Page 62 of The Starving Saints

She sounds vulnerable when she says it.

They creep out once more into the echoing, empty keep. The distance between the tower and the tunnel seems longer this time, but then, every excursion Phosyne has made in the last week has been harder than the one before. Voyne follows at a safe distance, but Treila stays close.

“An odd situation,” Treila says.

“Just another of many. The feast, how was it?”

“Wine-soaked,” Treila says. “A girl could lose her head in there. Everybody else has.”

“If something happens,” Phosyne tells her, “if we don’t get out right away—the water is safe. In the cisterns. It has some fortifying effect. Clarifying.” She gestures back toward Voyne.

“And what will we have to pay for that?” Treila asks.

Phosyne frowns. “Pay?”

Treila throws her a gleaming smile in the dark. “Don’t worry about it,” she says.

Phosyne wonders if she should.

“You’re taking this better than most,” she ventures. Bymost, Phosyne mainly means herself and Voyne. They’re holding it together, sure, but Treila is...

Treila looks energized by it all. She plunged into the belly of the beast to blend in, and has come out of it looking not disgusted, not exhausted, but exhilarated.

In answer, Treila looks back at Ser Voyne. Voyne’s head turns, eyes averting. She almost stumbles on the next step, which Phosyne doesn’t think she even notices. “I’ve already had all the rules of my life turned upside down before,” Treila says, finally. “It’s easier to keep your head when you know it’s all you can rely on.”

25

Ser Voyne wants to be herself again.

She’d almost managed it, in the tower. She’d almost moved past the echoes of Phosyne’s commands, the blurriness of her memory. But now she can’t look directly ahead of her, if directly ahead of her is Phosyne’s “friend,” and she can feel herself beginning to unravel again.

It’s tempting to believe Phosyne is speaking to herself. She wants to haul Phosyne back up to the tower, where shebelongs. Phosyne herself had cemented that in her mind, somehow, in the chapel.

After she—

After she—

Ser Voyne makes herself face it fully: after she carved the prioress’s tongue from her mouth and gave it to the Absolving Saint to take back to the Constant Lady. To eat.

It’s like reaching a fire after a day out in whipping snow. It hurts. But the pain turns to an ache turns to some measure of restored movement.

But as she passes the next window, a glint of gold in the night catches her eye. She knows she can’t afford to stop, but she slows, and then she sees him: Cardimir, out in the upper yard, attended by two saints, his crown upon his head. Fires have been lit, sending everything into stark, unsettling relief. The Absolving Saint and the Warding Saint stand close by; the Warding Saint clutches one of Cardimir’s servants, a woman Voyne knows. Her skirt is hiked up above one leg, baring her thigh.

The Absolving Saint kneels before her, and touches her vulnerable skin. Her head lolls back. Red blooms where the Absolving Sainttouches, enough blood that Voyne can see it from here as it falls into a goblet. The same one she has sipped honeyed wine from so many times in the past. There is a ring of people around the horror show, watching, kneeling, adoring. Nobody moves to stop any of it.

The Absolving Saint stands. He draws what might be honeycomb from his sleeve, crushes it into the cup. And Cardimir, without hesitation and with an easy air, takes the goblet and begins to drink.

Disgust wells in her. Disgust, and terror, and a bright urge to race out into the yard, to lunge at the saints, to rescue her king.

Except he doesn’t appear to want rescuing.

Neither did you, she reminds herself. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t protest. She didn’t even pause to consider who she had been eating.

Her stomach lurches.

A hand seizes her elbow. She recoils, hissing, but it is only Phosyne. “Come on, we don’t have much time,” Phosyne says. A feeling of weighty silence follows on, and then Phosyne shakes her head. “Our friend says to tell you that he’s hardly worth saving. But more importantly, they will stop you if you go to him. Or they will make you hold the cup.”

Voyne flinches.

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