Page 42 of Twisted Magic

The list did prove one important point, however: several houses were listed as defunct, the house name having been retired by the Convocation when the associated family failed to produce wizards of sufficient MP scores, the people essentially returning to the ranks of the mundane. Alise found the archives for those houses, by dint of slow searching. Most only occupied a shelf, or part of one, and most had never risen higher than an ambitious tier three before subsiding again into obscurity. Most interesting, each of these sets of documents was capped by a final notebook with the official Convocation seal. It effectively ended the archive of the retired house, and it summarized the essential house data: date of founding, date of retirement, and all of the wizards certified by the Convocation as belonging to the family line of the house. Those were particularly helpful as many of the other archives were magically sealed so she couldn’t open them. Probably keyed to only members of those houses.

The glimpses of history these summaries provided fascinated Alise, and she had to exert self-control not to follow her curiosity down a rabbit hole of Convocation history, far more interesting than anything she’d ever studied in class. Some of the archives were centuries old and contained intriguing allusions to magic systems and products she had no idea had ever existed. In fact, they likely didn’t exist now and she smiled absently at how the ambitious Nic might react to knowing about some of these. Not that many could be fit into the House Phel product aegis, but if anyone could find a way, she could.

But that wasn’t Alise’s assignment, so she put those books aside, continuing in her quest. With no luck at all. She couldn’t seem to find anything at all on House Phel. Night after night, week after week, she searched until she began to feel sure that she’d explored every dark and gritty bit of the library.

She even resorted to summoning a higher level spirit to help her search, as a last resort. The summoning itself had gone fine. Her strengths lay in Elal magic, after all, and she was pleased with her improvement in those skills, substantially better than she’d been before she’d come back to school. The spirit had taken to the task with obedient fervor, which gave Alise a little burst of pride, as she’d accomplished what few wizards, even high-level wizards in House Elal’s employ, could do. The more complex a spirit, the less inclined they were to be enlisted for human tasks.

She’d hoped she could teach a higher-level spirit to recognize the simple pattern of characters that spelled out “Phel.” After all, House Elal was known for using spirits of all types to spy on everyone in the Convocation. Alise had been disinherited before her father taught her those proprietary tricks, but there had to be a way to instruct the spies in what to seek out and report. They couldn’t be reporting everything—that would be an unworkable onslaught of information. She should be able to do it, too. But no.

After several more weeks of wasted effort—and a considerable amount of magic drain that advanced her quest not at all and gained her only several scoldings from her professors—she gave up on it and released the spirit, to its gleeful delight. So much for her pride in her amazing wizardry.

Alise blamed mental overload, because it took her way too long to hit upon the other obvious explanation: the spirit hadn’t found anything because there was nothing to find.

But how could she be sure? It was difficult to prove that something wasn’t there. Not unless she’d exhausted every resource and there was a major one she hadn’t yet touched: the librarians.

Some nights, after she’d canvassed the same obscure corners she’d examined before, Alis felt like she’d come to know everything in the archives better than the librarians themselves. But that wasn’t true. Alise lacked the Harahel magic that allowed them to mentally catalog everything they’d ever seen, touched, or read. Some Harahel wizards could even retain entire texts, so she’d heard, or hundreds or thousands of them, making House Harahel the ultimate repository for the institutional knowledge of the Convocation. They were one of the original twelve high houses. House Calliope—tier two—might do the actual printing, but Harahel controlled the information that went into everything published. Which meant that they could very well be culpable for seeing to it that no House Phel records remained.

It also meant that only they could confirm whether or not those records existed. Solution: she needed to forsake total secrecy, come up with a cover story, and simply ask one of the Harahel wizards for the Phel archives. She didn’t like exposing her interest, but she’d exhausted every other avenue.

Decided upon the course of action, Alise figured she’d wasted enough time, and sought out the night librarian. The archives had pretty much emptied out, giving her the most privacy she was likely to get. A few students lingered at the study tables at the better-lighted front of the library, solo or finishing work in quiet groups. Alise spotted one of the dark arts professors, an academy fixture, who always said she did her best work at night. The students were never sure if she was making a joke on her expertise, but Alise could confirm that the elderly professor spent hours every night at the table unofficially reserved for her, the green shaded elemental light focused on her rune-covered pages casting an eerie pool of emerald around her.

