Page 45 of The Starving Saints

Resurrection is not so different from coming back to herself in the cistern.

There is the tectonic shift, a fundamental reordering of her mind, her body, her very being. There is the chill, settling

deep into her bones. And above it all there is the disorientation, the sudden realization that there are holes in her memories,

that she does not know where she is, that something has gone very wrong.

But there are fewer tears this time.

Instead of crying, she convulses. She gasps for breath. She clutches her throat and writhes on what feels like stone, but

is uneven, uncarved, far more natural. She doesn’t know where she is, but she knows she is cold, and that breathing is hard.

It becomes less hard with every breath, though. That’s not usually how this goes.

And it’s not Phosyne beside her, but—

Golden hair. Wide, evaluating eyes. Treila de Batrolin crouches, curled in on herself, across a small, glowing creek. She’s

clutching her dagger tight. In the low light, Voyne can still see the metal is dark with her blood.

Old blood. There is no fresh blood beneath her hands, and no incision in the skin below. Her fingers flex and bend without

issue, all the swelling of her beestings gone. Her trembling slows. Voyne realizes, with a strange buoyancy, that she is alive .

And that just a few moments ago, she was in a garden. She was kissing a figment of her past. That figment had murdered her.

That figment is watching her now, with an expression that Voyne has no idea how to read, knife at the ready.

On the battlefield, she is trained to be a snarling, vicious beast. And in captivity, in Aymar, she has strained at her leash and burned to transmute frustrated rage into furious action. But death, she finds, is not so galling as dying . And her memory of dying is oddly pleasant. A relief, a surprise, a final lack of struggle. Perhaps that is why she’s not

angry. Why she isn’t primed to rip and tear and fight .

Or maybe it’s that when the spasms pass, Voyne is too exhausted to sit up. Too exhausted to defend herself.

“Will you kill me again?” she asks, finally, when she thinks she can speak. It comes out in a hoarse croak.

Treila grimaces, and Voyne notices that it’s not only the glow of the water that is illuminating them, but a candle, somewhere

behind her. “I might,” she says. There’s no conviction behind her words. No real threat, Voyne thinks. Whatever drove her

in the garden is gone. Transformed into what looks like agony.

She must be as intimately familiar with suffering as that perversion in the throne room had accused Voyne of being, by now.

Starvation, frostbite, the loneliness of wandering the land shut out of everything that was once due to her.

It wasn’t kind, what Voyne did to her. Perhaps they are evenly matched, now.

“How long have you been here? In Aymar?” she asks. “How long did I not recognize you?”

A coughing fit sweeps her up, cracking at her ribs. Her world goes hazy, then clears again. Treila is a little closer now.

“As long as you’ve been here,” she says. Her whole body is tense. Coiled. She may not be driven to attack, but she may still

snap, like a startled dog. The longer she is polite, the tighter she will be wound. Voyne is intimately familiar with the

process.

“I killed your father, Treila de Batrolin, and I have no regrets,” she says. It is kinder, she thinks, to be honest.

Treila bares her teeth, lunges. But the knife hits the stone between them, and it is just the girl on her, hands trembling

even as she fists her hands tight in Voyne’s matted braid. Her breath is hot on Voyne’s face. Bare inches separate them as

Treila’s chest heaves, as she struggles to get control over herself.

“No regrets?” Treila whispers. “None at all? So loyal to your master?”

Voyne doesn’t look away. “He deserved it,” Voyne she says. “After Carcabonne.”

Treila’s brow creases. Some of the tension bleeds out of her hands. “Carcabonne?” she asks, confused. “What are you talking

about? What does Carcabonne have to do with anything ?”

“Your father died because of Carcabonne.”

“My father died so Cardimir would look strong,” Treila spits. But her hands have slipped entirely from Voyne now. She gets

up, backing away. Something is strange about her hands. One finger, Voyne realizes, is gone. Frostbite, from that winter?

Or something else?

Where are they?

“My father ,” Treila says, “was trying to save our people from starving.”

Voyne takes the measure of her infirmity. Makes her fingers twitch. Her calves tense. It’s not enough. “And what did your

father do, to buy the grain he smuggled in?” she asks. Didactic, the way she remembers talking to Treila in those golden months

between when she had paid in horrors to win back Carcabonne and when she again spilled blood.

“Salt. He shorted Cardimir his salt. Sent the rest to—to Etrebia.”

She is so certain.

“No, he didn’t,” Voyne says, and shoves herself upright. She gets as far as sitting, then has to sag against the nearby wall.

Across from her, Treila is quivering, taut as a bowstring. “He said we’d sent them salt,” she repeats.

“He gave them Carcabonne.”

For a long time, Treila doesn’t move. Her eyes go unfocused. Voyne wonders what she’s thinking about. What she remembers.

Carcabonne had been only three months before they’d met. Voyne had been fresh off the field of battle, not newly made a hero

but certainly newly shined, when she’d arrived at Treila’s father’s house. She’d spent much of her recuperation there. And

then the king had come to visit, and brought with him the findings of his spymasters, and everything had gone to shit.

Voyne thinks, mostly, of Carcabonne itself. Of the blood. The fire. Etrebia had already held the fort by the time Voyne and her soldiers arrived to take it back; all of Carcabonne’s knights had been slain, all its people slaughtered or hauled over the border and sold into slavery. They had come very close to all-out war that winter. But they’d been lucky, heard the first whispers of treason early enough to stop Etrebia from stealing anything else.

It had just taken a while to discover who had sold them out.

