Page 20 of The Starving Saints

He is right, of course. But she cannot accept this butchery. “If we do this, we cross a line,” she says. “We cannot go back. We have time, still. The Priory has come through for us. Etrebia’s siege engines are broken. Will we not ride out to break their line? Will we nottry?”

Her liege’s lips curl in a snarl, an expression she hasn’t seen on him since the siege first set in and proved it could not be broken. “Ser Voyne, master yourself. We do not have the strength to fight. This is not the time to be precious.” He looks so arrogant, in this moment, chin lifted, tongue virginal to the taste of human meat. “Give me a miracle, and I will relent,” he proclaims. “But I see no miracle.”

“The woman is ungovernable!” Voyne cries. “You cannot rely on her. You can’t ask me to—”

“I can ask you to do anything I please,” he cuts her off. “She gave us clean water. Shewillgive us food. Until then, I will do as I see fit.” He looks down at the body of Jecobe de Avienten, touches the cut stump of his wrist.

“You screech so loudly of what we should and should not do. We should not eat him, hm? Then what if we give it to your charge instead?” Cardimir asks. “Not so bad as eating, but it could still give us food one day. It could be the link to our miracle. Would that mollify your nerves, girl?”

Girlstrikes her deeper even than the thought of Phosyne fumbling about with a man’s remains. Cardimir has never spoken toher this way, and she bristles. “And what would she do with it, Your Majesty? Let it rot and try to make it dance with grass seeds?”

“I must agree with Ser Voyne,” the prioress admits. “To be consigned to meat is terrible. To bewastedwould be more so.”

“And have you given me a solution?” the king snaps, rounding on her, his fury growing. “Either of you, will you give me a solution? No? If you tell me she is mad and cannot give me my miracle, then I will trust you. But if that is so, then this man’s flesh goes to feed my people. He is a sacrifice.Thisis a sacrifice. You must know what we have done, but they have no need to. It buys us time. Standback, Ser Voyne.”

Helplessly trained, Ser Voyne steps back. She sinks to one knee. She stares up at her king, and wishes she were anywhere else at all.

9

Are you lost?”

Treila screams. She falls back, staring wild-eyed at the whispering fissure, but she sees no movement, no indication of life. She hauls herself back up onto the ledge, clutches her dress to her front, never looking away.

But there is nothing. Nothing but the water, the breeze. She needs to go. She needs to squirm back through the gap in the stone, back into Aymar, back into her slow, slow death.

“Don’t leave,” the gap whispers. “Not yet. You are so tired.”

“Shut up!” Treila cries, feeling for the edges of the hole, pushing her clothing inside. The milky blue light of the trickle of a stream is dim, but the unnatural color scrapes at her eyes, making them sting and water. Or perhaps those are the fumes, whatever fumes she’s inhaling that are making her hear—this. This impossibility.

This useless impossibility, because even if that voice belongs to a person, and that person does not itch to kill every soul in Aymar castle, there is still no way to get through the stone.

Whoever, whatever the voice belongs to does not speak again.

Her chest aches with the fierceness of her gasping breaths, but slowly, in the silence, she calms herself. Her fingers shake against the rock, but soon it is with exhaustion, not fear. She looks at the stream again, considers a drink before she remembers how terribly it had hurt, when she’d sipped at the foul water before the Priory had clarified it. She doesn’t need that again.

With one last cautious look at the whispering crack, Treila forces herself back into the earth. She stretches out on her belly and begins to climb.

As she ascends, she finds each scrap of clothing she left behind save for one; a single stocking, the first thing she had abandoned to mark her way. But there’s nowhere it could have gone; she makes it from the second stocking to the entrance back into the keep in barely more than two minutes, her path entirely illuminated by the daylight that seems to have arrived too early.

But there is no stocking. She frowns at her bare foot once she is dressed again, then shoves it into her shoe.

She was down there longer than intended; there’s a good chance she is missed. She hurriedly covers the gap and moves her chair in front of it, grabs up work, sits. Fiddles with thread and needle.

It’s a way to get her breath back and to think, and if anybody comes in search of her, it gives her a ready excuse; she wanted to use this first light of day, while the air is still cool, to get a little piecework done.

Nobody comes in search of her.

The day grows warmer, and sooner than she expected, she hears the bells of the Priory ring out. She forces herself up then, and her body protests. Her joints ache. Her head spins. She pitches forward, catches herself on the wall just beside where her cache hides. She needs sleep, but won’t get it until night; the heat and her chores will make sure of that.

First things first. She hurries up the steps and out into the yard, notably behind her fellow servants. When she takes her place at the back of the line, Denisot, the chamberlain, has already taken his blessing. He shoots her a glare for her tardiness.

Treila fists her hands in her skirts so that he won’t notice how raw and scraped her fingers are.

The high noon sun glints off the metals that decorate the Constant Lady and Her saints, flashing into Treila’s eyes, making them water, making her head pound harder still. She thinks she might crack, break into pieces. If she did, might she be narrow enough to get through that gap?

As things stand, there’s no point in going back. Even if the voice was only in her head, she doesn’t have the tools or strength to widen out that passage.

The realization is sobering.

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