“No. I was alone, waiting for Alfric. He is a serving man for my brother-in-law. I did smell something, though.” The ghost gave a hideous chortle. “Even over the horse manure I thought I caught a whiff of the lake.”
Teza nodded once. The witch raised her hands, spoke a strange word, and snuffed out the fire. Lord Gireth’s spirit form vanished from sight.
“Now,” said Teza’s black-robed companion. “There is the matter of your vulnerability. You cannot concentrate on this quest if you are constantly dodging into taverns and racing home to change disguises.”
Teza tore her eyes away from the now dark brazier and frowned. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “That is my problem,” she said.
“True. But we can temporarily relieve you of that difficulty. You only have three days to find the killer.”
“Teza crossed her arms. “How?”
“A disguise no one will penetrate.”
Teza thought she heard a hint of laughter in the witch’s words. Her mental alarms began to clang. “That’s kind, but…“ She got no further.
The witch lifted her palms up and blew a pale, glimmering powder into Teza’s face. Even as the woman chanted her incantation, Teza felt an alien feeling crawl over her. Her skin tingled; her nose lengthened. Her legs and arms shortened so quickly she fell on her side on the cold stone floor. Her clothes sagged on her body. Worst of all, she was assailed by an explosion of sensory stimulation: hundreds of smells she had never experienced, new sounds that filled her sensitive ears. Her vision sharpened in the dark room and lost most of its color. Terrified she closed her eyes and shouted, “Stop!” She heard a dog bark so close it could have been beneath her.
Oh, no, she thought.
“Teza,” a gentle voice said above her. “It’s over now. Stand up.”
Slowly, carefully, Teza opened her eyes and climbed to her feet. All four of them. Too astounded for anger, her rump sagged to the floor and she sat.
“Excellent. This spell will last only three days, so don’t worry. Think of the advantages and put them to use. You will retain your own intelligence, but you will also be able to communicate with other animals and with those creatures, human and otherwise, who are a part of magic. Do you understand?”
Teza growled, “Yes.” She had a hundred other well chosen questions and opinions she wanted to add, but she was too bemused. Besides, her human memory reminded her, to disobey a witch was to ask for immediate death. If this witch thought Teza would be more effective as a dog, then that’s how it would be.
Grumbling to herself, she padded after the witch back to the front entrance. The door stood open.
“Chauntea go with you,” said the witch softly, and she shut the door behind Teza.
For a long while, Teza the dog stood immobile by the hail, her head lowered and her tail tucked between her legs. Of all the stupid, manipulating things to do to someone. At least the witch could have turned her into a horse.
This was all so bewildering. There were too many smells and too many sounds. Her vision was different and her body was aligned in a strange new way. Her perspective had changed, too. As a human she could look many people in the eyes, now all she could see were legs. Thankfully, the witch had made her a large dog, one people would not try to kick or eat or catch.
Just then the breeze wafted a scent toward her that even her dog sense recognized. She lifted her eyes to see a man walking along the road toward her-a young man in a shaggy coat and a jaunty knit hat and a smile that had melted her human heart on many occasions.
“Jereth!” she called as he passed.
The young man heard a woof. He glanced around at her, flashed his grin, and ruffled her shaggy ears. “Good day to you, too, big dog. Out watching the people? Well, maybe you’d better find another door to sit by before those witches turn you into a doorstop.” He patted her again and sauntered away, his boots crunching on the snow.
Teza watched him go, her ears cocked thoughtfully. Perhaps the witch’s spell had merit. If Jereth, a man who knew Teza very well indeed, did not suspect she was anything more than a dog, then no one else would either. Teza’s confusion melted away in the warmth of a growing curiosity. She had always been good at disguises, but this was the best one she’d ever had. This might prove rather interesting.
Hesitantly at first, Teza set out toward the Red Stallion Inn. As the witch pointed out, there were only three days to help Kanlara. So, dog or no dog, Teza decided she had better get busy. To her surprise and pleasure, her mind quickly adapted to the strange new ways of her canine body. Before long she was swinging along at a jaunty trot with her long tail high and her ears flapping. The distance to the inn vanished quickly under her long-legged pace.
The inn lay quietly in its shelter of trees with only a wisp of smoke from the kitchen chimney to show a sign of life. Teza trotted around the back and into the stable through the groom’s door. There were many more empty stalls this afternoon. A few ponies nibbled hay in a pen at one end and one horse dozed in a stall.
Teza inhaled deeply, astonished at the intensity and variety of the smells she could identify. The stall where Lord Gireth had died was all too easy to find by the intense, metallic scent of old blood. The bloodied straw had been removed, but nothing could disguise the smells that had soaked into the earth floor. Teza began a slow and careful search of the stall’s interior.
“New around here?” a husky voice asked. “I hope you’re not planning to stay.”
Startled, Teza looked up to see a large yellow tomcat perched on the wooden wall. “No, no,” she hastened to reassure. How she knew how to communicate with him so easily she never knew, but her speech was a richly varied combination of vocal sounds, body language, and an instinctive enhancement of mental images. It was remarkable, and it just seemed to come with the disguise. “The people think my friend killed this man. I want to find out who really did.” She continued to sniff around under the close scrutiny of the yellow cat.
There were any number of human scents in this stall, including her own and Kanlara’s. She also identified
Lord Gireth’s smell on the floor and on the door of the stall and two others that were quite fresh. “How many people have been in the stable today?” she asked the cat politely.
The torn ignored her as he settled down in the hay of the feed rack.
“Don’t pay attention to that lazy floor rug,” another voice squeaked. A small black rat poked her nose out of a hole under the hay rack. “He is older than this inn and just as set in his ways. If you want to know, ask me. There were three people who came in here last night to remove the body and one more who cleaned it out this morning. That was some excitement. We haven’t seen such goings on since the last midwinter festival.”
Teza lifted her lips in a dogish smile at the rat’s cheerful chatter. “Did you see anyone else before the man died?”
“Oh, certainly. There was the man, the selkie that met him, a guard, a woman who-”
“What?” Teza barked. “A selkie. Are you certain?”
The rat stuck out her whiskers and lifted her nose. “As certain as the darkness. Smell it yourself. She leaned against that wall.”
Teza sniffed and there it was, just as Lord Gireth had said, a whiff of the lake.
In the flick of an eye, the rat disappeared and like an iron fist a hand grabbed Teza’s ruff and hauled her out of the stall. “Here, you cur. Get out!” A man, tall and well dressed, planted a boot viciously into Teza’s side. Pain lanced through her ribs. She yelped. He pulled back his foot to kick her again, but this time her dog instincts took over.
Fast as a weasel she slipped around in her loose skin and sank her teeth in his arm. His scent and the smell of his blood filled her nostrils. A cry of furious pain escaped his lips. Teza wrenched herself free from his grasp. She caught one glimpse of his face before she whirled away and galloped out of the barn to the safety of the trees.
She went just far enough to get out of sight, then she stopped and sat thoughtfully staring at the road through the evergreens. That man had looked familiar. Somewhere she had seen him very recently. Then she had it. He was the lord in the communal longhouse who had watched the kohrtar with such interest. So what was he doing in the stable where Lord Gireth was murdered?
Without realizing what she was doing, Teza’s tongue lolled out and she started panting while her mind ranged over a hundred questions. Particularly, why was a selkie, a freshwater creature of the gentlest nature, in a stable with a murder victim? Why hadn’t Lord Gireth’s shade mentioned her?
