Once we were out of Max’s earshot, I said, “So you’re a GP?”

“Indeed. Now, have you been experiencing any fatigue or – ?”

“I already have a GP at home who’s asked me all that,” I cut in. “And Malas here, of course.”

“Hmm. Good point. We could save a lot of time if I requisition your existing medical records from the kuracar. Come along; it’ll be faster if you give him direct permission.”

That’s what was niggling at me. Permission. In the few minutes I’d been talking to Ed, he’d always made his intentions clear, but at no point had he actually asked my permission about anything. Max clearly didn’t want him here, he had no regard for what I thought… best to cut this off at the head.

And that was going to be difficult. The standard strategy for if someone got pushy with me over familiarity stuff was to heavily imply that I had some sort of agreement with Max, and let him deal with it. But I wasn’t going to force Max to shield me from his family. He’d do it, of course, and would probably be confused about my reluctance, but I wasn’t putting him in that situation. I needed something else.

“Your spell,” I said conversationally as we made our way down the corridor. “Force evocation. They used to think mine was one of those.”

“They were wrong?”

“No idea.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“What does yours do, specifically?”

“I can generate force fields. Do you know the way to the medical ward? These tunnels all look alike to me.”

I’d paced these corridors out for Max’s maps enough that I did know the way without checking, but I pulled out my tablet and very slowly brought up the map. Max’s childhood tutor made force fields. I remembered Max’s wariness of the force fields over the school beds, how he’d spend as little time as possible behind them before I’d discovered how to bypass them.

Yeah, there was no way I was going to make Max protect me from this guy.

What options did I have, then? To Max’s family, like the rest of the world, his successful human familiarity link was clearly the pinnacle of his achievement so far. I hadn’t even considered what kind of pressure they must be putting on him. Of course they wanted to help him figure out how, exactly, it worked, sending their specialists to look me over, and pushing him to capitalise politically on this in every way he could. I needed to twist the scenario so that that looked like a bad idea.

It helped that the whole situation was a big stack of lies. It meant I could swap them out for new lies without too much trouble. But what lies?

“We have to go left here,” I told Ed, which was a lie. “But I’m not sure how helpful you expect to be. I don’t need more people poking and prodding at me.”

“It’s vital that we figure out exactly how your link works and what effect it has on your body.”

“Why?”

“So that it can be replicated. If others want to safely – ”

“Not to be callous, Ed, but I don’t see how that’s my problem. I’m not a scientist or an engineer. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake isn’t my job. And this isn’t some great world-improving discovery; people have been getting by just fine using animal familiars for centuries. In fact, this way is more difficult and less convenient, since Kylie and I are far apart from each other quite often. If others are so keen to mess up their own lives, it’s not my job to help them.”

Ed narrowed his eyes. “Then why did you agree to the experiment in the first place?”

I shrugged. “I had my reasons.”

There; step one was complete. I’d made it nice and clear that the point of resistance here was me, not Max. Ed would be able to tell the Acanthoses that I was the problem.

But that didn’t solve the issue on its own. If I just refused to play along, they’d put more pressure on Max to put pressure on me, and my continued refusal would be read as his failure. I needed to bypass that, somehow. I needed to make Max not pressuring me, and them not pressuring Max, look like the politically smart move.

Ed tried another tack. “There is your welfare to worry about, as well. Nonus is very concerned about your wellbeing.” I had to give him props for that move; objectively true, but implying that Max wanted me to get Ed’s help, which he clearly didn’t. “Most human familiars die quickly, dramatically, and painfully. We need to know why your link is stable so that we can be sure it will remain so. If it fails – ”

“This again? ‘Do what I want or die’? Why does every single person who wants something from me try this tack? Do I need to make pamphlets to explain why I don’t care?”

“You don’t care about probable death?”

“Ed, listen. I got a curse lodged in my chest, right here, when I was six months old. I’ve been in mortal peril every damn day since then, and my whole life, people who have wanted the absolute best for me have explained why it’s so important that I do what they say, or I could die. Don’t yell at your mother, or the curse could kill you. Be good for the doctor, or the curse could kill you. Drop an attempted murder investigation, or mage politics could kill you. Submit to these tests, or the familiarity link could kill you. Somehow, the thing I need to do to help stay alive just always happens to be giving someone else what they want from me, and I’m getting rather sick of it.” I gave this little speech without really thinking about it. These were basic facts of my life, and they didn’t require much thought to explain. I was busy considering my next move to keep these people off Max’s back.

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I could just give in and let Ed poke around in my medical records and run whatever tests he wanted; I didn’t like it, but there was no risk. But if they could bully Max on this, they’d keep bullying him whenever they wanted something from me. I had to redirect them. I had to change the narrative.

