Page 106 of The Starving Saints

There is the tectonic shift, a fundamental reordering of her mind, her body, her very being. There is the chill, settling deep into her bones. And above it all there is the disorientation, the sudden realization that there are holes in her memories, that she does not know where she is, that something has gone very wrong.

But there are fewer tears this time.

Instead of crying, she convulses. She gasps for breath. She clutches her throat and writhes on what feels like stone, but is uneven, uncarved, far more natural. She doesn’t know where she is, but she knows she is cold, and that breathing is hard.

It becomes less hard with every breath, though. That’s not usually how this goes.

And it’s not Phosyne beside her, but—

Golden hair. Wide, evaluating eyes. Treila de Batrolin crouches, curled in on herself, across a small, glowing creek. She’s clutching her dagger tight. In the low light, Voyne can still see the metal is dark with her blood.

Old blood. There is no fresh blood beneath her hands, and no incision in the skin below. Her fingers flex and bend without issue, all the swelling of her beestings gone. Her trembling slows. Voyne realizes, with a strange buoyancy, that she isalive.

And that just a few moments ago, she was in a garden. She was kissing a figment of her past. That figment had murdered her. That figment is watching her now, with an expression that Voyne has no idea how to read, knife at the ready.

On the battlefield, she is trained to be a snarling, vicious beast. And in captivity, in Aymar, she has strained at her leash and burned to transmute frustrated rage into furious action. But death, she finds, is not so galling asdying. And her memory of dying is oddly pleasant. A relief, a surprise, a final lack of struggle. Perhaps that is why she’s not angry. Why she isn’t primed to rip and tear andfight.

Or maybe it’s that when the spasms pass, Voyne is too exhausted to sit up. Too exhausted to defend herself.

“Will you kill me again?” she asks, finally, when she thinks she can speak. It comes out in a hoarse croak.

Treila grimaces, and Voyne notices that it’s not only the glow of the water that is illuminating them, but a candle, somewhere behind her. “I might,” she says. There’s no conviction behind her words. No real threat, Voyne thinks. Whatever drove her in the garden is gone. Transformed into what looks like agony.

She must be as intimately familiar with suffering as that perversion in the throne room had accused Voyne of being, by now. Starvation, frostbite, the loneliness of wandering the land shut out of everything that was once due to her.

It wasn’t kind, what Voyne did to her. Perhaps they are evenly matched, now.

“How long have you been here? In Aymar?” she asks. “How long did I not recognize you?”

A coughing fit sweeps her up, cracking at her ribs. Her world goes hazy, then clears again. Treila is a little closer now.

“As long as you’ve been here,” she says. Her whole body is tense. Coiled. She may not be driven to attack, but she may still snap, like a startled dog. The longer she is polite, the tighter she will be wound. Voyne is intimately familiar with the process.

“I killed your father, Treila de Batrolin, and I have no regrets,” she says. It is kinder, she thinks, to be honest.

Treila bares her teeth, lunges. But the knife hits the stone between them, and it is just the girl on her, hands trembling even as she fists her hands tight in Voyne’s matted braid. Her breath is hot on Voyne’s face. Bare inches separate them as Treila’s chest heaves, as she struggles to get control over herself.

“No regrets?” Treila whispers. “None at all? So loyal to your master?”

Voyne doesn’t look away. “He deserved it,” Voyne she says. “After Carcabonne.”

Treila’s brow creases. Some of the tension bleeds out of her hands. “Carcabonne?” she asks, confused. “What are you talking about? What does Carcabonne have to do withanything?”

“Your father died because of Carcabonne.”

“My father died so Cardimir would look strong,” Treila spits. But her hands have slipped entirely from Voyne now. She gets up, backing away. Something is strange about her hands. One finger, Voyne realizes, is gone. Frostbite, from that winter?

Or something else?

Wherearethey?

“Myfather,” Treila says, “was trying to save our people from starving.”

Voyne takes the measure of her infirmity. Makes her fingers twitch. Her calves tense. It’s not enough. “And what did your father do, to buy the grain he smuggled in?” she asks. Didactic, the way she remembers talking to Treila in those golden months between when she had paid in horrors to win back Carcabonne and when she again spilled blood.

“Salt. He shorted Cardimir his salt. Sent the rest to—to Etrebia.”

She is so certain.

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