Page 37 of The Starving Saints

17

Morning comes with the blare of trumpets.

Phosyne wakes, sprawled face down among her books and the rags that make up her pallet, two warm, sinuous bodies draped across her back and legs. Ornuo and Pneio are heavy when they want to be, which seems to coincide with when she most wants to throw them across the room. Groaning, stiff and exhausted andhungrylike she can’t remember being (really hungry, not just starving, because she understands now that the two are quite distinct), she wriggles out from beneath them and hauls herself over to the window.

It feels like yesterday all over again. The yard is full of bodies, people watching with upturned faces as salvation is once more dangled in front of them. The saints (visitors, guests,impossible creatures) stand in the lower yard. The king and his attendants this time remain in the upper yard, but Ser Voyne is not among them.

No, she stands in the lower yard. She is not wearing armor, so it takes Phosyne longer to spot her, but there she is, half-shorn head turned to the woman who looks like the Constant Lady, gaze unwavering.

Phosyne chews her lip. Peels up a patch of dried skin, swallows it down. It only makes her stomach growl harder.

The trumpets blast again, and this time the noise sends the boys skittering below her blankets, huffing grumpily. Phosyne hesitates just a moment, then pushes on the glass, wriggles it free so that she can breathe a little fresh air and, just barely, make out the words below.

She can’t hear the king himself, of course, but his criers repeat his words at the tops of their lungs.

“We have been delivered,” the criers shout. “Our prayers have been answered. Our saviors bring with them good food and good wine, and tonight we will dine as one people, in gratitude.”

Nothing is said of the army that still (Phosyne checks) masses outside the gates. Nothing is said of how they will leave this place. But at the mention of a feast, Phosyne watches the crowd ripple.

They are falling to their knees. Her own have gone weak as well.

“Every person in Aymar will eat and drink their fill tonight,” the king continues through his speakers. He doesn’t seem to notice that there are no wagons of provisions below him, behind him, or anywhere at all inside the walls. Do they mean to bring them up from beyond the enemy lines? Or will they do what Phosyne was tasked with, and conjure sustenance from nothing? “There will be no rations, and no divisions among us. Rest, today, and make ready for the revels of the evening.”

A cheer goes up. Nobody sees what Phosyne sees, that this is wrong in so many ways. And it isn’t even the promises of salvation, or the sudden appearance of the saints who now turn to their swarming petitioners, or the mass of bodies that bows to touch the hems of their robes, while Ser Voyne stays glued to the Constant Lady’s side.

It’s the simple fact that the king should not be the one making this announcement. That is the Priory’s task, to be the intermediary between the numinous and the mundane. They should be organizing this adulation, rewarding patience with honey on the tongue.

But there are no nuns in the yard. Even Jacynde is nowhere to be seen. Just like the night before.

That’s because she knows this is your fault.Phosyne groans and closes the window.She knows something is wrong, and she knows who is to blame.

Still, nobody dragged her from the tower in the middle of the night. That sits wrong in her gut, even as she feels relief. Ser Leodegardis will, of course, stand by his liege, and might even attempt to protect her, even if he doesn’t believe the saints are who they claim to be. But he’s no fool. If Jacynde has doubts (and she must, or she would have been out in the yard)—and if she has realized that the only othersource of dubious miracles in these walls is Phosyne (which she did months ago)—then she would have demanded Phosyne, and Leodegardis would have at least come to question her.

That nobody has so much as knocked since Treila returned her to her little pen is concerning.

She stumbles down her steps, braced against the wall, and tries once more to recall how she summoned Ornuo and Pneio. Why can’t she remember? Shedoesremember the terror of it, and the subsequent delight, as they curled into her lap and nuzzled at her jaw, companionship when she didn’t know she had been aching for it for so long. But the actual invocations? It’s a blank spot in her memory. Food, perhaps, will unlock what she couldn’t remember last night, but her thoughts remain sluggish, recalcitrant.

The fruit was not enough to revive her fully, and her continuing, gnawing hunger demands she sate it, so she eats two pieces of tough beef, and another strip of meat she doesn’t recognize the flavor of. As she chews the last, she has a flash of brambles beneath her feet, nose low to the ground, a hundred different scents, and then the bright clarion call of a horn.

She swallows. It goes away.

Frowning, she looks for more of the fruit Treila paid her, but finds none. Either she ate it all last night (hopefully), or the boys decided to eat it (likely). Then she remembers the honey again, but when she turns to it, she finds it...

Well, it doesn’t even look like comb anymore.

Phosyne scowls at the puddle of muck. It looks likerot, but that is impossible. Honey in the comb doesn’t turn; the bees have made sure of that. Her gaze slides to Ornuo, who has twined around her ankles and gazes up at her with wide, ruby eyes.

“What have you done this time?” she groans, then hops on one foot to extricate herself.

He lets her, merciful beast, only to sit up on his hind legs and snap the jerky she tosses him from the air with powerful jaws. His brother joins him, and when a bit of hide lands between them, they tussle for it.Just beasts, she tells herself, watching them. They are only beasts, like cats or hounds, and that they came from nothing should not beso damning. Her ideas come from nothing, after all, and they have given her pure water.

The door to her tower moves in its frame.

The boys stop fighting, and instead flatten themselves to the ground, backing up to take refuge in their hiding spots. Normally, they would have thrown themselves under the table by now; Phosyne’s skin turns to gooseflesh as she edges closer to the door.

She should have rebuilt the barricade, or at least reset the locks.

“Ser Voyne?” she calls, hoping it is only that, but Ser Voyne would have thrown the door open, stalked inside, demanded answers. And Treila, though Phosyne barely knows her, would have simply entered as well—of that, she is unsettlingly sure.

---