Page 26 of Strange Familiar

The familiar, whose name she’d barely registered and had already forgotten looked confused and apprehensive. So much so that she waved the words away. He’d never summon the courage to speak so impudently to Lord Elal and it had been wrong of her to take out her frustrated ire against him.

Once the door closed and locked behind him, she went to test it, another of her newly acquired habits. The Iblis lock had, of course, been coded for the door guards to operate, not her. With time—of which she had plenty—she could probably wizard her way through breaking the lock. In addition to the lock, however, and the minor-wizards serving as guards, her father had stationed a particularly vicious set of spirits on the door. Not on the shuttered windows, however, which made her wryly aware that, while he expected her to try to escape, he figured she wasn’t desperate enough to choose plummeting to her death.

None of it was absolutely necessary as what truly kept Alise from leaving was the knowledge that Bria would have to take her place as his heir. She had spent her initial days of imprisonment binding and training a new guardian spirit for her niece. It had taken a bit more work to imprint the spirit on Bria from a distance, but—again—Alise had nothing but time. When she sent the little spirit off to Meresin and felt the snap of connection upon it finding Bria, Alise at least was able to savor that small victory.

She found it overkill that her father went to such lengths to lock her in when he’d already chained her with her love for her niece. Telling, she supposed, that he thought he needed insurance beyond that. Piers Elal might be savvy enough to use emotional extortion to manipulate her, but he could never understand basic compassion. Just as his transparent attempts at finding a familiar with a physical type similar to Cillian’s betrayed her father’s utter lack of understanding for what real connection between two people was about.

Yes, Cillian’s face had become dear to her, with his intelligent wizard-black eyes and sexy librarian look with those spectacles. His black curls framed an exquisitely boned face, with his narrow chin and sweet, bow-shaped mouth that kissed her with such tenderness. Those elegantly long-fingered hands that had caressed her body with the same care he showed a delicate and fragile, rare and ancient tome. That was key: Cillian cherished her as if she were precious. He understood her, amused even by her flaws and foibles.

She realized with a sudden crystalline clarity that a person like her father would never in a million years comprehend what she loved about Cillian. He’d built his entire understanding of relationships around manipulating people, so he’d never know how it felt to have someone come to him out of true regard and real feeling, with actual trust. He’d arranged his life so that he was surrounded by people forced to cater to him. Not one person in the whole world wanted to be with him for himself. He could trust no one at all.

Alise had what her father never could. Not just Cillian, though he lived closest to her heart, but also family like Nic and Gabriel, her many friends at House Phel, and even—bizarrely enough—at House El-Adrel now. Her father could weave a web of words about competition and power, but she had experienced for herself the immense rewards of true connection. No amount of wealth or status could compensate for the richness of knowing someone took joy from being around you, even from simply knowing you existed in the world.

She understood that now because knowing Cillian was out there, cozied into House Harahel, reading his books, perhaps poking at that archive, made her happy. Imagining how Bria would be growing day by day gave her joy. Han and Iliana enjoying their forbidden love, Asa practicing the dark arts, Quinn scheming to get her hands on the baby for a while, Nic and Gabriel growing and protecting their house and people … All of that rested like a glowing sun at the core of her, mitigating the cold isolation of her imprisonment.

Nic had written:

Had I been sequestered in that tower much longer, had Gabriel not come along to change my entire world, I’d have succumbed to both despair and the overwhelming need to escape that monthly and harrowing night with my suitors.

Alise knew exactly what Nic meant in saying that. Familiar or not, Nic would’ve found a way to escape that room, probably via those shuttered windows and the horrible drop to the courtyard far below. But that glowing certainty that Alise loved and was loved in return, kept her from considering any such thing. Her father need not shutter the windows or even lock the door. Alise would stay put and see this through, not out of fear, but for love.

The door flung open, Piers Elal’s stocky build filling it from side to side, though his head reached nowhere near the lintel. Alise got her diminutive height from him, along with her magical gifts, and possibly some of her more irascible personality quirks. She would take nothing else of his. If it lived in her—and as much as Cillian claimed otherwise, Alise knew the corrupt tendrils of her father twined around the empty, insecure holes in her heart—then she would root it out.

“Oh, hello Lord Elal.” She pretended to consult the non-existent El-Adrel clock. Probably the inability to track the passage of time precisely should bother her. “Apparently you received my message after all.”

“Yes.” He smiled, and she didn’t care for the look of it. “Come with me.”

Alise followed her father through the familiar halls of her childhood home. House Elal was by far the largest of all the high houses, something Elals long before her father had insisted upon. They laid claim to having the biggest house—in physical size and in population—although that was a claim difficult to prove. House Hanneil, for example, had an architectural profile that blended innocuously with the landscape above but purportedly extended below ground in an immeasurable warren of caves and tunnels. And they never disclosed their actual population.

