Page 5 of Strange Familiar (Warriors of Magic #2)

~5~

C illian awoke with a sense of refreshed wellbeing, aware first and foremost that he’d been relieved of the terrible, voracious burden of the stolen archive. Thank all the dark arts for that. Coming home had been the correct solution.

For home he was, lying in his bed in his old room at House Harahel. Though he came home less often these days, often preferring to spend academy breaks pursuing his own projects in the Convocation Archives to traveling, his room hadn’t changed much. Outside his mullion-paned windows, made of warped, human-made glass and lined with lead solder, not the perfectly clear glass made by Byssan wizards, a thick snow fell. Inside, it smelled of woodsmoke, old wood, and the distinctive scent of books. All sang quietly of his cozy childhood and the comforts of home, down to the warm quilt covering him, made by his grandmother.

He couldn’t wait to show Alise around and—he wasn’t embarrassed to admit to himself—show her off to his family. His mother and father would love her as he did. They’d admire her incisive intelligence and delicate beauty. Most of all, they’d see through her cool reserve that protected her huge heart. Alise had never had a loving family, the comforting tokens of a cherished and protected childhood as those that now surrounded him. He wanted to give her that. There weren’t that many things he could offer Alise that were his alone to give, but this was one.

Stirring, he sat up, finding the expected teapot under a cozy on his bedside table, his favorite tea within, and poured himself a cup. He told himself he wasn’t disappointed Alise wasn’t there, waiting for him to awaken. She wasn’t the sort to sit by the bedsides of invalids. Hopefully she slept, recovering from her own ordeal. The El-Adrel clock on his bedside table showed it was a little after six, but he couldn’t tell from the dim wintry light if it was morning or evening. He could have slept the clock around, as worn out as he’d been.

Drinking the tea down and pouring another cup, he willed his mind to clear. He didn’t remember much about the journey to House Harahel. Wanting to sleep and being unable to. His head aching as if boulders had been stuffed inside, cracking open his skull. Alise’s worry.

But it was all fine now. They’d made it to House Harahel safe and sound, with the precious House Phel archive intact. All was well.

Eager to find Alise—he was quite sure the light was growing, not dying—he flung off the enfolding quilts and hurried to the bathing chamber. A long time ago, when he’d only daydreamed about having Alise, never truly believing she’d return his feelings, even temporarily, he’d fantasized about showing her his home. They could go ice-skating, one of his few—all right, only—athletic skills. She would be so surprised by his prowess. Though he’d be rusty. His life at Convocation Academy left him little time for frivolities like ice-skating.

If Alise slept still, he’d go down to the pond and warm-up a bit. He should make sure it was swept free of snow anyway. Perhaps he could put a few surprises in place, like some hot chocolate and cookies. Happily anticipating Alise’s delight, he quickly bathed. No grooming imps or water elementals in House Harahel. The Harahels were prickly in their insularity, deeply distrustful of the rest of the Convocation, and abjured magical conveniences made by other houses, with very few exceptions.

With a sigh, he acknowledged to himself that they had good reason. Especially now, with the high houses taking sides in what seemed to be shaping up into an all-out war. But those were thoughts for another day. He wanted to enjoy being at home, to share all of his favorite parts with his beloved. They’d earned a moment or two of peace, a little time to simply enjoy each other.

Entering the breakfast room, he found his grandmother with her ubiquitous pot of tea, an empty breakfast plate pushed to the side to make room for several open books before her. He’d hoped to find her there, though he’d expected more of his family to be there also. As he entered, she glanced up and smiled, springing from her chair to embrace him.

“My boy,” she cried, holding him close. “It’s so good to have you home.” She pulled back scrutinizing him. “How do you feel?”

“Excellent,” he answered, meaning it. The vigor of extensive Refoel healing coursed through him, making him feel fresher and brighter than in ages. He mentally corrected himself that House Harahel didn’t eschew all wizardry from other houses. They did keep an in-house Refoel wizard—though it was always someone with a good portion of Harahel blood, and loyalty, along with it. “Where is everyone?”

