AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Once the well-maintained road—kept dry and clear of snow and ice by more fire elementals bonded during its construction—finished winding down from the foothills, it ran arrow-straight to the gates of House Elal. Now that they were on a level with its base, the castle loomed with majestic splendor, more fortress than home from this angle.
Gabriel began to encounter other travelers, too. Farmers, merchants, and craftspeople—all bundled in wool and furs against the chilly weather—passed by, some with smaller handcarts, others with wagons propelled by air elementals. The people looked well-fed, well-clothed, and reasonably happy, though they gazed at Gabriel with suspicion, eyeing the house crest on his shoulder in puzzlement. A prosperous people, but not so complacent that they didn’t notice an armed stranger in their midst—and a foreign wizard at that.
Gabriel nodded in greeting, otherwise ignoring their scrutiny. He’d like to say he was inured to the stares, but one didn’t come to wizardry as he had—relatively late in life and with cataclysmic suddenness—without being keenly aware of how people reacted to the sight of him now.
Needing to distract himself, he pulled out the miniature of Lady Veronica Elal and studied it, for the one-millionth time, probably, since he’d received it in the Convocation packet announcing her Betrothal Trials. Her image captivated him, though she was no great beauty, despite the painter no doubt flattering her as much as possible. She had the high Elal forehead and strongly arched nose. Her brows, black as a raven’s wing and flattened with a hint of impatience, framed lushly lashed eyes the artist had no doubt intended to look soft and appealing. The green of them had been perhaps difficult to capture, for they looked far too hard—almost unnatural—with nothing inviting about them. Lady Veronica’s lips had been fashioned into a pretty bow shape, shaded a deep red. Not prim, however, her lips were lush—and also seemed to be holding back a slicing remark. Her pointed chin tilted with the arrogance he’d expect of House Elal, but the picture overall evoked something else. She struck him as both sad and angry. Frustrated, perhaps, almost to the point of despair.
That, more than anything else, appealed to him about her. He understood frustrated ambition, and the despair that followed close behind. The other available familiars had been presented as handsome and pretty and sweetly serene—obediently invisible like Tyrna’s familiar, Feny—and without any spark that interested him. Nothing that made him want to spend his life bonded to them.
Maybe he imagined what he wanted to see in Lady Veronica. After all, how much could one read into a portrait intended as an advertisement of goods? The painting served primarily to confirm the familiar being offered. As the Convocation packet made clear by highlighting Lady Veronica’s magical potential scores, her value as a familiar and for the children she could breed were the grand prizes. The miniature had been clearly labeled as assurance that the chosen wizards would indeed be bedding the woman who accompanied the scorecard. Certified and guaranteed by the Convocation.
Yes, all so very cold-blooded, but Gabriel had been assured that the Betrothal Trials were voluntary, so Lady Veronica must be hoping to find a good wizard partner and husband.
The sense that he and Lady Veronica might at least find some common ground had been the final spur that decided him to try for her. Yes, her magical potential scores were desirable, too much so, because that meant he was reaching high. That she was of House Elal, with an expensive Convocation Academy education, also meant she could help him navigate that legal, professional, and social hierarchy.
When he succeeded in impregnating her—which he would, thanks to the spell he’d found—and they married… Well, it wouldn’t be a love match like his own parents had. Perhaps, though, he and Lady Veronica had enough in common that they could find a way to being friends.
Regardless, some wizard would have Lady Veronica for their familiar. And none of them could possibly need her more than Gabriel did. It might as well be him, especially since the future of House Phel depended on it.
Pocketing the miniature, he set his sights on House Elal and firmed his resolve.
He would be the one.
~2~
Skirts swirling abouther ankles, Lady Veronica Elal paced restlessly to the heavy velvet curtains that covered the barred windows of her round tower room, and slipped behind them. Shivering in the chill trapped there, she hooked her fingers into the slats of the shutters anyway, ignoring the cold bite of the metal. It was a ridiculous habit she’d developed over the last months of seclusion, as if she could make the spaces between the rigid slats wider, so she could glimpse just a bit more of the outside world.
The gray sky had dimmed to early evening. It would soon be full dark, and Lord Phel would invade her small territory. She’d watched him cross the bridge across the moat a while ago, but she hadn’t been able to make out much from the tower’s height except that both his hair and his horse’s coat looked totally white—and that could’ve been the dusting of snow.
Now they must both wait for sunset, as decreed by Convocation law, for the night’s trial to begin. The rose-scented unguent felt slick on her vulva, ready to ease Lord Phel’s assault of her womb. She’d learned that lesson in preparation from her first wizard suitor, Lord Sammael.
As her mother had advised, Nic had been prepared with wine, food, and entertaining topics of conversation.Your eventual marriage and working relationship with your wizard master will be much more pleasant if you can start out on congenial footing, Maman had said.If you want to have influence over your wizard master, then you will find sweetness gets you much further than sarcastic words and dour moods.
