Page 107 of The Starving Saints

“No, he didn’t,” Voyne says, and shoves herself upright. She gets as far as sitting, then has to sag against the nearby wall.

Across from her, Treila is quivering, taut as a bowstring. “He said we’d sent them salt,” she repeats.

“He gave them Carcabonne.”

For a long time, Treila doesn’t move. Her eyes go unfocused. Voyne wonders what she’s thinking about. What she remembers. Carcabonne had been only three months before they’d met. Voyne had been fresh off the field of battle, not newly made a hero but certainly newly shined, when she’d arrived at Treila’s father’s house. She’d spent much of her recuperation there. And then the king had come to visit, and brought with him the findings of his spymasters, and everything had gone to shit.

Voyne thinks, mostly, of Carcabonne itself. Of the blood. The fire. Etrebia had already held the fort by the time Voyne and her soldiers arrived to take it back; all of Carcabonne’s knights had been slain, all its people slaughtered or hauled over the border and sold into slavery. They had come very close to all-out war that winter. But they’d been lucky, heard the first whispers of treason early enough to stop Etrebia from stealing anything else.

It had just taken a while to discover who had sold them out.

“You’re lying,” Treila whispers, finally.

“No,” Voyne tells her.

“Nobody said anything about Carcabonne. When you killed him. When you cut his head off, you said—you said it was thesalt—”

“I said nothing,” Voyne murmurs. She waits for Treila’s hands to close around her throat again; they are spasming hard enough at her sides, and Voyne is helpless. Voyne is destroying her world all over again. “But yes, that was the reason Cardimir gave to everybody who asked. Treason, but of a lesser sort. Because we judged it would be better for the king to appear cruel than to appear weak. We cleaned house quietly, after that.”

Treila doesn’t grab her throat. She covers her own eyes instead, moans into her hands. She sits back on her heels.

She laughs.

The laughter turns to sobs, eventually, and then to silence, and then it is just the two of them, breathing in the semi-dark.

“Five years of my life,” Treila says at last. “Five years of my life, trying to defend a massacre. If I had known—”

“If you had known, would you have enjoyed your suffering?”

Treila does not answer.

“I had no other choice but to cast you out,” Voyne said. “But that does not make it less terrible. I have no regrets, because I protected my country, but if I could have done it differently...”

She trails off, unsure of what she means to say. In the end, all she can string together is, “I am glad you’re alive, Treila.”

The words ring in the silence of the little grotto they’re in. Voyne looks away from the girl, finally, to regard where she is, and whatshe has left. She is alive; they are underground. She feels like herself. She’d forgotten what that was like. It’s like her veins are filled with cool water, steady, strong.

She has been reordered. The Priory would likely have something to say about it. Phosyne, too, surely. Some transmutation. Some alchemy. Death as a transforming fire.

“Help me stand,” she commands, half expecting Treila to laugh in her face.

“No,” Treila says instead.

“Then tell me where we are.”

“Below the keep.”

“And the rest of Aymar? The—fiends that have walked its halls?” She realizes, then, how miraculous it is that Treila is here at all. That she isn’t up with the horrible throngs, gorging herself on flesh and bewitched fruits. In the strangeness of her resurrection, they had seemed to be in a world all their own. But they haven’t left it. “Your mind is clear?”

“Unfortunately,” Treila says. “When I killed you, I thought it was the Loving Saint, wearing your face. But that’s a more mundane sort of madness, I think.”

And finally, it clicks. “Phosyne’s way out. You were the one I couldn’t see.”

Golden hair. Yes, she remembers now, so many of their meetings in the garden.

“We can go,” Treila says. “Weshouldgo. I have food, we have this exit. I’ve left before. We can do it.”

Freedom should be tempting, but there’s no cowardice left in her, either; Treila’s blade cut that away, along with the fog inside her skull. “No.” She tries to rise again, and again her limbs are not quite strong enough. But they are getting stronger.

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