The Starving Saints

Cardimir⁶ accepts every offering without question, and at the great hall table, hours vanish in a warm fog of stories and impossible delicacies. Jacynde⁷ storms in to challenge the Lady⁴ — asparagus three months out of season, currants not yet ripe — but the Lady⁴ dismantles her resistance by articulating every doubt Jacynde⁷ has ever harbored about her own faith.

Forced to drink honeyed wine, Jacynde⁷ crumbles. Voyne² senses wrongness and lunges with a knife at the Lady,⁴ but the Warding Saint¹² deflects her. When the Lady⁴ bends to soothe Voyne's² brow, the memory of ever lifting the blade is erased.

Phosyne,¹ peering through a window from outside, sees no trace of the Priory anywhere in the celebration and suspects the creatures are something she herself has summoned.

A young nun leads Phosyne¹ to the observatory where Jacynde⁷ kneels in blazing sun, her tongue cut out, bees crawling from her bloodied mouth. Phosyne¹ drags the prioress to the chapel below, where she finds Voyne² standing motionless with strange rings of color painted in her irises. Phosyne¹ shoves her against the wall, touches her cheek, tries to provoke a spark of recognition.

Voyne² seizes her throat and squeezes. In her terror, Phosyne¹ feels the stone behind her give way — and tumbles through the chapel wall onto the walkway outside, whole and unharmed. She has passed through solid matter for the first time. She runs without understanding how she did it, knowing only that the visitors have taken everything she thought was safe.

Treila³ discovers Phosyne¹ collapsed in a stairwell, half-dead from malnutrition. She chews dried fruit into pulp and presses it between Phosyne's¹ lips, then strikes a deal: she wants a way out of the castle, and Phosyne¹ has skills nobody else possesses.

In exchange, Phosyne¹ gives her an everburning candle — lit with blood, sulfur, and the opening note of a hymn, it burns without consuming its wax. Treila³ takes the candle into the tunnel beneath the keep, where it illuminates a grotto with a softly glowing stream.

A narrow crack in the far wall whispers to her, offering freedom in exchange for one finger. When she reaches in to test the bargain, she finds wet lips and teeth waiting in the darkness. She leaves the candle burning to keep the creature silent.

Voyne² carries Phosyne¹ bodily to the Lady's⁴ table, obedient as a trained hound. The Absolving Saint⁹ presents a roasted shank surrounded by eight small bones arranged like scattered pearls.

Phosyne¹ counts them — carpal bones, unmistakably human — and recognizes that the arm belongs to Ser Leodegardis,⁵ keeper of Aymar, who gave his own limbs to feed his people. The Lady⁴ offers Phosyne¹ a bite. Instead, Phosyne¹ sinks her teeth into Voyne's² finger and bolts. She sprints to the nearest cistern and throws herself in.

When Voyne² follows, Phosyne¹ cups the purified water — her water, carrying her imprint — to the knight's lips. Voyne² drinks, shudders, and the fog lifts. She weeps as she remembers every terrible thing she has done under the Lady's⁴ compulsion.

The Lady⁴ appears at Phosyne's¹ door with all three saints, offering to teach her how they entered the castle. Phosyne¹ refuses entry — her room is her territory — but steps into the hall herself, bargaining her own safety for one lesson.

The Lady⁴ immerses Phosyne¹ in a vision: bees carrying the Lady's⁴ essence in nectar from distant meadows, spreading a film of ownership across every tongue that took the Priory's daily blessing of honey. Phosyne¹ grasps the mechanics — territory, fealty, red threads of obligation binding people to rulers.

When the vision nearly consumes her, Ornuo and Pneio¹¹ materialize at her feet, hissing sulfur, and the saints recoil from their heat. Phosyne¹ retreats behind her door, understanding now that her threshold is inviolable so long as she claims it.

Treila³ extinguishes the candle in the grotto and slides her left pinky into the crack. Teeth close around it. Two bites sever the finger clean, and the stone swallows her whole — she crawls through a tunnel of pulsing, interlocking limbs and emerges into sunlight on a hillside. The trees blaze orange. Months have passed outside Aymar though days have passed within.

The Etrebian camp is rubble; a small friendly garrison holds a watch post. Nobody from the castle has emerged. Treila³ could walk away forever, but survival without victory no longer satisfies her. She returns to the crack, offers her left ear to the creature's teeth, and squirms back inside — into a castle where summer still blazes and horrors have only deepened in her absence.

Voyne² finds the castle's blacksmith¹⁰ alive behind a ring of iron tools. When the saints' lesser creatures tried to bite him, they slagged their jaws on the metal filings embedded beneath his skin from years at the forge. He grudgingly gives Voyne² a small hammer — the only iron he can spare — and she steps back into the yard where the Warding Saint¹² waits, offering fruit.

