She’d already listed the relevant house crests, so he made quick work of sending the missives. Once they’d cleared the desk, he studied her, thoughts obscure behind his brooding mask, though hints of steam lingered in the air.
“I thought we’d practice working together on some wizardry,” he finally said.
“Of course.”
Looking annoyed by her agreement, he opened his mouth to say something, then firmly closed it again. “I’ll show you what I was trying to do with the wing that sunk again. I’ve been thinking that if we work piece by piece, it shouldn’t require huge expenditures of magic all at once.”
Privately, she didn’t agree that it would work very well at all that way, but she was also quite certain they didn’t have enough magic stored up between them to raise the entire manse at once. “All right,” she agreed, waiting for him to lead the way.
He didn’t move, glaring at her. “Are you going to be this way from now on?”
Biting back a sigh, she didn’t ask “what way?” like she really wanted to. He was teetering on the edge of fury, and she didn’t want to fight with him. Abruptly weary, feeling every lost hour of sleep from the night before, she searched for a reply. “I’m trying to be agreeable.”
“Like this sweet farm-girl wife you seem to think I want?” he shot back through his teeth.
Reining in her temper, she kept as calm as she could. “I don’t like fighting with you, Gabriel. I apologize for the things I said last night. I’m doing my best to get along with you.”
“By beingobedient,” he sneered.
“I don’t know what else to do!” she fired back, losing her resolve and nearly shouting at him. “I don’t know who you want me to be.”
“I want you to be yourself.”
No, he didn’t, but she couldn’t say so without contradicting him, so she set her teeth and nodded. “All right, I’ll try to do that.”
“Stop being so agreeable!” He took a step closer, hands flexing as if he wanted to seize her. So tempting to taunt him so he would, but that would only lead them back in the same circle.
“Do you even hear yourself?” she asked as calmly as she could, refusing to give ground. “You’re yelling at me for being agreeable.”
A low sound of frustration snarled out of him, but he took a step back. “Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “I don’t want to fight with you either.”
Could have fooled her. He was spoiling for a fight. More, he was boiling over with frustration, sexual and otherwise. And the fool wizard wouldn’t do what he needed to, for either of them. “Let’s go to work on that wing, then,” she suggested.
With a stiff nod, he turned, waiting for her to step up and walk beside him.
“Any luck finding Seliah?” she asked as they went down the main hall and turned into the dining hall and scene of the dinner debacle the night before. She raised a brow at the shattered dishes and the floor dusted with silver. Gabriel had told her once how, when his magic had first come upon him, that he’d awakened to find he’d layered the floor silver with transformed moonlight in his sleep. She hadn’t asked him what he’d been dreaming about when that happened, but this scene was like looking at her own emotional residue from the restless night, damningly scattered across the floor. She wouldn’t care for there to be such glaring evidence of her own rawness, so she refrained from commenting.
“No luck there,” Gabriel replied steadily, meeting her questioning gaze as if daring her to say something about the mess. “I have my best trackers looking for her, but she’s disappeared into the marshes. It could be days before anyone locates her.”
Something there he was leaving out. “Can you find her?”
Slowly, he nodded. “I always could, though over the years I stopped chasing her down every time she disappeared. It seemed to help her, to be away from people. At least, she always came back calmer. Does that sound congruent with what she’s struggling with as a latent familiar?”
Nic nearly said there was no such thing as a latent familiar—only someone living among people without the knowledge to recognize her nature—but she and Gabriel seemed to have established a kind of detente, so she didn’t want to disrupt that.
“I don’t really know,” she replied honestly. “All I know about untapped familiars is from stories, and the cautions of my teachers at Convocation Academy.” She braced herself for a scathing observation from him on that source of information, but he only nodded thoughtfully. Maybe he was trying, too. “I can tell you that the magic builds up inside, and it can feel like…”
How to describe it?It felt a lot like sexual frustration, like needing to come and not being able to, which was decidedlynotan analogy she wanted to use with him when they’d managed to find a fragile peace. And he might not react well to thinking of his little sister in those terms.
“You can be honest with me,” he said, sounding almost gentle, then raked a hand through his disordered silver curls, the black streak standing out like a lightning bolt made of night. “I realize that I’ve been asking you to be honest and then punishing you when I don’t like the answer.”
“Did Vale give you that counsel?” she asked with a smile. It helped more than she’d have imagined to have the tension between them relieved somewhat.
Gabriel cocked his head. “How did you know I slept in the stable?”
“There aren’t that many dry places nearby to sleep,” she pointed out, then risked edging close enough to pluck a wisp of straw from his sleeve. “And there’s physical evidence.”
He grimaced. “My clothes are in the master suite, and I didn’t want to disturb your rest.”