“Maman,” Nic interrupted and kept going, speaking fast. “I didn’t tell you this before, because I didn’t want you to worry—and I hoped, no, I was so determined that it wouldn’t come to this—but…” She faltered. It was too much. Tears forced their way into her eyes.
“Oh, my darling.” Maman embraced her again. “Was he cruel to you?”
“No,” Nic whispered. “Much worse.”
A perfunctory knock on the door heralded Nic’s maid Tasha, who entered with a tray holding a decanter of Elal Summer Red—though it was barely midday—and a plate of Nic’s favorite chocolate meringue cookies. “I thought the occasion called for a celebration,” she said, smiling. Then she took one look at Nic’s face and sobered. “Or comfort.”
“Thank you, Tasha,” Maman said, taking the tray and nodding at Nic to seat herself by the fire. “So the news is spreading through the household already?”
“I’m afraid so.” Tasha grimaced at that. “The proctor is telling everyone she encounters. She’s implying that Lady Veronica may not be perfectly happy with her lot.”
Stupid, Nic reflected, to have been so transparent. If she’d pretended to be happy, the proctor wouldn’t have been so on guard. Too late now.
Maman nodded in resignation. “Please turn away any visitors. Tell everyone I’m… celebrating, in private with my daughter.”
Tasha bowed, sent Nic an encouraging smile, and left again. Maman sat and poured them wine, took a cookie for herself, and settled back, watching Nic with a shrewd expression. “Tell me.”
“I felt it,” Nic said, and bit into the cookie to relieve the bitter taste of the words. The melting sweet slid into her senses with all the reassuring comfort of childhood. A sip of the wine swirled the swelling berry flavor of grapes bursting under the midsummer sun to blend with the chocolate. The taste of home.Savor it while you can.“I think it’s… Maman, I was Fascinated by him.”
“Oh, Nic,” her mother said in an appalled hush. “Are you sure?”
“How can I be sure?” Nic demanded, feeling perilously close to tears. “No one at school ever explained exactly what it feels like. Most of my teachers said it’s myth, that it’s the bonding that secures familiars to the wizards that claim them, not some…” She waved the cookie wildly, unable to find words to explain it.
“A feeling that you’d give him anything he asked of you, and love doing it, even at your own expense?” Maman filled in gently.
Nic stared at her, so many pieces falling into place. How Maman never defied Papa in any way, always melting to his will instantly, with a happy smile. “You’ve felt it, too.”
Maman nodded. Sighed. “With your papa. Even before the bonding. I so hoped you wouldn’t inherit this propensity from me. I should’ve warned you it was real, but… I hoped it wouldn’t happen to you.”
Both of them hoping for things that would never be. Nic resolved then and there never to trust hope again. It was a convenient lie, a happy trap that held you in place until the jaws closed on you. “I don’t want this,” she repeated. “This isn’t at all how we planned things. How can I manipulate him if I’m Fascinated?”
“You can’t.” Maman pressed her lips together in regret, the lines around her mouth deepening. “If only…” She didn’t finish.If only Nic had been born a wizard.“There’s nothing we can do now. It won’t be all bad, you know. There are tricks I can teach you to—”
“There is something I can do,” Nic interrupted. She didn’t want to hear Maman’s tricks for appeasing her husband and master. Nic had seen enough of their interactions to guess.
Maman eyed her warily. “What are you thinking, Veronica? You know your impatient nature gets you into trouble.”
Nic shook that off. This wasn’t being impatient. “I have to get away, to not be here when Lord Phel arrives to claim me.”
Maman stared at her, aghast, then drank down her goblet of wine in one swallow. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do know,” Nic insisted. “I can run away. There are stories of familiars who escaped the Convocation.” Lyndella had tried to escape Sylus. Of course, Sylus had found her almost immediately—and saved her from a roving band of rogue wizards who’d been intent on raping her before draining her of her magic.
“Stories,” Maman scoffed. “Romantic tales and nothing more.”
“There could be a grain of truth in them.”
“More likely there’s a hefty dollop of wishful thinking. The Convocation has ways of chasing familiars down—secrets that only wizards speak of—and they wouldn’t be happy to lose a familiar of your status and potential. The consequences would be severe.”
“More severe than me becoming a mindless slave?” Nic retorted.
Maman’s face crumpled into a rictus of shame and grief, and Nic instantly regretted her hasty words. “I’m sorry, Maman. I didn’t mean that you are—”
“Don’t be sorry,” Maman bit out. “I know what I am and the cage I live in better than anyone.”
Nic took Maman’s hand. “But Iamsorry. I know how unhappy you are.” Maman’s melancholy had always been a part of Nic’s life, like a sorrowful, dark music in the background. That was part of why Nic normally tried not to distress Maman with her own worries.
“Most days I’m not unhappy,” Maman said crisply, withdrawing her hand as she spoke the lie. “But I don’t wish my life on you. It grieves me to think of you, my fierce and talented daughter, being relegated to…” She trailed off with a grimace.