“Remember, poppet,” he said as they reached the stairs to the dais, “familiars should be seen and not heard. Eat, drink, keep your mouth shut otherwise.”
She bristled and he smiled coolly, as if pleased to have annoyed her. He led her to a chair beside his mother—not a seating arrangement that boded well for eating anything, hungry as she was. The food she’d gobbled in the carriage had been ages ago and the wine she’d drunk with Fyrdo on an empty stomach burbled with swimming discomfort.
The essence of gallantry, Jadren held the chair for her and helped her ease the heavy metal thing closer to the table. Again her imagination confused her, because the brush of his fingers over her shoulder felt like a caress, affectionate and encouraging. But when he took the chair beside her, his expression remained sardonically amused at her expense and he turned his back immediately, exchanging wry observations with a wizard on his other side, ignoring her thoroughly. Lady El-Adrel did likewise, so Selly perched like a forgotten novel between two uncaring bookends.
At least the food wasn’t metal. Determined to eat, she helped herself to a basket of bread, slathering butter and jam on a flaky popover that seemed to melt in her mouth, making her nearly groan in delight. The food blessedly helped settle her stomach. She prepared another to savor more slowly and dug into the pile of greens before her—surprisingly tasty and fresh, though seasoned with unfamiliar spices and oils—and studied the room.
The familiars were easy to pick out as the people who weren’t talking, steadily eating with quiet attitudes that weren’t exactly head-down and meek, but that allowed attention to slide away from them. She spotted some wizards eating in taciturn silence, their black eyes discernible even from a distance, their proud demeanor proclaiming their status in other ways.
There were other people, too, ones who were neither wizards nor familiars, some eating and some serving. All in all, hundreds of people filled the tables and streamed in and out of doorways. Maybe even a thousand or more. Certainly more people than she’d ever seen in one place in her life. She’d take a marsh crowded with blood-sucking insects over this and she found herself gazing up at the darkening sky showing through the glass above the endlessly orbiting spheres. Pillars and balconies ringed the room below that. She could climb up there easily enough, but would there be a way to exit to the outside?
At House Phel, when she’d been still recuperating physically and confined to the infirmary, she’d gotten in the habit of haunting the seat under the big bay windows. The glass wizard, Sage, and her familiar, Quinn, had glassed in the arches, and wizards Wolfgang and Dahlia had collaborated to make her a cozy nest of pads and pillows, so Selly could gaze out at the lawn sloping to the river. Moths and flies got trapped inside sometimes, hurling their bodies with mindless persistence against the glass, incapable of comprehending why they couldn’t get through.
One of the infirmary workers, a magicless boy from one of the outlying farms, had the job of swatting the bugs. Selly would find the crushed, withered shells of the ones that fell through the cracks in the pillows, sorry for their little lives lost. She began trying to herd others outside, to spare them that sad fate, but there were always more.
She’d be like that, perhaps, if she tried the climb: trapped against the curving glass dome, flailing to escape and unable to understand why she couldn’t. The image made her shudder, but would that be worse than this meekly accepting the threat of Lady El-Adrel’s displeasure? Better to die trying than like a spineless, witless insect.
Jadren’s hand settled on her leg under the table and, in her startlement, she flinched from the touch. His fingers tightened and she glanced at him. He lolled indolently in his own big chair, wine goblet in the other hand, which he waved as he told some story to the other wizard. He showed zero sign of being aware of her existence, much less that his hand rested so intimately on her thigh. Now that she’d frozen under his warning grip—though she didn’t know how he could have such an instant effect on her, nor how he’d known what she was thinking—his fingers relaxed and he petted her, smoothing over the silk draping thinly over her skin. Lulling her to accept her captivity. Threatening her with being crushed, if she didn’t. A husk crumbling away in the crevices of this house.
“Eat,” Jadren ordered quietly without looking at her.
She realized she’d been simply staring at her plate, now empty of the greens. He set a small bowl on top of it, filled with ripely red raspberries on a bed of cream. Her gaze flew to his intent one. “Raspberries?”
