Page 14 of Rogue Familiar

The question was: what to do about it?

She couldn’t just run on impulse anymore. If she wanted to be mature and responsible, she had to think these things through. Going after Jadren wasn’t a foregone conclusion. So, she began cleaning up the detritus of her former foolishness and thought through her options.

The first, most obvious and most rational was that she could have Alise sever the bond. Give Jadren the freedom he so desperately sought, let him have joy of it, though she highly doubted he would be happy, but that would be his problem. That solution would give her a new start. She could stay at House Phel, her home, where she belonged, and resume rebuilding her life as she’d begun to do before Jadren had wrenched it out of recognizability. She wanted to contribute to her house and family’s strength and success. Traipsing after Jadren wouldn’t do that. Learning her magic, helping establish House Phel, preparing for what might come next—all of that fit her goals. All of that made sense.

And yet…

Nothing had changed in her heart since her conversation with Nic that morning. All she wanted was to find Jadren, to close this aching distance between them. It made no rational sense, as Jadren would no doubt be the first to tell her. He didn’t want her. He wouldn’t welcome her arrival.

And yet…

She was going. That was all there was to it. Rational or not.

Resolved, she nearly got dressed in her new clothing right then and there. She could climb out her balcony windows and shimmy down the fretwork to the ground. She’d escaped her rooms that way any number of times over the years.

But that was the old her. The half-feral creature Jadren had named her. Nic had more to teach her, so Selly would take at least another day or two or three to learn all she could. Gabriel might not give her his blessing, but she wanted him to know she was going, and she should take advantage of any supplies he offered—or wanted to foist on her—just in case it took a while to find Jadren. And to bring him back to House Phel.

So, she put herself to bed like a responsible adult, telling herself to sleep so she’d be rested to endure Nic’s fierce demands the next day.

Then she’d find Jadren and she’d show him how much better they were together. They’d figure out the rest from there.

Who knew? Maybe Jadren would be glad to see her. Maybe he’d have come to see that House Phel was where he belonged.

Turned out Selly still had plenty of foolish fantasies.

Jadren had never been so happy to put a place behind him as House Phel.

Except that he’d certainly been desperate to escape House El-Adrel on multiple occasions, including and especially his most recent incarceration there. Getting clear of the house of his birth felt like being able to draw clean air into his lungs again after drowning.

Well, and he’d also been thrilled to get out of House Sammael with Seliah intact—more or less—and without incurring lasting damage to diplomatic relations between Sammael and El-Adrel. Even knowing he and Seliah were trapped on a surely doom-ridden chariot ride to House El-Adrel, he’d been relieved to get away from the gothic monstrosity of House Sammael.

Still, all those instances considered, he was practically giddy to be riding through the Meresin swamplands and away from the citadel of foolish optimism that was House Phel. Mad, all of them. And Gabriel Phel was their king in insanity. Offering Jadren a place in House Phel even as Jadren broke his contract as a minion, abrogating all agreements in the worst way, including and especially abandoning his familiar. Everyone deserves a place of refuge, somewhere they can be safe, Gabriel had said in his earnest, painfully honest way. Seriously, for a wizard, Phel had zero political game. Seems to me you don’t have one in your birth house, so I’m offering House Phel, should you ever want it.

Jadren snorted aloud at the memory of those utterly ridiculous words. No high-house lord ever made an offer like that. The wizard was completely off his rocker and Jadren was fortunate to escape that particular bog. House Phel was going down. It was simply a question of when. Even the how didn’t take much guesswork: the Convocation would stomp out their tiny grassfire of a rebellion—and that was if they didn’t collapse under the weight of their debt first. Their supposed allies would be circling like vultures ready to devour the freshly dead meat soon. Nic was clever, but even an Elal at their wiliest couldn’t salvage House Phel from their crazed optimism.

