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He laughs and throws her down onto her stomach.

She crawls.

“You never give up, do you?” he asks. “I was going to kill you gently,eat you sweetly, but that wouldn’t do you justice. You wretched, vicious little thing.” His boot comes down on her lower spine and she can feel her vertebrae screaming. Creaking.

The pressure disappears. Reappears on her neck. Her leg. Her arm. He is everywhere. She flails, meets nothing but air, and only barely manages to roll onto her back.

He looms above her.

“Scared little girl, always hiding in the dark. Do you think that makes your teeth as sharp as mine?”

He flickers in and out of place, half-real, half-insubstantial. He is a hundred different people, exchanging faces like paper masks. But he sounds the same in each aspect: a pure vibration, rattling around in her skull, ramifying.

It has a source. Like Phosyne touching her brow and making choruses erupt, his existence creates the rise and fall inside of her. She focuses in on it. She can hear the core of him, static, unchanging.

The noise rearranges itself, harmonizes, settles.

Treila stands upright. She fixes her gaze on him and refuses to fall into the ambiguity, the impossibility. Shesees.

The flickering stops, leaving behind just a smudge of white on the world in the vague shape of a man. The world is still around them. In his chest is a snarled thicket of a stomach, hungry, aching, desperate. And inside of her is a prism, a flashing diamond: heavy and unmoving, the result of every time she refused to abandon herself, no matter the guise she chose to wear.

In the center of it, a bee’s stinger. A gift from the true Constant Lady? A fragment of her suffering? Something vicious and pure, either way.

Treila blinks, and the vision is gone. The Loving Saint stands before her, no longer changing, no longer moving. Panting, he stares at her, brows drawing down in belated wariness.

“You—” he whispers.

And Treila lunges.

Her teeth pierce the pale, lovely column of his throat. They crack through his windpipe even as blood surges into her mouth, coats her tongue, drowns her in sticky sweetness.Sweet.Like honey. There’sno trace of iron, and she laughs, fierce and jagged, because of course there is no iron in his veins.

He is screaming. The noise gurgles, shrill against her tongue. She bites again, and again, chews and swallows, even as he thrashes beneath her. Her nails pierce his clothing, his skin. She claws him until his flesh is ribbons, until she is painting them both with his blood. They are on the floor; she doesn’t remember their collapse. All she knows is the feel of him, thefightof him. She is the dark thing in the forest, feral and fierce, feeding herself in his misery.

Ser Voyne and Cardimir and her father and the whole world sharpened her teeth, taught her to use them.

And it is glorious.

When at last the Loving Saint lies still beneath her hands, when she has drunk her fill of his hot and heady blood, when the buzzing in her missing ear has quieted to a light and diffuse din, she lifts her head and regards their audience. A hundred hungry faces look back at her. She can see them all, the margins where one differentiates from another. They cannot hide from her anymore, just as he could not hide from her.

She isn’t here to play their games. She is here to win them.

Treila rises to her feet, licking her lips. Her stomach feels full for the first time in many months. She scrubs one fist against her mouth, smearing the honey-thick blood across her flesh like war paint.

She takes a step back, holds out a hand.

“It’s eat or be eaten,” she tells her audience. “And I have made it good. Eat up, pets.”

They fall upon the Loving Saint, ravenous, and let her walk free.

She makes her way back to the keep.

47

The king’s body is apportioned among his people. To his household staff go the muscles of his back. To the garrison, his thighs and calves. To the refugees, the tender meat of his arms, soft and succulent from the years of idleness after he last lifted a sword.

Ser Leodegardis is given fine slivers of heart, presented by the Absolving Saint on milky porcelain. He flinches, though his red-rimmed eyes are empty of tears. All cried out before, Phosyne thinks, as she comes to sit across from him. She holds Treila’s knife in the folds of her robes. It is heavy against her thigh.

He is aware. Aware enough to recognize her, and what he has been served. But he’s still bewitched enough to feed himself. His shoulders tremble as he chews. His head bows as he swallows.