Page 32 of The Starving Saints

Phosyne slams the door shut with a single thought.

The bar draws down, her workbench slides over, and she is protected, bending double, gasping for breath. Nobody knocks. Nobody

tries to get in. When she’s got her breath back enough to retreat, it’s like any other evening she’s spent alone in this room.

Evening?

She stares for a long minute at the darkened glass pane up in the loft. She stares until Ornuo nips at her ankle, and she

kicks him off. It’s enough movement to get her started, and she prowls up the steps and begins to dismantle the haphazard

pile blocking her window.

Ornuo and Pneio are here; they have returned at least twice, and may leave again. There’s no sense in keeping them from an

easy exit or entrance. She needs the fresh air more than she needs them to stop doing anything, and if the Lady can’t cross

her threshold, Phosyne suspects the sill will have much the same impact.

And once the window is free, she can see that it is evening, and that something is wrong, because she has not been in the room for that long.

She leans out through the window, into the cooling night air, and squints down at the shadowed yard. There is another feast

in progress. She sees bodies writhing in the dirt below her, fires burning. The cisterns are all covered.

She does not see Ser Voyne.

“I should never have sent her away,” she says as she retreats back in. Pneio hops up onto the thick sill and coils himself around her wrist. Phosyne shakes her head but rubs at the scales below his pointed jaw. “Just like I should never have let you out. Where have you been, foolish boy?”

She gets nothing in return except the heat of his throat. His golden, burning eyes are slits as he gazes up at her.

“Where did you come from?” she adds, voice softer still. “Did you come because I was lonely?”

He shows his teeth in something like a smile.

“They don’t like you at all.”

She runs her hands over his sinuous body, the bunching of his muscles, the quick beating of his heart. For the first time

in many months, she studies him closely. He is hot, hotter than any living thing has any right to be, and of course the scent

of sulfur emanates from him. He is, to all appearances, living. He is a beast, not an imagining. Once, his brother’s claw

caught in the wood of her desk and when he hauled off, it broke. There’d been blood everywhere, though it had steamed and

evaporated.

The saints, they are something of the air. These creatures are of fire. Phosyne knows she can manipulate the flame; her candles

are proof enough of that, the realization kindled by that maddening chase out to the smithy, at this thing’s heels.

This is how the learning works: side-glimpsed realizations, nothing direct, but always leaning toward greater understanding.

She knew how to sing the first note from “On Breath” not because of something she understood from Pneio digging into a coke

pile, but because he had dug into the coke pile.

If Ser Voyne was here, there’s no way Phosyne could explain it in a way that makes sense, but it does. It does . Perhaps the Lady didn’t mean to teach Phosyne at all, with that strange vision of bees and honey and red threads, but Phosyne

has learned all the same. Boundaries, territory, translation. This room is hers. She is certain, now, that the Lady could

not enter without permission. With Pneio and Ornuo here, the dividing lines blaze a little hotter, because they are Phosyne’s.

Just as the water is Phosyne’s.

Her gaze drops down to the tower room’s floor. Beneath it is an entire cistern. She can’t reach it from here; its pipes extend to the roof’s catchment area and down to the kitchen. But there is water, here . It is not purified yet. It is a threat. It is a resource.

Phosyne pats Pneio’s head, absently, and climbs back down the stairs. She walks past Jacynde’s body, still motionless save

for the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Her presence barely registers; what is below her is far more important.

This is the first cistern that existed in the castle. The well preceded it, of course, but nothing else. Before them, there

was only the long trudge up to the ridge from the riverside. It will not be full; there hasn’t been enough rain. But because

of its safety (only rainfed, none of the earth’s filth within it), it is the only source the king drank from, and so fewer

hands have tapped it.

She is going to tap it.

If only she had a pick; she laughs at the thought, a hiccuping thing, reminded of Treila. She hopes Treila is okay. She hopes

Treila is far away from here, whatever here is becoming. No matter her sentiments, though, she still has no pick, and no knife, and nothing hard and pointed enough to

make a dent in the mortar below her.

But just as she has learned fire, she has learned earth, as well. She presses her palms to the floor. She wriggles her fingers.

She thinks of Ser Voyne against her back, and feels her hands sink, just a little.