“It’s early yet and, besides, I wanted to talk to you alone, so I sent the few early risers along when I sensed you awake. Sit. Have some breakfast. Tea?”

Cillian let her pour, happy enough to have her fuss over him. When he’d been a kid, he’d thought everyone’s grandmother knew exactly what they were up to. Only after he grew up some, and after hearing warnings from his siblings and cousins, did he discover his beloved gran was not only an accomplished mind-reader, but she also had no regard for privacy when it came to looking after her family and house. Oh, she didn’t pry deeply—so far as he knew—but she kept a mental finger on the pulse of surface thoughts at House Harahel. She considered it part of her sacred duty.

“Now,” his grandmother said, twinkling at him, clearly pleased to see him fill his plate, “tell me everything.”

He nodded, his mouth full of freshly baked and frosted cinnamon roll. No matter how he tried, he could never make his own taste like the ones at home. One of the pastry chefs at the academy had suggested that it could be the water at House Harahel that made the difference. Cillian had been tempted to carry some back with him, to test the theory, but had never gotten around to it. Maybe this was his opportunity. Alise could help him perform the taste-test.

Oh. Except he wasn’t going back to Convocation Archives. Tandiya Uriel had fired him. Had Alise told his grandmother that? Surreptitiously, he studied his gran. No, he didn’t think so. Alise would have respected his privacy. Still, it was worth finding out. “What has Alise told you so far?”

His grandmother waved that off. “As if I’d trust anything from the forked tongue of an Elal snake. I want to hear from you.”

Cillian paused at that. “Alise claims House Phel as her affiliation now, and they claim her.”

She snorted. “Yes, so the chit mentioned. I don’t believe it for a moment and neither should you.”

“Grandmother,” Cillian said slowly. “I know full well you’d have checked her thoughts to see if she was telling you the truth.”

“Oh, I tried, of course, and I managed to glean some thoughts, which were not at all flattering to you or House Harahel by the way. But I couldn’t get past her shielding. A tightly guarded mind on that one, which is suspicious right there. What young wizardling has shields against telepathy like that?”

One who’d been terrorized by a Hanneil wizard who’d imposed a mental block on her and further traumatized her with threats of sexual assault, that’s who. And Alise had nearly destroyed herself fighting that all alone, all to protect him. Cillian sighed to himself. As a result—at Cillian’s own insistence—Alise had only a few days before learned advanced shielding to extract herself from Gordon Hanneil’s vile extortion and to protect herself in the future. It didn’t seem likely that House Hanneil would stop targeting her, even if their reasons weren’t fully understood.

It was a bitter irony that Alise’s newfound skills would backfire in this way, undermining his grandmother’s trust in his beloved. Still, the situation was easily corrected.

“Alise has very good shielding for a reason,” he explained. “I can’t tell you all the details, as its very personal to her, but Alise was mentally attacked by an unprincipled psychic wizard. She received a crash course in protecting herself.”

“You don’t say.” His grandmother didn’t sound convinced. Quite the opposite, though Cillian didn’t understand why she’d be so suspicious.

“It’s all tied in with the archives I brought. When we go through them, I suspect we’ll find—”

His grandmother cut that off with a wave of her hand. “We can discuss that later. I have considerable reservations about the safety of those archives. You’ll have to establish a protocol that assures me this house will be protected if anything untoward is secreted in those spelled stacks.”

Ah. He hadn’t expected that, but he shouldn’t be surprised, given his grandmother’s suspicions regarding outside magic, so he nodded in acquiescence. “Anyway, the point is that I trust Alise implicitly and so can you.”

“Like you trusted Szarina Sammael?” his grandmother asked, raising her brows as she sipped from her cup.

Oof. That was a low and unexpected blow. The subject of Szarina was clearly still a tender spot—and possibly always would be—and the jab shocked his breath to a stop for a moment, temporarily stopping his thoughts.

