Page 8 of Strange Familiar

Oh. Except he wasn’t going back to Convocation Archives. Tandiya Uriel had fired him. Had Alise told his grandmother that? Surreptitiously, he studied his gran. No, he didn’t think so. Alise would have respected his privacy. Still, it was worth finding out. “What has Alise told you so far?”

His grandmother waved that off. “As if I’d trust anything from the forked tongue of an Elal snake. I want to hear from you.”

Cillian paused at that. “Alise claims House Phel as her affiliation now, and they claim her.”

She snorted. “Yes, so the chit mentioned. I don’t believe it for a moment and neither should you.”

“Grandmother,” Cillian said slowly. “I know full well you’d have checked her thoughts to see if she was telling you the truth.”

“Oh, I tried, of course, and I managed to glean some thoughts, which were not at all flattering to you or House Harahel by the way. But I couldn’t get past her shielding. A tightly guarded mind on that one, which is suspicious right there. What young wizardling has shields against telepathy like that?”

One who’d been terrorized by a Hanneil wizard who’d imposed a mental block on her and further traumatized her with threats of sexual assault, that’s who. And Alise had nearly destroyed herself fighting that all alone, all to protect him. Cillian sighed to himself. As a result—at Cillian’s own insistence—Alise had only a few days before learned advanced shielding to extract herself from Gordon Hanneil’s vile extortion and to protect herself in the future. It didn’t seem likely that House Hanneil would stop targeting her, even if their reasons weren’t fully understood.

It was a bitter irony that Alise’s newfound skills would backfire in this way, undermining his grandmother’s trust in his beloved. Still, the situation was easily corrected.

“Alise has very good shielding for a reason,” he explained. “I can’t tell you all the details, as its very personal to her, but Alise was mentally attacked by an unprincipled psychic wizard. She received a crash course in protecting herself.”

“You don’t say.” His grandmother didn’t sound convinced. Quite the opposite, though Cillian didn’t understand why she’d be so suspicious.

“It’s all tied in with the archives I brought. When we go through them, I suspect we’ll find—”

His grandmother cut that off with a wave of her hand. “We can discuss that later. I have considerable reservations about the safety of those archives. You’ll have to establish a protocol that assures me this house will be protected if anything untoward is secreted in those spelled stacks.”

Ah. He hadn’t expected that, but he shouldn’t be surprised, given his grandmother’s suspicions regarding outside magic, so he nodded in acquiescence. “Anyway, the point is that I trust Alise implicitly and so can you.”

“Like you trusted Szarina Sammael?” his grandmother asked, raising her brows as she sipped from her cup.

Oof. That was a low and unexpected blow. The subject of Szarina was clearly still a tender spot—and possibly always would be—and the jab shocked his breath to a stop for a moment, temporarily stopping his thoughts.

His grandmother stepped into the fraught silence with a crisp nod. “As I thought. You have a weakness, Cillian, for beautiful, young, and highly ranked wizard girls. Especially ones that frame themselves as in need of rescue and—”

“Alise didn’t ‘frame herself’ as in need of rescue,” he interrupted, perhaps unwisely and certainly uncharacteristically. “She faced a terrible danger all alone, even doing her best to keep me out of it, hurting herself in order to protect me. You are being incredibly unfair to her.”

“Am I?” She set her cup down and steepled her fingers under her chin. “Take a moment to consider this from my perspective. She is an Elal, a house notorious for their political scheming, and one deeply embroiled in the current cold war instigated by Gabriel Phel’s reckless attempt to reinstate a house best left forgotten in the annals of history. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Lady Veronica Elal became his bonded familiar, that the betrothal trials oh-so-conveniently decided the case there, so that none of us could dispute the alliance? History teaches us that there are no coincidences.”

It sounded so plausible, put that way, even though Cillian knew the truth. “Nic—Lady Phel—ran away from the bonding. She tried to escape it. That doesn’t sound like political scheming to me.”

“Or was that the perfect distraction, to allay our potential concerns? Regardless, she is only a familiar, a tool to be used by her father and her husband.”

“Clearly you’ve never met Nic,” he muttered.

His grandmother ignored that. “She might not have known. Or, she did know, and attempted to avoid her fate with that unlawful escape attempt.”

Nic and Gabriel loved each other, Cillian knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. One only needed to spend a few minutes in their presence to know that, to sense their intense regard for one another—along with the considerable erotic charge between them. When they’d visited House Phel, he and Alise had been only friends and barely that, though he’d obviously wanted her far longer than that. It had been torture to be near her and know she barely gave him a thought, all while Nic and Gabriel demonstrated what he most wanted, and could never have.

Even now, he knew full well that he could never have that with Alise, even if she somehow returned the love he felt for her. They were both wizards, so they could never experience that deep intimacy between bonded wizard and familiar. And that didn’t begin to address their very different stations in life. His grandmother wasn’t wrong there. But she was wrong about everything else.

“I can understand how you’d form these opinions based on the surface appearance of events,” he said, keeping his words slow and measured, “but the information you don’t have, that can’t be put in books and reports, is the heart and integrity of the people involved. Gabriel—Lord Phel, that is—had no idea that, by simply wanting to reestablish the legacy of his house, he’d be kicking over an anthill of ancient conspiracies.”

“How do you know that’s the case? I understand that you met and liked the wizard. I’m sure he appeals to you in that same way Szarina and Alise do, seeming to be non-traditionalists, exciting and not adhering to Convocation expectations, but those sorts don’t survive what Convocation society and law require of us.”

Cillian sat back in his chair. The cold winter light showed his grandmother’s face in a different way than he’d seen before. Just like the breakfast room, with its lead-paned glass sunroom filled with flowering plants and chirping birds in cages mitigated but didn’t erase the frozen landscape outside, her serene, seemingly practical assessment didn’t change what he knew to be true. “I know because I’ve met these people. I know them.”

“You know what they want you to know,” she corrected implacably. “You’ve never been an accurate judge of true character, my boy, which the entire Szarina debacle proved. Do you think these people don’t know that about you? That incident is hardly a secret. You have to at least consider that you were carefully selected as a target for this operation.”

As much as he bristled at his grandmother’s assessment of his character, Cillian had little foundation to argue against it. He had completely misjudged Szarina, wanting to believe that the dazzlingly gorgeous and popular Sammael scion truly loved him. She’d been skillful enough in her manipulation that she’d never introduced the topic of him helping her cheat. He had come up with the plan, so anxious to comfort her fears of her father’s reprisals, to dry her tears and make her smile again in that radiant way of hers. He’d been gobsmacked to discover she’d picked him out, seduced and cozened him entirely according to the strategy she’d devised. Never would he forget Szarina spitting hateful words at him during that horrible meeting in the provost’s office, how she’d laughed in his face that he’d ever believed a woman like her would want a meek librarian with no future.

The memory pained him still, so much that it worked like acid on his confidence that Alise was different. But his relationship with Alise wasn’t the same at all. For starters, he had pursued her. “Alise didn’t seek me out,” he informed his grandmother. “She ignored me for the longest time.”

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