Page 16 of Strange Familiar (Warriors of Magic #2)

~16~

I t took longer than Cillian had estimated or wanted, to get to the bottom of the folded archive. Or the side pockets or twisted-up middle, however you wanted to envision the non-space. Iliana and Han were tirelessly generous, taking turns supplying him with magic, for which he was immensely grateful, even though receiving magic from them was nothing like sharing with Alise.

The invidious comparison kept running around and through his mind to the extent that he had to bite down on the impulse to blurt it out. He was tired, that was all, that was the only reason he was tempted to articulate such an ungenerous observation. He was tired on a level beyond physical weariness, though that was a component. Even after he slept, he woke up unrefreshed. But, more, he felt emotionally exhausted, wrung out from worrying about Alise.

He didn’t trust the devious Piers Elal in the slightest, no matter the repeated reassurances from Han and Iliana—the pair sensing his restless anxiety—that Lord Elal wouldn’t harm his daughter, that he wanted her for his heir. There were more ways to harm a person than physically. In truth, the physical injuries the world inflicted on a person were the most easily healed and the most transient. Alise’s father didn’t need psychic ability to get in her head. She was vulnerable to him in ways she possibly didn’t realize. If her father figured out to shower her with the love and praise he’d always denied her in the past, she would—

“Is that all of them, Wizard Cillian?” Iliana asked, breaking into his morose fretting. When he focused on her earnest face, she raised her brows. “You’ve been searching that folded space for a long time without extracting any more books.”

She gestured at the shelves of neatly stacked and categorized books that had once occupied the null space. One advantage of having the tag team of the pair of familiars was when one ran low on magic, they could sort the books already recovered, taking over recording the information and indexing that Cillian had been doing before. There were nearly a thousand books recovered, from points all over the last several centuries—including well before the abrupt fall of House Phel—but nothing had jumped out at them as a reason for the house’s reversal of fortune. Nor had they found anything that seemed so terrible that a coalition of other high houses had decided to conspire to destroy House Phel and erase their historical record.

“I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more,” Cillian answered Iliana’s question, after a long hesitation. “I don’t have any good rationale for it, but I’m just sure I haven’t found them all.”

Iliana scrunched up her nose. “It could be that you feel that way because we haven’t identified a particular book as the culprit for all of this, but maybe it’s interwoven throughout all these texts.”

“ Or, ” Han said from an armchair where he was skimming one of the texts they’d identified as being potentially more relevant than others, “it could be that Cillian’s wizard senses are alerting him subconsciously to the presence of more books. We know wizardry works that way sometimes and wouldn’t library magic be especially sensitive to something like books?”

“Well, of course it would,” Iliana agreed, her forehead still pinched in worry as she side-eyed Cillian, as if he wouldn’t notice, “but at some point you have to concede—”

“Defeat?” he filled in when she broke off, abashed.

“That you’ve done everything you could,” she countered with a defiant lift of her chin. “Some tasks, like searching for something you aren’t certain exists, are so open-ended that they become infinite. You have to apply your own ending, decide upon a point at which you have diminishing returns for your effort. Otherwise you trap yourself in an endless quest for something you may never find.”

Behind Iliana’s back, Han lifted his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head.

“But I am certain this thing exists,” Cillian argued.

“Are you?” Iliana pounced on that. “Or are you wishing it’s so—fastening your hopes on it?”

“Iliana,” Han began, a cautionary note in his voice, his striking aqua eyes lingering on Cillian’s face with concern.

Cillian lifted a hand in acknowledgment, but he didn’t need Han to protect him. He didn’t need Iliana to do that either. “I believe some quests are important enough to see them all the way through,” he answered. “This is worthy of my effort, no matter how long it takes. If you don’t want to continue to provide me with your magic, then—”

“It’s not that,” Iliana interrupted with exasperation. “I’m not convinced you’re being entirely reasonable about this. I worry that you think you’re going to find some magical solution that will solve everyone’s problems and make you the hero, so you can take it to Alise and she’ll…”

Iliana trailed off and Han snorted into the awkward pause. “Neatly trapped yourself with your big mouth there, didn’t you?”

