It reminded her of Leopold’s tower.
The farther Caden stepped through the Keep, Hell-Bards marching severely around them, the more cold crept into Safi’s body. It made no sense to her knife-addled brain—how she could be ablaze, yet frozen to her bones. And what little color remained in this world was being sucked dry. Soon, there would be no color left at all. Just shadows and light and frost inside the flames.
Eventually they reached an open area framed by balconies and stairs. It was strangely beautiful: a graceful circle with three curving stairwells that rose to different floors and branching hallways. At the center of the high-ceilinged room stood a statue of a shrouded woman staring down at her chained hands.
“Who is that?” Safi tried to ask as Caden and her escorts marched for the nearest set of stairs, but either he didn’t hear her or he couldn’t understand the jumble leaving her mouth. He simply said, “We’re almost there. Hang on.”
Lev heard, though, and Lev replied: “Midne. The first of us.”
That name meant nothing to Safi, and the cold was spindling more deeply inside her. The world turning grayer and shallower and more alone.
More alone? What an odd thought. She was surrounded by people and held by a man who’d saved her many times before.
Caden carried her to the third floor, and if he was flagging—Safi was hardly a small person—he did not show it. His stride stayed as true as that of the other Hell-Bards around them until at last, they entered a new area of the Keep and his stride finally halted.
Safi wasn’t sure why she considered it a new area, since nothing here looked any different from where they’d been. Black granite, a hall of doors, and no decorations to disrupt the shadows. Yet the energy felt different—more voices, more light, and more fires crackling in hearths she could not see. Then Safi’s guards spread apart and a woman appeared.
Like all Hell-Bards, she wore scarlet, but instead of armor, a floor-length robe over high-necked black wool adorned her petite frame. Her amber skin was aged, her nose pronounced, and her black hair streaked with gray.
“The Empress,” Safi heard Lev explain. “She took a knife to the leg during training.”
“On purpose?” the healer asked, motioning for Caden to follow. “Actually, don’t answer that. I gather Emperor Henrick will be here soon?”
“We expect so,” Caden replied as he ducked Safi through a low door and down several steps into a wide, boiling room. The other Hell-Bards stayed outside, taking up their usual guardian positions, while Lev disappeared entirely.
At the healer’s direction, Caden eased Safi onto a high cot. Instantly, the woman pushed him aside, and with firm hands she forced Safi to stretch upon the hard mattress. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, but you won’t die yet. Although.” She pursed her lips and met Safi’s eyes. “You aren’t going to enjoy the healing.”
Safi rolled back her head and groaned. Ever since the training grounds, it had been one you won’t like this after another. “Just get on with it, please.”
The woman complied, starting with the linens wrapped around Safi’s thigh. Safi’s eyes crossed; black crowded over her vision.
“We need you to send the Emperor away,” Caden told the healer. “Once he arrives and confirms the Empress is being treated, we need him to leave.”
“I see,” the healer said, and to Safi’s surprise, she made no argument and asked for no explanations. “In that case, it might be best if you left, Captain. We cannot pretend to need privacy if you remain at her side.”
“Good enough.” Caden’s face swam into view over Safi’s. “Zander will come for you, all right? And Lev and I will handle the Emperor.”
Before Safi could acknowledge his words, or for that matter, even work through what they might mean, Caden withdrew. “Toward death with wide eyes.”
And the healer replied, “All clear, all clear.”
The door clicked shut moments later.
“Am I correct to guess,” the healer asked, a pair of shears now in hand, “that you’ve never been healed as a Hell-Bard?”
Safi forced a nod.
“Then I will warn you it is not like other healing.” She cut into Safi’s pant leg. Quick, sure strokes that let warm air caress her skin. “And it will get worse before it gets better.”
Before Safi could ask what that meant—or order the woman to just cursed well get on with it—the healer placed her hands on Safi’s wound.
And Safi’s whole world expanded.
There was no other word to describe what Safi felt. One moment, she was inside her own mind, closed off and contained. The next moment, all boundaries were gone. There was no Safi, there was no brain. No body with a stab wound bleeding out, and no healer with hands upon her thigh. Safi was bigger than that, her consciousness stretched into something she could not comprehend, much less explain.
At first, the change carried with it relief. No more pain. No more chill, no more flames. There was only release and welcome loss of self. But the relief was short-lived. Infinitesimal compared to the agony that roared in. Gradual, gradual, then so fast her entire existence felt ripped apart. A firepot going off. A thousand thousand firepots going off. And inside each was wintry pain like she’d never imagined, never known could exist.
The collective pain of every Hell-Bard in the Witchlands and every Hell-Bard who had ever lived.
It was not merely the physical pain of life without magic either, cold and vicious and eternal, but the emotional trauma of having it cut away. Safi became their loss, their isolation, their empty, blundering lives through a world forever gray. All the pain she’d felt in the last two weeks was magnified on a scale no body was meant to feel, no brain was meant to maintain.
She thought surely this must be the end of her life.
At some point, she sensed that she was screaming. Great shrieks that shredded her throat and ripped apart her lungs. She couldn’t say how she knew—she’d lost all contact with her body. Yet somehow she did know, just as she knew that she and the healer were no longer alone.
Henrick had come; Henrick was watching her.
Eventually he left. Safi’s screams, however, did not.
On and on, they tore free, bigger than she was. A voice for all the others, the thousands upon thousands of others, who were bound as she was in the darkest corners of hell. She lost all touch with time or reality while she was trapped, expanded, one with all Hell-Bards. But eventually, the horror did pass. Eventually, as the healer had promised, it did get better. And when she finally returned to herself once more—so small, so comfortable, so safe—she found herself soaked in sweat.
The stench of vomit keened in her nose; the side of her face, she realized, was coated. Gone, though, was the pain. Her thigh felt as if it had never been stabbed, and when she flexed her toes, no throbbing racked through her.
“There isn’t much time,” the healer whispered. She dug her arms beneath Safi’s shoulders and helped her rise. “The Emperor has been taken to another wing, where your screams would not reach, but eventually, he will return to check on your progress.”
Safi blinked and tried to rub at the sickness, sticky and damp, upon her face. “Wait,” the healer said, turning toward a washbasin nearby. While she dunked a towel within, Safi examined her leg.