A tactic that had totally failed because he’d fucked up with Seliah, trying to make her believe he’d betrayed her and was her enemy. With anyone else, the strategy would have worked. With Seliah, however, he hadn’t factored in her traumatic past, the ferocious instinct to fight and flee that overrode all rationality, and the bare fact that she trusted very few people and he’d somehow become one of them. I trusted you, her broken whisper reverberated in his mind. He couldn’t repair what he’d destroyed, but he could save her life—and her future as a familiar—no matter the cost to himself.
“You can’t possibly still want this creature after this… display,” his mother hissed.
“On the contrary, I want her more than ever. Who else will have a familiar who’d take a blade to a high-house wizard to defend me?”
“Defend you?” his mother repeated, scoffing. “You don’t expect me to believe that crock of shit?”
“Oh yes,” Jadren answered with confidence. “Just as you were readying Seliah for the testing chair, she saw…” What in the dark arts could she have seen?
“She saw Jadren stumble,” his father put in, a save from a truly unexpected corner. “He tripped on the corner of the cabinet there, but Seliah only saw him start to fall.”
Lady El-Adrel leveled a hard stare at him. “Are you lying to me, familiar?”
“Never, my wizard,” he averred, raising a hand to touch the wound on her throat. “You’re bleeding, love. Let me call a healer for you.”
She brushed him off, but put her own fingers to the copiously bleeding tear. The blade had been small and hadn’t penetrated as deeply as Seliah had no doubt intended. Still, it had made a long slice, barely missing the artery, and Lady El-Adrel looked at the bright blood on her fingers with considerable disgust. “I should kill that creature for this. The Convocation would never tolerate such disobedience.”
“We knew this going in,” Jadren reminded her, supporting the weakened, weeping Seliah more than pinning her now. “Seliah hasn’t been molded by Convocation training and she’s… impulsive. It’s something to take advantage of, not destroy.”
“Impulsive?” his mother echoed, then barked out a laugh. “I should let you bond this crazed familiar, just to watch you tear each other apart.”
“Challenge accepted,” he replied with a jaunty grin. “Thank you, Maman.”
“I wasn’t serious.”
“I am.” Deadly serious.
“She’d be a liability to House El-Adrel. You both would be.”
“Then we’ll go away. Send us back to House Phel. The perfect sabotage.” Dared he hope it would be that easy?
Lady El-Adrel narrowed her black eyes. Curse it—she knew him too well and he’d laid it on far too thick. Then she astonished him. “I’ll accommodate you in this request, son of mine. You may bond the familiar, and may you have joy of the little monster.” She paused, but he couldn’t even summon the proper gratitude, his mind racing to assimilate this new move of hers. Surely she’d renege. “But,” she added coolly, “I’ll want to exploit this valuable research opportunity. You’ll agree to stay—and cooperate with whatever I ask—until I decide otherwise.”
She’d backed him neatly into a corner. Until she decided otherwise could be a very long time. “If I refuse?”
She smiled in triumph, knowing she had him. At last his dear maman had found the leverage on him she’d sought. “Refuse and I give her to Ozana. Decide now.”
He shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him, though internally he cursed himself. If he wasn’t so rattled being in this place again, he’d have handled this whole thing better. “You have a bargain—but only if Seliah lives to be bonded. Let’s summon that healer, shall we?” he suggested casually, making sure to sound like a request that she pass a carafe of wine, not showing his fear for the internal bleeding that might be killing Seliah even as he held her in his arms.
“Testing first,” his mother decreed. “If she dies I at least want to extract some data from her first. Put her in the chair. She appears to be compliant now.”
Jadren knew better than to argue—or to point out that a healer would ensure Seliah lived to provide that data. His mother was simply being cruel at this point, exacting her vengeance. Lady El-Adrel enjoyed cultivating her image as a rational scientist, but that was more a convenient façade for her sadistic nature. Many of her “experiments” were excuses to inflict suffering in the name of the pursuit of knowledge.
Jadren had learned that lesson very early on, also. His father knew it, too, coming to help Jadren carry Seliah gently to the chair, surreptitiously giving him a rueful smile that his wizard couldn’t see. His father had clearly taken to Seliah, as Jadren had thought he might and hoped he would, and now worked subtly to protect her as he’d once done his best to protect Jadren. Well, as he still tried to do. Without his father’s intervention at the height of his mother’s fury and outrage, it was hard to say what could have happened.
Working quickly, Jadren buckled Seliah into the chair, steeling his heart against her hopeless sobbing, keenly aware of how she loathed being strapped down. Worst of all, even in the midst of whatever phantasmagoria consumed her mind, she was lucid enough to recognize him, to fasten a betrayed glare on him. “I hope Gabriel skins you alive before he pulls out your entrails,” she whispered as he strapped the helmet onto her head.
“Keep that spirit alive, poppet,” he replied, kissing her nose now that she couldn’t bite him again, “and perhaps you’ll live to witness the moment. Something to look forward to.”
The testing didn’t take long, though it felt like it lasted forever. His mother relented on being healed—mostly because the in-house Refoel healer arrived on her own, the wizards in the nearby labs having heard the screaming. Lady El-Adrel also, to Jadren’s immense relief, agreed to have Seliah healed also, albeit still strapped to the chair, if only because blood loss was affecting the test results.
Watching the bronze darts unscrew their way back out of Seliah’s willowy body, barely swathed in her ragged gown, rent and soaked in blood, had nearly made him faint. Only iron will kept him on his feet. That and his mother’s clinically curious gaze. “Still can’t bear the sight of blood?” she asked with interest.
“No one likes blood,” he answered through gritted teeth.
“No, but it’s more for you, isn’t it?” she countered thoughtfully, keenly seeking the precise weapon to skewer him with. “It’s the pain. You promised to cooperate,” she reminded him.
“Seliah isn’t bonded to me yet,” he retorted.
