Wren still didn’t want to decide who lived and who died, but she’d never forgive herself if she did nothing. Her overuse injury was severe, but if she performed the transplant manually, she could summon enough magic to rewire Lowry’s fola to Hal’s eyes.

Frantically, Wren called to her magic. It sputtered, an agonizing spark that tore a gasp of pain from her throat. It was enough. But could she do this to the man she loved?

Hal had done so much wrong in his life and still hoped to fix it, but this would destroy everything he’d worked toward. Without his magic, he had no hope of ruling Vesria. His people would never accept him. But without his life, he had no hope of ruling Vesria, either. If it would save him—if it gave them a fighting chance—she would have to try.

“Alright. I’ll do it.”

Elation cracked Lowry’s face open.

Wren’s hands were shaking too hard to be able to do this quickly, much less cleanly. She picked up the speculum and carefully pried open Hal’s eyes. His irises were so beautiful, strands of obsidian pigment braided with indigo. She remembered looking into them last night, when they were bright and wanting and full of love.

Biting down on her lip to stifle her whimper, she slid the blade of the speculum beneath his eyelid with a wet squelch. Slowly, she tightened the instrument until the whole of his eyeball, round and glassy, was exposed on a bed of shiny pink tissue.

The procedure was, in theory, simple.

She’d take the scissors and perform a limbal conjunctival peritomy to remove a strip of the clear tissue that encased the outside of the eye. Then, she’d sever the thin capsule of fascia that sheathed the eye and separated it from the orbital fat and oblique quadrant muscles. She’d pin back the recti muscles with metal hooks and shear their fibers at their insertion to the eye. Clamp the optic nerve with a hemostat and snip it, like an umbilical cord. Only then could she lift the fluid-filled globe of the bulbus oculi from the hole of exposed tissue and nerves and muscle.

This was insanity. She’d save Una’s life, and for what? Hal would still be executed. A war would still break out. It wasn’t a life worth living when she’d doomed them all herself.

Wren picked up the second speculum, but her eyes lingered on the sharp point of a scalpel. When she licked her lips, she tasted salt and blood. “Before I go on, I’ll need both my hands.”

Lowry hesitated only a moment before reaching down and cutting her other hand free. He must have seen her gaze dart to the cart, for he immediately seized her hand in a crushing grip. The speculum clattered to the ground as she cried out.