Chapter 12
Selly attempted, as Jadren had so often instructed, to keep her shit together.
She should be good at this by now, bearing witness as a battered and apparently dead Jadren gradually recovered.
She’d certainly gone through it enough. Still, she never quite got over the deep dread that this time he wouldn’t come back from the dead, that this time she’d lose him forever…
She stroked his bruised and blood-smeared face, his head in her lap as she sat in the carriage across from Cillian.
He mirrored her, with the still-unconscious Alise asleep with her head in his lap.
He’d helped her drag Jadren into the carriage and resumed this position, allowing the carriage to carry them smoothly along.
They met each other’s eyes and shared rueful smiles.
A camaraderie neither of them wanted or had asked for.
“So,” she said, “where are we going anyway?”
Cillian looked briefly startled. “Well, originally Alise and I were planning to go to Convocation Center, but then—after the hunters attacked, we lost our carriage, and got filthy—we were going to walk to this nearby hot springs to clean up.”
Hot springs? Selly perked up at that thought. Getting cleaned up and soaking in hot water while waiting for Jadren and Alise to recover sounded like perfection. “By all means, let’s go there.”
Cillian shook his head regretfully. “We were going to walk a goat trail to it. I don’t think it’s reachable by the road.” He paused thoughtfully. “Except…”
“Except?” Selly pounced with excitement. “Because, I’d rather not show up at Convocation Center looking like this. Or with him looking like that.”
Cillian frowned. “Will Jadren recover? That is… I mean, ah.”
Selly waved him not to worry. “He looks awful, I know, but this is not the worst I’ve seen him.”
“Truly?” Cillian sounded reluctantly fascinated. “Because, he does have literal chunks missing.”
“I know. I try not to look. But yes, once I found him shattered at the bottom of a cliff having made friends with the crows feasting on him. Not a solid bone in his body. That was worse.”
Cillian gazed at her in horror, his soft black eyes full of sympathy. “That must have been terrible for you. I’m so sorry.”
She liked this gorgeous librarian wizard. Not many men had that level of compassion and understanding. “It was, thanks. But I got through it.” She tried to think of words. “You have to, you know?”
“I do know,” he answered with a hint of grim resolve.
His face, however, glowed with love as he looked down at Alise and tenderly brushed her hair from her forehead.
“Selly, if you’ll hand me one of my books—it might be slimed, but—the one on geographical features of the Knifeblade Mountains.
It occurs to me that there might be another route to the hot springs. ”
“For that temptation, I will risk the slime,” she declared, carefully slipping out from under Jadren.
Much as she didn’t like disrupting the connection between her and her wizard that allowed him to draw on her magic for his healing/self-reconstruction, a brief break wouldn’t slow things much, if at all.
Rooting through the closed compartment where she’d stowed Cillian’s worst-slimed books, she found the one he wanted and handed it to him, wrapped in a towel.
She and Jadren had learned to bring lots of rags on excursions like this, primarily because Jadren had a habit of flinging his body into frays, treating himself like a human shield.
She’d given Cillian a few rags also, but the problem with hunter slime was that it didn’t clean up like natural blood or other body fluids.
It was both sticky and greasy, not to mention rank, and only extended soaking seemed to get the stuff off.
Or a grooming imp, but she foolishly hadn’t thought to bring one with her.
Cillian expertly balanced the open book, heavy as it was, on one hand while flipping the pages with the other, going almost immediately to the correct page.
“How do you do that?” she marveled.
He looked at her over his spectacles. “Library magic. I’m not a very strong wizard, but I can index a book fast enough to find the right page quickly, and I can pretty much memorize whatever I put my mind to.
I’d previously committed the maps of the region around the road through the pass to memory, so that’s how I knew about the goat trail to the hot springs, but I didn’t think to expand to the other routes through the Knifeblades. An oversight on my part.”
“Except you did remember.” Selly rather thought that having a magical memory would be very convenient. Certainly her tutors would have looked on her more kindly. Although later they all realized she was crazy, which negated all the judgements about her being stupid.
Cillian looked sheepish. “Well, that was just regular memory. And here it is, so regular memory was helpful. We can take this side road and loop around.” His wizardry moved past her with the scent of old parchment, sending new directions to the air elemental.
