Page 78 of The Starving Saints

She presses them to either side, her hand now solid and the floor now insubstantial. The hole she carves is just wide enough to admit her bucket. That bucket is, of course, filled with waste, but a little powder and a quietly sung note, and the water she dumps it into is clear once more. She hauls up one full load, sets it on the floor safely away from the gap, and retrieves the candle that she cannot fully extinguish from the cup it is submerged in.

It flares to life. She strokes the flame. It grows hotter beneath her fingertips.

She plunges it into the bucket.

The water turns hot around her hand, steaming,scalding, enough to peel every layer of grime and filth up from the stone where she has worn it in with six months of pacing. A year of pacing, really; this room was hardly better before the siege began. But she knows how to keep a clean space. She kept her cell spotless all her years in the Priory, and isn’t sure just when she fell out of the habit.

That’s not true—she knows. It became less important to her the moment she tasted magic for the first time. The Lady was right about one thing: it is intoxicating, even as it has destroyed every aspect of her life, crushed it into dust, swept it away on the breeze. She has sacrificed her body on the altar of knowledge.

But the Lady hasn’t.

So it’s not required.

Phosyne turns the thought this way and that as she works, scrubbing and sweeping and dumping all the accumulated detritus out of her window. She’d call it a sanctifying, but that feels pretentious, even to her. At the very least, it is a clearing of the decks. She refamiliarizes herself with every inch of her rooms, every join of stone.

She stops when she reaches Jacynde.

The woman is, at last, stirring. Perhaps it’s the damp cloth still on her lips. Perhaps it’s just the time, the darkness that is flooding the room because Phosyne hasn’t bothered to light any lamps or candles, save the one that lives in the steaming bucket. Whatever it is, it’s making her eyes move below her closed, swollen lids, making her hands curl and grasp at the thin blanket below her.

Prioress Jacynde did not drag herself to Phosyne’s door. She was left there, by... who? It is possible, maybe even overwhelmingly so, that the nun who first called for Phosyne’s aid came back for it once more. That, faced with Jacynde insensate, not healing, she hauled the woman’s body to the door of the one person in the castle who might still be safe.

But.

Phosyne thinks of red lines, of territory, and wishes she could close her eyes and see again the blazing map of Aymar, and see if, perhaps, red lines tug at Jacynde’s wrists, her lips. If that is what moves her now.

Is this a breach? The Lady had tried to win entry by an exchange. Is Jacynde’s body a gift, too, offered with some intention of collecting on a return, later?

“This isn’t a safe place for you,” she tells the prioress, and earns a whimper in response. “There’s no safe place for you at all.”

“Please—” the woman moans, or Phosyne thinks she does. All the finer points of her letters are erased by the lack of tongue.

Ser Voyne would tell her to care for this woman. To ignore the danger, or willingly face it, for the sake of another. But Ser Voyneisn’there, and Phosyne needs to make this space sacrosanct if they are to have any hope of untangling the mess around them.

So Phosyne grabs hold of the pallet and drags Jacynde toward the door.

The other woman fights it, as best she can. Her eyes open to slits, her head lolls, her legs push ineffectively against the reed mat, the blankets. “No—no—” she gasps.

Phosyne lets go only to unbar the door once more, to shift her worktable out of the way. She half expects her audience to still be there, waiting, hungry, but when she opens the door, there is only pitch darkness, as if something is blocking up the window from farther down the stairs.

It is a menacing sight. Unnatural.

All the more reason to move swiftly and with purpose. She turns and grabs up the mat again. Jacynde tries to pitch herself off one side, but is far too weak.

Phosyne shoves the whole mess out into the hall.

“I’m sorry,” Phosyne tells her. “I know I’m supposed to care.”

Jacynde meets her gaze at last. She is frantic. She is fading. She’s on the cusp—one firm push in either direction could be her life or her death.

“But I don’t.”

Phosyne closes the door.

33

Treila isn’t sure how long she lies there, in the cavern below Aymar, cradling the side of her head and hearing an endless, clear ringing. A candle burns bright beside her, but doesn’t melt. It could be minutes, or hours, or days, or weeks—she no longer trusts time to make sense. All she knows is that she is alive.

Probably.

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