Page 10 of Twisted Magic

“You’re just going to freeze me out now.” She stalked toward him and he deftly avoided her, slipping away like a shadow under too-bright light.

“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.” He dropped his robe, standing before her naked, supremely unaroused, and gestured to himself. “I’m tired. With all your care-and-feeding-of-wizards knowledge, I’d think you’d be sympathetic to that.” His wizard-black eyes glittered, hard, unyielding. “Though I suppose there’s all sorts of privileged information that you aren’t at liberty to share with me.”

It was a challenge, the implication clear. She sputtered mentally, trapped and unable to see a way out. She couldn’t even tell him it had nothing to do with him, because it did. It was all about him and her selfish need to keep him tied to her. Just a little longer, she told herself. We need more time together, for him to realize how much he needs me. That he loves me too much to let me go. “Jadren, this is not an adult way to handle this problem.”

He cocked an auburn brow, sardonic and mocking. “I told you I don’t know how to be in a relationship. Apparently I should have had you sign a disclaimer. Of course, it seems I can’t trust you to be honest with me, so it wouldn’t matter.”

And there it was, the deep pain of betrayal throbbing beneath his icy demeanor. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. That was the last thing she wanted. Well, not the very last thing, as she wanted to keep him even more. Did this make her a terrible human being? Probably so. Trust didn’t come to Jadren easily, not after he’d been lied to, manipulated, and tortured all his life by the very people who should have protected him.

“You can trust me,” she said, though the words seemed far too weak and tepid to penetrate that wall of reserve he’d pulled around him like an invisible cloak.

“Can I though?” he retorted and got into bed, yanking up the covers to his chin and firmly turning his back to her. “When you’re ready to tell me the truth, we can revisit that assumption. Until then, all bets are off.”

“Jadren…” She trailed off uncertainly, wanting to beg, wanting to pummel him with her fists.

“Make sure to turn off the lights,” was all he said.

Numb, with no idea how to dig herself out of this pit, she moved around the room, sending the fire elementals to sleep with the magical triggers even a familiar could use. The El-Adrel letter lay on the table, accusing, discarded.

She should’ve let Jadren burn it.

~5~

Jadren was still pissed. He’d slept pissed, dreamt pissed, and woke up pissed. Up for hours now, laboring under Liat’s remorseless tutelage, he still couldn’t shake the grinding anger. How dare Seliah lie to him? How could she keep a secret from him, after all they’d been through together?

“Calming breaths,” Liat instructed, “as I count backwards, allow your breathing to deepen, your thoughts to settle. One-hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight. Make of yourself an open channel for the magic to flow. Ninety-seven, ninety-six…”

A pissed channel, Jadren thought uncharitably, trying to fake the breathing enough to keep Liat off his back. And, underneath the being pissed, a small, raw part of him worried. Yes, Seliah had come after him when he left her, had found him against all odds, had vowed that she loved him and wanted only him, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew what he had to offer Seliah—or, more precisely, what he didn’t have to offer—and that she could do far better.

Like Chaim Refoel, for instance. That thought made the piss boil.

“When you’ve achieved a meditative state,” Liat said, after reaching ‘one’ and letting the hum of the word resonate into silence, “focus your attention on the moth. Extend your wizardry like an antenna, delicately sensing for where the creature is injured.”

When they began practicing healing, Seliah had worried about where the injured animals would come from. She needn’t have, here in the land of the eternally soft-hearted. All the denizens of Refoel—and many beyond—brought in wounded animals for healing. The gardeners, in particular, set aside any injured insects they came across, for junior healers to practice on. This moth was missing part of a wing, a beak-shaped wedge cut away by some enterprising bird. Jadren didn’t need healing antennae to discern that much about where the creature was injured.

Still, he tried to follow Liat’s directions, even as his mind wandered back to what might lie at the heart of Seliah’s discontent. When both he and Seliah had been broken, both fucked-up, wretched examples of magic-workers unable to work much in the way of magic, both strangers to polite Convocation society, their pairing had made a kind of sense. As much as anything made any sense. Still, they’d been two of a kind, paired in their inadequacy.

But Seliah had improved, leaving him behind. She had healed on every level, no longer struggling with the after-effects of insanity. Every day she grew stronger, more confident and polished. And daily she seemed less like a half-feral swamp creature and more the high-house lady she’d been born to be. Meanwhile he remained mired in the same old bog—a thrashing monster too twisted and malformed to ever be more than a groping, burbling mess. It rankled deeply that she’d said that about him becoming Lord El-Adrel. What if she did truly long to head a high house? Seems like she wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise, and it was arguably her destiny, with her powerful magic, intelligence, and resourcefulness. She deserved that life and it lay within her reach.

Especially with the continued availability of the lovelorn Chaim Refoel, with no familiar, no partner to help him lead House Refoel. Seliah loved it there in Refoel and would be happy staying forever, that much was obvious. She could become a legitimate citizen of the Convocation, produce well-fed, robe-clad cherubic babies, and be kept in style. She could become something more than a wet-nurse to a corked-up wizard who didn’t even understand his own magic and posed a constant threat to her very life. One she didn’t trust enough to be honest with. What in the dark arts could she be keeping from him?

“Once you have a feel for the injury,” Liat said, a bit more loudly, “draw magic from Seliah to feed toward the moth’s natural self-healing.”

Jadren stole a glance at Seliah where she sat calmly beneath his touch, her eyes closed and expression meditatively calm as she stilled her magic and concentrated on feeding it to him on demand. As always these days, her water and moon magic felt smooth and undisturbed as a mirror. Shining bright and deeply cool as a mountain lake, her magic called to him with the seductive powers of the sirens. He burned to immerse himself, to drink deeply of her, to quench the raging inside him. Of course, that was exactly the problem. Rather than being one small swimmer, easily cooled by her depths as he dipped in, he was a volcano. He could vaporize her with one careless burp of his magic, leaving an empty crater behind.

In order to love, admire, and protect that pristine lake, he could only lumber about her edges, some rough beast sullying her perfection by scuffing in a toe now and then. He didn’t dare go deeper, which had the effect of putting her even further beyond him. Like that reflecting, glassy lake surface, she revealed nothing of what thoughts lurked beneath.

What secrets she withheld from him.

“Lord Jadren,” Liat said, snapping him out of his reverie, “you are not concentrating.” The healer-wizard never raised her voice above a soothing murmur, but even so somehow managed to relay a substantial level of annoyance. “You’re wasting the time of all three of us if you’re not willing to focus on these exercises.”

He snatched his hand away from Seliah, refusing to meet her inquisitive, sympathetic, and frankly forlorn gaze. She’d been acting like a kicked kitten since the night before, slinking about the edges of rooms and jumping at his least movement, like she expected him to strike her. As if he’d ever do that. It set his teeth on edge. He was the offended party here; she had no business acting hurt.

“These are ridiculous exercises,” he snarled. “The same thing, over and over. And I can’t do them.” The poor moth fluttered helplessly in its open box, unable to fly out. A metaphor so blatant it was practically an attack.

Liat folded her hands primly. “In repetition, we build habit; in habit, we construct a foundation for our intuition to reply upon, one that liberates our thinking. With an intuitive foundation, there is no need for remembering or reconstructing. This frees our faculties for spontaneity and innovation.”

“Yes, yes, I know. You’ve repeated that ten-thousand times.”

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