His grandmother stepped into the fraught silence with a crisp nod. “As I thought. You have a weakness, Cillian, for beautiful, young, and highly ranked wizard girls. Especially ones that frame themselves as in need of rescue and—”

“Alise didn’t ‘frame herself’ as in need of rescue,” he interrupted, perhaps unwisely and certainly uncharacteristically. “She faced a terrible danger all alone, even doing her best to keep me out of it, hurting herself in order to protect me . You are being incredibly unfair to her.”

“Am I?” She set her cup down and steepled her fingers under her chin. “Take a moment to consider this from my perspective. She is an Elal, a house notorious for their political scheming, and one deeply embroiled in the current cold war instigated by Gabriel Phel’s reckless attempt to reinstate a house best left forgotten in the annals of history. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Lady Veronica Elal became his bonded familiar, that the betrothal trials oh-so-conveniently decided the case there, so that none of us could dispute the alliance? History teaches us that there are no coincidences.”

It sounded so plausible, put that way, even though Cillian knew the truth. “Nic—Lady Phel—ran away from the bonding. She tried to escape it. That doesn’t sound like political scheming to me.”

“Or was that the perfect distraction, to allay our potential concerns? Regardless, she is only a familiar, a tool to be used by her father and her husband.”

“Clearly you’ve never met Nic,” he muttered.

His grandmother ignored that. “She might not have known. Or, she did know, and attempted to avoid her fate with that unlawful escape attempt.”

Nic and Gabriel loved each other, Cillian knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. One only needed to spend a few minutes in their presence to know that, to sense their intense regard for one another—along with the considerable erotic charge between them. When they’d visited House Phel, he and Alise had been only friends and barely that, though he’d obviously wanted her far longer than that. It had been torture to be near her and know she barely gave him a thought, all while Nic and Gabriel demonstrated what he most wanted, and could never have.

Even now, he knew full well that he could never have that with Alise, even if she somehow returned the love he felt for her. They were both wizards, so they could never experience that deep intimacy between bonded wizard and familiar. And that didn’t begin to address their very different stations in life. His grandmother wasn’t wrong there. But she was wrong about everything else.

“I can understand how you’d form these opinions based on the surface appearance of events,” he said, keeping his words slow and measured, “but the information you don’t have, that can’t be put in books and reports, is the heart and integrity of the people involved. Gabriel—Lord Phel, that is—had no idea that, by simply wanting to reestablish the legacy of his house, he’d be kicking over an anthill of ancient conspiracies.”

“How do you know that’s the case? I understand that you met and liked the wizard. I’m sure he appeals to you in that same way Szarina and Alise do, seeming to be non-traditionalists, exciting and not adhering to Convocation expectations, but those sorts don’t survive what Convocation society and law require of us.”

Cillian sat back in his chair. The cold winter light showed his grandmother’s face in a different way than he’d seen before. Just like the breakfast room, with its lead-paned glass sunroom filled with flowering plants and chirping birds in cages mitigated but didn’t erase the frozen landscape outside, her serene, seemingly practical assessment didn’t change what he knew to be true. “I know because I’ve met these people. I know them .”

“You know what they want you to know,” she corrected implacably. “You’ve never been an accurate judge of true character, my boy, which the entire Szarina debacle proved. Do you think these people don’t know that about you? That incident is hardly a secret. You have to at least consider that you were carefully selected as a target for this operation.”

As much as he bristled at his grandmother’s assessment of his character, Cillian had little foundation to argue against it. He had completely misjudged Szarina, wanting to believe that the dazzlingly gorgeous and popular Sammael scion truly loved him. She’d been skillful enough in her manipulation that she’d never introduced the topic of him helping her cheat. He had come up with the plan, so anxious to comfort her fears of her father’s reprisals, to dry her tears and make her smile again in that radiant way of hers. He’d been gobsmacked to discover she’d picked him out, seduced and cozened him entirely according to the strategy she’d devised. Never would he forget Szarina spitting hateful words at him during that horrible meeting in the provost’s office, how she’d laughed in his face that he’d ever believed a woman like her would want a meek librarian with no future.

