A meaningful cough behind her made Clariel turn around. Her father smiled at her, the weak smile that she knew was a harbinger of bad news. It had made a frequent appearance in the last few months, the smile. When people first met Harven they would think him strong, until his mouth turned up. He had a weak, giving-in smile. He was a goldsmith too, but was not particularly gifted in the actual craft. He was much better at managing the business of his wife’s work.

‘Have you come to tell me that by some stroke of good fortune I am to be allowed to go home?’ asked Clariel.

‘This is our home now,’ said Harven.

‘It doesn’t feel like it,’ said Clariel. She looked over the railing again, across all the white stone buildings with their red-tiled roofs, and then back again at the ornamental shrubs in the terracotta boxes that made up their own roof garden, shrubs with pale bark and small, weak-looking yellow leaves. ‘There is nothing green here. I haven’t seen a single proper tree. Everything is ordered and tamed and put between walls. And there are too many people.’

‘There are lots of big trees in the gardens on Palace Hill,’ said Harven. ‘We just can’t see them from here.’

Clariel nodded glumly. A few trees too distant to be seen, across miles and miles of houses and workshops and other buildings, and thousands and thousands of people, rather proved her point, she thought.

‘Did you come to tell me something?’ she asked, knowing that he had, and she wasn’t going to like whatever it was. His smile gave that away.

‘Ah, your mother had a meeting with Guildmaster Kilp yestereve, and he made her aware of an opportunity for you that she … we desire you to take up.’

‘An opportunity?’ asked Clariel, her heart sinking. ‘For me?’

‘Yes, an opportunity,’ continued her father, raising his hands and lifting his shoulders to emphasise what a good opportunity he was about to reveal. ‘The Goldsmiths, the Merchant Venturers, the Spicers, the Northwestern Trading Company … all the High Guilds and most of the Great Companies, they send their children to the Belisaere Select Academy –’

‘A school?’ interrupted Clariel. ‘I’ve been to school! And I’m not a child!’

Clariel had indeed attended school in Estwael, from the age of eight to fourteen, and had been taught how to calculate using an abacus; keep accounts; write formal letters; supervise servants; ride in the great hunt with hounds and hawks; fight with dagger, sword and bow; and play the psalter, zittern and reed pipe.

She had also been baptised with the forehead Charter mark shortly after her birth and taught the rudiments of Charter Magic, that highly organised and difficult sorcery that drew upon the endless array of symbols that collectively made up the magical Charter that described, contained and connected all things upon, below, above, within and beyond the world.