“You know what this likely means, don’t you?” she said to her brother. “If you try to stab Morgan, you’ll get the same result.”

Remmie wanted to call that wishful thinking on her part, but since Danfey and his creatures were indisputably linked…

“Yes,” he said curtly. “And given what’s happening, you shouldn’t look so pleased.”

After that, Remmie rarely saw her. She shifted the books she needed from Morgan Danfey’s startling library to the College of Mages, where she and its remaining tutors studied them, and she ate, slept and breathed outrageous magics. Argued the finer points of warding incants. Created and discarded scores of different wards. It was thought, for a few hopeful moments, that because Remmie and she were twins that he’d be able to magework like her. But like every other mage, his magework remained sporadic. Unreliable.

That didn’t stop him from leading a series of workings, though. He claimed that practice made perfect, and with the workings to think about the mages of Elvado would not dwell on their grief. After four days of mass funerals, they needed something to distract them. And though the workings consistently failed, Maybe next time became their stubborn song.

Barl paid his doings scant attention. Wouldn’t let him tell her the names of who’d lived, and who’d died. She didn’t need to know. Sickeningly aware of the ultimatum they were facing, she drove herself without mercy to find a way to ward Dorana. Snatched sleep when she had to. Dreamed of Morgan then, and wept.

As instability spread inexorably through Dorana’s frightened districts, as more and more dwellings and buildings became unsafe, as the scourge of mage-mist swallowed more villages, and looked likely to swallow whole towns, mages of every ranking, made equal at last by the loss of their magework, abandoned their familiar lives and sought shelter in Elvado. The city was swiftly overrun. Makeshift encampments sprang up in every open space, filled parks and streets and laneways and spilled into the surrounding countryside.

At the second full waxing of the moon, Barl told Dreen Brislyn to beg their angry neighbours for more time. Knowing a personal appeal might be their only hope, Lady Brislyn and her Council sued for a face-to-face meeting and returned from Brantone shaken, with a stark, unyielding message.

The mages of Dorana have one more moon, and no longer.

“Tell me you can do this, Mage Lindin,” Dreen Brislyn said, meeting with Barl in the College. “Because I’ve seen the intransigence of the nations ranged against us, and how many swords and spears and bows stand ready to chastise Dorana. It will be a slaughter. There is no forgiveness in these princes for what we have done. Their people suffer as ours suffer and they demand a swift, rough justice.”