Page 47 of The Starving Saints

The king’s body is apportioned among his people. To his household staff go the muscles of his back. To the garrison, his thighs

and calves. To the refugees, the tender meat of his arms, soft and succulent from the years of idleness after he last lifted

a sword.

Ser Leodegardis is given fine slivers of heart, presented by the Absolving Saint on milky porcelain. He flinches, though his

red-rimmed eyes are empty of tears. All cried out before, Phosyne thinks, as she comes to sit across from him. She holds Treila’s

knife in the folds of her robes. It is heavy against her thigh.

He is aware. Aware enough to recognize her, and what he has been served. But he’s still bewitched enough to feed himself.

His shoulders tremble as he chews. His head bows as he swallows.

He’s not the only one in the hall who retains a small piece of himself. Ser Voyne had been busy, on her trip to the cistern.

Her water has slaked the thirst of many, binding them subtly to Phosyne with every sip. But Leodegardis has had the lion’s

share. He burns with twined loyalties, to the Lady and to Phosyne, so much like Voyne herself.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asks when he has clamped his hand against the wood of the table, as if to still it.

The Absolving Saint has disappeared back into the kitchen, and the Lady is missing. Phosyne has a moment. Below the table,

she presses the knife into her lap.

“Not yet,” Phosyne says.

“Did you call them? These invaders. These jailers of ours.” He plainly has grasped that the thing wearing the Constant Lady’s form is something else, if only by Her actions.

“No.” Her lips twitch into an apologetic smile. “If I had, this would have turned out much differently.”

She thinks.

“When I took you in...” Leodegardis grimaces in pain, as if he has to fight to remember. She’s not sure if he’s fighting

against the haze the Lady creates inside his mind, or his own guilt for everything that has transpired. “I didn’t mean to

use you. Maybe I should have.”

“It would certainly have given me structure. Putting me in that room, giving me no purpose except to learn... things got

out of hand, I think,” Phosyne says, and feels a pang of fondness for this man. He will not survive the night, she thinks.

His other leg has been cut away. He is balanced in a nest of cushions, provided by the Absolving Saint. She oversaw the process,

the negotiations. Leodegardis did not fight. In fact, he begged for them to do it, perhaps because he thought it would spare

his king.

“But I do not think I can be used, not the way you would have liked,” she adds, more softly now. “My knowledge does not proceed

linearly. It cannot be forced. It arises as some echo of another layer of reality, like a room adjoining this one without

a door. I think...”

I think it would have been better if I had never been kept. If she had never been sequestered away from the real world, allowed to bend her mind to the impossible. If she had not been

indulged.

Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered either way. What she wants, though, is to give Leodegardis some absolution of her own.

She touches his wrist. “You did well by me,” she tells him. “You did well by all of us.” That was his obligation, his duty:

in return for the fealty of his household, he gave them as much care and protection as he could. And now they are no longer

his to lead.

“At least we did not starve to death,” he says. He closes his eyes in grim humor.

No, they did not starve to death at all.

“Promise me something, my madwoman,” Leodegardis says after a moment’s quivering.

“Name it.”

“Do not forget my kindness. Do not let this have been in vain.”

It’s not what she expected, but she nods, curls their fingers together for a brief moment. “I will never forget,” she assures

him. A part of her wishes he had made her promise to end this, but she has already promised that to Treila, to Voyne.

Remembrance is probably just as important.

“I should have let Ser Voyne leave,” Leodegardis whispers as Phosyne stands once more. His eyes close in pain. He reaches

for another piece of meat. “She asked to go, to get help. I told her she was a coward.”

Phosyne’s heart twists, a flare of anger, and she leaves him there before she does something drastic for the memory of a dead

woman.

Her hands are tight upon the hilt of Treila’s dagger.

She slips out of the great hall unnoticed, taking the path she did the night she fled from Ser Voyne, through the halls, up

the stairs. She is not alone; the split-second images of the Lady’s lesser beasts pace her as she walks, but they keep their

distance. Phosyne cannot feel them the way she feels the people in the hall below, but she can see them, glittering and flat,

teeth sharp and waiting.

