Page 29 of The Starving Saints

Treila can barely see, the sunlight is so intense. It was full night when she crawled beneath the castle, but now it’s midday.

It’s midday, and it’s mid- autumn , the air filled with a crisp bite, the trees around her wreathed in blazing orange.

Across the river, there is mud, and rubble, and no other trace of the Etrebian camp.

She cradles her hand against her chest, fingering the abbreviated bump at the outer edge of her left hand. There’s no pain

now, not even a red raised spot to mark where the darkness’s teeth bit in. The skin is continuous, even-toned, soft. It feels

just like all the skin around it.

It’s like there was never a finger there at all, and that, that , is what brings her to her knees.

She clutches her hand tight, gasping, sucking in desperate breath after desperate breath, unsure of where she goes next.

A quick inventory: she has her body (mostly) and her mind (likewise), clothing and boots, a small amount of food, a candle

she can light, and a knife, still tucked into her remaining stocking, safe and sound. It’s more than she had when her father

was executed. She’d been tossed out with only the clothes on her back and fine slippers on her feet.

If she finds somebody, anybody, she can do it again. Walk away, forget about the Loving Saint and Phosyne, Edouart and Simmonet,

Ser Voyne and King Cardimir, and find some new place to make her home in.

Treila makes herself stand and trace the path of the river until she finds a bridge. It’s new construction. Not well-made, but more than a felled tree. It’s unguarded, and she crosses over, into the churned mud of the old encircling camp.

From this distance, Aymar is a monument. There is nobody on the battlements, and she can’t make out the blocks of stone from

here, only the imposing whole. It towers on top of the bluff, impenetrable, unpenetrated. There’s no smoke rising from it,

no new banners waving at the tops of the towers, and though she cannot see it from here, she assumes the gates are closed

just as tightly.

It makes no sense.

She picks her way along the riverbank, her boots drying slowly in the damp autumn air. There’s no trace of the heat that had

her almost senseless just days ago. It’s like she fell asleep below the earth and woke up only to find the future is now the

present.

But if it has been three months, then Phosyne and Ser Voyne...

Treila keeps walking and does her best not to think. It doesn’t matter, after all. It didn’t matter the moment she left them

in the keep and went on ahead alone.

Eventually, she leaves the river proper and begins picking her way up the hillside. It’s steep, but there are steps cut into

the sod at the worst parts, and the main road runs along the ridge above her, from Aymar into the world. As she walks, she

passes more remnants of buildings and fortifications. The contravallation has been broken down to rubble, and for a moment,

Treila fears that far more than a few months have been stolen from her. This looks like the work of decades.

Or of engineers. She catches sight, at last, of a smaller fortification between her and the road. The camp is small, home

to no more than twenty souls, and it stands out stark in the middle of what has become a field of mud. It sits where Etrebia

once centralized its command, if the walls that ring it and the emblazoned crates that linger are any indication. The bones

of it are hollowed out, surrounded by tents, and a fire burns at the center.

Treila makes for it as quickly as she can, desperate for the world to make sense again.

There are guards, and they bring Treila up short, but they’re not primed to kill. She keeps her eyes down and smiles and uses her quietest voice, tells them a quick little story about her father wanting to know what is happening up here on the ridge, and they let her pass. Make a place for her by the fire and let her warm her chilled hands as they cook their dinner: rabbit and squash, fragrant and safe to eat.

It is all she can do not to swallow it down in feral gulps. She could eat a whole rabbit herself, and long for more. Her carefully

managed hunger tries to slip its bonds.

She picks the meat from little bones until she remembers the foot upon the table, its owner nameless, forgotten. It sours

her appetite enough that she must appear normal to them.

When her portion is gone, she lets herself drift over to the man she thinks is in charge. He’s not trying to hide it; he didn’t

eat with all the rest, and has a beautiful fur-lined cloak. He’s young, with a twice-broken nose, and he inclines his head

in greeting when she sidles closer.

She doesn’t want to play the fool, but there are too few people here for her to sell herself as some long-ignored servant.

So instead she plays the farmer’s daughter, gawping at the devastation around her.

