Page 13 of Strange Familiar (Warriors of Magic #2)

~13~

A lise refused to fuck the familiars her father sent to her. Even though it made them sad, sulky, bitter and, with one memorable young man, outright angry. She made each candidate sleep in her bed alone, while she wrapped herself in a blanket nest by the fire. They were locked in together, which wasn’t their fault, but no way would she sleep in the bed where they could crawl in to join her.

Beyond having to argue with these hopefuls—and dashing their hopes in the process—she grimly reminded herself that at least she enjoyed the privilege of being able to refuse them. Unlike Nic, who’d had no choice but to accept those wizards that won the monthly lottery and arrived to spend a night attempting to impregnate her.

In that circular room in the tower where Nic had been sequestered while Alise was happily off at Convocation Academy, Alise spent time surveying the slices of the view through the slanted metal shutters meant to prevent the occupant from escaping via the window—or throwing themselves to their death. Alise, as a favor to Brinda Chur, had written to Nic about her experience in the Betrothal Trials. Lines from Nic’s reply kept circling through her mind like her own pacing within those walls, the single door locked and warded against her escape.

It was awful.

I didn’t think it would matter to me so much, letting those men have me, attempt to impregnate me, but… it did.

It hurt me inside in ways I can’t describe.

I would have agreed to anything, to anyone, to any level of treatment to escape the extended torture of boredom punctuated by rape.

Because that’s what it is, no matter how they dress it up as informed consent.

Even if Alise hadn’t been resolved not to lay a finger on the familiars sent to her—or for them to lay a finger on her—those remembered lines would have stopped her. Though several of the familiars, most in fact, attempted some form of seduction, believing her to be shyly virginal, she had no trouble setting them back on their heels. Unlike Nic, Alise had neither agreed to cooperate, nor did she lack the power to enforce her will. And, sadly, the fact that the familiars had all been trained to reflexively obey a wizard worked in her favor.

Though she recognized many of them from classes above her at school, and though others were even older, they all deferred to her, once they got past their initial confusion at her determined refusal. A couple mentioned that her father had told them she was shy and needed a man to take the lead, so she quickly learned to disabuse them of that notion right off. In the end, though, she found her greatest strength and certainty in knowing that—no matter how eager they seemed to be—none of them could be considered to be truly consenting. Like all familiars, they had one pathway, which was to be subservient to wizards in one way or another.

It grimly amused her to witness her father’s persistence and how clever he imagined himself to be. As time went by, with one disappointed familiar after another leaving in the morning after a night alone, it occurred to her that the men he sent to entice her had begun to resemble Cillian more and more closely.

She reached her limit with a bespectacled familiar who could have been Cillian’s brother, with dark curls and an earnest, intellectual mien. It turned out, however, that he’d never read a book in his life that wasn’t for school. And that he didn’t even need the glasses. As the guard unlocked and opened the door, she called out. “Tell my father that he doesn’t know what I want, so to stop trying.”

The familiar, whose name she’d barely registered and had already forgotten looked confused and apprehensive. So much so that she waved the words away. He’d never summon the courage to speak so impudently to Lord Elal and it had been wrong of her to take out her frustrated ire against him.

Once the door closed and locked behind him, she went to test it, another of her newly acquired habits. The Iblis lock had, of course, been coded for the door guards to operate, not her. With time—of which she had plenty—she could probably wizard her way through breaking the lock. In addition to the lock, however, and the minor-wizards serving as guards, her father had stationed a particularly vicious set of spirits on the door. Not on the shuttered windows, however, which made her wryly aware that, while he expected her to try to escape, he figured she wasn’t desperate enough to choose plummeting to her death.

None of it was absolutely necessary as what truly kept Alise from leaving was the knowledge that Bria would have to take her place as his heir. She had spent her initial days of imprisonment binding and training a new guardian spirit for her niece. It had taken a bit more work to imprint the spirit on Bria from a distance, but—again—Alise had nothing but time. When she sent the little spirit off to Meresin and felt the snap of connection upon it finding Bria, Alise at least was able to savor that small victory.

She found it overkill that her father went to such lengths to lock her in when he’d already chained her with her love for her niece. Telling, she supposed, that he thought he needed insurance beyond that. Piers Elal might be savvy enough to use emotional extortion to manipulate her, but he could never understand basic compassion. Just as his transparent attempts at finding a familiar with a physical type similar to Cillian’s betrayed her father’s utter lack of understanding for what real connection between two people was about.