The night librarian gave Alise a half-smile of question as she approached, setting aside the book he was reading, marking his place carefully with a thin bookmark. With a circling of his finger, to show her he had it handled, he created a bubble-of-silence ward around them, so as not to disturb the other patrons. The faint sounds of rustling pages faded away.

“It’s past midnight, Wizard Alise,” he observed mildly. He was one of the younger ones, no doubt assigned to night duty because of that youth. Unless he was nocturnally inclined, like the dark arts professor.

“I like the nighttime,” she answered, surprising herself, as she hadn’t really been in the habit lately of responding to anyone with anything but the required answer. This was part of her plan, she decided. Be pleasant. Have innocuous conversation so as not to transmit the urgency of her inquiry. “It’s… soothing.” She surreptitiously glanced at the nameplate on the desk, realizing she didn’t know his name, though he somehow knew hers. “Wizard Cillian.”

“Soothing,” he repeated, cocking his head. He wore his chestnut curls short, as most wizards did, but not close-cropped, so they tumbled around his intelligent face almost boyishly. Alise suspected the unruly length came from him failing to pay attention and enlist grooming imps regularly, rather than as a style choice. In point of fact, one of those curls fell across his forehead just then and into his eyes, causing him to brush it back with what seemed to be a habitual gesture. “And it’s Cillian, with a hard C.”

Embarrassed by her error, and by exposing her rudeness in having no idea who he was, she flushed. Mentally, she nudged the fire elemental tailing her to move farther back, hopefully casting her face in shadow.

“Did you need something, Wizard Alise?” Cillian prompted, his gaze wandering to the book he’d set aside with a hint of wistfulness for whatever had absorbed him. “You usually tell us you don’t need assistance,” he added with raised brows, making her think she had spoken with him before and had brushed him off in her single-minded focus.

“Yes. Please,” she answered, summoning a smile that felt creaky on her face, hoping it would evoke some vestige of politeness from her empty social well. “My sister, who is Lady Phel now—”

“I know who your sister is,” he interrupted, not unkindly, but with a bit of reproof. Of course, a Harahel wizard wouldn’t like any suggestion that they don’t know information of note. “Nic hasn’t been gone so long from the academy that we’ve forgotten her.”

“Right,” she replied, certain her cheeks had grown even warmer. When had she become so awkward, even shy? Too much time alone. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d had a conversation with someone who wasn’t a professor or fellow student, and then only about schoolwork. “Lady Phel—Nic—asked me to look up some information in the House Phel archives, but I haven’t been able to locate that section.” There, reasonable, plausible, and not untrue.

“Naturally, I can help with that,” he said briskly, steepling his fingers together. “And I can teach you how to locate that section for yourself. The archives are organized by founding date—have you got that?”

“Er, no.” She said it apologetically, feeling as if she’d let him down.

“I see. That makes it more difficult, but not impossible. There have been many houses over the centuries, but Phel was a high house, if I recall correctly, so the information should be readily available. Give me a moment.”

Something about the way Cillian said “if I recall correctly” made Alise think he only said so out of an attempt at humility, as the opposite was unthinkable. That level of self-confidence should’ve been offputtingly but she found it oddly endearing. Of course, it was nice to talk to a skilled wizard who was sure of their abilities, but who wasn’t interested in ruling the world. Most Harahel wizards didn’t have familiars, as they rarely needed to draw heavily on magic. Was there ever a library emergency? Alise suppressed a chuckle at the thought.

Cillian frowned at her and Alise opened her mouth with an excuse, thinking he heard the laugh and suspected her of mocking him. “I’m not finding this via the usual indexing. Can you ask your Phel family for the founding date?”

Her Phel family. No one else had used that phrase with her and it gave her a surprising surge of sentimental nostalgia. “That’s actually one of the things she asked me to look up.” She hurried on as Cillian’s brows climbed. “There’s some debate among the family of the exact date and the house records are… in less than ideal condition.”

He leaned forward, instantly intrigued. “Is it true that the entire manse sank into the swamps?”

“All but the center section and even that part flooded,” she answered, bemused to find herself happy to do so. “Everything on the lower shelves of the library was destroyed,” she added, knowing that would be of interest to him and oddly wanting to tell him interesting things.

Gratifyingly, he blanched. “Had they been properly recorded?”

She knew he meant recorded in the House Harahel collective memory and she hated to disappoint him in his earnest concern. Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned the drowned books. “I don’t know. But it seems likely that they complied with Convocation customs.”

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