~1~
One outcome ofAlise’s enforced apprenticeship with her unarguably evil wizard father: she’d stored up an enormous amount of magic.Which was at least one positive as they’d need every drop of wizardry she could muster to get them across the Elal border and to a level of safety.Cillian could and would provide her with more magic, if she needed it, as unorthodox as it was for wizards to share magic.But she didn’t like needing it.Or taking it from someone who already gave to her so unstintingly, in every way.
Whether any of it would be enough to escape her father’s vengeful pursuit was the next problem to deal with.All she could think about at the moment was getting out of Elal, house and land of her birth, more recently her prison.
“Incoming,” Cillian said quietly, as if noting a change in the weather and not the fifth wave of spirit attackers.The librarian-wizard, for all that he liked to self-deprecatingly describe himself as “not ever hero material,” possessed an enviable ability to remain calm under the most dire circumstances.Alise worried at times about Cillian’s unshakeable and apparently infinite faith in her abilities.She wished she felt the same.Instead she dreaded the day she’d fail to the ultimate test to protect him, on top of all the ways she’d failed him already.Today could be that day.
Shaking off the fatalistic mood—and incipient panic—and casting her wizard-senses in the direction Cillian pointed, she wrapped mental arms around the barrage of fire elementals about to rain down upon their rollicking carriage.She untethered the creatures with swift ease—she was getting scarily good at this trick—cutting their ties to the wizards that sent them, and the newly feral creatures returned to the wild in burning, hooting streaks of fire.The ability frightened her because of how easily she could free more than elementals.She could break the bonds between wizard and familiar, ruin lives and fortunes.Upend the very foundation of the Convocation and send their society into chaos.She didn’t have Cillian’s faith in her wisdom to use that power wisely.
“Hairpin turn,” Cillian advised in the same calm voice, but bracing himself with both arms against the walls of the antique House Harahel carriage that threatened to vibrate apart—or fling them into a defile if they took one of those turns too fast.Possibly both at once.
Alise cursed under her breath and swiftly diverted her attention to keep either or both of those things from happening.
Dealing with the unceasing bombardment would be enough to challenge any wizard.At the moment, however, she was also pouring prodigious amounts of magic into guiding the air elemental powering their carriage through the snaking canyon leading to the last narrow pass through the Knifeblade Mountains before they’d reach the barrier-border around Elal.Alise had tampered with the programmed settings of the tamed elemental, removing the restrictions placed on it by Elal production wizards.With her inherited ability to magically control non-corporeal entities, she could make the elemental faster and more powerful.With her own hard-won skills she could guide the less-than-intelligent being through the sharp corners and switchbacks of the canyon.Those holiday sleigh tournaments back at Convocation Academy had come in useful for more than garnering the brittle admiration of her classmates.
But very likely, none of her skills would be enough to prevent her father from recapturing her.And Cillian would face an even worse fate.
Though they hadn’t glimpsed their pursuers, Alise knew they were being chased as well as being magically attacked.Lord Elal had certainly sent some of his minions in pursuit in order to physically drag her back to House Elal.The feel of their magic and rage drew ever closer, scraping against her nerves.That was her father’s ultimate aim, to retrieve her and use extortion to enslave her to his plans again.Cillian had risked everything to rescue her, most especially from her own mistakes and self-delusion.If they were taken, her father would have the ultimate piece of leverage to use against her.He would have Cillian: the person who meant more to her than anyone in the world.
She’d already handed herself over once in place of her niece, Bria, to save the infant from the claws of the newborn’s rapacious grandfather.Thanks to Cillian’s courage and wit, Alise had escaped her luxurious prison—and the indoctrination that had her believing in so many terribly wrong things.But if they were recaptured, her father would have no use for Cillian and plenty of rage for how he’d underestimated the librarian who’d tricked him into an embarrassing bout of illness and spirited his daughter away.
Lord Elal wouldn’t even care about avoiding a war with House Harahel, the house of Cillian’s birth and—not incidentally—led by Cillian’s grandmother, Lady Órlaith Harahel.They were a high house, yes, with rank, but they also consisted of wizards devoted to archives and scholarly pursuits.Piers Elal wouldn’t hesitate to burn them to the ground and probably no one in the Convocation would more than whisper an objection, and even then, it would be too late to save any of them.Especially Cillian, who would die first and painfully.Probably while her father made her watch.
Her sister and brother-in-law could protect Niece Bria, but Cillian had only Alise to stand between him and a terrible death.
If she possessed the power, skill, and craftiness to fight her father and his wizard minions.
The carriage wheel on one side of the rocky road went off the edge as they careened around the hairpin turn.Looking an unusual shade of pale green, Cillian coughed a little, maybe swallowing against an uneasy stomach.“Maybe not quite so fast?”
“They’re catching up to us,” she explained tersely.“We have to go faster, not slow down or we’re done for.”
“How far to the border?”He looked out the window, then with obvious longing at one of the atlases he’d brought with him from the comprehensive House Harahel library, but which had long since fallen to the floor of the carriage, sliding around with several others, making him wince every time they bumped into something.Cillian worried about the state of his books only slightly less than the danger presented by Lord Elal.No doubt if Alise weren’t in jeopardy, the equation would tip in the other direction.
Alise split out a sliver of her attention to assess the distance to the barrier.It seemed that boundary around Elal lands and magic had been a tangible part of her awareness all her life.She’d become so accustomed to its presence in the back of her mind that it was more of an effort tostopignoring the vast looming magic of it.Built by ancient Elal ancestors originally around a much smaller territory—solely House Elal itself, back in the day—the magic of the barrier had been interwoven with the border of Elal territory and grew along with the land the family claimed, expanding ever outward in an uneven circle.The power of the barrier had been added to with each generation, making it unique in the Convocation.
That is, most high houses guarded their borders to greater or lesser extents, but no one matched what Elal had in place.Unless tattooed as a resident with a special glyph—or possessing enough Elal blood—no one could cross the border going in or coming out without a House Elal wizard minion altering the barrier to allow it.The area encompassed by the Elal border-barrier exceeded that of any other high house in the Convocation, one reason for House Elal’s enormous power and influence.Fortunately, Alise possessed more than enough ability to get Cillian through the border.
Ifthey could get there before the minions stopped them.
“Only a few more minutes,” she answered tersely, goading the air elemental to accelerate even more as they came out of the tight curve.
“Watch out for the—” Cillian broke off on a yelp as they crashed over a rock that had fallen into the road.
No, not a rock that had happened to fall, Alise realized as another thumped on the roof of the thankfully covered carriage, followed by a rain of more.
“Rockslide?”Cillian asked, trying to get a look out the window.“Ow,” he remarked, rubbing his face where a bit of gravel had hit him.
“Watch it!”Frazzled, Alise frowned at the blood trickling down Cillian’s face from the impact, smeared by his rubbing at it.“Earth elementals lobbing rocks now.Keep your faceinside.”
“Good advice,” he retorted drily.
“Sorry.I just like your face.”
“I like your face, too.”
Like a storm beginning with a few drops, then increasing, rocks hailed upon them, battering the roof and making the carriage wheels bounce with bone-jarring abruptness as they encountered more rocks on the road.Soon the aged contraption would just fall apart, dumping them out and stranding them to be retrieved like so much discarded trash.She was frankly surprised the antique had lasted this long.She needed to stop this attack at the source or they’d be battered to bits in moments.
“Where are you little fuckers?”she muttered, mentally searching for the bonds tethering the earth elementals.
