Page 21 of Strange Familiar

“Uh?” he grunted, not looking up from the missive he was penning. He put a hand out as if expecting a Ratsiel courier to land on it, clearly thinking the unusual sound of her voice had been an alert from an incoming message.

“I said,” she didn’t bother to hide her anger, her hate, “why do you want me for your heir? Nander is eager to lick your balls or ass to have the dubious honor. In fact, when last we spoke, if you can call it that, he’d seemed convinced he had the job.” Her younger brother had, in fact, preened and taunted her over his elevation and her disgrace, an effort that would have landed far more solidly if she’d given a flying fuck.

Her father lifted his gaze and attention from the letter he’d been writing, studying her with the one depthless, wizard-black eye. The gold metal patch on the other eye seemed to also stare at her, unwinking, baleful, and swirling with a condensed knot of spirits that no doubt enabled him to see, possibly beyond what physical human eyes could.

“It speaks,” he observed sourly.

She glared back, unamused.

“I’d come to the conclusion that my sole remaining daughter, chief among my ungrateful progeny, condescended to speak only to the lowly, the renegades, familiars, useless ‘high’ house minions, and mousy librarian wizards without true magic.”

Oh, so that’s how the wind blew. Despite her concerted efforts—and an intensive magic-working that had all but drained her to her very soul—he’d apparently managed to keep spirit-spies on her. “Are your feelings hurt?” she cooed in a falsely sweet voice.

“My feelings?” He barked out an incredulous laugh and set aside his lap desk. “I can see I went very wrong with you, Alise, allowing you to grow up with such sentimental ideas. You don’t have Nic’s hard-headedness. I never had to teach her to ignore the puny mewlings of the flesh that are our so-called emotions. She understood that much from birth—and managed to turn it against me, all out of bitterness because she failed to become a wizard.”

“Failed? She couldn’t control that she manifested as a familiar.”

“Couldn’t she?” He scratched his temple under the gold-buckled, black leather strap that held on the eye patch. Alise had seen him do it before, thinking that it probably didn’t itch so much as he’d developed the habit to stop himself from messing with the patch. The missing eye had to pain or at least gall him. She hoped it hurt like a burning coal in his brain.

“That’s debatable,” he declared. “What are the origins of failure? Some say they derive from a weakness of will.”

“Ah.” She nodded sagely. “So, your failure to acquire the House Phel arcanium and take that magic for yourself, not to mention nearly perishing at Gabriel’s hands and being sent home, spanked and maimed—that came from a weakness of will?”

His pressed lips twitched, one eye glittering like volcanic glass while the other swirled almost idly. The effect disconcerted her, but she didn’t let it show.

“This is where your inexperience shows itself so embarrassingly, Daughter. I didn’t fail. They cheated and my allies failed, yes. I, however, triumphed—as you witnessed at House Phel. All that matters is the long game. I won this battle and I will win the war. And you, Alise, are a weapon in that war, one to be molded and tempered into the service of our family’s cause.”

Alise suppressed a chill of foreboding. Talk. It was only talk. He couldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do. “And what, exactly, is our family’s ‘cause’?” She loaded the question with scorn. “Accumulating wealth? Crushing dreams? Oppressing the masses? Ruling the known world?”

“Ruling all the world, not just the known world,” he corrected, black eye glittering with unsettling avariciousness. “Once the world becomes known, it too will become ours. As for wealth, that’s a pathway to power. Crushing dreams and oppressing the masses is just a fun side-benefit.”

He seemed to be utterly serious, not in the least sardonic in adding that last. With new worry worming deep in her heart, she thought he might actually believe that.

Piers Elal shook his head slightly at her, mouth curving in sordid amusement. “You will learn, Daughter, to find joy in life where you can.”

“In the suffering of others?” she spat.

