Guilt-struck, resentful, she stared at her brother. “You’re so sure they’ll reject me.”

Instead of answering, he scuffed his booted toe through the lush grass verging Crackbone Lane. Then he sighed.

“I’m sorry, Barl. I just don’t want you hurt.”

“I won’t be.”

Remmie frowned, his eyes chilling. “In other words, you’ll do what you want, like always. Fine. Write to the College. Ask them to admit you. But when your heart’s broken for good this time, Barl, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Chapter Four

No,” said the old man, querulous, his voice a disgruntled wheeze. “Morgan, what is this nonsense? Are you fevered? Are you deaf? The energies as they exist, as you have combined them, are not compatible. They must be balanced counterclockwise, else the sigils, once confirmed, will not support the connecting incantation.”

Morgan looked down so his father wouldn’t see how close he was to saying something unwise. A cutting retort danced on his tongue. The need to lash out, to remind his father he was a man, not a boy to be commanded or treated like an ignorant student, was almost overpowering.

But he stayed silent. There’d be no profit in indulging his sorely tried temper. Hold tongue and endure: this was his life now and had been, almost without respite, for the past stifling eleven weeks. How much longer it would last he could not tell, nor could his father’s pother advise. Since his heart seizure, and the attack of palsy that followed it, Lord Danfey’s health had been gravely uncertain. His faculties were like a tide now at ebb, now on the rise, and while relieving his own feelings with an acidic retort might briefly satisfy, such self-indulgence would end only in estrangement… or worse.

“Well?” his father demanded. “Do you understand what I am telling you, or must we return to the schoolroom so I might refresh your memory on the basics of sigil creation?”

“No, my lord,” he said, and clasped his betraying hands behind his back. “I need no reminding. But if I might be permitted to explain—”

“What?” His father glared. “School me, would you? When I was creating sigils at half your age?”

“No, my lord. Of course not. But I fear I have not made clear my—”

“School and condescend to me! And this is the conduct of a dutiful son, is it?”

Morgan stared at his experiment. Cupped in their crucibles, the three barely coalesced sigils he struggled to confirm glittered in the intermittent sunlight shafting through his attic workroom’s plain round window. He could feel the latent power in them, feel the warp and weft of competing energies alternate hot then cold against his skin. The sigils would collapse soon, undone by the fragility of their incomplete creation.

And I will lose near a whole month’s work, see Dorana creep closer to danger, for no other reason than a sick old man’s pique.

He looked up. “My lord, if you would hear me out?”