Page 9 of Strange Familiar (Warriors of Magic #2)

~9~

P iers Elal, Lord of High House Elal, posed in the center of the room for effect. He’d dressed for the moment, too, wearing a deep violet velvet cloak over a fitted Ophiel suit of the same material, which took on black lowlights as it shifted, giving him a sinister cast. The effect was amplified further by the gold metal eye-patch he wore, affixed to his head with matching buckles that fastened to black leather straps.

He smiled at them, malevolent and triumphant, unmoved when Gabriel hurled a silver spear formed of moonlight at his head.

“No!” Nic shouted, lunging to stop Gabriel, even as the invisible shield of spirits surrounding their father deflected the spear, sending it spinning wildly away into the gathered guests, who scrambled out of its path. “You can’t,” Nic urged Gabriel, hanging onto his arm, even as he tried to put her behind him. “Jadren, help me!”

“Lord Phel,” Jadren said in a carrying voice that caught Gabriel’s attention. “Lady Phel is correct. You cannot take action against her father at the naming of his grandchild. It’s against Convocation etiquette.”

“Watch me,” Gabriel snarled, his magic billowing in the air, intensifying into water and silver.

His father, GF, tucked the baby securely into his wife’s arms and put himself between them and Lord Elal, standing squarely beside Gabriel. “Agreed,” he said in his deep voice, clasping together work-roughened hands. “This old farmer may not know Convocation pretty-quette, but I know a murderer when I see one.”

Nic cast a pleading glance at Alise, reflecting her own inner conflict. This could go very badly. Would go very badly, regardless, but they could at least protect Bria. Alise faced Gabriel and GF, feeling not unlike a mouse confronting two angry bull elephants, the men towered over her so, but she was a wizard, and she possessed the grounded strength of a practitioner of the dark arts and those aspects outweighed physical stature.

Beyond glad that she’d filled herself with the magic of the dark arts—but feeling like a traitor at the same time—she locked gazes with Gabriel, the wizard who’d become more of a brother, more of a father to her than either of her biological ones.

“Gabriel,” she said, speaking wizard to wizard, as aunt to father of this child they already loved beyond life itself. “This is about Bria. Convocation law supports primacy of blood. You cannot prevent a grandparent from having contact with a direct descendent or you will give them legal grounds to take custody of the child.”

“The hell you say,” Gabriel ground out. “That would happen over my dead body.”

“It would,” Alise insisted, “and then my father would still be able to take custody of Bria. Think about it. This is what he’s wanted all along.” As she said the words, she realized the truth of them. Their father had somehow engineered the match between Nic and Gabriel, wanting to bring that water and moon magic in combination with spirit magic into House Elal. “Don’t let him play you.”

“Alise is right,” Nic said in a quietly strangled voice. “We wondered why he was staying so quiet. This is the moment he has waited for, knowing that either way he’d win access to our child. Our only path toward maintaining control is to cleave to Convocation law and etiquette.”

Gabriel never glanced at Nic, fiercely glaring at Alise instead, as if she had somehow instigated all of this. “Asa, Wolfgang, Quinn—what say you on the boundaries of the legal requirements here?”

Alise didn’t relax enough to release a breath of relief. She held her stance, hoping to transmit through the firmness of her physical and magical posture just how serious this was. The two wizards and familiar that Gabriel called for briefly consulted. They’d all been champions of their debate teams and mock trial events at Convocation Academy.

Wolfgang, the Ratisbon wizard who, with his familiar Costa, produced furniture and other carpentry goods for the house, spoke for the group after a hurried, whispered discussion. “Lord Phel,” he said with a bow, at the edge of Alise’s peripheral vision, “we agree that Lord Elal must be allowed to approach his grandchild and to inspect the infant’s health. He need not hold her to do so. The law is very clear on this, that the infant can remain in the physical control of one or both parents, but the grandparent must be allowed to touch the infant.”

Gabriel set his jaw, a bright chiming echoing through the vast and silent hall as silver pinged in a soft rain onto the marble floor. At last he tore his gaze from Alise and turned to Nic. “What say you?” he asked.

Behind Alise, Lord Elal scoffed. “Some wizard and supposed lord of a house, asking his familiar for an opinion.”

Everyone ignored him.

“We stick exactly to the requirements,” Nic said, too softly for anyone beyond those right there to hear. “We get through this moment, then regroup.”

Gabriel nodded, the silver rain halting abruptly even as his magic intensified around them. Behind Alise, her father’s Elal magic similarly burgeoned, blazing like a furnace against her back. “Don’t let him provoke you,” Alise warned Gabriel. “He’s seething for a fight. Don’t give it to him.”

