Page 1 of Twisted Magic

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“Missive for you, Lord Jadren.”

Jadren turned from his contemplation of the annoyingly serene view of the valley that comprised the heart of House Refoel lands and took in the page bearing the sealed scroll with some bemusement. When he’d arrived at Refoel—as a prisoner, not incidentally—he’d been universally addressed with contempt, labeled a rogue wizard and violent murderer. He’d also been facing imminent execution, so how people talked to him had been the least of his worries.

Still, it never failed to amuse him that, during the months he and Seliah had been living at Refoel, he’d gone to being called “Lord Jadren,” which was a far sight better, if not necessarily correct. The community of healers had implemented the peculiar honorific as a way of acknowledging his status as a scion of another high house while discretely refraining from mentioning the name of House El-Adrel. He’d become somehow both a product of the house of his birth and severed from it in one fell moniker and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. But then, he’d been turned so inside-out from the Refoel wizard-healers torturing him in the name of mental health and attempts to teach him to be a proper wizard, that he wasn’t sure what to make of most anything.

It would bother him that he couldn’t trust his own mind, except that it was the story of his life. He was used to it, which also said something.

“A missive,” he repeated, eyeing the page. “For me?” He didn’t usually clarify information that was already abundantly clear. In fact, he’d normally take the opportunity to mock someone who felt the need to be so irritatingly redundant. Still, considering that he was supposed to be in hiding with no one outside a select few knowing where—or who—he was, receiving correspondence seemed… questionable.

The page nodded, earnest in her youth, extending the expensive-looking envelope, magically shimmering with the seal of some house or other. Jadren seriously doubted he wanted to know which one. “Delivered by a Ratsiel courier,” the page added. “Lord Refoel bade me bring it to you with all haste.”

Only in the blissful, non-political, and almost oppressively quiet environs of House Refoel would a missive delivered via Ratsiel courier be treated with such reverence. At House El-Adrel, Ratsiel couriers came and went in a blizzard of activity, sent and received by wizards of all echelons. Even House Phel, backward upstarts that they were, employed Ratsiel couriers to communicate with the other houses in the Convocation with enough regularity that there were always a few rats—as Jadren and his siblings had nicknamed the magical constructs that could resemble bizarre beasties—roosting in the rafters of the library.

Jadren really didn’t want to know who’d sent him a message, especially now, after all these months of silence, and especially since the potential list of senders was so short. Seliah had sent a message to her brother, Lord Gabriel Phel, the master they both looked to, when the two of them first decided to extend their stay at Refoel. “Decision” being a euphemism as it hadn’t been entirely up to them. The good healers at Refoel weren’t enthused about unleashing the monster that was Jadren on an unsuspecting population. Still, Jadren’s status had been upgraded from prisoner to quasi-guest, allowing Seliah to finally contact Phel, reassuring him that they were safe, together, and would be staying put for a while.

Jadren didn’t know what didn’t know what details Seliah had shared in the letter about the events leading to their capture by the Refoel wizards or how they’d come to be part-boarder, part-patients at the house, though she’d offered to let him read it. He did know that Seliah and Gabriel had traded semi-regular correspondence ever since. Probably Lady Phel, Gabriel’s wife, Nic, was in the mix, too. Jadren assumed Seliah was keeping House Phel abreast of their progress in healing from extensive trauma (mostly him), physical deprivation (mostly her), mental and emotional instability (both of them), learning to use their magic (both of them, but mostly him), and training in using their wizard–familiar bond (both of them, though they mostly sucked at it so far).

“Lord Jadren?” The page’s outstretched hand sagged a little, her round eyes glistening in concern. “Don’t you want it?”

“No,” he replied honestly. Nothing good could be in that missive. Why couldn’t whoever sent it have continued to correspond with Seliah and let him continue happily with his head buried in the sand?

