Page 126 of The Starving Saints

She doesn’t know how to set things back to rights. She does notwantto set things back to rights. The death of the Lady feels like enough, though she knows it isn’t. She wants to stay this way, but shecan’tstay this way. Outside her windows, the world is breaking; she can see stone floating in the air. She can see the moon nestled in the sun’s embrace. Strange, cold twilight has enveloped the world, and for a moment, all she can feel is delight. Delight, to experience this new working of the heavens.

This can’t continue.

Phosyne looks up at Ser Voyne, blade shining in her hand. She looks at Treila, blood-soaked, murderous, as certain as she’s ever been.

And then she plunges her hands into the stone and lets it solidify there, chaining her. Stilling things for just a moment, just long enough. “Kill me,” she begs, and bows her head to expose her throat. “Kill me, please.”

The sound of metal over metal; Voyne comes close, kneels before her. Fits one hand around Phosyne’s throat, as if it is meant to be there. Phosyne gasps, shudders, pushes into it.

But Voyne does not tighten her fingers, only urges Phosyne to look up at her.

“No.”

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Voyne’s denial strikes Phosyne hard. It drags a sob from her, and the world sobs too. Aymar shudders, and outside the rain begins again.

“Why?” she begs. “Look at me.Look.”

Voyne looks.

She sees, through the haze of a ringing skull and burning adrenaline, a frightened, desperate woman, whose skin is red and scalded, whose robes are stained crimson with blood over her ribs, whose eyes are the same cloudy gray they were the day they met. She sees a woman she has sworn to protect, though the king she gave the oath to no longer lives, and wouldn’t merit obedience if he did. She sees the woman who, in her own way, has ushered Aymar through a great and terrible transition.

The False Lady is dead, or at least locked away. If her words are to be trusted, Phosyne holds dominion over every life in Aymar, with possibly only the exclusion of Treila and Voyne.

Voyne doesn’t feel excluded, not really.

“I am your minder,” Voyne says, with more patience than she feels. Her certainty doesn’t remove her fear, not even close. But the world is spinning apart around them, and Voyne cannot fix that herself. She can’t fix any of this herself. Treila holds the leash of the beasts that wait to devour them, and Phosyne holds the keys to the world. “I will bring you back to yourself. Do you trust me?”

Phosyne bares her teeth, shakes her head.

“She will kill you if she has to,” Treila says softly, from just over Voyne’s shoulder. Voyne fancies she can hear a strained smile in her voice. “Do not doubt that. That she hasn’t says there is still hope.”

Phosyne laughs, weakly. She weeps. She folds down, held up only by Voyne’s hand around her throat.

Voyne tightens her fingers just a little, a reminder of the chapel, of the cistern, of everything between them.

Phosyne’s breath catches.

“Let me take you from this place,” Voyne says. Her head is foggy, but she knows they cannot remain here. Sweat rolls from her skin, even now that the boiling stew below them is closed off. “Relax. Trust me, Phosyne.”

She tightens her fingers, and, like in the cistern, it lets Phosyne’s hands slide from the stone. Voyne pulls her up to her feet, her aching muscles protesting every inch.

And when they are both upright, together, Voyne slides her other arm behind Phosyne’s knees and lifts.

She takes a moment to make sure she has her footing, and looks up to see Treila evaluating the two of them, standing as well, Voyne’s sword clutched in her arms. Alive and whole. It is more than Voyne had hoped for.

Phosyne saved her, too.

Voyne could not have borne her loss. She knows that, as much as she knows she cannot abandon the woman in her arms.

Together, they leave the tower and make their way down the stairs, breathing ragged in the close space.

Outside, the wind echoes the heaving of their lungs, bursting against the face of the keep. The stairs rock and yaw beneath them, like nothing so much as a ship adrift. They are all adrift, here in the eye of Phosyne’s power, raw and terrible and tasting, unavoidably, ofher.

A snap. A cry. Something else torn loose, tossed into the swirling abyss Voyne can see whenever she passes by an arrow slit.

Phosyne is far too light, and far from pliant. She isn’t trying to fight, Voyne reminds herself, but that doesn’t stop the paroxysms of pain and power from twisting her frail body, pitching her this way and that, making her spine bend and nearly crack as she howls.

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