Page 50 of The Starving Saints

Ser Voyne stands in the doorway, and Phosyne shakes apart, desperate for a miracle.

She is glorious in steel, true steel and not the Warding Saint’s weightless imitation, sword flashing, the way she looked down in the yard the day of the

food riot, the day Phosyne was given to her.

And she is alive , alive and quicksilver. Even as Phosyne spasms and the air within the room collapses into the flame of the candle, then bursts

out once more, taking the fire with it in a shower of sparks—even then, Voyne is moving.

Her blade plunges into the Lady.

It skewers Her right through. Phosyne sees it burst from Her belly, shining and clean. Sees the Lady look down at it in fascination.

There is no pain upon Her perfect brow.

The blade withdraws, and Voyne, too, can tell something is wrong as the Lady turns.

“Run—” Phosyne gasps, and then, with all her might, she thunders, “ Run .” The walls shake with it. Treila is there, too, and she, at least, will flee; she is smart enough, but—

But neither of them moves.

The Lady turns to face them both, and Phosyne cannot see Her expression. Cannot see if She is pleased or furious. Phosyne

has to know.

She must know.

That hunger crashes into her, steals away all her senses. Without the Lady’s attention, without the candle between them, Phosyne’s grasp on all the world slips through her fingers. One thing. She must focus on one thing above all the rest, because she can feel the wind gusting outside, can feel the heat ratcheting up, a boiling sun, a broiling sky.

She fixes herself on the flash of Voyne’s armor. Iron that will not help her now. Iron that comes too late.

And even though Voyne must understand at least a little, she cuts into the Lady’s belly once more.

It changes nothing.

The Lady walks forward along the length of the steel. It slides through Her easily. No blood drips from the wound as She at

last reaches Voyne, cups her jaw in both Her hands. Phosyne sees it all in the reflection of Voyne’s breastplate.

“Welcome back to the world, Ser Voyne,” the Lady says. “Though it was supposed to be you on this blade, if I recall.”

Voyne snarls. “It was to be Etrebia’s sword,” she says, “but you took that from me, too, along with all the rest.”

The Lady smiles, delighted. “Vicious thing, I will take my time in savoring you.”

“Voyne!” It is Treila’s voice, cutting through the roar. She is close at hand, and she is streaked with blood. Hers? No, it

does not smell like hers, and Phosyne is falling down a long, dark tunnel as she tries to place it. “You don’t need a sword!”

They must have some other weapon. But Voyne isn’t moving, and Treila isn’t either.

She is trying to, but Phosyne is holding her tight.

Phosyne doesn’t remember moving, but she has the woman in her arms now, and Treila is staring at her, confused, as Phosyne

leans in, catches a flake of blood between her teeth.

It tastes like honey.

Blood of a saint, then. Which one?

From behind her, she hears the Lady murmuring to Voyne, trusting that Phosyne’s distraction will keep Her safe. “But what

is this crown about your head? You are built to obey, Ser Voyne. It is written in your bones.”

That gets some response, some jerking movement that Phosyne cannot see the whole of, because she’s too busy staring into Treila’s eyes.

“They can die?” Phosyne whispers. But she knew this. She has not seen the Warding Saint since Voyne’s body was presented,

wearing his armor.

No, the important thing is—there need be no iron to do it, because when Treila left her, she was unarmed.

Phosyne staggers back, far enough that she can see all three of them. Treila stepping forward as if to come after her, murderous

and betrayed, and Voyne, her hands around the Lady’s throat. The Lady in the center of it all, unflappable, serene.

There is the flash of steel, but it’s not Voyne’s sword. It’s the knife, the Lady clutches it in one perfect hand, and before

Phosyne can cry out, Treila has thrown herself into Voyne, knocked her away from the Lady, and taken the dagger in her place.

Phosyne cannot see where the blow lands, but she can hear Treila gasp, can hear Voyne snarl as the Lady steps back. The sword

slides from Her belly, falls to the floor. It leaves no hole behind. A thicket of thorns grows across the Lady’s robes instead,

fresh armor, ready to cut.

And Treila is bleeding. She tries to move and can’t, a pained and ragged cry issuing from her throat. Voyne has her in her

arms, is positioned over her as if to protect.

“It would have been better if you’d never seen her again,” the Lady says to Voyne. “It could be only nothingness that was

bleeding out. Nothing worth saving, nothing worth staying your hand against me. What a pity that you had to return to her.

