Page 3 of The Starving Saints

The king is by her side, frowning at her makeshift shutters. “What is it?”

“A riot,” Phosyne breathes, eyes wide. And then they grow wider because she sees now who was at the center of the mob, as he is pulled from the crowd, hurried back through the garden, into the kitchen. “They had the quartermaster. They were going to tear him to pieces.”

The king snarls and thrusts Phosyne out of the way, crouching to peer through the glass. The screams are quieting now, and so the action must be too. Only a minute more passes before the king pulls away, running a hand through his hair, tugging his beard.

“Ser Voyne has it in hand,” he grinds out. But he does not sound happy. Unrest will kill them far quicker than starvation.

Phosyne will have to revise her numbers.

“I need my miracle.”

Her shaking worsens. “It can’t be done. I can’t promise that. Food—food is not as easy as water, and water was not easy either. We need something else, another solution. I’m sorry, I can’t—”

“You can,” he says. “You will.” He regards her closely, then the room at large. It is a far cry from the orderly cleanliness of a Priory workshop. She’s not surprised at his grimace.

She thinks that perhaps now he’ll agree, that he won’t believe she can do it either. For the wrong reasons, but if it gets her relief—

“I have clearly been too generous, allowing you to work unobserved, at your own pace. Your success with the water seems to have been born of luck, not labor. Leodegardis had me convinced of your unique point of view, of the necessity of thinking more flexibly, but I think now that Prioress Jacynde had the measure of you. You need a firm hand.”

No.

No, she does not want anybody else in here. There have been miracles, yes, but disasters, too, and she cannot keep disasters hidden if—if—

“Ser Voyne will be your minder,” the king says, and Phosyne looks back down at the tall, broad slab of a woman, all muscles and flashing blade, blazing eyes that Phosyne can feel, even from this height.

“A minder will not help me,” she says, hunching over herself protectively.

“Ser Voyne will be your minder, and you will find me my miracle. You will feed my people. You will buy us more time. And you will remember that you are here on my sufferance.”

2

Ser Voyne, still sweat-soaked and itching for a proper fight in the wake of the riot, listens as the rest of the king’s fellows debate the merits of killing their own.

It will free up food for other mouths, the pragmatists say. (They do not say that flesh is flesh, but Voyne sees hunger in their eyes.) The fearful and the faithful say that law and order must be kept, no matter the cost; in the closed system the castle became six months ago, there is no room for chaos. But the loyalists, they cry that there must be as many hands to bear arms as possible when at last the relief comes, when the siege is broken, when they can take back the fields.

This is when Voyne moves forward in her seat, and the room quiets.

“I would agree, except that treasonous hands had best not hold swords,” she says. That earns nods and soft murmurs of assent; after all, she is a war hero. She was at Carcabonne, has seen terrors. She should know.

Doesknow, she reminds herself, when her confidence falters under the weight of eyes on her, eyes that see her fine armor and her seat at the king’s right hand. They’re listening to her, but perhaps they shouldn’t. Perhaps she’s lost the taste; she hasn’t seen any terrors lately.

The king doesn’t let her get close.

She feels his eyes on her most of all, and so Voyne doesn’t add the more damning rebuttal to the loyalists’ argument that is burning a hole in her breast: that there has been no sign of a relief force, and the chance of them ever leaving these stone walls is so small she can no longer see it.

There will be no taking back the fields, with treasonous hands or not.

Today’s riot is just the beginning.

They were not meant to be pinned down in Aymar, though of course it was constructed for just such a possibility, a strong spur castle on a ridge manned by Ser Leodegardis, his brothers, his household. A garrison of not inconsiderable strength, managed and provisioned well. But even Aymar has its limitations, and feeding so many refugees and knights and servants for six months was never going to be possible, and that is before they consider that the king is here in residence with them with his own sizable retinue. The farms beyond the walls have all been torched and squatted on and turned to shit, and the kitchen gardens, while extensive, have now been picked bare of even the autumn-bearing crops, far too soon. The stores have sustained them this far, but only due to a miscalculation, because they’d all hoped they would be gone long before now.

Relief was supposed to arrive a month ago.

Instead, they are stalemated. They have fended off rounds of attacks from Etrebia, but they have destroyed few of their rams and towers, only fought back hard enough to make them bide their time out of range. Etrebia’s men are entrenched and willing to wait for resupply. Aymar’s inhabitants are prepared only to starve.

Voyne sees all of this, and is furious, and wants nothing more than to ride out herself and force her way through to victory. Instead, she puts down riots and sits at her liege’s side, spoiling for a fight she must not start.

“We need to send another messenger,” Ser Leodegardis says from the king’s other side, fists clenching on the table as he resists the urge to bury his head in his hands. He, too, feels the weight, but he bears it better. “Before our strength begins to fail. The descent—”

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