Page 36 of The Starving Saints

There is only one obvious place for Treila to run to. One person:

Phosyne.

Her creature of the tunnel may let her out again, but she refuses to squander the price she paid. Her missing ear sings with

aimless noise as she races across the room she used to bed down in, making for the other staircase. But it is blocked with

a clot of shadows, faces leering out of the darkness in the suggestion of cheekbones and chins. She doesn’t let herself look

closely. Out, instead, into the yard, then down and around toward the kitchens.

Not everybody is sleeping. In the distance, she sees three girls dancing. Their feet, she thinks, are bleeding. Shadows wait

to lap at the sodden dirt.

She doesn’t let herself look. Moves instead into the kitchen, because she knows there’s a staircase out the back that will

lead to the tower that contains Phosyne.

The main hearth has no fire in it. The tables are laden with ingredients, but nobody cuts, nobody stirs, nobody kneads. The

cooks are all absent. Even the Absolving Saint is missing, and she wonders if he, too, is at her heels. She can hear laughter

behind her, and smell pepper on the gust of too-close breaths. But every time she peers at shadows, they refuse to move.

Her missing ear is shrieking now. A warning, or something else?

She slips through another door and hesitates as cool air washes over her.

The Absolving Saint has been busy. Quarters of meat hang from the ceiling, the rib cages and bellies hollowed out, the spines split down the center. She has seen venison jointed out and hung to age, and this is much the same. But the proportions are all too familiar. The pelvises are round instead of flattened, the thighs long and luxuriously muscled.

She slides between and pretends they are just sides of pork. The muscle is pink enough. But there is so little fat.

It’s not as easy to lose herself here as it is in a crowd of the living, but the bodies hang thick enough that she feels unseen

as she creeps through the hall. Her tinnitus dulls, softens, and she can breathe again.

The sides of meat breathe with her.

No lungs to move the ribs, but something is shifting the hooks above. She glances down. No feet against the floor, but shadows.

The meat begins to part.

She turns and runs.

There, the servants’ stairs, and she is up them in a flash. She caught many rats here, broke their little necks, heard their

shrieking just before they died. It rises in her ears, then falls, rises again. At its loudest, she nearly trips, though she

can’t untangle the causality. Is it responding to her stumble, or warning her of an attack?

She doesn’t plummet, regardless. And then she is inside again, and going up, up, until she reaches a familiar hallway.

There are bright-burning torches outside the door that were not there before.

How much time has passed , she asks again, even as the ringing in her ear turns into a brief but deafening chorus.

The door opens.

The woman standing there is almost unrecognizable. Her black hair curls softly against her gaunt cheeks. Her embroidered robes

cling to her emaciated form. She is beauty and death wrapped up into one neat little package, and Treila flinches back reflexively.

But she knows the cut of that jaw, and something of the mad light in those eyes.

It’s Phosyne.

Inside, the same transformation has been worked. The room gleams , it is so clean. Perfumed steam seeps from a grate on the floor that Treila is certain was not there before. Every worktable and desk and scrap of furniture is organized and polished, and everything is so hot .

Sweat drips from her, and the air is hard to breathe. But she can’t find it in herself to be afraid; she’s too tired and desperate.

( Foolish girl , she tries to tell herself. But with only one ear, she barely hears it.)

It is hot, yes, but this is better than a frigid, starving forest.

She sinks onto a mass of cushions. They are plump and generous, with no stink of sweat on them or hint of mildew. They are

better than anything she has ever slept on.

“You’ve come up with a miracle,” she says, and her lips feel thick and slow. Unaccountably clumsy. She blinks, languid, catlike.

Phosyne has followed her, and settles on the cushions beside her.

“Your ear,” Phosyne murmurs, and trails her fingertips over the smooth skin where it used to be before Treila can flinch away.

At the touch of skin to skin, the chorus erupts once more inside Treila’s skull. She gasps, spine arching.

“Does it hurt?” Phosyne asks, and she sounds more curious than concerned.

