Page 33 of The Starving Saints

Treila isn’t sure how long she lies there, in the cavern below Aymar, cradling the side of her head and hearing an endless,

clear ringing. A candle burns bright beside her, but doesn’t melt. It could be minutes, or hours, or days, or weeks—she no

longer trusts time to make sense. All she knows is that she is alive.

Probably.

It doesn’t hurt, not anymore. Like her finger, the pain subsided more quickly than it should have. But next time it will be

worse. She knows it will. Her creature of the gap in the stone let her back in for a pittance, because he is confident she

will need to flee through his embrace again soon. When the time comes, he might ask for a hand. A leg. Something more.

He is confident she will pay it. If she’s indebted her future self, she’s going to make it worth it. First, she needs to find

Phosyne, tell her what she’s learned about the world outside. Use that strange mind of hers to calculate their next move.

See if, perhaps, they can’t turn Ser Voyne into a weapon for their own ends.

She leaves her candle burning and climbs up to the tunnel.

She hesitates.

This darkness doesn’t have hands or teeth within it, she knows that, but she feels a phantom pain in her bones all the same.

She has been here before, oversensitized, ready for another blow. It will just take a little patience and a lot more force.

Treila strips, makes her bundle. Feels the edge of the tunnel and leans in, listening for whispers.

There are none. She flattens herself out and crawls forward.

Like before, the tunnel makes her way easy. It’s definitely larger now; several times, she has to grope around unseeing to find where the path hooks around to next. The dimensions are stretched so much that it doesn’t feel like the same tunnel, and her heart pounds in her chest. She wants to stop, to retreat, to flee.

She pushes forward instead.

It is nighttime once more when she emerges into her workroom, shivering uncontrollably. The ringing in her head has subsided,

one small mercy. Her hands are clumsy as she dresses, sets her blade back into her boot. She keeps her gaze fixed on the doorway,

taking deep breaths, trying to discern the scent of turning leaves. But instead she smells baking stone, baking skin. Vital,

urgent scents. And she can hear singing.

It’s still the height of summer here, and at least some of the castle’s occupants are still alive.

She slips up into the keep proper, moving low, slow, quiet. The ringing creeps in once more, but she listens past it with

her remaining ear, head cocked, eyes lowered. The singing continues, coming in through the windows, echoing across the stone.

She recognizes hymns, but the singers keep falling into hysterical laughter that sounds half-pained.

In the main room on the ground floor, she sees guards, sitting at a table as if to play dice. As if nothing at all has changed.

But they do not wear armor, and they do not play dice. They stare at nothing, fingers twitching on the tabletop.

There’s no good way past them out to the yard, so she climbs higher instead.

One floor up, Treila creeps into the room she is meant to be sleeping in, expecting to find it empty as it was when she last

left, but no, it is full to bursting. People litter the floor, recognizable but in different arrangements than usual. So many

are curled up against one another, resting in unfamiliar embraces. Sleeping mats overlap and rumple, blankets tangle.

Simmonet is sleeping, as is Edouart. Both still alive. They look a little plumper, but that might just be the soft moonlight, and their easy stillness. Nobody is writhing or crying out in the dark. Nobody wears a visage of hunger and pain.

It is a strange, discomfiting sight. Treila leaves them behind, taking the western tower up to what has served as the throne

room as long as the king has been in residence.

She doesn’t make it past the first turning, because there stands the Loving Saint.

He looks surprised to see her, though that means very little. He glances at her over one shoulder from where he crouches on

the steps, peering into the throne room beyond. His fine lips curl into a smile, and he turns in full, leaning back and regarding

her down the length of his lithe body.

“You left,” he says, by way of greeting. His voice seems to prompt a new wash of noise in her missing ear. A harsher sound,

this time. A droning, coarse at the edges, familiar somehow.

“I came back,” she corrects.

A bruise discolors his jaw. It’s so incongruous with the rest of him and with what she knows (he can take on Ser Voyne’s skin,

but he can’t hide an injury? What use is his metamorphosing, then?), that she’s reaching out to touch him before she can stop

herself.

The Loving Saint seizes her wrist before she can reach him. It’s her left wrist. She’s reaching with just her thumb and three

fingers, and he sees it, the missing one, and he stares at it with—

Not hunger. Anger. So much anger it nearly burns her.

“You said,” Treila murmurs, “whatever the cost.”

She pushes her other hand into her hair, baring the smooth expanse of jaw where her ear once sat. “So I paid it twice.”

