Page 49 of The Starving Saints

Treila is just outside the keep when the sky breaks open and the deluge begins.

The clouds that have boiled out of empty air bring with them a flash and shudder of light. Not lightning, not thunder, but

the sun itself roiling, spinning, careening between noon and dusk and dawn, stars springing to life and then winking out again.

Treila stares up at the riot even as water falls on her with the force of an avalanche, churning the dirt below her feet to

sludge. The rain plunges down her throat, chokes her, and it’s only that spasming that tears her away from the sight, bends

her double so she can cough and gasp for breath.

It washes some of the honeyed sharpness of the Loving Saint’s blood out of her mouth and, selfishly, she clamps her lips shut,

not quite ready to lose the rest of it.

She pulls herself inside a doorway.

The stones themselves begin to dance.

That’s the only word for it, the way they rock and slide against one another. Gravity and mortar seem forgotten. The world

is lurching off its axis; no matter how hard Treila glares, it all refuses to still.

And above it all, she hears Phosyne, screaming.

It echoes down the stairwells, piercing and pained, and Treila freezes, clinging to a tapestry that has yet to melt. It’s

pained, but also ecstatic, and she reaches reflexively for the knife that is not there.

You can trust me , Phosyne had promised her. And she’d known better, known not to, but—

But does the loss of a blade really matter? This would have happened either way.

There’s no time for regret. Treila throws herself down toward her workshop, praying the tunnel has not shimmied closed.

It hasn’t. It yawns black and beckoning in her lonely little room, with its needles and awls and waxed thread, the fragments

of a life that doesn’t feel like hers. Treila, the glover, the rat catcher, doesn’t exist anymore. She has been washed away

by the blood and flesh in her teeth.

Which is good. That Treila wouldn’t have survived this long, no matter the armor she’d built for herself.

This Treila slides back down into the earth like she was made for it.

She is maybe halfway through the winding passage, the sounds dying away, the world falling back to order as she moves, when

she notices the next ill omen:

Voyne has doused the candle.

The absence of its flickering glow is subtle, barely noticeable until Treila hauls herself around a bend in the tunnel, and

then there is nothing but darkness and blue light. The earth itself seems to tighten around her, the tunnel constricting until

rock brushes against her sleeves. Her clothes are heavy, blood-soaked and sodden, and she kicks and snarls, fighting her way

through.

She tries not to think of what she will find—or won’t find. Perhaps Voyne will be gone, following her direction, yes, but

leaving Treila alone, and Treila does not want to be alone. Even if she knows she can kill a saint. Even if she knows she

can survive this next negotiation.

But when she crawls at last to the final lip of the tunnel, she hears voices, murmurs. She plunges forward, legs tangling

in her skirts, skin scraping as she tumbles from the mouth of the tunnel and back into her little cavern, secret from all

the world.

Voyne sits with her back against the crack, watching her.

It’s almost impossible to see her, the cavern is so dark. Even the glow of the creek is fading. But Voyne is alive, and Voyne

is smiling.

Treila swallows down her panic and straightens up.

“You came back,” Voyne says and, as Treila watches, plants her hands against the stone behind her and shoves herself to her

feet. Her armor looks different, but maybe it’s the light.

“Were you going to leave?” Treila asks, nodding at the gap behind her.

“No,” Voyne says.

The darkness says nothing.

“Does Phosyne have the knife?” Voyne asks, taking one lurching step toward her. Her mouth twists with pain, but she stays

upright.

Treila fights back the urge to go to her. “You were wrong, to trust her,” she snaps instead. Lets Voyne take another step,

then slips around her, goes to the crack herself. “We need to leave, and quickly. This whole castle is going to come down

soon.”

Voyne turns. Her armor is loud in the small space, clanking against itself. It sounds different now, too. Less tinkling. More

martial.

Treila ignores it, shoves her hand into the crack. “Come on, beastie,” she says, smile fierce on her lips. “Take a nibble,

let me through.”

The darkness does not answer.

There are no lips against her hand. No teeth. No curling limbs. There is nothing for Treila to bite into, nothing for her

to grab hold of. She slams her other fist against the rock, pushes farther in. “Name your price!” she demands.

The only response is Voyne’s hand, clapped hard onto her shoulder, but urging her back gently.

Only because of the weakness still in her limbs, surely. It is not tenderness.