There’s blood on them. The scent of honey. Something has changed, and Phosyne hesitates on the stairs. If she ascends, her

little tower room waits. She doesn’t want to go there, she wants to end this, but for just a moment, the urge to flee rises up in her. The old urge, to hide, to become unremarkable once more.

She pushes it aside. She steps instead into the throne room.

The Lady sits upon the throne. The honeycomb has spread from Jacynde’s corpse and now crawls up the wall behind the Lady,

up into the rafters. Brilliant sunlight shines warm through panes of wax that now stopper the windows. The whole room is warm

and humming with the movement of a thousand bees. They move in and out of the mass of the Lady’s hair, Her braids coming undone.

They sip at the nectar of the living blooms that wreathe Her.

The bees are not to blame; their nature has been played with as much as anybody’s, their life cycle accelerated, their hive fattened on unnatural nectar. But if Phosyne drives the blade between the Lady’s ribs, the comb will remain. The honey, too. The magic in it. The infiltration, the corridors filled with the Lady’s creatures. It’s too late to unmake what the bees have wrought.

There is little point in stabbing Her. There are a hundred more like Her within the castle walls, and Phosyne does not have

the strength or skill to hunt them down one by one.

Voyne would argue with her, surely, but Voyne is not here to stop her. Voyne is dead.

Phosyne lifts her hand and shows the Lady the knife.

Her ringed eyes widen. Her golden lips part. She does not look at Phosyne’s face at all, just the glint of metal. There is

a flicker of fear across Her brow, but it is slight, considering how much of a danger Treila has said it is to Her kind. More

than that is curiosity. Wonder.

Expectation.

“From Ser Voyne’s throat,” Phosyne says. “You asked me for her body, but you have many already. Forgive me if I do not believe

that was, in the end, your aim.”

To have the body, though, the knife had to be removed.

The knife is what matters.

The Lady inclines Her head in acknowledgment. “What a wonder you are, little mouse. And so you would offer me the knife instead?”

“The knife,” Phosyne agrees. “And in exchange, you will give me the castle and all the lives inside it that you hold dominion

over.”

Her gaze sharpens at that. Her lips curl. “Not freedom? Not knowledge?”

“Those can come later,” Phosyne says, helpless but to smile back.

The knife, of course, is not just a knife. Phosyne knows that, even if she doesn’t know what, exactly, it represents. It is

heavy in her hand, too heavy just for the metal it is made of. She lifts it an inch higher, takes a step closer.

From the outside, it is a lopsided bargain. A knife for the castle? A knife for victory? The Lady should rightfully push for

more, but She doesn’t. Instead the air between them thrums with anticipation. With hunger.

Phosyne breathes shallowly, as if afraid to disturb the air between them. Her mind works. She wants to ask what the knife

means, but isn’t so foolish as to tip her hand.

I go nowhere I do not please , the Lady had told her, upon their first meeting. But I do wander everywhere.

Except—not everywhere. Nearly, but not everywhere. Something changed, to allow Her to enter Aymar. It wasn’t just chance.

Phosyne feels the castle spread out around her, feels its comparative lightness. Before, it was heavy. Before, the bees could

come and go from the chapel, but could not carry the Lady’s touch. Alone, this castle was alone, set apart, so heavy —

The knife is heavy in the same way.

The knife is made of iron. A castle should be full of it. Aymar no longer is.

“Wait—”

“I accept,” the Lady says, rising from Her throne. She crosses the few feet between them, fine-boned hand extended. Her fingers

glide across the back of Phosyne’s hands, gentling her grip until the Lady bears the weight of the blade.

The iron does not burn Her, does not hurt Her, does not stop Her from gripping the hilt and bringing the edge to Her lips.

The tangled snarl of Phosyne’s thoughts fall slack, revealing a larger tapestry. Iron, collected and melted down, forged into

a one-time weapon, launched over their walls in a fruitless bid for freedom. It bought them time against their mortal enemies,

but also time enough for bees to return from far-off fields. They brought something with them that tainted the honey. Something

from the unseen world, something of the creature who came in the guise of the Lady, spreading a thin sheen of ownership across

every person who knelt to take the blessing on their tongues. The False Lady arrived soon after, into a world all but free

of iron, iron that girds towns and castles everywhere, protecting, enfolding, hiding.

