Page 38 of The Starving Saints

Phosyne goes rigid and cold beneath her hands.

Voyne tamps down the twin surges of rage and relief, jams her knee into the hard wood of the throne to still her swirling

thoughts. Whatever bewitchment Phosyne is under, she is under it just as deeply, and it takes all her willpower and her anger

to pant out, “Seen them at last, have you?”

“They aren’t moving.” Phosyne’s voice has shifted tones, from thick with want to nervous curiosity. Her hand is still on Voyne’s

shoulder, though, stroking, possessive.

Voyne shudders. “That doesn’t mean they won’t. They were likely waiting for us to be—”

Distracted.

“Don’t move,” Phosyne says, and the compulsion is a punch to her gut. Voyne lets out a low whine. Something flickers in Phosyne’s

eyes, then, and she offers a small smile. “Sorry. You can move. I just—if we stay like this, it holds the moment. If we move apart, they may strike.”

It is logical. That doesn’t mean Voyne likes it.

Beneath her, Phosyne is clad in fine silk. She smells like flowers and gives off a subtle, pleasing warmth. She doesn’t seem

quite real. “What happened while I was gone?” Voyne asks, thinking of the flames outside Phosyne’s door. “You said—you said

you made a place for us?”

“The Lady came to teach me.”

Voyne jerks back at that, and their audience murmurs, titters, and Voyne thinks she hears claws upon the stone.

Phosyne’s hand drops from her shoulder but takes her wrist, squeezes in warning. “It’s okay,” she says. “I took what I needed and no more. The room is safe, now. We need only return to it.”

And get away from whatever madness has led to Voyne wanting little more than to rest her head in Phosyne’s lap.

Unless that madness is coming from her, learned at the False Lady’s knee.

Voyne cannot trust her. Of course she cannot trust her. There is a buzzing in her ears, growing louder, impossible to ignore.

She is kneeling at this throne, and Phosyne is upon it, and—

She needs distance. She needs to think. More than anything, they both need to be gone from this place before the creatures

watching them get bored and take their hesitation as a chance to lunge.

“Behind you, please—my sword. I could not reach it. You must give it to me.” The throne has held her ever since the False

Lady left her here as, what, an offering?

Phosyne looks as uncertain as she does, but she at last lets go, twisting and leaning over the edge of the throne, peering

behind her.

Phosyne’s fingers clutch tight at the back of the chair. Her knuckles turn white in the gloom. “I don’t see a sword, Voyne,”

she whispers.

The buzzing is so loud.

“It must be there. Ser Leodegardis—he said—”

“Come, look ,” Phosyne orders, and Voyne lurches forward, angry and thankful both.

Until she looks.

On the floor, Prioress Jacynde lies dead, run through with a blade. With Voyne’s blade. At least, Voyne is halfway certain it’s her blade—whose else could it be?—but it is covered top to bottom with a lattice

of comb. Honey mixes with Jacynde’s blood, and the wax cascades over the corpse, binding it to the sword and to the floor

both. Only her face, twisted in agony, is still recognizable.

Bees crawl along the whole tableau, a dark and shimmering mass. Their buzzing merges with the whispered breaths and laughter

coming from the shadows.

How long? How long has Jacynde been there? How did she get here from Phosyne’s care? She should have been safe. Shouldn’t

be— skewered —

But how didn’t Voyne notice this, when the False Lady taunted her? She never got close enough, she tells herself. The buzzing was already in the air. Wasn’t it?

Would she even know if the monster had bridled her again, compelled her to kill?

Yes , she tells herself, but for all her bucking anger, she can’t be sure.

It doesn’t matter , she tells herself instead. What matters is that she needs her blade. What matters is that when she tries to reach for it,

her arm refuses to obey.

She can only look.

“Free me,” Voyne whispers.

“You are free,” Phosyne says.

But Voyne isn’t. Something has changed in the time between Phosyne letting her drink in the cistern and now. Something changed

when the False Lady left Voyne kneeling. Voyne isn’t free at all; she cannot act without somebody to act for , and she hates herself for it.

“Please, Phosyne,” she begs.

Phosyne flinches. She has, at least, that much shame. “Take up your sword, Ser Voyne.”

And like a hound let off a lead, Voyne lunges.

She tears into the comb with her hands. The wax is warm, molten between her fingers, but there is so much of it, and the honey

that bursts forth from each ruptured cell makes her clumsy. The bees have no such problem; they rise in a dark swarm, their

buzzing growing cacophonous. And then the first sting pierces her flesh. The second. The third. She tries to close her hands

around the hilt and heave, but she can’t grip it. It slides away every time. Pierces deeper into the body below them both.

