Page 34 of The Starving Saints

There’s no point in wasting time. Whoever these guests are, however they got into Aymar, they’re not a way out. At least not one that Treila can take advantage of. They’ve shifted the balance so abruptly that Treila hates them by reflex.Saints, she thinks, and wants tolaugh, because there is no such thing as saints. If there were, she wouldn’t be trapped here.

Really, she’s right back where she started, but she can see more clearly now. She’s got a light for her darkness.

Treila crouches where Phosyne had lain not half an hour before, and sucks at her lower lip, staring at her fingers. Just little pricks; Phosyne’s had barely bled (though Treila thinks that has more to do with why she’d been lying half-dead on her workshop floor than any calculation of how deep to pierce her skin). Treila has suffered worse. She’d bled more from scraped knees when Ser Voyne—

She pricks her fingers, and the pain seizes her attention, drags it back to the present. She dips her fingers into the little pot of reeking sulfur, then swallows down sludgy saliva and hums the opening note to “On Breath,” wavering and embarrassed, and pinches her bloody fingers to the wick.

Heat springs to life between them, and Treila snatches her hand back, stunned.

It works.

It fuckingworks.

A candle is not a pick is not a door, but it isreal, and it shouldn’t be, and Treila can’t look away.

She stays there, kneeling on the cold stone, for several minutes, staring until she sees that light burned into the inside of her eyelids. Then, and only then, does she remember what she’s here to do.

She wriggles out of her clothing once more, but this time remembers to pack food in the bundle she makes of it. Nothing to do about the water, though. She will have to move quickly.

The light should help with that.

She lowers onto her belly on the cold floor, picks up the candle once more, and places it as far inside the gap as she can. Then she clasps the bundle between her calves, and wriggles her way in after it.

The candle burns without protest. It illuminates jagged stone, fractures in the earth that she hadn’t noticed with just her fingers before. It both comforts her and makes her skin crawl; the earth feels so much closer andheavier, now that she can see it. In a brief fit of panic, she tries to blow the candle out—and it refuses.

So Treila squeezes her eyes shut, and continues forward by touch.

You’re acting like a child, she scolds herself, but it’s easier in the dark. There aren’t any turns, anyway, and without sight, the walls that press in on her feel only like boundaries, not like the tons of rock above her. They are simply lines she cannot cross, not because of man-built walls but because there simplyisnothing on the other side.

She wriggles forward, legs grasping tight to her bundle, a rat in a nest. With only one hand free, she drags herself along, loses track of herself in the dark. She makes the trickiest turn without issue, barely noticing it. She’s through almost before she realizes it, reaching for the ground and finding nothing beneath her. She pitches forward, drops the candle, eyes snapping open. Carefully, Treila rights herself and drags the bundle up her body. She clutches it to her chest and picks her way down to the ledge below.

The chamber is exactly as she left it, though the golden glow of the candle where it has come to a precarious stop clashes with the faint luminescence of the stream. Treila can only see the blue light at the far end of the little cave, where the candlelight begins to fail. Otherwise, it is erased by more aggressive yellow. She lowers herself down to the narrow bank, righting her candle as she passes.

She dresses this time. Single stocking, smalls, boots, chemise, kirtle, apron, even cap. It cuts the chill, and she has been below the earth long enough to appreciate the barrier, now. Her skin is gooseflesh all over, scraped and raw, and she realizes, as she puts herself back together, that her heart is racing.

Her gaze fixes on the crack.

It is innocuous, in the light. A little line of darkness. There’s no obvious path forward; no spidering accessory cracks, no widening a little ways up that she missed in her panic. But Treila takes her time, even turns her back on it to scan the far wall for a matching exit; perhaps the air flows in and out downhere, and the breeze she feels back in her workroom is only an echo.

But no. There is only the one crack. Wherever the water goes from here, Treila cannot find it.

So she approaches the crack.

It doesn’t whisper to her. It remains only stone, even as Treilareaches behind her, fumbles, grabs up the unmelting wax and manages to singe the pad of her palm for the trouble. She brings the candle to the crack, and hopes that her desperate madwoman’s heresy can reveal a way forward.

It’s still too narrow to admit her whole hand, but the candle is as slender as a finger, and she feeds it into the darkness. A little farther in, she sees the passage widen again. And then she has reached the limit of the candle. She draws it back and tries to think. If she can find the tools, she can break this thin ridge of stone and get through, but she told Phosyne the truth: she doesn’t think any pick has survived the Priory’s requisitions, and what remains (swords, armor, arrowheads) will not be strong enough for this.

So much for the flame revealing anything useful.

Frustrated, she turns back to the tunnel that will return her to the castle, but one glance of the flame off the close walls has her heart hammering again. She dunks the candle in the stream. The cavern plunges into its almost-darkness, and now she is lit only by the steady, unnatural glow of the water. Her fear ebbs.

She rubs the heels of her hands against her eyes and lets out a creaking laugh. Her confidence wavers, threatens to crack beneath the absurdity of her situation, the desperation.

Moved, perhaps, by whimsy, she sets the candle down and turns back to the gap. She rests her head against the stone. “Iamlost,” she confesses, to herself, laughing again. “So many roads to walk down, and all of them lead nowhere.”

The air shifts around her. Her eyes shut. She waits.

“I’ve missed you,” the crack breathes against her lips.

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