Yes, Cillian’s face had become dear to her, with his intelligent wizard-black eyes and sexy librarian look with those spectacles. His black curls framed an exquisitely boned face, with his narrow chin and sweet, bow-shaped mouth that kissed her with such tenderness. Those elegantly long-fingered hands that had caressed her body with the same care he showed a delicate and fragile, rare and ancient tome. That was key: Cillian cherished her as if she were precious. He understood her, amused even by her flaws and foibles.

She realized with a sudden crystalline clarity that a person like her father would never in a million years comprehend what she loved about Cillian. He’d built his entire understanding of relationships around manipulating people, so he’d never know how it felt to have someone come to him out of true regard and real feeling, with actual trust. He’d arranged his life so that he was surrounded by people forced to cater to him. Not one person in the whole world wanted to be with him for himself. He could trust no one at all.

Alise had what her father never could. Not just Cillian, though he lived closest to her heart, but also family like Nic and Gabriel, her many friends at House Phel, and even—bizarrely enough—at House El-Adrel now. Her father could weave a web of words about competition and power, but she had experienced for herself the immense rewards of true connection. No amount of wealth or status could compensate for the richness of knowing someone took joy from being around you, even from simply knowing you existed in the world.

She understood that now because knowing Cillian was out there, cozied into House Harahel, reading his books, perhaps poking at that archive, made her happy. Imagining how Bria would be growing day by day gave her joy. Han and Iliana enjoying their forbidden love, Asa practicing the dark arts, Quinn scheming to get her hands on the baby for a while, Nic and Gabriel growing and protecting their house and people… All of that rested like a glowing sun at the core of her, mitigating the cold isolation of her imprisonment.

Nic had written:

Had I been sequestered in that tower much longer, had Gabriel not come along to change my entire world, I’d have succumbed to both despair and the overwhelming need to escape that monthly and harrowing night with my suitors.

Alise knew exactly what Nic meant in saying that. Familiar or not, Nic would’ve found a way to escape that room, probably via those shuttered windows and the horrible drop to the courtyard far below. But that glowing certainty that Alise loved and was loved in return, kept her from considering any such thing. Her father need not shutter the windows or even lock the door. Alise would stay put and see this through, not out of fear, but for love.

The door flung open, Piers Elal’s stocky build filling it from side to side, though his head reached nowhere near the lintel. Alise got her diminutive height from him, along with her magical gifts, and possibly some of her more irascible personality quirks. She would take nothing else of his. If it lived in her—and as much as Cillian claimed otherwise, Alise knew the corrupt tendrils of her father twined around the empty, insecure holes in her heart—then she would root it out.

“Oh, hello Lord Elal.” She pretended to consult the non-existent El-Adrel clock. Probably the inability to track the passage of time precisely should bother her. “Apparently you received my message after all.”

“Yes.” He smiled, and she didn’t care for the look of it. “Come with me.”

Alise followed her father through the familiar halls of her childhood home. House Elal was by far the largest of all the high houses, something Elals long before her father had insisted upon. They laid claim to having the biggest house—in physical size and in population—although that was a claim difficult to prove. House Hanneil, for example, had an architectural profile that blended innocuously with the landscape above but purportedly extended below ground in an immeasurable warren of caves and tunnels. And they never disclosed their actual population.

In a similar fashion, House El-Adrel couldn’t be precisely measured in size as the clockwork, semi-sentient structure changed itself routinely, hiding away rooms—sometimes with the unwary trapped inside—and producing entire wings that hadn’t been seen in centuries. Conversely, House Refoel had no single structure, but instead spread over an entire fertile valley of hot springs and dwellings from spare single-person huts to the multi-roomed main facility.

But House Elal did take the prize for appearing to be the largest manse. It looked like a castle out of fairytales with its towers and turrets, the actual portcullis and drawbridge that lowered over the “moat” created by the near circular bend of a river. If the house hadn’t been built in that serpentine curve—completed by a spike-filled chasm to bridge the distance on the narrow spit of land—and therefore constrained in horizontal sprawl, it would no doubt be even larger. As it was, in their zeal to expand and place their personal stamp on the manse, the generations of Elals had managed to fill their self-made island from bank to bank, with expansions added mostly upward in the more recent eras.

Inside, this made for a confusion of hallways and staircases. One almost always had to ascend and descend several sets of stairs to move from one side of the manse to another. Having played in this house from her earliest days, Alise knew every twist and turn, every tower and cellar, and even those odd semi-secret rooms created by the access being mostly walled off by some desired addition and the resulting bottleneck making it too inconvenient for anyone to use on a regular basis.

Even so, trailing behind her father, Alise discovered herself in a part of the twisting manse she’d never before seen. With dawning realization, she began to think he was showing her the House Elal arcanium, a truly shocking development, especially given her obnoxious message.

