Chapter 9
Nic glared at the landscape passing ever so slowly outside the carriage windows. What had felt like a luxuriously slow and restorative journey on the way to House Harahel had turned into an excruciating exercise in being patient. Not something she excelled at.
And, not only had Gabriel remained obstinate about not allowing her to change into alternate form and fly, so they had to travel to Convocation Center overland, but they’d crowded in three more people—Han, Iliana, and Bertie—all of whom chattered with excitement about the adventure and seemed oblivious to her grinding impatience.
Plus, the enchantment Healer Asa had given her to reduce her breast milk production while away from Bria seemed to be wearing off and her breasts ached with fullness, more so with every jounce of the carriage, and reminding her with each physical and emotional pang that she wasn’t with her precious baby.
She missed Bria with a rending misery she’d never have predicted.
All she wanted was to go home and hold her infant and nurse her.
So much for all of her fine declarations of being more than a mother and wanting to do her part in the revolution.
Her body, her heart, didn’t care about such abstract thoughts.
Every fiber of her being only cried out to get back to her baby.
Folding her arms under her bursting breasts to attempt to subtly support them, Nic suppressed a groan of discomfort combined with frustration.
Gabriel, beside her, put his arm around her, encouraging her to lean against him, then brushed his lips against her temple. “What’s wrong?” he whispered quietly into her ear.
“Nothing.” She kept her reply equally quiet, but it came out belligerent anyway.
“Nic.” He didn’t have to say anything more.
Gabriel sank a world of warning and command into the single syllable of her name, a kind of wizardry all its own.
A magic with no name. In the arcanium, and nowhere else, he called her “Familiar,” which made her want to melt at his feet every time.
Somehow he’d managed to find his way into threading that same exact tone into her name.
Gabriel was not a naturally dominant person, especially not in a sexual sense.
But they’d forged this connection together, finding a way for him to give her what she so desperately craved from him.
She couldn’t fault him for using that intimate connection to reach her when she began to spin out emotionally, annoyed as she might be at him holding her feet to the fire when he ran up against her own brand of stubbornness.
Still, she set her teeth against the ingrained desire—even need—to obey him and spill everything.
She could be stronger than this. “I don’t want to discuss it,” she said under her breath.
“Too bad.” He subtly tipped his head at the three on the other bench avidly discussing some book they’d all read and seemed to have three entirely different opinions on.
The sound cut off as Gabriel created a silencing shield.
“They’re not paying attention, I’ve given us a cone of silence, and you’ve been groaning under your breath for at least half an hour. ”
“Oh, I have not.”
“You have. Tell me what’s going on or I’m pulling over the carriage so we can discuss in even more privacy.”
She leaned her head back to glare at him. He gazed back at her with an implacable black gaze. It was just her bad luck that him looking at her like that filled her with will-sapping desire. Instead of firming her resolve, she only wanted to snuggle into him and ask him to make it all better.
He put a finger under her chin, part caress, part implicit expectation. “Don’t be stubborn, Familiar,” he murmured. “Let me help you.”
“The milk,” she confessed unhappily. “I need to express it.”
Gabriel winced in sympathy. “Asa said the enchantment might wear off.”
“‘Physiology can overpower magic, especially the maternal forces,’” she said, mimicking him. “I shouldn’t have left home. Bria will—”
He slipped the finger up over her lips to stop the words.
“Bria is fine. House Phel does have couriers and an in-house Ratsiel wizard to craft new ones and send at any level of privacy and priority, which you know because you insisted on that expense and hired them. They absolutely know to contact us if there’s any kind of problem, in which case I promise you, I’ll agree to fly back with you. All right? Agreed?”
She nodded reluctantly, chagrined that she’d already agreed on this topic. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she confessed.
“Nothing that isn’t perfectly understandable.” He bent over her, replacing his fingers with his lips, giving her a warm and stirring kiss. “We need to do something for your problem. It sounds excruciating.”
“It’s not great,” she admitted, the carriage bumping over a rock, jostling her sore breasts, and making a little milk leak out. Pretty soon she’d soak through even her water-resistant Ophiel gown and then everyone would witness her embarrassment.
“All right then,” Gabriel said decisively. “The first step is to find an inn and give you the opportunity to express the milk in private—”
“It’s going to take forever,” she said mournfully. Sometimes it took a while for her milk to let down even with Bria giving her all.
“No it won’t. Especially if you are able to rest and relax.”
“I don’t need to rest,” she protested.
“You do,” he insisted gently. “Asa explained to me what we’d need to do, if this happened.”
“Well I’m thrilled you men had a lovely little conversation about my breasts,” she muttered at him.
“Rest will help you, Nic, darling.” He kissed her again.
“You’re as fretful as Bria with colic. You won’t be in any shape to help Alise if you’re falling apart.
