Page 18 of Rogue Familiar

And if that didn’t work, well, she could always escape. “All right,” she said, pleased with how smooth her voice sounded. She relaxed into Gabriel’s hold. “How did you come to be carrying me?”

Gabriel gave her easy capitulation a suspicious glance, but Nic nodded approvingly from over his shoulder. “Nic called me.” He glanced at her and she smoothed her expression into one of attentive concern. “Which was the right thing to do. Asa!” he called, as he turned into the healer’s offices. “Something happened to Selly. Seliah,” he corrected himself. He carried her directly into the infirmary and laid her on a bed with tender care—and Selly reminded herself that Gabriel loved her and that overrode all other considerations for him.

The dark-skinned Refoel wizard hastened over, calling out for a wash basin and cloths. “Is all this blood yours?” he asked, his magic twining just ahead of him, tingling bright green, brushing over her senses. She must indeed be getting better at using her magic because she’d never felt the workings of Asa’s wizardry on her like this before. It seemed she could almost track the changes he wrought on her physiology, the probing of her flesh as palpable as if he ran his hands over her, checking for injury. That reminded her of how Jadren had done the same, frantically searching for wounds, the action speaking more loudly of his feelings for her than any words could—and making her ache anew in fear and longing for him.

Surely he couldn’t be dead. If he’d promised her nothing else, it was that he couldn’t die. She’d depended on that foundational truth more than she’d realized. In a life of shifting sands of insanity and uncertainty, she’d already begun to rely on the surety that Jadren would somehow always survive.

“Seliah?” Asa asked, arching a fine dark brow, elegant in his concern. “Can you understand what I’m asking?”

“Yes, the blood is all mine,” she answered belatedly, aware of Gabriel’s scowl of concern and Asa’s mental probing. It seemed people would forever be first assuming she was slipping back into crazyland, as Jadren so flippantly phrased it. “Something has happened to Jadren,” she explained, wrapping her fingers around Asa’s wrist as he gently mopped the blood from her face. “I think it affected me through the bond.”

Asa nodded consideringly, not shaking her off, but continuing to clean the blood away, her hand on his wrist like a trailing guide, his other hand casually resting on her bare skin at the join of her shoulder and neck. Through that contact, his magic still twined into her, assessing and testing, a deft and meticulous use of wizardry she only now appreciated. No wonder Convocation-trained wizards and familiars looked down on rogues like Jadren, Gabriel, and her. They were bumbling amateurs by comparison.

“The solution is clearly to sever the bond,” Gabriel announced, surprising Selly that he’d said it aloud, but then she realized he’d warded the space around their cluster, preventing anyone else from overhearing.

“Is it, Lord Phel.” Asa returned mildly, not exactly posing that as a question. There was the required respect in his tone, but also a firmness that conveyed he wouldn’t be swayed by the orders of the high-house lord if his healer’s responsibilities dictated otherwise.

“Look how it’s damaging her,” Gabriel pointed out tersely, gesturing at Selly with an impatient hand. “This can’t be normal.” Even as he confidently uttered that declaration, he glanced at Nic for confirmation.

She pursed her lips and shrugged. “Asa can say better than I can. I don’t have direct experience with any wizard–familiar bonds but our own.” Slipping her hand around Gabriel’s tensely bulging upper arm, she squeezed, drawing his attention and smiling warmly. “Let Asa do his job, my only love. You know he’ll tell you true.”

“Whether Lord Phel wants to hear it or not,” Asa muttered under his breath, giving Selly a hint of a smile.

She smiled back, tremulously. “I think Jadren died,” she confided to Asa.

“He has a bad habit of doing that,” Asa agreed on a sigh. “I suppose it was too much to hope that he might honor all the work I put into healing him and keep his sorry flesh intact for longer than a week.”

Laughing despite herself, Selly agreed ruefully. “He does seem to be unduly careless about it.” Jadren was an unhappy combination of sharply cynical, jaded beyond the experience of most human beings, and scarily naïve. He waltzed through the world as if it couldn’t hurt him. But just because death didn’t stick to him—hopefully that was still true—that didn’t save him from suffering. And, someday, something would damage Jadren so much that he wouldn’t be able to recover from it.

She shivered with a sense of foreboding at that thought and firmly set it aside. That day had not yet come. She’d make it never would.

“I can’t feel the bond,” she whispered, through Gabriel frowned reprovingly, apparently thinking she was trying to hide the information from him. In truth, she hated to say it aloud.

“From what I understand of the nature of the enchantment governing wizard–familiar bonds, your bond with Jadren should have dissolved upon his previous untimely death at Lord Phel’s hands.”

“I’ve apologized for that,” Gabriel said tightly, proving he was listening with close attention to their murmured conversation. It was his right as lord of the house, Selly supposed, but she wasn’t above glaring at him for intruding.

“So,” Asa continued placidly, “either the wizard–familiar bond doesn’t dissolve with death, as is commonly assumed, and we’ve simply lacked resurrected participants to provide evidence—”

“Now there is a daunting thought,” Nic noted.

“—or Wizard Jadren’s physical deaths, which I’ve yet to determine are full deaths rather than near-death experiences, as I haven’t been present when he ostensibly died, are not enough to dissolve the bond. That is, whatever magic allows him to survive massive physical destruction and rebuild his body against all probability, may also keep him alive on some level. Enough to sustain his end of the spell.”

“Except this time,” Selly said with thin despair, her voice lifting in question at the end.

“That remains to be seen,” he answered gently, his magic still probing her. “Have you experienced this kind of sympathetic damage as a result of injuries to your wizard before? Because that is what happened, Lord Phel. Seliah’s physical reaction is essentially self-induced by her own magic, apparently as a sympathetic response to her wizard’s magic.”

“I thought a familiar’s magic can’t be wielded by them,” Gabriel said sharply.

“Not outside themselves,” Nic countered, “but our magic clearly affects our own bodies, or magic build-up wouldn’t be a problem. And we wouldn’t have the ability to control extraction of magic from us, or use magic as a passive field to sense the magic of others.”

“Then what prevents you from using it outside your bodies?” Gabriel demanded, as if Nic were deliberately being difficult.

She gave him an owlish look and thumped the center of her forehead. “Something in here.”

“Nobody knows,” Asa supplied without looking at them. “Great minds—familiar and wizard alike—have assailed the problem. Something in the brains of wizards undergoes a final maturation that enables the wielding. Comparisons of dissected brains reveals the anatomical difference, but no one knows why that region of the brain is important, nor why it takes on the wizard-configuration in some and not others.” He’d been speaking absently, clearly lecturing on a familiar topic, all while delicately probing Selly with his magic. His wizard-black gaze focused on her face. “Experiments on living subjects didn’t yield any further information, perhaps because the participants, all unwilling, as you might imagine, didn’t live long enough.”

She shuddered at that—as if the brain-dissection bit hadn’t been bad enough—and sincerely hoped Jadren’s mother didn’t take it into her diabolically cruel mind to investigate that particular research question. Jadren would be an ideal test subject. “I have felt Jadren’s pain,” she answered Asa’s question. “And at times maybe experienced some of what he did? Though not nearly on the same level of what he experienced. I’d get maybe a headache—and I thought that was because of the magic drain. I’m not well-trained enough to know the difference,” she added apologetically.

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