I gave you a gift, glory and certainty and righteousness, and you squandered it.”

Treila spasms against the floor, blood flowing from her gut despite Voyne’s hands frantically applying pressure, and that

reverses Phosyne’s retreat, unsticks her limbs. She throws herself at them, collapses to her knees at Treila’s side, fits

her hands with Voyne’s over the wound.

“I can fix this,” she whispers. “I can fix this, I can fix this.” She understands viscera and flesh, now, and knows healing, received it from this girl’s mouth while she lay dying, rotting from the inside from lack of food. Food, food, she needs food . She will give Treila food and that will staunch the flow.

The Lady holds out a hand, and in it is an apple.

“Give it to her,” the Lady says.

It is golden and perfect.

“No,” Treila whispers. “ No , I will not eat.”

But the juice of it is fragrant and sweet. Phosyne wants it, and can see how it will knit Treila’s flesh together again. It

will obscure her mind, yes, but it will preserve her body, and what good is a clear mind beyond death?

She is panting, hyperventilating, feeling the pulse of Treila’s blood beneath her fingers, when Voyne collides with the Lady

in a crash of steel. The apple falls from Her hand, bruising rapidly as it rolls to a stop against Phosyne’s thigh.

And the Lady is gone, and in another breath, the memory of Her as well. Phosyne blinks against a blank space, an absence,

there and then gone as suddenly as it arose. Cumin coats her tongue, sharp and insistent. Pay attention , it says, but she is angry, she is terrified , and she can’t heed it. The room is getting hotter, is roasting them alive, and it is her fault. She is making the floor

below them tremble and seeing colors she has no names for blossoming into being all around her.

Except no, there’s something else, something tangled in the flash of light on metal as Voyne convulses, grapples with the

air.

Then Treila cries out, “Down!” and both Phosyne and Voyne obey without question.

Phosyne stares at her. At the blood dried on her chin, and wet on her belly. She can see something shining, buried in the

meat of her. A solid, ringing core. Something Phosyne lacks, Voyne lacks, they all are missing.

Something beyond the heaviness of iron, and even more immutable.

While Treila stares at empty air, perfectly focused, the thing inside her glows more brightly. Phosyne tries to look where Treila looks, to the left of Voyne, but her vision drifts. Slides. This has happened before, Phosyne realizes. In this very room, Voyne had tried to look at Treila, and her gaze had slid. “Go right!” Treila cries. Fresh blood streaks her lips. She is losing too much blood.

The apple still rests against Phosyne’s thigh. She can’t remember where it came from, but it is also important, very important. She must give it to Treila, must chew it fine and pass it tongue to tongue; it is meant to heal, to stop that

flow of blood.

She takes a bite, juice exploding in her mouth. Her teeth crush its delicate flesh.

But no. No, if Treila eats this, it will paper over the core of her. Dim the glow. Phosyne can see that now. It will bind

her.

Bind. To what? To her? Yes, to her. Feasts of flesh and food grown from nothing, feasts that bewitch the mind and heart and soul.

She who provides the feast earns the fealty. But she doesn’t want that. She holds too many lives in her chest as it is.

How did they get there? What is she forgetting, so momentous, so horrible?

“Left, left!” Treila cries, voice breaking. Growing weaker. Voyne pivots left and slams her sword into the blur that Phosyne

can barely see, can barely remember they are fighting. The weapon does no damage, but the target must still be solid; the

force of the blow throws it into the wall, and for just a moment, the Lady is visible again, golden and terrifying. For just

a moment, She wears no familiar yellow paint, no beautiful raiment, but is a thing made of air and vine itself, thorn and

blood, around a tangled, pulsating stomach.

And then She is gone, and Phosyne’s head spins and Voyne staggers, tossing her head like a stallion.

Beneath Phosyne, Treila sags against the floor, and does not look at her. Phosyne wonders briefly, hysterically, if Treila

trusts her, or if she simply cannot afford to look away.

Another crack. The thud of a body hitting the floor. Phosyne twists and looks behind her.

Voyne convulses like she’s been struck, gasping for breath, barely up on one knee. There is something attacking her, Phosyne

remembers. Something old and dangerous and hungry, but Phosyne cannot feel it, except for a sick sense of absence, a lurching

slide when she tries to focus.

Voyne will die like this if Treila cannot be her eyes, and Treila cannot be her eyes if she loses much more blood than this or if she is entranced by a swallow of healing food.

