“If you use too much, doesn’t it hurt you?”

I know that from Nightsinger, from watching her try to work magic when she was sick with winter congestions. It’s dangerous, to go beyond your body’s threshold. And there may be “no coming back,” whatever that means. Nightsinger never did it, but she alluded to it.

Lucien stays quiet, the eeriness building nests in the void.

“Doesn’t it?” I press. “Are you…did you get hurt?”

“That’s none of your concern,” he rumbles.

“You’re my witch now,” I insist. “It’s very, very much my concern.”

I lift my hand to touch his face, the right side, and he doesn’t move. With slow unease, I watch as he shrinks away only when my hand cuts across his left side.

“You—” I swallow, resting my hand on his glass-cut right cheekbone. “What happened to your eye?”

It’s the same dark shard of onyx. It moves with his gaze, but it’s then I realize this whole time it hasn’t tracked movement. Not once. I thought he was just recovering, reacting slowly from the exhaustion of everything that’d happened. But I was wrong. I walked on his right side, and he looked at me with his left.

His right eye isn’t working. He just moves it to whatever his left eye sees.

But the emotion isn’t gone from them. I can see the urge to pull away from me, to build his impenetrable walls and insist he’s fine. The princely shell, coming up like a tide.

“Please,” I say with as much softness as I can. “Please.”

The shell suddenly stops, the bricks coming down. He puts his hand over mine on his cheek.

“It’s gone,” he whispers. “The right one. I can’t see anything.”

“But—but it’ll get better. Right?”

He shakes his head. “I can feel it. I felt it…when it happened. The nerves are closed. Burned out. It’s never coming back.”

“You of all people have to be more careful—”

“I know. But I had to do it, to save us.”

“Then save your magic now,” I insist, thrusting the covering back at him. His laugh is light, even if his words are dark.

“I have to use it now. More than ever. Rather, practice is more important now than ever.”

It goes unspoken. He means Varia. Preparing to fight her.

“She has years on me,” he presses, lacing his warm fingers thoughtfully through mine one by one. “Once I awoke as a witch, I learned everything I know by watching her. Feeling her power around me, around the city, and how she wove it. She’s so incredibly powerful. Was. Even before the Bone Tree. But now that she has it, she’s ascended even further beyond me. Beyond any witch in this world.”

“Your Highness—”