Or perhaps the binding would finish her. If she was kept trammelled long enough, perhaps Morgan Danfey’s incant would change her for good. Kill her power, steal her hard-won knowledge, truly make of her another Dilys. And if that were so, there’d be no more fabulous clocks or constellations, no chance to explore the length and breadth of her talent, to become the greatest artisan mage Dorana had ever seen.

Choking, she pressed cold hands to her face as shudder after shudder convulsed through her, the binding’s parting slap at a naughty, disobedient child.

I can’t let that happen. I’m no-one, I’m nothing, if I’m not a mage.

At last the shudders faded. As she dragged her sheet and blanket back up to her shoulders, she heard something clatter to the floor. Morgan Danfey’s hair clasp. When her fingers closed around the smooth, cool enamel she gasped, feeling his power call once again to hers.

Call without stirring his binding from sleep.

What was going on? She felt his power in the hair clasp. She’d felt his unbinding incant, seen its sigils, when by rights she should have been numb to it, and blind. Before his ward overcame her she’d felt the shape of that, too. It had to mean something. Something out of the ordinary.

All right. I can feel Morgan Danfey’s magework. What else can I do?

She could close her eyes. She could breathe out despair. She could open herself to his magic… and see what happened next.

The hair clasp felt warm and comfortable against her skin. More than comfortable. Comforting. Again the conviction that she wasn’t alone. Letting her puzzled mind drift, deliberately not thinking about what that might mean, she summoned from memory the shape and sound of the unbinding incant. Heard its sharp syllables. Saw its sigils burn the air. Waited and waited for the binding to wake.

But it didn’t.

“Oh, Remmie,” she murmured. “This is so strange. I’m mad. I must be. But I have to find out.”

She wasn’t brave enough to risk speaking the incant’s syllables aloud. But she uncrooked one finger… and traced its first sigil in the dark. In her tight grasp, the gold and black hair clasp shivered. Caught tight in its binding, her mage-sense shivered in reply. In the air, a flash of crimson. A sigil, that briefly burned then died out.

“It’s not possible,” she said, and started at the sound of her own voice. “It can’t be. Either I’m bound or I’m not.”

But it seemed she was both, which made no sense at all.

So does this mean I have a chance to override Morgan Danfey’s binding?

It didn’t seem likely. Nor did it seem wise. If somehow, inexplicably, she managed to unbind his binding, what then? How would she explain it when the councillor returned?