Since the spell was fairly delicate and would be cast on me, my father would do the actual spell casting. Together we ran the theory of it, testing and making sure that all would go as planned. Dad said I was a whiz at theory, to which I wryly replied that I ought to be, since my degree was in theory. He looked rather chagrined. I just smiled. He’d actually forgotten all about my latency and theoretical training for a moment. When we were sure it would go off without a hitch we began.

“I still don’t like this,” said my father as he raised his arms to begin the spell. I was standing inside a spell circle a lot like Lord Morren’s, but with a world of difference. I was here of my own free will, for one thing, and the person standing outside the circle was someone I loved and trusted, for another. My father spoke the first words, and immediately I felt a slight discomfort. He worked quickly but steadily, stringing words and gestures together with smooth professionalism. I focused on what he was doing, trying to ignore the discomfort that was rapidly blossoming into real pain. It built to the point where it was impossible to ignore, but it never came anywhere near the agony of the power transfer spell. A year ago I would probably have screamed or even blacked out. Now I was able to remain still, silent and conscious. It didn’t last every long, but built rapidly to a short crescendo of pain that gathered in my forehead and then vanished.

I let out a long sigh of relief and turned to look at my father. “Well, did it work?”

He smiled wanly at me, “Yes, it did.”

“You all right?” I asked. He looked tired all of the sudden.

“I should be asking you that. I half expected you to collapse screaming.”

I shrugged. “I’ve felt worse.”

Father just shook his head in amazement.

I shrugged again. I hadn’t been worried about the house mark; it was the collar that concerned me. We’d already found one really nasty trap on it. At first glance you could see an easy way to get it off, clear as day, but a closer look showed that the straightforward method would blow up in your face, literally. I figured the explosion would be violent enough to decapitate me, which thought I didn’t particularly like. We would have to be absolutely sure that no other such traps lurked hidden before we tried anything. But the painstaking care needed would take a lot of time, and time was running out. Already the collar felt too tight. I could still breathe, but the constriction around my neck was unnerving, and it got a little bit tighter every day. I estimated I had only a couple of weeks left at the very most.

As the deadline got closer and the collar tighter, Father and I spent most of our time up in his workroom. We pored over spells and options for hours. Gradually the complex net of spell-work wrapped around the collar came clear. Lord Morren may have been sadistic, but there was no doubt he was a skilled mage. The layered spells were expertly made, and unraveling them a time-consuming task. But at last every thread of magic was accounted for and we were ready to try and remove it.

My father was grumbling about Lord Morren’s sadism again. The spell we’d concocted to remove the collar was very elaborate. It would take a long time to cast and, since the spell on the collar tapped into my life force, the same force Lord Morren had been drawing on with his power transfer spell, I’d be feeling the same kind of pain the whole time. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. The prospect of twenty minutes or so of the kind of agony the power transfer spell had caused didn’t exactly thrill me, but I figured I’d survive. And survival was the issue here. The collar was getting very tight. I kept waking up in the night gasping for breath, and it was a little harder to breathe every day. We’d been concentrating on removing rather than resetting the collar, which my father said might have been a mistake.

“If we’d just figured out the reset spell, we’d have a lot more time to work.”

I agreed, hindsight is always clearer, but at that point I just wanted the cursed thing off. We didn’t have the time to research the reset spell by then anyhow. We had no option but to go ahead with the attempt to get the collar off entirely.

So early one bright summer morning we climbed the stairs to my father’s workroom. Together we went over the whole thing one last time, looking for flaws, but we didn’t find any. “Guess it’s time to start then,” I said. Father just nodded. As before, he would be doing the spell casting, though I’d probably had more input on the design of the spell he would use then he had. All that in-depth theoretical training was coming in handy. I went to the center of the circle again. This time I sat down cross-legged with my hands on my knees. I didn’t want to fall over and hit my head or something. I took a deep breath and said, “I’m ready.”