Page 41 of Twisted Magic

Bogdan faked a yawn. “Is this relevant?”

But the crowd of people—wizards, familiars, mundanes—all listened with interest, many nodding with wry smiles. Yes, everyone had a story about the house they all loved and feared in equal measure.

“We live without windows,” Jadren continued, ignoring Bogdan, “so as not to be alarmed by the changing scenery as the house contorts herself. We enter and leave only with the assistance of the head of the house, which is hardly a workable solution.”

People exchanged affirmations over that. Functionally it meant they’d had to wait for ages for a group large enough for Katica El-Adrel to deign sufficient for her attention.

“I propose that we no longer have to live like this.” Jadren allowed that startling statement to settle. “We know from old tales, from drawings and other artwork, that the house wasn’t always this way. This isn’t normal. These are symptoms of a house in distress. The sleeping contortions of an intelligent being unable to metaphorically breathe.”

Some looked skeptical, but other faces showed dawning understanding like his. It made so much sense.

“This is absurd,” Bogdan sneered. “First of all, this is building, nothing more, and it’s the centuries of layered and conflicting spells that create the effects we currently wrestle. Second, even if this fairytale is true, what in the dark arts do you propose to do about it, Jaddy boy?”

“I’m going put her back the way she was.”

Grasping the brass widget around his neck, in the direction he’d used to heal Seliah, he glanced at her and squeezed her hand. She nodded solemnly, amber eyes on fire with anticipation, her magic flowing into him sweetly, moonlight illuminating a dark night, water refreshing a desert landscape. Not a huge amount, but it should be enough. Wrapping his hand around the widget, mentally aiming it at the house in general, he formed the idea for her. Not an instruction or command, but an invitation. To wake, to be free of the chains of time and controlling wizards. In some ways, the house had been as much a prisoner as he had been. No wonder they got along.

At first, nothing happened, and Jadren focused on the same ideas he’d used to heal Seliah. Bring her back whole and functioning. Put things to rights. Let her heal and live.

The crowd murmured, a rising tide of speculation, a few people yipping in surprise, as the house rippled. That was the closest he could come to describing the sensation. No groaning of wood or clacking of metal this time. Instead, the house seemed to physically shimmer, a sensation of startled joy singing through the very foundation. Then she woke and unwound.

Yes, the floor moved beneath them, but with a smooth gliding, the walls unfurling like a flower blooming. Open archways appeared, leading into other hallways, and rooms beyond. Some glimpses revealed rooms and entire wings Jadren knew he’d never seen before, that perhaps hadn’t been seen in generations.

Windows opened into the autumn afternoon, showing a stable landscape and hints of towers still growing, a pool with flowing fountains out another, and the blooming courtyard someone had referred to as the queen’s garden returned, to Seliah’s laughing delight.

The transformation seemed to take hours and no time at all, the house settling into her new—or perhaps ancient—conformation, with a hum of satisfaction. Everyone, including Jadren, seemed to be holding their breath, but nothing happened. Birds sang outside the windows. A warm, flower-scented breeze wafted in, and fountains played a musical song.

“I remember those fountains,” an elderly wizard called out. “They vanished when I was a small boy and no one could bring them back, not even then Lady Brantly El-Adrel. At night, they shine with colored lights, if they’re the same.”

Bogdan had an expression of terrible realization on his face, the knowledge that he’d been defeated. Except that he refused to accept it. “It appears we have a tie,” he declared. “Three for three. We agreed: sudden death.”

~14~

The crushing courseload perversely served to settle Alise back into her former life, far more quickly than she expected. Rushing from class to class, snagging every spare moment to study—sometimes completing required reading even as she walked to that class—left her with little time or mental energy to reflect on her changed circumstances.

On the rare occasions she had a moment alone with her thoughts, it rankled deeply that she’d gone from being a contracted House Phel wizard, the lone worker of Elal spirit magic in Meresin, valued wizard and member of the family, to simply being a student again. And not exactly a celebrated one. Her professors treated her with suspicion, wariness, or sometimes outright disdain. More than one even commented on the pointlessness of starting Alise on a module that would take weeks to complete if she was just going to run off in the middle of it.

Her classmates weren’t unkind, but neither were they convivial. Wizards and familiars didn’t much mix—not like the cheerful mass of uncategorized students, days she missed sorely—so she was confined to the manifested wizards, most of whom gave her the side-eye for her shenanigans and association with House Phel.