She’d known that her wizard father used an arcanium, of course. Every high house, and some lower tier houses, boasted an arcanium. They were kept secret, as far as the wizards using them could contrive, and warded against intruders. Alise and her siblings had so feared their father’s many dire warnings should they intrude upon his sanctum sanctorum that they’d never even tried to find it. Now, as they traveled through one of those apparently unused bottlenecks, through a secret doorway so invisibly sealed Alise had never suspected its existence, though she’d—ironically enough—played prisoner in a tower with her friends there more than once, she decided they never could have found it.

They descended a short flight of steps that ended at a landing, which curved in a hairpin loop, went through another invisibly sealed doorway, up a wrought iron spiral staircase in an otherwise empty column to nowhere, ended up on a circular balcony overlooking open air. And then her father removed a curtaining veil of spirit matter unlike anything she’d seen before.

It was old, incredibly ancient, and comprised of spirits that had been combined and somehow retrained to have lost their individuation. Alise didn’t know that could be done, but her father brushed aside the barrier with an ease he’d use to push past one made of silk. Beyond it, a door with a huge wheel inset glowed with magic. Piers Elal put his hand to the lock, then gave her an impatient glance. “Your hands, too, Daughter. It’s meant to be opened by two people. Usually a wizard and familiar. The only other time I’ve opened it with another wizard is when my father showed me.”

She stood there dumbly a moment. “Why are you showing me now?” Surely he didn’t trust her.

“Because you are obstinate beyond belief and I’ve come to the conclusion that showing you what can be yours, along with the critical importance of having a bonded familiar, will be what it takes to convince you to cooperate with me.”

“I am cooperating with you,” she pointed out, not moving. “I am here in House Elal, fulfilling the terms of our agreement.”

“And yet there you stand,” he bit out, barely containing the fulminating irritation practically leaking from his pores. “ Not cooperating.”

He had a point. Biting back a sigh, Alise went to his side, wishing she could feel about this moment as she’d fantasized as a little girl. Back when Nic was the favorite, the obvious heir, the apple of their father’s eye, Alise had nursed a secret and jealous longing to have what Nic seemed to have. Everyone had been so certain Nic would manifest as a wizard, not a familiar, that Alise had been sure of the reverse: that she would be a familiar or, in the very best case scenario, a minor wizard forever in her brilliant elder sister’s shadow.

But she’d still imagined this exact scenario: being at her father’s side in his arcanium, which in her childish fantasies, looked more like a toy-filled playroom than a wizard’s workshop. Now she disliked having to be in such close proximity to him, his magic an unappealingly lurid mix of churning colors, an unpleasant smell emanating from his body. Why he smelled like rotten fruit, she didn’t know, but it turned her stomach and she had to hold her breath as she laid her hands opposite his, in the grooves obviously made for them in the big wheel.

“Invoke your spirit magic,” her father instructed on a grunt, mollified but far from pleased.

She nearly asked for more information than that, but then her wizard senses came alert to the spirits embedded in the wheel. No, not embedded but… forming the wheel. Like the surprising spirit curtain, these entities had somehow been condensed into an even more solid form, though these remained more aware, a living substance inquiring as to her blood and identity. Before she could think what to do, the material of the wheel gave the sense of a sigh beneath her hands, huge locks turning deep in the walls, releasing.

A door that hadn’t been there a moment ago appeared in the curve a short walk away. The magic of their wizard ancestors seemed to far outstrip anything they could do today. The set of her father’s face as he gestured her to precede him through the doorway made her wonder if he felt the same.

Or he could be just generally disgruntled, which was more likely.

Inside the door—surprise—another set of stairs spiraled up, daylight pouring through a circular opening at the top. Alise climbed all the way to the top and stepped into a place more wondrous than any fanciful playroom her childhood self could have conjured up. The top of the tower lay open to the sky, allowing in the pour of sunshine from one direction and the seething vista of yet another winter stormfront approaching from the north. It took her a moment to realize there was a barrier, this one formed of a transparent, almost undetectable film of solidified spirits, a combination of those in the door mechanism and the disguising curtain. Below, the manse sprawled in all its iconic glory—including her own tower not that far away, a bit lower, a twenty minute walk and a short hop for a crow.

She had never seen the tower in which she stood. Hidden from sight. Fascinating.

“Hello, Wizard Alise,” a politely quiet voice said, and Alise spun, torn from her enraptured contemplation of the spectacular view and even more transporting wizardry that had made it all possible.

“Brinda,” she blurted, then felt stupid, managing to pull back anything more foolish like asking Brinda Chur what she was doing there in the House Elal arcanium, instead of in class at Convocation Academy. As Brinda was currently bound to a transparent apparatus, her once long locks cut ruthlessly short, it was obvious what she was doing there. It was all the other questions that needed answering.