Voyne² swings the hammer into his skull, and it cracks like an eggshell. She hammers until he is nothing but honey and splinters, then strips his strange armor and belts it onto herself. When the lesser creatures descend to feast on the saint's remains, Voyne² strides past them unchallenged. It is the first real blow anyone has struck against the invaders.

In the overgrown castle garden, Treila³ spots a figure in ill-fitting armor carrying a weapon — traits she associates with the Loving Saint,⁸ who can wear any face he pleases. She circles through the undergrowth, knife ready. They grapple.

The figure fights like Voyne,² moves like Voyne,² but Treila³ has spent five years sharpening herself for exactly this kind of encounter and cannot risk hesitation. She straddles her target, kisses those bloodied lips in fury and longing and old, tangled desire, and drives her knife into the exposed throat.

Only as the body goes slack does she register the beestings swelling the hands, the hammer discarded in the brush, the eyes that never shifted or flickered. She has killed the real Ser Voyne.² The realization empties her completely.

Treila³ bears Voyne's² corpse through the tunnel into the grotto, where iron in the knife prevents the saints from touching the body. She kneels by the glowing stream, wraps her hand around the hilt, and tugs. The blade slides free. Voyne² gasps back to life — convulsing, confused, an iron shard still lodged behind her windpipe like a splinter of permanence.

In the quiet that follows, Voyne² tells Treila³ what she has carried for five years: Lord de Batrolin was not executed for shorting salt. He sold Carcabonne itself to Etrebia, and the slaughter of its people was his doing. Treila's³ entire architecture of vengeance — five years of rage and spite and starvation — shifts on its foundation in a single breath.

The Loving Saint⁸ hunts Treila³ through the castle, flanked by his lesser creatures, flickering between faces. She has no knife, no weapon at all, and he drives her to the wall, gloating. But Treila's³ missing ear rings with a new clarity — she can see through his shifting masks to the snarled, hungry core of him, the truth beneath the seduction.

She lunges and tears his throat out with her teeth. His blood tastes of honey. As he crumbles, Treila³ rises, painted in his gore, and commands his bewildered lesser beasts to devour their master's remains. They obey. Five years of starvation and spite have made her something the Lady⁴ never predicted: a creature with sharper teeth than any saint, and the will to use them.

Phosyne¹ offers the Lady⁴ a trade: Treila's³ iron knife — the one weapon that could neutralize Her kind — in exchange for dominion over every life in Aymar that the Lady⁴ controls. The Lady⁴ accepts with a kiss to Phosyne's¹ brow. The transfer is instantaneous and obliterating.

A thousand lives flood into Phosyne's¹ awareness, their hunger amplified inside her skull until she can barely distinguish herself from the vast, ravenous entity she has consumed. She nearly fractures apart, the castle shaking, stones floating free, the sky cycling madly between day and night.

In desperation she gives the Lady⁴ her name — Phosyne — as an anchor. It pins her just enough to hold together, but the Lady⁴ now holds that name like a leash, and the world keeps threatening to unmake itself around them.

Voyne,² resurrected with iron forged into her armor by the ancient creature beneath the castle, charges the Lady⁴ with her recovered sword — but the blade passes clean through without effect.

Treila,³ the only person who can perceive the Lady⁴ when She turns invisible, shouts directions while Voyne² strikes blindly. The Lady⁴ stabs Treila³ with the iron knife, but Phosyne¹ heals the wound with enchanted fruit pressed directly to torn flesh. Then Phosyne¹ grapples the Lady⁴ and drags them both through the floor into the cistern below.

She summons Ornuo and Pneio¹¹ — their fire ignites the purified water into a scalding cauldron. The Lady,⁴ trapped in Phosyne's¹ territory, boils in the very water Phosyne¹ cleansed months ago. Phosyne¹ seals the stone above Her.

Phosyne¹ begs Voyne² to kill her — dominion over the entire castle is crushing her, expanding her consciousness past what any body can hold. Voyne² refuses and instead offers herself as anchor. Phosyne¹ kneels before the throne and swears fealty, transferring the weight of every life in Aymar to a woman built to bear it. The world stabilizes. Stones settle. The sun holds still.

The Absolving Saint,⁹ the last invader, returns the iron knife and begs release; in exchange, the surviving inhabitants will sleep peacefully and wake with no memory of the horrors. Voyne² accepts. The gates stand open to a crisp autumn day, and three women — a knight, a heretic, and a rat-catcher — step through together into a world where the siege ended months ago.