Jadren awoke to a splitting headache and such debilitating wooziness that he refused to open his eyes, instead willing himself back to sleep. That was always the best way to recover from his darling maman’s extreme methods for making him into something else: sleep as hard and as long as possible. The gambit also delayed additional experimentation, as she grew impatient if his strength gave out too soon.
Unless she decided to have him healed—a last resort for her, as having another wizard heal him wasn’t the point—he could carve out maybe a day of rest before…
Before…
His thoughts snagged and stuttered to a halt. This was all wrong. That was all in the past. He’d gotten free of House El-Adrel and his maman’s tender ministrations—as long as one used the word “free” loosely. Because his freedom had been conditionally granted, his parole a stint in House Phel where he was to—
“Shit!” he yelled, hurting his own head as he wrenched himself upright, looking wildly around for Seliah. No sign of her. It was full daylight. The little clearing was empty but for him, Seliah’s fire a pile of cold ash. He’d been lying in a coagulated pool of his own blood—utterly delightful—and had most likely been left for dead. Ha to that. If only they knew how hard he was to kill. Dark arts knew, his mother had tested those boundaries plenty.
Being alive had a serious downside in that he felt like he’d rather be dead. His mouth tasted like the inside of a desiccated corpse—don’t ask how he knew that—and the rest of him was practically a shriveled husk. Between blood loss—a lot of blood loss, judging by the dried blanket of the blackened stuff coating him—and lying unconscious in the heat of the day, he seriously needed water.
Maybe then his brain would kick into gear and he could face the fact that Seliah was gone. Taken by those fucking hunters, no doubt. Phel was going to eviscerate him. Although, he noticed as he tried to move, the hunters had come pretty close to doing that already.
First things first: hope that the hunters hadn’t taken that water flask. Steeling himself against the pain, he crawled into the box he’d made. It was hotter than House Hagith inside there, the air practically unbreathable. Maybe it was a good thing Seliah had lost her shit and refused to sleep in there. They might’ve suffocated. Or roasted. Probably the suffocating would’ve come first, though, and wow he needed some water if he wanted orderly thoughts again.
To his immense relief, their supplies remained where he’d stuffed them, at the back of the box. Barely any light made it inside—yet another flaw in his not-so-brilliant plan—and he cut himself on some sharp-edged weapon as he rummaged around. Swearing, he settled for dragging everything out into the daylight, belatedly reminded of how much an abdominal laceration hurt when you tried to move anything at all. Crawling backwards was illuminatingly agonizing.
Back outside, he sprawled amid the recovered treasures, casting about for the flask. The silver shone in the sun like a beacon, and Jadren imagined a House Euterpe choir sending up a hymn of joy. All praise to Gabriel Phel and his water wizardry! Unstopping the flask, he drank it dry, upended it, and drank again, his mental praise quickly turning to familiar grumbles over the poor mechanism. He supposed it was a good sign that he retained enough El-Adrel spirit to be annoyed by shitty engineering, even half-dead and with his vulnerable companion taken captive.
“They won’t kill her,” he muttered to himself. “She’s too valuable.”
Keeping that barely reassuring information firmly in mind, his thirst temporarily quenched, he bathed the wound crossing his body from shoulder to groin. “Got you stem to stern, as it were, boyo,” he muttered, his father’s voice coming unexpectedly to mind. As bonded familiar to Lady El-Adrel, Jadren’s father hadn’t been able to interfere with any of her experiments on their son, but he’d done what he could, begging permission to tend Jadren, comforting him within the boundaries allowed him. Jadren had never understood how his father maintained such a jaunty outlook, but he admired it. And had gotten so he counterfeited the outward personality pretty well.
His wound nominally surface clean and seeming to be knitting fairly well—at least, he felt a reasonable level of confidence that his entrails wouldn’t actually fall out if he moved too suddenly—he used his machete to slice a blanket into bandages to wrap around his middle. It was an uncomfortably hot solution, but… better than losing said entrails. “Fat lot of good you did me,” he griped at the machete as he worked.
“A weapon is only as good as its wielder,” the machete replied in Gabriel Phel’s voice. Or maybe it was Han’s, the familiar who’d been teaching him weapons work. Either way, that the machete was speaking to him at all was a bad sign. “It’s not my fault you just stood there and let that hunter slice you open.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he replied, tossing it down. “Be that way.” Not exactly a brilliant retort, but it was all he had. “At least I don’t have to wait around for someone to wield me. Who’s just sitting there now, huh?”
The machete didn’t reply.
Moving laboriously, he sorted through the supplies. There was no doubt he’d have to go after Seliah. The other option was to make his way back to House Phel to face his liege lord’s fury and disappointment. Never let it be known that the prospect of disappointing the guy was what bothered him most.
