The Human Familiar (Familiar and the Mage Book 1)

by Honor Raconteur

  “Wait,” Rena pleaded breathlessly. Sprinting past him, she leaned against the doorjamb to stick her head out of the kitchen and yell, “MASTER! KITCHEN!”

  I could hear Tarkington trip over something, or drop something, as there was a clatter from his workshop. Really, the man was terrible at dealing with surprises and a bit of a klutz, he always dropped something when startled. Then I heard his footsteps as he ran to join us.

  Looking a little mussed and red in the face Tarkington demanded, “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I have the answer to why Renata called a human familiar,” Trammel announced again, expectantly.

  Tarkington did not disappoint. “You do?!” he demanded incredulously.

  Finally getting the reaction he was aiming for, Trammel went back to smiling. “I do indeed. The answer was in her the entire time.” Pointing a finger at Rena, he focused on her as he explained, “Your magic is extremely difficult, young magess. More than you imagined. Its very nature is destructive, so much so that when you don’t put it actively to use, your magic naturally carries over to its nearest gestalt of elements. And since you’re controlling it so that it doesn’t just randomly lash out, your magic focuses on the only thing that it can: its host.”

  I had a horrible, gut-wrenching feeling wash over me. The bond reacted too, but because I didn’t have an active target, it just buzzed and stuttered unhappily. I put a hand to my chest, trying in vain to hold it still, to keep it from distracting me. “Wait. You mean her own magic is killing her?”

  “That is an oversimplification,” Trammel informed me calmly, as if he were explaining weather patterns. That tone made me want to break his nose. “Her magic is, in fact, breaking down the ‘schematic,’ if you will, of its host’s form. It is doing this very slowly because of her constant use of it. The drain on its power stymied the destruction.”

  Rena looked physically ill. I’d seen corpses with better color. I crossed to her in two steps, catching her around the shoulders before she could sink to the floor. The physical contact helped to steady us both, a little, but in truth, I felt like joining her there. “Can we stop it?” I demanded of him.

  “There’s no need.” The man looked so pleased that I came close to punching him. Again. I was sure I’d like him better with a broken jaw. That way he couldn’t keep talking. “As I said, there’s a reason why she called for a human familiar. Renata, your magic, of course, does not actually wish to destroy you. It would be suicidal; it relies on its host to exist, so naturally it wants you to live as long as possible.”

  “Wait,” Tarkington interrupted, a hand to his head as if he were trying to keep his brains from leaking out his ears, a feeling I shared. “You’re acting as if her magic is an entity of its own. Magic doesn’t have any will.”

  “Is that what those fools of the Council told you?” Trammel snorted dismissively. “You poor man, you believed that? Of course magic has an awareness. You think that you can do a summoning spell that vague and somehow wind up with exactly what you need every time, and that magic has no part in divining your true thoughts? Your magic is your partner, a silent one, that exists not only to please you but also to sustain its own life force by using you as a host. It is a symbiotic relationship at its very finest.”

  Rena sucked in a shocked breath and a fine tremor danced along her skin. I tightened my grip on her, worried that she’d either have a breathing attack or pass out. Her breathing went high, in and out, expression petrified. I tried to imagine what it must be like, living in a body that held magic, magic that destroyed you with every heartbeat, and felt like my own heart would fail at just the thought. “While all of this is very fascinating,” I gritted out between clenched teeth, “can we please get back to why Rena shouldn’t be worried about dying?”

  Trammel had the sort of ego that loved being able to explain things to the plebians. He took great delight in answering me, a superior tone in his words as he did. “You, Bannen Hach, are what’s keeping her alive. As I said, her magic doesn’t actually want its host to die—but by its very nature it destroys, and now it’s degraded her structure so much that it can’t maintain it. However, the magic knew how to fix the problem—it magically linked her to another human being. It is literally using its connection to you to ‘remember’ how a human is supposed to be formed. You are its blueprint to restructure her physical being.”

