Page 22 of The Starving Saints

“I am not in need,” she says, guilt and shame weighing her down. “Keep that for yourself.”

She does not threaten to take it away and redistribute it. Treila feels a pang for the woman she once thought Ser Voyne to be, who Ser Voyne seems to play at being even now.

There is silence, then, and Treila ponders her next move. She wants Ser Voyne weak, reliant, and she has gotten there so swiftly, but the next steps are treacherous. Should Treila reveal her identity, and hope that there is guilt there, too? Or should she stretch thisout, encourage Voyne to come back to this spot, meet her here again and hope that they can have another anonymous exchange? Given time, Treila can pry apart this woman’s armor, make her desperate, and then leave her betrayed, broken on the rocks.

The king would allow it. The king has already begun to cut her loose.

But before Treila can decide, Ser Voyne makes a move she was not expecting.

“What I am about to say,” Ser Voyne addresses to the air, “cannot be told to anybody else. Do you understand me?” She doesn’t turn to look at Treila, and that is the measure of how desperate she is, how broken.

Lying is easy. “Of course, ser knight,” she breathes, coming to sit behind her on the bench. Their hips brush, just slightly, and the contact steals Treila’s breath away. She canhearthe older woman breathing. Can hear the shaking in her chest. She is going to freely offer up another dagger to point at her breast, and Treila is so eager she could cry.

Ser Voyne is silent at first, marshaling her will or slowly letting go of her propriety. And then she places her head into her hands. “Food is dwindling. Rations are scant. You know that, or you wouldn’t have offered me some of your portion.”

Treila nods. “I know.” A pause. “We all know.”

Ser Voyne nods, not surprised. “We have two options left, if we are to last until rescue comes,” she murmurs.

Two options. Treila frowns, thinking. One is simple: humans are made of flesh just as much as dogs are, and the deaths will begin soon enough. But the other, she can’t imagine.

“Andisrescue on the way?” Treila asks, mind working.

“I don’t know,” Voyne confesses, heartbreak weighing down her words. “It should be, but it should also have arrived by now. And because it has not...”

Her voice breaks completely.

Because it has not, we must assume it is not coming. That it will never come, no matter how many messengers we send over the wall.

Treila hesitates only a moment, then reaches behind her, placesone slight hand on Voyne’s gloved knuckles. The knight flinches, but doesn’t turn to look. She needs the anonymity if she is to speak. Treila hides a smile. “Ser knight,” she says, “I know that you would defend me until the end. All of us. Tell me, what has you so distressed?”

Voyne draws in a shuddering breath. “They will either begin to feed us the dead,” she says, “or they will feed us heresy.”

Heresy. Treila rolls the word around in her mouth, even as she makes the appropriate noises of shock, distress. To eat the dead is terrible, of course.

But she has done it before. She assumed it would come to that, sooner or later. “I don’t understand,” she says.

“I am glad of that,” Voyne says, and Treila bites down a sharp laugh. The knight’s hand has turned over beneath hers, is clasping her fingers gently. “But flesh is flesh. I don’t think they will announce when the change happens, but it will happen. I am sorry.”

“But isn’t that heresy itself? To—to do that?” She minces around it as if she is not intimately familiar with the taste of human meat.

As if she is not, in a dark part of herself, looking forward to it—if only because she knows it will not break her.

“There are worse things,” Ser Voyne breathes, “than that.”

“What?” Treila pushes. “What can be worse than what we are driven to, when all else is lost? Doesn’t it all become the same, then?”

But Ser Voyne does not answer, not immediately, and Treila feels her hand tense against her fingers. Ser Voyne turns, finally, to see who she has been speaking with. Treila freezes, considers, then turns her head as well. She pushes her blonde curls out of the way, tucks them behind one ear, twisted by a scar from a knife. She knows her cheek is visible now, the line of her nose. The patrician arc of her brow.

Treila hears her sharp intake of breath. She forces herself not to smile.

“Do I know you?” Ser Voyne asks.

And finally, Treila looks up. She meets the troubled gaze of the woman who took everything from her without a lick of hesitation or regret. She shapes her expression into one of fear, of sadness.

She sees the spark of recognition.

The confusion.

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