Magda handed the severed hair back over her shoulder to Elder Cadell. “Have it placed where people will see it so they might know that order has been restored, that tradition and customs endure.”

“As you wish, Lady Searus.”

With her place in the world now corrected, the six councilmen finally left her alone to the gloomy room and her bleak thoughts.

Chapter 5

Warm summer air rising up the towering outer Keep wall and spilling over onto the rampart ruffled Magda’s shortened hair, pulling strands around in front of her face. As she made her way along the deserted rampart, she reached up and drew her hair back. It felt strange, foreign, to her touch now that it only just brushed her shoulders rather than going down to the small of her back.

A lot of people, women mostly, paid very close attention to the length of a woman’s hair because, while not always absolute, length was a fairly accurate indication of their relative social standing and thus their importance. Ingratiating oneself to the right person could bring benefits. Crossing the wrong person could bring trouble. Hair length was a valuable marker.

Being the wife of the First Wizard meant wearing her hair longer than most women. It also meant that many women with shorter hair often fawned over her. Magda never took such flattery seriously, but she tried to always be gracious about it. She knew it was not her, but her position, that drew the interest of most of them.

To Magda, having not been born noble, her long hair had merely been a way to open doors, to get an audience and be heard on matters important to her. She had cared about Baraccus, not how long she was allowed to grow her hair simply because she was married to him. While she had come to like the look of it on her, she didn’t attach worth to that which she had not earned.

Since her long hair had begun to be a part of her life for the year Baraccus had courted her and the two years since she had been married to him, she had thought that she might miss it.

She didn’t, really. She only missed him.

Her grand wedding to Baraccus seemed forever ago. She had been so young. She still was, she supposed.

With the long hair gone, in a way it felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders in more ways than one. She no longer had a responsibility to live up to what others expected of her. She was herself again, her real self, not a person defined by an artificial mark of worth.