“Ah, I forgot you two know each other,” Lord Elal said, lying outrageously, and strutting over to the young Brinda and pinching her chin to make her look up at him. Which she did, utter worship in her brown eyes. “Meet my new bonded familiar, Brinda Elal.”

Alise took in a careful breath. “I thought Familiar Brinda planned to undergo the Betrothal Trials.”

“Yes, well, I put paid to that idea, didn’t I, Precious?” Piers said, nearly cooing, and Brinda responded with a radiant smile.

Alise shuddered at the sound of the nickname her father had once used for her maman. Not out of any kind of nostalgia, but more out of a realization of how cloying and condescending the nickname was—and out of a low-grade horror for what lay in Brinda’s future.

“Being Lord Wizard Elal’s familiar is all I ever could have hoped for,” Brinda said in a reverent tone, her eyes shining. “I have no doubt I’ll bear his child in time.”

“Throw enough money at a problem and people are happy to solve it for you,” Piers advised Alise. “That approach will always stand you in good stead. House Chur was most obliging. I wanted my new familiar now and, to my delight, she wanted me. Didn’t you, Precious?”

“More than anything, my Wizard,” Brinda responded promptly.

“Well,” Alise said brightly, ignoring the sick feeling in her gut at Brinda’s display of meek adoration for a man she couldn’t possibly admire. “Welcome to the family, Brinda. I offer you best wishes for success here at House Elal. I would shake your hand, but…” She nearly added that Brinda seemed to be tied up, but she’d accomplished annoying her father already, so it felt superfluous and she simply shrugged.

“Thank you, Wizard Alise,” Brinda replied, ever so sincere. She beamed at Piers. “This is more than I could have hoped for.”

And far more than she bargained for. A strange circle had been completed here and Alise wasn’t sure how to interpret that cycle of events. She’d severed the wizard–familiar bond between her mother and father in order to free Maman from his tyrannical control. Yes, it had been to save Maman’s life, too, but fundamentally what she and Nic had most wanted for their mother was to escape being Piers Elal’s familiar.

Now Brinda—who was far from a friend, but also not someone Alise wished ill—had stepped into Maman’s chains. Though Brinda had attempted extortion, threatening to spill secrets about House Phel, Alise knew the familiar had done so because she was following instructions from the house of her birth. She couldn’t hate Brinda for it. And now Alise possessed the power to break the chains binding Brinda. If Alise could find a way to do so without killing the familiar, as Asa had suggested.

Regardless, Brinda didn’t want that and would never thank Alise for it. Well, maybe not never . Eventually, when Piers had used, broken, and drained Brinda as he had their mother, then Brinda might see the light and regret. But for the moment, Brinda embraced her metaphorical chains, not even struggling against the physical ones that currently bound her. A lesson in that.

“Let us begin the lesson,” Piers said, following hard on the heels of that thought. “I want you to observe, Daughter, how a bonded familiar can catapult a working from adequate to ultimate.”

“Why is she tied up?” Alise asked, unable to restrain the question any longer, but trying to make it sound like genuine curiosity and not an accusation.

“If you’d bedded those familiars I sent you, then you’d know the answer to that question,” her father retorted instead of answering, then peered at her. “Did you even properly bed that librarian boy? Is that the issue, that you’re still a virgin?”

Brinda made a sound very close to a giggle, though she swallowed it in an appearance of deference, avoiding Alise’s gaze and fastening her worshipful brown eyes on her wizard. “Cillian Harahel isn’t terribly masculine, sir, if you know what I mean. Not like you are.”

Her father raised his brows at Alise. “I wondered about that. So there was a problem.”

Alise kept her posture relaxed, refusing to rise to the bait. She’d defend Cillian to her dying breath, but only if it mattered and this ridiculous, juvenile taunting was far beneath both of them. Brinda was too innocent and her father too cruel and jaded for either of them to understand what she and Cillian had shared. Passion, yes, but also that emotional intimacy, that longing that would burst through her skin if she gave into it. Which she could not. She’d given that up forever.

So, she shrugged. “That’s in the past, isn’t it. I’m here to learn from you, Father. Perhaps as you demonstrate the advantages of a familiar to me, I’ll overcome my… hesitancy over those you’ve sent to me.”

He bought it, his ego and certainty too large to allow for the possibility that she was playing him. Lord Elal smiled, his magic billowing with an unnecessary flourish. “Then pay attention, my child. This you will never learn at Convocation Academy.”

With an internal sigh and full-body resignation, Alise set herself to watch and learn. She might be there under duress, but there she was and she might as well extract whatever useful information she could.

After all, she’d need every advantage just in case she someday must face her father in a duel.