Remnants Read online

  Published by Raconteur House

  Murfreesboro, TN

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  REMNANTS

  Book Three of Familiar and the Mage

  A Raconteur House book/ published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Raconteur House mass-market edition/ October 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Honor Raconteur

  Cover © 2018 by Katie Griffin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions.

  www.raconteurhouse.com

  Other books by Honor Raconteur

  Published by Raconteur House

  THE ADVENT MAGE CYCLE

  Book One: Jaunten

  Book Two: Magus

  Book Three: Advent

  Book Four: Balancer

  ADVENT MAGE NOVELS

  Advent Mage Compendium

  The Dragon’s Mage

  The Lost Mage

  Warlords Rising

  Warlords Ascending

  Warlords Reigning

  THE ARTIFACTOR SERIES

  The Child Prince

  The Dreamer’s Curse

  The Scofflaw Magician

  The Canard Case

  THE CASE FILES OF HENRI DAVENFORTH

  Magic and the Shinigami Detective

  DEEPWOODS SAGA

  Deepwoods

  Blackstone

  Fallen Ward

  Origins

  FAMILIAR AND THE MAGE

  The Human Familiar

  The Void Mage

  Remnants

  Echoes*

  GÆLDERCRÆFT FORCES

  Call to Quarters

  KINGMAKERS

  Arrows of Change

  Arrows of Promise

  Arrows of Revolution

  KINGSLAYER

  Kingslayer

  Sovran at War

  SINGLE TITLES

  Special Forces 01

  The Midnight Quest

  *Upcoming

  I jerked around, alarmed, when I heard scrambling on the other side of the roof. I relaxed only when a familiar head popped into view and Bannen hopped onto the tiled surface.

  “Wifey,” he chastised in a thankfully low tone, “you found a hiding place and didn’t share it with me?”

  “You’re loud,” I informed him bluntly. “You’ll give us away.”

  “I can be quiet!” he insisted, voice rising a little as he crawled toward me.

  “Chance is a fine thing,” I groused. Still, I didn’t stop my husband of four days from joining me. I’d found this particular spot on the roof yesterday. It had a nice footstep of sorts because of the woodpile, and if I sat next to the chimney, practically no one could see me from the ground. In this house filled with fifty plus relatives, hiding places were essential.

  Bannen snuggled in next to me with an arm around my shoulders and a kiss, which I returned with a smile. Then he sighed, dropping his head to his chest for a moment. His long black hair fell over his shoulders with the motion.

  “What kind of madness is this, anyway? We’ve been married four days and no one wants to let go of us. Have these people all been married so long that they’ve forgotten what ‘honeymoon stage’ means?”

  “Apparently,” I groaned. I angled my back so I could lean against him a little more firmly. “I’ve been sitting here and thinking. We need to come up with an excuse to leave.”

  “Only an emergency would do it, I think. My parents are not willing to let go of us right now. They’re still in celebration mode.”

  Thinking hard, I ran through possible scenarios in my head. Most of them were completely ludicrous. Then the obvious occurred and I stopped to really consider it. Would that work? “Toh’sellor.”

  Bannen lifted his head to look at me oddly. “Toh’sellor’s been dealt with.”

  “It’s strange, but people are of two different opinions about that. They either believe Toh’sellor has been completely defeated and will never rise again, or they believe I’ve only killed the visible part of it and it’ll gather strength and return in the future. Your parents are in the latter camp.”

  He opened his mouth to respond, then visibly changed the words before actually speaking. “I sensed something the other night, but I thought that was old fears speaking. I didn’t realize they still thought that.”

  “I think it was something I said that put the fear in their heads,” I admitted, splaying a hand in an open shrug. “I told Eo’ma that she didn’t have to worry about Toh’sellor escaping containment this time.”

  “Oh,” Bannen said with a wealth of understanding. “That would do it. My family believed you’d destroyed it completely. They didn’t realize any trace of it was left.”

  “I’m not sure how the rumors got twisted around so bad that the truth of what happened didn’t make it out. I mean, we were directly involved with that fight, and your family still hasn’t gotten an accurate account.” Although I had tried. I’d gotten interrupted so many times with wedding questions that eventually I’d given up.

  A calculating expression flitted over my husband’s face, his almond-shaped eyes narrowing to mere slits, one slim eyebrow slightly quirked. “Is it wrong of me that I want to use that fear as the leverage we need?”

  “Bannen. Dearest. Between wedding prep, wedding, and after party, we have literally been here three weeks. The wedding especially sucked us low on funds. We have got to get back to work.”

  Nodding decisively, he let go and headed for the roof edge. “Manipulation it is.”

  Sensing that he had a plan, I readily followed him to the edge even though it was nowhere near the handy woodpile. Bannen flipped neatly off, the style reminiscent of an acrobat, and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a little. Show-off. He held outstretched hands to me, and without a second of hesitation, I hopped off. I had no doubt he’d catch me. I’d have to be much higher up than this to give him trouble.

