Page 9 of The Starving Saints

Are you lost?”

Treila screams. She falls back, staring wild-eyed at the whispering fissure, but she sees no movement, no indication of life.

She hauls herself back up onto the ledge, clutches her dress to her front, never looking away.

But there is nothing. Nothing but the water, the breeze. She needs to go. She needs to squirm back through the gap in the

stone, back into Aymar, back into her slow, slow death.

“Don’t leave,” the gap whispers. “Not yet. You are so tired.”

“Shut up!” Treila cries, feeling for the edges of the hole, pushing her clothing inside. The milky blue light of the trickle

of a stream is dim, but the unnatural color scrapes at her eyes, making them sting and water. Or perhaps those are the fumes,

whatever fumes she’s inhaling that are making her hear—this. This impossibility.

This useless impossibility , because even if that voice belongs to a person, and that person does not itch to kill every soul in Aymar castle, there

is still no way to get through the stone.

Whoever, whatever the voice belongs to does not speak again.

Her chest aches with the fierceness of her gasping breaths, but slowly, in the silence, she calms herself. Her fingers shake

against the rock, but soon it is with exhaustion, not fear. She looks at the stream again, considers a drink before she remembers

how terribly it had hurt, when she’d sipped at the foul water before the Priory had clarified it. She doesn’t need that again.

With one last cautious look at the whispering crack, Treila forces herself back into the earth. She stretches out on her belly

and begins to climb.

As she ascends, she finds each scrap of clothing she left behind save for one; a single stocking, the first thing she had abandoned to mark her way. But there’s nowhere it could have gone; she makes it from the second stocking to the entrance back into the keep in barely more than two minutes, her path entirely illuminated by the daylight that seems to have arrived too early.

But there is no stocking. She frowns at her bare foot once she is dressed again, then shoves it into her shoe.

She was down there longer than intended; there’s a good chance she is missed. She hurriedly covers the gap and moves her chair

in front of it, grabs up work, sits. Fiddles with thread and needle.

It’s a way to get her breath back and to think, and if anybody comes in search of her, it gives her a ready excuse; she wanted

to use this first light of day, while the air is still cool, to get a little piecework done.

Nobody comes in search of her.

The day grows warmer, and sooner than she expected, she hears the bells of the Priory ring out. She forces herself up then,

and her body protests. Her joints ache. Her head spins. She pitches forward, catches herself on the wall just beside where

her cache hides. She needs sleep, but won’t get it until night; the heat and her chores will make sure of that.

First things first. She hurries up the steps and out into the yard, notably behind her fellow servants. When she takes her

place at the back of the line, Denisot, the chamberlain, has already taken his blessing. He shoots her a glare for her tardiness.

Treila fists her hands in her skirts so that he won’t notice how raw and scraped her fingers are.

The high noon sun glints off the metals that decorate the Constant Lady and Her saints, flashing into Treila’s eyes, making

them water, making her head pound harder still. She thinks she might crack, break into pieces. If she did, might she be narrow

enough to get through that gap?

As things stand, there’s no point in going back. Even if the voice was only in her head, she doesn’t have the tools or strength

to widen out that passage.

The realization is sobering.

Her turn comes at last. When she kneels, she nearly falls. Her pulse thunders in her ears. She knows this feeling, and she

curses it even as she braces herself, plants her hands against her thighs, tilts her head up and closes her eyes with her

lips slightly parted. She doesn’t want to see the pity of the nun who dips her thin glass rod into the dish of honey, spins

it. The nun knows, too, that Treila is starving, but doesn’t know that this was avoidable. That if she’d eaten a little more

before going into that tunnel, she wouldn’t be so tragically feeble now.

But that one sweet dab of comfort doesn’t grace her tongue. Treila opens an eye, then both, and closes her mouth because the

nun isn’t even looking at her.

Instead, she’s looking at the king, come sweeping down the steps at the entrance of the chapel, flanked by Ser Leodegardis

and Prioress Jacynde. Behind them is a woman, set apart, face gone pale with... shock? Devastation, surely. She has the

look about her, every furrow deepened, eyes staring after the other three.

Treila recognizes her instantly.

