Safi and Iseult parted ways. Not because Safi wanted to leave her Threadsister so soon, but because Iseult still had work to do … and Safi did too. They would find each other after—Safi made Iseult swear that a thousand times over, and she waited until Iseult was nothing more than a fading silhouette within the trees before she set off too. Then with Caden slumped on a black mare before her, a hundred Hell-Bards trailing behind, she rode to the Emperor’s hunting lodge.

And as she rode, Safi surveyed a new world.

Before life as a Hell-Bard, she would have thought it bleak and barren. A wasteland where death crept in on silent, frozen feet. Winter’s breath cut into her. Snow blanched everything, and gray forest bled into gray sky.

After life as a Hell-Bard, Safi saw only potential. This winter, like all winters, would end eventually; green would return; the cycle would start anew. In the meantime, life harbored in countless pockets she’d never noticed before. Glimpses of evergreen thick with snow. Paw prints tracing between trees. Birds startling into flight. Holly berries beating red.

So much she had missed. So much she was grateful to see now—and to feel too, with her magic and soul fully returned. Both truth and lie, she sensed with stark clarity. Not merely half of her magic, but somehow the full entirety had been restored. Louder too, like an exuberant chorus living inside her.

True, true, true, it sang. Free, free, free.

The hunting lodge soon loomed ahead, perched on a craggy ledge above the Solfatarra. It reminded Safi of a different castle exposed to cold. A different life a hundred miles away. But where her childhood home had fallen into disrepair, the lodge had windows and walls intact, roofs without holes, and life—so much life.

Hasstrel would look that way again soon.

People crawled over the ramparts, moved within windows, and circled the various paths through the forest. Their scarlet uniforms flashed like fires, but no one interfered with Safi’s approach on horseback. She was in charge for now. Shambling along at the end of this imperial procession was the Emperor. Former Emperor. She was glad she hadn’t killed him. The Hell-Bards could decide his fate.

After crossing a wide bridge over a dark-watered moat, Safi’s mare reached a wide yard where soldiers and stable hands scurried about. No one argued when she bellowed for a healer. Instead, Hell-Bards rushed to help her. Freed Hell-Bards, who could do as they pleased, who wanted to aid her and wanted to follow a woman who had once been one of their own.