Page 120

“Then follow me, Ser Voyne. Let me show you what you couldn’t see before.”

The earth accepts the both of them, and if the armor Voyne wears slows her down, she compensates for it well. They squirm together through the tunnel, hand over hand, the only sound the movement of clothing, the rattle of metal, and their shared breaths. So different, from the desperate attempt she made with Phosyne. So different, too, from all the times she has passed this way alone.

And then they are back in the keep, for the last time, and Voyne stands beside her in the dim light of day.

Outside, the wind is still howling. The rain has stopped, but the clouds still hang low and heavy. Below her feet, the stone shivers, but it has ceased its dance for now.

A moment’s calm. She doesn’t know how long they’ll have it for.

Treila rolls her shoulders, loosens her jaw, and starts to climb, Voyne close at her heels.

At ground level, they are met with a fine corpse, disassembled and organized neatly in the time it took for her to retrieve Voyne. There are splashes of black and gold and red on the ground, remnants of the lesser beasts of the saints. They have made her an offering.

Behind her, Voyne growls, low and soft. “I knew him,” she says. And then Treila recognizes the face, peeled carefully from the skull and draped over an upturned bowl.

“Ser Galleren,” Voyne says, and stoops to touch his brow.

One of Ser Leodegardis’s cousins, Treila thinks. Not a bad man, not at all. She thinks, perhaps, she met him once as a girl. But he never recognized her.

“We have to keep moving,” she says, sidestepping a tidy coil of intestine that doesn’t even have the decency to stink of shit. Voyne nods and rises to her feet, then leads the way.

Some of the steps are missing. Voyne and Treila negotiate the gaps carefully, trusting that what remains is as stable as it looks.

The throne room is only wreckage. The stones are blasted black with soot, and that any of the walls remain upright beggars belief. But like the rest of the keep, it is stable. For the moment.

And silent, save for the endless hum of bees.

They issue from a mass of sticky comb, not golden but rust red, that curls around the throne itself. The seat remains bare, but only just, and the bees are industrious, connecting the mountain of wax to the walls behind it in thin projections. They roil and shift, clumping together into what looks, for just a moment, like the form of a woman.

And then it looks like the form of the prioress, if the shape of a headdress is anything to go by.

Voyne steps forward.

“Jacynde,” she says.

The mass of bees does not respond in words, but it lifts the silhouette of a hand. The insects compact until Treila can make out individual fingers. Another mass rises from the hive and shapes out the long straight edge of a blade, comes to rest in the figure’s hand.

Treila bares her teeth, but Voyne shakes her head. “Wait,” she cautions.

The bees do not approach. They do not brandish their makeshift weapon. The buzzing grows louder as the figure shifts, wavers as if drunk or dying, and then tilts the blade at its own belly. There is a sharp spike of noise, a thousand wings snapping down at once, as it pierces itself and then scatters.

Treila remembers this. The sound of it, the slick noise, the thud of Jacynde’s collapse. The Lady had been there, and the Prioress...

The Prioress had killed herself, because the Lady could not have held Voyne’s sword. Why had Jacynde done it? At the Lady’s behest? Or in opposition? The bees belong to the Priory, and they have clustered over her corpse, keeping her safe.

Keeping the sword safe.

“They have filled their comb with her blood,” Voyne says, almost dreamily. “And my flesh, upon a substrate of steel. They rejected me because I still held part of the False Lady inside of me. Their hives and honey have been perverted, but they never meant us harm.”

Treila stares.

“I hope, anyway,” Voyne mutters, sounding more herself, and picks her way across the room to the throne.

She does not hesitate, reaching into the sticky mass of wax and blood and rot. Bees rise around her, a roaring swarm, but they do not touch her. None alight, none sting, as she plunges her arm deep, to the shoulder.

She pulls her arm back and brings with it a sword, glittering and sharp in the fractured light. Maybe Voyne was right, Treila thinks.

“I thought,” Voyne confesses, quietly, “that I had killed her without knowing. Or that Phosyne had done something to her, for Jacynde was in her care the last I saw her. It’s... good to know that this was her choice, even if it was a terrible, forced choice.”