Page 17 of The Starving Saints

Morning comes with the blare of trumpets.

Phosyne wakes, sprawled face down among her books and the rags that make up her pallet, two warm, sinuous bodies draped across

her back and legs. Ornuo and Pneio are heavy when they want to be, which seems to coincide with when she most wants to throw

them across the room. Groaning, stiff and exhausted and hungry like she can’t remember being (really hungry, not just starving, because she understands now that the two are quite distinct),

she wriggles out from beneath them and hauls herself over to the window.

It feels like yesterday all over again. The yard is full of bodies, people watching with upturned faces as salvation is once

more dangled in front of them. The saints (visitors, guests, impossible creatures ) stand in the lower yard. The king and his attendants this time remain in the upper yard, but Ser Voyne is not among them.

No, she stands in the lower yard. She is not wearing armor, so it takes Phosyne longer to spot her, but there she is, half-shorn

head turned to the woman who looks like the Constant Lady, gaze unwavering.

Phosyne chews her lip. Peels up a patch of dried skin, swallows it down. It only makes her stomach growl harder.

The trumpets blast again, and this time the noise sends the boys skittering below her blankets, huffing grumpily. Phosyne

hesitates just a moment, then pushes on the glass, wriggles it free so that she can breathe a little fresh air and, just barely,

make out the words below.

She can’t hear the king himself, of course, but his criers repeat his words at the tops of their lungs.

“ We have been delivered ,” the criers shout. “ Our prayers have been answered. Our saviors bring with them good food and good wine, and tonight we will dine as one people,

in gratitude. ”

Nothing is said of the army that still (Phosyne checks) masses outside the gates. Nothing is said of how they will leave this

place. But at the mention of a feast, Phosyne watches the crowd ripple.

They are falling to their knees. Her own have gone weak as well.

“ Every person in Aymar will eat and drink their fill tonight ,” the king continues through his speakers. He doesn’t seem to notice that there are no wagons of provisions below him, behind

him, or anywhere at all inside the walls. Do they mean to bring them up from beyond the enemy lines? Or will they do what

Phosyne was tasked with, and conjure sustenance from nothing? “ There will be no rations, and no divisions among us. Rest, today, and make ready for the revels of the evening. ”

A cheer goes up. Nobody sees what Phosyne sees, that this is wrong in so many ways. And it isn’t even the promises of salvation,

or the sudden appearance of the saints who now turn to their swarming petitioners, or the mass of bodies that bows to touch

the hems of their robes, while Ser Voyne stays glued to the Constant Lady’s side.

It’s the simple fact that the king should not be the one making this announcement. That is the Priory’s task, to be the intermediary

between the numinous and the mundane. They should be organizing this adulation, rewarding patience with honey on the tongue.

But there are no nuns in the yard. Even Jacynde is nowhere to be seen. Just like the night before.

That’s because she knows this is your fault. Phosyne groans and closes the window. She knows something is wrong, and she knows who is to blame.

Still, nobody dragged her from the tower in the middle of the night. That sits wrong in her gut, even as she feels relief. Ser Leodegardis will, of course, stand by his liege, and might even attempt to protect her, even if he doesn’t believe the saints are who they claim to be. But he’s no fool. If Jacynde has doubts (and she must, or she would have been out in the yard)—and if she has realized that the only other source of dubious miracles in these walls is Phosyne (which she did months ago)—then she would have demanded Phosyne, and Leodegardis would have at least come to question her.

That nobody has so much as knocked since Treila returned her to her little pen is concerning.

She stumbles down her steps, braced against the wall, and tries once more to recall how she summoned Ornuo and Pneio. Why

can’t she remember? She does remember the terror of it, and the subsequent delight, as they curled into her lap and nuzzled at her jaw, companionship

when she didn’t know she had been aching for it for so long. But the actual invocations? It’s a blank spot in her memory.

Food, perhaps, will unlock what she couldn’t remember last night, but her thoughts remain sluggish, recalcitrant.

The fruit was not enough to revive her fully, and her continuing, gnawing hunger demands she sate it, so she eats two pieces

of tough beef, and another strip of meat she doesn’t recognize the flavor of. As she chews the last, she has a flash of brambles

beneath her feet, nose low to the ground, a hundred different scents, and then the bright clarion call of a horn.

She swallows. It goes away.

