Page 66
Story: The Starving Saints
“But should you wish to return,” he says, and she canhearhis smile, “the fee will be a little higher.”
He doesn’t specify. She doubts she could make him if she wanted to, but—she doesn’t want to. Doesn’tneedto.
Resolved, Treila extends the smallest finger of her left hand into the darkness.
At first, there is nothing. Then the brush of gentle lips against her knuckle. A tongue, laving from the web between little and ring finger up to the very tip, prodding beneath her fingernail. She thinks of the Loving Saint, planting his tainted seeds, and grips her free hand tight against the stone so that she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away.It’s eat or be eaten, she tells herself, and she cannot eat darkness.
But it can eat her.
Teeth close around her first knuckle, test the heft of the joint. Treila clenches her jaw and refuses to close her eyes or look away. There’s nothing in the darkness that she can see, and so there is no warning when the bite comes, and there is nothing but pain. Treila cries out, falling forward, catching herself against her left shoulder on the stone.
Tears burn her eyes. She’s yanked her hand back from the crevice, helpless to resist, and nothing stops her. Nothing stops her, but nothing opens for her, and she stares at the abbreviated length of her finger.
There is no blood.
“It’s not so nice, to tease,” her darkness whispers. “That’s not enough to set you free. A little more, clever. Just a little more.”
Treila’s crying. She doesn’t want to be, but the pain is too much,even though there’s no blood, even though there are no longer teeth against her skin. For a moment, she doesn’t think she can do it. Doesn’t think she can complete the bargain, offer her hand once more to the creature in the crevice.
But she has suffered worse. That long winter, starving, cold, too shocked and confused to be angry yet, not angry enough to keep herself alive. And yet she is. She found her spite, at last, and rode it out of the forest.
Treila harnesses that spite again and thrusts her hand into the black.
The second bite is faster than the first, one more knuckle gone, and Treila howls. She screams. She thrashes, but she keeps her arm in the gap, and she can feel it grip the length of her arm. There aren’t hands, no, though the lips and tongue still work against the skin of her palm. If anything, it’s like she’s enveloped in a spiral of interlocking legs, jointed and pulsing and tangling around her. She presses her forehead to the rock and pants, desperate not to move, desperate to see this through.
And then the third bite. The last one, severing her finger cleanly from her hand, and this time the pain is like scalding oil, shooting up her veins, and she is on her knees before she can stop her fall. She tumbles forward, and the stone is not there anymore, it was never there, and she is in a tunnel of flesh. She is crawling. She hears laughter all around her as the limbs of this monster convulse and slide and grasp. Treila pushes forward all the same, grips skin, grips stone, and then—
And then—
And then she emerges into sunlight and the sigh of a breeze through grass.
27
The sounds of the feast beyond the keep walls have died away when Phosyne and Voyne leave the little room with the crack in the world. What light there is comes from a pale half dawn, gray and strained. It falls on bodies, sleeping sprawled across the stone.
Nobody has gone back to their pallets or beds, and instead slumber seemingly where they fell coming in from the feast. There is very little sound. Phosyne and Voyne step over bodies and ascend the stairs, not quite looking at each other because (at least in Phosyne’s case) that would be to acknowledge just how scared they are.
Phosyne doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be on the other side of that tunnel, puzzling with the thing that Treila met down there, looking for another way out. It should have been easy to leave Voyne behind. Physically, it would’ve been. But then Phosyne thinks of Ser Voyne compelled to obey her orders, and remembers her confusion, her terror, as she surfaced from the Lady’s control instead, and she feels guilty for even considering abandoning this woman.
Besides, she can always leave on her own, if she changes her mind.
Probably.
“We’ll need a plan,” she says when it is just them in the staircase, halfway up to the tower. “A real one. A specific one.”
“Our enemy is powerful,” Ser Voyne agrees, slowing.
“Study won’t be enough.” Phosyne crowds up against Voyne, half so she can speak softly, and half because she feels exposed. Her room would be a far better venue for this conversation, but she wants a promise now. Something more than Voyne’s determination, beforeTreila arrived, or her tears, after Treila left. A promise that Phosyne is not making the wrong choice.
“No.” Voyne studies her face in the dim light. Mulls something over, behind her shadowed eyes. “My sword—the Lady took it from me. That is a place to start. And the water. Everyone must drink water, and soon; the day’s heat will only grow.”
“Unless they mean to kill us all.” Phosyne smiles. It’s a little hysterical. “In this heat, if they can keep the feast going—”
“They’ve already stopped the feast.”
“For tonight. But if they don’t give out water to everybody, I don’t think they’ll know to ask, anymore. Two days, then, at most. Right?”
“Surely thirst can punch through their intoxication.”
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66 (Reading here)
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114
- Page 115
- Page 116
- Page 117
- Page 118
- Page 119
- Page 120
- Page 121
- Page 122
- Page 123
- Page 124
- Page 125
- Page 126
- Page 127
- Page 128
- Page 129
- Page 130
- Page 131