  I was what, now?

  Rena had a death grip on my shirt, her eyes glued to Trammel. “The reason why I suddenly started to feel better, my hair growing back, my lungs not fighting for breath, all of that—all of that was because my magic was using Bannen to rebuild me?”

  “Precisely. Also the reason why you can’t use anything but the most basic of normal spells. Your magic, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days of the year, is struggling to do the most complicated creative spell in existence. It is trying to rebuild a human so as to not destroy its host. It literally does not have the capacity to do any more creative work than that.”

  I wasn’t a magician, I couldn’t pretend to follow magical theory or any of that, but the way he explained things—it made sense. It made perfect sense. “The reason why it hurt so bad for us when we broke the bond,” I said hoarsely to the woman clinging to me, “was because it was literally killing you to be separated from me.”

  Rena looked up at me and I think she had been hit with so many surprises that this new one couldn’t really register with her. Not yet. I kept expecting tears but didn’t see any, just shock, and I had a feeling she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around everything.

  “That as well,” Trammel confirmed easily. “I have not yet figured out why your magic is inclined to deconstruct so strongly—it’s very off-balance in that sense. However, I’m pleased to know that I have resolved at least one of the questions that I had come here with. The other, I believe, will take more time and research. At any rate, I have all the information from you that I need. At least for now. I’ll return home in the morning.” With a nod to us, casual and relaxed as if he hadn’t just dropped a building on us, he turned and sauntered out of the kitchen.

  Rena staggered as she put her weight properly back on her own feet, pushing past me and heading for the stairs. I watched her retreat to her room and didn’t try to follow. This was too much. She needed a minute to herself, I sensed that, and could respect it. I certainly needed a minute.

  Tarkington sank to the floor, back braced against the cabinets and just sat there with a glazed look in his eyes. As I felt about the same, I joined him on the floor and stared blankly at the opposite wall. I’d known since the first day that there was nothing simple about Rena. She was the very definition of complicated, in more ways than one. This, though. How was I supposed to feel about this?

  I was literally keeping her alive.

  Being a bodyguard was one thing, but knowing that another person’s every breath depended on you was different. A weight of responsibility descended that I had never felt before and honestly wasn’t sure I was mature enough to handle. It terrified me. My very soul shook under the force of this because this should never happen, this kind of dependency. I liked Rena, enough to turn my life upside and stay with her, despite all the odds that we had faced. But this? I could not leave her. For the rest of our lives I could not leave her.

  I could not say that we’d never fight. It would be ludicrous to even think such a thing, as we were very different people, and I knew that I got on her nerves sometimes, and sometimes she drove me straight up the wall, so we were going to fight. We were going to get into each other’s faces. But even if we got to the point where we couldn’t stand each other, I wouldn’t be able to leave her.

  I signed her death warrant the moment I tried.

  Another thought occurred, just as alarming, and I felt my chest constrict on it. I couldn’t die. I literally could not allow myself to die. I couldn’t keep just thinking ‘as long as Rena is safe’ and be reckless, because if I went down, she’d be
a dead woman walking.

  Both thoughts were too much. I didn’t know how to accept either truth, or what to do about any of this. Fortunately, even when completely overwhelmed, my mouth had a mind of its own. “At least we’ll be saving on doctor’s bills.”

  Tarkington snorted, then laughed, more than a little hysterically. “That’s true. I won’t need to buy her medicine anymore!”

  “Right? And I won’t have to worry about her being suddenly short on breath, or collapsing on me.”

  “But how in the world do I explain this to her parents?” Tarkington bemoaned, clutching at his head. “Or to anyone else, for that matter.”

  “Don’t try to explain it to anyone else,” I refuted, sounding calm and feeling anything but. My world had just tilted on its axis and did a shake for good measure. My mouth felt strangely detached from the rest of me. “Her family deserves to be told, but I don’t see how it’s anyone else’s business.”

