His father grunted. “The day some chit of an upstart young mage upsets me is the day you can measure me for a crypt. And what are you doing with those curtains? Trying to blind me?”

“My lord, of course not. But—”

“It’s too bright, I tell you,” his father snapped. “Close ’em again. If I want the curtains open I can open ’em myself!”

Biting his tongue, Morgan eased the curtains part way across the windows. Ranmer had told him his father needed time in the sun. He’d also cautioned there would come a time when direct light would be painful, but that even so Lord Danfey must not sit in the dark with nothing but a little glimfire to leaven the shadows.

“There, my lord,” he said, turning, feigning a lack of concern while his guts writhed. “Does that satisfy?”

Irritable, his father plucked at the blanket laid over his legs and lap. “I’d be satisfied if the Council housed its miscreant somewhere else.”

“I can see that Rumm keeps her downstairs, my lord. It will be as though she’s not here.”

“But she is here!” His father slapped the arm of his chair. “And I want to know why. What maggot’s in your brain, Morgan, that you’d drag us into a nonsense the nearest judiciary should see to?”

How could he answer that when he hardly understood the why of it himself… and when what he did grasp would send his father into spasms?

“My lord, do you trust my judgement?”

His father glared. “Think that’s an answer, do you?”

“She’s here because I believe it’s best,” he said, keeping his voice level and light. “Which is, you must allow, a question of judgement.”

“I’ll allow you’re impertinent! I’m still Lord Danfey, or had you forgotten?”

“Never.”

“Then if I told you to get rid of her, you’d do it?”

Morgan crossed to his father’s chair and dropped to a crouch beside it. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

Blueish lips slackened, his father plucked again at his blanket. “The girl’s pert, Morgan. She doesn’t know her place. Looked me straight in the eye, she did, and answered me back. A cell in the nearest judiciary’s too good for her!”

“Well, my lord,” he said, coaxing, “right now she toils in the poultry run, reeking of bird manure. I think it’s fair to say she is suitably humbled.”

“In other words, she’s staying, no matter what I want.”

He touched his fingertips to his father’s bony wrist. “My lord, I’d count it a personal favour if you withdrew your objection.”