So, the current story was that Max had found out how to successfully create a safe human familiarity link, had tested it on Kylie and myself, and was keeping the knowledge close to his chest while he figured out how to make it safer and reproducible. This was probably the story his family was working with, too, although they clearly knew that Max had a lot less knowledge of how the link worked than he was implying to others. But what if… what if Ed ‘found out’ that Max wasn’t in charge here? That it was someone else’s plan, and Max had used their knowledge and expertise to perform the experiment, and had arranged things somehow so that he got all the credit? That would work. Then, Max looked like he’d made an incredibly smart political move, but he wasn’t in control of the situation; he had to keep pleasing whoever was in control to hold onto his position in the whole thing. Ideally, if I could convince Ed of this, then Max’s family would leave him alone, or at least take his lead, not wanting to jeopardise his delicate position. If that didn’t work, then at the very least they’d bug someone who wasn’t Max.

Who, though? I could try to convince Ed that I was in charge, but that probably wouldn’t work. I didn’t have any real scientific or political status beyond that granted by the link itself. But I did have, much as I hated to admit it, a lot of connections to very powerful people. So, who should I put ‘in charge’ of the project?

Saina was the most politically powerful friend I had, but I dismissed her out of hand. She wasn’t involved in any of this, and I didn’t think she’d appreciate me revealing her secret identity over something as simple as not wanting a new doctor.

Alania was the obvious choice, since she was a very famous scientist who Max worked with, and easily the most convincing as the leader of this project. She was also on the Council that ran the school itself, which made her easily more powerful than anyone the Acanthos family could bring to bear, and someone they definitely wanted to avoid upsetting, at least while Max was at school. And she was our surveyanto; dealing with things like this was her job. But she had her hands full with the whole Fionnrath’s Destiny thing on top of her normal work, and expecting her to keep on top of this as well just seemed dangerous. Especially since the Acanthoses moved in the same circles as the Madjas, and the Fiore already thought Alania was building some kind of political cabal of young mages… best not to throw fuel on that fire.

Besides, I remembered the deeply disappointed look she’d given me after I’d woken up in the medical ward with the familiarity link. I didn’t want to inconvenience her with this. I didn’t want to prove her right.

Kylie, then. It made sense, the person getting a human familiar being the one running the show, but like me, Kylie didn’t have any real political power of her own. Except for the Fionnrath’s Destiny thing, and letting that get out was a monumentally terrible idea. If the Acanthoses were given the impression that their scion was taking orders from Fionnrath’s prophet… no. Just no.

I might be able to avoid the Destiny thing and imply that Kylie being my mage gave her control over me, but Max had checked familiarity laws quite thoroughly and no such laws existed. The laws mostly went the other way, giving me the right to go wherever she did and giving me extra protections against things like assault, since Kylie could claim that any attack on me counted as an attack on her as well – they were written under the assumption that mages would only make familiars out of animals they already had control over, pets and suchlike. There were no laws for human familiars – why would there be? Still, Ed probably didn’t know that, and with the way mage apprenticeships and soforth worked I could probably convince him quite easily that Kylie did have legal control over me, but it would be temporary. All he’d have to do was check, and then we’d be cornered. (Anyway, I didn’t want him bugging Kylie, either.)

Malas himself was an option. I wasn’t exactly sure how he fit into the politics of Refujeyo – I was pretty sure he wasn’t on the Council, like Alania – but he was obviously very powerful and very highly respected, and it just made sense for such a competent diagnostician to be involved in something medically dangerous and experimental. But there was no real reason for him to cooperate with such a facade; if anyone let him know that they thought he was somehow involved in our familiarity situation beyond his capacity as a doctor, he’d probably just correct them. Anyway, I didn’t trust him to protect my wishes. Oh, I was sure he’d act in what he thought were my best interestes, medically. He’d proven before that he was perfectly happy to mislead and coerce me to do that. I didn’t want him to have any more power over me than he already had.

The Magistae? Max was already relying on them for a lot of his normal political duties. But no; Max and the magistae were, so far as I could tell, equals in terms of their lineage. Giving the impression that this, his greatest achievement to date, was actually their achievement, would probably create more problems with his family in the long run.

So… a lot of options, but no perfect options. I was going to have to go with the most convincing and least complicated.

Sorry, Alania.

“Nevertheless,” Ed was saying, “your life is in danger. And you are important to my nephew. So if my assistance can be – ”

I feigned giving up. “Okay, look. If Instruktanto Miratova thinks I need another medical opinion, I’m sure Nonus will recommend you. But she trusts the kuracar’s abilities, and so do I. Thank you, really, for your offer. I’m relieved to know that Nonus has family ready to support us like this. I will keep it in mind.”

I was kind of proud of myself for that last bit, insinuating that I was taking his offer of ‘help’ for his ‘nephew’ at face value.This man wasn’t an Acanthos, and if I played his game, acting like his attempts at gathering information couched in the Acanthos family name were actually the benevolent offers of family help he was pretending they were and implying I might call in such promises later, he should back the fuck up rather than risk causing problems for the family.

It worked. Or maybe invoking Alania worked. Or maybe both. He stopped pushing, anyway.

“Indeed. Well, it was very good to meet you, Mr James,” Ed said.

“Likewise,” I lied. I turned and headed back to my room. He didn’t follow.

There, that was dealt with. For now.

Maybe I should do politics more often.