Frowning, she looks for more of the fruit Treila paid her, but finds none. Either she ate it all last night (hopefully), or

the boys decided to eat it (likely). Then she remembers the honey again, but when she turns to it, she finds it...

Well, it doesn’t even look like comb anymore.

Phosyne scowls at the puddle of muck. It looks like rot , but that is impossible. Honey in the comb doesn’t turn; the bees have made sure of that. Her gaze slides to Ornuo, who has

twined around her ankles and gazes up at her with wide, ruby eyes.

“What have you done this time?” she groans, then hops on one foot to extricate herself.

He lets her, merciful beast, only to sit up on his hind legs and snap the jerky she tosses him from the air with powerful

jaws. His brother joins him, and when a bit of hide lands between them, they tussle for it. Just beasts , she tells herself, watching them. They are only beasts, like cats or hounds, and that they came from nothing should not be so damning. Her ideas come from nothing, after all, and they have given her pure water.

The door to her tower moves in its frame.

The boys stop fighting, and instead flatten themselves to the ground, backing up to take refuge in their hiding spots. Normally,

they would have thrown themselves under the table by now; Phosyne’s skin turns to gooseflesh as she edges closer to the door.

She should have rebuilt the barricade, or at least reset the locks.

“Ser Voyne?” she calls, hoping it is only that, but Ser Voyne would have thrown the door open, stalked inside, demanded answers.

And Treila, though Phosyne barely knows her, would have simply entered as well—of that, she is unsettlingly sure.

The door does not move again.

She goes to her spyglass and peeks through to the hall. Nobody is visible in the limited scope. Just empty stone.

It makes no sense. But this is an opportunity: her workbench is long enough to span the doorway, and Phosyne can block it

all up once more. For the first time since Ser Voyne was assigned as her minder , she can have real privacy again. There’s a threat outside, and she can truly take shelter, and give herself the time to

think and remember.

But why would somebody knock, and then leave so quickly? Phosyne’s teeth chew at her lower lip, and then she opens the door

a crack, just to get a better look. A wider vantage.

There’s nobody there.

Phosyne looks back into her room, sees the rot and filth, smells it anew. She shudders, feeling disgust for the first time.

The ownerless knock hangs in the air around her, a temptation, a question. Search for the answer, or retreat back into her

moldering hovel, trying to unravel why her invocations would be worth listening to?

She steps out onto the stairs. She closes the door tight behind her. She rests her head against the wood.

Soft footsteps pad down the stairs.

Phosyne follows.

It’s very similar to how she chases down her ideas. They come out of nowhere, in sudden flashes, and she is helpless to do anything but pursue them. Something similar, she thinks, happened before Ornuo and Pneio arrived. She had been stringing up her corkindrill, face-to-face with the beast’s sharp teeth, and she had leaned in, put her head inside the jaws, and—

“Sefridis!”

Phosyne staggers to a halt, and realizes she’s gone all the way down to the ground floor, where the garrison should be stationed.

Like last night, it’s empty, except for the person who called her name.

Her old name.

It’s one of the nuns, thin-faced and desperate. She looks hunted , and Phosyne instinctively looks past her for a threat. She sees none. The room is empty. The woman tugs on her sleeve, and

Phosyne looks at her again, mouth open with a question.

“You must come with me,” the nun demands. “You must help.”

“Prioress Jacynde?” Phosyne ventures, though this feels wrong. Her old name, and a direct plea for help? Jacynde would never

do either. And this nun, she is young, younger than Phosyne by at least five or ten years. Little more than a child.

Phosyne doesn’t recognize her face.

The little nun nods. “Yes, the Prioress, she’s—but you must see for yourself.”

She should say no. She owes the Priory, if not Jacynde, for so much of her education, her life until just recently. And yet

if she is responsible for the impossible food the night before, the coming feast, the appearance of the Constant Lady...

“Where is she?” Phosyne asks. “Is she—is she with the visitors?”

The little nun wrings her hands. She is the very image of pathos. “She was,” the nun says. And then terror seems to clot her

throat, if the whites of her eyes are anything to go by.

“Of course, I’ll help as I can,” she says, blood turning to ice.

The nun nods, relief making her tongue her lips a moment, and then she turns and is off, racing for the chapel.

Phosyne follows.

