Page 13 of The Starving Saints

Ser Voyne is nowhere to be found, and Phosyne is left to her own devices. She can find no joy in it. Her body still shakes.

Her head still hurts. She should eat the honey Voyne has left her, but every time she tries, her body rebels. The floral aroma

goes to her head and she nearly vomits.

So she doesn’t eat the honey. Instead, she watches out her window, and tries to think.

When thinking doesn’t work, she sneaks out.

It’s not hard. Her guards are missing, and the room directly below her is empty. It’s easy, from there, to pick one of the

lesser-used staircases and creep down and out into the yard. It’s early evening now, the air dancing with the steady pulse

of glowing flies, and there is hushed laughter in the air. Laughter . Phosyne tastes hope on her lips, but it transmutes to something far more sour, and she presses herself up against a stone

wall and holds her breath.

Something is wrong. She doesn’t quite know what, but she saw the tableau down in the yard at noon. She thinks she saw Voyne fall to

her knees.

That, and the lack of her guards—those recent, desperate additions—it adds up to either greater fear, or the removal of fear.

Neither make sense.

The great hall glows with firelight, and she creeps closer to peer in through one of the many small windows. She is not alone,

but there are only a few others peering in; not the crowd she would have expected. Good behavior, for what should have rightly

been a mob.

Inside must be stifling, even though she can see no more than ten bodies within, crowded around a table. She sees the king, in his finery, and Ser Leodegardis, in his stoic remove. Prioress Jacynde is not there. Ser Voyne is, stone still with some form of shock, and Phosyne doesn’t like that look on her brow.

It looks broken.

The chamberlain is there, too, and the marshal, and the four guests. And those four guests...

She knows them. She knows them, because she cleaned their icons for years, knelt at their feet, offered up praise and processed

the honey from the hives painted in their colors. The Warding Saint, so similar to Ser Voyne in appearance, but richly ornamented;

the Absolving Saint, all silvered and earnest, head bent to listen to every whispered word; the Loving Saint, one hand curled

below his chin, fine fingers sliding back and forth against his jawline, enticement and comfort both; and the Constant Lady,

sitting statue-straight in Her chair, only a breath away from looking up and seeing Phosyne staring.

Her heart gives an unexpected pang of recognition, of longing.

A young boy tends to the fire, then runs to fetch food from the kitchens. And there is food, a whole spread of it, not just dried meat. Phosyne thinks she smells verdancy, then shakes it off; she’s too far away.

But she does see green.

There are vegetables on those plates. Her mouth waters; her stomach cramps. She knows exactly how everything on that table

would taste in her mouth, and her mind shrieks at her to force her way inside, to gorge herself. It had been easier to starve

when there was so little to eat, and so little that appealed. But these vegetables are plump and fresh, not dried and stored

through the winter, somehow uneaten until this very moment at the height of summer.

Fresh ones, not grown in the castle gardens, because those have all been picked clean. Nothing to flower, nothing to fruit.

They’re from somewhere else.

When? How? Perhaps Phosyne missed the moments the gates were raised, but for somebody to have reached them at all without

cries of death out on the walls—no, she’s missing something.

Phosyne’s rotting breath fills her nose, and is acrid enough to make her duck down, take shelter, instead of staring like a desperate fool. Her stomach riots, but her higher faculties resume control. Green means outside. These strange visitors, then, have come from outside and have brought offerings. So many offerings that the

tables looked ready to groan.

A miracle. Food, and the hand of what appears to be the Constant Lady.

And yet, no sign of the Priory.

For just a moment, she thinks to run to Jacynde and ask if she, too, can feel the wrongness. If that’s why she keeps her distance.

Of course, that presumes she can run , and that Jacynde’s creatures would let her near.

Still, she makes herself stand up. Makes herself leave all that bounty, and staggers to the walls for a closer look at the

world beyond.

In the eight months she has lived in Aymar castle, even before the siege, she has rarely wandered. Her room is her sanctuary.

She knows almost nobody in the castle household, let alone the refugees or the king’s contingent. There’s nobody she can go

to, except perhaps for Ser Voyne and Ser Leodegardis, to ask what is happening.

But when she reaches the gatehouse, the shadows wrap around her, and she goes unseen as she listens in.

Three guards in armor sit around a pitted table, all perched on wobbling stools.

“Georgie didn’t do it , ” the redhead is saying, throwing down worn cards on the table. “And I didn’t do it. And I don’t know that anybody could’ve

done it without somebody noticing, that winch can’t be moved on its own — ”

“But they’re here,” says the one with the coiled dark hair. “Somebody must’ve. If a door’s not open, no one’s getting in.

And if they can get in, then we’re all fucked, because Etrebia could just march right up here and—”

“We’d skewer ’em before they got close,” says the angry one, and their fury seems to bleed through the rock and into Phosyne’s

cheek, and she is panting, and—

She realizes, suddenly, that even if the shadows abandoned her, they would not see her; she is pressed against the stone wall on the outside of the gatehouse.

She doesn’t know how she can see them, hear them, and suddenly she can’t anymore. But that is for tomorrow, or the next day,

after she deals with the more obvious terror:

Nobody opened the gates.

Nobody opened the gates, and yet there are four strangers within Aymar’s walls, gentle and kind and beautiful, and they are

allowed to move about under their own power. They are guests . This makes no sense. Phosyne has been kept up in her tower, and Ser Leodegardis knows her. He saw her walk into this castle under her own power. The gates were open, then.

But they are closed now, and surrounded by a heavy earthen wall manned by enemy soldiers, and how, how could anybody make it all the way along the path that leads from the plain beyond up to the gates of Aymar without anybody

on either side noticing?

They are not natural. They are not people in costume, or people at all. Phosyne knows that with a galling certainty that makes

her head spin, the same certainty that tells her what the guards inside the room look and feel like. She pushes herself up

off the ground (When did she kneel? When did she fall?) and nearly vomits, but keeps whatever bile is left to her down. She

staggers back toward the upper bailey, the safety of her tower, the comfort of the wicked creatures that reside in her workspace.

But that thought brings her up short, too. She slows. Leans hard against an inner crenelation, hopes nobody with a bow sees

her weaving shadow.

Pneio and Ornuo appeared, as if from nowhere. The gates did not open, but suddenly she was den mother to two creatures she

has never seen before, never read of. They came to her from somewhere , just as her theories about the purification of water, just as the technique by which she can light a candle and have it

burn without using up its fuel.

Her stomach sours far beyond its physical pangs.

These saints are here by her hand, and she doesn’t know how she did it.