Page 12 of Reluctant Wizard

A direct hit for him and she flushed deeper, definitely in anger this time. “Thank you, no,” she replied harshly. “And I’m surprised at you, Librarian Harahel, bringing a fire elemental into the archives. I understood that was against the rules. Let me take care of that for you.”

With a scalpel-precise whip of her magic, she squelched the elemental. Then turned her back on him and left.

~7~

Shaking inside, as sick and full of turmoil and as a foul and muddy Meresin bog, Alise scurried like a fugitive through the midnight corridors of Convocation Academy. She’d followed this route so many times, traversing the familiar path from the library to the dorms practically in her sleep, sometimes even more exhausted than she was at the moment, but never before feeling quite this terrible.

Never before so gut-wateringly ashamed of herself.

Hurrying for no good reason, other than the guilt chasing her, she nearly ran through the shifting shadows of the moonlit halls. As always, the shadows seemed to curl and twine like living beings, independent of the objects casting them. The academy was so steeped in magic from centuries of research, supervised practice, and the occasional accident from a fledgling wizard, that it infiltrated the very stones of the hallowed halls. Regular cleansing by House Zomen bled off the residual magic and defused anything becoming too animated, but they must be about due for a sweep, by the feel of it. Nothing repressed the ambient magic for long and it always burgeoned just before the next cleansing.

Alise only wished she could enlist a Zomen wizard to cleanse her interior self of the foul residue of her actions. She’d been awful to Cillian. She could tell herself it was for the best, which it was. She’d had no choice but to create distance between them. She couldn’t risk him ever finding out the threats Gordon Hanneil had made. Cillian couldn’t be involved in what came next, because this would only get worse and more dangerous. Possibly not just for her.

Yes, House Hanneil had frightened her as intended. But this wasn’t over. Alise had spent the hours since Bossing the Bodiless organizing her task list and prioritizing her efforts, something she always found soothing. She’d skipped dinner—as Cillian had perhaps not so astutely surmised—since her stomach hadn’t recovered enough for her to risk putting anything else in there. Then she’d buried herself in reading for exams in the morning, taking refuge in thinking only of what she needed to memorize and nothing else.

The time alone with her thoughts had helped. With a few hours distance, Alise could see what Gordon’s attempt at intimidation truly meant: House Hanneil was afraid of what she’d find if she kept looking.

Which meant there was something to find.

Alise hadn’t yet decided how to handle things from here. House Phel needed this information and she couldn’t allow Hanneil to stop her research—even if that cursed compulsion flexed painfully every time she thought about it, convulsing like a will-eating worm embedded in her brain.

Maybe Nic and Gabriel really could and would file the petition to open the sealed archives at House Harahel. In the aftermath of the battle for House Phel—not to mention Maman’s death—there hadn’t been a lot of opportunity to discuss the fact that every bit of information regarding House Phel seemed to have been scrubbed from Convocation Archives. Alise had explained her and Cillian’s fortuitous appearance at the siege in the nick of time by telling everyone about the excursion to check the House Harahel archives. But they’d all been exchanging stories and, with Jadren’s dramatic rise to Lord El-Adrel, and truly astonishing and unprecedented newfound magical abilities, plus Seliah’s discovery of her glamourous alternate form as a big, black marsh cat, a trip to the library hadn’t garnered a lot of attention.

Then Nic and Gabriel had sent Alise back to Convocation Academy, their attention split in a dozen different directions—which Alise absolutely understood—and they hadn’t given her much in the way of instructions except to keep up the good work and graduate.

Really, there wasn’t much Alise could do here at Convocation Academy if every important bit of information regarding the precipitous fall of House Phel had been removed—or destroyed—as it seemed. And yet… would Hanneil have taken such an extreme step to stop her if there wasn’t something to find right here?

Regardless, definitely the first step had to have been cutting Cillian out of the loop and she’d at least done that, if not cleanly, then quickly. Without him looking over her shoulder, Alise could manage the appearance of pretending to be compliant with Hanneil’s threats. She could continue her search while seeming to be working on other things. But Cillian was far too perceptive for her to deceive him that way.

