Page 1 of The Starving Saints

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In fifteen days, there will be no food in Aymar Castle.

She has done the arithmetic forward and back. They have been down to strangled rations for weeks now, and there have been mistakes. Thefts. Impulsive, desperate gorgings. Even if every soul in Aymar Castle keeps to their allotted portion—and Phosyne does not think that is likely—every soul in Aymar Castle will run out of food in fifteen days.

And though Phosyne is one of the few outside the Priory who can work sums, everybody else is bound to realize this soon.

They are packed in one atop the other; a castle meant to hold at most three hundred for any length of time now shelters three times that. Every nook and cranny is full to bursting of terrified farmers and a pitiful handful of overwrought knights. They’ve been living in this unbearable press for almost six months now. It’s a testament to Ser Leodegardis’s leadership that they’ve lasted this long, that the siege outside their walls has not broken them, that plague has not crashed down heavy on their heads. But time is inexorable, as is the human stomach.

Relief has not come. They do not know if it will.

Fifteen days.

Phosyne counts out her own stores, meant to last her another three. She doesn’t eat much, so they might last her a little longer, except she has two little mouths to feed that the quartermaster doesn’t know about. Her companions slink along the walls and ceiling, all long, sleek bodies and dark scales, looking for a crevice to slip through. Ornuo stole a chicken a month and a half ago, but Phosyne has since stopped up her few windows. No chance of that happeningagain. (She does not know the depths of their hungers and desperations, nor even their real nature. She worries that they will begin to nibble on her toes as she sleeps.)

She tosses out a bit of ox hide she can’t bring herself to stomach yet, and Pneio snaps it from the air, then retreats beneath her desk to gnaw at it. His brother darts after him. They tussle.

For herself, she takes nothing, instead locking the strips of tough dried meat and gristle back inside the heavy box she’s reassigned for the purpose. Later, she’ll eat later, after she’s made some progress. Progress is the only reason she’s been afforded the rations she has been, the only reason she is allowed to live alone despite the pack of bodies throughout the rest of the keep. Progress earns her the candles she burns down to nubs in the close darkness of her stoppered tower.

Progress has not been forthcoming, as of late.

Her stomach cramps in irritation as she mounts the steps up to the loft above her main floor. When she moved in, this room was one of the most unpleasant in the castle: damp, fetid, filled with moss and fungus thanks to the cooling influence of the rain cistern below the floor. Now it is dry and warm, yet another impossibility she tries to keep hidden. It’s the sort of thing the Priory would take issue with. Eventually, somebody will notice, word will spread. Nothing lasts forever without changing.

Or breaking.

She settles on the sill of the one window that still lets in a shaft of light, through a dull pane of glass she’s secured into a mass of wood and mud and pitch. Outside, it’s early evening; the sun is setting atop the keep walls, and beyond them, she can just make out the line of contravallation, the wall their enemy has built to keep them in, should they ever risk leaving the castle’s safety. That wall sits between them and fields, fields that have either been torched or taken over by the thousands of soldiers and laborers that surround them. In six months, they have built a thriving town. They squat on the land and take its bounty for their own.

Her last experiment was too bold, she can see that now. Transporting food that she cannot see, through so much stone and acrossso many bodies? Impossible. But she is getting desperate, just like the rest.

Her other attempts were more reasonable, yet no less doomed. She has failed to speed the germination of seeds for the castle gardens. She has caused only blight when she has attempted to divide and propagate summer squash and sprigs of herbs. Her only success so far has been a process by which fouled water can be made clean again; invaluable, necessary, but not enough.

Phosyne’s head pounds, and she curls up into a tight little ball. Her fingers itch. Her whole body itches, really, with the lice and fleas that have grown rampant in the last few months, but her fingers itch for action. Desperate action. If she opens the little glass pane, and lets Ornuo and Pneio out—

They will not go out to foreign lands and bring her back a feast. They’ll only stalk starving babes in the crib. Foul creatures, unknown to any bestiary she has consulted, affectionate but untrustworthy.

Something bangs against her door.

It happens again, and she must concede it’s not an accidental collision. She is beginning to panic that they are here to take her food in punishment for her failures, or that somebody has seen Ornuo and Pneio, when she hears the rhythm to it. It’s not somebody come to hurt her. It’s somebody come to ask for help.

She leaves her window perch. She goes down the central spiral of stairs, into the main space of her workroom, with its astrolabes and charts and stuffed curiosities. She ducks below the corkindrill that is suspended from the floor of the loft and creeps toward the door, where the knocking is now accompanied by polite shouts. Her door is barred with a haphazard mix of materials and locks, and she is relieved to see it hold.

Phosyne goes to the series of pipes that feeds through a hole in the wall beside the door. The gap was originally designed to deter attackers, but she is no good with a spear or a sword, so instead, the pipes, with a little window at the end. Inside, a series of mirrors. She can see the whole hall from the safety of a little podium a good five feet to the left of the door.

The king stands just outside her rooms.

She shoves the glass-capped pipe away, then grabs it again, cursing, and peers once more. Yes, it is the king, still in velvet finery even after all these months, a little thinner in the cheeks but not by much. He stands at ease, flanked by guards but not wearing armor himself. He trusts the walls to defend him, and he has not come to kill her.

Silly; the king would never kill her. He has people for that.

So she measures the people: two soldiers, looking furtive and nervous but no more so than usual. Probably not here to kill her either, but the absence of Ser Leodegardis makes her uneasy. She only glancingly knows the king. Leodegardis, responsible for this castle in particular, is responsible for her as well. But a king cannot be denied; she needs to open the door, or else there will be even more trouble.

“Coming! Please wait!” she cries; the pipes should carry her words out of the room. And then she sets about unlocking locks and shifting planks of wood. Her serpents dive beneath rugs, hiding among her piles of texts and tools, more mess in the maelstrom of her room.

She pulls open the door, but doesn’t move out of the way, bowing where she stands. “Your Majesty,” she says to his fine leather shoes.

“My madwoman,” he greets, and his rich voice is pinched thin. (Not yours, she thinks.) “Do you have another miracle for me?”

“Not yet,” she says, wincing. It’s been nearly a month since she solved Aymar’s water problem. In any other circumstances, her work would have been enough to earn her safety and acclaim for years, if not a lifetime. Here, now, it is nowhere near enough.

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