Eyes shadowed with more than grief, he smoothed a wrinkle in his sleeve. “Not even my father knows what you’ve learned here tonight.”

“Is that your clumsy way of telling me I’m trusted?”

He slapped the workbench. “Do not joke on this! It is no laughing matter!”

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Councillor, I do know what it means, that you’ve shared this work with me. You’ve given me a weapon. But I won’t use it against you.”

He sneered. “Because you want to save your brother.”

There was no point denying it. “And because what you do here is marvellous. Your incants…” Her fingers brushed his notebooks. “They’re marvellous. I want to be a part of them. Is that so wrong?”

Without shifting his gaze from her face, he summoned to hand a newly plucked flower, intact from bud to root. From the garden bed by the stables, she thought. Tanamies grew in profusion there. The blossom’s lightly fragrant, pale pink petals were brushed with droplets of dew. Little clots of damp soil rattled to the attic floor.

Gravely, he held it out to her.

“Go on,” he said, when she hesitated. “It won’t bite. And neither will I.”

Her fingers brushed against his as she took the flower. The touch shivered her, and rushed blood to her cheeks. She saw him feel it. Saw him smile. But before she could change her mind, give the flower back, turn away, he burned the air with sigils and trembled it with words.

The power of his transmutation incant roared through her like a storm.

“Oh!” she cried, delighted, as the tanamie quivered, and rippled… and changed. Became a flower of slender crimson petals narrowly striped with gold-edged purple, its fragrance deep and rich. “Now the incant makes sense. That gap between the ninth and thirteenth syllables, that’s where you specify how the transmutation subject is to be changed.” Amazing. Inspired. His new flower was beautiful.

His new flower…

“I know,” he said, as she stared at him. “The transmutation of living things is forbidden. But a flower isn’t really alive, is it? And some rules must be broken for a greater good to prevail.”

She would never argue against that, but even so… “Councillor, you play with fire.”

“Are you going to burn me?”

“I told you already. No.”

He was watching her closely, his eyes half-lidded. “Compared to what I have done, your transgression is nothing. You’d be forgiven in a heartbeat if you brought my sins to light. You might even be rewarded with a place in the College. After all, we let Bellamie Ranowen teach there… and like you, she is unranked.”

She threw the flower at him. “Yes, I’m unranked, but that doesn’t mean I have no honour. I’m not in the habit of buying and selling other mages’ secrets! And if you think I am, then—”