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She breathed a laugh. “You still don’t understand why that’s such a foolish question to ask me.”
“Iwantto understand,” he replied quietly, much as she’d asked him how old he’d been when the magic hit.
“Are we trading stories?”
“Seems like a good place to start.”
Fine, then. “I am a practical person, Lord Phel,” she replied, taking up the towel to pat the wounds dry, the way Inytta had showed her. “I am also my papa’s daughter. I had the opposite childhood of yours: Everyone expected me to have magic, and a lot of it. Papa, he…” Irritated with herself for faltering, she plowed on, forcing herself to be gentle as she applied Inytta’s healing ointment. “Everyone believed I’d be Papa’s heir. I had the magic potential, my scores so high that we all assumed I’d be a wizard, that I’d take over House Elal. Papa trained me for it, grooming me to take his place. I learned everything about the business, about managing our wizards, lands, and exports. Everything he could teach me shy of actually manipulating spirits and elementals. Those are wizard tricks that had to wait for my final maturation. When the scores finally verified I’d be a familiar, well…”
Eventually the searing grief of that day would fade. She hoped.
“How old were you?” Gabriel asked when she had to pause, for far too long.
Old enough to have begun to worry. Maybe part of her had known, even then. “Nineteen, nearly twenty.”
“How did you find out?”
Gabriel started to turn around when she didn’t immediately reply, and she clamped down on the tears wanting to rise up. “Don’t move,” she told him. “I’m putting on the bandages again.” With a sigh, she made herself go on. “It wasn’t so dramatic as yours. In fact, finding out you’re a familiar is pretty much a nonevent.”
“Tell me,” he said softly.
“See, at Convocation Academy, they train us all together, so we learn the fundamentals of magic from both perspectives, wizard and familiar. You’re only accepted to the school if the testing shows you have enough potential—and they test us regularly, because once we finish developing and manifest as either wizard or familiar, they move us immediately into specific classes for our way of working.”
“That’s why you know so much about wizardry.”
“Yes, I was so sure that I’d be a wizard.” She sighed for her youthful hubris, for all the dreams abruptly shattered. “I was the best at the school, top of my class. I know that sounds like I’m bragging, but—” She didn’t know how to express what she wanted him to understand.
“No, it doesn’t. You were confident. It had to be hard to lose that.”
Yes.“So, when the scores confirmed I’d never be a wizard, I moved into the wing for familiars. It wasn’t a disgrace, exactly, but…” It had been so lowering. Her wizard friends had dropped her, no longer interested in cultivating the acquaintance, especially given that they might have to master her someday. The other familiars welcomed her to their miserable company, but some had smugly enjoyed her downfall.
“Was your family upset?”
“It was a boarding school,” she explained, realizing he might not know. “If Papa was angry, I never knew about it, because he stopped coming to see me.”
Gabriel grunted in pain—she’d been winding the outer bandages too tight. Backing off, she loosened them and started again, more carefully.
“Didn’t your mother come to see you?”
She laughed. “No. Familiars don’t run around without their wizards. Maman came with Papa or not at all. I didn’t see them again until after my graduation when I returned to House Elal to begin the Betrothal Trials. By then, my younger brother and sister had both tested as wizards, my sister, Alise, in Elal magic. Papa is teaching her to take over the house.” She quashed the pang of bitter betrayal. It wasn’t Alise’s fault that she was all Nic could never be.
“Nic, I—”
“Why have you started calling me that?”
“Sorry. Your mother called you that, and it stuck in my head. I’ll stop.”
Nic looked at the back of his head, the silky fall of silver hair begging to be touched. It was nice to hear her nickname again. “You might as well use it,” she said impulsively. “Much shorter.”
“But doyoulike it?” He looked over his shoulder at her, not turning around.
“I do. Only the Convocation authorities call me Veronica. My family and friends all call me Nic. You should too.”
His solemn visage lit up as if she’d given him a gift. “And you can call me Gabriel.”
“Not Gabe?”
He gave a mock shudder. “Please, no. And no more ‘Lord Phel.’ Gabriel.”
