A shadow passed over him, shivering through his wizard senses like a cloud passing over the struggling sun on a bitter winter day. Fuck.
“What?” Seliah demanded. “Why do you look ill all of a sudden?”
How he was so transparent to her, he really didn’t know. Waggling his brows at her, he attempted to transmute the plunging sense of dread into anticipation. “We’ve crossed into El-Adrel lands. Almost home, poppet!” His voice sounded strained to himself.
“You can feel it?”
“Any proper wizard should recognize their own house’s territory,” he replied with enough condescension to drown out his increasing panic. “In the case of El-Adrel, there are artifacts buried in the soil at our perimeter that alert our guardian wizards of anyone crossing the border. It’s simple for me to sense when they’re triggered.” And he was babbling—why tell her all this? “Elal has something similar, only they use spirits to guard their border, naturally. Meresin is unusual in that your lands are as open to trespass as…” He grinned salaciously. “Well, as an unbonded familiar.”
She didn’t bite on that bait. “Then why could we cross into Sammael unnoticed?”
Seliah might be ignorant, but never forget how sharply she observed and how quickly she learned. A blank slate indeed. He hated to think what his maman would do to that fresh, unadulterated mind and magic. Eyeing the sentry spirit, he weighed his options. They could make a run for it, but with that thing on their tails—not to mention on foot, with neither of them in peak condition—they likely wouldn’t get far before the El-Adrel guardian wizards captured them, and then he’d have tipped his hand and lost any good will his maman might bear him for bringing her this prize. Maybe they could make it, with Seliah’s knowledge of the backwoods, but he’d be a liability to her. He was healed, but exhausted and horribly ill-equipped for wilderness survival.
On her own, however… If only he could engineer a way for her to escape him and soon. Thing was, if she escaped and the guardians caught her—very nearly an inevitability, even with her agile and canny ways—they would be unkind to her at best. At worst… Well, it didn’t bear considering. The prospect of being unable to protect her galled him on a deep level. It wasn’t as if he’d be able to do much to protect her from his maman, but he’d have slightly more control than if she ran and was captured.
He shouldn’t care this much.
It was driving him insane that he did.
“Jadren?” she asked softly.
“What?” he snapped back, earnestly wishing he’d never crossed paths with this wretched waif of a gamine who should never have appealed to him as much as she did. She was a liability and he should shed himself of her.
“Why could we cross into Sammael unnoticed if the high houses protect their borders so stringently?” she persisted.
“This is the question at the foremost of your feeble mind?” he asked in astonishment.
She shrugged a little. “Better than the other things I could be thinking about.”
“Arrogance,” he answered shortly. “Sammael fears no one.”
“Must be nice,” she commented in a small voice.
Nice indeed.
~ 10 ~
Selly would’ve been terrified at the prospect of being taken to House El-Adrel under any circumstances, but seeing Jadren sweating bullets truly rammed home the severity of the situation.
Oh, he wasn’t literally sweating. Not Jadren. His pale complexion was smooth and unflushed, his wizard-black eyes glittering with the uncaring sheen of a natural predator, and he sprawled in languid indolence over the carriage seat he’d claimed entirely for himself after evicting her. With his characteristic insouciance and fine clothing clinging to his lean, elegant body, he looked every bit the arrogant lordling of a high house.
But he was bone-deep afraid. She couldn’t have explained to anyone how she knew that. She felt it somehow in the charge of his magic, the restlessly surging coil of it. In the way his gaze lingered on her, assessing. In the mercurial shift of his moods as he tried to convince her that he wasn’t her friend.
And should she need convincing of that bald fact? He’d been obviously chummy with Lord Sammael. Jadren himself cheerfully admitted to being an El-Adrel spy, something that was common knowledge at House Phel. Lady El-Adrel had used literal extortion to force Gabriel to take on Jadren. On top of all of that, he was very often not a nice person.
And yet… She couldn’t get over the conviction that Jadren cared much more than he wanted anyone to know. That he cared about her.
Staking one’s life on an intuition seemed as foolish as Jadren regularly accused her of being. He was eyeing the sentry spirit again, that inscrutable expression on his face that seemed both pissed and despairing. Though maybe she was reading too much into him, seeing what she wanted to see. He’d no doubt tell her exactly that. If she attempted to escape the carriage now, would he stop her?
Moving slowly as pond water, she slid a hand closer to the door handle. She didn’t look at him. That was a trick when hunting or evading the stalking marsh cats. Animals sense the attentive gaze of others. The best way to evade their attention, to achieve a kind of invisibility, is to look away. She was already positioned, huddled against the wall, as that sentry spirit made her skin crawl. So, she gazed out the window, her hand drifting like a leaf, settling on the handle. Gently tested.
Locked.
Without even a sigh—because it hadn’t truly been a possibility, right?—she let her hand drift away again, running fingertips along the glassed-in window’s edge, as if in idle thought. Feeling Jadren’s gaze on her, she looked his way, meeting those hard black eyes. He shook his head minutely, warning and … a hint of apology? She opened her mouth to ask, but the cadence of the carriage’s wheels changed just then, going from paving stones to a surface so smooth they made almost no sound. Jadren shook his head, looking disgusted.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We’re there,” he answered. “Pull yourself together.”
