Page 27 of Strange Familiar

A door that hadn’t been there a moment ago appeared in the curve a short walk away. The magic of their wizard ancestors seemed to far outstrip anything they could do today. The set of her father’s face as he gestured her to precede him through the doorway made her wonder if he felt the same.

Or he could be just generally disgruntled, which was more likely.

Inside the door—surprise—another set of stairs spiraled up, daylight pouring through a circular opening at the top. Alise climbed all the way to the top and stepped into a place more wondrous than any fanciful playroom her childhood self could have conjured up. The top of the tower lay open to the sky, allowing in the pour of sunshine from one direction and the seething vista of yet another winter stormfront approaching from the north. It took her a moment to realize there was a barrier, this one formed of a transparent, almost undetectable film of solidified spirits, a combination of those in the door mechanism and the disguising curtain. Below, the manse sprawled in all its iconic glory—including her own tower not that far away, a bit lower, a twenty minute walk and a short hop for a crow.

She had never seen the tower in which she stood. Hidden from sight. Fascinating.

“Hello, Wizard Alise,” a politely quiet voice said, and Alise spun, torn from her enraptured contemplation of the spectacular view and even more transporting wizardry that had made it all possible.

“Brinda,” she blurted, then felt stupid, managing to pull back anything more foolish like asking Brinda Chur what she was doing there in the House Elal arcanium, instead of in class at Convocation Academy. As Brinda was currently bound to a transparent apparatus, her once long locks cut ruthlessly short, it was obvious what she was doing there. It was all the other questions that needed answering.

“Ah, I forgot you two know each other,” Lord Elal said, lying outrageously, and strutting over to the young Brinda and pinching her chin to make her look up at him. Which she did, utter worship in her brown eyes. “Meet my new bonded familiar, Brinda Elal.”

Alise took in a careful breath. “I thought Familiar Brinda planned to undergo the Betrothal Trials.”

“Yes, well, I put paid to that idea, didn’t I, Precious?” Piers said, nearly cooing, and Brinda responded with a radiant smile.

Alise shuddered at the sound of the nickname her father had once used for her maman. Not out of any kind of nostalgia, but more out of a realization of how cloying and condescending the nickname was—and out of a low-grade horror for what lay in Brinda’s future.

“Being Lord Wizard Elal’s familiar is all I ever could have hoped for,” Brinda said in a reverent tone, her eyes shining. “I have no doubt I’ll bear his child in time.”

“Throw enough money at a problem and people are happy to solve it for you,” Piers advised Alise. “That approach will always stand you in good stead. House Chur was most obliging. I wanted my new familiar now and, to my delight, she wanted me. Didn’t you, Precious?”

“More than anything, my Wizard,” Brinda responded promptly.

“Well,” Alise said brightly, ignoring the sick feeling in her gut at Brinda’s display of meek adoration for a man she couldn’t possibly admire. “Welcome to the family, Brinda. I offer you best wishes for success here at House Elal. I would shake your hand, but…” She nearly added that Brinda seemed to be tied up, but she’d accomplished annoying her father already, so it felt superfluous and she simply shrugged.

“Thank you, Wizard Alise,” Brinda replied, ever so sincere. She beamed at Piers. “This is more than I could have hoped for.”

And far more than she bargained for. A strange circle had been completed here and Alise wasn’t sure how to interpret that cycle of events. She’d severed the wizard–familiar bond between her mother and father in order to free Maman from his tyrannical control. Yes, it had been to save Maman’s life, too, but fundamentally what she and Nic had most wanted for their mother was to escape being Piers Elal’s familiar.

Now Brinda—who was far from a friend, but also not someone Alise wished ill—had stepped into Maman’s chains. Though Brinda had attempted extortion, threatening to spill secrets about House Phel, Alise knew the familiar had done so because she was following instructions from the house of her birth. She couldn’t hate Brinda for it. And now Alise possessed the power to break the chains binding Brinda. If Alise could find a way to do so without killing the familiar, as Asa had suggested.

Regardless, Brinda didn’t want that and would never thank Alise for it. Well, maybe not never. Eventually, when Piers had used, broken, and drained Brinda as he had their mother, then Brinda might see the light and regret. But for the moment, Brinda embraced her metaphorical chains, not even struggling against the physical ones that currently bound her. A lesson in that.

“Let us begin the lesson,” Piers said, following hard on the heels of that thought. “I want you to observe, Daughter, how a bonded familiar can catapult a working from adequate to ultimate.”

“Why is she tied up?” Alise asked, unable to restrain the question any longer, but trying to make it sound like genuine curiosity and not an accusation.

“If you’d bedded those familiars I sent you, then you’d know the answer to that question,” her father retorted instead of answering, then peered at her. “Did you even properly bed that librarian boy? Is that the issue, that you’re still a virgin?”

Brinda made a sound very close to a giggle, though she swallowed it in an appearance of deference, avoiding Alise’s gaze and fastening her worshipful brown eyes on her wizard. “Cillian Harahel isn’t terribly masculine, sir, if you know what I mean. Not like you are.”

Her father raised his brows at Alise. “I wondered about that. So there was a problem.”

Alise kept her posture relaxed, refusing to rise to the bait. She’d defend Cillian to her dying breath, but only if it mattered and this ridiculous, juvenile taunting was far beneath both of them. Brinda was too innocent and her father too cruel and jaded for either of them to understand what she and Cillian had shared. Passion, yes, but also that emotional intimacy, that longing that would burst through her skin if she gave into it. Which she could not. She’d given that up forever.

So, she shrugged. “That’s in the past, isn’t it. I’m here to learn from you, Father. Perhaps as you demonstrate the advantages of a familiar to me, I’ll overcome my… hesitancy over those you’ve sent to me.”

He bought it, his ego and certainty too large to allow for the possibility that she was playing him. Lord Elal smiled, his magic billowing with an unnecessary flourish. “Then pay attention, my child. This you will never learn at Convocation Academy.”

With an internal sigh and full-body resignation, Alise set herself to watch and learn. She might be there under duress, but there she was and she might as well extract whatever useful information she could.

After all, she’d need every advantage just in case she someday must face her father in a duel.

~ 14 ~

Cillian was deep into the folded archive with a mental image of himself head-down and mostly submerged in a massive trunk of tissue paper, ass in the air as he scrabbled blindly around for books hidden in the bottom. He just knew more books must occupy the null-space, but they were getting more and more difficult to locate and extract. Especially as he reached those original, meticulously crafted inner layers where, he felt sure, the first books had been hidden.

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