Perhaps I could claim the incant unravelled itself in the midst of my suffering. If I made him feel guilty enough, he might not look too closely at the lie.

Oh, she was mad to even think of it. Undo Morgan Danfey’s magework?

I can’t. How can I? I’m not a tapestry he’s stitched, that I can unstitch like a seamstress. Magework has rules. I’m bound. And Morgan Danfey is a powerful mage.

The most powerful she’d ever met. And what was she?

Desperate.

Tapestry. Perhaps that was the key. She wasn’t Barl Lindin, a flesh-and-blood woman, she was Barl Lindin’s embroidered recreation. Embroidered women weren’t afraid. They didn’t miss their brothers, or feel their bellies churn because they were weighed down by chains of magic. Chains with barbs in them, that bit, vicious as any hunting hound.

If I’m a tapestry woman, perhaps the binding won’t wake.

A forlorn hope, surely. But it was the only hope she had.

Her breathing unsteady, Barl wriggled until she lay flat on her back, her spine taut as a drawn bowstring. In her fisted hand she felt the hair clasp, warm and somehow alive.

Then, without warning, she was deathly afraid. Only once before had she ever felt this kind of fear. The day her parents died. When she’d realised that aside from Remmie she was alone. For a moment, just a moment, she’d stared into a pitch black abyss. The warm and familiar stolen, her whole world turned to ice. But then Remmie had fallen to pieces, grieving, and there’d been no time for fear or despair. He’d needed her to be strong, so she was strong. And that was that.

I’m still strong. I am. The binding hasn’t ruined me quite yet.

To prove it, she closed her eyes and went looking for the way to break Morgan Danfey’s magework.