The yard is still full of people, though Phosyne cannot see the king, nor the saints, nor Ser Voyne. They have to weave through the crowd, and Phosyne hears them weeping, praying, cheering. The crush of hopeful bodies is almost too much, and twice, Phosyne nearly loses track of the little nun.

But when they reach the chapel tower, the crowd doesn’t thin; it abruptly stops.

It makes no sense. There should be a crush of parishioners here, too; if the faithful can’t touch the hem of the saints’ robes,

they should be on their knees inside, thanking the icons instead. And yet there is nobody.

Her guide is the only sister she sees as they slip into the chapel, though Phosyne cannot see the whole wide room. Now, at

midday, the open walls only let in sharp shafts of light and a dim glow; otherwise, the rest of the room is cool and shadowed.

But at this time of day, there should be at least ten women here, engaged in various devotional tasks, or sitting with the

faithful. Tending the timekeeping candles that burn despite the availability of the sun for measuring each hour, the better

to calibrate each measurement. Instead, Phosyne can only make out the shadowed form of somebody standing at the far end of

the hall, their posture too martial to be praying.

She doesn’t have time to look closer. The girl’s hand tugs on her sleeve again, and Phosyne turns to follow.

They wind up the stairs that lead to the observatory platform above the chapel proper, and are almost to the door when the

nun stops. She bows her head, and Phosyne expects she’s praying, but then she asks, “Did you do this?”

Phosyne can’t stop her panicked smile.

“We were tasked to find food,” the nun continues, without looking back. “Impossible task, of course, and yet—and yet there’s

food here now, and when we were tasked to clean the water, impossible task, you delivered us.”

If Phosyne speaks, she’s going to blurt out her guilt. The temptation is too great. She doesn’t like the weight of secrets

on her, wants help to solve this problem, wants absolution. Phosyne makes a weak, strangled sound, animal in its tone.

“No, it doesn’t matter,” the nun says, presses her hands to her eyes, then beckons for Phosyne to go ahead of her. “She’s up there. She wouldn’t talk to me, but maybe she’ll talk to you. I just... this all feels wrong. Is it blasphemy, for this all to feel wrong?”

Phosyne wishes she remembered this girl. Wishes, too, that she remembered that oceanic feeling of faith she knows she must

have had. Worship was her life for twenty years; shouldn’t it feel more real to her now than an old, unraveling dream? If it did, maybe she could offer

some comfort.

Instead, she slips past the nun and eases open the door.

The wind fights her. The insubstantial breeze down in the yard is stronger up here, where the walls can’t stop it, where it’s

maddening instead of useful. She can’t move the door more than an inch until the wind abruptly changes directions, catches

the door from the other side, and throws it open. Phosyne stumbles out into the midday sun.

Jacynde is there, just as the nun said she would be. Phosyne stares at her prostrate form, then looks behind her. The door stands open,

but her escort is gone. She feels unmoored, and sways on her feet as she forces herself to look at the prioress again.

She will have to confess, she tells herself. She couldn’t tell that poor girl, no, because what would it have changed? But

if she can help Jacynde now, and then tell her what she knows, perhaps Jacynde will have some better idea of where to start.

And if not, Phosyne might at least beg some honey to help get her mind working better. If she shows contrition and obedience,

maybe Jacynde will take pity on her, given the strange circumstances.

The thought makes her grimace, but she still twitches her robes into some semblance of order and walks away from the shelter

of the stairway tower.

Around her are the astrolabes, the telescopes, the tools of measurement that make order out of the world. Jacynde is not using

any of them. She is kneeling, head uncovered, staring at nothing. She is inanimate, and Phosyne does remember enough to be

afraid. Jacynde is so rarely still.

“Your Radiance,” Phosyne says. It comes out as more of a croak.

Jacynde’s shoulders shudder.

Phosyne circles around so she can see the prioress’s face. She ex pects to see... pain. Pain, and desperation, and the wreckage of a crisis of faith. If Phosyne concentrates, she can imagine it: a lifetime spent as the intercessor to the Lady and Her saints, only to be caught unprepared and unbelieving when the Lady and Her saints actually appeared. Maybe that, instead of doubt or suspicion, is the reason why she has retreated here. Maybe faith, when brought to life, is too much when you are drowned in it your whole life. The sustaining liquor of it suddenly made solid.

And Jacynde doesn’t look comfortable, no, but she doesn’t look like she’s drowning either. She looks...

Blank.

