With the banisters shining brightly enough to satisfy even fastidious Master Rumm, she trudged to the third floor. There she listened for Lord Danfey stirring behind his closed apartment doors. Not a whisper. She hadn’t seen him since the day she’d arrived. Rumm tended to his every need and whim. It was a wonder the master servant wasn’t worn to skin and bone with all his running up and down stairs.

Sighing, she started polishing the next stretch of banister. Strictly speaking it was the housemaid’s task, only Dilys’s mother had taken poorly and Rumm had given the girl leave to go home, because now there was Barl Lindin to take her menial place. But she’d lay a wager that if Remmie were to get sick she’d never even hear of it, let alone be permitted to see him.

She felt her breath catch, imagining. And then it caught again, from temper.

See what they’ve done, Remmie? Turned me into a poor, spineless creature leaping at shadows. When they bound my magic, they bound my courage with it. Did they mean to? I think they must have. They know exactly what they’ve done.

The pain of that was like a whip’s lash, curling round her ribs. She tried to smother her fears with harder polishing, but all that did was remind her of how very far she’d fallen.

Sweeping. Waxing. Dusting nooks and crannies. Washing windows. Wringing out sopping wet clothes and sheets and table linens in the laundry, then lumbering them outside to dry. And of course the poultry coop, which she also had to mind. Rumm was determined to keep her running as hard as he did, from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning until she fell face-first onto her thin, lumpy pillow late at night.

“Idle hands make for mischief,” he’d told her, severe. “And you, Mage Lindin, are in trouble enough.”

He really was the most disagreeable man.

From artisan mage to housemaid. If Ibbitha could see me now…

Still, no matter how much she resented all this tedious servant work, she couldn’t help admiring the banister’s beeswaxed lustre. The elegant staircase, built of rare anfra, from Vharne, had been crafted by a mage of real talent. Of particular delight, each landing’s newel post was mageworked into a cunningly lifelike beast. Her fingers caressed the antlers on the third floor’s magnificent stag.

Curse it.

Just when she thought she could endure the misery of her binding, the terrible incompleteness that made her a stranger in her own skin crashed over her yet again. Closing her eyes, she rested her forehead on her outstretched arm.

I can bear it. I have to. It won’t be forever. Not even the Council could be that cruel.