It takes effort, but she can keep the rest of herself from falling if she tries. Her fingers dance through rock as if it is

itself water, and she moves them in, then out. In, then out. She remembers water compressing, expanding, roiling when she

did the same in a tub, a stream, a river.

The stones melt like butter beneath her touch.

She presses them to either side, her hand now solid and the floor now insubstantial. The hole she carves is just wide enough

to admit her bucket. That bucket is, of course, filled with waste, but a little powder and a quietly sung note, and the water

she dumps it into is clear once more. She hauls up one full load, sets it on the floor safely away from the gap, and retrieves

the candle that she cannot fully extinguish from the cup it is submerged in.

It flares to life. She strokes the flame. It grows hotter beneath her fingertips.

She plunges it into the bucket.

The water turns hot around her hand, steaming, scalding , enough to peel every layer of grime and filth up from the stone where she has worn it in with six months of pacing. A year

of pacing, really; this room was hardly better before the siege began. But she knows how to keep a clean space. She kept her

cell spotless all her years in the Priory, and isn’t sure just when she fell out of the habit.

That’s not true—she knows. It became less important to her the moment she tasted magic for the first time. The Lady was right

about one thing: it is intoxicating, even as it has destroyed every aspect of her life, crushed it into dust, swept it away

on the breeze. She has sacrificed her body on the altar of knowledge.

But the Lady hasn’t.

So it’s not required.

Phosyne turns the thought this way and that as she works, scrubbing and sweeping and dumping all the accumulated detritus

out of her window. She’d call it a sanctifying, but that feels pretentious, even to her. At the very least, it is a clearing

of the decks. She refamiliarizes herself with every inch of her rooms, every join of stone.

She stops when she reaches Jacynde.

The woman is, at last, stirring. Perhaps it’s the damp cloth still on her lips. Perhaps it’s just the time, the darkness that

is flooding the room because Phosyne hasn’t bothered to light any lamps or candles, save the one that lives in the steaming

bucket. Whatever it is, it’s making her eyes move below her closed, swollen lids, making her hands curl and grasp at the thin

blanket below her.

Prioress Jacynde did not drag herself to Phosyne’s door. She was left there, by... who? It is possible, maybe even overwhelmingly

so, that the nun who first called for Phosyne’s aid came back for it once more. That, faced with Jacynde insensate, not healing,

she hauled the woman’s body to the door of the one person in the castle who might still be safe.

But.

Phosyne thinks of red lines, of territory, and wishes she could close her eyes and see again the blazing map of Aymar, and see if, perhaps, red lines tug at Jacynde’s wrists, her lips. If that is what moves her now.

Is this a breach? The Lady had tried to win entry by an exchange. Is Jacynde’s body a gift, too, offered with some intention

of collecting on a return, later?

“This isn’t a safe place for you,” she tells the prioress, and earns a whimper in response. “There’s no safe place for you

at all.”

“Please—” the woman moans, or Phosyne thinks she does. All the finer points of her letters are erased by the lack of tongue.

Ser Voyne would tell her to care for this woman. To ignore the danger, or willingly face it, for the sake of another. But

Ser Voyne isn’t here, and Phosyne needs to make this space sacrosanct if they are to have any hope of untangling the mess around them.

So Phosyne grabs hold of the pallet and drags Jacynde toward the door.

The other woman fights it, as best she can. Her eyes open to slits, her head lolls, her legs push ineffectively against the

reed mat, the blankets. “No—no—” she gasps.

Phosyne lets go only to unbar the door once more, to shift her worktable out of the way. She half expects her audience to

still be there, waiting, hungry, but when she opens the door, there is only pitch darkness, as if something is blocking up

the window from farther down the stairs.

It is a menacing sight. Unnatural.

All the more reason to move swiftly and with purpose. She turns and grabs up the mat again. Jacynde tries to pitch herself

off one side, but is far too weak.

Phosyne shoves the whole mess out into the hall.

“I’m sorry,” Phosyne tells her. “I know I’m supposed to care.”

Jacynde meets her gaze at last. She is frantic. She is fading. She’s on the cusp—one firm push in either direction could be

her life or her death.

“But I don’t.”

Phosyne closes the door.