“Why not?” he countered. “It’s pure propaganda that’s shoveled down our throats that we should be sorry if others suffer. Why not savor the sweetness that we prosper instead? Their debasement exists as a contrast to our exaltation, else our supremacy wouldn’t be as sweet. That’s all that matters in life. Nature teaches us that. It is devour or be devoured. Why not enjoy being the apex predator? Do you think the crippled prey, the weak, the starving, those who exist only to feed you, that they wouldn’t change places with you in a moment? Be sure they would, my daughter. When you have your teeth buried in their throat, they will fear and loathe you—but they will also admire and wish with every fiber of their being to be you.

“There is no shame in giving yourself the same regard. You were born to rule the world. Bred for it. Gifted with the power and the ability. You possess even greater talents than I realized. If you squander those abilities, that’s where the shame lies. What would we say of the tiger who refuses to kill, who only wastes away nibbling grass until it dies, mangy and skeletal? Would we admire and glorify that pitiful creature or do we celebrate his brother, strong and sleek, muscled, radiantly gold and terrifying as it prowls through the territory it owns utterly?”

Alise found her convictions blurring. He made a compelling case, though she knew the principles he espoused must be wrong. Still, the image he painted of the starved tiger denying itself food compared to the glorious, well-fed one… She didn’t want to be the pitiable, starving tiger. Her father saw it in her, too, that shared pride, the desire to be the best. All this time she’d worried about becoming like him—had the struggle been in vain, for no reason?

“We are not animals,” she said, knowing that to be true and important.

“Correct. We are better than animals,” he shot back. “As wizards, we are also better than humans. Everything that applies to those lower tiers of beings, applies to us, but magnified. We have a manifest destiny to better ourselves, to rise ever higher.”

“My point is that the tiger knows not what it does. There is no morality, no question of compassion. It knows it must eat to live and its instincts drive it to kill. There is no deciding not to. The tiger lives in the moment. It cannot predict the future or plan for it. It has no abstract thought.”

“Exactly,” her father said with approval, even a kind of pride that could become intoxicating. “Now you are thinking and you understand my point. Humans improve over animals in just that aspect. Because of our ability to predict a future that has not yet occurred, to plan in the abstract, to concoct a strategy and see it through, humans have risen to dominion over animals. Despite our lack of claws and fangs to rend and tear, we puny creatures have triumphed because of one thing.” He tapped his temple, stirring the spirits in his glass-domed patch to swirl like snow in a decorative globe. “Our minds. By employing magic and wizardry in addition to that intelligence, we possess more formidable weapons than mere claws and fangs.

“Alise, you and I, like most wizards stand at the apex of all the world. With magic, we are gifted with metaphysical fangs and claws. They allow us to win every fight, to put down the weaker prey, and feed on them. With the ability of our human minds to plan, to strategize, even centuries ahead, we ensure our place as the most powerful beings in all the world. More important, among wizards, you and I are at the very top of even that rarified group. This is your legacy. This is what I want for you.”

“What if I don’t want it?” She lifted her chin, but her resolve wavered in the face of what seemed like irrefutable logic—and so her voice trembled too.

“You don’t fool me, Daughter,” he replied, not without a strange form of compassion. “You do want it. You’d be an idiot not to recognize that in yourself and you’re no idiot. You only question yourself because you’ve been too long among the prey, the losers, the ones pretending they enjoy their lives as is to console themselves over the brutal truth, that they lost before they even began. I left you too long in the contamination of small minds and little lives. I seek to correct that now, to both elevate you and help you to cherish what makes you so very special.”

He was making too much sense and Alise looked out the carriage window as spring once again yielded to winter, growing whiter and harder as they crossed into the high altitudes of the Knifeblade Mountains, traveling at the speeds of luxury. The landscape became sterile without the gentle blossoms and fuzzy new leaves. Was it still snowing in Harahel? Probably. And Cillian would be cozied up inside, buried in books, as he was happiest. And she was in the cold and bitter world, once more alone, as seemed to be her destiny. Special? Maybe. But she’d never asked for that.

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