Jadren hadn’t wanted to respect, much less like, Gabriel Phel. The provincial farm boy turned rogue wizard and Convocation iconoclast should’ve been a bumbling rube, easy to disdain. Jadren had fully expected to find that. It was unfair that the man turned out to be honorable, dazzlingly powerful, and foolishly kind enough to treat Jadren like a human being.
And Nic… Well, the reputation of House Elal spoke for itself, plus all the gossip Jadren had heard about Lady Veronica Elal hadn’t prepared him to meet anyone but a viper in an expensive gown. Not a familiar who shared her magic generously with him, out of loyalty to her new house, as obviously distasteful to her as it had been to open herself to him that way.
The ruminations got him through the painful processes of triaging necessities. Though he was healing, the process would be slow and draining. He was lucky he’d been topped off with Seliah’s magic when he was mortally wounded or he might not be in even this good of shape. Still, he wouldn’t be able to carry much, especially if he hoped to move fast enough to catch up with Seliah and her captors. Who was he kidding? They would take her back to House Sammael and they had a massive head start. He wasn’t catching up with anyone. But he could get there as quickly as possible. Settling on the bare minimum of supplies, he stuffed everything else back in the box and used a precious bit of magic to ward it. There—at least the thing had come in useful in the end.
Seliah had been forced to leave her bow and quiver behind, so he carried that for her, since she’d want it for after he liberated her. The only other weapon he took was his machete, as they’d made up with each other in the interim. “I didn’t mean it, buddy,” he told it. “It’s just that you can be pretty cutting sometimes, you know?” He laughed at his own joke, though the machete seemed unamused. He buckled it on anyway and set to trudging back in the direction Seliah and he had already come.
Maybe he had managed to die and his eternal punishment was walking up and down the length of this forsaken road in the oppressive forests of Sammael. Seemed about right, given the nature of his many sins.
The bright sun rising behind Jadren to cast rosy light against craggy House Sammael only served to highlight what a grim monstrosity the place truly was. It stank of cruelty and despair, reminding him vividly of home. The El-Adrel ancestors, however, had at least made an attempt to hide the more phantasmagoric aspects of the house. In fact, House El-Adrel looked quite innocent and shiny from the outside, with its copper roofs and clockwork drawbridges. It was the ever-shifting landscape of an interior that revealed the diabolical nature of the house of his birth.
Typical of House Sammael that they had to plaster their monstrosity on the surface, the level of horror almost ostentatious. They took their branding as the punishers of the Convocation much too seriously. The house oozed malevolence, fang-like towers rising from a rugged defile. Who built an enormous manse on a peak with slopes so steep the structure looked liable to pitch into the abyss below at any moment? Oh, wait, he knew the answer to that one: the Sammaels. Crazed, every last one of them.
Of course, after walking the remainder of the previous day and all night, resting only when he found himself suddenly faceplanted in the road—and still delirious from fever, blood loss, and exhaustion—his own rationality was also in question. Even more so than usual. With a sigh, he glanced around at the undisturbed remains of the hunters he and Seliah had defeated. Wishing he could fly across that valley, which was at least blessedly empty now of a river of attacking hunters, he continued trudging down the road that led to the house.
Why yes, he did intend to walk up, knock on the front door, and introduce himself. Phel had been so suspicious of that suggestion, but Jadren stood by the approach as well within Convocation etiquette. Also, he couldn’t simply pluck Seliah out of the tower with his ambiguous, unassisted wizardry. However, if he’d learned nothing else from his devious maman, Jadren could wage a polite war of negotiation.
He knocked on those doors a few hours later, having passed into the phase of exhaustion where his head felt like it floated an arm’s length above his shoulders. It was a restful sensation, in truth, and a welcome counterpoint to his boulder-heavy feet, swollen inside the boots. A lightning bolt of searing agony connected his top and bottom, the skin and muscle of his lacerated midsection repeatedly tearing open and attempting to knit again. Just like old times.
He knocked again, using the gruesome iron knocker that was shaped like a coiled whip. Sure it was the House Sammael symbol, but arrogantly over the top of them to make visitors use the thing to request entry. Especially when the molded braids turned out to be sharp enough to sting. Just charming in every way, the Sammaels.
At last the door creaked open—literally creaked with a squealing of hinges that had to be deliberately unoiled, more theatrics—and a large man filled the partial opening. With wizard-black eyes and an intimidating bulk, the guy must be a Sammael minion who did double duty as guard and gatekeeper. Probably possessed some kind of physical magic like crushing bones or paralyzing muscles. Jadren gave him a jaunty grin.
“Hi. Wizard Jadren El-Adrel. Is Lord Igino Sammael at home to visitors?” He was betting Sergio had made himself scarce. Besides, why not go directly to the top? It would be enlightening to discover if Igino Sammael was aware of his son’s recent escapades.