She tossed him a glare over her shoulder. “I do not have a big mouth!”

“Loose lips?” he suggested.

“You have reason to know my lips are wonderfully tight,” she retorted, then blushed. “Sorry, Cillian.”

He pretended he wasn’t blushing, too. One day he’d feel more comfortable taking part in the more ribald exchanges of those comfortable in their sexuality, but for now those feelings remained too tied up in the wondrous, almost painfully raw intimate moments he’d shared with Alise that he couldn’t manage his reactions. Grief, hope, longing, anger, bitterness, need, love—they all surged against the meager rational control he maintained.

Iliana was right about one thing: Cillian was clinging to hope, probably against all reason. But he could no more let go of it than he could of his love for Alise. That probably made him a fool in anyone’s estimation, even his own. “You’re not wrong, Iliana,” he said, abandoning any pretense at dignity. “And neither are you, Han. I know I’m not being logical.”

“No one expects wizards to be logical,” Han replied lightly. “You lot are renowned for your dramatic passions. Like Sylus destroying all the world for love and hate.”

“Not so much librarian wizards,” Cillian pointed out drily, feeling a bit of starch go out of his spine. What in the dark arts did he really think he could accomplish? He’d finished The Saga of Sylus and Lyndella and the ending truly had been heart-breaking and romantic in an utterly tragic way. Even though he’d known how it ended, he’d been affected, sharing Sylus’s rage over Lyndella’s pointless and painful death. “We mainly get fussed if someone dog-ears pages.”

Han laughed, but came over, bringing the stack of unusually raggedy-looking bound papers with him, and gracefully lowered himself to the floor beside Cillian and Iliana. Cillian rather envied Han his dancer’s athleticism, and his prowess with weapons, and his blond handsomeness that had more than a few of the younger folks—and some older ones—at House Harahel abuzz with delight. Han never seemed to notice, his attention all for Iliana, who now leaned into him as he put an arm around her, cuddling her close.

“Love isn’t logical or rational,” he said, brushing his cheek over Iliana’s shining hair. “We two know that better than anyone. Or we should,” he added, setting the stack of documents down and using both arms to squeeze Iliana so she squeaked. “We defied Convocation law because we couldn’t bear to give each other up.”

“And because we really hate Sabrina Sammael,” Iliana put in darkly.

“You would have made the same choice, even if the loveliest wizard in the world wanted to bond me,” Han told her.

“Depends on how lovely,” Iliana retorted with an impudent sniff. “I might’ve been willing to share.”

Han ignored her quip, focusing on Cillian. “I, for one, don’t think you should give up.” He didn’t specify on whether he meant the quest or Alise, but Cillian rather thought he meant both. “There was a time when I thought I’d resigned myself to fate, when I thought I was too tired to keep fighting, that what I wanted had become so impossible that I told myself the smart, wise, rational course of action was to give up.”

Iliana, leaning against Han’s shoulder, had closed her eyes. All pert attitude fled, her face held a quiet pain as she listened.

“Giving up, however,” Han continued, gazing down at her and placing a soft kiss on her forehead, so she opened her eyes and smiled at him, “is defeating yourself before you even engage the enemy. Like plunging the dagger into your own heart rather than face your opponent. It could be they’ll win, that they’ll strike to your heart, wounding or even killing you, but you don’t need to do the job for them.”

Iliana nodded a little against his shoulder. “I think that’s what decided it for me, back when it looked like Sabrina would win. If we went along with her plan, we’d suffer. If we rebelled, there was a chance we’d lose our bid for freedom and suffer—but knuckling under ensured we would. It was worth the risk—and now look what we have.”

Han smiled at her fondly, but looked to Cillian, frowning at whatever he saw in Cillian’s face. “No?”

