Page 66 of The Starving Saints

“But should you wish to return,” he says, and she canhearhis smile, “the fee will be a little higher.”

He doesn’t specify. She doubts she could make him if she wanted to, but—she doesn’t want to. Doesn’tneedto.

Resolved, Treila extends the smallest finger of her left hand into the darkness.

At first, there is nothing. Then the brush of gentle lips against her knuckle. A tongue, laving from the web between little and ring finger up to the very tip, prodding beneath her fingernail. She thinks of the Loving Saint, planting his tainted seeds, and grips her free hand tight against the stone so that she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away.It’s eat or be eaten, she tells herself, and she cannot eat darkness.

But it can eat her.

Teeth close around her first knuckle, test the heft of the joint. Treila clenches her jaw and refuses to close her eyes or look away. There’s nothing in the darkness that she can see, and so there is no warning when the bite comes, and there is nothing but pain. Treila cries out, falling forward, catching herself against her left shoulder on the stone.

Tears burn her eyes. She’s yanked her hand back from the crevice, helpless to resist, and nothing stops her. Nothing stops her, but nothing opens for her, and she stares at the abbreviated length of her finger.

There is no blood.

“It’s not so nice, to tease,” her darkness whispers. “That’s not enough to set you free. A little more, clever. Just a little more.”

Treila’s crying. She doesn’t want to be, but the pain is too much,even though there’s no blood, even though there are no longer teeth against her skin. For a moment, she doesn’t think she can do it. Doesn’t think she can complete the bargain, offer her hand once more to the creature in the crevice.

But she has suffered worse. That long winter, starving, cold, too shocked and confused to be angry yet, not angry enough to keep herself alive. And yet she is. She found her spite, at last, and rode it out of the forest.

Treila harnesses that spite again and thrusts her hand into the black.

The second bite is faster than the first, one more knuckle gone, and Treila howls. She screams. She thrashes, but she keeps her arm in the gap, and she can feel it grip the length of her arm. There aren’t hands, no, though the lips and tongue still work against the skin of her palm. If anything, it’s like she’s enveloped in a spiral of interlocking legs, jointed and pulsing and tangling around her. She presses her forehead to the rock and pants, desperate not to move, desperate to see this through.

And then the third bite. The last one, severing her finger cleanly from her hand, and this time the pain is like scalding oil, shooting up her veins, and she is on her knees before she can stop her fall. She tumbles forward, and the stone is not there anymore, it was never there, and she is in a tunnel of flesh. She is crawling. She hears laughter all around her as the limbs of this monster convulse and slide and grasp. Treila pushes forward all the same, grips skin, grips stone, and then—

And then—

And then she emerges into sunlight and the sigh of a breeze through grass.

27

The sounds of the feast beyond the keep walls have died away when Phosyne and Voyne leave the little room with the crack in the world. What light there is comes from a pale half dawn, gray and strained. It falls on bodies, sleeping sprawled across the stone.

Nobody has gone back to their pallets or beds, and instead slumber seemingly where they fell coming in from the feast. There is very little sound. Phosyne and Voyne step over bodies and ascend the stairs, not quite looking at each other because (at least in Phosyne’s case) that would be to acknowledge just how scared they are.

Phosyne doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be on the other side of that tunnel, puzzling with the thing that Treila met down there, looking for another way out. It should have been easy to leave Voyne behind. Physically, it would’ve been. But then Phosyne thinks of Ser Voyne compelled to obey her orders, and remembers her confusion, her terror, as she surfaced from the Lady’s control instead, and she feels guilty for even considering abandoning this woman.

Besides, she can always leave on her own, if she changes her mind.

Probably.

“We’ll need a plan,” she says when it is just them in the staircase, halfway up to the tower. “A real one. A specific one.”

“Our enemy is powerful,” Ser Voyne agrees, slowing.

“Study won’t be enough.” Phosyne crowds up against Voyne, half so she can speak softly, and half because she feels exposed. Her room would be a far better venue for this conversation, but she wants a promise now. Something more than Voyne’s determination, beforeTreila arrived, or her tears, after Treila left. A promise that Phosyne is not making the wrong choice.

“No.” Voyne studies her face in the dim light. Mulls something over, behind her shadowed eyes. “My sword—the Lady took it from me. That is a place to start. And the water. Everyone must drink water, and soon; the day’s heat will only grow.”

“Unless they mean to kill us all.” Phosyne smiles. It’s a little hysterical. “In this heat, if they can keep the feast going—”

“They’ve already stopped the feast.”

“For tonight. But if they don’t give out water to everybody, I don’t think they’ll know to ask, anymore. Two days, then, at most. Right?”

“Surely thirst can punch through their intoxication.”

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