So weary she could barely speak, Barl pushed a note-covered sheet of paper across her workroom table. “This is the warding, Lady Brislyn. The College’s surviving mages and I have spent nearly two weeks pulling it apart for flaws. We can’t find any. In theory, we believe it will work.”

“In theory,” Dreen Brislyn murmured, frowning over the incant.

“Theory is all we have, until I put it into practice.”

Dreen Brislyn looked up. “I have never seen an incant so complex. It seems to me impossible.” She sat back, shaking her head. “Can you do this?”

“I can try.”

“Mage Lindin…” Dreen Brislyn slid from her chair and paced the confines of the workroom. “When do you begin to construct it?”

“Tomorrow.”

“You have everything you need? All the catalysts? Enough crucibles strong enough to contain these magics?”

She’d scoured the College for every last pinch of azafris, susquinel, tilatantin and zife. With Venette Martain’s assistance had emptied every ranked mage’s home of their myriad supplies also. And every College crucible, warded to protect it from violent, dangerous magework, was stacked in the distant workroom she’d chosen for this task.

“Yes, Lady Brislyn.”

“Can you—should you—attempt this alone?”

She was mad to be attempting it at all. “Remmie has agreed to help me.”

“Your brother.” Dreen Brislyn sighed. “No-one else?”

“No-one else can be spared. If I should fail, if something goes wrong…”

“I understand. Well, thank you, Mage Lindin. On behalf of the General Council, I wish you good fortune. I’ll look to Venette to tell me how you get on.”

As soon as she was alone again, Barl returned to the Danfey estate. Before going upstairs to Morgan, she visited Rumm in the Danfey family crypt. Venette Martain had seen him interred there, his plain, unadorned stone coffin a silent, painful reproach.

“I’m sorry, Rumm,” she whispered, her hand flat to the coffin’s lid. He deserved his own effigy. When this was over, if she survived, she’d make him one. It was the least she could do. “We never intended any of this. You were a good man… and Morgan loved you.”

Morgan.

She couldn’t linger. If she was going to face him, she had to do it now.

Dusk’s shrouding gloom lifted by glimfire, she retreated to the mansion. Climbed the stairs one by one, heartsick and light-headed. Pushing their—his—privy chamber door open, she saw at once that Venette Martain had already been and gone. An oil lamp burned a little distance from the bed, lifting the sumptuous room out of a growing darkness.

She hadn’t seen him since that terrible day in the library.

“My love, how could you do this? You bitch, you slut, you treacherous whore…”

Her betrayal of him was a brand seared into her soul.