“I worry that…” Cillian said slowly, plucking at the documents Han had brought over. The pages weren’t finely cut, but slightly uneven, and bound with tape. Not House Calliope printing, but something done by an archivist, possibly even at Convocation Archives, given the meticulous work. Judging by the age of the paper, the documents had been bound a couple of centuries before, but the tape had held, looking only somewhat brittle and lifting barely at all. Of course, the null space tended to preserve texts better, being somewhat timeless. Usually, however, documents like these—often committee meeting minutes and similar records—were only temporarily perfect bound like this. After a sufficient accumulation, they were sent to Calliope for a more permanent binding into a collection. Likely this little batch hadn’t made it in with its brethren because it had been secreted away.

“You worry what?” Iliana prompted.

So much easier to think about all things archival than his deepest fears. Maybe he should ditch thoughts of romance and stick with books. No doubt his grandmother would be delighted. But he made himself face the painful truth. “I worry that, even if I find something to take to Alise, that she’s… happier—” He almost couldn’t say the word “—at House Elal. That, for her, this isn’t some choice between a dire fate and supreme happiness. Arguably, she’s where she belongs, where she shines. She’s always been meant to be Lady Elal.”

“But you’re in love,” Iliana protested.

“I am,” Cillian said on a sigh, “but Alise isn’t.”

“Just because she hasn’t said so, that doesn’t—”

Han interrupted Iliana with a quiet shushing sound.

“I think that, if she knew, she would have said so,” Cillian explained to Iliana and to himself. “But our relationship is so new and we both understood it to be temporary, an alliance of the moment and circumstance. She’s young and she shouldn’t have to know what she wants yet.”

“But—”

“No, Iliana,” Cillian felt more certain now, Iliana’s arguments solidifying his own. “Alise is a generous, warm-hearted person. I don’t want her to feel she needs to accommodate my feelings.”

Both Han and Iliana sat silent, the mood glum. “So, how do you want to proceed?” Han finally asked. “Do you want to declare the search of the folded archive done with? We can complete the inventory of its contents and make decisions from there. Begin the comparison list to the Harahel archives. You don’t have to go to House Elal and use the favor to make contact with Alise.”

No. No, he didn’t have to go to Alise. Giving that up might be the most generous move he could make for her. He could ask his grandmother to let him send a courier to Alise with the inventory. If he swore to give Alise up forever, Lady Harahel might lift her sanctions. And then perhaps someday they could return to his original fantasy, the one where he visited her at House Elal, her trusted friend and advisor. As Lady Elal, she would welcome him and they’d talk fondly over their escapades back in the day and exchange news over Bria and other children. Perhaps Alise’s children, too—though he couldn’t bear to think of that, so he firmly banished that image. He would bring her interesting books, discuss archival trivia, and…

His gaze focused on the bound documents he’d been idly studying. Committee meeting notes. Why would those have been hidden away? Cillian always got a tingling sensation when he hit upon what he’d been searching for. Whether plain old intuition or his wizard senses, when he used his magic to index books, looking for the text a patron had described in terribly vague—or horribly incorrect terms—he’d get that feeling that he’d found it, even before he verified.

That tingle roared into excitement as Cillian flipped open the text. Minutes from the Committee for Verification of Research Results. This was it. This had to be it. “Dark arts,” he whispered.

“I was about to shelve those,” Han commented, sounding uncertain. Maybe sounding like he thought Cillian might be losing his mind. “They’re minutes from some committee meeting two-hundred and fifty years ago. Lots of Wizard Bumble-Dumble opining on control groups.”

“Not just any wizard,” Cillian murmured, paging through the notes, his wizardry racing ahead to search for the terms he hoped to find. “The one suggesting that experiments were conducted without proper controls is Wizard Moore Elal. And here.” He stabbed at a point on a page, heart racing. “Here is Wizard Anciela Phel’s rebuttal. She…” He trailed off, reading. “Dark arts,” he whispered.

“What?” Iliana nearly screeched, tearing herself out of Han’s loose embrace and bouncing with excitement. “What did you find??”

Cillian looked up at them, in wonder and horror. “House Phel had been conducting independent studies with familiars. They’d found a way to trigger the change in familiars.”

“Change?” Han asked, with marked urgency.

Cillian nodded. “To make them into wizards.”