Chapter 15
Cillian slept far better and harder than any person had a right to, given that he shared a couch with Alise and the carriage with Jadren and Seliah.
Of course, having a lot of very intense sex and soaking in the hot springs—both activities for hours—went a long way toward relaxing and draining a guy.
He and Alise had been so lax and boneless by the time they finally climbed out of the hot springs, they’d barely been able to drag on their clothes and stumble back to the carriage.
Jadren and Seliah had been sound asleep, lumped under their fur blankets, and had thoughtfully made up the makeshift bed on the other side for Cillian and Alise, so all they had to do was crawl in and cover up.
It was one of those sleeps so deep that it came as a surprise to wake up, as he hadn’t been fully aware of sleeping.
Alise was still out, curled up against him, head pillowed in the nook between his shoulder and chest. In sleep, she looked even younger and more fragile, so he didn’t move, wanting to keep his precious companion comfortable and resting.
But the sound that had awakened him came again—and he realized that Seliah and Jadren no longer occupied the carriage and in fact seemed to be carrying on a jovial conversation outside, including occasional laughter.
He supposed he’d better go find out what was going on.
At least it didn’t sound like Lord Elal had found them, nor any of his minions.
Taking the side road and dallying at the hot springs had added to their travel time to Convocation Academy, but it had also had the virtue of confusing their trail—and giving everyone much-needed recovery time.
He extracted himself from under the sleeping Alise, gratified that she simply mumbled a protest and turned over, burrowing more deeply under the blankets.
She was so sexy and adorable, Cillian had to apply serious willpower to leave her, firmly turning his back on the enticing sight and exiting the carriage wearing the rumpled clothing he’d slept in.
At least they’d had the wit to take clean clothes to the hot springs to change into, though he still looked far from presentable.
Raking his hands through his hair, he found it had dried into tangles and considerable snarls in places.
Knowing how his at-best unruly curls probably looked, he resigned himself to having a rat’s nest of a dark halo to greet whoever had run into them. Hopefully no one he knew.
No such luck.
“Cillian!” Han and Iliana chorused upon seeing him.
It took him a very long moment to process the unexpected sight of the two familiars he thought he’d left safely ensconced in House Harahel.
What was it about the Knifeblade Mountains that you just happened to run into people you knew in isolated passes?
By the time he’d grasped that, however improbable, they were actually present, Iliana had engulfed him in an enthusiastic hug and Han, wearing a broad grin, was pumping his hand and slapping his shoulder—despite the relative difficulty of both actions occurring at once.
A fully healed Jadren held up his hands in the universal signal of having no idea either and Seliah pointed at the carriage, indicating she’d wake Alise. Probably a good idea.
After a lightning round of catching up on news, accompanied by a most-welcome breakfast brought by Han and Iliana, they all piled into the carriages.
They had two now, as the familiars had arrived via a very snazzy vehicle loaned by Tandiya Uriel herself, with the aim of finding Cillian and Alise and bringing them to Convocation Academy at top speed.
Alise even agreed to fill up on magic from Han and Iliana, all the better to push the air elementals along.
Cillian felt much better for Alise being replete on magic, both because the infusion improved her health even further, and because he worried that they hadn’t completely shaken their pursuers.
It had been a nice hiatus, but the closer they got to Convocation Center, the more likely it seemed they could be located and possibly stopped.
Especially as Han and Iliana had been able to locate them fairly easily, albeit with assistance from Provost Uriel.
Despite popular sayings otherwise, only a few roads led to Convocation Center and the nearer they were, the fewer possibilities they could be anywhere else.
What Cillian hadn’t anticipated was that Alise would insist on him getting his own magic replenished by Han and Iliana.
“By the sound of it, you’re going to be using your library wizardry quite extensively when we arrive,” Alise commented with a line of concern between her winged brows.
“Though I don’t know what they all expect you to be able to do.
You can’t just decide to decode Anciela’s data. ”
“I have a few documents that I think could be the key,” Iliana said, “but I really don’t have confidence in any of them. I keep thinking I’d have a eureka moment with something.”
