Remmie and Barton and a few of their pupils were distressed by Tranter’s use of live rabbits to demonstrate both poison and cure but really, what did they expect? Volunteers from the audience? Rabbit served up in a stew or used to demonstrate magework, there was no difference, surely. Dead was dead.

Mage Folet’s newly patented incant was far less bloody. She’d devised a method of showing where an object had been in the previous nine hours.

“Nine hours?” Barl muttered to Remmie, under cover of the resulting applause. “Make it a full day and perhaps there’d be some use to it.”

“Doubtless that will be her next achievement,” Remmie replied. “In the meantime, petty pilferers far and wide will think twice before taking what doesn’t belong to them. There’ll be a market for that incant well beyond our borders.”

Which meant more riches for Dorana, with every sale tariffed by the General Council.

A nod from Lord Varen had Mage Folet rejoining her companions. Then, at another nod, the youngest councillor stepped forward. Brahn Sorvold might have succumbed to his own arrogant ambition, but it seemed his final achievement would still be honoured.

Tall and pleasingly lithe, his golden hair pleated away from a hawkishly handsome face, the councillor lifted one graceful, beringed hand. Seeing him properly, Barl blinked.

Oh, my.

With careless authority the councillor summoned to himself the items required for dead Mage Sorvold’s incant. Looking past his striking appearance, she saw that just like every First Family mage she’d ever encountered there was a haughty arrogance to the man.

But despite the knot of old, cold anger tangled in her chest, she couldn’t help admiring the way his long fingers danced their way through a complicated sequence of sigils. The way his molasses voice caressed the incant’s syllables. The gleam of unbridled pleasure in his piercing blue eyes as he caused first unrefined gold, then silver, to melt into crude, formless liquids. The councillor smiled to see their destruction, smiled wider still as his audience gasped and groaned. Barl bit her lip, staring.

There’s so much power in him. Can’t anyone else feel it? Is the whole world made of straw, that no-one else feels it?

His seamed face impassive, Lord Varen was watching with no more anxiety than if he waited for a kettle to boil. Surely he must feel the beautiful mage’s power. But if he did, he gave no outward hint.

Remmie could feel it. There was tension in the back of his neck, in the way his hands were thrust deep in his pockets. The corners of his mouth were tucked deep, betraying his unease. Barl frowned.

Don’t be a fool, Remmie. Power should be embraced, not feared.

The powerful mage on the dais held the glass vial of liquid gold in his left hand, the vial of silver in his right. Steadily he emptied them into the shallow glass bowl he’d summoned and set before him on a conjured stand. Hot metal kissed hot metal, hissing, breathing out pungent steam. Finished, he tossed the vials into nothingness then spread his arms wide and drew fresh sigils to left and right, so swiftly she couldn’t keep track of their shapes. The air sizzled and smoked, bright jewel colours blinding.