“Bet you were a good student, too.”
He carefully set the towel-wrapped book aside without disturbing Alise, tipped the glasses down his nose and raised his brows, giving her an arch look. “As I have not been summarily exiled from the house of my birth, yes. Harahels don’t abide poor scholars in their midst.”
Selly laughed. “What terrible things do Harahels do to those unfortunates? Send them off to remedial school?”
“You laugh, but pretty much. They get placed in houses needing clerks and that sort of basic staffing.”
She mock-shuddered. “The horrors. You know, compared to what I’ve heard other high houses do to their less-sterling members, that’s pretty tame.”
He regarded her very seriously. “It’s true, so I shouldn’t be flip.
When I was helping Alise identify Gordon Hanneil to stop his harassment of her, I did a deep dive into the registers of wizard and familiar citizens in the Convocation.
” At her blank look, he waved a hand in the air and tipped his spectacles back into place.
“In most families, testing starts early. There are records of magical potential scores—taken at regular intervals. You wouldn’t know because of your unusual circumstances, but most of us are aware that there are binders with our information and MP scores over time, up to the final scores certified at manifestation,” he explained.
“At any rate,” he continued, “I was naturally concentrating on the House Hanneil records and I saw convincing evidence that they were very closely following certain groups of children scoring high in psychic magic.”
“Which makes sense, doesn’t it?” Selly asked. “Since Hanneil is all about psychic magic, wouldn’t that branch matter to them the most?”
“Sure—but even for a high house, this was over the top. They were testing these kids every month for some. And the scores for those individuals increased dramatically. Notably so. I didn’t have time to do a house-to-house comparison, but I feel confident in saying no other house has children whose scores increase at those rates. ”
“So, you think they were doing something.”
“Yes, I think they were and are doing something to improve the MP scores, and possibly the ability of those kids to generate and wield psychic magic.” He looked thoughtful.
“An interesting point occurs to me, though. I brought this up because I also saw low-scoring children simply disappear from the books. Never to appear again.”
“What do you mean?” Selly asked, dreadfully afraid she did know.
“Those kids should have grown up and gone to Convocation Academy. Even if they weren’t brilliant examples of Hanneil wizardry, they were still far from duds.”
“Where did they go then?”
Cillian pressed his lips together. “I don’t know. I… I think hoping that they ended up as the Hanneil version of clerks is hoping for too much.”
They gazed at each other soberly. Selly shook her head. She couldn’t do anything right then about the possibly terrible fates of children she’d never met and wouldn’t have even known about without this conversation. “What interesting point occurred to you?”
“Well…” His gaze fell to Alise’s drawn face. “How are they doing it?”
“Getting rid of the kids who are the high-scorers?”
“Dark arts, no. I don’t even want to contemplate that, much less discuss it.
I mean, clearly there’s some sort of experiment going on there that they’re tracking so carefully, so what are the parameters?
What are they testing? What are they doing to increase those MP scores so dramatically in some kids—and is that possibly linked to what Anciela Phel was researching? ”
Selly felt as if she’d fallen through a crust of dirt and straight into a cold water bog.
“Fuck me,” she breathed, adopting one of Jadren’s favorite epithets for the occasion.
She was still processing all the startling information Cillian had explained lurked in the folded archive.
“And if we go with the theory that House Hanneil has been behind much of the apparent ‘forgetfulness’ surrounding the collapse of House Phel and subsequent cover-up—could it be that they’ve had copies of Anciela’s data all this time? ”
“But instead of using that to free familiars of the blocks preventing them from becoming full wizards—because obviously, no power-mad wizard family wants that—Hanneil has been employing Anciela’s techniques to amplify magical power full-stop,” Cillian filled in.
“Many of those kids turned out to be familiars, I’m sure.
I didn’t follow their trajectories at the time, because I was concentrating on finding the sleezeball calling himself Gordon, but it follows that Hanneil would want super-powerful familiars, too. ”
“And they’ve been doing this for the last, what, three or four generations since Anciela?” Selly asked and continued when Cillian nodded. “So why don’t they have super-powerful wizards and familiars yet?”