He slid her a black look, both in mood and the color of his eyes. No telling what color he’d been born with, as working magic had turned his eyes as wizard-black as Gabriel’s. With Jadren’s auburn hair and beard, his skin the translucent paleness that went with that coloring, his eyes stood out a deep and depthless black that spoke of infernal magic and shiver-inducing power. “Tell you what?”
She shrugged blithely, a gesture that seemed to irritate him, so she made a note to add it to her repertoire for more frequent use. Turnabout was fair play. “I know very little about the Convocation. Tell me about House Elal and how all of them came to share the same characteristics.”
He snorted at that. “You think you’re being clever by pointing out that a high house comprised of thousands of people can’t be reduced to a few common traits.”
She didn’t comment, diligently covering her surprise that a Convocation high house could have so many people. Were all the houses so large? There were only so many high houses and then lots of smaller ones. House Phel was comprised of maybe three dozen people. Not that she’d met all of them, few as they might be. Thousands was beyond what she could picture. She wanted to ask if they all literally lived in the same house—and, if so, how big were those houses?—but she shied from sounding that ignorant. For the most part, Jadren’s opinion didn’t matter to her, but apparently she had her lines she hesitated to cross.
“The truth of the matter,” Jadren went on, fortunately needing no encouragement to wax chatty on this topic, “is that you have to understand how houses, especially the high houses, operate. The head of the house, large or small, is always invested in keeping control of their minions. This wizard will—”
“Is it always a wizard?” she interrupted.
That supercilious brow arched as he slid her an astonished look. “Of course.”
“But why?”
“Who else would head a house full of wizards?”
“Familiars?”
He laughed. “No, little familiar—no one in the Convocation is going to put a familiar in charge of anything except delivering magic to people who can actually make use of it. Even then they can’t be in control of that, for obvious reasons, your eccentric sister-in-law notwithstanding.”
Selly let that scathing assessment go without comment. What she didn’t know about being a familiar could fill barrels. She hadn’t even known that she was a familiar until she’d awakened from what Jadren so graciously referred to as crazyland to a serious sit-down conversation with Gabriel. Distraught as he was over Nic’s abduction, he’d still taken the time to explain that—just like him—she’d experienced the same weird manifestation of magic skipping a few generations. Just as he’d suddenly manifested as a wizard at the late age of twenty-two, a bizarre aberration in their magicless family that hadn’t produced a wizard in over a century, it turned out that she had magic also.
Only she couldn’t use hers, because of this being a familiar thing. Where Gabriel had discovered his wizardry by suddenly and violently bringing rain, Selly hadn’t even known about hers. Nobody had. Instead it had grown inside her like an infection with no outlet, until it poisoned her mind. Gabriel had explained that she’d be fine now that the stagnant magic had been expelled. That whole process remained unclear, largely because Gabriel had glossed over the details, but whatever had happened, her brother had ended up in the infirmary, unconscious and nearly dead, for a week. With him incapacitated, their enemies had pounced. House Sammael had abducted Nic, leading to their current situation.
So, while Gabriel had explained that regularly releasing her magic—which meant having wizards tap her to extract it—would keep her sane and healthy, and even though the whole concept made her feel uneasily like a keg of apple cider, she was resolved to offer her magic to any of the House Phel wizards who needed it. She’d already been too much of a liability, so whatever she could do to help, she would. More selfishly, she’d rather literally die than return to that soul-sapping mist of insanity that had already consumed too much of her life. Even if that meant, as it currently did, keeping company with the obnoxious El-Adrel wizard.
Because they still had a long walk ahead, and Selly was years behind in understanding much at all about her new life and role in the Convocation, she decided to press him more. “All right, if familiars are the lowest of the low and can’t be trusted to do anything—”
“You’re not the lowest of the low,” he interrupted, scowling. “Familiars are highly valued by the Convocation, second only to wizards. Some familiars are considerably more valuable than wizards because of their powerful magic, compared to barely-there wizards who are lucky to be able to boil water without a fire.”
Since boiling water with a fire was dead easy, Selly didn’t find that to be a rousing endorsement of the value of magic. “So, who is the lowest of the low then?”
He snorted, adjusting the burden of their supplies. “Me, currently serving as pack mule. If the house of my birth could only see me now.”
“I told you to leave that stuff behind.”
Gazing steadfastly ahead, he walked on. “We already had this argument once. It would be ever so dreary to repeat it, so let’s continue with this scintillating Q and A instead. Convocation rank goes as such: Wizards, ranked by a combination of magical potential and house status; Familiars, ranked by their wizard’s status; then commoners, who have no magic, or none to speak of.”
Like her parents and most everyone she’d known all her life. “Not having magic doesn’t make you an idiot,” she pointed out. “You can still make good business decisions. Why not have nonmagical types run the houses and free up wizards for…” She had very little idea of what wizards did when they weren’t battling hunters or other wizards.
Fortunately Jadren didn’t need her to finish her sentences under most circumstances. “Won’t work. To control a wizard, you need a wizard.”
“Why do you need to control wizards?”
“You have no idea,” he answered, staring bleakly down the path.
She nearly bit out that this was why she was asking questions, but something about his taut expression stopped her. Jadren used that phrase a lot, and it occurred to her that his ‘you have no idea’ was communicating something else, something too awful, perhaps, to put into words. It gave her a pang of sympathy, though she indeed had no idea why the arrogant and privileged wizard deserved any pity. Still, it was nice to feel sorry for someone besides herself. “All right, so controlling minions leads to a house being a cultural monolith how?”
“Cute. The head of a high house sees their minions—wizards, familiars, commoners, even horsies—as extensions of themselves.” He freed a hand to waggle his fingers. “Basically appendages of a single hand and mind. The more effective the head of the high house, the more consolidated in values, approach, and thinking are the members of the house.” He slid her a glittering glance. “Nic is an Elal through and through. Her father, Lord Elal, is very effective.”
“What about Lady El-Adrel?” Selly knew Jadren’s mother was the head of House El-Adrel, and Gabriel had told her a bit about how the woman had brought Jadren to House Phel and essentially extorted them into hiring Jadren as a junior wizard, despite his lack of credentials and the clear implication he was there mainly to spy on them.
“Dear Maman takes ‘effective’ to an exponential level of control.”
She waited, but this time he said nothing more. “How so?”
He slanted her a look. “I’m already exhausted, wounded, stinking like rotten stew, carrying bags like a servant, and traipsing through the middle of nowhere with a crazy girl. Let’s not exacerbate my misery by talking about her.”