Gabriel gave her a sharp dip of his chin in acknowledgment. “I’ll hold Bria for this.” His mother, Daisy, looked like she might refuse, her pressed lips wobbling, but she let Gabriel take the infant, gazing up at her powerful son in beseeching trust. He whispered something to his mother that Alise couldn’t hear and Daisy turned to bury her face GF’s chest. Bria, who’d been happily clutching the clockwork doll, gleefully tasting any part she could fit into her mouth, gave an unhappy warble, subsiding when Gabriel kissed her forehead.

“Nic, Alise, by me,” Gabriel said, and stepped off the dais.

Gratified to be included in the triangle, though uncertain why he wanted her there, Alise flanked Gabriel a half-step behind, able to see her sister’s coldly composed profile. Nic had always loved their father more than Alise had—probably because he’d loved her the most to begin with. Until Nic shocked and devastated everyone—including herself—by manifesting as a familiar instead of a wizard, she’d been the House Elal darling, their father’s heir-apparent and golden child. In truth, Nic had enjoyed such privilege as their father’s favorite that she’d been blind to his darker nature and more egregious behaviors. When she’d fallen from grace and later discovered just how awful their father could be, Nic had been blindsided.

Alise could see it in her sister now, that vulnerability to the wizard she once worshipped and who’d wounded her more deeply than could ever heal.

For her part, Alise had forever been a disappointment to her father and so felt at most cold hatred for him. It was so much like him to pull this stunt, so in keeping with his grandiose ambition and vainglorious decisions that they should have predicted this would happen.

They should have known.

As if hearing her thoughts—though she knew he couldn’t read minds—Piers Elal fastened his mocking black eyes on hers. “Shouldn’t you be in school, Daughter?” he asked silkily.

“I don’t answer to you anymore,” she replied in the same tone.

“Rumor has it that you think you answer to no one. I’ve heard of your troubles keeping enrolled at Convocation Academy.” He tsked, shaking his head. “A pity. But then, you were never what anyone would call a star student, were you?”

“You’re here to see the baby,” Gabriel inserted, standing close enough to Lord Elal to tower over him, “not taunt Alise.”

“I can do both,” Piers replied with a smirk, but he reached out for Bria.

Gabriel held her close. “You may touch her. Not hold her.”

“I’m her grandfather.”

“Nevertheless.”

Piers didn’t like it, casting a reproving glance at Nic who looked on with that stoically remote expression she assumed when she was trying to hold herself together. “The doll is in the way,” he complained.

Nic didn’t move, didn’t seem to be able to, so Alise eased the doll away from Bria, having to unwind the small chubby fingers from their surprisingly strong grip on the toy. Immediately, the infant began to wail in protest and sorrow. Nic instinctively reached for her baby and Gabriel turned his shoulder just slightly to block her. Nic made a small sound of despair, a quiet echo of her daughter’s. Gabriel flinched at the sound, as did Alise, clutching the doll to her chest. Bria’s wail grew in volume and intensity.

“Get on with it, Elal,” Gabriel ordered, his magic tightly contained.

Piers, seeming not quite certain of his moves at the moment to Alise’s eye, put tentative hands on the baby, touching the soft skin of her forehead, the perfect round of her cheeks. No doubt he sampled her magic, too, which remained much like Bria’s young mind: brilliantly present but as yet unformed and without the clear resolution into particular directions that would later distinguish her as an individual.

“That’s enough,” Gabriel decided, lifting Bria away from the shorter man’s reach.

“I’ve barely begun,” Lord Elal protested with a thunderous frown.

“Advisors?” Gabriel called over his shoulder without taking his gaze off his much-loathed father-in-law, his magic like molten silver in the air, steaming with fury. Alise wondered if he regretted not killing the wizard when he could have, taking only the eye. It might be some small comfort that Piers Elal hadn’t reached a Refoel healer in time to save or restore the eye. The metal eyepatch looked to be of enchanted El-Adrel devising and Alise suspected he could use it for some form of seeing, if not actual vision.

“No time requirement, Lord Phel,” Wolfgang called back. “A good faith effort at allowing contact is sufficient.”

“This is hardly ‘good faith,’” Lord Elal complained.

“You can argue it in court,” Nic bit out. “Now go. You’re not wanted here.”

Their father eyed Nic craftily and Alise’s stomach tightened. She knew that look well. Lord Elal had a card up his sleeve, a way to win he’d yet to exploit. “Then I suppose it’s time to bestow my gift on the child,” he said in an oily pretense at sounding paternal.

“No,” Gabriel said.

Lord Elal smirked. “Advisors?” he called, clearly mimicking Gabriel.

“Lord Phel,” Wolfgang said, pointedly speaking to the lord he owed allegiance to, rather than answering Elal’s question, “I should add that the grandparent is allowed to give the infant one gift of their choosing.”

