Page 23 of Strange Familiar

Her face had grown hot, though from embarrassment or anger, she didn’t know. Her father didn’t notice, or if he did, didn’t care, not even looking up from his letter.

“The more I think about this,” he continued, “I’m certain it’s the ideal situation. We can kill several birds with one stone. I’ll arrange for a parade of suitable candidates to visit you, for you to choose from. It’s good for a woman to have her babies young, while her body is fresh, leaving her later years to build magical skills.”

Lady Harahel had said almost the exact same thing, though she didn’t have a familiar. Cillian had said that most Harahel wizards didn’t. Familiars provided reservoirs of magic for workings that required massive power, or in case of emergencies. And there was no such thing as a library emergency.

Except for when they’d needed to extract the Phel archives from that folded space, and then she had given Cillian the power to do it. That had felt like such a triumphant moment, when they’d finally succeeded, defying the odds. That had felt like the ideal path, not this. Somehow she’d been navigating a labyrinth of conflicting choices, dodging monsters and worse, gradually finding her way out—and then had hit a dead end. Neatly cornered by her father and fate, finding herself back exactly where she’d started. Where Nic had started.

Depression settling over her like a dense fog, Alise stared out the window at her tower home for the foreseeable future and wrapped herself in silence again.

~ 12 ~

Cillian needed a familiar. Possibly several. His eyes gritty, his magic reservoir drained to the dregs, books piled around him, he had to confront the fact that this was not a one-person job.

Rather than growing easier, extracting each book from the sticky web of enchantment embedding them grew more difficult the “deeper” he went. Though he knew it was a fallacy to think of the folded space in terms of physical dimensions like depth, he couldn’t help envisioning the layers of books as being like nuts or raisins studded throughout a giant, insubstantial cinnamon roll he was gradually unwinding. The image amused him as much as the grueling process did not.

As he worked, he’d become more and more convinced that the key texts, the critically important ones with the information that had caused them all to be hidden, lay at the gooey center. There didn’t seem to be a discernible pattern in the books he pulled out like wrenching teeth from the hardened jaw of a fossilized mastodon. They came from different eras regarding different topics by different authors, randomly shuffled together. The only consistent theme was, of course, that they all had to do with Meresin and House Phel in some way. Whoever—the multiple whoevers over the centuries—had stowed in them in the archive had done so by rote, he imagined. Someone had started it all with the key incriminating texts, then others had followed behind, probably obeying instructions by rote, wedging books in with no regard for order.

Although it could be the nature of that folded space that made establishing and maintaining order impossible. Still, whether as a result of his library magic operating subconsciously or flights of fancy taking over, Cillian began to form an idea of how the folded archive had been first created and then added to over the years.

The initial enchantment had clearly required a librarian wizard of immense skill and power, but after that, various minions probably had been assigned the task over decades and centuries. There had been at least a hundred of them, judging by the magical remanence they’d left behind on the books they’d hidden. For a time, Cillian had considered indexing those actors, along with the other data he was collecting, but it seemed like a wild-goose chase. These were not major players, but lackeys lobbing books willy-nilly into the folded space, ensuring that they stuck, but otherwise leaving them to randomly settle.

He couldn’t decide which sort he loathed more: the initial traitor to the sanctity of the Convocation Archives who set up the elaborate spell to hide these books from existence or the shitty flunkies who’d blithely and unquestioningly followed along all those years. It was especially galling to know that so many had been willing to simply comply. It deeply offended him that any librarian wizard would violate the historical record this way; that there had been so many heaped insult upon injury.

The one he most wanted to identify was that long-dead initial culprit, the deeply unethical wizard who’d colluded with the enemies of House Phel centuries ago. They were well past punishment, but Cillian wanted their identity anyway. The world should know what had been done and by whom. And why.

Just as soon as he figured it out.

Which wasn’t going to happen with him sitting there on the salon floor, surrounded by towers of books like a kid building a fort, his eyes so gritty he couldn’t blink without pain and his magic so threadbare he couldn’t even feel the folded space, much less consider extracting one more book. He hadn’t begun the task of comparing the extracted books with their counterparts in the Harahel house archives.

That phase was complicated by the quarantine on the texts from the folded archive. He couldn’t take those books out of the shielded room and he could hardly bring the entire Harahel archive to them. Probably what he needed to do was index everything regarding Meresin or House Phel in the Harahel archives, make a comprehensive list, then compare it to the list he had yet to make of the books piled around him. Eventually.

“Cillian.” The sound of his name came as if from a great distance, and with the tenor of having been repeated more loudly. It occurred to him to look up, gaze traveling over the neatly aligned titles of the tomes in the nearest tower. His grandmother stood there, lips quirked in amused irritation, peering at him over that teetering pile. “What in the dark arts do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

He blinked—ouch—and considered how to answer that. “Working on extracting books from the folded archive. You told me to.”

She snorted inelegantly. “I gave you the assignment, yes. I never said to kill yourself doing it. When did you last eat? You haven’t been to a family meal in over a week.”

No, he hadn’t wanted to take the time, or face the questions, or be made to engage in conversation of any kind. He’d been grabbing snacks from the kitchen or trading on his meager sway as a scion of the house to have plates sent up to his room. Unfortunately, especially in the evenings, those plates of food went cold and congealed when he passed out before remembering to eat.

“You’re too skinny and your magic is whisper-thin,” she observed. “And you look like a demon scraped you off the pavement then put you through a washing wringer.”

“I love you, too, Grandmother,” he replied wryly, realizing as he said it that he did love her. Still. Despite everything. He sighed. “I just want to get to the bottom of this riddle.”

“You never could resist a puzzle,” she noted fondly. “You were just like this as a boy, glued to whatever riddle-game you’d found, refusing to eat or sleep until you solved it—or we forcibly pried you away.” She paused meaningfully. “Do I have to forcibly pry you away?”

“No,” he said, capitulating to the fatigue so intense it nearly hurt. “I’ll go sleep.” It looked to be nighttime anyway, the windows black, not even a reflected glow from the wintry landscape outside.

“And you’ll eat first.”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

“Don’t ‘yes, Grandmother’ me, boyo. I’m wise to your tricks.” But she offered him a hand up, steadying him when he swayed. “You’ll sit at the table and eat while I watch,” she decided.

“I had no idea that fell under the aegis of Lady Harahel,” Cillian mused. “Should I add it to my list of techniques to learn? ‘Badger junior wizards into eating and sleeping. Personally observe when necessary.’”

“Very funny,” his grandmother replied, sounding not at all amused now as she steered him out of the salon—barely preventing him from colliding with the door frame as he stumbled—and locking it behind them. “In general, junior wizards are not difficult to pry away from work. Keeping them from indulging in side-projects, pleasure reading, and eating their weight in cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate is the primary challenge.”

“This project is important,” he said fuzzily, knowing that much to be true. Even in his current state, the need to get to the core of the archive, to solve the riddle, burned like an unquenchable flame. “Alise needs these answers.”

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