Asa seemed to read Gabriel’s darker thoughts, because he chuckled, holding up his hands in surrender. “You can pull back your magic, Lord Phel. I’m not going to betray you.” Reaching for the quill Nic offered him, Asa flipped to the final page and signed with a flourish. “I assume you want Laryn to sign also.” He beckoned to her, handing her the quill when she stood there, unmoving. “Read it, of course,” he prompted her gently, running an affectionate hand down her arm.

She tried to hand the quill back to him. “My signature has no legal significance.”

“It does here in Meresin,” Nic told her firmly. One thing about Nic—when she gave her loyalty, she gave it absolutely. She might argue Gabriel to death about bashing himself brainless against the walls of the Convocation, but she kept those arguments private. Before others, they were a united front, something he hadn’t known to value until she gave it to him.

Laryn eyed Nic with obvious, even virulent, dislike. “It’s foolishness,” she told Nic. “I am a properly bonded familiar, and thus could never go against my wizard’s wishes.”

“Then why haven’t you read the contract, as Asa directed you to do?” Nic replied softly, giving no indication that Laryn’s insulting implication had registered.

Flushing, Laryn bent over the contract, reading with such grim intensity her eyes might’ve burnt holes in the paper, flipping the pages with more force than necessary. Then she signed beneath Asa’s signature, dropped the quill on top, and turned to face Gabriel and Asa. “Any further instructions?” she bit out ungraciously.

Behind Laryn’s back, Nic wrinkled her nose, smoothing her expression before sliding the contract to Gabriel. “You’ll need to sign and seal this.”

He spun it around, plucking up the quill Laryn had dropped and offering it to Nic like a gift. “You, too.”

She opened her mouth to argue, realized her predicament, and shook her head slightly. Gabriel smiled to himself as she signed. The easiest argument he’d ever won with her. When she handed the contract back to him, he took it to his desk and opened the drawer. Well oiled and now with convenient compartments, the drawer held the House Phel seal in the same spot. Very interesting wizardry on Wolfgang’s part. Did the wizard leave everything in place and shape the desk around it?

Shaking off the musings, he withdrew the silver seal with a sense of reverence. When he’d finally grappled with his new, hugely changed life as a wizard, and had determined to restore House Phel, he’d gone to Convocation Center to complete the paperwork. They’d given him the ancient seal, which had been returned to the Convocation, they explained, when the Phel family lost their house status. From Nic, he now understood that the Convocation should’ve given him full access to the House Phel archives at the time, instead taking advantage of his ignorance by omitting that bit of information.

Still, receiving that heavy silver seal had been a thrilling moment, one whose shine had yet to fade. Despite everything he’d learned since, he still experienced that sense of gravity in using the seal, the excitement of realized ambition, and anticipation of the endless possibilities the future held. Nic had told him that part of his inheritance of the Phel magic was a connection to his ancestors. Even though he had reservations about who those wizards had been as human beings, that sense of connection trilled through him through the silver.