Page 118 of The Starving Saints

Cardimir and the False Lady and Phosyne—but the darkness doesn’t laugh at how much practice she has at shifting her loyalties recently. It doesn’t needle her, doesn’t mock her.

“I do not ask for a bargain. I do not ask for submission,” it says instead. “We are already one and the same.”

She quakes at the thought. “But you are hungry,” she whispers, wary.

“Hunger is inescapable, shield bearer,” it says, and the hands at last leave her scalp, disappear back into the darkness. The teeth go with them a moment later. “You cannot gain any distance on it. It will follow you to the ends of the earth. But the hunger that I am holds this castle up. The hunger that they are would tear it away from you. The hunger that you feel would lead you to victory.”

Another shudder rocks her. “If you speak the truth. If this is not another ploy.”

“You doused the candle. You asked to speak to me. You never intended to ask for freedom.”

“I wanted only information, not a mandate.”

“You have always had the mandate.”

Voyne closes her eyes. Thinks of Carcabonne, and Treila’s father, headless at her feet, and Phosyne given over into her care. None of it has been easy, or simple, or even clear at the time. It is only after that she can feel the rightness of it. It is not obedience, not even loyalty, but one single note above all else:

Protect them.

She has the strength to do it. She has the iron in her spine. She has the stone beneath her feet.

“I have always had the mandate,” she agrees.

The darkness bows behind her.

49

Treila is just outside the keep when the sky breaks open and the deluge begins.

The clouds that have boiled out of empty air bring with them a flash and shudder of light. Not lightning, not thunder, but the sun itself roiling, spinning, careening between noon and dusk and dawn, stars springing to life and then winking out again. Treila stares up at the riot even as water falls on her with the force of an avalanche, churning the dirt below her feet to sludge. The rain plunges down her throat, chokes her, and it’s only that spasming that tears her away from the sight, bends her double so she can cough and gasp for breath.

It washes some of the honeyed sharpness of the Loving Saint’s blood out of her mouth and, selfishly, she clamps her lips shut, not quite ready to lose the rest of it.

She pulls herself inside a doorway.

The stones themselves begin to dance.

That’s the only word for it, the way they rock and slide against one another. Gravity and mortar seem forgotten. The world is lurching off its axis; no matter how hard Treila glares, it all refuses to still.

And above it all, she hears Phosyne, screaming.

It echoes down the stairwells, piercing and pained, and Treila freezes, clinging to a tapestry that has yet to melt. It’s pained, but also ecstatic, and she reaches reflexively for the knife that is not there.

You can trust me, Phosyne had promised her. And she’d known better, known not to, but—

But does the loss of a blade really matter? This would have happened either way.

There’s no time for regret. Treila throws herself down toward her workshop, praying the tunnel has not shimmied closed.

It hasn’t. It yawns black and beckoning in her lonely little room, with its needles and awls and waxed thread, the fragments of a life that doesn’t feel like hers. Treila, the glover, the rat catcher, doesn’t exist anymore. She has been washed away by the blood and flesh in her teeth.

Which is good. That Treila wouldn’t have survived this long, no matter the armor she’d built for herself.

ThisTreila slides back down into the earth like she was made for it.

She is maybe halfway through the winding passage, the sounds dying away, the world falling back to order as she moves, when she notices the next ill omen:

Voyne has doused the candle.

---