That earns her an actual snarl. It’s bestial, and accompanied by his fingers tightening hard around her wrist. It feels honest

when he jerks her arm hard, and she sprawls down across him on the steps.

“Are you jealous?” she whispers in his ear, her heart hammering, feeling both terrified and alive .

And with that he shoves her off him, to the side.

Gingerly, Treila untangles their legs that last little bit and sits up on one of the steps. She’s wedged between him and the wall, and can see only a sliver of the throne room, but she watches it instead of him. She gives him a moment to pull himself back together, get his breathing under control.

Just like when the creature in the dark grew angry that she’d learned the rules of the game elsewhere, the Loving Saint’s

knee-jerk response tells her more than any words. These two predators are territorial, and they don’t like knowing they aren’t

alone in this little fiefdom.

She ponders her next question, turns it over like a coin across her knuckles. The humid night air has resolved around her

into summer, certainly, so there’s no point in mentioning that she knows it’s autumn beyond the walls. But if time does not

flow at the same rate here as it does in the world at large, she might have been gone for—who knows?

“What did I miss?” Treila settles on. It’s just coy enough that he’ll enjoy it.

He huffs something that might be a laugh. He’s on his hands and knees beside her, and he prowls a step up, then glances back

over his shoulder to her. “The wizard in the tower is learning how to walk the tightrope.”

That can mean nothing good. But she hasn’t toppled yet. That’s something.

Treila wriggles onto her hip. The stairs aren’t particularly wide. It’s a long fall down. He’s on the outside; she could push

him. She wonders if he would fall, and if he did, if it would matter. “How many feasts have gone by without me?”

“It never really ends,” he replies. “But don’t you want to know about your knight, too?”

“She isn’t mine,” Treila says, too quickly. She feels exposed after.

He just grins. “She’s been on the prowl,” he tells her. “Looking for answers. Looking for something to fight. Looking, I think,

for her sword.”

His gaze drifts to the doorway, and Treila’s follows. She creeps forward, enough that she can see somebody moving in the gloom.

Not Ser Voyne, though. No, whoever it is has a shorn head, and is unsteady on her feet. Treila can hear her rasping, roughshod

breathing.

The prioress, she realizes, weak and staggering.

And then there is a laugh, sliding through the humming of her missing ear, and a wash of sunlight. The Constant Lady steps

into the throne room. Treila strains to see more.

But the Loving Saint catches hold of her arm and pulls her back. “It’s not safe in there,” he murmurs, body warm against her

back. “Better to watch the shadow play.”

“They wouldn’t know I was there,” Treila argues, but goes still all the same. The Loving Saint’s hands stroke over her hips.

His mouth falls to her neck, featherlight. She should kick him for his troubles, but it feels good. Indulgent and sweet, with

a blistering edge.

She strains to hear words. There is the soft murmur of one voice only, the Lady’s, and then a wet, slick sound, a wail, a

thud.

Treila knows those sounds, though not in that order; by the time her father’s head was parted from his shoulders, he could

no longer scream. Her skin goes cold. Insensate. The buzzing in her ears turns all-consuming, obliterating.

It is the sound of bees, erupting from the hive, swarming over her, piercing her flesh.

“Where’s your mind gone to?” the Loving Saint asks, taking her chin, dragging her out of the dark. “Somewhere frigid and angry.”

Foolish girl , she thinks, viciously. But she’s shaking now. She can’t help it. Five years. Five years, and she shouldn’t be so reactive.

She is better than this. She has made herself better than this.

“What was done to you?” he murmurs. “What did they take from you? I can smell the scent of snow on your breath. Snow, and

blood. Your winter woods.” He pets her sides, and she can feel him wriggling, peeling, untangling. He is searching for that

core of her, that thing that makes her dangerous, that element the Lady cannot predict. He thinks he is going to find it.

“What are you remembering?”

She makes herself soften. Be easy for him. “Only bad dreams,” she says. “Of when I had a tender heart.”

“Is that why you run away so readily?” he asks, nuzzling at her pulse.

“You told me to go,” she reminds him. Her breath catches in her throat.

“And yet you came back. Changeable thing. We’re not so different, I think, you and I.” She can feel his smile against her skin, and the lightest brush of teeth. She doesn’t flinch. “Why did you return?”

“I wanted to.” It is the truest answer, if not so simple as it sounds. She toys with options, angles she can show him. What

would intrigue him? What would keep her safest? What would make him spill some new detail?

