Page 23 of Rogue Familiar

Vale whickered a good morning greeting, barely pausing in his gleeful grazing, though he stomped one hoof pointedly. Erg—right. She’d have to clean out his hooves lest the frogs of his feet suffer from all the rot-inducing moisture. Jadren might have a point about the elemental-powered carriages of the Convocation being easier than dealing with horses, but could they pull you out of a sinkhole? Vale cocked his head at her and shook it, black mane rippling. That’s right—no, they could not.

Fortunately there was lots of water and they might as well both get a decent bath before moving on, so she coaxed Vale into the shallow verge of the pond, picking the sandiest spot. With a towel from the bags, she scrubbed them both clean of last night’s mud. Then, with Vale back on the grass, she used the pick Gabriel had sent, along with every other tool imaginable, to clean the mud packed in around the frogs of Vale’s feet.

It took a while, but afterward she felt less like an irresponsible horse-owner, promising herself that Vale’s speed would make up for the delay. If that nightmare vision of Jadren had been true and not just a figment of her worst fears, then she needed to get to him as soon as possible.

She kept her head together better that day, focusing on finding the best route through the marshes, relying now on the insistent tug of direction that whispered of Jadren’s presence, rather than following his trail. That would save her some blundering like the near-disastrous one of the night before. Following in the footsteps of someone as ignorant of nature as Jadren would only lead to more calamities.

It helped her confidence, too, to know that she and Vale were definitely headed to Jadren’s current location. If that dream proved true, Jadren wouldn’t be moving anytime soon.

It took Selly two more days to get close enough to Jadren to recognize the landscape from her dreams. She had only a vague idea of where she might be. School had never really been one of her strong points, then the whole losing-her-mind thing had cut her education rudely short. Besides which, the teachers in Meresin didn’t emphasize the geography of the rest of the Convocation much.

It wasn’t as if she could ask where she was, either, as she’d been assiduously avoiding people, easier in some places than others. She’d gotten good at discerning when they were approaching population centers. Keeping to the natural camouflage of the roadless, trackless wild places allowed her to spot the cleared avenues for roads before they came upon them. Those big throughways were like rivers cutting through the forests and hills, creating low points in the landscape where elemental carriages streamed along in a frothing current of color. People went on foot, too, and occasionally on horseback, but the carriages dominated. She and Vale both eyed them warily, mutually agreed that they wouldn’t get too close.

Selly couldn’t articulate to herself her exact reasons for making sure she wasn’t seen. Some of it was habit. She’d spent so many years avoiding people that it was in her blood and bones. Stay hidden. Move fast. Don’t let them catch you, her old, feral self whispered in the back of her mind. Yes, that was her crazy-girl self, but that side also possessed certain skills. Besides that, she didn’t know who might be an enemy, and one didn’t have to be taken captive more than once to exert effort to ensure it didn’t happen again. The last thing she needed was to be captured by hunters, recaptured by El-Adrel, or snagged by some rogue wizard thinking she was an unbonded familiar ripe for stealing, and carted off somewhere where she couldn’t get to Jadren.

So, she avoided the inns with their enticing smells of gravy wafting in the evening air over the meadows. She slept on the ground, keeping company with Vale, and dreaming of Jadren—battered and broken beyond repair—every night.

From how he looked in the dreams, he didn’t seem to be improving at all and he hadn’t “spoken” to her again. That is, if the dreams represented any kind of reality. She’d begun to nurse a sick dread and anxious worry that they were real. The landscape in the dreams didn’t change and, though he wasn’t improving, Jadren continued to strengthen at the end of the tether between them, the sense of him increasing with every dream moment, every league she closed between them. The bond had begun to feel as it had before he left, with none of the fraying attenuation.

That was the good news. The bad news was her magic seemed to react to the strengthening bond by billowing up. Oh, it had been building all this while, which she’d anticipated and had been warned about umpteen times by everyone at House Phel, as if she didn’t know from extreme personal experience what having untapped magic would do to her.

She hadn’t expected this effect, however, like Jadren was the moon pulling on the tides of her magic. His need raked her, tugging at some visceral core with an almost painful hunger. She found herself urging Vale to go faster and harder, until the gelding galloped through the scrublands, the dirt turning redder and spraying in a cloud behind them. As usual, she had no idea which High House ruled the lands she crossed. It wasn’t as if the Convocation put up signs. She only hoped it wasn’t anyone too awful, because she didn’t think she could bring herself to slow or halt their headlong travel.

Even when Vale skidded on some loose shale, the shock momentarily clearing the haze of urgency from her mind, she only managed to slow him somewhat. The horse was breathing hard, sweating in the intensifying mid-afternoon sun so that his black coat gleamed wet, and yet he didn’t seem to want to stop either. As if Vale also sensed Jadren’s need.

So it was with vast relief that Selly recognized the cliff she’d dreamed about far too many times. Dusty red like the rest of this landscape, starkly dramatic, it stood out against a searing blue sky free of clouds. Even without the bond pulling at her like a rope inexorably wound round a winch, she’d have been able to go right to the spot, as if she knew it well.

Vale skidded to a halt at the immense spread of rocks tumbled at the base of the cliff and Selly launched herself from the saddle, half-running, half-climbing to scramble over the scree. White shards stood out among the rocks, like bleached wood stranded on the riverbanks after a flooding rain. As one snapped with a splintering crunch beneath her foot, she realized with horror that they weren’t made of wood at all. They were bones.

