Daisy clasped her hands together, awarding Gabriel with a hopeful smile. “There is healing magic? And we’ll have someone right here to do it! This is wonderful news, Gabriel. Thank you!”
“Nic gets the credit for thinking of it, and for setting up the exchange,” Gabriel told her. “We’ll have other help, too, to fix up the manse. Wizards who can make furniture and put in glass, and so forth.Ifwe can lift it out of the water.”
“Which we can,” Nic said firmly.
“Not by tomorrow,” he cautioned the three looking at him expectantly.
“I disagree,” Nic countered.
“Disagree all you like,” Gabriel said with measured patience, “but even you can’t bend reality to your expectations.”
She fluttered her lashes. “Want to place a bet on that?”
“You two,” Daisy said on a laugh. “I’m so happy yours is a love match. It doesn’t always happen under circumstances like yours.”
“They’re clearly two peas in a pod,” GF agreed. “What’s for dessert, Narlis sweetie? Let’s have some and send these lovebirds on their way.”
Narlis came over with a glistening strawberry pie and set it in front of Gabriel, to his father’s comical dismay. “You’re a good boy,” Narlis told him, and kissed him on the forehead.
“Narlis’s strawberry pieis now my favorite thing in the entire world,” Nic announced as she mounted Salve. “The entire meal was delicious, in fact.”
The pie had been especially good, redolent of spring sunshine and sweet cream, the pastry flaky with butter. “Mom was very flattered that you were so complimentary.”
“I wish she wouldn’t worry so much about me being a fine lady, blah, blah, blah,” Nic said, drawing up the hood of her cloak against the persistent drizzle. “Her food and the other meals people have been sending over are as good as anything ever served at House Elal.”
“I wonder if we could get the recipe for that gravy we had in Ophiel?” Gabriel asked.
Nic grinned at him. “And the garlic-infused mashed potatoes. Weneedthose recipes. I’m going to investigate.”
“I wasn’t serious,” he protested, realizing belatedly that he needed to be careful about expressing desires of any kind. Between her magically induced desire to please him and her innate determination, she took his least yen as a directive to make it happen.
“I am,” she replied, undaunted. “House Phel will serve delicious food if I have anything to say about it, which I do. Why not collect the best recipes we encounter? There are a few I’d like to extract from Missus Ryma back in Wartson, too. I know a few magical conveniences that might tempt her into a trade, too. Hmm.”
“Perhaps we should concentrate on the tasks before us?” he suggested.
She sighed. “Are we going to argue about whether or not to try to lift the house out of the swamp again?”
“Well, no, because you took care of that—didn’t you?—by enlisting my parents to the cause.”
She shrugged, a dim figure in the rainy twilight. “That wasn’t my intent. They’re proud of you, Gabriel, and they deserve to be. And you deserve to feel good about your wizardry once in a while, instead of forever agonizing over it.”
“Ah.” Now her ulterior motives became clear. “All of this is by way of luring me back into the arcanium.”
She huffed a sound of exasperation. “It’syourarcanium! I shouldn’tneedto lure you there. It’s just a tool, Gabriel. Nothing more or less. A tool is only what you make of it.”
There was a cold logic to that, he supposed. Though he wished on one level that he’d never insisted on finding the arcanium. Then it wouldn’t pose such a temptation, wouldn’t be filling his mind with alluring and perverse images of what could be. He couldn’t regret the result—he’d wanted to try a reciprocal bonding instead of making Nic into some kind of mindless and subservient tool in her own right. And that had worked, hadn’t it?
“We haven’t really talked more,” he said quietly, “about the reciprocal bonding and what it means for us.”
She didn’t look at him, the cowl of her hood creating a still and abstract profile. “We can’t know what it means—if anything—if we don’t work on magic together,” she finally replied.
“We worked together all day today,” he pointed out.
“Those are beginning steps. Unbonded wizards and familiars do much of the same at Convocation Academy. Part of the point of having a bonded relationship is taking advantage of that sexual give and take. You experienced that for yourself when we recharged this afternoon.”
When she had serviced him, teasing him and then driving him into erotic rapture with her mouth and hands, refusing any pleasure for herself. “Seems to me that was all me taking and you giving.” Just like with the magic. He really hated that those exchanges followed the same pattern.
“I was and am perfectly fine with that. I enjoyed what we did together.”