Chapter 11
Gabriel had been to Convocation Center only once before in his life—and that seemed like a lifetime ago. Or something that had happened to an entirely different person.
He’d been a young man. A funny thought to have, as he’d been an adult by Meresin standards, working his own fields and orchards, thinking seriously about starting a family.
Also, that had been only a few years before.
He felt so much older now, however. He’d barely recovered from the sudden onslaught of his wizardry, the recovery process taking up nearly a year of his life.
From those first days of utter astonishment and, honestly, gut-watering terror at the discovery that the sudden deluge of rain and silver plating every surface came from him.
Those first few months, in truth, blended into a kaleidoscope of confusion and emotion in his blurry memories.
He’d been exhausted and hungry from the years of drought.
Then the rains poured on the baked soil caused flooding, drowning the few seedlings they’d managed to keep alive, uprooting trees in the orchard.
The Dubglass River had overflowed its banks and cut a new channel for itself, washing away several homes.
And the magic drain exhausted him further.
Only when he ran out of magic and collapsed—and the rains suddenly ceased—had anyone put two and two together.
And the resulting math made him a stranger in the eyes of his own family.
Not Seliah, though. She had begun to manifest as a familiar, though none of them knew that, but it would be a while before the worst effects of being unable to express her magic would make her truly crazy.
She’d supported him at first, helped him do the necessary research, and gently, persistently told him their parents would come around.
The Phel family had been magical once, so having a wizard son wasn’t that much of a stretch.
Still, by the time he’d made the journey on horseback, riding the trusty Vale to Convocation Center in order to file the paperwork to re-establish House Phel and find out what else he needed to know, he’d been weary in every fiber of his being.
A stranger to himself, feeling supremely incapable of coping with this wrenching turn his life had taken, he’d been already overwhelmed when he reached the “big city.”
Having spent his life in the fields, orchards, and wetlands of Meresin, his younger, more na?ve self had never seen so many people in one place.
The buildings towered overhead, the streets an incomprehensible maze filled with speeding carriages that moved on their own, no horses in sight.
He’d felt fully the country rube, gaping at every new sight, completely overwhelmed by it all.
Those memories, more than any from all those times, stood out in his mind with crystal clarity.
He vividly recalled his awe at seeing Convocation Central, the administration building that housed the councils that made up the government of the Convocation.
In reality, the high houses did pretty much as they pleased, held accountable primarily by their competitors for product, trademarks, and land: the other houses.
But councils of representatives from those high houses passed ultimate judgement on issues brought to them, typically as presented by legal advisory committees.
Convocation Academy, which housed the Convocation Archives as well as being responsible for the education of every certified wizard and familiar—excepting the wild cards that slipped through the net, like Gabriel and Seliah, and Jadren El-Adrel, though for different reasons in his case—was nearby, but on its own parklike grounds, not physically or officially attached to Convocation Central.
This time, entering the large conglomeration of housing, businesses, shops, restaurants, and theaters that made up the sprawling city center, Gabriel had a far better perspective.
Convocation Center contained the largest population in all the Convocation, but he could better perceive the order of it now.
And they rode in their own carriage, Vale back at House Phel.
Being in the air-elemental powered carriage somehow put him at the same speed as everyone else.
And knowing his own power—thanks to Nic, her advice and tutoring, along with the wizards she’d roped into providing him with excellent teaching—he came to the city with a confidence he’d been incapable of back then.
To his surprise, as they passed the Convocation Central building, it looked smaller and less startlingly glamorous.
The first time he saw the towering structure made of gold beams and inset with Byssan glass, he’d been flattened.
Of course, he’d never seen actual glass at that point, much less magically tempered Byssan glass of perfect clarity and meticulously shaded in ombre colors of Convocation Center, the deepest making the windows at the bottom opaque for privacy and shading to translucent at the top, so much so that the building seemed to dissolve into the low-lying overcast.
Now it struck him as rather tacky. Certainly overblown, the architecture clumsily rendered.
He caught Nic watching him with quiet amusement and he took her hand, marveling anew at the elegance of her long fingers tipped with jeweled nails and at the sophistication of her intelligence and taste.
