Page 85 of The Starving Saints

36

There is only one obvious place for Treila to run to. One person:

Phosyne.

Her creature of the tunnel may let her out again, but she refuses to squander the price she paid. Her missing ear sings with aimless noise as she races across the room she used to bed down in, making for the other staircase. But it is blocked with a clot of shadows, faces leering out of the darkness in the suggestion of cheekbones and chins. She doesn’t let herself look closely. Out, instead, into the yard, then down and around toward the kitchens.

Not everybody is sleeping. In the distance, she sees three girls dancing. Their feet, she thinks, are bleeding. Shadows wait to lap at the sodden dirt.

She doesn’t let herself look. Moves instead into the kitchen, because she knows there’s a staircase out the back that will lead to the tower that contains Phosyne.

The main hearth has no fire in it. The tables are laden with ingredients, but nobody cuts, nobody stirs, nobody kneads. The cooks are all absent. Even the Absolving Saint is missing, and she wonders if he, too, is at her heels. She can hear laughter behind her, and smell pepper on the gust of too-close breaths. But every time she peers at shadows, they refuse to move.

Her missing ear is shrieking now. A warning, or something else?

She slips through another door and hesitates as cool air washes over her.

The Absolving Saint has been busy. Quarters of meat hang from the ceiling, the rib cages and bellies hollowed out, the spines split downthe center. She has seen venison jointed out and hung to age, and this is much the same. But the proportions are all too familiar. The pelvises are round instead of flattened, the thighs long and luxuriously muscled.

She slides between and pretends they are just sides of pork. The muscle is pink enough. But there is so little fat.

It’s not as easy to lose herself here as it is in a crowd of the living, but the bodies hang thick enough that she feels unseen as she creeps through the hall. Her tinnitus dulls, softens, and she can breathe again.

The sides of meat breathe with her.

No lungs to move the ribs, but something is shifting the hooks above. She glances down. No feet against the floor, but shadows. The meat begins to part.

She turns and runs.

There, the servants’ stairs, and she is up them in a flash. She caught many rats here, broke their little necks, heard their shrieking just before they died. It rises in her ears, then falls, rises again. At its loudest, she nearly trips, though she can’t untangle the causality. Is it responding to her stumble, or warning her of an attack?

She doesn’t plummet, regardless. And then she is inside again, and going up, up, until she reaches a familiar hallway.

There are bright-burning torches outside the door that were not there before.

How much time has passed, she asks again, even as the ringing in her ear turns into a brief but deafening chorus.

The door opens.

The woman standing there is almost unrecognizable. Her black hair curls softly against her gaunt cheeks. Her embroidered robes cling to her emaciated form. She is beauty and death wrapped up into one neat little package, and Treila flinches back reflexively. But she knows the cut of that jaw, and something of the mad light in those eyes.

It’s Phosyne.

Inside, the same transformation has been worked. The roomgleams, it is so clean. Perfumed steam seeps from a grate on the floorthat Treila is certain was not there before. Every worktable and desk and scrap of furniture is organized and polished, and everything is sohot.

Sweat drips from her, and the air is hard to breathe. But she can’t find it in herself to be afraid; she’s too tired and desperate.

(Foolish girl, she tries to tell herself. But with only one ear, she barely hears it.)

It is hot, yes, but this is better than a frigid, starving forest.

She sinks onto a mass of cushions. They are plump and generous, with no stink of sweat on them or hint of mildew. They are better than anything she has ever slept on.

“You’ve come up with a miracle,” she says, and her lips feel thick and slow. Unaccountably clumsy. She blinks, languid, catlike.

Phosyne has followed her, and settles on the cushions beside her.

“Your ear,” Phosyne murmurs, and trails her fingertips over the smooth skin where it used to be before Treila can flinch away.

---