Page 55 of Reluctant Wizard

“For whatever reason,” Brinda continued with obvious relish, “Szarina decided to dally with Cillian Harahel. No one knew why, except that he was always pretty. Well, and easily led, poor bookish boy. He’d already manifested as a wizard, so everyone knew Szarina couldn’t be thinking to train him up as her familiar, but she wrapped him around her little finger. From what I understand, he became essentially her lap dog, following her everywhere, fetching and carrying for her, baking for her.” Brinda tittered knowingly behind her hand. “No one knows if he imagined that she’d elevate him to House Sammael, but they even attended the Winter’s Ball together. She bought him a suit for it and everything.”

Alise had glimpsed an Ophiel suit in Cillian’s closet, carefully sealed in the distinctive garment bag, out of place amidst the inexpensive, low-key clothing he normally preferred. She hadn’t wanted to snoop, so she hadn’t looked closely, but she wondered now. Was it a remembrance of the lost Szarina? The beautiful wizard so astonishing in every way that Cillian hesitated to allow even the least mention of her name into their bed, lest… what? Alise struggled with a wave of insecurity, wondering if perhaps Cillian had worried that evoking the glorious Szarina—even her name was fabulous—would make Alise pale by comparison. Alise undoubtedly came up short in any point by point comparison, but that Cillian likely also thought so hurt more than it should.

“What happened?” Alise asked through numb lips. She didn’t really want to know, but she seemed to be unable to resist finding out.

“What you’d expect,” Brinda answered with glee, fully in her element. “It turned out that Cillian had been helping Szarina cheat.” She whispered the word with fabricated horror, as if saying it full voice would be too distasteful. “Not only with her out-of-class work, but using his wizardry to obtain the answers to exams for her. It was only when her work in practicums came up so far short of her stellar exam grades and other work that the faculty put two and two together. Provost Uriel expelled Szarina and sent her home to House Sammael in disgrace. So horrible.” Brinda actually wriggled in delight.

“But Cillian wasn’t expelled?” Obviously not, as he’d not only graduated from Convocation Academy, but was hired to a staff position there, albeit a lowly one. Was the night shift a punishment?

“No!” Brenda answered, sounding impossibly shocked. “No one knows how he escaped equivalent justice, but everyone knows that’s why House Harahel and Sammael have been feuding. I suppose him being relegated to Convocation Archives for the rest of his unimpressive career is punishment enough.”

“Hmm.” Except Alise knew Cillian loved his job. “What happened to Szarina?”

Brinda shrugged with negligent ease. “Who knows? House Sammael is hardly going to trot out a disgraced scion for social functions. Well, I must get ready for dinner.” She patted Alise’s hand. “I’m so glad we’ve become friends. Let me know when you have that information for me.” With a jaunty wink, Brinda exited the bubble of silence, leaving Alise alone inside it.

Quickly, Alise penned a reply to Nic. Short, but to the point.

Thank you for your wonderful letter and for sharing with me. I love and admire you so much. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine and Cillian Harahel is watching out for me. I’ll write more soon. All my love, your sister.

Before she could change her mind, she gave the missive to the tenacious little courier and sent it on its way back to Nic. Alise would figure out how to appease Brinda’s insistent questions without bothering her very pregnant sister, who had much more important things to worry about.

Alise sat there a moment longer, savoring the rare moment of peace and quiet, then dispelled the silencing field, allowing in the tumult of people traveling through the hallways. For once, the noise gave her comfort.

~25~

Beginning to feel the effects of his upended sleep schedule and knowing he wouldn’t be able to tackle the major magic working he had in mind without a bit of rest, Cillian was able to squeeze in a decent nap before heading to his shift in the archives a few hours early.

If all went as planned, he could execute this refined search before his work day started. It meant missing dinner, but he felt confident Alise would eat in the dining hall and he’d scarfed some leftovers at his place. The sleep had helped and he felt energized with renewed determination.

This was something he could control. The Szarina thing had spiraled out of his grasp with astonishing speed—if he’d ever had any control in that relationship—but this was different, even if it was technically helping Alise. It did not, however, count as white-knighting. Doing this research was part of his job, delineated as urgent by the provost herself and was something he could do well, if only he applied himself. About time he concentrated on that task.