Countless bones littered the sharp rocks, filling the interstices and sticking out in thorny bunches. Her throat tight, she resisted looking up at the cliff’s edge high above, not wanting to picture how many people had met their deaths falling from it. I didn’t fall, Jadren’s voice echoed in her mind. I was thrown!

She looked around wildly for Jadren, but his voice had been only in her mind, maybe only in memory. Still, Jadren had to be here, somewhere in this graveyard of scattered bones. She could feel him at the other end of the bond, but he was still absurdly weak even this close, and she couldn’t quite triangulate on him. What would she do if he was unconscious or too injured to pull magic from her in order to heal? Whatever it takes, she told herself grimly. She wouldn’t flinch from whatever it took to bring him back. She hadn’t come this far to give up on them.

A whimper of despair escaped her when she finally found him, despite her resolve to be strong. The birds pointed the way, the crows concentrated black against the sere expanse of dusty red rocks and white bones. At her approach, they lifted in a cloud, croaking reproachfully, revealing a bright crimson smear, gleaming wetly amongst the rocks. Jadren.

He was nearly unrecognizable, a heap of crumpled body draped over and between the rocks, bone shards sticking up through him. No wonder he hadn’t been able to heal.

The wonder was that he still lived. Which he did, as evidenced by his continued fresh bleeding, the blood oozing in some places, flowing in sluggish fountains in others, otherwise, she might not have been able to tell. She couldn’t bear to look at his face for more than a quick glance, his skull grossly misshapen, features so mashed as to be unrecognizable. That wasn’t like the dreams at all—though mostly what she remembered of Jadren’s face in those were the sense of his presence and his intense wizard-black eyes. They were closed now, at least so far as she could discern in the puffy mess of his face, sunken deep into bruises that were a disconcerting mix of old and fresh.

In a haze of utter despair, Selly considered that it might be better to put him out of his misery rather than attempt to save him. Surely no human mind could survive days of this kind of agony intact. If she had known of anything that would actually put him out of his misery for good, she might have done it in that moment. As it was, however, she was afraid any attempt to truly kill him would only prolong his suffering. Dark arts knew that others before her had tried to murder him with no luck.

“Jadren,” she said, patting his cheek over his beard, a spot relatively unscathed for no discernible reason, keeping her palm against his skin. “Take my magic.” She hoped against hope that he would draw on her reflexively, his wizard senses knowing unconsciously what to do. But no. Nic had said wizards needed to consciously draw magic from others, and that was holding true. Jadren’s skin felt both papery thin and weirdly clammy under her hand, especially odd given the hot sun. He didn’t feel alive to the touch, only in the fluttering of his presence along the bond.

Well, first things first—he couldn’t heal with so many intrusions reinjuring him. So, she did the only thing she could. Working bit by bit, she freed his limbs from their twisted positions, methodically extracting the bits of rock and bone that had impaled him. She started with his feet, figuring she could begin to inure herself to touching his broken body, steeling her stomach against the gore and her heart against the debilitating fear of somehow hurting him more, as little sense as that made. Even so, just touching the boots he wore, seeing that they were the same ones he’d complained so bitterly about walking in, moved her ridiculously—and she became aware that tears ran down her face in a continuous, silent stream as she worked.

With her hands covered in his blood—she’d seriously had more than enough of Jadren’s blood getting all over her, though if they remained a bonded pair, she might have to get used to it, assuming that past experience could be extrapolated to the future—she focused on working her way up his body, straightening the long, lean legs, aligning his narrow hips, meticulously rearticulating the fingers of one mangled hand. Maybe she should remove his boots and do the same for his toes, but considering that task felt like more than she could bear.

As it was, his clothing was mangled in with his flesh. Taking off his boots might take the toes, perhaps the whole foot with them. He could likely regenerate anything that came off, but whether her sensibilities would recover from that experience was something else entirely.

She’d just cross that bridge when she came to it. Getting Jadren ambulatory was a goal for the future. Top priority at the moment was prying him free of the impaling bones trapping him among the rocks. The biggest challenge facing her was a splintered femur—not his—thrusting up through Jadren’s chest. It impaled him imperfectly, wedged perhaps on a shoulder blade, so that his body bowed up in a rictus of ongoing agony.

Feeling around beneath his back, hoping that maybe she could roll him over, and pull it out the way it went in, she discovered the sharp-ended bone was wedged solidly in a crevice. Just Jadren’s bad luck that he’d landed on something so fixed, and hit it so precisely, that it had gone through him rather than splintering.

You have no idea, she imagined him agreeing in his dry, sardonic voice, glad that it was only her imagination as he needed to be blessedly unconscious for this. With a nearly audible click, his eyes opened, snagging her immediate attention. Wizard-black, starry with pain, they focused on her. There he was, fully himself beyond that horribly battered face.

“What in the dark arts are you doing here?” he demanded, his voice barely there with no breath behind it, his words slurred and sloppy from broken teeth.

“Saving your life,” she snapped, happy for the opportunity to snark back at him, beyond relieved that he had enough mind and spirit to bite at her. “Speaking of which,” she added, laying a hand against his cheek again, “take my magic.”

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