  “That’s a point. That’s a good point.” He blew out a long stream of air and looked marginally more in control. “Bannen. How are you taking this?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. I wasn’t sure if I did have an answer for it. Instinct said that I needed to follow Rena at that point, so I clapped Tarkington on the shoulder and stood, sightlessly heading for her room. I tried to work out as I walked what to say to her, but my brain whirled chaotically and everything I came up with sounded lame even in my own head. I gave a tentative knock on the door with absolutely no plan on what to do next. When I didn’t get an answer, I frowned slightly and slowly pushed it open, peeking inside.

  Rena was in turtle position on the floor, with head, arms, and legs all tucked up under her chest.

  I’d gone turtle a few times myself. Going turtle right now seemed like a pretty good idea, actually. It was usually a sign that you were completely overwhelmed and you just needed to stay there until you could process it. Words didn’t normally help at this stage, so I didn’t even try. I crossed to her and draped myself over her back, keeping most of my weight on my knees and elbows so I wasn’t crushing her, but giving her good, solid contact. I felt better the instantly, the traitorous bond liking the contact no matter how emotionally upheaved we felt about this insanity. “You okay?”

  “No,” she responded in a small voice.

  Right. Me either so I understood. “Should I stay like this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  Don’t ask me how long Bannen stayed like that, curled over my back, just breathing. I couldn’t tell you. His weight never pressed down against me, never made me feel trapped; he was just there. Warm, solid, comforting. The silence and physical contact exactly what I needed to ground me until I could somehow wrap my head around the idea that my own magic had been slowly killing me.

  That was so messed up in so many ways.

  The bond kept pulling us tighter together, unhappy at our alarm, but unable to do anything constructive about it. I swear familiar bonds were ridiculously unhelpful sometimes. It wasn’t doing a single constructive thing but kicking up a fuss.

  Except, apparently, helping my magic to keep me alive.

  My irritation ebbed and I went back to that state of non-thinking because I really couldn’t get a handle on this. Any of this. How was I supposed to feel? Right now my brain felt very detached from the situation and only Bannen kept me grounded at all.

  When my legs couldn’t take the position anymore, and pins and needles started shooting through my thighs, I finally gave up and uncurled myself. Bannen drew me down into the kitchen, sat me on the kitchen counter and set about making rice cakes like nothing was out of the ordinary. I appreciated that, too. Right now I couldn’t handle questions. I didn’t have any answers.

  Usually I helped make the rice cakes, as Bannen made them at least every few days, but I couldn’t find the energy to do it now. I just watched his hands as he moved, the efficiency and confidence of them, letting them soothe me into an in-between state of aware and daydreaming.

  I stayed in that state until he popped a piece of cake into my mouth. Automatically chewing, I found that the food strangely helped pull me out of the weird spiral my mind funneled down.

  “Bodies are oddly distractible,” Bannen commented, words leading to nothing. “It’s the weirdest thing. I’ve been so badly injured my body was shaking, mind blanking, and then someone would force a bite into my mouth and my brain suddenly latched onto it. Crazy, right? Now I know that when the brain has too much to handle, food is the first go-to in order to give it something easy to do, something it can focus on without being overwhelmed.”

  That seemed to be true. My brain had turned to thinking: food? Food. Fooooood. “Are humans really that simple?” I mused.

  “On the base level, yeah, seems like it.”

  I chewed, swallowed, stole a rice cake, and set to gnawing on that. I studied Bannen as I chewed, taking in more than his expression. I didn’t know him extremely well after a month, of course, but I’d learned how to read him a little. The tense way he held his shoulders, the way his fingers kept gliding up to touch his sword hilts, the way he stood with feet shoulder length apart, all of that said to me that he was angry and wanted something to pound. But there was no target here for him to reach. Maybe because he wasn’t pushing me to say anything, I felt obligated to say something.

