Page 125 of The Starving Saints
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 shedoes. 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.
