Page 26 of Rogue Familiar

“Mount,” he gasped to Seliah.

She didn’t reply, but picked up her pace.

“Get on the horse, Seliah,” he ground out.

“No,” she hissed. “I’ll hurt you.”

“Do as I say, Familiar!”

She coughed out a laugh under her breath, at least breaking into a jog and urging Vale into a faster clip. “You can’t both abandon me and lay claim to me at the same time, Wizard. Screw you and your orders.”

If Jadren’s teeth hadn’t been a jagged mess of splinters, he’d have clenched them. “Think of it as revenge.”

“Tempting,” she spat. “But I won’t hurt you more than I have to. Yet.”

“If you don’t mount and get us out of here, you won’t get to punish me.” He sensed her hesitation, perhaps finally believing him.

“Fine.” To his intense relief, she halted Vale and reached for the saddle. Then she stopped, the vivid sense of her burgeoning magic suddenly muffled. Uh oh.

At the same moment, a fist clamped over his already weakened brain, his feebly moving thoughts losing all momentum. They slowed, then skidded to a stop. Vale and Seliah went similarly motionless.

Shit shit shit. Desperately, Jadren reached for any wizardry in him. Something, anything to shake the hold of these Hanneil wizards. But he came up empty. Worse than empty, because apparently being on the edge of death for days, and then his body attempting to make up for the healing it had been unable to accomplish all that time, had dug into his reserves so far that he’d begun cannibalizing himself. The only positive here was that Seliah hadn’t frozen in a posture touching his skin, or he likely would lose even that slim thread of control that kept him from seizing her magic.

The need inside him—that coiling magic that never felt wholly born of himself, but often like some kind of rapacious parasite devouring him along with anything it could feed from—would fasten itself upon Seliah and take everything from her to its satisfaction. It had taken everything in him to refuse her offers of help so far. Why and how in the dark arts had she come after him to begin with? And now all that self-restraint could be so quickly and easily foiled by a slip of the hand.

Worse, he couldn’t help wondering if, had he accepted her help back at the bone field, maybe they wouldn’t be in this fix now. Maybe he could’ve controlled himself. Maybe.

“Well, look what we’ve found,” a familiar voice observed, though Jadren could still only see—through blearily unfocused, semi-healing eyes—an expanse of black horse hide and a glimpse of hooves below. Ignominious didn’t begin to describe his current ass-up, humiliatingly helpless position. “Imagine our surprise when we detected the presence of a powerful familiar in our territory,” the Hanneil lead guard-wizard said. “One with such an unusual flavor.”

Seliah didn’t make a sound, but her thrum of distress echoed down the bond to Jadren. He thrashed against the inside of his skin with the desperate need to get to her, to protect her. Later he’d make her sorry she’d put herself in danger coming after his pathetic self. Sorrier, that was, since she should be greatly regretting the misguided effort by now.

“And now we find that familiar is bursting with magic—though what taste is that, precious one?—loosely bonded to a dead rogue wizard we dispatched days ago. Except he’s not so dead. Wasn’t this intruder thrown over the cliff, as instructed?”

“He was,” another too-familiar voice protested. “I watched for his body to hit bottom, even though he was dead when he went over.”

“Not quite so dead, apparently,” the Hanneil wizard observed with bland interest, coming over to Jadren and lifting his head by the hair, then making a sound of disgust when the clump came loose from his barely healed scalp, Jadren’s chin thumping back down against Vale’s flank.

It was a measure of his overall level of pain that none of it hurt noticeably. Though he did wonder how truly awful he must look. Poor Seliah, saddled with him with his monstrous nature showing fully on the outside for once. Good cautionary experience for her though. Maybe now she’d listen. If they got out of this.

The Hanneil wizard shook their hand free of the stuff, wiping a hand against their gray robe. “Lady Hanneil will want to know about this. Bring them along.”

To Jadren’s intense dismay, Vale obediently turned, carrying him like so much baggage in the direction of House Hanneil. Considering that had been his initial plan, it was galling to confront how very much he did not want to face Lady Hanneil with Seliah present. This could only go badly.

Even worse was Seliah at the other end of the bond, her anxiety at being unable to speak or move her own body as she was loaded into one of the Hanneil guard’s chariots almost more than he could bear. If small, enclosed spaces reminded her of the powerlessness and vulnerability of being restrained, how much worse would this be for her?

Viciously, he wished he possessed Gabriel’s trick for turning his familiar into alternate form without touching her. It didn’t escape him, trapped as he was with too much leisure time with his thoughts, that it wouldn’t do him any good to have that trick as he was 1) so far into magic debt he was as bad off as House Phel, and 2) by refusing to embrace Seliah as his familiar, he wouldn’t be able to change her into alternate form regardless.

That’s what he got for attempting to be noble and do the right thing—he just fucked things up even worse. And didn’t that just figure?

Selly used her newly acquired breathing and meditative techniques to fight off the mind-fragmenting panic of being unable to move. Now is not the time to lose your shit, she told herself fiercely, wishing it was Jadren’s disembodied voice drawling the sardonic order instead. It was so much more effective, but he apparently only talked in her head when they weren’t in each other’s company. It also bothered her intensely that she couldn’t turn her head to check on him, but at least she had the bond to reassure her that he hadn’t fallen off Vale and been left behind.

Not that Vale would ever let that happen, but he wasn’t his own horse right now and couldn’t control himself any more than she could and—

This is not meditating, she told herself. This is spiraling into crazyland and it helps no one. Since clearing her mind and thinking of a bright light, as Nic had taught her, wasn’t coming even close to working, Selly concentrated instead on the bond between her and Jadren. Why had that loathsome wizard called her loosely bonded? Maybe because of the attenuation. She had to focus past all the muddying pain to get a sense of him within it. So far as she could tell, he was all right. Immobilized like she was, but there and conscious. And afraid, definitely worried for her.

Whatever Lady Hanneil wanted from them, it couldn’t be good. Especially since this group of wizards who must be from House Hanneil—and apparently she was on Hanneil lands?—had tried to kill Jadren. They would have succeeded, had he been killable. From what little Selly knew of Convocation politics, for House Hanneil to murder the scion of House El-Adrel would be a big problem. So, they couldn’t have known who he was. And they didn’t recognize her magic. Somehow this should work to her advantage. She could use their ignorance against them.

“Or,” said the impassive wizard who seemed to be the leader, moving into her line of sight, “your ignorance can work in our favor, little familiar. How is it that you don’t know Hanneil wizards can read thoughts as you’re longing to do with your broken wizard? The scion of House El-Adrel, eh? That makes things interesting.”

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