Page 95 of The Starving Saints

But she is seen.

Voyne’s eyes widen. Her jaw goes slack for a moment, then tenses. There’s a flicker in her eyes, like there was after her confession, when she’d turned to see Treila for the first time in so many years: pain, and confusion, and the smallest hint of submission. There’s none of the bewitched adoration.

It is a cunning mask.

Her flesh is blotched red and her hair, where it is not shorn off, is plastered to her scalp with sweat. It’s not the form the Loving Saint took upon the battlements, but he’s capable of many others. He’s advancing on her now like she is a skittish colt, one hand out low, placating.

She wishes he would just lunge and take her.

Shaking, Treila brings her knife up between them.

The saint stops. Holds up his hands. There’s a hammer in one of them. Not even a large one, made for war: it’s small, for small work. Treila wants to laugh, it’s so ridiculous. A hammer might do as much damage as a sword, but Voyne would never wield one. Whatever he is, he cannot get the details right of being human. “I won’t hurt you,” he says. It sounds so much like Ser Voyne, but voices must be as easy to ape as faces for him.

“You’re lying, even now?” Treila can’t help herself. Can’t keep her mouth shut. She edges farther into the clearing, circles around one side to get the bench out from in between them.

She wonders if he has a heart, and if it lives in the same place it does in her own chest.

“I have never lied to you.” Voyne’s eyes turn wary. The bafflement is gone.

“You’ve always only been playing with your food.”

Saint Voyne cocks his head at that.

“From the first time you saw me, I could tell what you were,” Treila says, grinning. “So hungry and desperate for personalized attention. Nobody else could really see you, could they? Just me.”

“Calm down. Please. Just for a moment. Think clearly, Treila,” the Loving Saint says with Ser Voyne’s mouth.I’m older than you, stronger than you, hungrier than you, he does not add.

There’s something wrong with this, but Treila doesn’t have time to sort it. One of Voyne’s ears is red and swollen. And the fingers—

No time.

“I am thinking clearly,” she returns, grinning. “I know the rules of this game as least as well as you do by now.”

That makes the beast in knight’s clothing hesitate. About to argue that Treila can’t fully comprehend, or afraid that she might?

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he says, and casts the hammer into the nearby brush. She gets a better look for just a moment; his fingers are swollen and red as if stung by bees. They look like hers did, five years ago. Why? Why would he do that?

To boast that he is no holy thing, either?

There’s a flicker of doubt in his eyes. He’s a better liar than that, though. Something’s wrong.

She makes another snap judgment. Should she soften under his words, his vulgar apparition, so that he’ll get closer, or stand her ground? She has so much practice pretending to be what she is not.

But she’s tired of it, and the one good thing he has given her—that this whole mess has given her—is the freedom to shrug off her disguise.

Treila takes another step closer, blade shining in the dappled light of their little world.

“Funny,” she says. “Because I’m here to hurt you.”

She throws herself at Saint Voyne, lips peeled back in a snarl, and catches him around the waist. In Voyne’s guise, the saint is far more solid, heavier and more thoroughly muscled, and if not for Treila’s dagger, could no doubt just absorb the blow. But the blade glints in the garden’s filtered, shaking light, and Saint Voyne dances back, sidesteps before Treila can strike home.

Treila falls forward, spins, rights herself. Gets her footing.

Voyne’s mouth is hard now, and it’s harder to see the Loving Saint in her. Her eyes glint. She is menace and power and skill.

Treila darts forward again.

This time, she is lucky; her blade catches Voyne’s armor, and it should glance right off, but instead it sinks in, slides home. It’s just Voyne’s arm beneath, but it draws a cry all the same. Draws blood. Voyne roars and swings her fist; her knuckles slam into Treila’s side, send her sprawling.

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