The whole situation with Gordon Hanneil had distracted him, which he ruefully had to concede to himself had been the intention of House Hanneil, to derail this research. Rage still clouded his thoughts now at what they’d done and tried to do Alise, and he needed to set that aside to formulate this magic working clearly. And trust that Provost Uriel would handle the situation.

Cillian waved to the librarian on duty, then proceeded directly to his private nook in the archives. On the way, he mentally reviewed his plan for this entirely new working and his own magic reserves. Ruefully, he acknowledged that he might not have enough power for the magnitude of what he had in mind—and no familiar to supplement his magic. There’s no such a thing as a library emergency, he’d told Alise. It just figured he faced the equivalent of one now.

He deliberated on acquiring sufficient magic. Maybe he could ask Marah or one of the other for-hire familiars employed by the academy for such purposes. But that might tip off anyone spying on him that he was up to something unusual. While he mused over that, Cillian sketched out the basics of his plan. This would be a multi-layered approach. He could employ some of his standard techniques for indexing information and some of his tricks for locating texts related to vague descriptions from patrons, but he needed to supplement that with ways to search for hidden and deliberately obscured information.

There were only so many methods for hiding texts in the archives, which had been explicitly designed to make stored materials findable. Occasionally, however, faculty members asked to make certain valuable and potentially dangerous texts difficult to find except by those approved to handle them. The Archivists Council had compromised with a work-around that allowed carefully selected works to be placed in a space that could be accessed only by those in possession of a password that activated a trigger to reveal those texts. The enchantment had to be of the sort that could be operated by anyone, even mundanes with no magical ability, to preserve the availability of the archives to all Convocation citizens. The documents were also still listed in the commonly used indexes, for the same reason. Functionally, that meant the librarians could find the hidden texts, but most people lacked the appropriate skillset.

The most closely guarded secret regarding the Convocation Archives was that, huge as the physical space was that housed the centuries’ worth of collected texts, the archivists also employed library magic to allow a far greater volume of work to occupy that space than was physically possible. This proprietary magic—provided by House Harahel, of course—operated invisibly to most patrons, even highly gifted wizards. It helped that the ambient magic of the ancient building, saturated with centuries’ of wizardry, created enough background “noise” that even the most sensitive put down the sense of space and time dilation to that, especially in the deepest parts of the archives.

Also, the stacks had been designed to add to the sense of disorientation. It didn’t take much—amplified shadows, a bit of optical illusion built into the construction of the shelves, giving them a looming quality. The archives lacked timepieces that gave cues on the passage of time. To preserve the materials from the ravages of natural light, there were already no windows.

Most people who ventured deep into the archives ascribed the sense of lost time to becoming absorbed in their search, which wasn’t far from the truth.

One reason Cillian had paid close attention to Alise’s explorations of the deep archives—at least in the beginning and that hadn’t been solely a rationalization to excuse his interest in her movements—w as to ensure she emerged safely again without having lost too much time. All of the House Harahel librarians took on that responsibility as part of their sacred duty to house and Convocation. No one wanted some hapless student, or absentminded professor, to become lost in the stacks for an extended period of time.

Cillian had been mulling the seemingly vanished materials regarding House Phel, along with House Hanneil’s urgent need to stop Alise’s search, for quite some time. Only one answer made sense: someone had to have found a way to use the archives’ unique characteristics to hide materials from even him and the other, far more experienced archivists. Did that mean another Harahel wizard had done so? His sinking stomach indicated there could be no other explanation, which was also why he’d dragged his feet for so long on pursuing this particular avenue until he’d exhausted every other possibility. Some things you just didn’t want to know.

Also, penetrating this deception required a level of psychic sleuthing that went beyond his normal skills. “But not my abilities,” he muttered to himself, though the lack of magic amplification made the challenge even more daunting. “I can do this.”

“Can do what?” Alise asked. She gave him an impish smile at having startled him. “You must have been lost in thought. That’s the first time I’ve been able to sneak up on you, and I wasn’t even using a cloaking spirit.”

“Shouldn’t you be at dinner?” he asked, unbending from his scribbled diagram and stretching. He had been concentrating a while.

She raised a brow. “It’s long past. Now I know you’re preoccupied if you forgot about spying on me to make sure I was adequately fed and—before you ask—yes, I ate in the dining hall, even though the snacks you gave me could feed a small family for a week.”

“What time is it?”

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