Alise shuddered internally. Seeing it, her father smirked in satisfaction. “I see my heir has already attached an amateurish attempt at a guardian spirit.” He scrutinized her very sweet and simple spirit, which cringed away from his wizardly poking. Alise had to restrain herself from leaping in to defend it. Her father turned his gaze to her. “Not terrible work, but nothing that could withstand a wizard of any caliber in spirit magic.” In the next moment, he annihilated the guardian spirit which vanished with a pained wail and a flicker of apology to Alise. Bria sent up new cries of distress.

It hurt her heart. She’d spent days selecting, binding, and teaching the spirit, crafting it to grow with Bria and learn with her. That the spirit felt so bad failing her was a testament to how well Alise had embedded its mission. Bria sought the vanished spirit, bereft of both it and her new doll. Nic had closed her eyes and fisted her hands by her sides, clearly unable to bear it either. Their father had taken this day of joy and celebration and shattered it for all of them. Worst of all, he knew and savored their pain, relishing this cold and delicately plotted vengeance.

“Since the child is in need of a guardian spirit now,” he said, “let me provide one.” He drew forth a meticulously crafted spirit of such malicious intent and inestimable power that Alise gasped in horror. Her involuntary cry caused Nic’s eyes to fly open and she whimpered deep in her throat, well able to see exactly what their father had planned, even with her familiar’s magic.

“Please,” she whispered. “No.”

Gabriel glanced back and forth between Nic and Alise, able to sense the powerful magic being held at bay like an avalanche stopped in time, but without the necessary expertise to know what it meant. It was a mark, of what a very different wizard Gabriel was that he followed Nic’s lead with perfect trust and no questions.

“I will not allow this,” he informed Elal, silver daggers manifesting in the air to surround the older wizard. He tucked the disconsolate Bria against his chest, muscular arms wrapped in a firm shield around her.

“Then I take custody of the child,” Elal crowed with sparkling delight.

“That remains to be seen,” Gabriel replied with such eerie menace that Alise didn’t know how her father withstood it. “In the meanwhile, I can take your other eye, and then begin carving off pieces until there’s nothing left of you. I defeated you before, Elal, and I will do it again.” The daggers spun silently, several aimed at Lord Elal’s remaining eye.

“I’m in the prime of health this time,” Piers replied with easy confidence, “and in the fullness of magical reserves. And I have nothing and no one to protect while you have…” He made a show of looking around the ballroom. “Why, I suspect that every soul that matters at all to you is in this room right now. How many of them are you willing to sacrifice? Perhaps I should start with your sweet mother.”

Daisy screamed and it was all Alise could do not to look. Gabriel visibly shuddered with holding himself in place.

“Stop this,” Nic shouted, the order lashing out, garnering her father’s immediate attention. Daisy stopped screaming, though Bria still wailed against her father’s chest.

“Excuse me,” Lord Elal said, giving Nic a blank, polite smile. “Do I know you?”

Nic’s upper lip curled in contempt. “You just love to disown your children, don’t you, Papa ? It’s the last bit of your crumbling control you try to exercise and it just kills you that it doesn’t work. That you have to resort to this horrific charade.”

“It’s no game,” he warned her in kind. “I will see this through. I will win.”

“Is that all that matters to you?” she asked, almost wistfully.

“It’s all that matters, period,” he answered with conviction. “You’ll learn that someday.”

She shook her head. “No, I used to believe that—because you taught it to me, to us,” she added, glancing at Alise. “But I’ve learned better. You could have been invited here, could have had contact with your grandchild, been part of her life, by simply being human. But that’s beyond your ability isn’t it? You have to control everything and everyone.”

“I’m a wizard, not a human,” he spat at her. “If you hadn’t utterly failed to become the wizard you were meant to be, you’d understand that.”

“I am a wizard,” Alise inserted, surprising herself—and having to straighten her spine when her father’s ire turned on her. “And I don’t understand why you’re such a monster. How could you summon a malevolent spirit to fasten onto your granddaughter like that? You would ruin her life before it even began.”

“True,” he replied thoughtfully. Too mildly. Something very bad was coming, verified by her father’s spreading smile. “Because you’ve raised such a salient point, Daughter, I’m willing to entertain a third option. I’ll withhold my gift in exchange for a favor. My daughter—my wizard daughter—will return to House Elal with me, to be trained as my heir.”

A stunned, fraught silence thickened the already dense air of the now stuffy ballroom, pierced only by Bria’s increasingly frantic wails.

Then: “No,” Gabriel and Nic said in unison.

Alise had known they would because they were just that good. And because they were, she knew her own answer had to be just as easy, firm, and nearly as fast.

“Yes,” she said.

And her father smiled in such triumph that she knew this, too, had been part of his plan all along.