  I had a weightless moment where nothing but air surrounded me, sending an adrenaline spike up my spine. Arms that felt like iron bars caught me firmly against an equally hard chest. I grinned down at Bannen, a warmth rising in my cheeks. “It’s always so much fun when you do that.”

  “It’s like a crazy trust exercise,” he agreed, grinning back at me. “The fun kind. Alright, stop grinning, we have to do Serious Face.”

  “Right.” I regained my footing and ran a hand over my cheeks and mouth, rearranging them into Serious Face. I thought of it as a cross between I-mean-business and This-is-important. We stopped and checked each other, like two women would each other’s makeup. Satisfied, we went back into the house.

  It felt overly warm in here—partially because of the fire in the kitchen hearth, mostly because of the fifty people crammed inside. Even though the weather possessed a strong hint of coming winter, I found the roof far more comfortable because of the tight quarters inside.

  “There you two are,” Eo’ma scolded, a frown tugging at the corners of her mouth. She didn’t shake her finger at us, but the gesture was implied. “Renata, we must teach you more of the home recipes.”

  More cooking?! Just how many home recipes did Z’gher have? I’d done nothing but cook, eat, and participate in ceremonies since our arrival here.


  Bannen hastily cut in, “Eo’ma, we really, really can’t stay any longer.”

  “You always say that—” his mother complained.

  I cut her off before she could launch into her usual rant. “Eo’ma, we’re worried about Toh’sellor.”

  Everyone within earshot stopped in their tracks. The word spread and I could hear people saying something to the others throughout the house. I ignored it and focused on her.

  Worrying at her bottom lip, Eo’ma frowned at me. “You said something like this before. I thought you destroyed it.”

  “I destroyed about 99% of it,” I responded. How did I explain this to her? “Think of Toh’sellor like a nut with a shell surrounding it. The shell of Toh’sellor is comprised of energy and materials it has collected. Dirt, stone, sunlight, all of that. I destroyed the shell and exposed the nut—or in this case its core—but I was incapable of destroying that core.”

  “It’s chaos, Eo’ma,” Bannen chipped in, as he always did when I start floundering. “The core of Toh’sellor is pure chaos. There’s no order to it, no rhyme or reason, no structure. It’s not something that can be destroyed. The best she could do was destroy everything it had gathered, take it down to a flicker.”

  “Which I did, and now the core is under a containment barrier, but it makes me nervous. I don’t know that a containment barrier will hold Toh’sellor for a long time.” Maksohm said it would for about six months, and I trusted his opinion. But she didn’t need to know that part. “I’d like to check in on it, make sure the barrier is holding.”

  She didn’t like this. No one liked what we were saying. I felt a little bad about worrying them like this just to have an excuse to run away. But at the same time, everything I said was truth. Their fears would ease as time passed and they realized I had it all well in hand.

  “If this is still dangerous,” my father-in-law appeared in the doorway, slipping sideways to move past people, “then surely the MISD agents posted near it will alert you.”

  “I’m sure they will when they see something dangerous,” I agreed readily. “But remember, my eyes are much better than theirs. I can see things they can’t.”

  “A’ba,” Bannen gave his father an exasperated look, as only a child can to a parent, “which would you rather do? Patch the dam when it cracks, or deal with the flood after the dam breaks?”

  Our parents looked at each other, troubled and upset, and finally relented with unhappy nods. Since they’re always unhappy when we’re gearing up to leave, I ignored that too.

  “Of course, if you must go to keep us safe, then you must go,” my father-in-law relented. “But we want you back here before the end of the year.”

  Bannen smiled at them and gave each a quick hug. “We’ll do our best.”

  I translated that promise without difficulty: ‘We’ll do our best to avoid that.’ Truly, his family was wonderful, but this habit of trying to keep us for months at a time made us want to avoid visits altogether.

  It took effort, but I kept Serious Face on, hugged everyone goodbye, threw my belongings and all of the presents into my luggage, then struggled to close the flaps. You could say this about Z’gher: they weren’t stingy when it came to weddings. A lot of my presents were amazingly beautiful. I already had half of what I needed in order to start a home.

  Bannen had four bags, I had six, and it took a cart and some muscle to get us to the local train station. Then more hugs goodbye while Bannen got our tickets, a food basket thrust in my hands, and another round of hugs given until Bannen pulled them off of me so we could actually board the train.

  I clambered onto the narrow confines of the passenger train, relieved to the depths of my soul that the wedding was finally over with. Whoever dreamed of having a large wedding was crazy. I plopped onto the padded bench and stretched out, legs and arms flopping every direction, reveling in the space. Which was saying something, because this passenger train didn’t have large cabins like some of them did. My free arm actually hit the opposite wall.

  My husband flopped onto the other bench, mirroring me, and we didn’t say a word to each other for ten solid minutes. Peace was blissful. Space was blissful. Being on a train that smelled of oil and smoke was blissful.

