Page 15 of Reluctant Wizard

“All right, let’s see,” she said to herself thoughtfully. The most obvious spies would be spirits, both the canned variety that could be purchased and used by any reasonably powered wizard and more sophisticated ones specifically tasked by an Elal wizard. There were even some available on the general market that a mundane could use via an embedded enchantment that could be triggered by the unmagical also. Although “only” a student, Alise had enough skill and native Elal magic in her little finger to detect the canned spells of either variety. Ones specifically bound and tasked by a wizard of her house would be more difficult, though not impossible to locate and neutralize. For the most part.

She’d always assumed her father had spies on her and her siblings. That had been true all their lives, though as children they’d learned ways of ducking their unseen—but not unsensed—observers. That had been relatively easy because they’d been safely ensconced in House Elal, inside the heavily guarded territory of Elal, with little to threaten them. No, their beloved papa had mainly tasked elementals and other non-intelligent spirits to keep track of them in case they got into mischief. Which meant that any plans to be disobedient had included provisions to escape detection.

In retrospect, Alise could see that Lord Elal had likely known everything his children got up to and allowed it, to an extent. They’d only gotten called onto the carpet for truly egregious violations—usually Nander, as Nic and Alise had been dutiful daughters—and they’d assumed their father had found out via other means. Now it was clear he’d always monitored them closely. For the first time Alise wondered how Nic had not only escaped House Elal, but how she’d evaded the spirit spies. She wanted to be able to ask her older sister the question with a desperation completely out of proportion to the moment.

More, she longed to confide in Nic and get her advice on how to handle this dreadful situation. She and her sister hadn’t been close in years, especially when Alise manifested as a wizard at young age at about the same time Nic, substantially older, turned out to be a familiar, to her profound and devastating disappointment. That had driven a wedge between them deep enough—and due to circumstances so far outside of their control—that neither had tried to mend the rift. Not until Alise turned up on the doorstep of House Phel with fugitive familiars, Han and Iliana, in tow and bearing an absurd notion that Nic needed rescuing.

That seemed to be the story of Alise’s life: always trying to do the right thing for wrong-headed reasons. Well, that was going to change. She had no one to rely on but herself in this current situation. She did have a clear task and goals. Her enemies had conveniently made themselves manifest. She could figure out how to avoid them and—as necessary—handle them.

But in the meanwhile, she needed privacy and discretion most of all.

Wishing she could kick up her magic stores with a familiar’s help, she set that aside as a futile hope. Cillian had advised her to use the familiars hired by the academy to top off her reserves and once even hired one for her. Ever since Nic turned out to be a familiar, though, and since all Iliana and Han went through, Alise had felt wrong about taking magic from familiars. Wizards weren’t supposed to think twice about using familiars for this purpose. In truth, most wizards, with a few singular exceptions, regarded familiars as existing solely to provide magic for them.

As an additional rationalization, since familiars couldn’t express magic on their own, they needed a wizard’s assistance to bleed off the magic they generated before it built up to such toxic levels that it drove them insane. Viewed through that lens, wizards provided familiars with a desperately needed service. Or, at least, so they had convinced themselves.

But having access to a familiar’s magic—especially a familiar bonded to you for life, creating in them a near-desperate adoration that meant they’d give anything to their wizard—was critically important to the wizards. They weren’t selflessly assisting familiars; wizards exploited them to increase their own power and influence. Any wizard could release a familiar’s magic; a familiar didn’t need to be bonded to a wizard for that.

Sure, everyone acknowledged that familiars were also people, but when it came down to the laws governing the Convocation, wizards had the most rights and familiars almost none.

Somewhere along the way, Alise had developed squeamishness around the whole unseemly enterprise. Or a conscience. She supposed how one described it lay in the eye of the beholder. Alise didn’t know what her future held, but being head of House Elal wasn’t in it. And, while she understood the need to master her own magical skills, she had no desire for power. She stopped short of mentally vowing to never bind a familiar of her own, but she rather felt she never would. If she had to imagine her future, it looked like some sort of monastic sojourn. Maybe she’d travel to the lands without magic. No one would expect her to have a familiar there.

