Page 15 of Rogue Familiar

Though… who was the greater fool? She’d made a necklace of it and he’d taken it from her as he left, like some sort of keepsake. Touching the brass tube, knowing she’d worn it against her skin, made him miss her even more. He forced himself let go of the thing, tucking it back inside his shirt.

Maybe he was feeling the effects of the bond attenuating. That would make sense. After all, what did he know about what it was like to have—and to break—a wizard–familiar bond? It could be that this will-sapping desire to turn around and run back to her was the prompting of the enchantment. That had certainly been an interesting revelation, when he’d been taught the spell to bond Seliah at House El-Adrel, a spell which naturally came with a geas to prevent him from speaking of it. Turned out that most wizards got initiated into that little trick when they graduated from Convocation Academy. Since he’d been essentially homeschooled—and ha to that milksop euphemism for what his dear maman had done to him instead of sending him to the academy like every other wizard and familiar in the benighted Convocation—it seemed he’d missed out on more than lectures on history and house seals. The revelation of a secret bonding spell made him wonder what other tasty tidbits the wizards horded like dragons atop treasure.

He needed to know more. And there was one place the dragons kept that ultimate bastion of knowledge: Convocation Center.

That was somewhere he could go. If he wanted to discover what his tyrannical mother and the many wizards firmly under her thumb had kept from him, then he should go to the source of learning.

The problem there was that no one at Convocation Center would have any incentive to help him out. Especially since he didn’t exactly exist as a proper citizen of the Convocation. At least, not as a magical one, and going about as a non-magical commoner didn’t sit well with him. He’d had plenty of being powerless. Now that he was, more or less, free to do as he wished, doing so as a pauper held zero appeal. Besides which, no one would teach a commoner the arcane wisdom of wizards.

To be acknowledged as a wizard, however, presented two major obstacles. First, he lacked the essential magical potential scorecard that was every wizard and familiar’s official method of identification. Jadren had never been formally tested—only subjected to his mother’s various experiments—and so he lacked that particular document. In order to get that all-important piece of paper, he’d need to be tested by an officially designated Hanneil wizard and the non-decaying bit of nasty human flesh in a portable cupboard that were their pet oracle heads.

Not exactly appealing, and the logistics might be daunting, but theoretically he could find a way to get it done. The aftermath might cause some trouble, as the real sticking point was what that MP scorecard would reveal. Jadren really had no idea how his peculiar brand of magic would show up on the official Convocation tests. As healing magic, sure, but his didn’t work the way the House Refoel healers wielded theirs. Jadren couldn’t heal anyone else to save his life—or theirs. In truth, saving his own life wasn’t a concern since his healing magic worked passively to keep him alive, no matter the damage to his body.

Maman had certainly tested the limits of that, with excruciating (for him) and frustratingly inconclusive (for her) results. She’d been limited (thank the dark arts) by an unwillingness to lose her favorite test subject. That and the alluring potential of what she could make him into had prevented her from testing scorched earth possibilities for killing him. Therefore, he didn’t know if immolation could destroy him completely or, say, full dismemberment. The parts of him that had been amputated, dissected, or burnt, simply grew back. No, the removed pieces didn’t bud new hims, to his mother’s disappointment and his own relief.

Gabriel Phel had ably demonstrated that destroying Jadren’s heart—literally, not metaphorically—only temporarily killed him. It was Jadren’s good luck that Phel had used a sword extruded from moonlight in the moment and not one of the weapons he’d enchanted with the intention of destroying any enemy. Just possibly one of those weapons, one like Jadren’s trusty Mr. Machete, would melt Jadren into a pile of goo as it did to the hunters. Jadren laughed aloud at the thought, amused to categorize himself with those unhappy creations of misguided magical might.

He supposed that, if he got desperate and self-destructive enough, he could test the edge of Mr. Machete on himself and see what it did to him. Good to have options.

But not yet. The Refoel wizard at House Phel, Asa, had nearly drained himself dry saving Jadren’s miserable life. While Jadren appreciated the effort, he could’ve told Asa to save his magical energy. Jadren would have recovered eventually. Probably. Only those soft-headed saps at House Phel would have gone to the effort to save the spy planted like a venomous snake in their midst.

At any rate, apparently destroying a vital organ only slowed him down. And, while he could drown or suffocate, he also eventually revived once given air again. Being effectively dead during those episodes, Jadren was uncertain how long his maman had tested that. She never was inclined to share data with her subjects. She always claimed that, as a scientist, she had a responsibility to control variables and having the experimental subject aware of the parameters being tested could taint the results.

Besides that, she was an insane megalomaniac who did exactly as she pleased.

Probably he needed to stop thinking about his mother, as he was beginning to feel ill, and the last thing he needed was to lose his shit in the midst of the Meresin swamps. Seliah had already seen his humiliating reaction to those dark memories; he didn’t care to repeat the experience. He could just picture it. Seliah coming after him and discovering him only a few leagues from House Phel, curled up in a quivering ball of cowardice.