“Your knight calls to you so loudly?” he asks, and oh, she hasn’t led him far enough astray at all.

“I want to win ,” she says, too quickly, too honestly, as she turns to face him, reclining across the steps. She came back to prove she was

clever enough, quick enough, not only to get out alive, but to salvage something of value. Save a few other lives, even though

nobody had come back for her after her father’s death. But that isn’t the whole of it.

If it were, the mention of Ser Voyne wouldn’t gall her so deeply.

She’s still clinging to girlish dreams of revenge, even now that they’re pointless. Sentimental loathing, useless here. She

tenses under his touch, half expecting him to grip her harder. To fall upon that show of weakness.

But he doesn’t.

She tries to focus of the feel of his hands, his mouth, to divine some meaning in the patterns they map onto her skin. There

is not much to see, nothing visible to analyze. But over his shoulder, there is movement.

“What is that?” Treila whispers, gaze skipping up to shadows that seem to move, to dance. Past the buzzing in her ears, she

hears breathing, too many dissonant tempos to belong to just her or the beast against her.

“The rest of my kind,” that beast murmurs. “Drawn to the feast.”

“There are more?”

“So many more, little things that like to eat my leavings. We’ve made a path for them to come and play. Are you afraid?”

Bravado wins her nothing here, but honesty doesn’t, either. Instead, she tries to study them.

He takes her silence as nerves all the same. “If you’re afraid of other teeth, I could stake my claim on you. If you asked nicely.”

“Hasn’t somebody already done that?” She tilts her head to one side, bares her missing ear once more.

From the corner of her eye, she watches as his beautiful lips ripple into a snarl, then recompose into a pleasant smile. “Oh

no, you didn’t let them. You negotiated well.” Yes, he is a jealous monster; if he wants to lay claim to her, she can use

that.

It’s still hard to look away from the unknown threat and focus on him instead, but she does it smoothly. She arches up so

that their bodies press together. Maneuvers them onto their sides so her back is to the wall once more.

“And you think I’ll negotiate poorly with you?”

“I think you have less to lose now.” His eyes are heavy-lidded. He thinks he’s winning.

She kisses him to help that thought along. It’s light. Teasing. Barely a breath.

“You made a mistake, last time we spoke,” she murmurs against his mouth. “You told me I was worth something.”

“Did I?” He kisses her again. She adjusts her posture little by little, so that she maintains enough space to move, to retreat,

even as she lets him tip her chin back, nurse at her lower lip.

“You’ll have to promise me something more than a good time.”

“What if I let Ser Voyne see you?” He nips, swallows down her small, shocked gasp.

“You can’t offer that. What would your Lady say?” There is a hierarchy here, one she thinks she can exploit. And better not

to think of the possibility of Voyne seeing her again. She only needs to stay here a little longer, figure out what else she

can learn.

“She doesn’t have to know,” the Loving Saint purrs.

He presses on her shoulders, and she has no choice but to slide partway down the length of his body, until her mouth is close

to his hips. He means it to be seductive, but the angle makes her bristle. He thinks she is weak.

She must put them back on equal footing.

Her hand finds her knife. She slides it from her boot as she trails her lips along the line of his hip. His hands slide into her hair, and his eyes narrow to pleased slits.

She presses the flat of the blade to the inside of his thigh.

He goes still as death.

“Surely you’re not afraid of a little danger,” Treila says with a coy smile, leaning back for a better view of his face. “Surely

you trust me. What say we mark each other?”

She trails the point of it up his body, up his throat, until it touches the underside of his chin. Now it’s him who’s afraid.

Cornered-animal afraid. Even though he could take another form in an instant, or even simply back away. It’s like the steel

of it holds him fixed upon its point.

Only the third knife he’s seen since he arrived, hm? Yes, she supposes with the Priory’s requisitions, there aren’t many blades

left. Strange, though, for him to be so frightened.

A whisper of sensation on her hand: a bee, alighting, wings shivering in the air. Treila flinches.

For one second, the blade no longer touches the Loving Saint at all.

That’s all it takes, and then she’s falling back, the Loving Saint rising up to his full height. His beautiful face doesn’t

shift, but the tension that dances between them has a different edge, now. He, like all the rest, is hungry , and he watches her with the eyes of a shrike, prepared to impale her on barbed thorns to keep her all to himself as he tears

her to pieces.

The creature who cocks his head and scents the air is something old.

He smiles, and his teeth are sharp.

“I’d recommend you run, little girl.”

And Treila does.