You grew an entire person, while going through difficult transitions, abductions, and fighting literal battles, and then you gave birth less than two months ago and have been nursing and losing sleep ever since.
I’m not trying to be a tyrant here. I’m worried about you.
I only agreed to this trip because I thought it would be restful for you and set your mind at ease. Instead…” He sighed.
“Instead we’re in the thick of it all again,” she agreed ruefully. “Though, to be fair, we have been all along. We just had a little baby bubble of pretending it wasn’t so.”
“Embroiled in this mess since we met,” he agreed, brushing a lock of hair back from her face.
“From before that,” she reminded him. “Whatever forces fell into place to conspire for you and me to live in interesting times, they arrayed long before we met. Maybe before you and Seliah were born with your house-restoring magic. I still don’t believe it was random.”
“Do you still think your father deliberately arranged for you to become my familiar?”
Even him asking that question and using the word “familiar” innocuously sent a flare of needy desire through her.
Though they’d—finally!—started having sex again, Gabriel insisted on being gentle with her, not giving her the firm hand and harsher treatment she craved.
She was hard up, probably contributing to the fretfulness.
Maybe it wasn’t more rest she needed, but the exact opposite.
Maybe the inn was an opportunity. If she couldn’t go straight to Alise, it might be possible to convince Gabriel of what she truly needed to be in fighting form.
“Nic?” he asked, frowning because she hadn’t answered.
“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what I do think—and that’s that someone is helping us.”
“But who? Everyone has been against us. You’re forever warning me about how many enemies House Phel has.”
“Some of that from your own behavior,” she pointed out with asperity.
She now knew him well enough—or perhaps she’d always known—that she could never have stopped him from his reckless idealism.
From that first time when he rescued Narlis, the beleaguered Iblis familiar, or before that, from his soft-hearted outrage on behalf of all familiars in the Convocation, Nic had known where Gabriel’s values stood.
“I wouldn’t change any of that,” he said, just a tiny bit testy about it.
“I know.” She laid an affectionate hand on his cheek.
Who would have guessed in the beginning that she’d go from castigating him for being the kind of person to bash himself brainless against the wall of Convocation tradition to planning to bang her own skull against it?
The power of Gabriel Phel. He’d even gotten the relentless jaded Jadren El-Adrel to become an idealist. After a fashion.
“My point is,” she continued, “that someone made sure that whatever curse or enchantment or whatever killed off all the wizardry in House Phel stopped working, allowing that magic to rebound.”
“But who would or could?”
“That’s the million-coin question, isn’t it? It would have to be someone who would either benefit from Phel recovering and accessing the house archives or a person with an altruistic motivation.”
“Or both,” he countered thoughtfully. Catching her lifted brows, he continued.
“If someone suspected what Anciela Phel had hit upon, and wanted to liberate familiars from the bonds of physiology reducing them to second-class citizenship, they could both want to personally benefit from it and want a better society for everyone.”
“Pure altruism like the latter is pretty rare,” she commented doubtfully. “I think financial or social gain is more likely.”
“Could be love,” he returned, smiling at her cynicism. He trailed a finger down her cheek. “It’s a powerful motivator. Look at how you want to turn yourself inside out for Bria and for Alise.”
“Just into a bird,” she sniffed, but internally had to admit that he had a point.
“Iliana thinks that the person who helped Anciela Phel hide her data was either a familiar or someone in love with a familiar. But,” she added, stopping his next words and sliding a careful glance at Iliana.
Sure enough, the red-headed familiar who’d sacrificed so much for love was watching them cannily, quickly looking away and pretending she hadn’t been trying to read lips.
The young woman was far too intuitive—and nosy—for her own good.
“But,” Nic continued, averting her face to be less easily visible, “Iliana is young and romantic.”
“She’s not much younger than you are.”
And yet Nic felt ages older. “Well, I don’t have a romantic bone in my body.”
“This is very true,” he agreed easily.
“Ha ha. My point is that those are not qualities to base an investigation on.”
“In my experience,” Gabriel said slowly, “people are motivated by greed, hate, or love. Sometimes all three,” he conceded when she opened her mouth to argue, “but usually one wins out.”
“What about lust for power?”
“That’s greed.”
Hmm. “What about fear?”
“Hate is a manifestation of fear.”
He could be right. He usually was, annoyingly enough. “Sometimes there’s fear in love.”
“Yes.” He said the word with such fervor that she knew she’d struck a nerve. “But for someone else.”
That made her unexpectedly misty, as her unstable emotions roamed from hither to yon these days. “Also, if there are multiple players, then they could all—very likely do—have any combination of these motivations.”
“Very true.”
She leaned against him, realizing that he’d been distracting her from the discomfort all this time. And that she did feel tired. Curse it. “About this inn…”
“We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
She should have known he’d already handled it. “I might not be romantic, but I do love you.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I know.”