Without iron, She is free to come and go as She pleases.

Without iron, there is nothing to stop Her hunger.

The Lady holds in Her hand a blade of iron, one of just a few left in Aymar, and it does not hurt Her.

“Oh,” Phosyne whispers.

The Lady smiles.

It is a kindly smile. An indulgent one. She draws close to Phosyne, close enough to lean in, to press Her lips to Phosyne’s forehead. “The castle,” She murmurs against Phosyne’s quivering brow, “and all the lives within it I hold dominion over.”

Her world goes white.

Awareness staggers after, pinpoints of color resolving behind her eyelids. A hundred lives, a thousand, so many creatures

and not all of them mortal, not all of them finite. Dominion is not just control; it is power over, it is power within . She can hear them all, feel them all. They clamor at her, screaming, shouting, and she wants to touch each and every one

of them.

The refugees, ecstatic in their feasting. The lesser beasts that came to the Lady’s table, now sated on honeyed flesh, waiting

for command. The Absolving Saint, standing in the heat of the kitchen, watching Phosyne through layer and layer of stone,

eyes cool and assessing. Ser Leodegardis set like a trophy at his side, heedless of what has happened but knowing, instinctively,

to be afraid.

The Lady, too, for She holds dominion over Herself as well as everything else within Her world. Phosyne grabs on to that realization,

clings to it, desperate, because it means that She cannot leave. She cannot leave so long as Phosyne remembers to hold Her

leash, and so She cannot go out into the world and pass through its bonds of iron as if they mean nothing.

That is important. Phosyne must remember that. Hold tight to the leash , she tells herself again and again, even as the sound of her voice warps, twists, becomes unfamiliar.

She can see light refracting off water, and feel the dawning of revelation inside of her.

The taste of all these lives has opened a yawning pit inside of her. They all hold hunger in their bellies, and it is amplified,

sharpened within the crucible of her skull.

What is falling through the stone as if it were water before this ? What is seeing the boundaries of her little room compared with the whole world stretched out before her?

She wants to know all of it. She wants to touch it all, grasp it, bend it before her. The world is vast , and suddenly she is at the pinnacle of it, and she knows so little.

Tears streak down her cheeks, and she shudders at the cutting, burning reminder that she has cheeks, she has a body, she is just a woman and she is spinning out to pieces.

“Your hunger is so sharp,” the Lady says. Phosyne can barely hear Her. The world is so loud, so large, and she is drowning

in it. She is ever-expanding. Something inside her has come loose, and she doesn’t know that she could tamp it down again,

even if she wanted to.

And she does not want to.

No, no , she does want to, she does want to.

“You’d take everything if you could,” the Lady murmurs. “And you can . You are a black hole, little mouse. Endlessly hungry, endlessly , and all you had to do was notice it. How does it feel? Is it good?”

Phosyne sobs, and rain crashes against the stone. The sky itself is breaking. She can feel it breaking, even if she cannot see it—but she can see it, can’t she? If she shivers out of the boundaries of her skin, if

she unleashes herself.

No. No. No, she must hold on, she must—she must remember what she is.

“You need a teacher, little mouse,” the Lady says, and She is on Her knees before Phosyne, and isn’t She so pretty like this?

Her face upturned, mouth and nose golden and shining, Her eyes concentric rings of endless color. She knows something of eternity.

Phosyne shudders, reaching out to touch Her. She pushes her fingers into the Lady’s golden hair. Feels every strand of it

like molten fire.

“Tell me your name,” the Lady entreats, so sweetly, “and I will be your firm hand. I will steer you through this awakening.

Only your name, little mouse, it is such a small thing, but without it you will collapse in on yourself, snuff out the blazing

light of you.”

She can feel it. Can feel the impending collapse. A bright flare, and then nothing, and Aymar will be gone. Treila will be

gone. Ser Leodegardis will be gone and, somewhere in the bowels of this rock, the body of Ser Voyne will be gone.

Wouldn’t that be for the best? All of them, gone together.

But Phosyne made a promise to remember, and she cannot remember if she disintegrates.

“Phosyne,” she gasps. “My name is Phosyne.”