“We fight,” Voyne tells her, voice quiet in her ear. “That is the deal I have made.”

Treila shivers, then turns, staring up into the other woman’s eyes. They are calm, cool, everything Treila is not. They incense her.

But Voyne just reaches out and cups her jaw, strokes her gloved fingers over the dried and flaking gore Treila only now remembers.

“You fought ,” Voyne reminds her.

“We have no weapons,” Treila says, and her voice sounds choked and frightened.

That won’t do. She firms her shoulders. Leans into Voyne’s touch, a challenge.

“Get me to the throne room,” Voyne says, “and I will take up my blade again.”

“You’re not going to like what you find up there,” Treila cautions her. “The world is breaking. Phosyne is breaking it. It may not be the Lady we need to stop, now.”

For all Treila knows, the Lady is dead, and Phosyne has eaten Her.

Voyne inclines her head in understanding. “Nevertheless.”

Treila licks at her bloody, bruised lips. Voyne stands ready to fight. And she... she realizes she does not actually want

to run. For all the impossibility that Phosyne has brought upon the world, Treila has tasted victory, and she is ready for

more. A struggle with an endpoint beyond simple survival, beyond bitterness.

No more fleeing. No more hiding in the shadows.

She grins.

“Then follow me, Ser Voyne. Let me show you what you couldn’t see before.”

The earth accepts the both of them, and if the armor Voyne wears slows her down, she compensates for it well. They squirm

together through the tunnel, hand over hand, the only sound the movement of clothing, the rattle of metal, and their shared

breaths. So different, from the desperate attempt she made with Phosyne. So different, too, from all the times she has passed

this way alone.

And then they are back in the keep, for the last time, and Voyne stands beside her in the dim light of day.

Outside, the wind is still howling. The rain has stopped, but the clouds still hang low and heavy. Below her feet, the stone

shivers, but it has ceased its dance for now.

A moment’s calm. She doesn’t know how long they’ll have it for.

Treila rolls her shoulders, loosens her jaw, and starts to climb, Voyne close at her heels.

At ground level, they are met with a fine corpse, disassembled and organized neatly in the time it took for her to retrieve

Voyne. There are splashes of black and gold and red on the ground, remnants of the lesser beasts of the saints. They have

made her an offering.

Behind her, Voyne growls, low and soft. “I knew him,” she says. And then Treila recognizes the face, peeled carefully from

the skull and draped over an upturned bowl.

“Ser Galleren,” Voyne says, and stoops to touch his brow.

One of Ser Leodegardis’s cousins, Treila thinks. Not a bad man, not at all. She thinks, perhaps, she met him once as a girl.

But he never recognized her.

“We have to keep moving,” she says, sidestepping a tidy coil of intestine that doesn’t even have the decency to stink of shit.

Voyne nods and rises to her feet, then leads the way.

Some of the steps are missing. Voyne and Treila negotiate the gaps carefully, trusting that what remains is as stable as it

looks.

The throne room is only wreckage. The stones are blasted black with soot, and that any of the walls remain upright beggars

belief. But like the rest of the keep, it is stable. For the moment.

And silent, save for the endless hum of bees.

They issue from a mass of sticky comb, not golden but rust red, that curls around the throne itself. The seat remains bare,

but only just, and the bees are industrious, connecting the mountain of wax to the walls behind it in thin projections. They

roil and shift, clumping together into what looks, for just a moment, like the form of a woman.

And then it looks like the form of the prioress, if the shape of a headdress is anything to go by.

Voyne steps forward.

“Jacynde,” she says.

The mass of bees does not respond in words, but it lifts the silhouette of a hand. The insects compact until Treila can make

out individual fingers. Another mass rises from the hive and shapes out the long straight edge of a blade, comes to rest in

the figure’s hand.

Treila bares her teeth, but Voyne shakes her head. “Wait,” she cautions.

The bees do not approach. They do not brandish their makeshift weapon. The buzzing grows louder as the figure shifts, wavers

as if drunk or dying, and then tilts the blade at its own belly. There is a sharp spike of noise, a thousand wings snapping

down at once, as it pierces itself and then scatters.

Treila remembers this. The sound of it, the slick noise, the thud of Jacynde’s collapse. The Lady had been there, and the

Prioress...

