A thick scar puckered on top of her thigh, faded and smooth. If not for the bloodstains on Safi’s cut pants, she would have thought the injury years old.
The healer shoved a damp towel into her hand, when Zander slipped inside the room.
Safi paused her rough cleaning to smile weakly at him. She hadn’t seen the massive Hell-Bard since before her noosing, and her friend looked as he always had—though bags now darkened his eyes. And like the healer, he also wore no armor, but rather a simple scarlet-and-gold uniform.
He hurried toward her. “You’ll have to clean as we go.” He spoke low. “And you’ll also have to…” He trailed off. Then tapped meaningfully at his noose.
Safi recoiled. “I’ll have to what?”
“Remove it,” the healer hissed, impatient. “Did they not tell you?”
Safi shook her head. She thought she might be sick again. Removing the noose was certain death. The Hell-Bard’s doom, they called it, and she had seen it consume Caden before. He had cleaved before her very eyes—slower than a true Cleaved, but still fast enough to incapacitate and kill.
“With the Loom nearby,” Zander explained, pulling the towel from Safi’s hands, “we can exist without our nooses. It hurts, but the shadows are slow. They will not kill you before we get to the Loom and return.”
“Take it off.” Safi tasted those words, coated in stomach acid. She had just experienced the worst pain of her life. How could she possibly endure more? “Can’t I just go with you before Henrick returns?”
Zander and the healer shook their heads. “He might sense your movement,” Zander explained, and the healer added, “As long as the noose stays here, though, he will have no reason to be concerned.”
Safi exhaled slowly. She had wanted to see the Loom. She had needed to see it because as Leopold had said: she still had a piece of her magic. Maybe coming face-to-face with the device that imprisoned her would offer some clues as to how she might break free.
“All right.” She swung her legs to the floor, and with Zander’s help, she stood. Her leg gave her no trouble. She felt strong and whole and new. Then, before she could change her mind or even consider what she was doing, Safi reached up to her noose … and paused.
She’d never removed it before. Never even considered how one might try. But it was as if the magic recognized what she wanted. As soon as her fingers touched the gold, the chain split in two.
And there was the cold again, clawing in fast.
“Come,” she said before frost stole her voice. “Take me to the Hell-Bard Loom.”
* * *
If Safi had felt drained and gray before, it was nothing compared to now. All color vanished, all sounds echoed and warped as if coming at her from a thousand leagues away. She lost any sense of touch.
There was darkness and there was light. There was cold and there was more cold. The healer had draped one of her robes over Safi’s tattered, battered training clothes. It was thick, it ought to be warm, yet all Safi felt was ice upon her skin.
Zander seemed to expect this and he kept a firm guiding hand the entire way. As they retraced steps out of the healer’s wing and into the main area with the statue, as they hurried down the stairs onto the first floor and then veered right down a new hallway. Each step away from the healer’s room made Safi’s heart thump faster. There was no pain—not yet—but an overwhelming sense of panic.
Several times, her feet slowed. She twisted as if to flee. Each time, though, Zander was ready. “The Loom,” he reminded her, hauling her onward. “We will be there soon.”
“Liar,” she ground out when he said it for the third time. “You and Caden are both … liars.”
This earned her a wincing, if genuine, smile.
Then they were to a new stairwell, this one spiraling off the hallway and descending into the depths of the earth. A draft billowed up; shadows too. Even if Safi hadn’t had Zander to lead her that way, she would have known instantly that the Loom waited at the bottom of those stairs.
On the first landing, Safi heard screams. Tortured screams like the ones she’d made only moments before when healing.
Like she’d made when she’d become a Hell-Bard.
A tight-lipped glance at Zander showed him nodding. “New Hell-Bards,” he said, and no further explanation was necessary.
On the next landing, the cries of pain were softer, subdued, tired.
“Heretics.”
On the third landing, the stairs stopped and hoarfrost lay thick across the granite. It laced over the flagstones and through a crooked door. The stone changed from light to dark, though what color precisely, Safi could not say. Shadows and pale flame were all she could discern.
Her teeth chattered; her muscles ached; but she did not slow as Zander hurried her through the slashing entrance. Beyond was a tunnel, not so different from what Safi had explored with Leopold only the night before. Even the ancient sconces looked the same.
Each step brought more cold, more darkness. Her heart hurt in a way she did not know a heart could hurt. As if she were losing her magic all over again. As if the very core of her identity was being sucked away.
When she made the mistake of glancing down at her hands, she saw small black lines rippling beneath the surface. She was not cleaving yet—she was not turning into the husk made of shadows that Caden had become in Saldonica—but she would be. Soon.
After several turns in the tunnel, the ground dipped sharply. Steep steps had been carved into the stone, and Zander helped Safi descend. Without depth perception, without color, it was almost impossible to see where each foot needed to go. Zander’s touch, frozen and numbed though it was, was the only thing that kept her upright.
They were close now. She could feel it, like a new calling, a new tug. Now, instead of the noose yanking at her to run back, the Loom was yanking her to run forward.
When at last she and Zander reached the Loom, Safi’s footsteps were mere thudding shambles beneath her. She leaned heavily on Zander, and sensed more than saw that they had entered a large cavern with a vast empty bowl spanning before her, as if some god had planned to add a lake here but then forgotten.
What Safi did see was the actual Loom. “Gods below,” she rasped, gaping at it while Zander held her upright.
“Yes,” he replied.
“The shadows.” Safi squinted at the undulating mass before her. It reminded her of an anthill she’d seen as a child. It had been filled with so many ants that the ground itself had appeared to move.
“Souls,” Zander explained. “Each shadow is a Hell-Bard’s soul.”
So mine is in there, Safi thought. And yours too. Aloud, she said, “Brace me, please.” And then she felt his arms slide around her. She could not feel his warmth, could not feel his breath or see his face, but there was a comfort in knowing he was there.
With fumbling, frozen hands, Safi withdrew her Truth-lens, tucked in an inside pocket of her training clothes. Zander’s gentle fingers helped lift the lens to her eye. Then suddenly she could see. A flicker of silver. A flash of orange. A spinning, writhing trail of blue. Threads, she realized. Iseult had described them so many times over the years, Safi had no doubt she was watching them now. Yet she had never realized how vibrant they were. How rich and real and beautiful.