The pain is growing. She shuts her eyes, shoves her face down between her arms, and tries to retreat, but she can’t, because

Phosyne’s order is too thick in her veins. She hears herself pleading. Crying.

In her panic, she fears Phosyne will leave her like this. Will watch her be stung to death, subsumed into the hive that is

forming too rapidly to be natural. That Voyne was wrong, that this is Phosyne, in truth, and always has been, merely waiting for the moment when all the rest of the world cracked away and left

her unstoppable.

“No more!” Phosyne cries. “Ser Voyne, retreat!”

And, at last, Ser Voyne does.

She falls back, chest heaving, eyes rolling in her skull. She can barely see, but her face is the least-stung of her. Her

hands are beginning to swell. Her scalp is a searing cap of pain. She shakes her head, forcing herself to focus.

Long-limbed things have crawled down from the windows, and advance in cautious waves. Eyes glint at her in the dark. Phosyne is rising from

the throne, and she is beautiful and terrifying all at once. She is glowing. Voyne feels heat rolling from her. She tips her

head back and sings one quaking note, and all the reed lights in the room flare to life.

The shadows, caught by the light, resolve into something not quite human. They are like paintings, frescoes, pale faces staring

back in the flickering glow. They don’t move when Voyne looks at them, but she can’t see them all at once. At the edges of

her vision they’re only smears, bits of gold leaf and charcoal. They are prowling. They are getting closer.

Phosyne reaches for her.

Ser Voyne surrenders to the last order she was given and runs.

Maybe it’s Phosyne’s distance from the throne; maybe it’s the strength of Voyne’s own panic; maybe it’s some whispered order

she does not hear as she pounds down the stairs. But as she runs, her mind comes back to her. Full awareness returns to her,

and with it, horror. She is retching as she reaches the ground floor, stumbles over the bodies sprawled below her. Some stir.

Some ask questions. She ignores them, throws the door open.

The sun is blinding overhead when Voyne pitches out into the yard.

She has stopped trying to make sense of time.

Space, though, she thought she could count on. She knows the dimensions of Aymar intimately, knows how many the upper and

lower baileys can hold comfortably, knows where every entrance to the towers that stud the walls are.

Nothing is where it should be.

This place has transformed since she tended to the fallen beneath the blazing sun. The walls tower above her, the ground undulates away, and the sky spins lazily. Voyne makes it only three yards at most before she stumbles, falls, vertigo swarming over her in a hazy rush. Inside. If she goes back inside, the walls and floors will join as they ought.

If she can only get up to Phosyne’s tower, instead...

Voyne can’t risk it. She must go to ground somewhere else. The cistern’s depths, perhaps, if only for a little while. Long

enough to think. To regain mastery of herself.

But unlike the last bright sunlit moment Voyne was outside the keep, the people in the yard are awake. They are on their feet.

They are—

Well.

The Absolving Saint stands at the head of a table and slides a piece of sharp, shining glass beneath the skin of a man who

lies naked beneath him. The saint flays him carefully, a beatific smile upon his silvered lips. The man sings.

Sings, not screams.

In the lower yard, down by the cisterns, a man holds aloft his daughter like an offering. Blood runs down the little girl’s

arms and legs. At his feet, his other children crowd and press, lapping up each drop that falls.

And around it all is the audience. Even in so much drowning sunlight, Voyne can barely make out their contours. They are light

flashing off of quartz, heat haze, splashes of whitewash on stone. They are flat, where the bodies they advance toward are

thick and curved and so real Voyne can’t stand to look at them.

But they do have weight to them. Dust scatters in their wake. And when one bends to the flayed man’s chest and bites—

Well, their teeth rend flesh as well as any beast’s.

Voyne keeps her head down through all of it, shaking, shivering, cold in the hot noon sun. She feels like she is drowning.

She feels like she is dying. But that’s hardly new. What is new is only the intensity of the feeling. She takes solace in

the fact that she doesn’t feel hunger when she sees these horrors, unlike everybody else around her.

But it is her lack of hunger, of course, that marks her.

She’s in the shadow of the south wall when it happens. When the first set of eyes settles on her, sees through the thin veil of her act. Voyne only knows because she stumbles as she walks, has to put out a hand to support herself, and as she tips forward, she sees the whites of two eyes replaced with piercing gold, pupils dotting the center, widening as they take her in. They measure her weakness. They see her falter.

