Sketched in the margin of a page scrawled over with incomplete sigil designs, a small map of Dorana and its immediate neighbours. Scribbled beneath it a short, stark question. Are we safe? She frowned at it, startled.

How odd. Of course we’re safe. Why wouldn’t he think so?

She couldn’t imagine a reason.

Several pages further on, past more partly worked-out sigils, six different variations of the one incant, scrawled through and scribbled over with countless pen—strokes, messy as chicken-scratchings in the dirt. Written underneath them, a revealing cry from the heart.

Every attempt ends in failure. I begin to lose hope.

Oh. He sounded so—so—vulnerable.

Moved, discomfited, she hastened through the rest of his notes.

At the back of the notebook she found another kind of incant entirely. A reworking of something called Hartigan’s transmutation. She’d not heard of it before and wasn’t certain she understood Morgan Danfey’s intent in the way he wanted to alter it. What she did see, almost immediately, was that it was a longer version of the incant that he’d so despairingly scrawled over.

And, now that she could read it properly, she could also see where he’d made his fundamental mistake.

But as she re-read his preamble, trying to fathom the new incant’s purpose, the attic’s closed door crashed open.

“Mage Lindin?” Framed in the doorway, Morgan Danfey stared in furious astonishment. “What are you doing?”

She had no idea how to answer. Took a prudent step sideways, away from his workbench and notes.

The councillor stepped over his own threshold and slammed the door shut. “Who unbound you?”

Heart hammering, she met his blazing gaze. “No-one. I dreamed again. It was terrible. As I came wake, screaming again, the incant unravelled.”

He shook his head. “You’re lying.”

If she looked away, if she so much as blinked, he’d be on her like a wolf.

“How else could the binding have broken?”

“And the warding on this attic? I suppose that unravelled too?”

Remmie liked to play spindle stones down at The Greased Pig. Sometimes he won the game and sometimes he lost, but he never risked a few cuicks. He always gambled with trins.

“If you’re going to wager,” he liked to say, “then best make it worth your while.”

Barl lifted her chin. “There was no ward, Councillor. And the door was unlocked. It’s not strange you forgot to secure it, sir. There is much on your mind.”

“What?” Incredulous, he laughed. “You must think me Feenish, that I’d swallow pap like that.” Then his angry amusement faded and he was staring again, his fingers clenching and unclenching, white-knuckled, by his sides. “I want the truth, Mage Lindin. You’ll not leave here until I get it.”

Her skin prickled with cold sweat. What remained of her breakfast churned in her belly like swill.