No one would know expect anything from her at all. The thought was both comforting and lonely. On the heels of that idea, it occurred to Alise that she’d be following in Nic’s footsteps. Pregnant Nic, who’d fled to magicless Wartson to escape Gabriel Phel, with the idea of raising their child alone. If the Convocation hadn’t sent hunters after Nic—and if Gabriel had been a bit less in love with her—she might have succeeded in disappearing. As a wizard, Alise would have an easier time of it. No one would pursue her.

Another thought both comforting and lonely.

Setting aside her morose ruminations, Alise concentrated on her task. She should have enough magic left to do what she needed to, and in the morning, she’d be refreshed and replete again. Mostly, anyway.

Summoning her reserves and ignoring the twinge of discomfort of pulling magic from what felt like the hollows of her bones—thin and brittle enough to punch a fist through, Nic’s concerned and irritated voice sounded in her head—Alise cleared her mind and focused all of her magic on sensing the unseen. Fortunately, she had drilled all her life in meditative techniques to still her emotions and separate them from her thinking. True, her teachers were thinking primarily about their students being able to control their fear during an attack, but this pretty much counted as an ongoing battle.

She channeled her tumult of keen emotions into a blade’s edge of wizardry, searching all levels of spirit manifestation within the walls of her room. There was no sense in scanning all of Convocation Academy. She knew what she’d find if she did that and it would be overwhelming. From tame fire elementals heating the floors to meticulously bound and warded demons serving the dark arts professors, the hallowed halls of the academy teemed with spirits of all kinds.

But Alise didn’t need to find every incorporeal entity in reach of her wizardry: just the ones tasked to watch her. Breathing so slowly an observer might worry she’d died, she drew her attention over every pore of the stone walls, of the rough grout between, in the fibers of the throw rugs on the floor, and the furry space between. She combed through the weave of her blankets and the vanes of the smallest bit of down in her pillows and mattress. With deft skill, she eased her awareness through the Byssan glass of her small window that overlooked an enclosed courtyard and the tiny gaps between the fitted frame and the much older stone of the wall.

By the time she’d finished, hours had passed and she’d located and isolated forty-seven spirits of all echelons. The ones that weren’t supposed to be there, anyhow. She, naturally, left unmolested the heating elementals and the dust-eating ones. She also disregarded the more sophisticated spirits installed to raise an alarm should there be a surge in magic, as happened occasionally with newly manifested wizards with shitty control.

Not that there was any danger from Alise—no, she was at her most dangerous at her deliberate best—but they posed no danger to her. The ones she did tether to her will, however, those could have caused trouble if she hadn’t captured them. She didn’t sever their bonds to the wizards that had tamed them, as that would alert those wizards, but she also couldn’t allow them to continue to report back. She counted the signatures of nine different Elal wizards in her little herd of spies, including Lord Elal himself. Never content to leave anything entirely to his lackeys, her father had assigned three spirits of varying sophistication to watch his wizard-daughter.

Very tempted to snap their leashes so their master would feel it and know her power, Alise restrained herself—along with the flare of vicious hatred for her father. Wouldn’t he be surprised to know how far her skills and ability had grown? She could break any spirit-bond he could make. Maybe, eventually, she could do so without him feeling it. That would be a valuable skill to pursue. But she couldn’t risk that yet. He thought disinheriting her, real or threatened, had her cowed, whipped and beaten. It would serve her purposes for him to continue to believe that.

For the time being, Alise confined the forty-seven spirits to a bottle she’d quickly emptied of its commercially bound grooming imp, temporarily attaching the creature to her mirror instead. The task felt a bit like balancing a stack of plates in one hand while pouring sparkling wine into a delicate goblet with the other, and trying not to defizz it in the process, but she managed. The spirits she’d gathered up twisted and struggled in her mental grip. They didn’t take up physical space, so wedging them all into one small bottle wasn’t impossible. Still, they didn’t like overlapping so much, especially those with opposite natures, like earth and air or water and fire.

