Page 124 of The Starving Saints

Phosyne falls back, just in time to hear the crack of Voyne’s skull against the floor. The Lady once more exists, standing above the three of them, regarding each in turn.

None move.

Treila is too weak to rise. Voyne has been beaten down one time too many. And the knife is back in the Lady’s hands as She stands over Phosyne, surveying the destruction.

“You toy with your food,” Phosyne pants. “You could have killed them five times over, couldn’t you?”

The Lady doesn’t answer, but the slight tightening around Her mouth suggests—no. No, She is struggling, just as they are. She is just as liable to fall.

“You can’t kill them, can you?” Phosyne murmurs, frowning. “You can do nothing to them I do not allow. I hold dominion.”

But that’s not quite right. She did not want Treila run through. Does not want Voyne insensate on the ground, eyelids fluttering as she tries to find one last store of strength within her.

“No, little mouse. I am your minder,” the Lady murmurs. “Power flows both ways.”

And yet the Lady does not move to cut either Treila’s or Voyne’s throats.

Phosyne struggles up to her knees, claws her hands into the aether around her, feels the rumble of the heavens outside, but canfind not one thing to craft into a weapon. Her mind is blank and too full all at once.

She sways. “What do you want of us?” she asks, because there are no answers at hand.

The Lady smiles. “Only free me, Phosyne, and they might still live.”

Another bargain.

Phosyne begins to laugh. She is supposed to be beyond bargains, now. She is supposed to have made the right one. But there is always one more ahead of her, one more dangled morsel that she feels she would die without.

She wants them to live. She is desperate for them to live. But she will not give up this, her last shred of control, for amight.

With a howl of rage, Phosyne grasps whatever she can reach. The gnarled, dried husk of the corkindrill, hanging from the ceiling; its teeth are blunt but there is something unseen tangled in them. A star, burning in a vast emptiness. A glittering fragment of mica embedded in enamel. In life, it must have tried to bite the heavens. That tooth sings against her palm. She lunges.

The Lady does not step aside.

“Phosyne,” the Lady says, and it is like a brand, like a muzzle. Hearing her name doesn’tstopher, not quite, but it makes her falter. She goes crashing to her knees, losing her grip on the bit of ephemera that now makes little sense, like every other epiphany that has lingered just out of her reach for the last year. Her thoughts grow dim and fuzzy, the way they had as she had focused on the candle flame. Phosyne doesn’t want this anymore, doesn’tneedthis anymore.

But there is no taking it back. The Lady has her name. Phosyne gave it to her.

Except—

Phosyneis only one name she has borne.

It is the name of a woman, once a nun, who has abandoned her faith, a desperate mind reaching too far beyond its ken, a woman rotting alone in a tower, protected but not cultivated. Before that was Sefridis, believing and orderly. And before that, another name shebarely remembers, a child’s name. She has been through so many. She has abandoned two of them. What strains against the Lady’s touch is none of them. She is, instead, clothed in fine robes, made of hunger, dancing upon the fretwork of the universe. It is only the bounds of this castle, this web of tight red string, that contains her. She is not Phosyne, not at all.

The name does not apply.

The nameless thing at the Lady’s feet looks up. She grins. She fists her hands into the Lady’s skirts and hauls Her down.

“Phosyne,” the Lady says, eyes shining, as the nameless woman prowls up her body. As she bares her teeth, but does not bite. “Free me. Free us both.”

The order slides off her like water.

Water.

Her eyes close to slits, and she sees beneath them a great pool of water, lit with burning flames. The water is hers and hers alone.

“No,” the nameless woman says.

They sink into the stone. The Lady thrashes, and the nameless woman feels the bite of the knife into her ribs.

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