It’s Ser Voyne, more broken than Treila has ever seen her, and twin shocks of fear and delight rock her back onto her heels.

There is murmuring all around her, and nobody is looking. Treila quietly joins the crowd. She can’t stand the thought of waiting

for a meaningless touch of honey to her tongue, not when this is playing out before her.

It’s not much. It’s subtle. But Treila has watched Ser Voyne for months now, whenever their paths cross, and she has seen

Ser Voyne at the king’s heels like a favored dog. They have never walked so far apart, let alone with Ser Voyne looking so

hurt, so devastated. So vulnerable, without her armor.

It clears Treila’s head in an instant. Makes her mouth water.

Treila cannot take vengeance on a king; even she is not so bold and desperate to believe that. But she notes now with interest

how very little the king marks his chosen lapdog, how that lapdog’s carefully controlled countenance is broken now, pained,

frustrated. Betrayed. Treila knows that feeling too well to miss it here.

She has waited months and months, months longer than she thought, and until this very moment she didn’t know what she was waiting for. A moment to slip some poisoned nectar into her drink? A night when Ser Voyne sat alone, distracted, her throat bare to a quick knife from an unexpected corner?

But this is far more poetic, and it is almost worth the roaring pit of her stomach, the terror of the cavern below the castle.

She will break Ser Voyne’s spirit, the same way hers was broken.

It will only take the slightest push.

Ser Voyne lingers a moment longer, and then she turns, not to the keep where she has been holed up for the last week, but

to the great hall, to the walled-off sod of the kitchen garden. To the scene of last week’s riot, but Treila doesn’t think

that’s what’s on her mind.

She trails after, head down. Pulled inexorably toward her, and feeling, for just a moment, like the girl who adored the great

Ser Voyne, who thought something special was quickening between them. She knows better now, but this close, the old habits

stir back to life.

Behind her, the nuns lift their burdens; they will take the icons around the walls, then down again to the lower bailey, more

succor for the innocents. Treila quickens her pace, and follows Voyne into the garden, close enough on her heels that the

guards don’t question it.

Voyne slows as she takes in the rows of feeble plants. There’s not enough rain to keep them fed, not enough water to go around,

and many have been harvested too soon to provide some limited sustenance. What remains is not encouraging. Voyne’s expression

darkens, and Treila thinks she hears her breathing hitch, as if with repressed sobs.

But the knight doesn’t cry. She sits on a low bench, stares down at her hands.

Treila considers her approach. She has avoided being alone with Ser Voyne for this long out of caution, and she isn’t sure she’s ready to announce herself. But a woman like Ser Voyne, cautious though she is, is also used to having a certain amount of power. Impunity. She knows more of the servants by name than most, Treila will concede, but not all. Those who do not serve her directly are simply acts of nature. A soothing rain, a warm day. A breeze.

Treila tries not to think of the breeze below the earth, or the heat of the day sapping what little strength she has. She

needs to eat.

She needs this more.

“Ser knight,” Treila murmurs, voice pitched in such a way that it could belong to anyone. “May I get you something?”

It’s been many months since she needed this deference, but she learned it well by necessity. It slips over her like the leather

of the gloves she makes. That Ser Voyne wears now on her hands. Treila recognizes her own work.

Voyne’s head jerks up; she must have thought she was alone, or followed only incidentally. But she doesn’t turn. Treila’s

read on the situation appears correct.

“No,” Ser Voyne says at last. “What is there to get?”

“Water,” Treila suggests.

Ser Voyne laughs, and it is dark and bitter, and Treila wonders if she knows something Treila does not.

She will take her water from the kitchens tonight, then, not the cisterns.

“I apologize,” the knight says, when she has control of herself once more. “It’s been a long few days.” Weeks. Months.

“I have a little extra food,” Treila says, risking some exposure for a greater reward: Voyne’s vulnerability. It breaks over

her like ocean surf. Treila can see her shoulders tighten, then unclench, and Ser Voyne sags where she sits.

“I am not in need,” she says, guilt and shame weighing her down. “Keep that for yourself.”

She does not threaten to take it away and redistribute it. Treila feels a pang for the woman she once thought Ser Voyne to

be, who Ser Voyne seems to play at being even now.

