Page 79 of The Starving Saints

It doesn’t hurt, not anymore. Like her finger, the pain subsided more quickly than it should have. But next time it will be worse. She knows it will. Her creature of the gap in the stone let her back in for a pittance, because he is confident she will need to flee through his embrace again soon. When the time comes, he might ask for a hand. A leg. Something more.

He is confident she will pay it. If she’s indebted her future self, she’s going to make it worth it. First, she needs to find Phosyne, tell her what she’s learned about the world outside. Use that strange mind of hers to calculate their next move. See if, perhaps, they can’t turn Ser Voyne into a weapon for their own ends.

She leaves her candle burning and climbs up to the tunnel.

She hesitates.

This darkness doesn’t have hands or teeth within it, she knows that, but she feels a phantom pain in her bones all the same. She has been here before, oversensitized, ready for another blow. It will just take a little patience and a lot more force.

Treila strips, makes her bundle. Feels the edge of the tunnel and leans in, listening for whispers.

There are none. She flattens herself out and crawls forward.

Like before, the tunnel makes her way easy. It’s definitely larger now; several times, she has to grope around unseeing to find where the path hooks around to next. The dimensions are stretched so much that it doesn’t feel like the same tunnel, and her heart pounds in her chest. She wants to stop, to retreat, to flee.

She pushes forward instead.

It is nighttime once more when she emerges into her workroom, shivering uncontrollably. The ringing in her head has subsided, one small mercy. Her hands are clumsy as she dresses, sets her blade back into her boot. She keeps her gaze fixed on the doorway, taking deep breaths, trying to discern the scent of turning leaves. But instead she smells baking stone, baking skin. Vital, urgent scents. And she can hear singing.

It’s still the height of summer here, and at least some of the castle’s occupants are still alive.

She slips up into the keep proper, moving low, slow, quiet. The ringing creeps in once more, but she listens past it with her remaining ear, head cocked, eyes lowered. The singing continues, coming in through the windows, echoing across the stone. She recognizes hymns, but the singers keep falling into hysterical laughter that sounds half-pained.

In the main room on the ground floor, she sees guards, sitting at a table as if to play dice. As if nothing at all has changed. But they do not wear armor, and they do not play dice. They stare at nothing, fingers twitching on the tabletop.

There’s no good way past them out to the yard, so she climbs higher instead.

One floor up, Treila creeps into the room she is meant to be sleeping in, expecting to find it empty as it was when she last left, but no, it is full to bursting. People litter the floor, recognizable but in different arrangements than usual. So many are curled up against one another, resting in unfamiliar embraces. Sleeping mats overlap and rumple, blankets tangle.

Simmonet is sleeping, as is Edouart. Both still alive. They look a little plumper, but that might just be the soft moonlight, and theireasy stillness. Nobody is writhing or crying out in the dark. Nobody wears a visage of hunger and pain.

It is a strange, discomfiting sight. Treila leaves them behind, taking the western tower up to what has served as the throne room as long as the king has been in residence.

She doesn’t make it past the first turning, because there stands the Loving Saint.

He looks surprised to see her, though that means very little. He glances at her over one shoulder from where he crouches on the steps, peering into the throne room beyond. His fine lips curl into a smile, and he turns in full, leaning back and regarding her down the length of his lithe body.

“You left,” he says, by way of greeting. His voice seems to prompt a new wash of noise in her missing ear. A harsher sound, this time. A droning, coarse at the edges, familiar somehow.

“I came back,” she corrects.

A bruise discolors his jaw. It’s so incongruous with the rest of him and with what she knows (he can take on Ser Voyne’s skin, but he can’t hide an injury? What use is his metamorphosing, then?), that she’s reaching out to touch him before she can stop herself.

The Loving Saint seizes her wrist before she can reach him. It’s her left wrist. She’s reaching with just her thumb and three fingers, and he sees it, the missing one, and he stares at it with—

Not hunger. Anger. So much anger it nearly burns her.

“You said,” Treila murmurs, “whatever the cost.”

She pushes her other hand into her hair, baring the smooth expanse of jaw where her ear once sat. “So I paid it twice.”

That earns her an actual snarl. It’s bestial, and accompanied by his fingers tightening hard around her wrist. It feels honest when he jerks her arm hard, and she sprawls down across him on the steps.

“Are you jealous?” she whispers in his ear, her heart hammering, feeling both terrified andalive.

And with that he shoves her off him, to the side.

Gingerly, Treila untangles their legs that last little bit and sits up on one of the steps. She’s wedged between him and the wall, and cansee only a sliver of the throne room, but she watches it instead of him. She gives him a moment to pull himself back together, get his breathing under control.

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