“You are a good woman, and have always been a proper wife to the First Wizard,” Sadler said, his words rambling on, apparently in an attempt to cover his obvious discomfort. “This is merely an upholding of custom that gives people a sense of order. Because of your high standing as the wife of the First Wizard, they expect us in this case, as the Central Council, to see this done. It’s more for them, really, that they might see that our ways endure, and thus, despite the perils of the times, we will endure as well. Think of it as a formality in which you play an important role.”

Magda hardly heard him. It didn’t really matter. None of it did. An inner voice whispered promises of the loving embrace of the good spirits awaiting her beyond the veil of life. Her husband, too, would be there waiting for her. Those whispers were reassuring, seductive.

She was only distantly aware of her hands gathering her long hair together in the back and tying it tightly with the ribbon near the base of her skull.

“Not that short,” Cadell said as his fingers gently took hers away and slipped the ribbon down until it was just below the tops of her shoulders. “Though you may not have been born noble, you have proven yourself in your own right to be a woman of some standing, and besides, you are, after all, still the widow of the First Wizard.”

Magda sat stiff and still with her hands nested in her lap as another man used a razor-sharp knife to slice through the thick rope of her hair just above the ribbon.

When it was done, Cadell placed the long hank of hair, tied just beneath the fresh cut with the red ribbon, in her lap.

“I’m sorry, Magda,” he said, “I truly am. Please believe that this does not change the way we feel about you.”

Magda lifted the length of brown hair and stared at it. The hair didn’t really matter to her. What mattered was being judged by it, or by the lack of it, rather than by what she had made of herself. She knew that without the long hair she would likely no longer have standing to be heard before the council.

That was just the way it was.

What mattered most to her was that those whose causes she brought before the council would no longer have her voice to speak for them. That meant that there were creatures without an advocate who very well might die out and cease to exist.

That was what having her hair cut short meant to her, that she no longer had the standing needed to help those she had come not merely to respect, but to love.