She finds herself in the darkness, in a space of silence between heartbeats. Like thistledown she floats through herself. Like a breeze she hears herself sigh. With her closed eyes opened inwards she sees the binding laid upon her. She sees Morgan Danfey’s fingerprints on the needle that against her will has stitched her tight and bound her to pain. There are gold threads wrapped around her. They are beautiful. Like him. In the silence she feels his power. She sees his sigils brightly burning. They are the knots that keep her bound. Magelore states, unequivocal, that the mage who utters the binding incant must be the mage who breaks it. But in this dark, silent place she knows that rule does not rule her. In this place, which is her deepest self, she can unbind his binding, needing neither his help… nor his permission. And she wants to. Oh, she wants to. So she becomes the seamstress and she unpicks his golden thread. Stitch by stitch she undoes him until the last stitch is undone. And then lights the darkness with his sigils… and sets herself free.

Was she drowning? She was drowning. There wasn’t enough air to breathe. Arms thrashing, lungs heaving, Barl battered her way back to the ugly, cramped cupboard Rumm had shoved her in, like a broom. She dropped the hair clasp, kicked the blanket away, thrust the pillow aside then tumbled half off her uncomfortable pallet, banging knees and elbows in the lightless room.

Without thinking, she summoned glimfire… and it chased away the dark.

“Oh, Remmie,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Remmie… what have I done?”

The impossible, it seemed.

Trembling, she called more glimfire in little glowing balls, and set them to dancing just to prove that she could. Pretending magic could only be amusing and beautiful and had never been used against her.

But the pretence wouldn’t hold.

Ball by ball she blew on the glimfire until her cramped cupboard of a room plunged back into darkness. In darkness she curled up under her blanket, breathing softly, feeling like herself again. She’d not realised how deeply altered she’d been until the ugly alteration was removed.

Until I removed it. I did it. Me.

She shouldn’t have been able to. Tampering with Morgan Danfey’s binding should have left her wracked with pain. Instead, she felt reborn. No. Not reborn. Remade. Become a new Barl Lindin, forged in the fires of injustice. The Council’s mages in their meanness, in their desire to keep all the best things for themselves and their ranked brethren, had given power to a voice that for too long was kept silent. But she’d stay silent no longer. Someone had to speak for the unranked mages of Dorana.

I wonder… I wonder… what else can I do?

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

Morgan! Morgan, are you in here?”