Page 3 of Strange Familiar

He wanted to explain that they couldn’t take the stolen House Phel archives to the actual House Phel. “Alise, listen to me. This is important. Come here.”

She heaved a sigh, but responded when he wormed a hand from the blankets and offered it to her. Her composed expression crumpled and he realized she’d been waiting for the gesture of welcome. So easy to forget with all of Alise’s formidable competence and regal mien just how uncertain she was, how insecure of her place in his heart, despite all evidence to the contrary. She’d spent far too much of her life feeling unloved, so much so that he doubted he could undo that damage. Still, she came to him with alacrity that did his heart good, burrowing inside the blankets with him, her warmth like a hot coal against him.

“You’re so cold,” she said, rubbing her hands over him. “Maybe we should go to House Refoel or back to Convocation Academy. I could—”

“Alise,” he interrupted, lacking the force, but she stopped talking. “No. Harahel.”

“Just because that’s home…”

“Harahel,” he repeated. “Promise.”

“Please don’t do this.”

“Promise.”

She made a deeply unhappy noise, but the carriage changed direction, accelerating. “I promise,” she answered on a whisper. “But you have to promise me you won’t die. I mean it, Cillian. Promise me!”

“Promise…” he breathed and, at last, blessed sleep dragged him under.

~ 3 ~

When Alise had agreed to journey to House Harahel with Cillian the first time, she’d envisioned a formal approach and negotiated visit with all the appropriate etiquette observed.

That would have been infinitely preferable to arriving without invitation in the pre-dawn hours with Cillian’s cold, limp, and unconscious body. Better than his corpse, but barely. She didn’t kid herself that anyone at Harahel would be pleased to see an Elal on their doorstep. House Harahel wasn’t exactly an enemy of House Elal, but neither were they allies.

In truth, given the way her father ran business, Elal enjoyed very few allies—and the ones they’d had seemed to be meeting with reversals of late. Fortunately, a couple of those had converted to allies of House Phel, where she owed her loyalty, but unfortunately, the bulk of the Convocation didn’t know that. To most everyone she was heir to House Elal, her father’s daughter, and with every indication of being as powerfully gifted with magic and as unprincipled with it as the head of the house of her birth. She didn’t blame any of them for being wary of her.

At the moment, she was pouring every drop of that powerful magic into pushing the air elemental to maximum speed. She’d enlarged and empowered the simple creature, giving it as much fuel as she could from her dwindling reservoir, while using the lion’s share of it to keep Cillian’s spirit in his body. She had no experience with doing such things, but his essential self kept attempting to tug away, to rid itself of the drained flesh it seemed done with occupying. Alise refused to allow that to happen, no matter the cost to herself.

If she had a familiar available to replenish her magic, she’d promise them anything in exchange. But she didn’t and the nearly deserted landscape en route to House Harahel offered no possibilities to find a familiar, even if one had been willing to help. All she could do was hold onto Cillian, physically and magically, hoping to warm him with her body and keep her mental hooks in him with her wizardry.

She bitterly regretted promising to take him to Harahel and repeatedly reconsidered the wisdom of capitulating to Cillian’s wishes. Him and his cursed integrity. She knew full well that’s why he insisted on House Harahel, because of the archives he carried, the archives currently killing him. Obdurate, high-minded Cillian, so determined to prove his integrity and honesty after that awful Szarina Sammael used him so brutally and tainted his reputation.

Well, regardless of how Lady Harahel received Alise, hopefully they’d take care of Cillian and someone there would be able to relieve him of the burden of carrying those archives. She privately had her doubts. Cillian himself had said that he didn’t know of any wizards, library-magic-gifted or not, who’d managed to perform the monumentally difficult feat that he had. At this point, she didn’t even care if the archives survived the procedure; she only wanted Cillian to live.

Alise counted the minutes until their arrival at House Harahel, which didn’t help much as she had no idea how much longer it would take to get there. Feeling as if she held herself together with mental fingernails, she periodically diverted a sliver of attention to the air elemental, prodding it to determine if she could get it to go even a little faster. Full of fierce glee at the unprecedented freedom and power she’d bestowed on it, the creature had gone almost feral. That was partially her fault. In order to strip away the enchantments constraining the elemental’s size and power, she’d gone for the quick and dirty method of unbinding the entity entirely—which meant removing the spellwork cast by whatever Elal factory wizard had manufactured it—and rebinding it to her own specifications.

Because she’d been working fast, she’d performed the bare minimum required to keep the elemental leashed to her will instead of haring off on its own. The lax binding had also served to allow her to inflate the elemental’s size and propulsive force, so that the carriage hurtled along on its skids, practically flying over the snow-covered road. Left to the elemental’s instinctive desires, and if not for the constraints of gravity, they might have become airborne. As it was, they were fortunate the recent winter storm had left everything deeply buried. Otherwise the barely controlled elemental would have crashed them. The instructions she’d embedded kept them on course and following the markers buried within the road by the builders, but without those, nothing would have stopped the elemental from dragging them through any obstacle in its programmed path, living or not.

Checking on the creature, she noted the fraying strands of her control, barely keeping it tamed to her will. Given time and opportunity—and more magic than she currently possessed—she’d rebind the elemental and do it correctly this time. She could just imagine the horrified expression on the face of her Professor of Manipulation and Control of Noncorporeal Entities upon discovering her slapdash methodology. But reworking the binding would take time and energy she couldn’t afford. Also, with the air elemental so swollen on her magic and glutted on unaccustomed freedom, Alise had to consider she might not be able to bind it again. It might wrest free of her and then she’d have to gather up a new elemental. They were ubiquitous and she could do that, but—again time and energy. Therefore, she left it as it was and hoped.

Hoped the elemental wouldn’t break free.

Hoped they made it to House Harahel in time to save Cillian.

Hoped she hadn’t destroyed everything that mattered to her before she’d even had a moment to savor it.

Hope. Hope. Hope.

So it was that, sometime later, they flew at blazing speeds onto the grounds of House Harahel. Alise had expected to be stopped at the Harahel border, or at the very least at the boundary of the grounds of the house itself, but apparently Harahel didn’t employ shields or guards. The Elal in her blanched in horror, deeply uncomfortable with such lax security. No one could cross the borders of the extensive lands belonging to Elal, not without being admitted by a border guardian. Even Houses El-Adrel and Sammael, who flaunted their supreme confidence—and general lack of interest in the safety of their populations—by leaving their borders open, closely guarded the approach to the houses themselves.

Alise didn’t realize they’d reached House Harahel itself until the air elemental slammed to a stop, throwing her hard against the thankfully padded backrest. At first, she feared they had collided with something. Pulling aside the heavy, insulating curtains, she gazed out the carriage window in considerable surprise.

The house loomed directly overhead, a few warm lights in its many windows. They’d pulled up in a circular drive directly in front of a wide wooden porch, not unlike the design at House Phel, which also seemed far too inviting and lacking security to her. Alise should have been able to predict that House Harahel, like Cillian with his relaxed and friendly ways, would be open and approachable.

In the pre-dawn half-light, the edifice seemed to be mostly gray and black, but she suspected it would be colorful in the light, with its fanciful gables, ginger-breaded eaves, and slender towers ringed with wide windows and peaked roofs. Spindly silhouettes of whirling things topped several of those conical peaks, glinting with a metallic shine as the sun tipped its rays over the hilly horizon.

No one had emerged from the house, for which Alise judged them with edged anger. Noses in their books, no doubt, while one of their own—no matter how lowly Cillian’s rank might be within House Harahel—lay dying on their doorstep. Well, she would get their attention.

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