That same intermittent sunlight played across his father’s sunken, sallow cheeks and for a moment bleached the shadows beneath his bloodshot eyes. His drooping left eyelid twitched, an echo of past trouble. Perhaps a harbinger of more trouble to come. But to suggest as much would provoke a storm of abuse.

“Do I hear you aright?” said his father, derisive. “You’ll stand there and tell me, in the face of all accepted practice, that a clockwise balancing must be pursued?”

“In this instance, yes,” he replied. “Since I am attempting to reconfigure a basic transmutation incant I must redistribute the energies antithetically, or risk—”

“Risk blowing the roof off this mansion!” his father shouted. A thread of spittle glistened on his too-pale lips. “And you cannot expect me to remain sanguine about that.”

“I admit the incant is volatile,” he said, choosing his words with continued care. “But worthwhile, I am convinced.”

His father grimaced. “Worthwhile for what purpose? Do you say there is a sudden, overwhelming need for a new transmutation incant? No matter of urgency has reached my ears and reach me it would, though I am ridiculously confined to this estate.”

“My lord…” Morgan swallowed a groan. Why must you turn this into an argument? Would you have me bar you from my work? “There is no immediate crisis, it’s true, but—”

“But you will not accept constraint.” Pinching the bridge of his beakish nose, a familiar gesture of goaded self-control, his father breathed out hard. “And so we come to it. This new incantation, is it commissioned by the Council?”

Telling his father a point-blank lie was out of the question. “No.”

“Sanctioned, at least?”

“No.”

Heart seizure and palsy had left his father weakened, but still he managed to stamp about the attic with his fingers fisted. “Morgan, what are you thinking? There are prohibitions.”

“That do not apply to me,” he pointed out. “As a member of the Council, I—”

“Its junior member!” his father said, turning. “And newly seated. Do not let being chosen to demonstrate Sorvold’s confounded incant go to your head! If Brice Varen should learn of your experimenting I cannot imagine he will salute your daring. Rather he’ll wonder if the Council’s choice of you to replace Andwin Bellem was rash.”

“That is your opinion, my lord,” he said, unable to keep the stiff offence from his tone. “I choose to see the matter differently.”

“Yes, of course you do,” his father muttered. “And so leave me wondering if it’s any great surprise I am plagued by pothers when you persist in such reckless pursuits.”

With a sigh of released energies, the crucible-cradled sigils on the cluttered workbench collapsed in a flare of blue light.

“There!” said his father, triumphant. “You see? They did not hold, Morgan, and it was folly to dream they would. As my son, you should know better. As your father I expect better. You are a Danfey. There are standards to maintain.”

Making sure to hide his dismay, and his resentment at being held accountable for his father’s ill health, Morgan looked away from the emptied crucibles with their faint blue smears of dissipated energy.