Page 28 of The Starving Saints

Ser Voyne sees no trace of saints as she makes her way to the cisterns.

She does see the sun too high in the sky; only minutes ago, it seems, it was dawn. But now the yard is baking, and there are

too many people still passed out in the dirt, baking with it. Their skin is growing red and hot.

Like Prioress Jacynde’s.

She can feel Jacynde’s writhing tongue inside her fist. She can feel many things that should be far away, fogged over, but

it is as if the heat of the sun and the clarity of the cistern water has laid her open. She feels the tongue, and the impact

of her sword hilt into an unarmored skull, and the frigid chill of a failed campaign in winter, when she and Leodegardis had

been left with no choice but to carve up the dead and portion them out to the survivors.

She has seen so much suffering. She has been the instrument of it so many times: the edge of the blade, the lick of the flame.

It’s easier to cast it as protecting Aymar, protecting her king. But from another angle, it is only violence. If she serves

the wrong master...

Voyne cannot allow herself to dwell on it. Not even as she feels acutely every whimper, every keen, every begging tug at the

edge of her armor that has ever happened.

Nobody here is begging.

They sleep like the dead. She recognizes many of them; there is no order to who has fallen where. She tells herself that the

steady rise and fall of their chests is merciful: sleep stops pain, and they are, at least, alive.

This is no Carcabonne. A battlefield strewn with dead, and a liberated castle empty of everybody she meant to save. There is still a chance here.

She draws up water, bucket by bucket, and fills what oilskins are at the ready. She fills cups, too, after she dumps out honeyed

wine. She ignores the bloody remnants where the Absolving Saint bled that woman for Cardimir’s thirst. There are so many people

here, lying at her feet, needing to be saved. She tries to save them. She props up first one, then another, tipping water

down their throats. Some swallow. Some choke. One wakes up and screams when he sees her, and Voyne remembers, too late, that

she is the reason his arms are covered in half a dozen red stripes. Her nails on his flesh, hauling him to this banquet.

After that, she can’t do it anymore.

It won’t be enough, she reasons. Phosyne was right. She could give every person in this yard a drink of water, and wait for

them to rise, and she would have no way to keep them safe from another offer of food. There are too many people here to lead.

So instead she turns her strength to getting them out of the heat. The sun beats down on her as she hauls limp, helpless bodies

into shade.

She hopes it will be enough.

Most that she moves are whole and healthy, save for the burning of their skin. But a few... a few have been ravaged. She

finds strange wounds: a kitchen boy missing stripes of flesh from his legs, the furrows already healing pink and smooth. A

girl with her shirt missing, exposing her belly, where a window of translucent skin covers over the pulsing of her guts. Other

injuries she suspects were at her hands the day before, more immediate, some purulent.

She can do nothing for them, and the knowledge tears at her heart.

And she sees no trace of Cardimir, no trace of anybody she can rouse and scream at, beg for help or guidance or leadership.

There is only so much wreckage.

Her muscles are screaming by the time she gives up, and she feels too exposed, too raw. She stumbles to the walled garden.

She needs shade herself, a little shelter, but she’s not ready to go back inside. Not yet. Not yet.

The garden has grown green again. She sidesteps broad, shining leaves, sticks to the thin track of dirt that still leads to the center. She sits heavily on the bench. It’s not safe here, either; she remembers the Lady coming to collect her here before the feast. She remembers...

Golden hair.

Golden hair, and then the thought is gone again, buried, stolen from her. There is only buzzing left, and emptiness, the same

feeling she felt in Phosyne’s tower, in the tunnel below the earth. The nothingness that has replaced something that once

was. Voyne fists her hands in her hair, shudders. She can’t even remember what she was thinking of, when the buzzing started.

The garden, perhaps? She remembers the Lady. She remembers her king telling her that it was time to begin eating their own,

remembers fighting it, but it all runs together. Those weren’t the same day. The Lady came later. But it is the Lady she remembers

sitting on this bench with her, taking her hand, shaking the foundations of her world apart.

Voyne jolts away from the bench, on her feet again, retreating. Something foul has happened here, and she cannot think about

it without bile rising in her throat.

It’s easier to go back out, to keep moving bodies.

She doesn’t notice how she is gentler with the girls with golden hair.