The man takes pity. Of course he does. “It’s not a pretty sight, is it?” he asks.

No need to ask about the siege directly; anybody close enough to walk here would know the details. But the castle gates are closed. “Has nobody come out?” she asks, gambling.

She wins. “Not a soul,” the man confesses. “The strangest thing. We’ve been here two months now, keeping watch, and nothing.

Not even somebody up on the walls.”

“Have you tried to go up? Force your way in? Perhaps—perhaps they have all—”

Starved. It’s been long enough, judging by the season around them.

“Can’t get close.”

Treila frowns. Now that is strange. As strange as the fact that it is no longer summer. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that we have tried countless times to get near, and we have never reached the door.”

“Do they attack?” She sees visions of Ser Voyne manning the walls, sending volleys of arrows out at any who dare approach—but no, all their arrowheads have been melted down.

“No,” the soldier says. “Nobody is there, and we cannot get close. The Priory has been unable to explain it. If it weren’t

for the fact that the king is said to still be inside...”

They wouldn’t be here at all.

Treila nods, slowly, gaze fixed on the walls. She wants to ask about Etrebia, about how close this stretch of border is to

failing, but she doesn’t have to. It’s obvious in how well-fed this camp is, how healthy and, ultimately, relaxed this man

is beneath his boredom and frustration and concern. This is not a man at war. The enemy has been driven off.

There is a world out here to return to.

They let her curl up close enough to the fire that she could sleep, especially once she’s given a blanket (worn, a little

rat-chewed, but not so bad) by the man with the twice-broken nose. She closes her eyes to slits obediently, lets her body

be limp and vulnerable in the dirt. Nobody approaches her, and she is quickly forgotten, left to think. To argue with herself.

It is eat or be eaten , the Loving Saint purrs in her memory. She will not be eaten; she has won her freedom, paid for it with bone and flesh, and

she will not give that up.

She’s not that sentimental.

Ser Voyne will suffer and die inside those walls. The king will. Edouart and Simmonet may already be turned into pies, for

all she knows. Phosyne has at least half a chance, Treila figures, then asks herself why she cares. What have they exchanged

except a little food, a little magic?

It should be easy to walk away.

She should be delighted to have escaped victorious.

She knows better than to think herself a coward for taking the smart route to safety.

And yet she does not sleep. The autumn chill descends in force, and with it, the memory of the winter after her father’s death. The memory of how the remnants of her household starved and died. Human flesh, tough and wasted, the only thing keeping her alive.

It won’t be like that , she tells herself. But she trembles beneath her blanket anyway, because her body knows better: that as kind as this camp

has been to her, they won’t let her stay indefinitely. That she will be hungry again. And that if she walks away, she will

carry with her the weight of everybody she left behind to die.

Does Ser Voyne carry that guilt, too?

Treila rolls onto her back and stares up at the stars, and she replays her conversation with the Loving Saint, looking for

proof that she is making the right choice. Instead, she finds a bigger tangle. More questions. There had been so many little

fractures: how he’d responded to her knife, how he’d spoken of the thing that wears the Constant Lady’s face, how he’d gazed

at her as if he was unsure whether he’d prefer to eat or be eaten.

She will never know what is at the core of her that so angers a creature who can hide an entire person from the mind of another,

that so delights a creature who can grow a feast from a fingernail. And she will never know if that means she could have saved

the others.

Unless she goes back.

Two versions of herself begin to take shape: One, fleeing, too weak to take anybody else with her. Too smart to stay and risk

herself. Willing to brave another long, dark winter, hoping she will survive more easily this time.

And the other, clever and possibly foolish, who believes she’s strong enough to fight. To get what she wants. To finally stand

and refuse to be displaced.

She could die either way. But only one option provides the possibility of victory instead of just survival.

As the sun rises once more, Treila stands at a crevice in the rock face far below Aymar. She plants her hands on either side

of the darkness and leans in, touches her lips to the black.

“Can you hear me?” she breathes into the crack. “I’d give you another finger to get back in.”

The darkness smiles. “But would you give me your ear?” it asks.

And shivering, Treila turns her face to one side and leans in.