Escaped from his privy chamber, she took a moment to catch her breath. As she stood in a pool of shadow within the artisanry’s central courtyard, its chivvying clock chimed the hour. Time to start work. Scurrying footsteps had her turning. It was one of the ’prentice mages late to her place. Lucky for her, Arndel remained in his chamber, still fuming, else she’d have to endure a lecture on tardiness. The trade artisanry’s workroom door slammed shut, then all was silence.

Too angry yet for tears, her belly still roiling, Barl hefted the marvellous crystal she’d created. It was too heavy for carrying home, and she desperately needed to walk. So she translocated it to the cottage ahead of her, briefly pressed cold palms to her still-flushed cheeks, willing her face not to betray her… then marched out of the artisanry with her head defiantly high.

That anger carried her more than half the way home. Arms swinging, heels thudding against the beaten earth track, she felt it burn through her, setting her blood alight. Write to Arndel? Turn him against her? What gave them the right? And what right had he, that prosing, selfish old mole, to read her a lecture, presume to admonish her, when it was none of his business! All she owed him was the time and effort that he paid for. Not so generously, either. He wasn’t making her rich.

Temper goading her, she walked faster and faster as the litany of injustices chased themselves dizzy inside her head.

“I do all he asks, and better than he could ever hope for!” she shouted at a startled crow, when she couldn’t keep silent any more. “He has no cause for complaint, no grounds to criticise. If I turned around right now and gave him notice he’d have no power to stop me! And he knows it!”

Perched on a fence post, raucously derisive, the crow ruffled its glossy black feathers. Then it flapped away, leisurely, and she was left to shout at thin air.

“I’ve a good mind to do just that,” she muttered, slowing. Abruptly weary. Beads of sweat rolled in thin lines down her ribs and back. “Wouldn’t that make him look a fool to Lady Grie? Wouldn’t she be slighted?”

Yes, indeed. And slighted, she’d make sure to inform every mage of her acquaintance, so many of them ranked First Family, that Arndel’s artisanry was—was—unreliable.

“That’s the word, unreliable!” she told a sleepy spotted milch cow, chewing its cud beneath a bulbin tree on the other side of the fence. “And wouldn’t that serve him right?”

Yes. Only… damage to his reputation would hurt the artisanry, which meant hurting the mages who toiled there beneath Arndel’s interfering, unforgiving rule.