So Phosyne dips her head and presses her lips to the bleeding slit in Treila’s side, and slides her tongue, thick with chewed

fruit, against the wound.

Treila shudders, her head falling back against the stone, and Phosyne can’t tell if she moans from pain or pleasure.

All she knows is that the skin heals, and when Phosyne spits out blood and pulp, when she kisses Treila’s side one last time,

there is only a white mark to show where the blade had pierced her.

Treila shoves her aside.

Phosyne falls back, just in time to hear the crack of Voyne’s skull against the floor. The Lady once more exists, standing

above the three of them, regarding each in turn.

None move.

Treila is too weak to rise. Voyne has been beaten down one time too many. And the knife is back in the Lady’s hands as She

stands over Phosyne, surveying the destruction.

“You toy with your food,” Phosyne pants. “You could have killed them five times over, couldn’t you?”

The Lady doesn’t answer, but the slight tightening around Her mouth suggests—no. No, She is struggling, just as they are.

She is just as liable to fall.

“You can’t kill them, can you?” Phosyne murmurs, frowning. “You can do nothing to them I do not allow. I hold dominion.”

But that’s not quite right. She did not want Treila run through. Does not want Voyne insensate on the ground, eyelids fluttering

as she tries to find one last store of strength within her.

“No, little mouse. I am your minder,” the Lady murmurs. “Power flows both ways.”

And yet the Lady does not move to cut either Treila’s or Voyne’s throats.

Phosyne struggles up to her knees, claws her hands into the aether around her, feels the rumble of the heavens outside, but can find not one thing to craft into a weapon. Her mind is blank and too full all at once.

She sways. “What do you want of us?” she asks, because there are no answers at hand.

The Lady smiles. “Only free me, Phosyne, and they might still live.”

Another bargain.

Phosyne begins to laugh. She is supposed to be beyond bargains, now. She is supposed to have made the right one. But there

is always one more ahead of her, one more dangled morsel that she feels she would die without.

She wants them to live. She is desperate for them to live. But she will not give up this, her last shred of control, for a

might .

With a howl of rage, Phosyne grasps whatever she can reach. The gnarled, dried husk of the corkindrill, hanging from the ceiling;

its teeth are blunt but there is something unseen tangled in them. A star, burning in a vast emptiness. A glittering fragment

of mica embedded in enamel. In life, it must have tried to bite the heavens. That tooth sings against her palm. She lunges.

The Lady does not step aside.

“Phosyne,” the Lady says, and it is like a brand, like a muzzle. Hearing her name doesn’t stop her, not quite, but it makes her falter. She goes crashing to her knees, losing her grip on the bit of ephemera that now

makes little sense, like every other epiphany that has lingered just out of her reach for the last year. Her thoughts grow

dim and fuzzy, the way they had as she had focused on the candle flame. Phosyne doesn’t want this anymore, doesn’t need this anymore.

But there is no taking it back. The Lady has her name. Phosyne gave it to her.

Except—

Phosyne is only one name she has borne.

It is the name of a woman, once a nun, who has abandoned her faith, a desperate mind reaching too far beyond its ken, a woman rotting alone in a tower, protected but not cultivated. Before that was Sefridis, believing and orderly. And before that, another name she barely remembers, a child’s name. She has been through so many. She has abandoned two of them. What strains against the Lady’s touch is none of them. She is, instead, clothed in fine robes, made of hunger, dancing upon the fretwork of the universe. It is only the bounds of this castle, this web of tight red string, that contains her. She is not Phosyne, not at all.

The name does not apply.

The nameless thing at the Lady’s feet looks up. She grins. She fists her hands into the Lady’s skirts and hauls Her down.

“Phosyne,” the Lady says, eyes shining, as the nameless woman prowls up her body. As she bares her teeth, but does not bite.

“Free me. Free us both.”

The order slides off her like water.

Water.

Her eyes close to slits, and she sees beneath them a great pool of water, lit with burning flames. The water is hers and hers

alone.

“No,” the nameless woman says.

They sink into the stone. The Lady thrashes, and the nameless woman feels the bite of the knife into her ribs.

She does not care as they plunge into the cistern, into the light. They strike the water. They roll. They are separated, and

the woman’s lips part, inhaling, drinking deep. It pours down her throat and in through the wound in her side.

It slakes the hunger in her just a little. Just enough for her to rise up over the Lady, and to grin down in triumph.