Voyne is running before she has time to rationalize any of it.

The nearest open door leads into the smithy. It’s fifty yards away, if that. She has a clear shot, or as close to it as she’s

going to get; the nearest tableau, a woman carving pieces of her flesh and placing those bloody scraps into her own mouth,

isn’t close enough to reach her.

Her muscles burn. Her head pounds. The world keeps trying to fall away, to pitch and yaw, but she closes her eyes and sprints.

Behind her, she hears paws, hooves, feet in the dirt. Her pursuers snarl. They call to her, desperate for her aid. They laugh.

The wall of the smithy is as solid as it was when she slammed Phosyne up against it, and she collides hard, wrenching her

shoulder. She gasps, eyes open, spun around to face what is coming for her. Everything tilts. She sees a flash of movement,

feels pain in her leg, kicks out. Punches. Scratches. Fights, like she has not fought in years.

She gains a moment’s freedom. It’s enough.

She throws herself into the smithy, expecting only more chaos, more horror, more blood—

But the building is dim, and warm, and all but empty.

There is only one man inside. Theophrane, the head blacksmith. He sits surrounded by his tools, as if he’s built a nest of

them. They’re in no fit state to be used, all jumbled up, but he does clutch a punch chisel like a dagger. It would do some

damage, if he lunged.

“Get out,” the blacksmith says.

She ignores him but keeps her distance, gasping for breath as she shoves the door closed and leans her whole weight against

it. She locks gazes with the blacksmith, daring him to argue as the beasts outside hurl themselves against the wood.

He doesn’t, but he doesn’t lower the chisel, either. Soon, sooner than Voyne would have expected, the thuds slow, then cease.

Easier prey outside, perhaps.

He waits until she’s eased up against the door to demand, once again, “Get out, Ser Voyne.”

He knows who she is. He knows to be afraid. He’s hiding, trying to defend himself, and—

And that means that he’s not under their sway.

She lifts her hands, hoping to gentle him. “You’re safe here?” she asks.

His throat works. He lifts the chisel up a little higher. “Not if you’re in here with me.”

She sinks down to one knee, hands still up. “I just need space to think. I will not harm you.” She scans the room. It’s steady.

Nothing spins. The world has reasserted itself, and she lets out a low, helpless moan, fisting her hand against the floor.

“Out there, I—”

“You’re one of them,” Theophrane says.

And there is the memory: the lead-up to the feast, before Voyne found Phosyne huddled below the keep. There were so many who

needed to be brought to the table. She had honey for so many of them.

Her beestings itch. They throb. There is blood beneath her nails, too. Jacynde’s blood.

Theophrane’s blood, before.

When she looks back up at him, she can see them, the purpling bruises on his face, his throat. She dragged him out of this

building, threw him down, ordered him to eat. His fellows had held him, then, when she left to resume her patrol.

“I wasn’t myself,” she protests, half apology.

He doesn’t care. She can’t blame him.

“And you won’t be yourself again soon enough,” he mutters. He is so thin. He is starving. He doesn’t look at all like the

people out in the yard.

“Did you eat?” she asks.

He grimaces. It bares all his teeth. “They tried to make me.”

“But?”

“But it all came right back up. It turned to ash in my mouth.” Theophrane hesitates. His beard has gone patchy over the last six months. “Maybe—maybe it would’ve been better if it hadn’t. I wouldn’t know, then, would I? What’s happening out there?”

“No,” Voyne says. “No, you wouldn’t.”

And wouldn’t it have been easier if she didn’t know, either?

But she does. He does.

Silence stretches between them, broken only by the occasional ecstatic cry from without.

“They hate iron,” Theophrane says at last. “At least, I think it’s the iron. It’s the only thing I can figure that saved me.”

He displays one muscle-corded forearm. His skin is flecked all over with what looks like soot, until Voyne realizes it’s not

on the surface of his flesh, but underneath. The blurred edges come not from particulate but from the lens of skin.

“It gets in you,” Theophrane says with a bitter twitch of his lips. “Iron filings, all the rest, in with the burns. Unavoidable.

But when one of those things tried to take a bite of me, it slagged its jaw. I built the ring after. They haven’t gotten close

since.”

“Iron,” Voyne repeats. She thinks of her sword, skewering Jacynde. All the iron that they gave to the Priory, that was melted

down and turned into ammunition. So much lost armor. So many lost weapons. Even the few iron nails in this place, stripped

from their moorings, given to Theophrane to melt down and repurpose.