He suspected she knew what he was thinking, even if she couldn’t actually read his thoughts—though he sometimes wondered about that with her maman’s Hanneil blood.
She proved at least her intuition when she said, “It looks more grotesque and pretentious to me every time I come back.”
Bertie snorted without looking up from the heavy tome splayed open across his lap. “You should have been around when High Houses Sammael and Tadkiel proposed the plans for that monstrosity and rammed the decision—and funding—through the high council.”
“No wonder it looks like the unplanned child of the Sammael and Tadkiel houses,” Han commented.
Gabriel had never seen House Tadkiel, but he disliked the Sammael manse enough to believe Han’s assessment was accurate.
“That’s not real gold,” Bertie added. “Not because they didn’t want it, but the House Hagith engineers finally convinced them that even gold alloy would be too soft for the weight of the structure. Everything inside is gold-plated, though.”
“I remember,” Gabriel said drily—and, to his chagrin, he remembered being dazzled and intimidated by all of it, too.
“I’m surprised they got that kind of expense approved by the council,” Iliana said.
Bertie and Nic both had jaded expressions on their faces for Iliana’s innocence. “When you have Sammael, Tadkiel, Elal, El-Adrel, Chur, and Ariel all in favor—and willing to pay Hanneil to influence the vote of the holdouts,” Bertie explained, “then there’s no surprise at all.”
“But Hanneil psychic interference is strictly illegal,” Iliana protested. “Everyone knows that,” she insisted to Han when he put an affectionate arm around her.
“Yes, well,” Nic put in, tugging on her ear thoughtfully, “in the Convocation, there’s what’s illegal enough for action to be taken and what’s technically illegal but overlooked depending on the circumstances.”
“And the rank and power of the perpetrator,” Gabriel put in cynically.
Nic tipped her head in tacit agreement and Bertie cackled gleefully.
“But what you don’t include there, boy,” he said, pointing a quill at Gabriel, “is that there are all kinds of power. Some of the high houses may have been overlooking certain shenanigans.” He slid a sly look at Nic. “But that doesn’t mean they approve.”
“They certainly haven’t fought,” she returned with crisp fire, to Gabriel’s surprise. “Where were these noble objectors when House Phel was destroyed?”
“Ah, but House Phel, to all appearances, collapsed on its own. Very sad tale, but the plague that wiped out all the living Phel wizards and familiars, and their progeny, was assumed to have also burned out the magic-bearing genes of the rest of the populace.”
“Plague?” Nic jumped on that before Gabriel could. She glanced at him for confirmation.
“I’ve asked and no one in Meresin remembers anything about what happened when Phel died,” Gabriel put in. How troubling, but also… it made so much sense.
“We’ve never heard of a plague,” Nic confirmed.
“Haven’t you, young Elal? Hmm.” Bertie tapped the quill against his lips, black eyes sharp. “Harahel remembers.”
“Why haven’t you told us this before?” Nic demanded.
Bertie gave her such a calm and pitying look that even Gabriel winced beneath the power of it. “You didn’t ask, did you?”
Nic sat back in dismay, her chagrin palpable in the dimming of her magic. Gabriel patted her thigh in sympathy. “No,” she said faintly. “I didn’t think to ask Harahel.”
“Well, you are an Elal,” Bertie said with patently fake generosity.
“Your house among many others dismisses House Harahel as irrelevant. A bunch of fusty old scholars, redundant with the Convocation Archives available to all. No useful magic or lucrative trademarks to speak of, lands that are barren northern moors that no one in their right mind wants. Isn’t that what you were taught? ”
“Yes,” Nic admitted. “A massive bias and oversight on my part. I apologize, Lord Harahel Emeritus.” Her worried glance for Gabriel told him she offered the apology to him, too.
“Eh. Call me Bertie, I told you. No need to apologize for being a product of your upbringing, but before you throw stones at those houses who’ve chosen to bide their time and wait, you might consider who is on your side.”
“If we count those who haven’t shown themselves to be enemies of House Phel,” Gabriel said, smoothly stepping in while Nic stewed in self-recrimination, “that would be Houses Uriel, Refoel, and Harahel,” he finished with a nod to Bertie.
He counted the twelve high houses on his fingers. Who was he missing… “Ratsiel?”