Page 30 of The Starving Saints

The righteous fury bleeds from her so swiftly she doesn’t notice its passing, and she is filled, instead, with yearning. Her lungs work to a steady beat. Inhale. Exhale. The Lady smells of honey.

“What a beautiful creature,” the Lady says. “Honed to such a sharp edge. So loyal. So brave. So ready to leap into the fray.”Yes, Voyne thinks, and then frowns as she recalls the weight of a blade in her hand. Recently. So recently she can still feel the vibration of a blow up to her shoulder, the faint echo of collision. But she doesn’t remember lifting a blade.

“Your king is not as good to you as he should be, perhaps. Does he not know what he has in you? The passion. The strength. You would break yourself open against every weapon Etrebia could bring to bear on you, and still push forward. You’d spear yourself on the blade and keep walking, until you could wring the life from their necks. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” Ser Voyne says, and she can see it. Taste it. She wants to be outside of the walls, riding down hard against the enemy. She wants to push them back. She wants to free them all.

But there is a leash around her neck, and she can’t go beyond the wall. Voyne cannot stop the animal whine that builds in her throat at the thought, but the Lady is there to soothe her, press cool lips to her brow.

“He wastes you. I can see how you strain.”

“Yes,” she gasps.

“I would cultivate you,” the Lady breathes into her skin. “Only say that you will be my champion, and I will loose you upon the world.”

Something twists in the back of Ser Voyne’s head. Somethinghowls. But this is all Ser Voyne has wanted for five years now, and she tilts her head up. She doesn’t look at Leodegardis, or her king, or anybody else in the room.

She looks up at her Lady, at Treila de Batrolin, at the rising sun, and smiles. “It would be my honor,” she says.

Her Lady rewards her with a kiss. Voyne tastes honey on Her lips.

15

The night cools around Phosyne as she rocks on the wall of Aymar castle.

She has called the Constant Lady and Her saints. She has done the impossible. The divine does not walk upon the earth like humans, like dogs, like creeping bugs. If it were that simple, there would be no wars, no disorder in the world. And yet her prayer, her desperation...

Perhaps it was only coincidence. Perhaps it is the Priory that has done something unprecedented. But she knows that can’t be true; she knew it when she saw Jacynde absent from that room. Knew it even when she spoke with Jacynde the other day, when she realized that any success of hers would be something beyond what mortals were meant for.

Magic. Intercession. A summoning.

Will it even matter that she has called their Lady?

A miracle so profound may be indistinguishable from horror. Phosyne certainly feels horrified.

Every step away from her faith and toward an understanding of the unseen world has done a little more damage. First, she was no longer so fascinated by the exactitude of the bee space’s measurements that she couldn’t see the alchemy in how honey was formed, or in the transformation from egg to larva to winged beauty. From there she pursued her heretical texts, ignored all guidance, all advice, broke with the Priory and abandoned her nun’s name and chose to call herself Phosyne. To that point, it was all theoretical, but then she cleaned the water, and that... that began to break the order of things. Her pursuits are anathema to the divine structure of theworld, even if Phosyne believes them to be more true. Her sisters might even now be waiting for her in her tower room, and she has only escaped them and the flame by the barest margin.

And yet there is nowhere else for her to return to. It is the little world she has made herself, a refuge from all the rest.

Feeling like she is walking toward death, she makes herself stand up. Her knees wobble. She pitches forward, and uses the momentum to keep on toward her tower.

Each step is harder than the last, though. The weakness she felt earlier in the day is back a hundred-fold, fed on her guilt and shame. She reaches the upper bailey without falling, but it is a near thing. She weaves in the darkness, closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, she is at the base of one of the towers. Not hers, but close.

She stares at the spiraling steps.

Upseems impossible, but down is easier. She stumbles down the steps, into a pocket of darkness. Her head is spinning. Her knees are weak. If she just sits a little, rests, she can put herself back together again. She needs to construct an argument that will sway Ser Voyne and all the rest, and she doesn’t thinkI may have summoned them from someplace dangerouswill get her the results she wants.

She sinks to her knees, then keeps going, helpless to stop herself. One breath she is upright, and the next she is laid out, aching, skin tight over her bones. The stone below her is cool, at least, and drains some of the heat away, but she cannot move, and she cannotthink, and oh, this is bad.

Walking this much was a bad decision. She didn’t have the strength for it. She hasn’t walked so far since chasing after Pneio, and she has only eaten less and less.

She lies there for a long time, hoping that the strength will come back to her. It doesn’t. She should call out for help, but she doesn’t want to explain what she’s doing down here. Instead, she imagines her little pallet and wonders, if she dreams about resting there, if she’ll wake up there when she opens her eyes again.

Unlikely.

She forces her eyes open again a few minutes later; she’s fairlycertain she heard footsteps, though she doesn’t know how long ago. A girl with blonde, curling hair peers down at her. She can’t be more than twenty, but Phosyne sees something in her eyes that makes her twitch and roll away with a weak moan.

“You’re Ser Leodegardis’s madwoman, aren’t you?” the girl asks.

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