Page 109 of The Starving Saints

Treila takes the long way to it, clinging to shadows, back against the stone. She clutches the knife in her hand, watching for any sign of saints or beasts. Ready to fight. Ready to carve a path.

There’s no need. She reaches the great hall without seeing so much as a flicker of a shadow that is not hers, and she peers inside.

The room is full of bodies. There is laughter, a hundred voices raised one atop the other, singing at the far margins. There is delight. There is happiness. It shreds at her nerves, discordant, and Treila retreats until she finds an empty window into the corridorthat leads into the great hall itself. She tucks her blade in the folds of her skirt and prowls forward, the way she had the night of the feast.

And it is so like the night of the feast, when she enters the great warm room. It feels like the whole of the castle is concentrated here, though Treila knows that to be impossible. The walls could not contain them all. But the crush of bodies is so much tighter and hotter than it was the night of the feast, and the yard outside so empty.

Treila, shivering, pushes her way in. Every brush of skin against skin makes her flinch. She waits for one of the faces to turn, to see her with the Loving Saint’s piercing eyes, or the golden blank hunger of the beasts, but there is only mindless rapture. Nobody cares that she steps on their feet, that she crushes them into their neighbor. Nobody reacts at all, except to let her pass.

And then the bodies begin to thin. Each step becomes a little easier. Treila stops just short of falling out of the press of bodies entirely, held up by a flash of yellow—the Lady’s face, turned away from her, gazing out to the center of the clearing.

Phosyne stands before Her.

Before them both, the king hangs upside down. He is naked, pale, just a man.

Less than a man; Phosyne has opened his belly, and his organs lie at her feet on golden platters. They have been carefully sorted. His kidneys gleam. His liver glistens. His heart still seems to beat, though Treila is sure that is only a trick of the light, or of her own rising gorge.

In Phosyne’s hand is a knife not made of iron but of bone. It is sharp, though; she is flensing the skin from Cardimir’s corpse with casual flicks of her wrist. She is focused, wholly, on her work, reducing a great man to nothing more than a hanging side of meat.

She isfascinated. Treila can see it in her eyes, when at last she wises up and focuses on the butcher instead of the butchered. It’s easier.

And it means she’s looking when Phosyne at last realizes that Treila is there.

It’s a subtle shift. It’s shocking that it happens at all, Phosyne is so clearly enamored with her newest project, her newest investigation.She doesn’t stop, of course, but she moves through the rest of the flaying knowing that Treila is there. She joints the meat knowing that Treila is there. She presents each lovingly sectioned cut of flesh to the Absolving Saint knowing that Treila is there.

She speaks to the Lady, words swallowed up by the heat of the room, knowing that Treila is there.

It’s a fine dance, from that point forward. Phosyne is clearly in no position to simply slip out of the room as the party only grows once the king’s cuts have been carted off to the kitchens to be cooked up. Treila lets herself be swept up in it, if only to obliterate herself a little longer, so that no prying eyes might find her. It’s a sick echo of the first feast, with Treila playing the bewitched guest once more. Her knife burns in her fist.

She should be pleased that the king is dead. What Voyne said is, in the end, true: what was done to herwasmonstrous. Thrown out into an already starving countryside at the tail end of a brutal winter, with not even an understanding of why. Perhaps her father earned Voyne’s blade through his neck. Perhaps her father even earned his family’s disinheritance. But there were gentler ways. Kinder ways. Cardimir did not choose them.

And yet she can’t bring herself to feel vindication. He probably didn’t even notice when he was strung up.

She wishes she could have feasted on him five years ago, though.

The tide of the room has pushed her nearly to the door to the yard when Phosyne, at last, finds her. They see each other across a scrum of bodies, much the same way the Loving Saint had first caught Treila’s eye. Maybe that’s what makes her blood run cold, or maybe it is just rational fear of how much like them Phosyne has become. Her robes are finer than the last time Treila saw her. They are heavier with embroidery. They are dyed in soft and shifting colors. And Phosyne is clean, so very clean, no blood on her at all.

Treila turns and runs, throws herself back into the tide, lets herself be swept away, danced across the hall. She wants to lose herself, but she is tripping, staggering, something catching at her feet. She’s felt like this once before, near Phosyne’s rooms: it must be some manifestation of her power. Treila hisses a curse as she is steered back tothe door, but when she looks up, Phosyne is not there. When she looks down, there are darting shadows. Not the flat painted things, but something else, something substantial but elusive.

And then she’s outside. Alone.

There’s heat around her legs, burning hot, and then it’s gone, too.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Phosyne murmurs from the shadows.

Treila jerks and whirls, body tightly strung. Her eyes dance around the courtyard. Nobody watches.

Treila hides the blade behind her back and hopes Phosyne hasn’t seen it.

“Stay back,” Treila whispers.

Phosyne, to her credit, does. She holds up both hands, empty. “Were you able to hide her?”

Her jaw clenches. “Yes.”

Phosyne’s shoulders dip the slightest bit. “Good. Good. I—negotiations are ongoing.”

“I can see that,” Treila says, eyes flicking to the hall.

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