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Nic closed her eyes briefly in pained acknowledgment. “Now I’m jumping out of my skin atlunch,” she muttered.
Gabriel smiled at her caustic tone and went to the door, keeping his sword out anyway, just in case.
But it was only lunch, and the decidedly nonmagical boy staggered under the weight of the tray as he carried it to the table. Gabriel took the opportunity to check the hallway. It was quiet, an inn empty of guests at midday. No sign of Jan or poor Daniel—nor any other magic he detected, beyond the many conveniences. Passing the boy a coin for his trouble as he exited, Gabriel closed and locked the door again.
Nic was already arranging the plates, humming happily at the prospect of hot food. No one would guess she’d been rigid with fear only moments before. She possessed an admirably resilient character. She’d retrieved his half-full wineglass, setting it on the table and topping it off, so he sat at that place.
“I hope you like your steak rare,” she said, neatly slicing the substantial cut of meat and giving him the larger portion. “I do, and you weren’t here for the ordering.”
“That’s fine,” he said, though he preferred his meat thoroughly dead and not still bleeding. She added a generous portion of roasted vegetables, a hunk of fresh bread oozing with butter, and fragrant mashed potatoes. Glancing up at him, she raised a brow. “Gravy?”
“Yes, please.”
She poured, paused, and looked at him expectantly. “More?”
“Leave some for yourself.”
“There’s plenty, and we can always send for extra. Places like this are generous with the stuff.” She doused the potatoes with gravy and brought his plate around to set it before him.
“You don’t have to wait on me,” he said, bracing for her slicing reply.
But she paused. To his utter shock, she lifted a hand and brushed his hair back, trailing her fingers down his cheek. “I know,” she said quietly. “Maybe that’s why I don’t mind doing it.”
She returned to her side of the table and prepared her own plate. Noting that he’d waited for her, she scooped up a bite of potatoes—hers as liberally doused with gravy as his—and popped it into her mouth. Making a sound of ecstasy, she wriggled in her chair, face suffused with almost erotic pleasure. “They make them with garlic and real cream here,” she said when she’d swallowed, pointing her utensil at him. “Try it. It’s best piping hot.”
Deciding not to mention he’d been enjoying watchinghereat, he took a bite—and had to agree. “This is amazing.” He regarded his loaded plate, and the remaining food, with some dismay. “Did you say you ordered dinner, too?”
“Dinner will be lighter,” she informed him, green eyes sparkling as she sipped her wine. “You needed a heavy meal to replenish your magic. Then hot bath, long nap, a light meal, and a full night of sleep. You should be feeling refreshed in the morning.”
“Did you learn that in your Care and Feeding of Wizards class?” he asked.
She cocked her head. “You laugh, but familiars are taught exactly that. It’s part of our job.”
He sobered. “What about the care and feeding of familiars?”
“We learn to take care of ourselves,” she replied, dropping her gaze and paying a great deal of attention to cutting a bite of her steak.
“Why can’t it be mutual?” he persisted.
She gave him that hard stare, like she figured him for crazy or an idiot or both. “The wizard–familiar relationship is codified the way it is for very good reasons. You’d do better to stop fighting the world and work within it. If you want to restore House Phel, then you can’t be at war with the Convocation. You need to resign yourself to the power dynamic of our relationship. I have.”
“Have you, though?” he asked with soft insistence. He’d begun to see through her shifting moods and masks of apparent poise. Jan had treated her with contempt, and that had hurt Nic as much as anything.Familiars have no rank, kitten, he’d jeered at her, an obvious hit to her pride, the humiliation clear in her face. She loathed being powerless, no matter what arguments she managed to force through her lips. He understood because he’d hate it, too.
“I don’t want you to take me back to House Elal, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, ducking the actual question. “Papa would punish me—and punish Maman—and then he’d be forced to turn me over to the Convocation for more discipline and retraining and…” Her voice broke a little, but she covered it quickly with a flash of bared teeth and a swallow of wine. She shrugged, setting her glass down. “Remember that I’m practical. If I can’t be free—which was clearly an empty-headed fantasy to begin with—then I’d rather take my chances with you in the swamps of Meresin. Which is, by the way, why you need to bond me.”
“Explain that part,” he said, seizing on it as the easiest to grapple. “I understood that once the proctor determined that you carried my child, then you… I—that is, we…”
She regarded him with clear amusement. “That I belong to you. It’s all right to say the words. That’s an objective reality. Also,” she continued when he opened his mouth to argue, “while it’s true that I belong to you now in the eyes of the Convocation, regardless of all else, not everyone obeys Convocation law. There are plenty of landless or houseless wizards not in the Convocation. Maybe they’re from an exiled branch of the family, or they could be a spontaneous reappearance of high-potential wizardry from a happy recombination of old, forgotten bloodlines.” She toasted him with her glass. “The ambitious among them sometimes attempt to claim an unbonded familiar. Once a familiar is bonded to a wizard, they belong to them until the wizard’s death. A good thing, too, as otherwise wizards would be attempting to steal each other’s familiars all the time.”
Or familiars would be free to leave a wizard that abused them for a happier partnership, Gabriel reflected. “That’s what your Jan assumed—that I was a rogue who’d abducted you.”
“He’s not my Jan, but yes. Andyourun the risk of someone else grabbing me and doing exactly that unless you bond me.”
“You weren’t worried about that in Wartson,” he pointed out.
“I was sent—I went there because there aren’t wizards in Wartson. If no one could sense what I am, I had a chance of living like any ordinary person.”
“Aren’t there spontaneous reappearances of high-potential familiars, too, if that happens with wizards?”