The Prioress had killed herself, because the Lady could not have held Voyne’s sword. Why had Jacynde done it? At the Lady’s behest? Or in opposition? The bees belong to the Priory, and they have clustered over her corpse, keeping her safe.

Keeping the sword safe.

“They have filled their comb with her blood,” Voyne says, almost dreamily. “And my flesh, upon a substrate of steel. They

rejected me because I still held part of the False Lady inside of me. Their hives and honey have been perverted, but they

never meant us harm.”

Treila stares.

“I hope, anyway,” Voyne mutters, sounding more herself, and picks her way across the room to the throne.

She does not hesitate, reaching into the sticky mass of wax and blood and rot. Bees rise around her, a roaring swarm, but

they do not touch her. None alight, none sting, as she plunges her arm deep, to the shoulder.

She pulls her arm back and brings with it a sword, glittering and sharp in the fractured light. Maybe Voyne was right, Treila

thinks.

“I thought,” Voyne confesses, quietly, “that I had killed her without knowing. Or that Phosyne had done something to her,

for Jacynde was in her care the last I saw her. It’s... good to know that this was her choice, even if it was a terrible,

forced choice.”

“Better than what happened to the king,” Treila mutters.

Voyne stills. Turns on her heel. “The king,” she repeats.

Treila grimaces, ducks her head. She hadn’t meant to—but Voyne will find out soon enough, if they survive this. “Dead,” she

says. “Eaten.”

She does not mention Phosyne’s hand in it.

But as if summoned by the omission, Phosyne’s voice rings out through the halls. It is overloud, too loud to come from mortal

lungs, but it is one clear note: the first note of “On Breath,” the one Treila has used to light her candles. She shivers

with it, and Voyne’s head snaps up, to the stairwell that leads to Phosyne’s tower room.

Eyes stare back at them.

Too many eyes, Treila notes, sliding in between that shadowed doorway and Voyne, head tilted to one side. Painted, flat faces. Frescoes in the dark. They crowd the stairwell, their teeth bared, sharp and stinking of rot. Shreds of pale flesh still linger in some of their maws. Traces of the Loving Saint. Of her generosity.

She takes a step toward them.

“Treila—”

“Ignore them,” Treila says. She lifts her chin a fraction of an inch, grins. “They know who feeds them.”

And as she takes another step, they part like hunting hounds, spilling out of the doorway in two ranks, creating a path.

Voyne joins her, but stops short of the door, looking back at the shifting lines. At how they strain. The tip of her blade

lifts from where it is pointed to the door.

“I made a promise,” Voyne says. “To paint the earth with their blood.”

And Treila sees again Voyne with her back to the darkness, to the crack in the stone. Considers, then places a gentle hand

on her elbow, urging Voyne back another step, until they are out from between the beasts.

“Let me,” she says, in Voyne’s ear, and Voyne lowers her blade once more.

Treila looks out at the creatures, so hungry and ready to rend and tear. They so enjoyed the blood of their own. And they

trust her. She has given them food; she has taken ownership, of a sort. The only sort these beasts seem to understand.

She tongues the stain still on her teeth and says, “Slake your thirsts, loves, on each other’s flesh.”

They lunge in an instant, and then there is only red and white and gold, paint slashed across the stone, and Treila shuts

the door.

Voyne regards her with something between fear and admiration. It looks good on her.

And then she turns and climbs.

At the top of the stairs, the door to Phosyne’s tower room hangs open, and inside are two figures, both draped in silks, both glowing in the dim light. The Lady is wreathed in flowers, in full icon regalia, and Phosyne stands before her, rigid, face tilted up, eyes wide as she clutches at a candle. The light that dances upon the wick is every color imaginable, and those colors are echoed in Phosyne’s irises.

Treila backs away.

But Voyne is right behind her, and the knight clasps her tense shoulder as she, too, takes in the scene. The Lady has not

seen them, is even now murmuring to Phosyne in a low and teasing tone.

Phosyne flinches, as if in pain. She releases her grip on the candle, and it stays fixed in the air, hanging motionless. Her

hands tremble as she splays her fingers. She is focused wholly on the pillar of wax.

The world remains steady. Voyne shifts her grip on her blade and steps forward.

The Lady still does not see them, but the movement catches Phosyne’s attention, and her head turns, lips parting. Her brow

creases.

She wails, and the world shudders.