All gone, now, gone over the walls.

And the false saints came in its absence. The False Lady and the bees that have gone mad with Her arrival kept Voyne from

her sword. It makes sense, now.

She can use this.

“One piece,” she says, rising to her feet. “Give me one piece from your ring. Anything. I can use it. I will fight them.”

It’s as good as a sword, if what Theophrane says is true. If it isn’t, he loses nothing, not really. “Whatever you can spare.

Please.”

He glares. He does not move.

“I can take it,” Voyne adds, voice softening, “or you can give it.”

She is stronger than he is. She’s been kept better fed, even before the saints arrived. Not, she understands now, so that she could protect her liege, but because she was a prized possession, and it would not do to let her waste away. So honeyed wine and the last of the cheeses were for her. She feels guilty, so guilty, but not enough to surrender her strength for it.

In another life, Theophrane might have looked on her as his salvation. The hope of rescue. But instead, even as he pulls something

from the pile, he glares at her with hatred.

He tosses his offering at her feet. It’s a hammer. Small. The head is rough iron, the handle worn wood. It’s well-loved, but

useless now, if only because the metal makes up such a small portion of it.

She doesn’t look away from him as she crouches and picks it up. Her fingers are thick and swollen, stingers still embedded;

the joints almost don’t close around the handle. But she doesn’t look away, even as she straightens, retreats to the door.

“Your little witch did this, didn’t she?” he asks. “You should have killed her that day she nearly lit my shop on fire.”

“It was already too late,” Voyne tells him.

His expression shutters. He draws tight within himself.

Voyne opens the smithy door and steps back into the blistering sun.

The Warding Saint is waiting for her. At his heels are the shifting, refracting shapes of a hundred observers.

“Come,” he says. “My Lady has need of you.”

Voyne grips the hammer harder. She feels something ooze from the punctures. Blood, honey, something else? “I have no need

of your Lady .”

He considers this, taking her measure. Can he see Phosyne’s touch still on her?

He holds in one hand a piece of ripe fruit. It glistens with juice. Her stomach roars in answer to it.

The Warding Saint extends his hand to her. “Eat,” he says. “You will feel better if you eat. The little mouse won’t hold your

lead anymore. She is a far crueler mistress, isn’t she? No art to it, no kindness. She doesn’t care what you want, does she?”

It’s a transparent ploy, and yet Voyne is still tempted. She is, in her heart, tired. What can one hammer do against the writhing mass of hunger before her? And what can one madwoman, sitting on a throne and ordering Voyne to kiss her when they both remain in danger, really offer for protection?

But Voyne is sick to death of following orders. Any orders.

The hammer cracks into the Warding Saint’s head like his skull is only as thick as an eggshell.

He falls at her feet, howling, writhing, the crater smoking with a bitter stench. Honey spills out of him like blood. She

falls to her knees and brings the hammer down again, again, into his cheek, his orbit, his jaw. He splinters and falls to

pieces. She slams the iron down into every chink in his armor, pulps every exposed inch. He howls until the last. He spasms.

He sobs.

His armor is not as heavy as it should be, and is not made of steel. The buckles do not work well; they are poorly made, poorly

balanced. The straps don’t feed smoothly through them. She knew this from the start. She saw this the first day they arrived.

She didn’t know to be afraid of it.

Still, she strips it off his body, belts it all in place on hers. It’s just pageantry, but it makes her spine a little straighter,

a little stronger. She hefts the hammer in her hand, dripping as it is with honey, and looks out in challenge at the prowling

host before her. She sees a face, two faces, three. They are gone as quickly as they appeared.

They are not the only things moving. The tableaus have broken apart. People, people she is sworn to protect, are edging closer.

She wants to open her arms to them. Take charge. Tell them she is here to right these wrongs.

But behind her, the door to the smithy hangs open. She hears Theophrane shouting her name. Begging.

She stands, head spinning. At her back, her audience is prowling closer; she can feel it in the hot pepper breath that gusts

around her. She can hear the crack of bone as they devour the offering she has made for them. They feast upon their own; they

make no distinction.

Her world is shaking at the seams. She has done something wrong. Her gut twists.

In front of her, she sees bodies. A mass of bodies. Farmers and trappers and cartwrights and shop clerks, unwashed and half-starved and piling into the smithy. They rush through the door like a wave.

She can make out every hair on their heads, smell the stink of their bodies, and when she looks at them she doesn’t feel drunk

or drifting.

They are human, only human, but they tear Theophrane apart all the same.