“I am sorry, my lord, but it’s best I err on the side of caution. Be sure I’ll tell you everything, just as soon as I can.”

“Morgan—” His father shifted against his pillows. “Your Council work. Is it everything I imagined?”

Pushing again to his feet, he leaned down and kissed his father’s uncomfortably cool, clammy cheek. “My lord, you would have made an exemplary councillor. And your leadership would have thrown Varen into the shade. It is a wickedness that Dorana was ever denied your wisdom.”

And then he withdrew from his father’s chamber, so that they might not be discomfited by the tears in Lord Danfey’s grateful eyes.

Alone in his own chamber, no gentle glimfire glowing, he stripped himself naked and dropped haphazard to his bed. Showed the darkness his naked face, showed it the depth of his pain as his fingers touched the naked skin where Luzena’s locket used to rest.

And in the midst of anguish, slid into exhausted sleep.

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

Binding was a terrible thing.

Skin crawling, pain simmering in her blood like water on the boil, Barl sat on the floor in the corner of a stone room deep beneath Elvado’s soaring Hall of Knowledge. Four blank walls surrounded her. The blank ceiling pressed down on her. Even if she’d had somewhere to run, she couldn’t. The same two mages who’d dragged her from Hahren’s chamber to face the Council, and then down to this bleak cell, stood sentinel beyond its heavy, brass-bound timber door. She couldn’t feel them, because the binding had left her deaf, dumb and blind, or as good as. But they’d marched her down here, ignited one tiny ball of glimfire so they could tell themselves they weren’t downright cruel, then closed that heavy door on her. And if she listened hard she could hear faint, muffled snatches of their sporadic conversation.

Most likely they were gloating, celebrating how the upstart mage had been so thoroughly chastised.

She couldn’t help but wonder what Remmie would say, could he see her now. Would her predicament at last prompt him to an exasperated I told you so? Surely he deserved to say it, having yet again been proven right. If just this once she’d listened to him, tempered her outrage with a pinch of his caution, disaster would’ve been avoided.

“But it’s a good thing you can’t see me, Rem,” she whispered to the echoing, empty stone room. “You’re far safer where you are. No unranked mage should come to notice by the Council.”