“You are.”He kissed her mouth, lavishly this time, his lips parting to welcome her in.“I shouldn’t have teased you.”
“It’s all right.”She smiled through the kiss, the passion rising between and around them like the steam growing increasingly dense as the colder air descended.“It’s probably good for me.Keep me humble.”
“I don’t think you need to be kept humble,” he argued softly, raining little kisses over her face.“My powerful wizard love.”
“You’re a powerful wizard, too,” she retorted, but laughing.
He grimaced playfully.“Books and nonsense.I’m fine with that.”Sobering, he said, “I want to tell you something first though.”
That sounded awfully serious.“Anything.”
“Bonding with a familiar—you were saying earlier about the intimacy of that connection, how you thought some wizard–familiar pairs wouldn’t want to risk losing that bond.”
She nodded, knowing where he was going with this.“I don’t—”
“Let me say this first,” he interrupted firmly.She loved that about him, too, for all his sweetness and gentle handling of her, he knew when to be firm.She wouldn’t be able to have a life with him knowing she could push him around.She nodded, made herself wait.
“If you ever want to bond with a familiar,” he continued, “I want you to do so without reservation or guilt, even if you think the intimacy of that connection might interfere with or supersede what we have.”
“I don’t want—”
“Promise me.”He was dead serious.“I can’t be with you thinking that I’ve stopped you from having that kind of connection, that access to a familiar’s magic.”
“It might be moot anyway,” she argued.“If we decode Anciela’s data and—”
“If,” he said with grave significance, “we are able to decode it after months or years of study, or ever.There’s a distinct possibility that we never will find the key, and then—even if we do and are able to decode her findings—we might never be able to apply them.Her method simply might not work, or might not work on everyone, or we might not sway the powers of the Convocation to allow her methods to be applied.The fact of the matter is that our current paradigm might persist for a long time, possibly for our lifetimes, and that means you most likely having to face your father again in a duel.”
A duel… with her father?She couldn’t win that.
“No, I want you to listen to me right now,” Cillian said when she opened her mouth.“I wasn’t any help to you in that fight back there, which nearly killed me.Even if I’d convinced you to take my magic, I couldn’t have given you the level of power a good familiar could.I can’t live with myself knowing I’m holding you back.Even if you are forced to fight and defeat your father and become Lady Elal, you might—no, undoubtedlywill—have to use your wizardry to protect your house and people, and I want you to have the best possible resources to do that.That very possibly will include bonding a familiar, maybe very soon.”
She waited a beat.“Are you finished?”
He considered.“Yes, I think so—though I reserve the right to add arguments at any time.”
She laughed through her exasperation.“We’ve been through this.I had an opportunity to bond any of the familiars my father presented to me.”All of whom had looked like Cillian, which had been no accident.Just a sign of how her father regarded other human beings, as basically interchangeable.“And I didn’t want any of them.”
Cillian simply stared her down.“That’s not what I’m saying and you know it.I want you to promise me this.”
“It might not come to that.”
“If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.But if it does, I will have this promise from you.”
“Or what?”she demanded, half-laughing.He wouldn’t leave her.He’d already promised never to separate from her again.
“Just promise me, Alise.I haven’t asked much else of you, but I’m asking for this.A token of your love for me, if you will.”
“I don’t like this.”She really didn’t, and she was tempted to dig in on the subject, to refuse to consider this—especially when the thought of being this intimate with anyone but him felt repellent—but he was right that he didn’t ask for much from her.“But I promise to give the possibility fair consideration.”
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously.“That’s not a promise todoit.”
“I can’t possibly promise to do something in the future, not knowing what those circumstances will be,” she countered, justifying to herself that she wasn’t really splitting hairs.This was a perfectly fair argument.“I won’t rule out the possibility, but I’m not promising to bond a familiar regardless of extenuating circumstances, no matter what.”
“You’re so stubborn.”
“Guilty, but you love me anyway.”
Cillian looked like he wanted to argue further, but finally sighed, expression set in lines of resignation.“Yes, I do.And I suppose that’s the best promise I’m going to be able to extract from you.”
