Page 21 of The Starving Saints
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 whenthisis 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 knowsthatfeeling 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 willconcede, 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.