“You’re lying,” Treila whispers, finally.

“No,” Voyne tells her.

“Nobody said anything about Carcabonne. When you killed him. When you cut his head off, you said—you said it was the salt —”

“I said nothing,” Voyne murmurs. She waits for Treila’s hands to close around her throat again; they are spasming hard enough

at her sides, and Voyne is helpless. Voyne is destroying her world all over again. “But yes, that was the reason Cardimir

gave to everybody who asked. Treason, but of a lesser sort. Because we judged it would be better for the king to appear cruel

than to appear weak. We cleaned house quietly, after that.”

Treila doesn’t grab her throat. She covers her own eyes instead, moans into her hands. She sits back on her heels.

She laughs.

The laughter turns to sobs, eventually, and then to silence, and then it is just the two of them, breathing in the semi-dark.

“Five years of my life,” Treila says at last. “Five years of my life, trying to defend a massacre. If I had known—”

“If you had known, would you have enjoyed your suffering?”

Treila does not answer.

“I had no other choice but to cast you out,” Voyne said. “But that does not make it less terrible. I have no regrets, because

I protected my country, but if I could have done it differently...”

She trails off, unsure of what she means to say. In the end, all she can string together is, “I am glad you’re alive, Treila.”

The words ring in the silence of the little grotto they’re in. Voyne looks away from the girl, finally, to regard where she is, and what she has left. She is alive; they are underground. She feels like herself. She’d forgotten what that was like. It’s like her veins are filled with cool water, steady, strong.

She has been reordered. The Priory would likely have something to say about it. Phosyne, too, surely. Some transmutation.

Some alchemy. Death as a transforming fire.

“Help me stand,” she commands, half expecting Treila to laugh in her face.

“No,” Treila says instead.

“Then tell me where we are.”

“Below the keep.”

“And the rest of Aymar? The—fiends that have walked its halls?” She realizes, then, how miraculous it is that Treila is here

at all. That she isn’t up with the horrible throngs, gorging herself on flesh and bewitched fruits. In the strangeness of

her resurrection, they had seemed to be in a world all their own. But they haven’t left it. “Your mind is clear?”

“Unfortunately,” Treila says. “When I killed you, I thought it was the Loving Saint, wearing your face. But that’s a more

mundane sort of madness, I think.”

And finally, it clicks. “Phosyne’s way out. You were the one I couldn’t see.”

Golden hair. Yes, she remembers now, so many of their meetings in the garden.

“We can go,” Treila says. “We should go. I have food, we have this exit. I’ve left before. We can do it.”

Freedom should be tempting, but there’s no cowardice left in her, either; Treila’s blade cut that away, along with the fog

inside her skull. “No.” She tries to rise again, and again her limbs are not quite strong enough. But they are getting stronger.

Treila stares down at her. “You can’t mean to die for your king still. Not—not after all of this.”

“I don’t mean to die at all. I mean to fight. There are too many people still alive up there to abandon. And Phosyne—”

“Phosyne is changing. And not into anything good.”

Voyne licks her lips, remembers how Phosyne had looked on the throne. She can’t help her shudder. “Then all the more reason to end this. Treila—the knife.”

Treila goes to it, eyeing it mistrustfully. As if she does not want to touch it again.

“These creatures can be killed by iron,” Voyne says.

“Maybe, but—there are so many. Too many.”

“Take the knife,” Voyne says again. “Get it to Phosyne. Give it to her. It cut through whatever enchantment had hold of me,

it might do the same again.” She might not even need to die for it to work; when Voyne had clutched the hammer in her hand,

she had been able, at last, to see Treila. “No matter what, she will know what to do with it.”

Of that much, Voyne is certain, down to her bones.

Treila is clearly struggling, though, even as she picks up the knife. She has seen something Voyne has not. She is wary. She

is clever.

“Brave girl,” Voyne murmurs, and Treila looks up at her, stricken, like the blade is in her belly and not her hand. “I trust

in the both of you. And I will follow as soon as I am able.”

“You’re certain?” Treila asks. “You don’t think I’ll fail?”

“I think you haven’t let yourself die so far,” Voyne says.

Treila hesitates one last time, then jerks her chin toward the candle. Voyne can see it now, glowing boldly against the dark.

It’s one of Phosyne’s; there’s no melted wax around its base.

“If I don’t come back,” Treila says, “if it’s been too long, don’t come after me. Don’t let them have you again, don’t even

risk it. Promise me.”

“And where would I go?”

“There is a creature, here. In the crack in the wall.” She motions with her chin to a line of deeper darkness that splits

the dimly lit wall. “While Phosyne’s candle burns, it can’t hear you. But douse it, go to it, ask to leave. The thing that

lives in it can get you outside the walls, just—just negotiate carefully. And don’t come back. Only one of us needs to be

a fool.”

Voyne nods. “I understand. Now, go.”

“I’ll come back,” Treila promises. She hesitates. Voyne wants to touch her, wants to press a kiss to her brow, wants to hold her. But she doesn’t need it. What Voyne and Cardimir and the world have made her—what she has made herself—is strong enough on its own.

One last breath, and then Treila pushes herself into the earth and, in another moment, is gone.

Voyne sits, unmoving, for a long time after. She counts her breaths. She tenses and relaxes each of her muscles in turn. When

she is ready, she pushes herself forward onto her hands and knees. She crawls to the candle.

She douses it in the creek, then sits back and regards the gash in the world.

“Hello,” she says. “Let’s have a chat.”