Page 36 of The Starving Saints

A soft sound comes from the crack—not a word, not a breath, something closer to a hand against rock.

“Just a touch?” she asks.

“To start with.” She swears she can hear a smile. She doesn’t hear a threat, though she imagines one anyway.To start withis an open door. She doesn’t want an unbounded bargain. Too many things can slip in.

She looks down, steps back just enough to measure the height of the gap again. Thinks over what she knows. Here, now, she has no further options; a candle gives her nothing. Above, the world is swiftly contracting, and the rules have changed so much Treila will not know where to step safely for much longer. What can she give Phosyne to produce another answer? What else does she have to bargain with, herself?

She doesn’t suspect she’ll find the woman half-dead again anytime soon, anyway. She’s more likely to find a corpse.

Just a touch. She thinks of the green world beyond this dark hole, and comes once more to the gap. She hears a boyish intake of breath. She closes her eyes.

She slides one finger into the stone. She waits to feel skin, or scruff, or fabric.

Instead, she feelsteeth.Wet lips closing around her. A tongue curling around her joint, sliding along her nail.

Treila shouts and draws back, stumbles, nearly falls. She loses a strip of flesh in the process. Blood oozes from the open welt as she clutches her hand to her chest.

“Come back,” the voice entreats. “Come back, or the deal won’t be satisfied.”

“You said a touch!” she cries, shocked, horrified, confused.

“I’m hungry,” the voice whines, louder now, loud enough that it echoes around the little cavern.

Treila can’t stop her bark of a laugh. “Join the club.”

“You understand,” he counters. “You know what it is to starve.” And she does, but she has never—would never—

Except she has. Just not like this. Not so openly, so baldly, and she remembers Voyne in the garden, disgusted and overwrought. Nausea rises in her.

“Can you even free me?” she asks.

“Oh, yes. Just satisfy my hunger.”

“I have food,” she says, swallowing the bile down.

“I don’t want your food,” he says. “Thisis the price of freedom: one finger. You can even choose it.”

She shudders.

When contrasted against her stores, though, it’s not so heavy a price. Strange. Unthinkable, almost. But not heavy, and for a moment, she even thinks to pay it. That only lasts as long as it takes her to ask, “What kind of man wants a girl’s finger?”

He only laughs in reply.

No kind of man, she realizes. Not even a starving man would ask for afinger.

With shaking hands, she grabs up the pillar of wax again, finds the little jar of powder. She fumbles for the pin she left in the hem of her skirt, pricks her fingers and dips them, whistles out the note.

“What are you doing, clever?” the voice asks. He sounds curious, not afraid. Treila doubts, but pinches the wick anyway.

The flame springs to life once more, and she jams it into the crack. Nothing looks back at her. No teeth, no lips, no tongue. Not even an eye, peering out at her, watching.

“You’d hide from me?” she hisses.

There is no response. The scent of metal is gone. And Treila, for the first time since she doused the candle, feels like she’s alone again.

Perhaps Phosyne’s bargain was worth something after all.

Treila leaves the candle burning, stuck between two stones just before the crack, and she retreats back into the castle by touch.

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