who'd taken this ride to find Sherra when the palomino stallion had returned alone to Second Siccawei.
    And wishing most of all that she wasn't standing on the edge of a warped, diseased section of woods that looked like nothing more than a particularly disturbed Dali painting, a scene of carnage so beyond her imagination that she could barely comprehend it.
    She should have known things had been too quiet. Going too well. Camolen didn't have that kind of track record with her. On the surface it was a quieter, much more peaceful place than Earth, but when things went wrong with magic, they spiraled almost instantly into crisis and past the cold war stage—usually before almost anybody even knew there was trouble in the first place.
    She couldn't imagine it going much wronger than this .
    Slowly, Trent dismounted. The palomino had been his, lent to Sherra when her own horse threw a shoe on the way from Siccawei, and initially he'd blamed himself for giving her a mount more difficult than she was used to. Initially he'd thought the palomino, with its trailing lead rope, had simply pulled away from her grasp and left her afoot. Initially, he'd simply mounted up