None of them could resist her wizardry, however, especially as they’d already been tamed by another wizard, and soon all were stuffed into the bottle, which she sealed with a cork and an indelible cap of magic. It wasn’t a permanent solution, but it would suffice for the rest of the night. Which, she suddenly realized, along with her scratchy eyes, dry mouth, and aching head, was nearly over.

Considering the El-Adrel timepiece on the wall, Alise contemplated through the dense fog of exhaustion whether it might be better to simply stay awake—get some coffee, perhaps study a bit—than go to sleep for such a short time that she’d wake up groggy. Somewhere in the midst of debating with herself over the pros and cons of each option, her body decided for her, and she conked out.

When the wake-up bells rang, Alise came out of a dead sleep with a crooked neck from where she’d apparently crashed onto her side and possibly the worst headache of her life. Her magic had not only not replenished during the too-short nap, but it felt lower than ever. Belatedly she realized that, by tethering all those spirit spies to her will without breaking their bonds to the wizards that had tamed them, she’d engaged in an ongoing battle for control of them.

Not at all wise, but done was done. She couldn’t release them now or they’d report back to their wizards what she’d attempted. Instead she staggered to her feet, weaving only a little on wobbly legs on her way to the wash basin, and invited the little water elemental to splash cold water on her face. Slightly more alert from the bracing effects of that, she dragged wet hands through her short hair, hoping to flatten the spikes sleep had pressed in the wrong direction, with only partial success. Good thing she’d never had cause for vanity. She’d long ago given up on extracting anything close to beauty from her oddly thin face, with her pointed chin and widely spaced eyes. At the moment, those eyes also sported purple bags big and puffy enough to stow her entire wardrobe in, an effect highlighted by the arrows of red lines creased into her cheek from the wrinkled bedding.

All in all, not her best look. Stripping off the stale, slept-in clothing from the day before, she then dragged on pants and a shirt from her closet, just as the bell for breakfast sounded, making her stomach clench in hunger. Food would go a long way toward helping her body replenish at least her native magic, and it sometimes worked as a substitute for sleep. More or less, anyway.

Knowing the vial of bottled spirits would drain her magic less in close proximity, she tucked it in a thigh pocket of her baggy pants, buttoning it closed again. The slight weight of it bumped against her leg. At least she’d been smart enough to pick a small vessel, which she could keep on her without drawing attention.

Unlocking her door and removing the other enchantments she’d added for security, Alise checked the corridor for any lurking enemy wizards, then plunged into the thin stream of wizard-students heading down the hallway. They didn’t provide robust cover, but she was grateful for their presence as she’d never been before. The other students might sneer at and snub her, but they wouldn’t attack her with tigers or employ illegal psychic pressure to subvert her will. She even found herself grateful for the by-now standard cold shoulders they presented to her and how they pretended she didn’t exist. There was a comfort in that, in invisibility, a surcease the remorseless mirror had failed to give her.

Hurrying along to breakfast, Alise mentally reviewed her schedule for the day, as best she could recall it. In her haste, she’d left the document the provost gave her back in her room. She rather envied Cillian’s ability to access records magically. That would be a handy trick to master, and theoretically one she could learn, so long as she never used it for profit. As if she had time to learn anything else. Probably Cillian wouldn’t teach her the proprietary Harahel techniques anyway. Besides which, they weren’t speaking to each other. She shouldn’t even be thinking about him.

With her tray of the standard breakfast plate and an extra-large coffee, Alise looked for a place to sit. She hated this part and had since she’d become a pariah. Before that, she’d always had a place at a table with the wizard-students from the highest houses, to the point that people would shift around to make a place for her. Everyone had wanted Alise Elal to grace them with her presence. There had been a time when she’d held her tray and chosen from a half-dozen options, tables of different friend groups waving to her, beckoning her to join them.

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