Page 77 of The Starving Saints

He releases her, and she falls forward. The shadows are slinking closer, the light from the windows brightening as they leave the sills and come into the room proper.

“I swear,” Ser Voyne says. “I swear on my life. I am sorry—”

And then she runs.

32

Phosyne slams the door shut with a single thought.

The bar draws down, her workbench slides over, and she is protected, bending double, gasping for breath. Nobody knocks. Nobody tries to get in. When she’s got her breath back enough to retreat, it’s like any other evening she’s spent alone in this room.

Evening?

She stares for a long minute at the darkened glass pane up in the loft. She stares until Ornuo nips at her ankle, and she kicks him off. It’s enough movement to get her started, and she prowls up the steps and begins to dismantle the haphazard pile blocking her window.

Ornuo and Pneio are here; they have returned at least twice, and may leave again. There’s no sense in keeping them from an easy exit or entrance. She needs the fresh air more than she needs them to stop doing anything, and if the Lady can’t cross her threshold, Phosyne suspects the sill will have much the same impact.

And once the window is free, she can see that itisevening, and that somethingiswrong, because she has not been in the room for that long.

She leans out through the window, into the cooling night air, and squints down at the shadowed yard. There is another feast in progress. She sees bodies writhing in the dirt below her, fires burning. The cisterns are all covered.

She does not see Ser Voyne.

“I should never have sent her away,” she says as she retreats back in. Pneio hops up onto the thick sill and coils himself around her wrist. Phosyne shakes her head but rubs at the scales below hispointed jaw. “Just like I should never have let you out. Where have you been, foolish boy?”

She gets nothing in return except the heat of his throat. His golden, burning eyes are slits as he gazes up at her.

“Where did you come from?” she adds, voice softer still. “Did you come because I was lonely?”

He shows his teeth in something like a smile.

“They don’t like you at all.”

She runs her hands over his sinuous body, the bunching of his muscles, the quick beating of his heart. For the first time in many months, she studies him closely. He is hot, hotter than any living thing has any right to be, and of course the scent of sulfur emanates from him. He is, to all appearances, living. He is a beast, not an imagining. Once, his brother’s claw caught in the wood of her desk and when he hauled off, it broke. There’d been blood everywhere, though it had steamed and evaporated.

The saints, they are something of the air. These creatures are of fire. Phosyne knows she can manipulate the flame; her candles are proof enough of that, the realization kindled by that maddening chase out to the smithy, at this thing’s heels.

This is how the learning works: side-glimpsed realizations, nothing direct, but always leaning toward greater understanding. She knew how to sing the first note from “On Breath” not because of something she understood from Pneio digging into a coke pile, butbecausehe had dug into the coke pile.

If Ser Voyne was here, there’s no way Phosyne could explain it in a way that makes sense, but it does. Itdoes. Perhaps the Lady didn’t mean to teach Phosyne at all, with that strange vision of bees and honey and red threads, but Phosyne has learned all the same. Boundaries, territory, translation. This room is hers. She is certain, now, that the Lady could not enter without permission. With Pneio and Ornuo here, the dividing lines blaze a little hotter, because they are Phosyne’s.

Just as the water is Phosyne’s.

Her gaze drops down to the tower room’s floor. Beneath it is an entire cistern. She can’t reach it from here; its pipes extend to theroof’s catchment area and down to the kitchen. But there is water,here. It is not purified yet. It is a threat. It is a resource.

Phosyne pats Pneio’s head, absently, and climbs back down the stairs. She walks past Jacynde’s body, still motionless save for the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Her presence barely registers; what is below her is far more important.

This is the first cistern that existed in the castle. The well preceded it, of course, but nothing else. Before them, there was only the long trudge up to the ridge from the riverside. It will not be full; there hasn’t been enough rain. But because of its safety (only rainfed, none of the earth’s filth within it), it is the only source the king drank from, and so fewer hands have tapped it.

She is going to tap it.

If only she had a pick; she laughs at the thought, a hiccuping thing, reminded of Treila. She hopes Treila is okay. She hopes Treila is far away from here, whateverhereis becoming. No matter her sentiments, though, she still has no pick, and no knife, and nothing hard and pointed enough to make a dent in the mortar below her.

But just as she has learned fire, she has learned earth, as well. She presses her palms to the floor. She wriggles her fingers. She thinks of Ser Voyne against her back, and feels her hands sink, just a little.

It takes effort, but she can keep the rest of herself from falling if she tries. Her fingers dance through rock as if it is itself water, and she moves them in, then out. In, then out. She remembers water compressing, expanding, roiling when she did the same in a tub, a stream, a river.

The stones melt like butter beneath her touch.

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