There is silence, then, and Treila ponders her next move. She wants Ser Voyne weak, reliant, and she has gotten there so swiftly, but the next steps are treacherous. Should Treila reveal her identity, and hope that there is guilt there, too? Or should she stretch this out, encourage Voyne to come back to this spot, meet her here again and hope that they can have another anonymous exchange? Given time, Treila can pry apart this woman’s armor, make her desperate, and then leave her betrayed, broken on the rocks.

The king would allow it. The king has already begun to cut her loose.

But before Treila can decide, Ser Voyne makes a move she was not expecting.

“What I am about to say,” Ser Voyne addresses to the air, “cannot be told to anybody else. Do you understand me?” She doesn’t

turn to look at Treila, and that is the measure of how desperate she is, how broken.

Lying is easy. “Of course, ser knight,” she breathes, coming to sit behind her on the bench. Their hips brush, just slightly,

and the contact steals Treila’s breath away. She can hear the older woman breathing. Can hear the shaking in her chest. She is going to freely offer up another dagger to point at

her breast, and Treila is so eager she could cry.

Ser Voyne is silent at first, marshaling her will or slowly letting go of her propriety. And then she places her head into

her hands. “Food is dwindling. Rations are scant. You know that, or you wouldn’t have offered me some of your portion.”

Treila nods. “I know.” A pause. “We all know.”

Ser Voyne nods, not surprised. “We have two options left, if we are to last until rescue comes,” she murmurs.

Two options. Treila frowns, thinking. One is simple: humans are made of flesh just as much as dogs are, and the deaths will

begin soon enough. But the other, she can’t imagine.

“And is rescue on the way?” Treila asks, mind working.

“I don’t know,” Voyne confesses, heartbreak weighing down her words. “It should be, but it should also have arrived by now.

And because it has not...”

Her voice breaks completely.

Because it has not, we must assume it is not coming. That it will never come, no matter how many messengers we send over the

wall.

Treila hesitates only a moment, then reaches behind her, places one slight hand on Voyne’s gloved knuckles. The knight flinches, but doesn’t turn to look. She needs the anonymity if she is to speak. Treila hides a smile. “Ser knight,” she says, “I know that you would defend me until the end. All of us. Tell me, what has you so distressed?”

Voyne draws in a shuddering breath. “They will either begin to feed us the dead,” she says, “or they will feed us heresy.”

Heresy . Treila rolls the word around in her mouth, even as she makes the appropriate noises of shock, distress. To eat the dead

is terrible, of course.

But she has done it before. She assumed it would come to that, sooner or later. “I don’t understand,” she says.

“I am glad of that,” Voyne says, and Treila bites down a sharp laugh. The knight’s hand has turned over beneath hers, is clasping

her fingers gently. “But flesh is flesh. I don’t think they will announce when the change happens, but it will happen. I am

sorry.”

“But isn’t that heresy itself? To—to do that?” She minces around it as if she is not intimately familiar with the taste of

human meat.

As if she is not, in a dark part of herself, looking forward to it—if only because she knows it will not break her.

“There are worse things,” Ser Voyne breathes, “than that.”

“What?” Treila pushes. “What can be worse than what we are driven to, when all else is lost? Doesn’t it all become the same,

then?”

But Ser Voyne does not answer, not immediately, and Treila feels her hand tense against her fingers. Ser Voyne turns, finally,

to see who she has been speaking with. Treila freezes, considers, then turns her head as well. She pushes her blonde curls

out of the way, tucks them behind one ear, twisted by a scar from a knife. She knows her cheek is visible now, the line of

her nose. The patrician arc of her brow.

Treila hears her sharp intake of breath. She forces herself not to smile.

“Do I know you?” Ser Voyne asks.

And finally, Treila looks up. She meets the troubled gaze of the woman who took everything from her without a lick of hesitation

or regret. She shapes her expression into one of fear, of sadness.

She sees the spark of recognition.

The confusion.

And for a moment, she is caught. Caught by how she thrills to Ser Voyne’s attention after all these years, and caught, too,

by the pain glinting in those familiar eyes.

But she can’t stay. Staying would be too kind. Treila untangles their hands and flees, knowing Ser Voyne cannot follow, because

the leash is, as ever, tight around her throat.