“You didn’t have a lot of time to look.” Han patted her thigh, reassuring her.
The four of them rode in the Convocation Academy carriage, giving Jadren and Seliah the privacy of theirs—along with the opportunity to use the fresh grooming imps Han and Iliana brought, since they hadn’t been able to use the hot springs.
Iliana made a face at Han’s words. “Unfortunately I only had—what’s a partial eureka?”
“A tingle?” Cillian suggested. “I feel for you. I kept expecting to hit upon the system or key, also, but to no avail.”
“You cracked a huge part of the riddle,” Alise said, amusing him by reassuring him in the same way Han had with Iliana. “You—both of you—are expecting way too much of yourselves.”
“That’s right,” Han put in staunchly. “This information has been hidden for centuries. The key is probably even harder to find.”
Those words tickled something in the back of Cillian’s mind.
“If House Hanneil is as heavily involved as we suspect,” he said slowly, thinking it through, “and if they have been using some or all of Anciela’s research to improve their psychic magic to unprecedented levels, then either they had access to the data before it was hidden or they have the key to decode it. ”
“Not necessarily,” Iliana countered. “I’ve been thinking about this since you told us about your theory of Hanneil grooming their children to have greater magical potentials—and I think I’m following your thought here. A Hanneil wizard could have plucked some information from Anciela’s mind.”
“I’m no psychic wizard,” Alise said, “in fact, Cillian’s magic is much more akin to mind-reading than spirit magic is, but I imagine trying to read dense scientific and experimental data from someone’s mind would be a difficult proposition. That’s more than picking up stray thoughts and secrets.”
Cillian nodded. “That’s a huge part of the Harahel specialization—learning to apply the magic to accessing and processing large amounts of information and committing them to memory.”
“So it would make sense,” Han said thoughtfully, “that a Hanneil wizard or wizards would have gleaned only some pieces, but not all.”
“Especially if Anciela didn’t want them to, and she wouldn’t have,” Alise said. “We don’t really know what happened after that council meeting, right? We can only guess at what happened to her.”
“Jadren thinks she could have been tortured and held for a time to extract this information,” Cillian told the two familiars, realizing they hadn’t been there for that conversation.
“Of course, Jadren always thinks that way,” Alise put in wryly. “Understandably. It really complicates things knowing that Hanneil likely erased memories. We may never know what actually happened.”
Cillian nodded, trying to trace the branching paths of possibility in his mind.
He kind of wished he could diagram it. Also, he was feeling that tingle, the intuition that told him he was close to something.
“If I were going to hide something—if any of you wanted to hide critical information, data you wanted to keep from your enemies, but not destroy, because you wanted to save it for your friends… How would you do that?”
“Right,” Alise breathed. “Anciela—or whoever encrypted the archives—wanted to save this information, but for the right people. She would have wanted those people, us, to find it and use it.”
“So the key has to be somewhere we can find it but no one else likely could,” Iliana agreed. “I thought of that, but there are so many texts in the folded archive and most of them I don’t think are relevant. Cillian, you thought that, too.”
He nodded absently, still mentally chasing that tingle.
“If it were me,” Han put in, “thinking strategically, I would not put the key in the same place as the texts it’s meant to decode.”
Cillian pointed at him. “Exactly. The key is not in the archives. It’s not even in Convocation Center.”
“Then where is it?” Iliana asked plaintively.
“House Phel,” Alise said with unerring certainty, then looked faintly surprised when they all looked at her. “If I wanted to secure critical information for my descendants, I would hide it in my house.”
“But House Phel sank into the swamps,” Han pointed out, “except for the main part of the manse, but even it was flooded up to several feet, including the library. And all of it stayed that way for a couple hundred years until Gabriel and Nic raised and restored it.”
“And most of the books in the library were ruined,” Iliana agreed unhappily. “What wasn’t water-damaged beyond legibility had molded. Gabriel went through every salvageable book a long time ago, even if Gabriel did come across the text that’s the key, he might have destroyed it as a dead loss.”
“Making sure the manse sank underwater and caused that damage would be an excellent way to ensure any information the Phel enemies missed was destroyed forever,” Han speculated.