Page 113 of The Starving Saints

He’s not the only one in the hall who retains a small piece of himself. Ser Voyne had been busy, on her trip to the cistern. Her water has slaked the thirst of many, binding them subtly to Phosyne with every sip. But Leodegardis has had the lion’s share. He burns with twined loyalties, to the Lady and to Phosyne, so much like Voyne herself.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asks when he has clamped his hand against the wood of the table, as if to still it.

The Absolving Saint has disappeared back into the kitchen, and the Lady is missing. Phosyne has a moment. Below the table, she presses the knife into her lap.

“Not yet,” Phosyne says.

“Did you call them? These invaders. These jailers of ours.” Heplainly has grasped that the thing wearing the Constant Lady’s form is something else, if only by Her actions.

“No.” Her lips twitch into an apologetic smile. “If I had, this would have turned out much differently.”

She thinks.

“When I took you in...” Leodegardis grimaces in pain, as if he has to fight to remember. She’s not sure if he’s fighting against the haze the Lady creates inside his mind, or his own guilt for everything that has transpired. “I didn’t mean to use you. Maybe I should have.”

“It would certainly have given me structure. Putting me in that room, giving me no purpose except to learn... things got out of hand, I think,” Phosyne says, and feels a pang of fondness for this man. He will not survive the night, she thinks. His other leg has been cut away. He is balanced in a nest of cushions, provided by the Absolving Saint. She oversaw the process, the negotiations. Leodegardis did not fight. In fact, he begged for them to do it, perhaps because he thought it would spare his king.

“But I do not think I can be used, not the way you would have liked,” she adds, more softly now. “My knowledge does not proceed linearly. It cannot be forced. It arises as some echo of another layer of reality, like a room adjoining this one without a door. I think...”

I think it would have been better if I had never been kept.If she had never been sequestered away from the real world, allowed to bend her mind to the impossible. If she had not been indulged.

Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered either way. What she wants, though, is to give Leodegardis some absolution of her own.

She touches his wrist. “You did well by me,” she tells him. “You did well by all of us.” That was his obligation, his duty: in return for the fealty of his household, he gave them as much care and protection as he could. And now they are no longer his to lead.

“At least we did not starve to death,” he says. He closes his eyes in grim humor.

No, they did not starve to death at all.

“Promise me something, my madwoman,” Leodegardis says after a moment’s quivering.

“Name it.”

“Do not forget my kindness. Do not let this have been in vain.”

It’s not what she expected, but she nods, curls their fingers together for a brief moment. “I will never forget,” she assures him. A part of her wishes he had made her promise to end this, but she has already promised that to Treila, to Voyne.

Remembrance is probably just as important.

“I should have let Ser Voyne leave,” Leodegardis whispers as Phosyne stands once more. His eyes close in pain. He reaches for another piece of meat. “She asked to go, to get help. I told her she was a coward.”

Phosyne’s heart twists, a flare of anger, and she leaves him there before she does something drastic for the memory of a dead woman.

Her hands are tight upon the hilt of Treila’s dagger.

She slips out of the great hall unnoticed, taking the path she did the night she fled from Ser Voyne, through the halls, up the stairs. She is not alone; the split-second images of the Lady’s lesser beasts pace her as she walks, but they keep their distance. Phosyne cannot feel them the way she feels the people in the hall below, but she can see them, glittering and flat, teeth sharp and waiting.

There’s blood on them. The scent of honey. Something has changed, and Phosyne hesitates on the stairs. If she ascends, her little tower room waits. She doesn’t want to go there, she wants toendthis, but for just a moment, the urge to flee rises up in her. The old urge, to hide, to become unremarkable once more.

She pushes it aside. She steps instead into the throne room.

The Lady sits upon the throne. The honeycomb has spread from Jacynde’s corpse and now crawls up the wall behind the Lady, up into the rafters. Brilliant sunlight shines warm through panes of wax that now stopper the windows. The whole room is warm and humming with the movement of a thousand bees. They move in and out of the mass of the Lady’s hair, Her braids coming undone. They sip at the nectar of the living blooms that wreathe Her.

The bees are not to blame; their nature has been played with as much as anybody’s, their life cycle accelerated, their hive fattened on unnatural nectar. But if Phosyne drives the blade between the Lady’s ribs, the comb will remain. The honey, too. The magic in it. Theinfiltration, the corridors filled with the Lady’s creatures. It’s too late to unmake what the bees have wrought.

There is little point in stabbing Her. There are a hundred more like Her within the castle walls, and Phosyne does not have the strength or skill to hunt them down one by one.

Voyne would argue with her, surely, but Voyne is not here to stop her. Voyne is dead.

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