Fair play , Treila concedes, when the noise softens. It’s exactly how she’d felt standing over Phosyne’s dying body that first night.

The thought is half-hysterical. Phosyne reaches as if to stroke her brow, then hesitates.

Realizing it might hurt her.

And then she does it anyway.

Treila sags, boneless, as the noise doesn’t surge. There is only the normal faint ringing that has been with her since she

returned. The cushions are still so soft.

“My ear was the price of returning,” she murmurs. “My finger the price to leave. I did, you know. Leave. There’s nobody waiting

for us outside the gates anymore. We could just walk out, I think. Maybe.”

To a different world. A later world. A world where Etrebia has lost, at any rate, and that is the only thing that matters,

surely? A world where Etrebia has lost and they are not being carved up into meat.

“The tunnel?” Phosyne asks. Her gaze is vague, as if she is looking down through the floor to it. But, of course, that’s impossible.

(But so are miracles. Treila would do well to stop asking questions.)

“The tunnel. But it will cost us.” The words come out—soft. Weak. Desperate. “It’s not so great a cost,” she hastens to add,

in case Phosyne wouldn’t offer an ear, or a finger.

(What did she offer to receive this?)

Treila knows better than to trust, but she can’t do this alone. Not anymore. And Phosyne—Phosyne is not Voyne. She doesn’t

trust Phosyne guilelessly. Phosyne is a tool. She just needs the tool to have its own motive force, for just a moment, until

she catches her breath.

“Of course,” Phosyne murmurs, considering. “It makes sense, that your creature beneath the castle would charge for safe passage

through its territory.” Her hands haven’t left Treila. They map out her boundaries, find her ankle, her missing sock.

Treila flinches but can’t argue, but she also knows she’s missing something, with this talk of territory. With Phosyne’s new

possessiveness.

“The king gave them Aymar,” Phosyne attempts to explain. “They stole in via the Priory’s honeybees, but he could have stopped

them. He could have turned them away. Instead, he ate their food, and now Aymar is theirs.”

Yes, they do act like they own the place. But she owes them no fealty.

“We can’t win,” Treila says. “You know that, don’t you? These things —they’re so hungry, and there are more of them now. In the shadows.”

Phosyne rises from the cushions, hands washing over one another again and again. “Have you seen Ser Voyne? She can be our

bulwark.”

Treila looks around the room, as if seeing it anew. It is changed—and empty of any other living creature. Her heart falls

at a rate she doesn’t want to examine. “She’s not here?”

“No,” Phosyne says. “I sent her to help the people down below. To take the measure of the enemy. You haven’t seen her?”

Treila shakes her head.

Phosyne’s hands clasp tight together.

“Right. Forget her. We have other options,” Treila says. None a winning move, but trying to find Voyne in the chaos of the

castle will only leave her vulnerable. The Loving Saint made that clear, and she suppresses a shudder as she remembers his

teeth.

She’s too late for her preferred prize; she must make her peace with that. “I can take you to the tunnel again. Perhaps, if

you speak to the thing beneath the castle...”

Her plan ends there. All she knows is she cannot leave alone again.

Phosyne isn’t looking at her.

She makes herself stand. She is unsteady on her feet, too tired, but she knows better than to ask Phosyne for food; there

will be none, or none that will be safe to eat. “There’s no time left. Come with me,” she says.

“No,” Phosyne replies, calmly.

And Treila realizes that the shivering mess of a woman she found nearly starved those few nights ago is not just unrecognizable,

but gone entirely.

“Stay here,” Phosyne says. “Or leave. Whichever you prefer. I only ask that you decide now, because once you do, I can’t let

you take it back. But I am going to get back what is mine.” And Phosyne looks down at her hands for just a moment. “She needs

me,” she murmurs, and Treila thinks she wasn’t meant to hear.

Treila stares.

Phosyne glances up at her, and for a second, there is both the disjointed mess of a girl and the frightening lick of a flame.

“Will you stay?” she asks.

And Treila shakes her head, and slips past her to the door.

Phosyne does not call after her.