She knew what her father wasn’t saying. Her parents were hoping she would find someone who wanted to marry her, or more likely, wanted to marry into the family of Jaciel High Goldsmith. An apprentice from a Guild family, or one of these ‘best people’ from the school. This would solve the problem of a daughter who didn’t want to be a goldsmith herself, or take up any of the other crafts or businesses deemed suitable.

But Clariel didn’t want to marry anyone. She had once or twice – no more – wondered if she was naturally a singleton, like the russet martens who only came together for the briefest mating season and then went their own way. Or her own aunt Lemmin, for that matter, who chose to live entirely alone, though happily for Clariel could stand visitors provided they amused themselves.

They had talked about solitude and self-sufficiency once, Lemmin and her niece, soon after Clariel had first chosen to lie with a young man and had found herself quite separate from the experience, and not caring one way or another about repeating the act itself or the emotional dance that went with it.

‘Perhaps I don’t like men,’ Clariel had said to her aunt, who was pulling garlic bulbs and delighting in her crop. ‘Though I can’t say I have those feelings for women, either.’

‘You’re young,’ Lemmin had replied, sniffing a particularly grand clump of garlic. ‘It’s probably too early to tell, one way or another. The most important thing is to be true to yourself, however you feel, and not try to feel or behave differently because you think you should, or someone has told you how you must feel. But do think about it. Unexamined feelings lead to all kinds of trouble.’

Clariel examined her feelings once again, and found them unchanged. What she desperately wanted to do was get out of the city and, since the Borderers wouldn’t let her join them, purchase a hunting lodge or forester’s hut outside Estwael, to go hunting and fishing and just live in the quiet, cool, shaded world of the Forest valleys and the heather-clad hills that she loved. But that would require her parents’ permission, and money, and she had neither of these things.

At least not until she worked out how to get them …

‘There is one other matter,’ said Harven cautiously. He was gazing over the railing now himself, which was a slight improvement from staring at his shoes, though he still wouldn’t look her in the eye. ‘Well, a few other matters.’

Clariel lost sight of the seagull, who had joined the flock and been absorbed by it, all individuality gone in an instant.

‘Yes?’

‘This school … uh, the Academy … it doesn’t teach Charter Magic.’

‘And this means?’ asked Clariel, encouraging the bad news out. Her father’s smile was spreading across his face again, so obviously there was more unpleasantness to come.