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“Hardtack,” Ser Voyne says, staring at it. “I thought we gave out the last of it...”

The reminder of exactly how bad the situation is, even absent the unnatural feast below, nearly knocks Voyne off her feet. She sinks toa crouch, covering her face with her hands. That she doesn’t moan is, Phosyne thinks, likely only because of her training.

Phosyne picks up the biscuit, turns it over in her hands. Most of it is dry and grainy, what she’d expect, but one corner is covered in a thin film of slime. She lifts the biscuit to her nose, breathes in.

She smells sulfur.

“Oh, you clever boys,” she murmurs, then takes a bite.

Or tries to; it’s so hard it nearly breaks her teeth, and she hisses in pain. No matter; her hands are wet and her robes are soaked. She wraps the brick in her skirts and presses until she feels it give a little. It’s still too hard to bite, but she can scrape the top layer off with her teeth. It’s too salty by far, and otherwise tastes like sawdust, except for the faint hint of sweetness on her tongue as her saliva breaks it down.

Bread. Bread, bread she caneat, and she, too, sinks to the floor.

She has scraped all the soft bits off and is soaking it again in the folds of her robes when Ser Voyne manages to speak again. “I don’t understand what happened to me,” she says.

Phosyne looks over at her. She is still hunched over, almost prostrate.

“I’m afraid I don’t have many answers,” Phosyne says. “I can tell you what I saw, from outside. Would that help?”

Voyne nods.

“I saw you at Her table last night, eating food that She must have conjured from nowhere. And I saw you this morning, at the chapel. I found Jacynde above you, with her tongue cut out. Your hands were covered in blood.”

Voyne shudders. “She said... She said a faithless tongue was worth more as food than to eat food.”

At first Phosyne takes that to mean Jacynde said that, but of course not, of course it is Her. The Lady. “Faithless?”

“Last night,” Voyne says. “Prioress Jacynde came to make us see sense. To make us understand that the food could not be explained. But the Lady cowed her. Pulled apart her armor by articulating all of the prioress’s doubts. She couldn’t withstand it. She let them give her honeyed wine. And then she stopped fighting.”

“But the Lady holds grudges.”

“It didn’t feel like that,” Voyne whispers. “It didn’t feel like retribution, or even lesson-giving. It felt like...” She frowns. Closes her eyes. “Harvest.”

Phosyne pulls the softened biscuit from her robe and stares at it, stomach curdling, before she sets it gently upon her workbench for later. “Somewhere, on those tables down there...” She goes back over the evening. Sees the Absolving Saint presenting the roasted arm so proudly. The Lady chewing bits of flesh.

She says nothing. She can’t make herself say it. Ser Voyne either understands or she doesn’t. Either way, the other woman gets up and begins to pace.

Phosyne works on mastering her stomach, putting the realization aside for later. Exhaustion wins out over both, but it dampens down the horror enough that Phosyne can make herself grab the biscuit, scrape another layer off with her teeth. It goes down thick and gluey in her throat.

At length, Ser Voyne stops pacing. Her shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath, and when she exhales, she looks a little more like Phosyne remembers. Flinty-eyed. Strong. The transformation is impressive; Phosyne can almost forget how small and broken she’d looked in the cistern, and their clothes aren’t even half-dry yet.

“So,” Ser Voyne says, turning to Phosyne and, after assessing her appearance, approaching as if afraid one or both of them might spook. “What next?”

Phosyne bites at her lip, then looks at the door. Still no sign of Treila. “There’s a way out. Maybe. We’re waiting for the girl who knows the way.”

Ser Voyne does not look as relieved as Phosyne had expected. In fact, she looks angry.

“No,” Voyne says, voice firm. Unyielding.

Phosyne blinks up at her. “No?”

“No. We aren’t leaving. We stay here. We fix this. We save them.”

“Savethem?” Phosyne asks, disbelieving.

“If what happened to me is happening to everybody in this keep,” Ser Voyne says, slowly, as if trying to explain something to a verydistractible child, “then we cannot leave them to suffer. Even if we delude ourselves into thinking the Lady has kind intentions.”

They both know She does not.