Once manifesting as a wizard, those students concentrated on completing their advanced studies and otherwise devoted themselves to political maneuvering. Some would return to the houses of their birth, to take up the family business, but the majority needed to find good positions at established houses, preferably high houses or at least tier two houses. Naturally, many of them would end up at tier three or lower houses, but nobody aimed for that.

With House Phel on probation, a status made even more precarious by the several pending legal matters, no one had any interest in cultivating that connection. Besides that, everyone recalled that it was Alise’s own sister who had started the alarming new trend of familiars attempting to run away from their rightful wizards, and that Alise had been involved in the most recent bad behavior. Being associated with her conveyed zero advantages and arguably numerous disadvantages.

On top of all of that, Sabrina Sammael had not returned to Convocation Academy, and the blonde wizard who’d ruled the social hierarchy at the school had not been shy about Alise’s offenses against her before Sabrina stormed off home to get daddy—not incidentally head of high-House Sammael—to fix her problem. Sabrina had been obsessed with Han as long as anyone could remember. The moment he’d manifested as a familiar, she’d pulled strings to have him bonded to her. That he’d evaded her power move and, adding insult to injury, defied the rules and ran off with Iliana, a “mealymouthed, milksop familiar,” of all people, had driven Sabrina into a rage that the school still dissected with relish. Sabrina hadn’t hesitated to catalog Alise’s many faults in the process, which dealt the final blow to her reputation, with little regard for the truth.

As a result, no one bothered with her much. The few who did ask for her tale, usually in titillated whispers, were promptly discouraged by the thought-seekers. Those proctors kept a close eye on Alise, as the provost had promised. She supposed she should appreciate that they ensured she had plenty of quiet time to concentrate on work. The sooner she completed her studies, the sooner she could go home to House Phel.

But she was lonely. Even Nic’s cheerful letters delivered daily by Ratsiel courier—Alise had no idea where Nic found the time to write daily, with all her responsibilities—didn’t do much to make her feel better. Life at House Phel went on without her and sometimes reading about everyone’s doings only reminded her sharply that she wasn’t a part of it.

If not for her clandestine quest to unearth documents regarding House Phel from the Convocation archives, she might have despaired. As it was, the challenge kept her going when she began to wonder about the point of completing her education. And the independent study assigned by the provost provided her with the perfect excuse to raid the shadowy depths of the library. Of course, with her wall-to-wall course schedule leaving no time during the day for searching the archives, that meant she mainly spent time there after dinner, when the place was at its shadowy maximum.

Alise would finish her meal alone in the crowded dining hall, reading one of her assigned texts under the watchful eye of a proctor, then proceed to the library. The pass the provost had given her turned out to give her an alarming amount of access to the archives. All Alise had to do was wave the magically sealed pass indicating she was engaged in a secret, top-priority research project for Provost Uriel and the librarians, all high-caliber House Harahel wizards, would unlock gates and rare-document display cases for her, then leave her be with nothing but admonitions to be careful.

Being able to summon her own fire elemental and use her Elal wizardry to compel the elemental to use all of its energy to produce light and no heat both endeared her to the meticulous librarians who feared fire more than anything and allowed her to penetrate the darkest corners on her quest.

A quest that so far had utterly failed to yield any House Phel records. It was so perplexing she’d nearly gotten to the point of asking where those archives had gone. All the other existing high houses had huge archives, well lit and clearly labeled. Entire rooms were devoted to the oldest houses, but even tier three houses had at least a shelf or two of records. They were organized more or less in terms of founding date of the house, something she suspected had happened organically, with the oldest houses near the back of the library, in the original sections that now held only shelves and no study tables, and the newest in rooms and on shelves that had clearly been more recently added to the front of the library. As she had no idea when House Phel had been originally founded—that information was no doubt, frustratingly, in those archives she couldn’t find—she didn’t know where to look for even a telltale gap in the stored records.

Thanks to her Convocation History course, she did have a list of all the houses recognized at any point in Convocation history, along with their current status. It was a bit out of date as she’d taken the class fairly early on, as did most Convocation Academy students, so it didn’t list House Phel at all, not even on probationary status. That was due to timing, however, as Gabriel had only petitioned to have the house restored a couple of years before. She’d ask for an updated list, but that wouldn’t serve the clandestine aspect of her project very well.

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