Page 21 of Witchshadow
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. Havealwaysburned, 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—becausehell-fires,the encounter in this letter was so acrobatic, she could scarcely imagine what body parts went where.
Oh, welldone,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 strangenotto 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 attendantsanda 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 itwasthe 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.
She could not explain how she sensed that or why. Magical items were simply a bit more colorful, a bit more dimensional than anything else in her leached world. Witches too, and without any effort, her brain simplyknewwhat witchery was before her and how powerful.
Sometimes it felt as if the information came from some vast, collective consciousness. Perhaps directly from the magic that bound all Hell-Bards as one. But when Safi had asked Lev about that, the woman had simply shaken her head and said,Word of advice, Imperial Majesty: thinking leads to hoping, and nothin’ is more futile when you’re a Hell-Bard.
When Safi looked at her Truth-lens now, it gleamed against the desk’s glossy wood, and as soon as her fingers touched the brass…
Ah, there it was. The certainty trilling down the back of her neck that this was Truth magic—and what a strange, awful feeling that was. To stare at the only remnants of her own magic. Untouchable, unusable. Because, of course, magic didn’t work on Hell-Bards. It could not harm them, it could not trick them. Whatever happened when the noose cinched into place, it rendered all magical effects obsolete.
Safi couldn’t resist trying, though. She bent her head farther beneath the screen and pressed her eye to the glass.
It was like peering into a kaleidoscope, but with no rhyme or reason to the patterns. She trained it on her right hand, and her Aether Witchmark, only three weeks old, turned a variety of colors thanks to the stones and threads within. No longer a hollow circle, but a jagged, broken ellipse.
She’d never used her invention before. After pouring all of her energy and the false half of her magic into the various parts, Safi had attended Empress Vaness’s birthday party—and then that party had ended in tragedy. So,somuch tragedy that even now, she struggled to fully fathom it all.
Tragedy that could have been prevented. Tragedyshehad caused.
At that thought, the lens turned white.
Safi snapped back her head, blinking. She shook the lens; quartz rattled. Then, after a quick scrub at her eye, she peered through the device again, this time fixing it on Leopold’s letter.You know how much I burn for you.Safi dragged her gaze across the colorfully contorted sentence, mouthing each word to herself.
The lens went white again.
And Safi snapped back her head again. Surely the magic wasn’t working.Surelythe change in color was not a sign that something was false. Instinct sent her fingers rubbing at her eyes, though she knew perfectly well her vision was keen.
Ducking under the screen once more, she peered through the lens and whispered, “I am in love with Leopold fon Cartorra.”
Oh, how the Truth-lens turned white at those words, and oh, how Safi smiled. The magicwasworking, even if she had no idea why. Perhaps it was simply because the lens was her own creation, hewn from her own witchery.