There are old tear tracks on her cheek, cutting through layers of paint. Sweat, too, once beaded on her brow, blurring the

edges, warping the design. But now her skin looks dry and red. She has been sitting out in this heat for Phosyne cannot guess

how long. Too long.

Phosyne reaches out, then stops, hands only an inch or two away from Jacynde’s shoulders. The prioress frowns, but not at her. Perhaps only at the way she blocks out the light, casting shadow over the woman’s face.

Jacynde’s lips part, and Phosyne smells blood. It doesn’t run out past the prioress’s lips, but it clings to the margins of

her teeth, lines her gums. And behind that, Phosyne sees—

Nothing. Her tongue is gone. Cut out at the root.

Bile rises in her throat, and Phosyne falls back onto her ass, staring.

As she stares, she catches movement, a pulsing. A faint buzzing.

A bee crawls along Jacynde’s hard palette, along her teeth, and out onto her upper lip. It lingers there a moment, flicking

its wings to dry them of pink-tinged saliva, and then it alights and disappears into the wide heavens.

That breaks through Phosyne’s shock, and in another moment, she’s dragging Jacynde against her skinny chest. The prioress

is so heavy, in all her robes, but Phosyne urges herself to move. She uses every scrap of strength left in her and hauls Jacynde

back toward the stairs. Jacynde is dead weight in her arms, her only response a thin, high whine.

“Who did this to you?” Phosyne asks, shaking, knowing already that the answer is her . Not the Lady, but Phosyne herself, somehow summoning salvation. It is wrong , has always been wrong, and if Phosyne still felt the slightest bit of control over the situation, that’s gone now. Gone,

along with the prioress’s tongue , and oh, Phosyne thinks she is going to be sick.

She crawls instead, pulling them both into the shadow of the tower.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers as they collapse together down the spiraling stairs. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I did.”

Jacynde only moans in response, and does not flinch as her hip strikes the edge of a stair.

The little nun finds them where the stairs open up onto the chapel, and clasps her hands over her mouth to stifle a cry of

horror. She goes to her knees, staring into Jacynde’s unblinking eyes. “Is she—is she—”

“Not yet,” Phosyne says, head falling back against the stone. It is cool, and the tower is dark, and she has that same feeling

she did the night before, that she could very well simply slip through the floor and into somewhere else. “But she needs water,

badly.” She almost asks if the girl can help carry Jacynde all the way back to her tower, but the thought of Jacynde in her

territory is a bridge she cannot cross. “Get her somewhere cool and dark and quiet, get her water, stay with her. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” the nun agrees, and though she is likely as weak as Phosyne is, she does a better job of hauling up the limp body of

the prioress. “What happened? All I know is that she went to see the—the king and his guests last night, and when she returned,

she went up to the observatory. And nobody else thought to check on her.”

“Where is everybody else?” Phosyne asks.

“Preparing for the feast,” she whispers, and she sounds broken.

Phosyne closes her eyes, trying to think, to understand.

When she opens them again, she’s alone.

She’s still in the stairwell. The same stairwell, too, because from where she sits, slumped, she can see the pillars of the chapel, hear the humming of the bees. She must have fallen asleep, then, and the girl has correctly taken Jacynde to safety instead of trying to help her. Slowly, stiffly, Phosyne stands up, expecting her head to spin.

It doesn’t.

She’s still hungry, of course. Still confused and frightened, too. But her body is no weaker than it was when she climbed

these stairs. It’s almost as if it never happened at all, save for Jacynde’s paint that is still smeared on her fingertips.

And the martial shadow across the chapel is still there, too.

It looks familiar.

Warily, Phosyne steps into the chapel. She half expects to be swarmed by the bees that buzz through the chamber, chased out

as a heretic, but they ignore her, tracing out their usual patterns, heading inexorably out past the castle walls instead

of turning in. They know there is no nectar to find here.

Phosyne is halfway across the floor by the time she realizes the shadow is Ser Voyne.

Ser Voyne stands alone. There is no king for her to guard, nor the Lady, and her gaze slips over Phosyne, as if Phosyne doesn’t

exist, let alone require her minding. Phosyne wants to stop and look and evaluate, but if she stops, she’s going to drop back

to the floor. So she keeps walking, comes so close she can see the color of Ser Voyne’s eyes.

They’re brown.