And, though the compulsion prevented her from speaking of Gordon Hanneil’s more loathsome threats, she couldn’t run the risk that the astute librarian-wizard would detect her upset and dive into solving the riddle. He wouldn’t be able to resist the puzzle and, with his brilliance, he’d probably figure out everything, which would be a disaster. She and Cillian in no way had any kind of romantic relationship, but she felt in her bones that he would take the way Gordon had spoken to her very badly. Cillian had a bit of a white knight tendency, usually a charming trait, but he couldn’t save her from this. Not with cinnamon rolls and whatever a kolache was.

No, she’d absolutely done the right thing, for Cillian’s sake, for House Phel’s, and for her own. She only regretted that last bit of showing off, squelching his fire elemental. That had maybe been too petty.

But he needed to stop baking for her. She’d really wanted whatever was in that basket. Whatever a kolache was, it smelled savory and delicious. The enticing aroma had made her mouth water and too-empty stomach clench. It annoyed her no end that Cillian had somehow kept track of the fact that she hadn’t eaten dinner, and that overwhelming irritation had prompted her impulsive bit of minor vengeance, putting his fire elemental to sleep. She felt bad about it now, though that drop of guilt barely pinged in the bucket of the rest of it.

Like that look on his face when he’d asked if he’d hurt or offended her. So stricken, so genuinely concerned for her, even in the midst of her deliberate cruelty, as she stood over him and did everything in her power to ice him out, to thoroughly and irrevocably destroy any friendship between them. She shouldn’t have offered him that favor. In truth, she hadn’t meant to, but she’d felt so guilty, like such a monster, when he’d said he’d always be her friend. The favor had occurred to her in the moment, as a way to formalize the distance between them.

What she really, really shouldn’t have done was write down that she owed him a favor. That was truly irresponsible. If her father didn’t hate her already, he’d want to kill her for that alone. An Elal scion owing a member of another high house an open-ended, unnamed favor? Unthinkable.

And yet, when pressed, she hadn’t been able to refuse. Cillian hadn’t requested she write down that promise out of calculation, she reassured herself. He didn’t have a manipulative bone in his body. No, that was the archivist in him, where he simply had to have a record of every little thing, let alone a potentially major transaction like that. Good thing she wasn’t fated to become a high-house power or a favor like that out in the wild could be a major problem.

Knowing Cillian, he’d pick something small and innocuous anyway, like meeting for a cup of coffee. That would be fine. She would pretend to be friendly and gracefully duck any intrusive questions, and then her obligations to him would be dispensed with. Everything would work out for the best.

A murk condensed across the hallway. Alise slowed her steps.

That was odd. Then things got even odder, very quickly.

The shadows coiled into a shape like a person. Alise altered her course to go around the mirage. Whatever direction or diffuse consciousness drove the behavior of the ambient magic that sometimes manifested as these swirling shadows, it had a sense of whimsy that bent toward mischievous. It liked to scare people, or at least startle them.

Therefore, it wasn’t a surprise, exactly, when the “person” tracked her trajectory, gliding into Alise’s path. With a sigh of exasperation—she was tired, and hungry, and full of guilt and unaccustomed shame, roiling with impotent angst over Gordon Hanneil, and so not in the mood for prankster shadows—Alise erected a woven wall of air elementals to ward off the nebulous magic.

Most of it was illusion, a variety of psychic magic that to her senses colored the space with prismatic shimmering. She wasn’t terribly concerned, as the ambient magic never accumulated to levels potent enough to cause real problems, but it had kind of trapped her near the corridor wall and she’d had more than enough of that for one day. She also prepped her basic self-defense, just in case, ready for anything, learning from her past mistakes.

So, when the shadows parted and a young woman stepped out, Alise launched her spirit warrior to behead the person out of sheer, panicked reflex. A tiger instantly melted around the woman, appearing from nothing, reared up, and batted the warrior’s sword away like a play toy.

A real freaking tiger and not illusion.

Alise goggled, shocked into inaction, the worst possible reaction. Freezing in stunned surprise was never the correct response, either magically or not.

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