“Bu—but…” she stammered. “Lord Refoel bade me to—”

“I know, I know. All haste. Blah blah blah. Listen, you tell Lord Chaim Refoel that he can suck my enormous—”

“I’ll take it,” Seliah said, striding out to the terrace and plucking the envelope from the girl’s hand. “Thank you, Pinny. Please tell Lord Refoel that I’ll see to it that Lord Jadren reads this.”

The page smiled at Seliah, gave Jadren a last, alarmed look, and fled back inside, the doors to the rooms he shared with Seliah closing with a thud.

“Do you know the name of every cursed robe-wearer in this valley?” Jadren asked her.

“No, only the people I see on a daily basis,” Seliah retorted. “Pinny is in and out of our rooms all the time and she’s the one who keeps you in endless carafes of wine and clean towels. You should know her name.”

“I don’t know the name of the wizard-nanny who spoon-fed me and wiped my hiney either,” he pointed out. “That doesn’t mean I should.”

Seliah gave him a long, simmering look. With her brown eyes such a light golden color they resembled flawless amber, the glare imparted considerable impact, like a focused ray of light. And, like the lightning bolt emblem of House El-Adrel, that ray struck hard, piercing him to the bone with how much he loved her. He wasn’t the kind of guy to fall in love. With the exception of his father, he’d never loved or been loved in all his benighted life. Among all his other failings, he didn’t know how to do this. If he had any choice in the matter, he wouldn’t.

But he didn’t have a choice. Not in having Seliah as his familiar, an irreversible bond, nor in loving her to the point of insanity.

Of course, it didn’t help that she was infuriatingly gorgeous, in her own unique style that shouldn’t work, but did. Her odd assembly of features, none of them pretty on their own, somehow combined into an original beauty infused with her strong-willed personality. She looked absurdly lovely in the golden Refoel robe, the silky material clinging to her lean figure in all the right places. Her glistening black hair fell to below her waist, long and loose, the way she knew he liked it. He liked it too much, immediately assailed by smoldering memories of being veiled in that hair as she rode him, rising above him, slender, tawny, and suffused with animal sensuality. Something he’d like to do, but had not yet tried, involved wrapping that hair firmly around his fist and—

“And what has crawled up your hiney?” she asked with false sweetness, startling him out of the lurid fantasy. She raised one black-winged brow as she tapped the missive against her thigh. Seliah had gained weight during their stay, thanks to the assiduous attention of the Refoel nutritionists, losing the gauntness from starving in the swamps during her magic-induced madness, but she would always be lean, all tensile strength and wiry muscle. “Did the session with Liat go badly?” she asked more gently, eyes filling with that compassion he both loved and loathed.

“Depends on what you consider to be bad,” he answered, trying to sound flippant and turning back to the view, so he wouldn’t have to see the sympathy in her gaze. He’d come out on the terrace with the half-formed thought of soaking in one of their three private pools of varying degrees of heat, with an eye toward unknotting some of the tension sending spikes up and down his spine.

Then it had seemed like too much effort to even get undressed and he’d ended up broodily staring into the distance like some damaged hero from a novel, full of existential despair and dreary self-involvement.

“I’m no closer to being able to consciously wield my healing magic—on myself or anyone else,” he reported. “I suspect Liat is contemplating breaking all of her precious healer’s vows by deliberately wounding me to determine if I even can heal. I’m not sure she believes me.”

“You can’t expect to solve a lifelong problem in a month,” Seliah said, moving closer.

That was rich, coming from her. He cast her a scathing glance over his shoulder. “Weren’t you the one to give that big speech about not liking when people tell you what you can expect of yourself and how important it is to you that I do expect you to step up and handle your shit?”

She actually rolled her eyes at him, coming up beside him and gazing out at the stupidly pretty valley. Unlike him, she looked peaceful and lovely, not tortured at all. “So, what’s the letter about?”

“I don’t know, do I?” he snarled. “You snagged it before I could even look at the cursed thing.”

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