Free Changespell 01 Dunn Lady's Jess by Doranna Durgin Page A

all seems pretty odd to me. Jess is so simple—yet so complex. If she's feeling sad, or angry, or happy, she lets you know about it right then—she's amazingly straightforward. At the same time, sometimes I feel like I haven't the slightest idea what's going on in her head."
    "I know what you mean," Eric said. "I'd give anything to know who Carey is, and how they got separated."
    "That reminds me," Jaime said, sitting up straight. "Today a man came looking for a mare he'd lost—a mare and her tack. He was pretty pushy—I thought for a minute I was going to have trouble with him. And he was looking for a dun."
    Dayna scowled even as Eric said, "Dun Lady's Jess!"
    "He's staying at the LK," Jaime said, looking directly at that scowl. "It'd be interesting to see what else we could find out about him."
    "If you think I'm going to use my passkey, think again," Dayna said. "I like my job. I don't want to lose it."
    Jaime held her tongue while Mark trotted back and retrieved his sneakers from beside the table. Then she said, "I haven't told Mark yet."
    "Meaning . . . ?" Dayna asked suspiciously.
    "He has a passkey, too. Who would you rather have poking around, him or you?"
    Startled, Dayna had immediate images of Mark in the man's room, carelessly looking through drawers, leaving a dozen and one signs of his presence. When she looked at Jaime, it was with anger and a little bit of respect. "Don't tell him," she said. "I'll do it."
    * * *
    Jess offered the old border collie another scrap of hoof just to see his reaction again. Keg gingerly accepted the treat, looked swiftly around to see if anyone was poised to intercept him, and slunk furtively toward the big double sliding doors. As he looked out his head snapped to the side and he quickened his step, so Jess wasn't surprised when Eric showed up in the doorway. She swept the last of the hoof parings and sharp, used horseshoe nails into the dustpan and dumped it into the garbage while he greeted her. She thought he had an unusual glint in his uptilted eyes. He was up to something.
    "Computers?" she asked, with no notion of what a computer really was—aside from the fact that one sat in Jaime's office, looking sort of like a television—except that Eric usually spent the day dealing with them.
    "Took off work today," he said. "And I just talked to Jaime—she had the whole day scheduled for the farrier, so she—and you—have the afternoon free. She muttered something about catching up on her record keeping, but you —well, you can come with me, if you want."
    Her curiosity was immediately piqued; her scalp shifted in the slight way that would have swiveled her ears forward, had they still been proper ears. "Where?"
    His face registered satisfaction. "Shopping. For books. I think, and Jaime agrees, that it's important that you learn to read. I'll be the first to admit I don't really understand what's happened to you, or how it'll turn out in the long run, but as long as you're here, you'll be better off if you can read."
    "Read?" Jess' memory supplied her, unbidden, an image of Jaime staring at the morning sheaf of paper-that-smudged. And then, of Carey, looking at one of the black-scribbled things that always came with them on a run. Was that "read?" What did it do?
    "Read," Eric repeated, looking off to the side for an instant of thought. That meant an explanation, for Eric often looked at nothing right before he made something clear to her. Of course, just as often, he looked at nothing for no apparent reason at all. If Dayna caught him at it, she called it "daydreaming."
    "Reading," Eric said, "is a way of listening to someone talk with your eyes."
    " Ears ," Jess scoffed.
    "No. Look." Eric drew her over to the board over the grain bin, the green slatelike rectangle that Jess had gotten quite used to without understanding its purpose. He took one of the white sticks that always sat in the tray at the bottom of the board, and brandished it with a flourish. He drew angular