Page 24 of The Starving Saints
We are hungry, she begs wordlessly, eye sockets aching with tears her body isn’t sure it can shed,and we are lonely, and we are desperate.
Save us, because I’m not sure I can.
She lifts the comb to her lips. She closes her eyes. She prepares to bite.
And then the saints arrive.
11
The blast of trumpets steals Voyne’s attention away from Phosyne, her blood running cold, then boiling hot, as she thunders up the stairs to the little glass plate that Phosyne has insisted on reseating. She grips the sill hard as she leans forward, peers out of the gloom into the bright light of midday. Her eyes refuse to adjust at first, and the glass is uneven.
But she can see movement, shapes, the glint of sun off metal. The garrison is rallying. Has Etrebia made another move at last, recovered so quickly from the routing of their siege engines?
No; the patterns of movement are all wrong. All focus is not on the walls, but inside them. As Voyne’s eyes adjust, she makes out a broad circle of uncovered soil down in the lower bailey, ringed by a thick press of bodies.
Something isinside.
“Stay here,” she snaps as she races back down the stairs, dodgingsomethingthat waits at the landing that she is certain wasn’t there before. But she doesn’t have time to think. “Eat the honey. That’s an order, witch.”
Phosyne’s hands drip, sticky and golden, and she nods. Then Voyne is in the hall, and the door is shut behind her, and she doesn’t have to think about the madwoman or her own tender, anxious heart anymore.
The king’s chambers are empty. So are the rooms below, and so, even, is the wall of the upper bailey, becauseeverybodyis crowded in the lower yard staring at whatever is just inside the gate. She has hersword in hand before she’s tramping down the stairs, and she is on the verge of barking orders, demanding knowledge.
Then she sees Leodegardis and Cardimir standing halfway down to the yard, staring with open wonder. Sitting ducks to any attack. She makes for them, staggers to a halt, panting at their sides.
They don’t look at her.
Her eyes flash over the crowd, trying to see what everybody else is staring at. Her gaze catches on a head of blonde curls.Treila de Batrolin,her ghost from the garden. Her heart threatens to strangle her, but she doesn’t have time for a haunting, not now, not here. No time to think of those she’s already failed.
She tears her gaze away, and then, at last, she sees them.
Four strangers stand inside the gates.
“Who let them in?” she demands, unable to look at her king as she addresses him.
“I don’t know,” he replies, voice filled with wonder. It should be filled with fear.
“Etrebian? Come to parlay?”
“I don’t think so.” That is Leodegardis. He, at least, sounds cautious. “Nobody told me of riders approaching.” Well, they were not riders. There is no sign of horses. “And the gates? Who gave the order to raise the gates?”
“I don’t know,” the king says, and Leodegardis does not offer anything else.
There is a murmur, a rustling, and then the crowd below them shifts, opening a path leading straight toward them.
Voyne steps in front of her king, sword drawn, as they approach. They move in steady procession with a flowing grace, so different from the haggard lurching that colors every moment inside of Aymar now. They do not stop, and nobody moves to stop them.
They draw close enough that Voyne can, at last, make out the detail of them.
They look like... saints.
Voyne isn’t the first to think that; there’s no other explanation for why the lower yard is hushed, prostrate, everyone with theirheads bowed, their shoulders trembling, as the party makes its way through their masses.
At the front of the little group is a tall, slender woman, all angles and hard lines. She is draped in layer upon layer of fabric, flowers pinned to the stole that falls over her shoulders, but the skin that Voyne can see is pure white except for where dandelion-gold stains her flesh over her cheeks and nose and lips. Her pale hair is a thick mass of braids, carefully arranged, not a strand out of place. There is no dust of the road on her, no weariness, nowariness.
“A ploy,” Voyne makes herself say, unable to look away. “This is a ploy. They have sent people here in—in costume—”
But her words sound hollow, even to her ear.
