Page 88 of The Starving Saints

She doesn’t taste cumin anymore, but the memory of it is... persuasive. It makes sense. Phosyne wants to test it.

Phosyne sits on the throne.

Ser Voyne’s head jerks up, immediately, as if on a tether. She meets Phosyne’s eyes and her lips part. She is... she isbeautiful, radiant, kneeling there. She belongs there. There is purpose in her eyes, in her limbs, and if Phosyne could taste her skin, she would taste...

Competence. Loyalty. Devotion. What do those taste like?

Ser Voyne is going to protest. Phosyne knows her well enough now; Voyne will be angry that Phosyne is sitting where her liege should sit, where Leodegardis should sit if not. Phosyne doesn’t belong here.

But Voyne isn’t protesting. She’s looking at Phosyne with something that looks very much like longing.

Phosyne rests her head against the back of the chair and decides to pretend. Just a little. Maybe it’s the high of defending her room, carving out a little square of territory in this benighted castle; maybeit’s just perversity, for she has so much of it even in just her little finger. She remembers the cistern, Voyne on her knees. She remembers the smithy, Voyne’s body flush up against hers, angry, raging, but still so tightly leashed to her duty: protect Phosyne, make her produce a miracle.

“Come closer, Ser Voyne,” she whispers into the thick heat enveloping the room.

And though Ser Voyne shudders, she does not resist or protest. She shuffles forward on bended knee, close enough for Phosyne to touch.

This is not the time or place. They exist in a small circle within a larger, infiltrated world. The Lady and Her saints prowl these halls, and at any moment, eyes might blink at them from out of the darkness. Out here, Phosyne has no ready defense against them. If she were a rational woman, she would tell Voyne, now, to get up. To follow her, back to her rooms. They could cross that threshold, collapse into safety, and perhaps even play this game a little longer, if this impulse hasn’t fizzled out by then.

But Phosyne is not rational. She is powerful. She has cleansed her land and her body, and she sits now wearing fine silk robes where once they were roughspun wool, and she has doneallof this herself.

Phosyne reaches out and cups Voyne’s cheek.

“I have made a place for us,” she murmurs.

Ser Voyne presses her cheek into Phosyne’s palm and closes her eyes, tight. She shivers. She is full of barely restrained energy.

She wants to be led. Commanded. Phosyne can’t taste it yet, but she knows it.

Desire is a strange, unfamiliar beast. Phosyne isn’t sure when last she truly let herself feel it, but it’s kindling in her now.

“Touch me,” Phosyne tells her.

And Ser Voyne does.

It’s not tentative, not at all. One moment, her quaking knight is nuzzling her palm, and the next Ser Voyne rises up, covers Phosyne with her body, presses her to the seat. Her knee remains bent—she still offers just the slightest capitulation, or perhaps she expects Phosyne to push her back.

Phosyne doesn’t. She grins as Voyne’s hand fits itself around Phosyne’s throat, the way they’ve practiced, and she arches her spine. She lifts one foot, hooks it around Voyne’s leg, wishes there was armor there.

She wishes for a lot of things.

She asks for only one: “Talk to me. I know you’re in there, Ser Voyne.”

Voyne answers with a moan, her hand tightening. But the bond between them compels. “You’re like Her,” she gasps out.

She sounds as angry as she is adoring. Ser Voyne didn’t speak to the Lady that way. No, this is just for Phosyne.

“But you remember that you hate me,” Phosyne says, voice reedy from the weight of Voyne’s fist.

Ser Voyne grimaces, relents just a little. Just enough to draw so close to her that Phosyne could kiss her lips.

“I don’t hate you,” Ser Voyne whispers.

“Because I haven’t told you to?”

Voyne convulses, then, halfway to a seizure. Her hand tightens, then drops to Phosyne’s shoulder. To the throne beneath. She is panting. “Because this isn’t you. Phosyne—”

She doesn’t want to hear it, and so she stoppers her knight’s lips with a kiss. It’s better than fighting her. Better than feeling shame, too, or hesitation, and the important thing is that Ser Voyne doesn’t hate her. She’s groaning into Phosyne’s mouth, her hands sliding down along her body. All the world beyond the two of them is gone, and Phosyne is so eager to tip into the abyss.

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