The memory pained him still, so much that it worked like acid on his confidence that Alise was different. But his relationship with Alise wasn’t the same at all. For starters, he had pursued her. “Alise didn’t seek me out,” he informed his grandmother. “She ignored me for the longest time.”

His grandmother nodded, passing him a plate of scones. “How did you meet her?”

“She came into the archives. I saw her then.” Night after night, Alise would arrive late, illuminating the quiet, shadowed space like a slim candle, her magic and fey beauty shining to eclipse all else.

“During your shift,” his grandmother noted.

“It was an independent study,” he explained, doing his best not to sound defensive. “She had to work on it late at night.”

“And then she, inevitably, needed your help.”

“I do work in the archives at the reference desk. It’s literally in my job description to provide exactly that kind of assistance.”

His grandmother held up her hands in a mockery of surrender, her expression set and wizard-black eyes hard. Belatedly, Cillian realized he was speaking with Lady Harahel, not his loving and beloved gran. He should have realized when she made that statement about the questionable safety of opening the folded archive. For the first time in his life, his grandmother was speaking to him as the head of a high house, questioning one of her wizard minions, one she wasn’t happy with.

“Believe it or not, Cillian,” she said, seeming to note the change in his internal weather, “I am on your side here. I do not mean to make you defensive, only to point out that there is a recognizable pattern in your behavior. Not to mention that you did what no one else could do. You were the one to locate the hidden Phel archives and extract them. You carried them here to House Harahel, drawing us into a conflict not of our making. Who else could have accomplished what you did?”

“We didn’t know I could. I didn’t know it, until I tried.”

“You have always been far more talented and full of potential than you give yourself credit for,” she observed, and he wished he felt less miserable and could take pleasure in the compliment. “Your MP scores are exceptional—and are a matter of public record.”

“No one cares about exceptional MP scores in library magic,” he retorted. It was like being champion moss-grower.

“Until they do,” she retorted remorselessly. “In this case, I posit that they cared deeply. Alise Elal escorted you here personally, to ensure the mission was completed.”

How to refute that except to explain that Alise had come with him because she loved him and cared about him? It sounded like more of the Szarina thing on the surface, sure, but he shared something different with Alise. Something intimate and heartfelt, a meeting of like minds and spirits. In contrast, he could look back on the time with Szarina and see that it had all been a lie from the beginning, a shiny fairy tale he’d wanted desperately to believe in. It had all been surface without substance, like Szarina herself. Whereas Alise was substance, through and through, feeling more deeply than anyone he’d ever known. She simply wasn’t capable of that level of deception.

“All I can say is that you’re wrong about Alise. You’ll understand when you get to know her. I wanted to wait until we were together to tell you all about us, but I’ll share with you now: Alise and I are in love. We know there are challenges to our relationship and that it might be for only right now. Still, I want that right now, whatever I can have of her. And I’m telling you so you’ll understand that Alise brought me here because I asked her to help me. She was afraid for me and worried. There’s no collusion, no hidden agenda to her. Alise is my girlfriend and my lover. I wanted her here to meet my family, see my childhood home. To meet you .” He finished his impassioned speech feeling as if he’d lost steam along the way, fading in the face of his grandmother’s stony reception. Worse, she almost seemed to be regarding him with… sympathy?

“My dear boy,” she said, shaking her head. She took a deep breath, glanced out the window where the snowfall thickened. “It grieves me to see you go through all of this yet again, but if what you say is true, why did she leave?”

Leave? Cillian’s heart, already chilled, dropped like a rock through his stomach. Alise wouldn’t leave him. She especially wouldn’t leave without making sure he’d recovered, without saying goodbye. But his grandmother—no, Lady Harahel—regarded him remorselessly, waiting out his shock.

“Alise wouldn’t leave,” he said, but he sounded tentative.

“She would and did. She left yesterday morning, shortly after she divested herself of you. Alise is gone.”