There, that bracing image served to straighten his spine. Jadren didn’t care for the good opinion of many people—and he certainly shouldn’t care what a house-poor, uneducated, half-feral familiar thought—but… Well, he did care what Seliah thought of him. The sweet ache of longing for her tugged at him sharply and he very nearly turned the horse around. Instead, he urged the creature into a faster pace.

He definitely needed to get more information on the wizard–familiar bond. From the tales, only the familiar went mad from the separation, and then only because of the magic accumulation that slowly poisoned the person’s mind. Phel would see to it that Seliah’s magic was regularly vented, ensuring that she wouldn’t go crazy again. Gabriel Phel might be a soft-brained idealist, but he loved his baby sister and would take care of her. Seliah should be in no danger from the bond attenuation.

On the wizard’s end… Hard to say how that went. Without academic knowledge, Jadren had to rely on stories. The most salient tale of wizard–familiar separation was the tragic epic of Sylus and Lyndella. Sylus clearly lost his shit in a dramatic way when Lyndella was abducted, laying waste to the countryside to destroy his enemies. Had Sylus been insane or just seriously pissed off, though? Maybe it had hurt him, too. But, if Jadren had no other skills, he sure knew how to withstand pain.

But it would be better all around if the bond broke. Seemed like it should, eventually. If wizards could create the enchantment to bond a familiar, surely they could undo the spell. Convocation wizards weren’t ones to leave themselves without a back door. They were too obsessed with power and control to bind themselves to a spell that could backfire on them.

No, whoever created the enchantment to begin with had to know a way to dissolve it. Because the spell was psychic in nature, he’d bet it was of Hanneil make. It had been an in-house Hanneil wizard minion of House El-Adrel who gave Jadren the bonding spell, and laid the geas on him. Coincidentally enough, Hanneil was also the house who could perhaps assist him with an MP scorecard that would pass muster as not being generated embarrassingly late in his life.

That decided it. He should go to House Hanneil, not Convocation Center. He could strike a bargain with Lady Hanneil. What he’d offer her, he had no idea, but he’d always been reasonably glib in the moment. Half of manipulating people was discovering what they wanted. The other half was figuring out how to make them want what you could actually deliver.

Another consideration was the apparently brewing war amongst the High Houses of the Convocation, with perhaps some of the lower tier houses jockeying for position, hoping for the rare opportunity to rise in rank. The love/hate scheming between House Sammael and the house of his birth had been going on for decades, if not centuries, though the recent reappearance of House Phel seemed to have catalyzed things to a new level. Nic’s house of birth, House Elal, was in the mix, too—with Lord Elal colluding at least with Sammael. Probably El-Adrel, too, given recent evidence.

House Hanneil, along with House Refoel and a smattering of others, tended to stay aloof from conspiracies. They claimed integrity as the reason, what with being healers and psychics, but Jadren was naturally suspicious of anyone who claimed ethics as a motivation. Sure, it sounded nice, but where did ethics get a person?

That’s right: in the same position as the lunatics at House Phel, stripped of magic and their house status, exiled to the swamps of Meresin—though, to be fair, the Phel family had always lived there, it was just that with their fall, everybody else had stopped going there—and relegated to becoming a cautionary tale.

Sure, hanging with the misfits and idealists of House Phel had been educational. Likely his unexpected sentiment over his short-lived tenure there, and the people he’d come to know, stemmed from his basic exhilaration at escaping the oppressive house of his birth for the first time. He’d been like a middle-aged virgin discovering sex existed—and had been pitifully grateful for the least crumbs of pleasure. But he was realist enough to know that Phel was doomed. The Convocation would crush them all. Unfortunate, even sad, but there it was.

If he was going to look out for himself, he needed all the distance from Phel he could get. That was pure self-preservation, even without the rest. Yes, he’d strike a deal with Hanneil. Shore up his credentials. Possibly rid himself of the bond to Seliah and set her fully free of him. Create a new life for himself.

Somewhere. Somehow. Something…

No matter what, it certainly wouldn’t be at House Phel. Or with Seliah.

~5~

A few days later, Jadren approached House Hanneil and surveyed it from above. It sat in an unprepossessing valley and didn’t inspire as much awe as other High Houses did, at least, not at first sight. Certainly nothing like House Sammael or El-Adrel did. Not that the Hanneil ancestral line lacked the necessary hubris and overweening sense of melodrama that characterized the other High Houses. They simply went about it a different way, probably because they were devoted to psychic magic, and spent much of their attention turned inward.

The structure of the house certainly reflected that idea, at any rate. Built of simple gray stone, the structure blended into the landscape, almost disappearing into the surrounding wind-eroded hills. It lay coiled like a snake amid the sparse pinon pines and other evergreens, apparently a single story of rounded walls and roof, hinting at a labyrinthine interior.

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