After dusting and beeswaxing the library and snatching her servant’s lunch—bread, cheese and pickles, how exciting—there were more chores in the kitchen. Carrots and potatoes to peel, pots to scrub. The roasting pit needed emptying of stinking, fatty ash and gobbets of charred meat and splintered bone. She nearly lost her bread, cheese and pickles over that. Once Verrick had done with gutting wild rabbit fresh-caught in the woodland she took the discarded heads and limbs and viscera out to the mansion’s kennels so Yan, the kennel man, could boil them up for the councillor’s hounds. He took the stripped, bloody pelts too, to turn into winter gloves. Then she scrubbed the kitchen bench from red back to white, pretending not to see how Verrick was delighted to be spared the bloody task.

Morgan Danfey’s library seemed an entire world away.

Last task of all, she inspected the poultry coop again. Hens, it seemed, had a habit of dropping eggs wherever and whenever they felt like… and of dropping dead without the courtesy of a warning first thing in the day.

She didn’t know whether to be relieved or dismayed that the stink of all those chickens didn’t seem so bad any more.

Chores completed, her servant’s supper of mutton, potato and carrot eaten in solitary silence, she retreated to her cupboard of a room to lose herself in the one book Remmie had managed to squeeze in amongst her clothes. Not a magework book, of course. Just a silly story about a brave Feenish warrior queen fighting to regain her lost throne. Doubtless it was all a nonsense, nothing to do with Feenish history. Since Dorana’s mages rarely travelled to other lands, the writer of this tale had most likely relied on wild imagination leavened with generous helpings of trader gossip. It didn’t matter. It was only a story, and it helped to pass the time.

But as she read, her fingers strayed to Morgan Danfey’s enamelled hair clasp, slipped for safety under her pillow. Letting the book fall open on her chest, she closed her eyes and listened for the councillor’s echoes. Waited, her mouth dry, for the waking of his binding. To her great relief the cruel incant stayed asleep… even as she felt her bound mage-sense warm to the memory of his magic, trapped within his black and gold trinket.

Subtle, it was, and intricate… yet at the same time bold. The councillor painted his power in wide brush strokes, and with delicate finesse. Again she was assailed by that odd sense of the familiar, with the conviction she wasn’t encountering anything new, only meeting an old friend. She’d never felt like this before. There was no explaining the mystery. All she knew for certain was it left her feeling… less alone.

She fell asleep almost smiling, with the clasp held loosely in her fingers and the oil lamp still burning…