At least Seliah had had an excuse for her craziness. She couldn’t help herself, with those ignorant country louts allowing her to go untapped all those years, not having the wit or education to recognize that she was a familiar—and a wildly powerful one. Deliciously so. Thinking of how she was very nearly destroyed by that ignorance lit a fire of burning rage in him that he had to force aside, counting his horse’s steps to regain a measure of mental calm.

Of course, once he started thinking about Seliah at all, he was doomed to the thought-spiral of longing and loathing—the former for her and the latter for himself. He was experienced at self-loathing. Really, he’d refined the practice to an art, honing it to a lethal edge over these many years. That was nothing new.

Longing, however…

Oh, that was new. And unwelcome. Even as he determinedly left House Phel in the distance, the bond to Seliah tugged at him, pulling him back to her. When he had put her long, lithe, deliciously naked body in bed and left her there without touching all that soft, silky skin, without burying himself in her sensual heat and passionate intensity… Well, it had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. He’d taken extra care with the note he left her, making it excruciatingly spiteful to remind himself of what a shit he was.

Yes, Seliah would be hurt by his words, and by the intimately treacherous act of actually drugging her wine. Dark arts! He’d handed her the glass and she’d smiled with pleasure. He’d had to clench his hands around his own wine to stop himself from dashing the dread glass out of her hands. It had been necessary to do it, he reminded himself, in order to evade her artless and ridiculously effective seduction attempts. If he’d indulged in sex with her, he might not have been able to make himself leave. Hurting her was the best way to make sure she wouldn’t want to come after him. Seliah was better off without him.

And he needed to be rid of her, lest he become more of a monster than he was already on his way to becoming.

I’ll handle the disappearing part. You handle keeping her from thinking she needs to look for me, he’d told Gabriel. Dark arts see to it that Phel held up his end of the bargain. Seliah was a stubborn chit and the last thing he needed was her using her sleuthing and feral swamp-creature skills to track him down to… wherever he was going.

He should probably make a plan for where he was going. “As far away from Seliah and House Phel as possible,” likely didn’t count as an actual destination. Out of sheer instinct he’d turned in the opposite direction from House El-Adrel, too. That was just self-preservation. When his monstrous maman discovered that her least-favorite child had screwed up the one thing he’d ever done right—according to her—and divested himself of the Phel familiar she’d gifted him with, well… Everything she’d ever done to torture him in the past would fade compared to her righteous punishment. And that wasn’t figuring in the fact that she’d be in a seething rage because he’d escaped her.

The only reason to go back would be for his father. Fyrdo had taken a grave risk to free Seliah and Jadren from the experimental laboratory. How he’d pulled it off, Jadren still didn’t know, but he could only hope his father had successfully hidden his role in the escape.

Besides, even if Jadren went back to House El-Adrel, he had no power to help his father. As Katica El-Adrel’s familiar, Fyrdo was utterly subject to her rule. And Jadren could never defeat his darling maman. No, he definitely needed to get far, far away from his mother. Somewhere her long claws couldn’t reach. Did finding a hidey-hole count as a destination? Probably not.

Ideally, he should go off on some sort of heroic quest. Show everyone his true mettle by doing… something. He had no idea what. To be honest, contemplating doing something heroic just made him feel tired. Even with wizard Asa’s assistance on top of his native magical healing that made him virtually immortal—perhaps actually immortal, as dark arts knew his mother had tested those boundaries without ever managing to make death stick—he still needed time to recover from Phel running him through the heart.

He was also unaccountably depressed. Hating himself and his life was nothing new, but this low-level angst was decidedly unlike him. Jaunty and acerbic self-loathing, absolutely. Directionless maundering, no. He already missed Seliah a stupid amount. Without thinking about it, he wrapped his hand around the brass widget he’d sarcastically told her to string on a chain and wear around her neck. The gadget that his body had extruded following his mother’s attempt to implant it somewhere in his chest. Seliah, the sentimental monkey, had done exactly that.

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