“I hold dominion,” the woman says, “over more than just you.”

And she clicks her tongue.

Two sinuous black forms slip through the grate overhead, and for just a moment, the tufts of wool between their slick scales

ignite, and then they crash into the water with great plumes of steam.

The water flares hot, so hot, scalding, boiling , and soon the cistern is filled with heady fumes purified and sanctified, and none of this is from this False Lady’s hand.

No piece of this power flows from the transfer of Her dominion. It comes instead from the nameless woman’s past, when she

did have a name, a self, a boundary.

Her skin burns.

She screams. Feels herself scalded from within and without, feels the wound close, melting shut. Her blood boils with the Lady’s. She is dying.

But arms plunge down from the gap above, through the latticework of stone that she left in another life to vent the steam,

and they’re not enough, they will not bring her up, there’s not enough space. They grasp her all the same. They pull, and

she is light, and she is planting her feet on the Lady’s spasming back, shoving her down, pushing her head below the water

as she cooks, cooks, cooks.

She is lifted to the ceiling. She touches the stone and sees beyond it Ser Voyne and Treila, faces red and contorted and desperate.

They are trying to save her.

She should not let them, except that she does not think she can die down here. She does not know if the Lady can, either.

She doesn’t know enough, can never know enough.

Panic splits her, and the rock is like air, and they haul her up into the tower room.

“Phosyne,” Ser Voyne entreats. “Phosyne, please—”

She fights.

The name is like lead, heavy and stifling and she does not want to go back into that box, does not want to be trapped once

more inside the body that is thrashing, snarling, biting. The stone is solid beneath her back, but only for now. The False

Lady’s screams are in her ears. She wants nothing more than to open her mouth, unhinge her jaw, swallow it all down and sort

it out later.

“ Phosyne ,” Treila says, and there comes the sting of a slap. Treila seizes her shoulders, drags her up, and the nameless woman remembers

bruises on her throat, chewed fruit between her lips, a day when Treila held her in the sun and tried to calm her fraying,

splitting nerves. The day she’d first sunk through the stone.

That is important. She is supposed to remember that. She is supposed to remember...

Kindness.

That’s it. She is supposed to remember kindness. And what she is now is not kind, is not deserving of kindness, is beyond...

all of that.

“Phosyne,” she mumbles, like a spell. Like an anchor.

She feels a little smaller.

She feels a little steadier.

She doesn’t want either of those things except that she does . This is unsustainable. She wants to have her room, her little world. She wants control. There is no control in this.

Phosyne has control, though. Little scraps, but enough. Enough to build a little world.

Groaning, she pulls away from Treila’s and Voyne’s hands, onto her belly. The stone below her holds, the steam rising, heating

the sodden silk against her chest even as it plasters against her back, cooling quick. She stares down at the Lady, bounded

by Phosyne’s scraps. Boiling in her flames, in her water, restrained by the stone that lets Phosyne come and go as she pleases.

The Lady is screaming. The Lady is snarling.

The Lady will be soup soon enough.

Phosyne smooths the stone back into place, sealing Her away. It goes readily.

The rest of the keep slides with it.

Because the problem remains that Phosyne still holds dominion over the whole of the castle, and all the lives within it. The

knowledge still tears at her. A name gives her an anchor, something to hold on to, but it does not stop the hunger.

And it does not make the world any smaller.

She doesn’t know how to set things back to rights. She does not want to set things back to rights. The death of the Lady feels like enough, though she knows it isn’t. She wants to stay this

way, but she can’t stay this way. Outside her windows, the world is breaking; she can see stone floating in the air. She can see the moon nestled

in the sun’s embrace. Strange, cold twilight has enveloped the world, and for a moment, all she can feel is delight. Delight,

to experience this new working of the heavens.

This can’t continue.

Phosyne looks up at Ser Voyne, blade shining in her hand. She looks at Treila, blood-soaked, murderous, as certain as she’s

ever been.

And then she plunges her hands into the stone and lets it solidify there, chaining her. Stilling things for just a moment, just long enough. “Kill me,” she begs, and bows her head to expose her throat. “Kill me, please.”

The sound of metal over metal; Voyne comes close, kneels before her. Fits one hand around Phosyne’s throat, as if it is meant

to be there. Phosyne gasps, shudders, pushes into it.

But Voyne does not tighten her fingers, only urges Phosyne to look up at her.

“No.”