Page 48 of The Starving Saints

Hello, shield bearer,” the darkness whispers.

Ser Voyne’s lips quirk for just a moment. “Shield bearer?” she asks. “Is that what I am?”

“It’s one thing you are.”

The voice flits between childish and gravelly, thin and deep, as if it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Voyne can see nothing,

no hint of face or form. Only the crack in the stone, and the shine of the water below. She half expects a surge of vertigo,

but the world is still and steady.

“It is,” she agrees.

She has the odd sensation of the darkness smiling at her. “Are you here to ask for safe passage, like the girl?”

“No.”

What she wants is the lay of the land, and what Treila has told her about this thing intrigues her.

Worries her.

She does not like that something lives beneath Aymar that makes deals. It feels too much like the creatures that have torn

her world to pieces.

“Come closer,” the darkness whispers. “Let me see you.”

It takes more energy than Voyne really has to rise to her feet, but she does it. She takes the five careful steps to close

the distance between her and the crack in the stone. There is nothing within it, no point of light to suggest an eye peering

out at her, no touch of warmth in the cool air to denote breath. There is simply an absence, a descent that she cannot make.

The crack is too narrow to do more than slip a finger through, and she does not try even that.

“What did you take from—the girl?” Voyne asks, remembering at the last moment that they have not been using names. That this thing does not know Treila’s name. Voyne guards it jealously by reflex.

“A finger,” the darkness says, “to leave. An ear to come back.”

“And if she wants to leave again?”

“Something more, certainly, since I don’t think she’ll ask to come back a second time. But she is a good negotiator.”

Voyne smiles despite herself. “She is. Could you hear us, while the candle was lit?”

It is an obliging darkness. “No,” it says, and she doesn’t think it’s lying. It sounds too frustrated. “The light belongs

to somebody else. Somebody who knows how to assert a claim. When it burns, this place is not mine anymore.”

Phosyne.

They are interrupted by a noise—a howling shriek, distant but echoing down the tunnel that connects this limited space to

the world beyond. Voyne turns, posture shifting to something far more defensive than it has been.

The noise does not repeat, but there comes a closer crashing surge, and Voyne glances down to see the water below her rising.

“Rain,” the darkness says. “Falling fast and heavy.”

“Will this cavern flood?”

“No,” it says, and there is a creaking rumble.

Across the cavern, the stone slides, a shifting shadow, and the water slows first to a bare trickle, and then nothing at all.

The glow persists, but is thinner now, lingering in the puddles that are left. Voyne stares at it, processing this show of

force, this mastery of the environment. Heart hammering in her throat, she looks up, to the side, to where Treila left her.

The tunnel remains.

It may not always.

Her head swims. She should leave, and yet she is still not wholly herself, still not strong enough to navigate a tunnel she

does not know the lay of. She needs Treila, or the darkness, if she is to leave.

“Sit,” the darkness murmurs. “You are tired.”

Trembling, Voyne sinks to her knees, leaning back against the stone. The crack cradles the base of her skull. She is too exhausted to move any farther.

If it takes her, it takes her, but she does not think it will.

“You’re not like the—” She hesitates. She will not call them saints, not anymore, but has no other name for them. Guests is too euphemistic. Enemies too crude, too broad. “Like the invaders above,” she settles on.

The darkness does not respond immediately. She wonders if it is considering how to respond, or if it is looking , somehow, up through the yards of rock above them.

“Tell me about them,” it says. “I have smelled them on the girl, and I can feel them walk above me, but I can’t hear them.”

“They are hungry,” Voyne murmurs.

“I am hungry,” the darkness says.

“They toy with us. They strike bargains.”

“In this we are alike.”

She inclines her head at the darkness’s honesty. “They taste like honey. They look like I do, and the girl, in the broadest

sense. They ask for loyalty, devotion, adoration.”

The darkness hums. “What else?”

“They abhor iron.”

“Then they are not like me at all.” The darkness laughs, and the ground trembles. “They are my enemy, then, as well.”

“You do not fear iron? It does not strike you dead?”

“Oh, no. No, I am made of it. I could not reside below the earth and shy from any scrap of ore, any vein of metal, now could

I?”

