The voices filled every piece of her, their hands ripped and shredded. She felt trapped by their anger, and no amount of struggling would let her break free.
This is what drowning feels like, she thought as she was dragged beneath an ocean of forgotten souls who were bound for all eternity to a Hell-Bard Loom. Yet before she could crumble away forever, a figure moved over her. Fully formed, fully alive.
Relief washed through Iseult. This person would help her, just as the Rook King had helped her before. She would not be lost to drowning. She would not crumble yet. But then the person’s face coalesced: a pointed chin and long jaw framed by black hair, graying at the temples. His yellow-hued eyes were small, his lashes short, and on his forehead were deep trenches that made him seem forever mildly surprised.
He looked mildly surprised now, turquoise frothing within his bright Threads—but there was pink pleasure in those Threads too.
“Ah,” he said, a smile sliding over his face. “I had been wondering when you would finally step inside.” Corlant’s hand reached for Iseult’s face, fingers long and spindly. “It will be easier if we meet in the real world, though, Iseult det Midenzi. I will be waiting.”
He shoved. Iseult screamed.
The Dreaming ended.
EIGHT
It was well past midnight before Safi was able to confirm whether the Truth-lens actually rested in her pocket. She had returned to her quarters, her usual Hell-Bards flanking with Lev at the lead. Her muscles burned after hours of endless dancing, her bad ankle ached, and her face had gone stiff from too many smiles.
But those were all distant, cursory sensations. The whole of her being was focused on the Truth-lens.
If the device, which Safi had made in Marstok, was indeed within the folds of her pocket, then she would need to be very careful over the next quarter hour. The Hell-Bards could not see it, for they would know right away what it was—what magic it could do. Her attendants could not find it, for they would certainly tell the spymasters they reported to. And Safi could not openly examine the device in her bedroom, for she was under constant surveillance.
Not the magical kind—her Hell-Bard powers would have sensed that—but rather the human kind with peepholes and listening horns.
Fortunately, although she also loathed him for it, Leopold fon Cartorra was one step ahead. When the Hell-Bards reached Safi’s door, one of her attendants (named Svenja) rushed to open it while another (Nika) hurried forward to greet her. Clasped in Nika’s hands was fine courtly paper with a red ribbon twined around it.
“For you,” Nika said. She spoke with the slightest northern accent, her family hailing from some wealthy estate on the North Sea coast. “It is from His Imperial Highness,” she added, and there was no missing the bright spots of color rising on her pale cheeks. They made her lovely face even lovelier.
Well, Safi thought, she obviously read the message. After accepting the letter while her Hell-Bards fell into their usual positions in the hall, Safi followed Svenja into the bedroom. Svenja was also an attractive woman, though with a more regal bearing. No smiles or blushes from her. Only business.
“I have chosen the blue nightgown,” Svenja began.
But Safi snapped up a staying hand. “I will undress myself.” She flashed the letter at both women. “And I would like to read my letter in privacy. I will see you in the morning, yes?”
“Oh, of course, Your Imperial Majesty.” Nika curtsied buoyantly, her cheeks still aglow. Svenja curtsied more stiffly, with a murmured “Your Imperial Majesty,” before hooking Nika’s arm in hers and practically tugging the younger woman from the room.
Safi hurried to her desk. She’d had no occasion before to use it—who would she have written to? But the desk itself possessed a privacy screen. For writing lover’s letters, Svenja had explained, which had made Nika giggle behind her hand, blushing all the while.
A blush not so different from the one Nika had just made, Safi realized as she unfolded the four-panel screen from its slots within the desk. She was surprised to find it didn’t match the rest of the room. Even to her gray-shrouded eye, the silver silk clashed with the room’s gold, and the elaborately printed flowers seemed too delicate next to all the Hasstrel bats.
It would protect Safi’s privacy, though, and that was all that mattered. In moments, she had the ribbon off the letter and the paper smoothed across her desk.
My dearest Safiya,
You know how much I burn for you. Have always burned, since that summer long ago. I realize this is why you have avoided me and refused my offers to dance. But tonight, you have given me such hope. Please, tell me my hope is justified!
Feeling your supple waist beneath my fingers, seeing your eyes—blue, so blue—mere inches from mine, watching your lips move as you smiled or laughed … It felt like that summer all over again. Please, please consent to meet me tomorrow, in the Winter Garden, at the tenth chimes. I will ensure that we are alone.
Do you remember that first night together, Safiya? The way you laughed when I led you into that garden in Veñaza City? There was the alcove hidden by jasmine, and I pulled you close, our lips and hands desperate. And do you remember how I lifted you onto—
Safi slammed down the letter. Her eyes bulged, her cheeks scorched, and she rocked back from the privacy screen’s protection.
No, it wasn’t just her cheeks that were aflame—her whole body was. Not a word in this letter was true, of course, but gods below, the detail! Anyone who read it would surely think Safi and Leopold had shared an extremely passionate teenage affair.
No wonder Nika had looked so delightfully scandalized.
Well done, Polly. Safi now appeared, for any spies who might be peeking in her bedroom, like a woman who’d just read a lascivious letter from her lover. One could not fake a flush like this one, and she was even fanning herself against sweat—because hell-fires, the encounter in this letter was so acrobatic, she could scarcely imagine what body parts went where.
Oh, well done, Polly. Safi still didn’t trust him, and given a chance, she would gladly do him bodily harm. But she couldn’t deny this had been a clever ruse. No one in court would bat an eyelash if she and Leopold began an affair—not even the Emperor. Lovers outside of marriage were so common among Cartorran nobility, it was considered strange not to have one.
As the old skipping song went, Robins and magpies on branches above. Money for marriage, and Heart-Threads for love.
The cleverest element of Leopold’s letter, though, was that it had given Safi the perfect reason to send away her attendants and a perfect reason to sit at her desk with the privacy screen. Now she could easily withdraw the item burning in her pocket.
While she shifted her dress around her, as if trying to billow in more air, she slipped out the small metal cylinder. And while her left hand tousled her hair, fanned at her face, her right hand slid the cylinder onto the desk beneath the privacy screen.
Safi grinned, and with a great flourish, she plucked quill and paper from beyond the screen. Then she hunched forward as if to scrawl a similarly seductive letter in return.
Instead, she examined the Truth-lens—and it was the Truth-lens. Exactly as she’d made it in Marstok. There was the brass casing, taken from a telescope’s eyepiece. There were the outer lenses, and she could almost see hints of thread and flashes of quartz within. The only real difference between now and when Safi had crafted it a month ago was that now Safi was a Hell-Bard. Now, when she looked at it, her Hell-Bard senses revealed it to be magical.