  The train jerked a little as it got underway, the speed slowly ramping up as the engines warmed. I let my eyes close as the sensations rolled over me.

  “Wifey.”

  I grunted, not budging an inch.

  “What are we going to do with all of that luggage? We can’t keep hauling it around, the baggage fees will kill us.”

  He made a very good point. “Ship it to someone for safekeeping?”

  “Where? Mary certainly doesn’t have the room. Tarkington could likely put it in your old workroom, but then we’d have to go all the way down to Corcoran to retrieve it.”

  And it would likely take a pretty amount to send it that far to begin with. Not to mention that Corcoran would love to get their hands on us. They seemed to think they still had jurisdiction over me since I’d initially trained there. Tarkington sometimes forwarded letters from the Corcoran Magic Council with their demands. So far, I took great delight in soundly ignoring them. But it would be hard to do that if we did go back to Corcoran.

  “Maybe MISD Headquarters?”

  I heard the rustle of clothing as he sat up a little. “Does that mean you want to sign up with them after all?”

  “The more I think about it, the more I want to do it.” Alright, maybe I should sit up for this conversation. It was rather important. I levered myself up, swinging my legs off the bench so I could sit up properly. “For one thing, it means steady income. No more hunting for jobs, no more lean months, no more haggling or negotiating.”

  “That alone is tempting,” he admitted. “Is that all there is to it?”

  “Vee alluded that if we wanted to form a permanent team with her and Chi, we could probably do it. Because my magic is so strange, I can make the argument that I need more than one person to protect me for the bigger jobs.” I shared a sardonic look with him because I rarely ever got called for the smaller jobs these days. My reputation only seemed to draw the impossible projects to me. That was part of the problem, actually. No one seemed to think I’d take the more reasonable projects, the ones that paid a moderate amount. Others tried to get me to do the physically impossible. Sometimes I couldn’t find a project for two or more weeks at a time because of it, which made budgeting challenging in the extreme.

  Bannen caught my hand, a thumb stroking over my wedding ring in idle circles. “I never thought that defeating Toh’sellor would cause us trouble like this.”

  “I’m not sure if I thought at all about the future. I was so focused on how to defeat him, nothing else really occurred to me.” Although, even if I had thought of it, I wasn’t sure what I could have done differently to change the outcome. “Are you against the idea of joining?”

  “No, not really. I like the MISD. I like the agents we’ve met, I like their standards, and you know they have great fun with all the trouble they get into.” Making a face, he admitted, “I just keep remembering all of those after-action reports we had to write. I hate paperwork.”

  “I hate your hatred for paperwork,” I snarked right back at him.

  The rat fink laughed. “Thank you for doing that, by the way.”

  “It was either write the report for you or miss the wedding. I honestly don’t know if I made the right choice.”

  Undeterred, he laughed harder. Some husband he was.

  When the chuckles subsided, he admitted, “I’m not against signing up, but I have a few questions I want settled first. I want to know what city we’ll be based out of. I know Chi and Vee bought a house, so it’s possible to have a semi-permanent place of our own. I want to know if we really can form a permanent team with them. That’ll make the job much more fun.”

  “And much safer,” I agreed whole-heartedly. “Maybe we can write it
into the contract? Maksohm told me unofficially that I could basically name my terms. The MISD higher ups are salivating to get their hands on us.”

  “That perversely worries me.”

  “Doesn’t it?” I studied his expression, but he actually didn’t seem all that worried about the concerns he’d brought up. One of the things I loved about Bannen was that he stated what he thought. I never had to second guess what he felt. He’d tell me. I agreed with his concerns, and I definitely wanted to see certain things in writing. Still, I felt like this was a very good option for us, and the possibility of getting to work with Vee and Chi excited me. “Let’s go do that quick spot check on Toh’sellor’s remains and then head to MISD Headquarters.”

  “With all of our stuff?”

  “Might as well? Once we sign up, they’ll surely tell us what city we’ll be based out of. I vote we just move it to the right place.” A thought struck and I pondered it for a moment before asking slowly, “They give signing bonuses, right?”

  “Yes, and yes, I totally plan to get enough of a signing bonus for us to put a deposit down on a place.”

  Of course he’d already thought of this. Then again, he was the one in this relationship that tended to think ahead. “You think we’ll have time to get settled into a place before they throw us into the thick of things?”

  “Don’t borrow trouble, wifey. We don’t need any help in that regard.”

  I looked at the remnant of Toh’sellor with mixed feelings. I had no idea what Rena saw when she looked at it, but to me it looked like a rather jumpy gas flame. It sparked all different colors, whisking in and out of a flame shape, then spiraled up before reverting to some different form. To think it started this small in the beginning, and because it went unchecked, grew to a monster that swallowed a mountain range. Unbelievable.

  Rena studied it hard for a full minute and then beamed at the agent hovering nearby. “Agent Wilkes, you can relax. The barrier around it is working perfectly.”