  “I feel unnerved.” That had to be the understatement of the century. “You?”

  “Unnerved?” he returned, trying the word out and not liking it. “That is way too mild. In fact, I can’t think of a way to describe this except guel jweo han.”

  Having my mouth full, I gave him a cock of the brow and an inquisitive noise.

  “There’s no direct way to translate it for you,” he answered, finishing off the last of the rice cakes and placing them on a plate. “It’s a little hard to explain. It means extremely frustrating, terrifying, and being at a loss as to how to respond, all at once. It’s what we say when something so dangerous and extreme happens that we don’t know how to face it.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel,” I decided. “And yet not at the same time. Part of me, strange as this sounds, is relieved.”

  Bannen braced his hands against the counter and leaned there, looking at me with an enigmatic expression. “Relieved because you finally know what’s wrong with you?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t realize until I said it how true that was. I felt relieved but at the same time I felt like I shouldn’t be, because who would be relieved to know that their own magic was destroying them? But it rang true nonetheless. “I saw so many doctors growing up, and I was constantly sick, so it’s nice to finally have an answer. ‘This is what’s wrong.’ Even better,” here I strangely felt like smiling, “is that not only do I have the diagnosis, but the cure is already in place.”

  Snorting, he turned and leaned against the counter so that our shoulders brushed each other. “There’s that. I admit that eases my mind too. The only thing that really makes me happy about this, though, is that we now have a very strong reason for people if they try to send me away again.”

  “That is what I’m happiest about,” I admitted frankly. Truthfully, that was the only part of this I felt secure about. The rest of it I could have lived without knowing.

  “Rena—” he started. Then stopped. Then tried to start again. “You realize that we won’t ever be able to separate.”

  Some part of me had realized that. I found it interesting that he brought it up first. “Yes, I know.”

  “No,” he cut a hand through the air, growing frustrated. “I won’t be able to ever leave you. I’ll kill you the moment I do. I know that familiars are with their mage until their death, but in our case that means another sixty years. And what if I don’t survive you? What if I go down—”

  Without thinking my hand raised and smacked him solidly on the back of the head. It stopped him dead and he stared at me, nonplussed.

  “You are literally my lifeline,”
I insisted, growing more irritated with every word. “My familiar, my best friend, we basically live in each other’s pockets, and I don’t want to hear about the possibility of you dying before me! Why are you thinking about the worst case scenario?”

  He chewed on that for a minute before offering, “Habit?”

  “It’s a bad habit. Kick it to the curb.”

  Lifting a hand in surrender, he grinned. “Alright, Rena. I do have a concern, though. What if we fight? What if we get to the point that we can’t stand each other?”

  “Then we make it right.” He worried about the strangest things. “Bannen, you realize the familiar bond is there to connect us, to make us want to get along, even when we’re at each other’s throats?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “We will fight,” I informed him and even as I said the words, I knew them to be true, “because we’re two very different people and we’re not always going to see eye-to-eye. But what will save us is that we’re good at talking to each other. We’re good at communicating, at compromising, and we want this to work. As long as we keep that attitude, we’ll be fine.”

  He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, looking as if he had an encroaching headache. “I think I’m freaking out about this a little.”

  “It certainly looks that way to me.” Although what he chose to freak out about was interesting. “You’re not worried about my health?”

  “Trammel is certain that as long as I’m alive, you’ll be fine. I can keep us both alive.”

  The absolute certainty of that basically radiated from him and I smiled. Physically, he knew he couldn’t protect me, but it was my heart he worried about? “What did I do to deserve you?”

  “Serial kitten killer in a previous life?” he offered.

  I threw back my head and laughed because that shouldn’t be funny but strangely was. He smiled at me, pulling me in long enough to plant a chaste kiss against my forehead. The bond buzzed and hummed happily and I grinned back at him. Deities, but this man was good for me, in every sense. How had I managed sixteen years without him?