Page 56 of Witchshadow

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, itdidget 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.

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 likethe 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 hadneededto 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.