If she let herself look at Lowry straight on—all the things he’d said, all the things she’d witnessed and endured—didn’t she already know the answer to that question? When she closed her eyes, she saw blood beading on the tips of his fingers. How it flowed freely from the wound in his arm as he had emerged from behind that tapestry. Maybe he’d failed that night. What person, after all, had the skill and the bravery to perform a complex surgery on themselves?

That was why he had summoned her here. That was why he had tested her with that brutal transplant last night. To serve as assistant in his sick experimentation on mages.

“A full organ transplant,” she said absently. “Jacob Byers had the ability to manipulate his bone density. That’s why Lowry was taking his marrow.”

Hal lifted his eyes to hers, and she did not miss the flicker of fear within them.

Wren drove her fist against the wall. Her knuckles popped, but she ignored the ache of it, the way her skin split. Her breaths came hard and ragged. “How could I have missed it? How did I not know?”

Because she’d always assumed it was impossible. Even in skilled hands, an experimental surgery on people like Byers, whose abilities were diffuse and broad-reaching, would kill both the donor and the recipient. To have full use of magic like Byers’s, Lowry would need to replace every bone in his body. But a more localized magic—one that lived only, say, in the eyeball …

It was possible.

All she could see were those detailed drawings in the morning room desk’s drawer. Every line drawn in silver ink on the drawing of the bulbus oculi. Every insertion point marked with fervent certainty. All she could hear was Lowry’s hatred as he uttered the name Hal Cavendish.

Lowry wanted magic. He wanted revenge.

“That’s why we’re here,” Wren said slowly. “That’s why he’s kept us alive so long.”

“What’re you saying?”

“He wants your eyes.”

Hal swore, a sudden, sharp burst of a Vesrian word—one of the few she understood. He paced the room, all the color draining from his face. All his disgust, all his horror, came out in a single word. “Why?”

“Because he thinks he deserves it,” she said. “Because it’ll hurt Vesria.”

“Whatever he hopes to gain from them will bring him far more suffering,” he muttered. “A fitting curse.”

“Don’t. Don’t even joke like that.” The grief she’d tried so hard to stifle surged anew. It churned around her, rising higher and higher until she feared she’d choke on it. “I failed him. He’d only been dead a day. If I’d had the courage to stay … If I hadn’t run away when I was afraid, he’d still be alive. I know it.”