Before Safi could ask what that meant—or order the woman to just cursed well get on with it—the healer placed her hands on Safi’s wound.

And Safi’s whole world expanded.

There was no other word to describe what Safi felt. One moment, she was inside her own mind, closed off and contained. The next moment, all boundaries were gone. There was no Safi, there was no brain. No body with a stab wound bleeding out, and no healer with hands upon her thigh. Safi was bigger than that, her consciousness stretched into something she could not comprehend, much less explain.

At first, the change carried with it relief. No more pain. No more chill, no more flames. There was only release and welcome loss of self. But the relief was short-lived. Infinitesimal compared to the agony that roared in. Gradual, gradual, then so fast her entire existence felt ripped apart. A firepot going off. A thousand thousand firepots going off. And inside each was wintry pain like she’d never imagined, never known could exist.

The collective pain of every Hell-Bard in the Witchlands and every Hell-Bard who had ever lived.

It was not merely the physical pain of life without magic either, cold and vicious and eternal, but the emotional trauma of having it cut away. Safi became their loss, their isolation, their empty, blundering lives through a world forever gray. All the pain she’d felt in the last two weeks was magnified on a scale no body was meant to feel, no brain was meant to maintain.

She thought surely this must be the end of her life.

At some point, she sensed that she was screaming. Great shrieks that shredded her throat and ripped apart her lungs. She couldn’t say how she knew—she’d lost all contact with her body. Yet somehow she did know, just as she knew that she and the healer were no longer alone.

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, it did get 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.