Page 90 of The Starving Saints

It doesn’t matter, she tells herself instead. What matters is that she needs her blade. What matters is that when she tries to reach for it, her arm refuses to obey.

She can only look.

“Free me,” Voyne whispers.

“You are free,” Phosyne says.

But Voyne isn’t. Something has changed in the time between Phosyne letting her drink in the cistern and now. Something changed when the False Lady left Voyne kneeling. Voyne isn’t free at all; she cannot act without somebody to actfor, and she hates herself for it.

“Please, Phosyne,” she begs.

Phosyne flinches. She has, at least, that much shame. “Take up your sword, Ser Voyne.”

And like a hound let off a lead, Voyne lunges.

She tears into the comb with her hands. The wax is warm, molten between her fingers, but there is so much of it, and the honey that bursts forth from each ruptured cell makes her clumsy. The bees have no such problem; they rise in a dark swarm, their buzzing growing cacophonous. And then the first sting pierces her flesh. The second. The third. She tries to close her hands around the hilt and heave, but she can’t grip it. It slides away every time. Pierces deeper into the body below them both.

The pain is growing. She shuts her eyes, shoves her face down between her arms, and tries to retreat, but she can’t, because Phosyne’s order is too thick in her veins. She hears herself pleading. Crying.

In her panic, she fears Phosyne will leave her like this. Will watch her be stung to death, subsumed into the hive that is forming too rapidly to be natural. That Voyne was wrong, that thisisPhosyne, in truth, and always has been, merely waiting for the moment when all the rest of the world cracked away and left her unstoppable.

“No more!” Phosyne cries. “Ser Voyne, retreat!”

And, at last, Ser Voyne does.

She falls back, chest heaving, eyes rolling in her skull. She can barely see, but her face is the least-stung of her. Her hands are beginning to swell. Her scalp is a searing cap of pain. She shakes her head, forcing herself to focus.

Long-limbedthingshave crawled down from the windows, and advance in cautious waves. Eyes glint at her in the dark. Phosyne is rising from the throne, and she is beautiful and terrifying all at once. She is glowing. Voyne feels heat rolling from her. She tips her head back and sings one quaking note, and all the reed lights in the room flare to life.

The shadows, caught by the light, resolve into something not quite human. They are like paintings, frescoes, pale faces staring back in the flickering glow. They don’t move when Voyne looks at them, but she can’t see them all at once. At the edges of her vision they’re only smears, bits of gold leaf and charcoal. They are prowling. They are getting closer.

Phosyne reaches for her.

Ser Voyne surrenders to the last order she was given and runs.

Maybe it’s Phosyne’s distance from the throne; maybe it’s the strength of Voyne’s own panic; maybe it’s some whispered order she does not hear as she pounds down the stairs. But as she runs, her mind comes back to her. Full awareness returns to her, and with it, horror. She is retching as she reaches the ground floor, stumbles over the bodies sprawled below her. Some stir. Some ask questions. She ignores them, throws the door open.

The sun is blinding overhead when Voyne pitches out into the yard.

She has stopped trying to make sense of time.

Space, though, she thought she could count on. She knows the dimensions of Aymar intimately, knows how many the upper and lower baileys can hold comfortably, knows where every entrance to the towers that stud the walls are.

Nothing is where it should be.

This place has transformed since she tended to the fallen beneaththe blazing sun. The walls tower above her, the ground undulates away, and the sky spins lazily. Voyne makes it only three yards at most before she stumbles, falls, vertigo swarming over her in a hazy rush. Inside. If she goes back inside, the walls and floors will join as they ought.

If she can only get up to Phosyne’s tower, instead...

Voyne can’t risk it. She must go to ground somewhere else. The cistern’s depths, perhaps, if only for a little while. Long enough to think. To regain mastery of herself.

But unlike the last bright sunlit moment Voyne was outside the keep, the people in the yard are awake. They are on their feet. They are—

Well.

The Absolving Saint stands at the head of a table and slides a piece of sharp, shining glass beneath the skin of a man who lies naked beneath him. The saint flays him carefully, a beatific smile upon his silvered lips. The man sings.

Sings, not screams.

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