Page 15 of The Starving Saints
She advances.
Still, she should have brought a light, she thinks, as she passes from the tight confines of the tube into something more open, just a little, where she could gather herself and turn around, go back headfirst. She clutches the bundle of her clothing to her chest andtries to think, one hand on the path home so she will not lose it. A cooling breeze comes from below and to her left, soothes her sweaty brow, helps her put her thoughts in order. If she goes back, there’s a chance she can steal a rushlight, but she will have no way to keep it lit through that tunnel, and no way to light it once she’s through. The same for any candle, though there’s a better chance, if she can find a glass housing to put around it. The nuns will have them, surely, though obtaining one from them seems unlikely. The madwoman’s tower, then? Perhaps, but now the king’s lapdog is her guard dog instead. So no, there is no chance of light.
Which leaves one decision only: Can she go forward in blackness—or will she die if she tries?
There is no guarantee that this path leads to safety, or anywhere at all. But the breeze from below is not only in her imagination. The wind must come from somewhere, mustn’t it? If she goes slowly, if she leaves things behind her to mark her path, if she turns back themomentthere is a branch she may not remember later—she can do this. She can go by touch and instinct. She is a slippery thing of darkness, an eel in girl’s skin, and she is brave.
She loses all sense of time as she inches forward, down, following the whisper of air. She leaves one stocking first, then the other. Her cap. Her girdle. Her smalls. She does not find any branch, not really, a few gullies that are only the depth of her shin and then stop. Her stomach grumbles, and she thinks of food, and how she should go back, loot her cache, bring food with her, but what if she edges forward just another step, squirms through one more gap barely large enough for her to pass, what if she—
And then there is light.
Light.
Not daylight, but the thin blue of night, and she has not been down here so long at all. She makes out the shadows of footholds, descending a steeper section. She sees a ledge below her, drops her dress down first, then follows after.
She emerges into a room.
No; not a room. This was not made by human hands. It’s a grotto, an underground stream, and she can hear the water moving now.The stink of human waste presses in, and she knows she has found the water that feeds the well. She falls to her knees and wants to kiss it, but knows better.
But the light...
The light is coming from the water, and Treila frowns down at it. Then she lifts her head and peers around, and sees no crack in the stone, no way for moonlight to filter in. Confused, she rocks back on her heels. She looks up and down the length of the faintly glowing water, looking for how it enters, how it exits.
She can’t see anything. The water passes through gaps that are so minuscule she cannot see them, or perhaps just appears, as if by magic, through the stone. The water will not help her.
She makes herself stand, makes herself feel for the breeze.
There.
It’s coming from a narrow fissure in the wall, barely visible. It might have been impossible to find without the thin light that throws strange shadows on every surface. Treila approaches, slides her fingers into it, but it’s not wide enough even to admit her hand. She presses her face to it, nose and lips in the gap, and breathes, breathes the first fresh air she’s had in months (because she does not count the air in the lower yard, not even if she can see birds flying above, because she cannotleave).
But she can’t leave through here, either.
“Are you lost?” the crack breathes against her lips.
7
Ser Voyne takes to sleeping in Phosyne’s room, across the doorway. She is a better block than the old haphazard stacks of detritus. Nobody comes in, and nobody goes out.
Phosyne is very glad that only Pneio left her tower during the bombardment, and that she was able to haul him back without Voyne’s notice. Her best guess is that Voyne cannot see the little beasts, for she doesn’t comment on them, even when Phosyne can clearly see them dart between hiding places. They are like smoke.
Their heat, though, Voyne has noticed.
“Unblock the windows,” Voyne demands, the morning after the bombardment.
“No,” Phosyne says, scrambling for some excuse.
“A person needs sunlight,” Voyne says. “Fresh air. A break from this infernal heat and stench.”
Phosyne positions herself in front of one of the filled windows. “My work requires the dark.”
Voyne’s jaw tenses, twitches. It’s clear that she is itching for relief. For a summons to do as she did the night before. She is not a creature made for standing guard, but for action. Phosyne hates to see her caged like this, but it isn’t up to her.
She waits to see if Voyne will lunge.
Bruises make a patchwork of Phosyne’s dry, pale skin, lurid and uneven as if her body lacks the resources to soothe them. She feels the ache of each one, even as her mind is afire.
“Leave the windows,” she says. “Let me work.”
