Page 86 of The Starving Saints

At the touch of skin to skin, the chorus erupts once more inside Treila’s skull. She gasps, spine arching.

“Does it hurt?” Phosyne asks, and she sounds more curious than concerned.

Fair play, Treila concedes, when the noise softens. It’s exactly how she’d felt standing over Phosyne’s dying body that first night. The thought is half-hysterical. Phosyne reaches as if to stroke her brow, then hesitates.

Realizing it might hurt her.

And then she does it anyway.

Treila sags, boneless, as the noise doesn’t surge. There is only the normal faint ringing that has been with her since she returned. The cushions are still so soft.

“My ear was the price of returning,” she murmurs. “My finger the price to leave. I did, you know. Leave. There’s nobody waiting for us outside the gates anymore. We could just walk out, I think. Maybe.”

To a different world. A later world. A world where Etrebia has lost, at any rate, and that is the only thing that matters, surely? A world where Etrebia has lost and they are not being carved up into meat.

“The tunnel?” Phosyne asks. Her gaze is vague, as if she is looking down through the floor to it. But, of course, that’s impossible.

(But so are miracles. Treila would do well to stop asking questions.)

“The tunnel. But it will cost us.” The words come out—soft. Weak. Desperate. “It’s not so great a cost,” she hastens to add, in case Phosyne wouldn’t offer an ear, or a finger.

(What did she offer to receive this?)

Treila knows better than to trust, but she can’t do this alone. Not anymore. And Phosyne—Phosyne is not Voyne. She doesn’t trust Phosyne guilelessly. Phosyne is a tool. She just needs the tool to have its own motive force, for just a moment, until she catches her breath.

“Of course,” Phosyne murmurs, considering. “It makes sense, that your creature beneath the castle would charge for safe passage through its territory.” Her hands haven’t left Treila. They map out her boundaries, find her ankle, her missing sock.

Treila flinches but can’t argue, but she also knows she’s missing something, with this talk of territory. With Phosyne’s new possessiveness.

“The king gave them Aymar,” Phosyne attempts to explain. “They stole in via the Priory’s honeybees, but he could have stopped them. He could have turned them away. Instead, he ate their food, and now Aymar is theirs.”

Yes, they do act like they own the place. But she owes them no fealty.

“We can’t win,” Treila says. “You know that, don’t you? Thesethings—they’re so hungry, and there are more of them now. In the shadows.”

Phosyne rises from the cushions, hands washing over one another again and again. “Have you seen Ser Voyne? She can be our bulwark.”

Treila looks around the room, as if seeing it anew. It is changed—and empty of any other living creature. Her heart falls at a rate she doesn’t want to examine. “She’s not here?”

“No,” Phosyne says. “I sent her to help the people down below. To take the measure of the enemy.Youhaven’t seen her?”

Treila shakes her head.

Phosyne’s hands clasp tight together.

“Right. Forget her. We have other options,” Treila says. None a winning move, but trying to find Voyne in the chaos of the castle will only leave her vulnerable. The Loving Saint made that clear, and she suppresses a shudder as she remembers his teeth.

She’s too late for her preferred prize; she must make her peace with that. “I can take you to the tunnel again. Perhaps, if you speak to the thing beneath the castle...”

Her plan ends there. All she knows is she cannot leave alone again.

Phosyne isn’t looking at her.

She makes herself stand. She is unsteady on her feet, too tired, but she knows better than to ask Phosyne for food; there will be none, or none that will be safe to eat. “There’s no time left. Come with me,” she says.

“No,” Phosyne replies, calmly.

And Treila realizes that the shivering mess of a woman she found nearly starved those few nights ago is not just unrecognizable, but gone entirely.

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