Page 30 of The Starving Saints

Phosyne conjures the taste of honey on her tongue.

The vegetal spike of it erases the stone beneath her feet, the stench from her rooms, and all she can feel now is soft grass,

blades pressing into her skin, sun beating down on her. She is warm. She is hot . She is burning up, and she is bedding down in flowers, and she feels the hum of a thousand bees crawling along her skin.

They map her, every inch of her, and she is shaking with their vibrations, coming apart into pollen on the air.

Bees travel widely for their food. They range over hill and dale, and they do wander everywhere. They bring back with them

the taste of foreign fields, nectar sweet, and they make no distinction as they crawl into the frames of the Priory’s hives,

packing their comb, fanning it with their wings to remove the water. They leave only sweetness and the faintest hints of where

they’ve been. Buckwheat flowers produce dark brown honey, rich and nutty on the tongue, while meadowfoam adds a soft thickness,

impossible to describe and impossible not to taste. Frame by frame, the wax is filled and capped and then, at last, extracted

by the nuns. The wax is peeled away, the honey runs down, and it finds its way to waiting tongues.

Phosyne tastes those tongues as they taste her, and she fractures apart again, spread between a hundred, two hundred bodies,

all pressed together inside a stone husk, keeping them piled one atop the other. They are starving. They are reaching. They

feel so strongly, in the midsummer air, and they...

They are not alone.

They have been alone, for so long. They’ve kept this sweetness at bay. Oh, they’ve taken honey on their tongues, but they have not taken the true nature of the wood into them in many decades. Centuries. Too much hardness around them, too much sharpness, but now all that terrible strength has melted away, gone to nothing, and the sweetness can come in once more.

This sweetness that wears the Constant Lady’s face, but is made of something far less regimented. Far less venerated.

And it is hungry. She is hungry. With the walls of Aymar grown strangely porous, she passes through stone as if it is air, because to her, it is air. She has been borne upon the air, and into the stone, and now she exists in all of it. She sees the whole of the spur

that Aymar rests upon, and she is inside each beating heart within (save two, and those two, who are they, why do they not

taste sweetness on their lips? But no matter—) and so, when she arrives at the gate, they will be ready for her.

But they are afraid. Fear does not serve her. She wants them to know her, to love her, and so she waits at the walls, paces

them, finds her equal born upon a litter. Round and round this effigy goes, until the sweetness has learned her form. She

drapes herself in white, paints yellow upon her cheeks. She chooses this form because it is pleasing and it is powerful, and

when she comes to their gates, they fall at her feet.

Still, there are bonds upon her. Strictures. This castle belongs to a man. He is eager enough to bow to her, but not to relinquish

his command. These people are his , before they are hers. She is tangled in his ownership, red threads cutting tight to bleed her. She must alter the balance,

earn his loyalty and obeisance and that of all the rest. She starts small but heavy, plying him with food, playing to his

belief in his worthiness to be saved. He is used to fine things, and so he does not question them when they come from her

hands. He also has that honey on his tongue, and that is as persuasive as a kiss.

The castle shivers. Begins to rearrange itself. By the time its inhabitants come to her table, they are bleary-eyed and hungry,

and they eat all that she can give them. With each swallow of their throat, they become hers. The red threads are rearranged.

Ownership passes to her.

Ownership lets her slake her own thirst at last, sip by sip. It strengthens her limbs, light as air, with the force of a gale. And as she grows in strength, she can feel the press of other bodies at the walls. Little things with sharp teeth and empty bellies, whispering, Let us in, feed us, let us serve you .

So many empty bellies. The whole world is starving. But she has enough to share, doesn’t she? And then, like a dispersing

dream, Phosyne is no longer the sweetness, is no longer the Lady. And she is sinking.

Laughter. She hears laughter and feels hands seize her shoulders and haul her from the stone that seeks to envelop her. Phosyne’s

eyes flutter open and she is held in the embrace of the Lady and Her saints, these buzzing creatures, honey-sweet and just

as sticky. Phosyne cries out.

“You’ve gone a little too deep, sweetling,” the Absolving Saint murmurs. “Come back to us. Open your eyes. That’s it, that’s

it.”

“What a strange creature you are,” the Lady says. “I have never seen your like. What does it feel like, to walk in my skin

for an evening?”

“Too much,” Phosyne gasps. “It’s too much.”

It’s not enough. She’d like to vibrate apart again, slide once more out of this castle. But the hunger. The hunger . It’s too much to bear, and she can’t let herself feel that again. Groaning, she throws herself forward.

The Absolving Saint lets her go, and she hits the floor. It is solid.

She’s halfway back into her room now. Her head and shoulders extend into her cell, and if she can just summon a little more

strength, she can drag herself to safety. She grasps at the scraps of knowledge her vision gave her. These creatures, they

obey certain things: territory, ownership, hierarchy. They twist those things to suit their purposes, but they can’t ignore

them. Phosyne’s room is just that— Phosyne’s . And if she had let them in, she knows now, all would have been lost.

But she didn’t.

“Stay, sweetling,” the Absolving Saint says, taking a step forward to stand over her, just at the border of her territory.

“You know how we did it, but not how you will. Don’t you want us to teach you?”

She rolls onto her back, heaving for breath, staring up. Just behind the Absolving Saint is the Lady, but the Loving Saint is close, too, crouching at her feet.

“I am not like you,” Phosyne says, jerking one leg away as the Loving Saint reaches out to grasp her ankle. “I can’t—infiltrate.

I can’t bewitch.”

“No?”

“ No. ” She scrabbles another inch away. Another. Now her waist has passed through the invisible barrier between them.

“Then let us teach you something else.”

But they have taught her enough, more than enough to satisfy their end of the agreement, and if she lingers—

The Loving Saint catches her other leg. Tugs. She feels herself slip against the stone.

She hears claws clicking on the steps.

The smell of sulfur wraps around her, and Phosyne jerks in reflex, reaches out a hand. Her fingers skim the black, scaled

muscle of Pneio’s—Ornuo’s?—leg as he leaps over her, and behind her he skids, hissing, to a halt.

The saints are staring.

“Something summoned,” the Lady says, with deep distaste. Then She hisses and jerks back as Phosyne’s other brimstone creature

streaks past Her and runs straight over Phosyne’s belly, clawed feet digging in. It spurs her to action, and she kicks the

Loving Saint in his perfect jaw and throws herself back into her room.

It is blazing hot inside. Phosyne clambers upright. At her feet, Pneio and Ornuo bristle, hissing and slithering about her

ankles.

“Lesson over,” Phosyne gasps.

The Lady’s lip curls, and then She smiles, inclines Her head. Bows at the waist. Her saints follow suit, conceding defeat—for

the moment.

They turn to leave, and that is when Phosyne, at last, registers the impossible:

More eyes peer out of the shadows behind them.

The saints are no longer alone.