“Ser Voyne,” she says, barely above a whisper.

Those brown eyes blink, placidly.

“Can you hear me?” Phosyne asks. Ser Voyne does not move from her post. She does not even flick a glance at her, and Phosyne’s

heart sinks.

This is bad. Voyne should be lunging into action, snatching Phosyne and throwing her once more into a wall, demanding what she thinks she is doing outside of her tower, not working on their miracle. Or she should at least be sneering in irritation, waving Phosyne’s madness away like a fly. She does neither. She does nothing. And it is galling, that after a week of hating this woman’s presence, that her inattention... hurts, even more than it unnerves her. Maybe that’s why she seizes the knight’s arm, hauls her back into the shadowed niche of the chapel.

That does get a response. Ser Voyne looks at her at last as Phosyne crowds her against the wall. She doesn’t have the strength to shove

her, not like Voyne did to her out by the smithy, but Phosyne feels the echo all the same. She waits for Voyne to fight back.

She may be feeling stronger, but the knight is still six inches taller and nearly twice as broad.

And Ser Voyne squirms, but... that’s it.

It’s like she doesn’t know what to do. How to lash out. She looks confused , brow pinching, lips parting. The glaze of her eyes sharpens, and for just a moment, Phosyne sees panic.

“ Ser Voyne ,” she demands in response. “Listen to me.”

Where the command in her voice comes from, she cannot say. Maybe just desperation.

Wherever it hails from, it works. Ser Voyne goes still, but her eyes remain sharp, her brow pinched.

In the brown of her iris, there’s a ring of color that doesn’t belong. It’s hard-edged, like it was inked with a paintbrush.

Phosyne cannot fix this on her own. She knows that. She knew it enough to consider begging forgiveness of Jacynde, who would

have her jailed at the slightest opportunity. But Jacynde can’t help her, and the feast is tonight, and she needs somebody on her side to tell her what to do, what question to solve first. Ser Voyne is supposed to be on her side, even if that hasn’t

ever worked out for her before.

She reaches up and touches Ser Voyne’s cheek.

“Can you hear me?” she asks.

Ser Voyne nods shakily. Her skin twitches beneath Phosyne’s touch. Where Jacynde was hot, Voyne is cold. Her eyelids spasm.

She’s having trouble focusing, thinking.

Phosyne can relate.

“You are to look after me. Do you remember that?”

Ser Voyne nods, slowly, the movement ungainly and wrong. But she does not look away. She is listening. She’s remembering , with great force of will. Her body has begun to tremble.

Phosyne leans into her. Drags her hands along the muscles of her arms, corded and tense. There’s anger there. Good. She should be angry. If she could see the mess they’re in, she would be raging, and she would be beautiful in her rage.

“I’m out of my tower,” Phosyne points out. “I’m not supposed to be. The last time I got out, you nearly killed me. You were

so angry , because together, we’re supposed to be saving this castle, and I never do what you ask.”

That gets a snarl out of the bigger woman, and then suddenly, it’s not Voyne pressed into the wall, it’s Phosyne. Her head

cracks against the stone and she bucks, trying to get the knight’s weight off her. It doesn’t work.

Ser Voyne’s fist closes around her throat. Her thumb and forefinger press into the points of Phosyne’s jaw, and she gasps,

head falling back against the wall. She’s supposed to be afraid, she knows that, but this whole mess is so confusing and turned on its head that Phosyne isn’t really surprised to realize she’s enjoying

this. That her body sings when Ser Voyne squeezes a little tighter, and panic blooms in her chest.

“That’s it,” she gasps out. “You hate me. Remember?”

Ser Voyne squeezes harder. Phosyne can barely breathe. But on the gasp she does manage, she smells—

Blood.

And she remembers Jacynde’s empty, bloody mouth, the pieces clicking into place as she realizes why Ser Voyne was standing

below the observatory. The eagerness in her flips to pure terror in an instant, and she begins to thrash. The stone is no

longer cold against her back, it’s hot with the heat of her body, and she scrabbles against it, eyes closing, lips parting

in a silent, airless scream—

And then she’s outside of the chapel, on the narrow walkway that rings the tower. There is a wall in front of her. She hears

sobbing coming through it. Voyne’s sobbing. Somehow she’s fallen through the stone and come out whole the other side—and Voyne

cannot follow.

Phosyne doesn’t look. She just runs.