“I shall visit my father now, Lord Veredith,” she said. The old man glanced up from his own reams of paper, formalizing the transfer of the Protectorship from the Justice to her.

“Very good, dear,” he quavered, smiling.

She reached the door to the north tower. The physician had locked it behind him, but—checking quickly over her shoulder—she magicked it open with a simple tap of her cane. She slipped through the door and relocked it from the inside.

Her father was calmer today, but less responsive. After a few minutes of persistent questioning, she knelt on the hard stone floor beside him, pressed her fingers against his temples, and tried again to break through the barriers Dr. Thorn had set up in his mind.

After a few minutes of fruitless work, she put on her mask and turned the dial. The spell-scape emerged all around her. The storm was weak up here—merely a faint web of lightning clinging to the sides of the glass dome. But her father was glittering with the red spell that kept him trapped in madness. She probed the red wall for weaknesses, needling gently through the mortar of the spell. Thorn was a strong mage, and skilled. She knew from experience what effect throwing her full power against the wall would have—and she wasn’t eager to try it again. She knew she’d have to go the long way around: undo the spell, undermine it, pick at it until it fell apart.

It felt like hours before she bore a tiny hole in the wall, sending a stream of her magic into the weakness. Her head ached, but she persevered. Cracks appeared in the spell and the Duke’s posture visibly relaxed. The effort had sapped her energy. She let out a sigh, a trickle of cold sweat running down her neck as she refocused, slipping the mask off her face.

“Father?”

“Constance?” He spoke in his ordinary voice, his eyes clearing. “Ancestors…” He looked as if he was about to weep—but it was different now. The emotion on his face was real, sane emotion, and she felt a wave of relief. But the pure feeling in his eyes quickly hardened into something like shame, and Constance knew instinctively that while her father had been a prisoner in his own mind he had seen everything. He remembered everything.

“We don’t have much time,” she said. “I don’t have the strength to break this spell completely.”

“What are you doing here, Constance?” He met her eyes, a flash of his old determination returning in his gaze. “I told you never to come back,” he hissed. She was startled by how quickly he had transformed from the broken old man into the Duke she’d once known. “Well?”

She stared at him. She was asking the questions now. “Who did this to you, Father?”

“Constance—”