In a similar fashion, House El-Adrel couldn’t be precisely measured in size as the clockwork, semi-sentient structure changed itself routinely, hiding away rooms—sometimes with the unwary trapped inside—and producing entire wings that hadn’t been seen in centuries. Conversely, House Refoel had no single structure, but instead spread over an entire fertile valley of hot springs and dwellings from spare single-person huts to the multi-roomed main facility.

But House Elal did take the prize for appearing to be the largest manse. It looked like a castle out of fairytales with its towers and turrets, the actual portcullis and drawbridge that lowered over the “moat” created by the near circular bend of a river. If the house hadn’t been built in that serpentine curve—completed by a spike-filled chasm to bridge the distance on the narrow spit of land—and therefore constrained in horizontal sprawl, it would no doubt be even larger. As it was, in their zeal to expand and place their personal stamp on the manse, the generations of Elals had managed to fill their self-made island from bank to bank, with expansions added mostly upward in the more recent eras.

Inside, this made for a confusion of hallways and staircases. One almost always had to ascend and descend several sets of stairs to move from one side of the manse to another. Having played in this house from her earliest days, Alise knew every twist and turn, every tower and cellar, and even those odd semi-secret rooms created by the access being mostly walled off by some desired addition and the resulting bottleneck making it too inconvenient for anyone to use on a regular basis.

Even so, trailing behind her father, Alise discovered herself in a part of the twisting manse she’d never before seen. With dawning realization, she began to think he was showing her the House Elal arcanium, a truly shocking development, especially given her obnoxious message.

She’d known that her wizard father used an arcanium, of course. Every high house, and some lower tier houses, boasted an arcanium. They were kept secret, as far as the wizards using them could contrive, and warded against intruders. Alise and her siblings had so feared their father’s many dire warnings should they intrude upon his sanctum sanctorum that they’d never even tried to find it. Now, as they traveled through one of those apparently unused bottlenecks, through a secret doorway so invisibly sealed Alise had never suspected its existence, though she’d—ironically enough—played prisoner in a tower with her friends there more than once, she decided they never could have found it.

They descended a short flight of steps that ended at a landing, which curved in a hairpin loop, went through another invisibly sealed doorway, up a wrought iron spiral staircase in an otherwise empty column to nowhere, ended up on a circular balcony overlooking open air. And then her father removed a curtaining veil of spirit matter unlike anything she’d seen before.

It was old, incredibly ancient, and comprised of spirits that had been combined and somehow retrained to have lost their individuation. Alise didn’t know that could be done, but her father brushed aside the barrier with an ease he’d use to push past one made of silk. Beyond it, a door with a huge wheel inset glowed with magic. Piers Elal put his hand to the lock, then gave her an impatient glance. “Your hands, too, Daughter. It’s meant to be opened by two people. Usually a wizard and familiar. The only other time I’ve opened it with another wizard is when my father showed me.”

She stood there dumbly a moment. “Why are you showing me now?” Surely he didn’t trust her.

“Because you are obstinate beyond belief and I’ve come to the conclusion that showing you what can be yours, along with the critical importance of having a bonded familiar, will be what it takes to convince you to cooperate with me.”

“I am cooperating with you,” she pointed out, not moving. “I am here in House Elal, fulfilling the terms of our agreement.”

“And yet there you stand,” he bit out, barely containing the fulminating irritation practically leaking from his pores. “Not cooperating.”

He had a point. Biting back a sigh, Alise went to his side, wishing she could feel about this moment as she’d fantasized as a little girl. Back when Nic was the favorite, the obvious heir, the apple of their father’s eye, Alise had nursed a secret and jealous longing to have what Nic seemed to have. Everyone had been so certain Nic would manifest as a wizard, not a familiar, that Alise had been sure of the reverse: that she would be a familiar or, in the very best case scenario, a minor wizard forever in her brilliant elder sister’s shadow.

But she’d still imagined this exact scenario: being at her father’s side in his arcanium, which in her childish fantasies, looked more like a toy-filled playroom than a wizard’s workshop. Now she disliked having to be in such close proximity to him, his magic an unappealingly lurid mix of churning colors, an unpleasant smell emanating from his body. Why he smelled like rotten fruit, she didn’t know, but it turned her stomach and she had to hold her breath as she laid her hands opposite his, in the grooves obviously made for them in the big wheel.

“Invoke your spirit magic,” her father instructed on a grunt, mollified but far from pleased.

She nearly asked for more information than that, but then her wizard senses came alert to the spirits embedded in the wheel. No, not embedded but… forming the wheel. Like the surprising spirit curtain, these entities had somehow been condensed into an even more solid form, though these remained more aware, a living substance inquiring as to her blood and identity. Before she could think what to do, the material of the wheel gave the sense of a sigh beneath her hands, huge locks turning deep in the walls, releasing.

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