Voyne adjusts the map that has been forming in her mind since she awoke down here, weak but clearer-headed. She moves pieces

about the board, not to wholly new terrain but to where she thought they might go, where she hoped they could be placed.

“You are very old, aren’t you?” Her hand caresses the stone below her, stone that has sat here for centuries, millennia, the bedrock that Aymar was built upon. She wonders how long this cavern has existed for. If it’s always been here, or if the water by her side has carved it more recently. Still, she knows she is thinking not in mortal years, but something larger, more expansive. “You were here before I arrived. Before my people arrived. Before the first hands laid the first cut stones aboveground.”

“Not quite. I came when those first stones were cut.”

Her heart quickens. “Why?”

“Because I was called for. I was bargained with. I was fed.”

She thinks, then, of Carcabonne. Of blood in the snow, sinking down to the stone beneath. These castles have certainly been

fatted upon death.

“What for?” she asks.

“Protection.”

There is love in its voice, or at least a heady fondness. “And would you say you protect us now?” Voyne whispers.

“The castle has not yet fallen to ruin, has it? The stone it sits upon has not collapsed? I am limited in what I can do. Just

as you are limited.”

Just as she has been paid in blood for her protection, as well.

“There is iron in your spine,” it says. Fingers trail up her back, along her shoulders, across her neck. She shudders but

does not pull away, holding herself stiff and wary, wondering, wanting to know where they will go. They tangle in her hair,

then come to rest atop her scalp. There are too many of them to belong to only two hands, though of course the hands they

belong to (if they belong to any hands at all) need not be the same as hers.

But there are enough, regardless, to encircle her brow. To rest as a crown of sorts, and for a moment, they are a circlet

not of flesh or shadow but of stone. Heavy, solid.

“The clever girl’s knife, the tip snapped off within you. Can you feel it?”

Her throat is whole now, unnaturally whole, but if she swallows—yes, she feels it, a sharp little pebble, lodged behind her

windpipe, her esophagus. If she strains her head from side to side, she thinks she will feel it scrape.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“It is that which has cut you free from a tangle of air and fire. And now you are what you always were before—clad in iron, strong and steady. Can you feel it?” Hands press into the armor along her back, the shimmering metal that Voyne now realizes is no metal at all, but a glittering latticework. The idea of armor, not the substance of it. But where the darkness touches, it solidifies, gains the heft of steel.

She gasps at the weight.

“You are made of me,” it murmurs in her ear.

“What do you want?” she asks. “And what can you give me in return?”

“They are one and the same. Destroy them. Let their blood soak into the stone. Restore order and solidity.”

A tongue curls around her earlobe. She shudders, panic flaring in her breast, sharp and bright. She listens to it as carefully

as she can. “Feed you once more,” she supplies.

The tongue disappears, replaced with nibbling teeth. They do not pierce flesh. They are gentle. Controlled. A dog biting fleas

from its mates’ fur. “That frightens you.”

“I won’t exchange one master for another.”

Cardimir and the False Lady and Phosyne—but the darkness doesn’t laugh at how much practice she has at shifting her loyalties

recently. It doesn’t needle her, doesn’t mock her.

“I do not ask for a bargain. I do not ask for submission,” it says instead. “We are already one and the same.”

She quakes at the thought. “But you are hungry,” she whispers, wary.

“Hunger is inescapable, shield bearer,” it says, and the hands at last leave her scalp, disappear back into the darkness.

The teeth go with them a moment later. “You cannot gain any distance on it. It will follow you to the ends of the earth. But

the hunger that I am holds this castle up. The hunger that they are would tear it away from you. The hunger that you feel

would lead you to victory.”

Another shudder rocks her. “If you speak the truth. If this is not another ploy.”

“You doused the candle. You asked to speak to me. You never intended to ask for freedom.”

“I wanted only information, not a mandate.”

“You have always had the mandate.”

Voyne closes her eyes. Thinks of Carcabonne, and Treila’s father, headless at her feet, and Phosyne given over into her care. None of it has been easy, or simple, or even clear at the time. It is only after that she can feel the rightness of it. It is not obedience, not even loyalty, but one single note above all else:

Protect them.

She has the strength to do it. She has the iron in her spine. She has the stone beneath her feet.

“I have always had the mandate,” she agrees.

The darkness bows behind her.