Safi grinned, and with a great flourish, she plucked quill and paper from beyond the screen. Then she hunched forward as if to scrawl a similarly seductive letter in return.

Instead, she examined the Truth-lens—and it was the Truth-lens. Exactly as she’d made it in Marstok. There was the brass casing, taken from a telescope’s eyepiece. There were the outer lenses, and she could almost see hints of thread and flashes of quartz within. The only real difference between now and when Safi had crafted it a month ago was that now Safi was a Hell-Bard. Now, when she looked at it, her Hell-Bard senses revealed it to be magical.

She could not explain how she sensed that or why. Magical items were simply a bit more colorful, a bit more dimensional than anything else in her leached world. Witches too, and without any effort, her brain simply knew what witchery was before her and how powerful.

Sometimes it felt as if the information came from some vast, collective consciousness. Perhaps directly from the magic that bound all Hell-Bards as one. But when Safi had asked Lev about that, the woman had simply shaken her head and said, Word of advice, Imperial Majesty: thinking leads to hoping, and nothin’ is more futile when you’re a Hell-Bard.

When Safi looked at her Truth-lens now, it gleamed against the desk’s glossy wood, and as soon as her fingers touched the brass …

Ah, there it was. The certainty trilling down the back of her neck that this was Truth magic—and what a strange, awful feeling that was. To stare at the only remnants of her own magic. Untouchable, unusable. Because, of course, magic didn’t work on Hell-Bards. It could not harm them, it could not trick them. Whatever happened when the noose cinched into place, it rendered all magical effects obsolete.

Safi couldn’t resist trying, though. She bent her head farther beneath the screen and pressed her eye to the glass.

It was like peering into a kaleidoscope, but with no rhyme or reason to the patterns. She trained it on her right hand, and her Aether Witchmark, only three weeks old, turned a variety of colors thanks to the stones and threads within. No longer a hollow circle, but a jagged, broken ellipse.

She’d never used her invention before. After pouring all of her energy and the false half of her magic into the various parts, Safi had attended Empress Vaness’s birthday party—and then that party had ended in tragedy. So, so much tragedy that even now, she struggled to fully fathom it all.

Tragedy that could have been prevented. Tragedy she had caused.

At that thought, the lens turned white.