The Convocation ran on elegant manners, so Nic had expected the night with Sammael to be civil and courtly. She wasn’t so silly as to hope for romance, even though she and the other students at Convocation Academy had swooned over the tale of the dashing wizard Sylus and his beautiful familiar Lyndella. When Lyndella had been forced by her greedy family into marrying Sylus, she’d been reluctant, even afraid. But she and Sylus had fallen in love, the magical Fascination between wizard and familiar forming a bond that none of their enemies could break, despite the pair’s many epic adventures and trials.
The Convocation teachers had been far more practical on the matter, explaining in detail that the Fascination some familiars claimed to feel for their wizard masters had never been adequately proven, despite intensive experimentation. The Convocation paired wizards and familiars according to their magical potential scores, ensuring their compatibility, and the Betrothal Trials guaranteed their combined fertility. The ritual bonding sealed the familiar to their wizard, not love.
Now that Nic had endured the attentions of several suitors, she was grateful that she didn’t feel even a glimmer of that mythical Fascination for the wizards who applied for her. Sammael had barely bothered with a hello. He’d simply bent her over the arm of the big chair by the fire, tossed up her skirts, and entered her. They’d never even reached the bed, and the various oils and cremes arrayed there to help them along.
Nic hadn’t told Maman the unpleasant details of that encounter. Her mother had enough to worry about without fretting over some girlish tears and a bit of chafing. Still, it hadhurt. And, worse, it had been humiliating, leaving Nic feeling soiled in a way that wouldn’t be cleansed, no matter how much she coaxed the fire elementals to boil the wash water ever hotter.
She’d hated that she’d shed tears over Sammael’s treatment of her. It didn’t do for a daughter of the House of Elal to be weepy. With the shedding of those tears, though, she released the hurt and shame—and resolved to learn from the experience. She couldn’t change her fate. Much as Nic had been certain she’d manifest as a wizard, that she’d follow in her father’s footsteps to become head of House Elal someday, she was doomed to be a familiar. And a familiar didn’t have many choices in life. So she’d wield those few choices to the best of her ability.
If Sammael’s seed had taken, Nic would’ve had to marry him and become his familiar. Those were the Betrothal Trials rules, and she’d agreed to them—because the Trials at least gave her the power of summary dismissal. As long as she accepted at least twelve of the Convocation’s list of compatible wizards—enough for a year of trials—then she could eliminate the rest at will.
At least until the year was up. If she didn’t quicken by then, she’d have to face some of the more sordid possibilities. But that was a worry for the future. The current list was as good as she and Maman could get it.
With Maman’s canny insight as Lady Elal, Nic had carefully reviewed the list of potential suitors and removed any wizard she wouldn’t be able to handle, and then further culled the list of suitors to include only those from houses where Nic could rise to power. According to Maman, a clever familiar could subtly manipulate her wizard master to her liking. Also, though Nic might be only a familiar, she was forever and always the eldest child of the most powerful house in the Convocation. Lord Sammael was his house’s heir apparent, so Nic would’ve been on track to be Lady Sammael.
Odious though the man might be, she would’ve found a way to control Sammael—and perhaps help tilt his descent to the grave with a bit more of a downward slant. An early widowhood was about the only path to freedom for a bonded familiar. If, that was, Nic could avoid being acquired by her husband’s heir, but she’d navigate those waters when she reached them. Once she was married and on track to be lady of a house, preferably a High House, she could begin to consolidate power of her own. It was her best choice of a crop of terrible ones.
Sammael had been… not cruel, exactly. But he also hadn’t been kind or gentle, nor had he seemed much interested in the person end of her body. He’d also been her first time with a man—not that she’d been unprepared. Maman had gone through eight months of Betrothal Trials until Nic’s papa impregnated her and she came to House Elal. She’d given Nic the tools and ointments to stretch her woman’s passage enough so her first time wouldn’t be painful—not physically, anyway—and the oils to ensure that Sammael’s entry would be sufficiently eased.
No amount of preparation, however, could have eased the casually arrogant way he seemed to not hear anything Nic said, before he suggested—ordered, really, in that imperious way of a wizard addressing a familiar—that she not speak at all.I know you’re an innocent, he’d said,but no one cares what a familiar has tosay. If I want intelligent conversation, I’ll talk to another wizard.
So much for Maman’s advice to engage her suitors in conversation.
Thus, Nic had been relieved when the Convocation proctor and her oracle head pronounced her not with child after Sammael. Though Nic hadn’t much liked suitors two and three, Lords Tadkiel and Ratsiel, either, she’d still been a bit disappointed their seed hadn’t taken. Either wizard would’ve been relatively easy to manipulate. Also, she didn’t want to endure the Betrothal Trials month after month. If she didn’t quicken after a year of this, things got considerably more dire. Which was saying something.