“You like them,” he reminded her. “Your favorite. Enjoy what you can, while you can. That’s my best advice.”
Bemused that he’d remembered her chance remark, she ate the raspberries, which were indeed delicious, bright with sunshine, a perfect balance of sweet and tart, the cream providing a lush background flavor.
Still hungry, when a servant replaced the empty bowl of berries with another course, Selly dug into that, the airy pastry encasing a succulent fish. A rich sauce poured out when she cut through the crust, and she ate with enthusiasm, quite sure she’d never tasted anything so delicious in her entire life. She was mopping up the last of the sauce with yet another popover, when Lady El-Adrel shifted in her chair, turning her full attention on Selly.
“So, little Phel familiar, how much training do you have?” she asked, sending Selly rigid with alarm. Jadren’s hand which had never ceased its soothing slide while she ate, gradually tightened. More warnings without context or useful advice. “Answer me,” the wizard woman prompted. “Though your silent obedience does you credit.”
On the other side of Lady El-Adrel, Fyrdo leaned forward just enough to be in view, giving Selly an encouraging smile. The easygoing expression on the face so like and unlike Jadren’s harder one still disconcerted her.
“All I know about being a familiar, I learned from Jadren, Lady El-Adrel,” Selly said, choosing her words carefully. It was mostly true.
“How enterprising of my apathetic son.”
Jadren turned at that. “My ears are burning,” he said in a jaunty tone, acting as if he hadn’t been listening to every word before that. Still elegantly relaxed, he held up his goblet to a server to be refilled. In the same movement, he released his grip on Selly’s thigh—leaving a cooling spot that felt oddly bereft of his touch, though she was also relieved to be rid of it, yet another quandary—and draped his arm over the back of her chair, idly toying with one of her curls.
“Seliah knows nothing, Maman,” he answered for her, shaking his head with a weary sigh. “It would be sad and shameful to witness if the vast lacunae in her education didn’t offer us such a stirring opportunity.”
“I asked the familiar, not you,” Lady El-Adrel returned, cold black gaze going to Jadren’s possessive arm around Selly. “And I take exception to your use of the word ‘us.’ Don’t think you’ll be laying claim to her. I have other wizards in need of a powerful familiar. Wizards more useful and loyal than you.”
“I only went away because you sent me, Maman,” Jadren replied, just shy of wheedling. “Pretending to be junior to a wannabe like Lord Phel was a test of my loyalty to House El-Adrel that I’ll hazard none of my cohort could have passed.”
“Yes, well…” Lady El-Adrel sniffed, gaze crawling over Selly with uncomfortable intensity. “I selected you for the job because you make an ideal minion. No other child of mine could have been so convincingly impotent and submissive.”
Because Jadren leaned so near, his chest nearly brushing Selly’s arm, the heat of him palpable on her bare skin, she felt his reaction, the frustrated hurt and murderous rage, the clean-oiled sense of his magic ticking in slow ratchets to ever greater tension. Under the table, she set her hand on his thigh, squeezing hard enough to make his breath catch.
All right, yes, it was partly payback. To her surprise, however—after his initial shocked reaction—Jadren’s ticking magic relented slightly, his lean thigh muscle flexing under her hand, and he tugged on the curl he’d been fondling, then transferred the caress to her bare collarbone. It shouldn’t have sent warm shivers through her, but it did, and she became excruciatingly aware of how close to the heat of his groin her hand lay, of the clean, spicy scent of him, and his warm breath wafting over her ear and cheek as he leaned around her to converse with his mother, holding Selly in the circle of his arm, as if to protect her. Though she knew better than to think that was his motivation.
“Underestimate me some more, Maman,” he breathed, so quietly only the three of them could possibly have heard.
“Careful, boy-o,” Lady El-Adrel hissed just as quietly. “I may start suspecting you’re not sincere in your protestations of loyalty.”
“And after I brought you such a lovely gift, too,” he purred.
“You mean, a gift for you,” she replied in the same tone. “You clearly want this familiar. Careless of you to tip your hand. I should give her to one of your siblings, just to teach you your place.”
